Sweetland

He was oddly crestfallen to see it. A symptom of too much time alone, he guessed, to have felt almost grateful for the company of the nameless dead filing out past the light. To be disappointed seeing he’d dreamt or imagined the entire thing.

The dog had followed him in to nose around the room and Sweetland called it from the side door as he was leaving. “Mr. Fox,” he said, and it came out from behind the red gas cans under the workbench, sitting at the door to be let out. Sweetland staring at those three containers. He went across the room and picked them up in turn. All of them empty. He lifted the tarp off the back of the quad and opened the carryall, took out the blanket he’d packed there and the box of ammunition. He put the shells back in the cupboard over the workbench and turned to leave, but had to catch himself against a rising spell of dizziness.

He lifted his head to the rafters once it passed. His eyes coming to rest on the white wooden cross directly above him, his name hand-lettered there in black. And he nodded a simple hello.

~ ~ ~

THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER the accident Sweetland drifted through porous layers of pain and narcotic relief. Duke quit the job at the steel mill to be closer to the hospital and he spent all of his time there, scavenging meals off trays left in the hallways, finding an empty bed to sleep in at night or kipping down in the abandoned television room.

Sweetland was barely capable of carrying on a conversation those early days and Duke talked up the revolving cast of men in the other beds on the ward instead. Wanting to know where they were from and what they did for a living and how many youngsters they had. Half the people in the hospital were from elsewhere in the world, it seemed, from Italy or Greece or some Balkan country they’d never heard of. He ran errands for patients who needed cigarettes or chewing gum or a letter posted. An elderly man from Spain admitted for bypass surgery spent the long hours of his convalescence teaching Duke to play chess. After the Spaniard was discharged, Duke tried to pass on what he’d learned to Sweetland, using a checkerboard borrowed from the television room, improvising chess pieces out of beer caps, paper clips, pennies, empty syringes. The nurses and custodial staff stopping to check on the progress of the latest game, laying wagers on the outcome.

When Sweetland was too tired or stoned on medication for chess, Duke wandered the hospital aimlessly, flirting with the nurses at the desk. He mopped the floors on the ward if he found a bucket unattended, just to have something to do with his time.

You ought to go back, Sweetland told him finally.

You’re here a long while yet.

And you got no work. And a wife home with a youngster you haven’t even laid eyes on.

I can wait.

You fly the fuck home out of it.

You kiss my arse.

A rake like you, Sweetland said.

A week they argued it back and forth until Sweetland ratted him out to the nurses, telling them Duke had been living in the hospital more than a month. He heard the racket down the hall the next morning, Duke shouting at the top of his lungs as he was hauled away by Security.

Sweetland woke in the hospital dark that night to see him sitting in a chair by the bed.

You’re a lousy cunt, Moses Sweetland, Duke said.

How’d you get in here?

It’s not a fucken bank or anything. I walked in.

I’ll call Security, Duke, I swear to God.

I’m going, Duke said, don’t get a hard-on. He leaned in close to the bed. I just wanted to know if there’s a message you wants passed on to Effie when I gets back.

Tell her I won’t likely be home for Christmas, Sweetland said.

6

AFTER THE COLD SNAP, THE WEATHER reverted to its regular schizophrenia. Snow, followed by days of rain and sleet, ice pellets. Thaws followed by sudden freeze-ups that made the paths treacherous to walk. None of it matched the forecast he was getting on the radio. There was a storm in February that lasted two full days, a fierce gale of wind and snow drifting halfway up the kitchen windows. The radio announcer calmly calling for scattered flurries and moderate easterly winds and a low of minus one.

It took days to dig out from the storm. A permanent gloom inside from the height of snow over the windows, the paths to the shed and the outhouse shoulder high and no wider than the upstairs hallway. He and the dog suffering a long fit of claustrophobia in the tiny lifeboat of the kitchen, until a thaw set them loose. Four afternoons of sunshine and a southeasterly warm enough to pass for July, waterfalls of melt off the eaves of the buildings. Two nights of steady rain and the snowpack disappearing so quickly Sweetland could watch it go, inch by inch. The radio like a broken record repeating its call for flurries and moderate winds and minus one.

It had been comic at first, to see the forecast so far off the mark day after day. But there was something increasingly disturbing in the disconnect. It seemed a sign of a widening fracture in the world.

He got up with the light each morning and washed and fed himself and he occupied his waking hours with whatever chores the day required. The dog at his heels as he went about the property, or on its wanders up to the mash or down through the cove. From the kitchen window Sweetland would catch sight of it on the government wharf or nosing along the side of Queenie’s house and he’d watch until the dog was out of sight. There was a comfort in knowing it was out there on its own trajectory, that his house was one of the many points on the animal’s compass.

There were days the dog wandered off as soon as it was let outdoors and there was no sign of the creature again before dark. Sweetland waiting each evening to see it go by the kitchen window, to hear it barking outside or scratching at the door. It went straight for its food bowl and afterwards lay at Sweetland’s feet, dozing but watchful, wanting him to settle for the night on the daybed so it could do the same.

In the few minutes between waking and getting up, Sweetland combed leisurely through the dog’s fur, working twigs and shards of tree bark and burrs from the tangle as it slept beside him. It was the only time the animal allowed that sort of intimate attention. As a rule it balked at being picked up or coddled or mauled, shying away and growling. Sweetland tried to clip the hair around its eyes before Christmas, thinking the creature must be half-blind behind those bangs. But it refused to let him near with the scissors and kept a wary distance for days afterwards. He wasn’t willing to chance losing the dog’s trust altogether and gave up the idea, settling for the idle grooming he was allowed. Like a chimp picking nits from the fur of a companion.

Before it was fully awake the dog stretched and rolled on its back, legs splayed while Sweetland scratched its belly. Its testicles were nearly hairless and they made an impression in that posture, two bald fruit in their wild nest of fur. He thought of Loveless talking about the darling set of balls on the dog. Out looking for love half the time it wandered off, Sweetland guessed, trying to scare up a female canine whose rear end was no higher than a beef bucket. “I expect you’re shit out of luck on this island, Mr. Fox,” he said. And he gave the testicles the affectionate little rub he’d seen Loveless bestow. “Shit out of luck.”

For years he’d had the same lonesome feeling about Jesse — that the boy was stranded on the island of his own peculiar self, that he’d never find a soul fit for his eccentric way in the world. Between the ages of five and six, Jesse was a compulsive masturbator. He would have a go at himself anywhere the mood struck, at school, in a church pew, in the living room while they were watching SpongeBob SquarePants. His mouth half open, his face blank as a doll’s. It seemed a completely asexual activity, an itch he scratched absently, though it was hard to argue the point when parents of other students complained. The Priddles christened the boy Jerk-off, a name that was in common usage around the cove for awhile, and Sweetland badgered Jesse to keep it in his pants. Put that thing away, he’d say. The boy ignoring him until Sweetland reached to tap the back of his head. Put it away, he repeated.