Theodore Wheeler - Bad Faith

I was thinking about pet names for pricks when I saw a Pomeranian wander out into the thoroughfare. I laughed when I saw it come out of the trees, a bouncing white puff of fur.

There was a neighborhood across the road, behind a trees of heaven clutch. The Pomeranian must have escaped from its yard and found its way to the thoroughfare, drawn by the noise. It looked pleased with itself as it approached the road, the way dogs do when they think they’re getting away with something, when they’re doing something stupid.

A woman gasped when she saw the dog, then everyone turned to the road, the traffic. Anna spun in time to see the Pomeranian struck by a car. We all saw. We all heard. The dog caught in the undercarriage of a gray Cadillac and spit out the back to tumble along the pavement. The Cadillac didn’t stop. The cars behind slowed and bowed around the dog once they saw it heaped in the center lane. Anna wondered why no one stopped to help. She asked how the driver could do that.

“Maybe they didn’t notice,” I said. She didn’t buy that.

“How couldn’t they?”

Some hotel workers went out and circled the dog. They helped direct traffic and gave the appearance that things were under control. No one wanted to touch the dog. They surrounded it and talked. We couldn’t hear what they said. “They’re deciding who will pick it up,” I guessed.

Eventually a man in a burgundy-red uniform came out and wrapped the dog in a pillowcase. He lifted it off the road and carried it to the parking garage.

We stayed in Anna’s room after that. She turned on the TV. I took my shoes and socks off.

It was three days like that. Anna curled under the hotel comforter to watch basic cable, the air conditioning on full blast, while I typed on my laptop at the Lucite bureau. I had to catch up on work, but I crawled in next to her when I was bored and hugged her from behind. She wore pajamas, black and furry, that zipped up in the front. Anna and I never slept together. I enjoyed her body like I did comfort food, like too much might make me sick. We napped and dozed. I laid my hand on her tummy and felt how soft it was. I rested my head on her shoulder and smelled her hair. Sometimes she reared into me to spoon, but that was as far as it went.

We hardly even talked. Anna didn’t mention Jon, not after what happened with the Pomeranian. She asked questions like we’d just met — which, I realized, was precisely the case.

“What’s it like there, where you live?” Anna asked. “Are there any people in Nebraska? I couldn’t live like that, out in the middle of nowhere. I get the creeps just thinking of all those cows out there, chewing grass.”

Jacq and I had been married seven years by then. We met in New York and were married there. She’s nine years older than me, from northwest Ohio originally. I grew up in Connecticut, in a banal, middle-class neighborhood, but the tiny travel agency I operated was in Chelsea. That’s where I lived when we met. My parents started the agency in the seventies and it wasn’t a bad business. We were a small outfit with regular clients. Then 9/11 happened. Almost all small agencies went out of business the next couple years. We were no different. My parents started the agency; it was shuttered on my watch. Then I started writing product descriptions for the online novelty mall. Then I married Jacq.

Once we were married Jacq convinced me to move out to the ranch she’d bought near Alliance. I had nothing else going. The agency was closed. My job with the Internet people was flexible. I felt like I might be getting a little old for New York. The idea of settling on the Ponderosa to grow into middle age sounded romantic. So we moved.

I liked it right away. There was a new house on the ranch — the hunting lodge, I called it — a guest house Jacq turned into her studio, plus lots of open valleys of dirt and rock I hiked in. I bought a pistol and a holster because there were coyotes, and damn if that didn’t excite me. Alliance had a country club where we’d go for drinks sometimes if we wanted to trade stories with locals, and a RadioShack and a pharmacy and a pizza place. Most of our food was shipped to us from an organic market run by a disembodied poet in Boulder, but we frequented the greasy cafes and steakhouses if we felt tolerant of shredded iceberg lettuce and Folgers crystals. There was a swimming pool, a track at the high school. There was more than that, but those were the places we went to. The nearest Wal-Mart was in Scottsbluff, an hour away, so a few of the local stores in Alliance avoided being run out of business. I appreciated that.

There was lots of time on the ranch. I learned how to use it. I answered e-mails, worked on my descriptions. I began expansive, free-form landscape projects I never intended to finish, left mounds of worm castings and hardwood mulch to erode across the prairie. I talked to my parents an hour every Sunday evening, something we did ever since I took over the agency from them. We didn’t really know what to say anymore. Mostly they bitched about the commercials for Priceline and Travelocity they saw on TV. If I was bored, I trawled airfares on my computer, in the old system, a black screen with green characters. It was all prompt commands, no windows, no clicking a mouse. I loved it. It was like traveling back to a time when you had to be an expert to run a computer, the good old days.

It wasn’t something I saw coming, but I liked living in a small town. (This is what I explained to Anna when she asked how I could stand a place like Alliance.) There’s something essentially decent about walking on Main Street with the rumble of pickup trucks circling to cruise a highway drag, or happening into a park when the Legion team is on the diamond. You can stand at the fence and watch the game. “We love that,” I said, sitting up out of Anna’s blankets. “The little kids race into the weeds after foul balls. The fathers chain-smoke and lean into the backstop to grumble. At night you can see the dome of light from the highway.”

Anna and I went out to a club in Buckhead, near the hotel. I’d been in Atlanta nearly a week. Anna wanted to go dancing, but the place we went to wasn’t a real club. This was a suburban bar, across from the mall. There were TVs showing Braves highlights and old replays of Herschel Walker in a Sugar Bowl, years and years ago. The place made me feel my age. I was eight years older than Anna. That seemed like a big difference there. In reality, Anna was too old for this place too. It was all college students, or kids of that age, like a frat party. It made me nervous to see groups of young, drunk-fuelled men in college football tee shirts and jean shorts roaming the floor. I felt like such a Yankee. Most of my clothes were out with a laundry service, so I was in a black suit and white dress shirt I’d brought along just in case. I didn’t wear the tie, but it still felt ridiculous to be dressed like this in a place like that. I wouldn’t dance with Anna.

There was a group of guys at a table near us, Yellow Jacket fans, according to their branding. They flirted with Anna when they came for drinks at the rail, two or three of them at a time, asking her to dance. She was nervous about it. Her back straightened when they spoke to her. “No thank you,” she said. “Not interested.” I could tell she liked the attention. She refused them each time, even though she’d come here to dance.

“Why don’t you tell them you’re married,” I said. “Say you’re pregnant. Maybe they’ll give up and leave you alone.”

I saw by Anna’s face that she liked those boys talking to her. The ones she’d already said no to watched out of the corners of their eyes, alert to what Anna would do next. She looked different, watching them back. By the angle her face tilted, how she swept her hair behind her ears, I saw how she betrayed different emotions. She didn’t look so bored.