I went back out to my lawn chair and I’ve been sitting here all day, listening. When I close my eyes the world seems full of sound. Traffic on the highway half a mile away. Children shouting on a playground at the neighborhood school. Dogs barking to other dogs, those dogs barking back. Telephone ringing in a house somewhere. The knockity-knock-knock of a roofing crew. Birds scratching in the shrubbery for grubs.
A breeze drifts through the live oak leaves, cooling the sweat on my burning skin, dropping me into the kind of sleep that’s deep as death, or the underworld, a whole other life you never knew you were living. It was nice, for a while. Only the sound of the blood rustling quietly like the ocean in my veins.
Terrible Argument
ONCE THERE WERE A MAN, A WOMAN, AND THEIR DOG. Neither the woman nor the dog had ever conceived, so there were no babies or pups. The man and woman drank heavily and often had terrible arguments late in the evening, and raged back and forth at one another for an hour or more, their fights often spilling out of the house and into the yard. If they had guests, which was rare, they tried not to argue but usually failed, and then they would argue in loud hissing stage whispers that inevitably became loud hushed gargling voices like people being strangled. They were sure that the guests heard almost every terrible word they said to one another: the threats to leave, the vows of retribution and declarations of hatred, the sock-footed stompings in and out of the room, and the openings and furiously careful closings of the front door as one or the other went outside to smoke or pace around in frustration and rage.
More than once, as he stomped out to his car intending to leave her to her own insane devices, she leapt onto his back and rode him around like a fierce, undisengagable monkey until he fell down and promised that he wouldn’t drive away. She demonstrated a frightening strength when she was enraged, and all he could do in the face of this was submit. Once, he managed to throw her off in a jujitsu-type move onto her back, throwing his own back out, and she was so astonished, outraged, and incredulous that she made him fetch the cordless phone from inside and called the police as she lay in the yard. When the police came, they argued so vehemently over who had attacked and hurt whom that the officers put them into the caged back seats of separate squad cars until they calmed down and then made them go back inside their home and behave.
Sometimes their lives entered less disturbing or fearful periods of relative calm. These times were most often disturbed in small ways, incrementally, subtly and insidiously cracking the door to more serious arguments, awakening their hibernating ires. They might argue about the salt and pepper shakers, gone empty again, how the one never bothered to refill them and so the other always did. They argued about the recycling, how the one never bothered to take it to the recycling center. They argued about who failed to remove their hair from the shower drain sieve. About who snored or farted, frequently, in sleep. About who left the front door unlocked in the night. Who left the car windows down when it rained. They fought over the dog, over who loved the dog more or less, or walked it less, or yelled at it when angry, or did not love it, or traumatized it by yelling at the other, not at the dog. They fought over who had wanted the dog in the first place. About who picked up more of the dog’s turds from the yard. Who had let the dog chew on the battery whose acid had eaten away part of its tongue. Who’d let it eat the mothballs that had nearly vaporized its anus.
For her part, the dog seemed traumatized by their constant fighting. She had a put-upon look on her face as if she wished they would just settle down. She had been a shelter rescue and although they knew nothing of her past they assumed it had not been good. She was an exceedingly good-natured, gentle dog, with big brown eyes she would level on them as if they were the saddest creatures in the world. But she was nervous, a little neurotic, and in truth such outright conflict increased her anxiety to the point where she had become a compulsive eater. In addition to the battery and the mothballs, she had eaten a mole, a chipmunk, a piece of rope from a corner in the garage, the dried corpse of a mouse from the same place, a pine cone, several sticks of various sizes, a bunch of roses from the garage garbage pail, cat turds, dog turds, coyote turds, squirrel turds, a pair of severed crow’s feet, a songbird’s skull and beak, several small stones and one larger sedimentary rock, a rubber part from a motor mount, a valuable 1924 buffalo nickel, a utilities overdue notice, a box of wooden matches, a hot sausage right off the grill, many fleas, and of course hundreds of pounds of kibble. She shat approximately twice a day, in the best possible accessible places in the yard or the park or out on the prairie. When she was on long trail walks she liked to shit on top of tiny shrubs, no one knew why.
Sometimes when the dog held them in her long, inscrutable gaze, the man believed she was truly thinking about them, truly regretting being adopted by them, and he felt ashamed. Then he would think it was ridiculous to feel ashamed over what you thought a dog might be thinking of you, as if their thoughts could be anything but the simplest kind of reaction to your behavior or possibly your moods. A dog didn’t know how to reprimand. He really should try not to have such absurd thoughts. It wasn’t making things any better, that’s for sure. No matter how they tried, things seemed to get steadily worse. At least, he told himself at such times, we were never foolish enough to have children.
IT WAS NOT UNHEARD-OF for them to argue over the way in which one or the other took steps intended to ward off the possibility of an argument in the first place. One might do more than one’s share of the cooking or cleaning, only to have the other accuse him or her of trying to gain the moral upper hand, of shoring up ammunition for or against some future assault.
Their therapist told them they were both emotional infants and this stung badly enough that for several days they were sullen and mute and limped about the house like injured pets who’d been kicked by their masters.
Sometimes, in their studied attempts to get along and avoid unnecessary argument, they argued over whether or not one or the other was, in fact, actually angry. The interpretation of a mood, a gesture or the lack of one, a meaningful look or a meaningful avoidance of eye contact or acknowledgment of a gesture or a mood. And then the one, indignant that the other was angry for no apparent reason, would begin to display obvious and intentional signs of frustration or anger, perplexing and then angering the other, all of which led to loud accusations of the one or the other and then of the one and the other having lost his and/or her mind.
Once they had a fantastic blowup over whether or not a certain actor in a particular movie was Albert Finney. She insisted the actor was Albert Finney, and he insisted that she was wrong, the man was not Albert Finney and possibly was not even English. They became impossibly enraged, out in the yard shouting at one another about Albert Finney, until one of their neighbors called the police.
He was essentially right in the end but it was spoiled because the other actor was in fact English, just like Albert Finney, and this tainted his victory with the faint odor of speculation, of luck. Afterward, they laughed over what the dog would think if she could understand that their argument was over the identity of an actor who resembled another actor, Albert Finney.
The dog lay on her pallet in the den, surrounded by her comforts — her buddy toy, and her bunny which she’d had since she was in the shelter, and her ball and her bone — and gazed at them evenly, her snout resting on her paws, and said nothing.