riverbanks. Our group stealthily moved among the willows that lined the Humboldt, looking for anything that moved so we could zap it with our trusty rifles.
"Fritzie, who was not pretty, was an intrepid dog. He had the unerring instinct to be able to detect anything with breath in it. He would flush anything that had legs, wings, or slithered, and the 'Death Squad' would automatically fire away, a!! the time trying to avoid shooting each other and Fritzie.
"Around noon, we flopped down under a willow patch and ate the sandwiches my grandmother had made for us that morning. Homemade bread, sliced rare roast beef, and fresh crisp lettuce along with homemade cookies. We were blissfully unaware of our good fortune to be raised in the nation's largest cattle and sheep county, where even at the height of the Depression we ate damned well. Meat, potatoes, and milk every day of the year!
"After lunch, we laid around in the shade and speculated about how great it would be when we'd be old enough to sneak into the whorehouses and lose our virginity, all for the princely sum of two bucks.
"As a reward for flushing our morning's game, Fritzie came over by me and flopped down on his back to have his belly scratched. I obliged him and in the process noticed a tick on his dick, which, being the good Samaritan that I was, I removed. Somehow, Fritzie mistook my intentions and immediately got a big red dog boner that could have won him a blue ribbon at the Westchester Dog Show. Being the perennial dipshit and
showoff, I obliged him by giving his engorged tallywacker several good jerks, much to the delighted whoops and hollers of my perverted companions. After my little fling with Fritzie, we finished our lunch and forgot all about it as we resumed our afternoon carnage.
"That evening, after our mandatory Saturday bath, whether we needed it or not, I was sitting in Stinky's living room, talking to Stinky and his dad, when Fritzie came in, headed straight for me, and immediately started to hump my leg. I did my best to ignore this blatant attempt for canine romance when to my horror I felt and saw this raw, wet, bright red dog boner sliding all over my leg! Now, I don't know how it was in other areas of the country, but in Sweetwater, Nevada, in 1936, the most uncool thing a tenyear-old could do was to lose his nerve.
"The old axiom 'My life flashed before my eyes' was never truer. I panicked as all kinds of guilty mind-flashes started to ricochet around my brain: 'My God, his father knows that I jacked off his stupid dog! Look at that asshole Stinky, flopping around on the couch, turning purple and blowing large snot bubbles trying not to laugh. If he laughs, the jig is up. His old man is going to know for sure and he'll tell my grandfather! How will I explain that to the old folks? "Yeah, well, you see, Gramps, heh-heh,
I was just laying there and, you know, this dog sort of liked me and. ."
Oh Shit. I'm dead!'
"His dad, in a moralistic Mormon rage, jumped up and kicked poor Fritzie across the room, all the time yelling, 'I don't know what got into that goddamn dog! He ain't never done that before!' Fritzie, totally undeterred
and undaunted, snuck right back, boner and all, and proceeded to resume his romance with my leg again. This earned him another drop kick across the room and caused Stinky to bolt out of the house before he totally lost it. His old man sat there shaking his head and mumbling, 'That crazy fucking dog. Must be a bitch in heat around here somewhere.'
"Fritzie never forgot that moment's indiscretion on my part and made damn sure that I never did either. Forever after, whenever I got within humping range, I became a target for his misguided affections.
"At this stage of my life, I can now see where more than a few 'moments of indiscretion' in my relationships with the female gender should have taught me a lesson. That is, never tell a female you love her just to get into her knickers."
He straightened the typed pages of his story, smiling at them with satisfaction. And then he became aware of the silence.
"Get it? Never jack off a dog," Buddy said. " 'Cause they'll never leave you alone."
By his side, in her wedding dress, Pinky smiled. Uncle Tony and Aunt Mariel looked apprehensive, as though wondering whether there was more.
36 Another Death
"Pinky. She's coming in a few weeks, when she gets her American visa." What sounded like his chuckling was the ice in his drink.
At a family gathering to which I was invited that week — Bula, Melveen, all the rest of them — Buddy pulled a snapshot out of his wallet and held it up: Pinky smiling with her lips pressed together and the nail of one slender finger held against a dimple.
"Look at your new mother."
Buddy was drunk, in his thronelike chair, drinking while the others ate. He masticated the ice, his chewing giving him a crooked grin, and he shifted the noisy stuff to the side of his mouth like a dog with a bone in its bulging cheek.
Two days later I remembered Buddy's funny face with anguish. The eldest boy, Bula, called me and told me in a stuttering voice that his father had drowned in a fishing accident off the Big Island, near Earl Willis's place. It was something I had been both dreading and expecting from this reckless man.
"I think my dad would have wanted you to know first. Willis called from Puna to say that they picking opihi and my dad get hit by one wave
and he wipe out." After this hesitant explanation Bula honked, "They never find him!"
"Missing or drowned?" I asked.
I heard the bugling sour notes of the boy blowing his nose.
"Missing mean drowned!"
"I am very sorry." Then I remembered. "What about that woman from the Philippines, the one he married?"
It was so hard to think of her as his wife, I could not use the word.
Bula said, "Man, we need you help wid dis incredulous thing."
I was put in mind of a cruel folktale or a myth. The new wife arrives in a far-off country only to discover that her husband has died and she, a total strangei is the mistress of the house.
The moment I saw her at the airport, arriving in her cheap new traveling clothes and carrying her cheap old suitcase, after the nine-hour flight from Manila, I knew that I could not give her the tragic news. I recognized her from the video, though she was thinner, not smiling, watching nervously for Buddy.
"Pinky Rubaga?" I said, heading her off.
She looked wary and vulnerable, the way tired, rumpled passengers do just off a long flight, like people who have been interrupted while sleepwalking.
"Where is Buddy?" she said, stiffening with suspicion.
"This is his son Bula. He'll explain."
Bula was standing just behind me, breathing hard through what sounded like baffles in his nose. I could sense the damp heat radiating from him. He was big, his body a large, anxious parody of his father's.
When I looked again she had gone gray, her skin was ashen, and her face was dusty, as though decomposing with sorrow. She got into the back seat of my car and did not say a single word for forty miles.
"This the house," Bula said as I pulled into the driveway.
Pinky winced at the house and then, with an involuntary smirk of fear twisting her face, headed for the front door.
It was a two-million-dollar house on the beach, not pretty, even boxlike, a squarish, flat-roofed building. But big — three stories, with fluttering awnings, famous for its large size and the number of rooms, for the long dining table that could seat eighteen people, and for the wonderful view over the most dangerous surf breaks. She saw a castle with an entrance like a gaping mouth.
Pinky kept walking, through the open door, leaving her shoes at the bottom of the stairs with the jumble of sandals. She stepped back on the top landing and clutched her throat.