Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

“What’s your name, dog?” She almost laughs at the question. She can call him whatever she wants and that’ll be his name, at least for tonight. She wonders if he belongs to the black salesman or the skinny white one. She doesn’t know what a tattooed white man would name his guard dog, but if he’s owned by the black man his name would be something country and southern, like Blue. She remembers a line from an old song, I had a dog and his name was Blue…

“Hey, Blue, you gonna let the nice lady come down?”

At the sound of her voice the dog lifts his massive head, looks up at Ventana for a few seconds, then lowers his head again, watching her with eyes wide open now, his small ears tipped forward, his forehead rippled as if with thought. Ventana remembers some more lines from the song and sings them to him. She has a thin, almost reedy singing voice:

You know Blue was a good ol’ dog,

Treed a possum in a hollow log.

You know from that he was a good ol’ dog…

Ol’ Blue’s feet was big and round,

Never ’lowed a possum to touch the ground…

No response from Blue, which she decides is a good sign, so she slides forward, and when her feet touch the hood of the car, she stands up. Feet apart, hands on her hips, shoulders squared, she believes she is the picture of self-confidence and good intentions. “Well, well, Blue,” she says, smiling. “What do you make of this? I’m starting to think we’re gonna be friends, you and me.”

Blue stands, squares his shoulders similarly and appears to smile back. He whips his tail like a piece of steel cable back and forth in a friendly-seeming way and droops his ears in a manner that suggests submission to Ventana, as if he’s decided that for the moment, until his owner shows up, she’s the boss. Must be his owner is the black man, she thinks, since he’s so relaxed around black people. Maybe the white man’s not the boss, like she originally thought. She decided earlier that when she got out of here, whether it happened tonight or tomorrow morning, she would not come back and test-drive and buy a vehicle from Sunshine Cars USA. But now she’s thinking maybe she will.

She sits down on the hood and tells Blue face-to-face that she’s going to walk over to the gate in the fence and try to climb over it. “Sorry to leave you, ol’ Blue, but I got to get home,” she explains. “I got to work tomorrow, and I need my sleep.”

Keeping the silver Ford between them, still not taking her eyes off the dog, she slides her feet from the hood of the car to the ground and takes a short step away from the vehicle. Blue has watched her descent, and except to stand up and flip his tail back and forth has not reacted, has not even blinked. For the first time since she left the roof of the car, she takes her eyes off him — a ten-second trial. When she turns back he has not moved or changed his expression. He’s watching her almost as if he’s glad she’s leaving, as if her departure will relieve him of duty and he’ll be free to find a quiet spot in the lot to sleep away the rest of the night.

“Okay, I’m going now,” she says. “Goodbye, Blue.”

Ventana walks slowly along the fence toward the locked gate three car lengths away. She doesn’t look back at Blue, and she doesn’t walk tentatively; she walks like someone who is not afraid, faking it the same way she entered the lot hours earlier. She was afraid then, too, but only of buying a car, of being outsmarted by the salesman — or saleswoman, if she ended up buying it from the young Latina. She was afraid that the car would turn out to be a lemon, rusting on cinder blocks in her backyard, used up; that depositing one hundred dollars in the credit union at the end of every month for three long years would be wasted. Now she is afraid that she has dangerously misread a guard dog’s intentions and desires. Though she walks with seeming confidence, she may be sacrificing herself to a set of obscure but nonetheless sacred principles of property and commerce. She is afraid of the blinding pain that will come if the guard dog attacks her. And for a second she lets herself imagine the awful relief that will come when only death can take away the pain. Her night has come to that.

She remembers another verse from that old song, but this time sings it silently to herself:

Old Blue died and I dug his grave,

I dug his grave with a silver spade.

The chained and padlocked gate is wide enough to drive a car through if it were open. Just below the top of the eight-foot-tall spikes is a horizontal steel pipe that she believes she is tall enough to reach. She adjusts her purse so the strap crosses her chest and the bag hangs against her back. She reaches up and on tiptoes grabs the pipe. She pulls herself a few inches off the ground, then a few more, until she’s high enough to work her right elbow through the spikes and over the pipe. Holding her weight with her upper right arm, she uses it as a fulcrum to swing her left foot up, above the pipe and through the spikes. With her left foot wedged between them, she is able to grab onto the spikes with both hands and pull herself high enough to see over the gate. She suddenly remembers the last lines of the verse:

I let him down with a silver chain,

And every link I called his name.

The empty streets and sidewalks out there, the darkened stores and warehouses and homes, the whole vast dark city itself, all seem to go on endlessly into the night. She is about to free herself from this cage. She is escaping into the city. Her right leg hangs in the air a few feet off the ground behind her. The dog doesn’t growl or snarl. He doesn’t even breathe loudly. He is silent and strikes like a snake. He clamps onto her leg with his powerful jaws and drags her backward, off the gate.

Guy walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder…

Actually Billy walks into a neighborhood grocery store, not a bar, and he’s only pretending he has a parrot on his shoulder. He’s trying to think of a new version of an old joke. When Billy’s depressed or scared — and this morning he’s both — he has imaginary conversations with himself.

The place is a combination grocery-liquor-cigar store smelling of three-day-old fish, sour milk and tobacco, on Alton Road a block north of Lincoln, between the hotels on the beach and the condos on the bay. Squeezed between a Burger King and a massage parlor, the store is dim and dingy — four narrow, crowded aisles with a single cash register operated by a thin Chinese woman in her fifties. Her arms are crossed and she’s gazing at the ceiling deep in thought when Billy strolls in with his invisible parrot. He stops here several times a week on his way to or from work at the hotel and he sort of knows her, although they’ve never really talked.

She ignores him and he feels himself and the parrot fade. He figures she’s compounding variable interest rates on randomly chosen sums and doesn’t want to interrupt her calculations to say, Hello, good morning, young man. What a pretty bird! To which the parrot would say, Thank you, ma’am. I’d like today’s Miami Herald with the weekend real estate listings and a map of the city. My apartment has been condemned by the city and I need to find a clean, inexpensive place to live that accepts humans. Ha, ha.

There are two other people in the store — a tall gray-faced black woman in her thirties and a slump-shouldered middle-aged Chinese man with a clipboard, probably the husband of the cashier, counting dented cans in aisle two and positioning the cans on the shelves to hide the dents. The black woman has voluminous hips stuffed into too-tight jeans and wears a dark green company uniform shirt with Charlotte sewn onto the right breast pocket. She looks like she’s been up all night cleaning bathrooms at Mount Sinai Medical Center. He was up all night, too, packing his belongings to move out of his condemned apartment. He knows how she feels. Sort of. She feels hopeless. And invisible. But not to him: Billy sees her, and if he can see her — if one other person can know that’s she’s alive and in spite of everything still kicking — then she needn’t feel hopeless, right? Same for him, if one other person can see him.