Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

It’s not like Karen and I ever had such a good thing going. Bad match from the start. You probably don’t realize, though. Probably don’t ask too many questions about me. You’re a bald museum docent, used to doing the talking. She wanted to train me into some refined fop who liked art and Russian opera, you see, and I was pretty reluctant. She’s so quiet and refined. Reads all those books and never talks too loud in a restaurant, even when I wear a flannel shirt under that Joseph Abboud sport coat she bought me. I do think she loved me at first. She was a city kid, grew up in a boxy Bronx high-rise, and here I was, a guy with calluses. She could feel cultured around a guy like that. Looking back, she probably started getting frustrated early on, though, when she realized I wasn’t going to turn into some cosmopolitan dick.

Has she told you any of this? Told you about our silent fights, sitting across from each other at that little metal table we had, eating cold pastrami sandwiches, just glaring? Or what about all those nights we just threw our hands up and went to sleep because we were too tired to fight anymore? Or that President’s Day weekend, 1993, when we drove up to Vermont, to that adorable little bed and breakfast with the wraparound porch and the gingerbread trim. It had a petting zoo—cows, sheep, a couple pigs, a horse. All she wanted to do was feed the lambs, run her fingers through their soft coat, and so why did I go on explaining about how the different parts she was petting were really just different cuts? That’s the scrag right there, dear. Kind of tough but okay for stew. And that—that’s the fillet. I like the chump chops better, a little fattier, but most people like the fillet. That’s what you’d order at the little restaurant down the street—the one you said took reservations six months out and we would never get to try . She was awfully upset after that, which is probably fair. I apologized and everything, told her I’d take her to get that fillet soon, though I never did. Later that night she crawled on top of me and started gyrating. And I just went with it because who wouldn’t? Even you would. But halfway through I realized she wasn’t moaning so much as she was sobbing, and then I didn’t know what to do, so I sat there for a minute before I started feeling dirty. Then I rolled her over and we sat quietly in the dark and didn’t talk for a while.

On the drive home she told me I was like a chunk of deformed brass. She kept polishing me, thinking I’d stay like that. I’d be like gold. But after a couple weeks I’d be all tarnished again, and she’d have to start over. That’s called a metaphor, and she uses lots of those, being a librarian and all.

I wonder, did she tell you some skewed version of this? Or was she maybe too embarrassed? Or does my name not even come up? I start suspecting something is wrong with Linus late that first week. We’re up early mending fence, splitting firewood, clearing brush from trails in the woods. It’s all refreshing work, and I’m taken back immediately to being a kid, trolling around the farm with my father, working those thick yellow calluses deep into the creases of my hands. And Linus starts to open up just a little, easing off the angry old man routine.

“A museum docent?” he says.

“A bald one,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “Never been to a museum myself.”

“Well,” I say. But I don’t really tell him much more about you since I don’t know much more. Just that you guide little kids around and don’t have as much hair as I do.

“So when you drive in there at night, it’s what, some kind of stalking?”

“Nothing like that,” I tell him, but then I don’t really explain any more since I don’t know why exactly I do go in there or what I’d do if I bumped into you.

Anyway, while we’re mending a length of split-rail and talking like this, Linus reaches too far for a flat-blade screwdriver, and his forearm pops out from under his jacket. And it’s messy looking: red and blistered, dark splotches like craters. Mix that with his old man wrinkles, and it starts to look like someone hit him with a load of buckshot and he never cleaned it, so it got all gangrened. Has to hurt like a real bastard.

Linus catches me staring, I know he does, and we both stop for just a minute. He looks down at his exposed arm, but he doesn’t cover it because that would be too obvious.

“What you do,” he says, “is buy her some sort of jewelry. A necklace, maybe, with a turquoise rock on it. Women love turquoise shit.”

“Right,” I say.

He stands and stretches, kind of nonchalant like, pulls his shirt back over his forearm. “You’ve been working out good,” he says. “You go hard, don’t need me training you. How’s an extra hundred a week sound? On top of room and board.”

I squint at him, trying to figure his angle, but I don’t think too long. I need the money, and I tell him that’d be great if he can spare it.

“It’s a deal,” he says. “A hundred a week for the next few weeks so long as you keep working out. Get you back on your feet, maybe help you buy a turquoise rock.”

I leave Gus with Linus that night when I drive in to the city. They seem to have hit it off: Gus gets his snout scratched, but he doesn’t ask stupid human questions, doesn’t stare at that rotting arm. As I drive that night, I can all but see Gus with his face on Linus’s lap, the old man’s gruesome looking arm draped around him, petting little circles, feeding him chunks of bologna while they listen to the radio.

I park near Baruch College and walk up and down the side streets until I see the little hatchback that you hate. At first I’m dismayed because it looks like my note is still stuck under the wipers, but then I realize it’s a different note, one from Karen. Please, Marty , it says. Don’t come around. Vick carries a stun rod for work, and I don’t want him to use it on you. Hugs to Gus, Karen .

What’s odd, though, is how small to Gus is, like she wrote Hugs as a sign-off but then realized it was inappropriate now and had to squeeze the other part in to make it more acceptable. I stare at it for a long time, how squished to Gus is.

So I write her another note on the back of hers, and I pin it under the wiper blade: Dogs can’t hug, but I can. Call me. This is silly .

We trade more notes on the car. Karen doesn’t call, but she responds. One of them says it’s not fair to her, the way I’m writing nice notes now, that I have to stop. It’s like I’m Lopakhin and she’s Lyuba, and we’re trying to keep on living in some cherry orchard even though we know we can’t. She knows I don’t read books like she does, but she still says things like that. Please do stop, Martin, she says.

You’re oblivious to all of this, of course. No way she’s telling you. Do please understand, Vick, I’m just writing little notes to Marty, but you’re still the one who gets to see my nipples .

I ask Linus if his daughter has any books around so I can find out about Lopakhin.

“What?” he says.

“Doesn’t she have some books around here or something?”

He looks confused. “Oh,” he says. “My daughter. No. No books.”

Then he limps outside and calls for Gus. And I sit there wondering about Linus, what his deal really is. He’s a mysterious character, and I think I could live in his house for the next ten years and still not really understand him. Why he is how he is. That arm, his daughter, all of it. I think on that for a while, and I can’t decide who I’m more like, Linus or you. I guess neither. I’m some strange mixture who only erects half walls around himself. And I don’t know where that leaves me, where I should be or who I should be there with.