Hound Dog & Bean (33 page)

“I know. I know,” she said. “I missed you too, you old dog. I missed the hell outta ya.”

H
OUND
D
OG
went out back and found the large jar of sun tea like she’d said. He brought it inside, opened the old ceramic container with the sugar in it, measured out the amount she’d taught him, and stirred it into the tea. He got ice from the ice cube trays and filled two glasses (“Don’t forget to refill those trays!” he heard her yell, like she used to and for the same reason—he’d almost put them back in empty) and then poured their teas.

He brought them out to her, sat in the chair beside her (the one he’d always sat in, except when Ezzie had customers come calling), and handed her a glass. They raised them to each other and drank, and God, it tasted so good!

“Yup,” she said. “There isn’t nothing like sun tea, is there boy? Nothing.”

He agreed and sat and looked at her. She looked the same, maybe a little older. Hair a little sparser, but no whiter. It had been as white as snow when he met her. She was perhaps a little frailer and more wrinkled. She’d already looked like one of those apple-head dolls—the kind you carved from an apple and then let dry up and once it got all shriveled, you shellacked it to keep it from rotting. Yes. She looked like an old apple-head doll.

“Just like,” she said.

“What do you mean you were waiting for me?” he asked.

“
They
told me,” she answered and pointed. He turned his head and there, sitting along the porch railing, was a group of what looked like six, no, eight birds. He
had
seen birds earlier. “Wha…?”

“Black birds,” she said. “Messengers from the underworld. They told me you were coming.”

“Bullshit.” It was out of his mouth before he could stop it.

“Say what you will, you always did.” She took a long draught of her tea. “My, that’s good! I put some red clover, and some dandelion and peppermint in there—”

“—to help clear your mind,” H.D. finished.

She gave a little cackle (it was the only word that fit, despite the cliché of it all). “Yes. And what else?”

He shrugged.

“You know! Tell Ezzie.”

“I don’t know,” he snapped.

“And lavender,” she replied. “To help with the flatulence.”

He burst into laughter.

“It’s not funny,” she remarked. “They can be terrible awful smelling. Would you have wanted to see me again for the first time in forever and me be farting?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said.

The birds began to make a lot of noise.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I’ll tell him in my own good time.”

Bullshit
, he thought once more. “You aren’t talking to those birds, Ezzie. Or you are and you’re as crazy as you always were.”

“Well did that arnica and chamomile help with his black eye or not?”

H.D. froze. He couldn’t even take a breath.
Bullshit bullshit bullshitbullshitbullshit. There is
no
way she knows about that
.

She laughed then and leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “Hillary?” She was the only other person he’d ever let call him that. “Would you go check the beans on the stove top? Make sure they’re not all dried up? I’m going to take a little nap. Don’t know how much longer this dried up old body has left, and like I said, I got some things to do. Some powerful important things. I got some cornbread batter ready too. You remember how to put it on?”

She didn’t wait for him to answer. The next thing she did was let out a soft little snore.

H.D.
FOUND
the old plastic pitcher in the kitchen, with a towel over it. He lifted it, and sure enough, there was the yellowish, gritty cornbread batter. He got the big cast iron skillet out of the oven and then set it to what he thought was the right temperature and got everything ready. Then he popped it in the oven—it was an old gas one and of course didn’t beep when the temperature was right. He just knew it probably was. He found a kitchen timer. It was shaped like a penguin. Apparently the old one, which had looked like a tomato, had given up the ghost. He set the penguin and carried it out to the porch with him, sat down next to the old lady, and had a second glass of sun tea. The birds had flown off, except for one, who stared him down with eyes as black as a Raggedy Anne’s.

It should have creeped him out, he supposed. But it didn’t. Soon he found his eyes were getting heavy too, and then Ezzie was waking him up. “Come on inside darlin’. It’s dinner time.”

He’d slept through the ringing of the timer. “Sorry,” he said.

