“None of our business?” she shot back at me. “She could be abused, or I don’t know, abducted, you ever think of that?” She strained to look around me to where the girl was still standing there on the blacktop as if she’d been fixed in place. “Did he hit you, is that it?”
Another sob, sucked back as quickly as it was released. “No. He’s just a jerk, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” he crowed, sliding down off the hood now, “you tell them all about it, because you’re little Miss Perfect, aren’t you? You want to see something? You, I’m talking to you, you in the car.” He raised one arm to show the long red striations there, evidence of what had passed between them. “You want her? You can have her.”
“Get in,” Mallory said.
Nome began to whine. The house was no more than half a mile up the road and probably he could smell Chris and Anneliese’s dog, a malamute named Boxer, and maybe the sheep the farmer kept behind the fence that enclosed the barn. The girl shook her head.
“Go ahead, bitch,” the guy called. He leaned back into the hood of the car and folded his arms across his chest as if he’d been at this awhile and was prepared to go on indefinitely.
“You don’t have to put up with that,” Mallory said, and her voice was honed and hard, the voice she used on me when she was in a mood, when I was talking too much or hadn’t got around to washing the dishes when it was my turn. “Come on, get in.”
“No,” the girl said, stepping back from the car now so that we got a full view of her. Her arms shone with sweat. There were beads of moisture dotting her upper lip. She was pretty, very pretty.
I eased off the brake pedal and the car inched forward even as Mallory said, “Stop, Paul, what are you doing?” and I said, “She doesn’t want to,” and then, lamely, “It’s a lovers’ quarrel, can’t you see that?” Then we were moving up the channel the road cut through the greenest fields in the world, past the pissed-off guy with the scratched forearms and a hard harsh gloating look in his eyes, down into a dip and up the next undulating hill, Mallory furious, thumping at the locked door as if it were a set of drums and straining her neck to look back as the whole scene receded in the rearview mirror.
—
By the time we got to Chris and Anneliese’s, Mallory was in full crisis mode. The minute we pulled into the driveway I flicked off the child lock, but she just gave me a withering look, slammed out of the car and stalked up the steps of the front porch, shouting, “Anneliese, Chris, where are you?” I was out of the car by then, Nome shooting over the front seat to rocket past me even as Boxer came tearing around the corner of the house, a yellow Lab pup I’d never seen before at his heels. The dogs barked rhapsodically, then the screen door swung open and there were Chris and Anneliese, spritzers clutched in their hands. Chris was barefoot and shirtless, Anneliese dressed almost identically to the girl on the road, except that her top was blue, to match her eyes, and she was wearing open-toed flats to show off her feet. Before grad school she’d been a hosiery model for Lord & Taylor in Chicago and she never missed an opportunity to let you know it. As for the rest of her, she was attractive enough, I suppose, with streamlined limbs, kinky copper-colored hair and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen or imagined. My own teeth tended toward the yellowish, but then neither of my parents was a dentist and both of hers were.
Mallory didn’t say hello or how are you or thanks for inviting us, but just wheeled around in exasperation and pointed down the road. “I need a bicycle,” she said. “Can I borrow somebody’s bicycle?”
Anneliese showed her teeth in an uncertain smile. “What are you talking about? You just got here.”
The explanation was brief and vivid and unsparing with regard to my lack of concern or feeling. All three of them looked at me a minute, then Anneliese said, “What if he’s dangerous?”
“He’s not dangerous,” I said reflexively.
“I’m going with you,” Anneliese said, and in the next moment she was pushing a matching pair of ten-speed bicycles out the door, hers and Chris’.
Chris waved his glass. “You think maybe Paul and I should go instead? I mean, just in case?”
Mallory was already straddling the bike. “Forget it,” she said, with a level of bitterness that went far beyond what was called for, if it was called for at all. I’d done what anyone would have done. Believe me, you just do not get between a couple when they’re in the middle of a fight. Especially strangers. And especially not on a sweltering afternoon on a deserted country road. You want to get involved? Call the cops. That was my feeling anyway, but then the whole thing had happened so quickly I really hadn’t had time to work out the ramifications. I’d acted instinctively, that was all. The problem was, so had she.
Mallory shot me a look. “You’d probably just wind up patting him on the back.” She gave it a beat, lasered in on Chris. “Both of you.”
That was when things got confused, because before I could respond — before I could think — the women were cranking down the drive with the sun lighting them up as if we were all in the second act of a stage play, and the dogs, spurred on by the Lab pup, chose that moment to bolt under the lowest slat of the bleached wooden fence and go after the sheep. The sheep were right there, right in the yard, milling around and letting off a sweaty ovine stink, and the two older dogs — mine and Chris’—knew they were off limits, strictly and absolutely, and that heavy consequences would come down on them if they should ever lapse and let their instincts take over. But that was exactly what happened. The pup, which, as it turned out, was a birthday present from Chris to Anneliese, didn’t yet comprehend the rules — these were sheep and he was a dog — and so he went for them and the sheep reacted and that reaction, predator and prey, drove the older dogs into a frenzy.
In that instant we forgot the women, forgot the couple on the road, forgot spritzers and croquet and the notion of chilling on a scalding afternoon, because the dogs were harrying the sheep and the sheep had nowhere to go and it was up to us — grad students, not farmers, not shepherds — to get in there and separate them. “Oh, shit,” Chris said and then we both hurdled the fence and were right in the thick of it. I went after Nome, shouting his name in a fury, but he’d gone atavistic, tearing wool and hide from one bleating animal after another. I had him twice, flinging myself at him like a linebacker, but he wriggled away and I was down in the dirt, in the dust, a cyclone of dust, the sheep poking at my bare arms and outthrust hands with their stony black hooves. There was shit aplenty. There was blood. And by the time we’d wrestled the dogs down and got them out of there, half a dozen of the sheep had visible gashes on their faces and legs, a situation that was sure to disconcert the farmer — Chris’ landlord — if he were to find out about it, and we ourselves were in serious need of decontamination. I was bleeding. Chris was bleeding. The sheep were bleeding. And the dogs, the dogs we scolded and pinched and whacked, were in the process of being dragged across the front yard to a place where we could chain them up so they could lie panting through the afternoon and contemplate their sins. That was the moment, that was what we were caught up in, and if the women were on their bicycles someplace wearing a scrim of insects or stepping into somebody else’s quarrel, we didn’t know it.
A car went by then, a silver Toyota, but I only caught a glimpse of it and couldn’t have said if there were two people in it or just one.
—
We never did get around to playing croquet — Mallory was too worked up, and besides, just moving had us dripping with sweat — but we sat on the porch and drank zinfandel and soda with shaved ice while the dogs whined and dug in the dirt and finally settled down in a twitching fly-happy oblivion. Mallory was mum on the subject of the couple in the Toyota except to say that by the time she and Anneliese got there, the girl was already in the car, which pulled a U-turn and shot past them up the road, and I thought — foolishly, as it turned out — that that was the end of it. When six o’clock rolled around we wound up going to a pizza place because I was outvoted, three to one, and after that we sat through a movie Anneliese had heard good things about but which turned out to be a dud. It was a French film about three non-specifically unhappy couples who had serial affairs with one another and a troupe of third and fourth parties against a rainy Parisian backdrop that looked as if it had been shot through a translucent beach ball. At the end there was a close-up of each of the principals striding separately and glumly through the rain to separate destinations. The three actresses, heavily made-up, suffered from smeared mascara. The music swelled.