“Nonsense. You been through a lot lately. Comin’ out of the dark into the light isn’t easy. Learning to love isn’t easy. Not with all the things weighing on
your
heart.”

He shook his head, and followed her inside, and they ate her amazing pinto beans with a chunk of ham hock and that mind-bogglingly good cornbread. Few could cook home cookin’ like old Ezzie.

After, she sent him to his old bed, and he marveled that it looked like it had before, a decade ago. It was like he’d never left. Or like he’d stepped back in time. But that couldn’t be, could it? Only in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, maybe. But this was real life and things like that didn’t happen. Not in real life.

The next day he woke and got up early, dressed and went out back and commenced to hoeing. Weeds never stopped growing. Neither did rocks. They had to grow, didn’t they? How else could you dig them up year after year after year?

He threw them over the fence like he had at least ten thousand times, and once again, he was nothing much more than a boy.

It felt good.

They didn’t talk much over the next week or so, except for her to explain that no, she hadn’t died in that old hospital, and she’d told them to let her go home a few days later where she knew she could take better care of her own self than they ever could.

He told her nothing about Dean and the life that had started between them. All he said was that he’d had reasons to leave Kansas City. She told him he would tell her about it when he was damned good and ready.

In the evenings, he would sit with her on the front porch—that was when she didn’t have clients. They would come like they always had, wanting love spells and money spells and cures for arthritis or summer colds. They’d come about their headaches and toothaches (“Sorry, Gary, but you got to get that one pulled as rocks roll down hills.”) and ingrown toenails. They’d want their fortunes told too, of course. She’d take out that weathered old leather bag of hers, and she’d dump her collection of junk out on a little table: a piece of glass smoothed by a creek, a gnarled piece of wood, a flint arrowhead, a buffalo nickel, a bolt with a nut half screwed on (or off as the case may be, she changed depending on her client), a bear claw, a piece of antler, a small fossil, a bone (it was a chicken bone he told himself then like he had when he was a teenager—it wasn’t a finger bone, it wasn’t) and several other odd objects. She’d tell them things that she probably could have told them without such silly bits and pieces, but it lent a magical nature to the whole thing and people believed. Sometimes he wondered too, like when she told a widow where her husband had put his will or (
“Well did that arnica and chamomile help with his black eye or not?”
) if this crying woman’s baby was her husband’s or a traveling salesman’s (
“It’s not your husband’s, but it’s not that man’s either, is it? He’s gone and that means unless you tell Harold that it’s his, that baby won’t have a father and every boy needs a father, don’t he?”
—and wasn’t that true?—
“But it’s a boy and he’ll have hair just as black as Harold’s and he don’t ever need know. Besides, Harold can’t make babies and this will make him happy as can be, because what man doesn’t need a son?”—Me! That’s who
, thought H.D.).

One week turned into two.

H.D. found himself thinking of Bean—
Dean
—a lot. Especially in that bed at night alone. He’d think about cruising around and finding a man to play with. There were always men to play with, no matter where you lived. But whatever man he found would be just as bad in the sack as that man from the rest stop—all teeth and no skill and no desire to swallow. And what was a blowjob when they didn’t swallow? You might as well not have gotten one at all.

He would not be as good, nor would any man, as Dean had been. Dean had shown him what loving—no!
sex
had been all about.

But with the passage of every night, he was realizing he couldn’t trick himself any longer.

He was in love with Dean Alexander.

He could run all he wanted.

He could have sex with strangers from rest stops and get shitty blowjobs.

He could live here in this house with this old woman.

It didn’t change a thing.

He was in love.

For the first time in his life.

Billy had been nothing but a prelude to what this was like.

When he’d dropped Rammstein off at Four-Footed Friends, he and the dog knew he was leaving. Rammstein cried and whined and pawed at H.D. to be picked up and loved. He’d shaken his head and backed away.

Elaine had known it too. He could see it in her eyes.

Or maybe she saw it in his.

She was another reason he’d run. People were knowing him too well. Too much. That was dangerous. Because when you loved someone, they went away and took their love with them. They didn’t adopt you when you knew—just
knew!
—this was the right family. The one that would really love you. They’d turn on you and tell their parents that it had just been sex, it wasn’t love, and that they’d been forced to do it. They’d die in a drug deal gone bad when they didn’t even do drugs, had only let it happen in their apartment because they’d promised her a hundred dollars and she needed it to pay the rent and get Puppy some food to eat. Or they’d get pneumonia and die in a hospital.

Yet Ezzie hadn’t died, had she?

That day H.D. had gone back to his apartment and looked around, and he’d taken only what he really needed. What he could stuff into his backpack and the basket of his bicycle, and the rest he’d left behind. It was just shit. Stuff. Anchors to keep you in a place you had stayed in way too long.

But hadn’t it been nice to have a place? A place that was his own?

And hadn’t Bean’s—
Dean’s!
—place been nice too? The bed was so big. The back deck, a place to be naked outside where no one could see you right there in the city. The big comfortable couch and that big TV and the cuddling while watching movies. That picture hanging in the upstairs hall. The one Bean had painted of the tree with its big branches. The one he would look at and wish he could walk right into. Hadn’t all those things been nice?

And hadn’t H.D. started bringing little things over there? A few of his favorite books (
The Front Runner
, Clifford Simak’s
City
,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
), a wooden carving of a beagle, a picture of the ocean (he’d never seen the ocean, his travels had never taken him that far) that Dean had cheerfully hung on the living room wall, his favorite pillow. Hadn’t it been nice that he was starting to think maybe, just maybe, there was someone who liked him for him, and not for what he could give them? Like his body? His hard work? Favors unnumbered?

But H.D. had taken one last look at it all and then he’d left.

Maybe there had been reasons to stay. But there were more reasons to leave.

First it had been Dean’s mother calling him Hillary. She’d known his real name.

And yes, he could see that Dean had only made a mistake. It could happen. Happen to anyone. But then Dean hadn’t told H.D. he’d done it. If he had only told him, he would have been prepared. Dean would have shown H.D. that he could be trusted.

Then there was the fact that Dean’s parents were treating him like shit and Dean stood there and let them. Dean’s parents.

What would he have done had
he
had parents in the same situation?

Don’t know. Never knew my dad. Mom dead when I was ten. Don’t know what it’s like!

And yes, Dean had finally grown a pair and stood up to them. Put them in their place. H.D. had even been willing to let it go.

But then Dean said those words.

“I love you, Hill. I love you so damned much. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

That was it. That was what had made him run.

Because the next thing that would happen is that Dean would go away. He’d cheat or he’d leave H.D. Leave him all alone right when he was letting go and finding out what it meant to
not
be alone. Or he’d die.

He couldn’t take the chance.

It was thoughts like those that sent H.D. to sleep on more than one night, tears on his face and soaking the pillow.

H.D.
WAS
hoeing weeds when Ezzie came to him.

“It’s time,” she said.

He stopped. Stood up. Felt his back pop from the hard work. The pop felt good. “Time for what?” he asked, squinting into the morning sun.

“Your reading.”

“Reading? That shit you do for—”

“Don’t swear. I don’t like it.”

His mouth snapped shut.

“Come with me, boy.”

She turned and walked off, holding a hand to her own back. She went into the house. He stood for a moment longer, then sighed, put the hoe down, and went in after her.

She was on the porch, of course. She had her bag with her. It was a little smaller than a kid’s brown lunch bag, but it was made of leather and there was no knowing how old it was.

Ezzie said nothing. Just pointed at his chair, which was pulled up to the little square table in front of her. About the height of a card table, but smaller, and made of wood that was as worn as the leather bag and its owner.

H.D. sighed and sat down. He heard a squawk and jerked and saw the black bird sitting on the knob at the top of the porch stair railing. It eyed him with those Raggedy Anne eyes that should have been scary, but weren’t. He felt like he should know that bird, but how would he know a bird?