I had saved a really long cigarette butt for after my shower and I was about to light it up, actually had it in my mouth and was picking up the lighter, when Hayes smashed his face up against the screen door and yelled, “Lynnie, sweetie, honey!” With his nose smushed up against the screen like that, he looked like a serial killer. I didn’t say anything at first and I don’t think he could see me since the blinds were down and it was dark in there. “Whatcha doing, Little Flipper?” He made a couple of dolphin squeaks per usual. “Why don’t you let old Hayes in?”
I stayed right where I was on the floor by the coffee table. “My mom said you weren’t allowed in the house because you’re having a spell.”
“Having a what?”
“A spell. That’s what she said. Spell. S-P-E-L-L.”
“The only spell I’m having is one of unemployment. And I believe that’ll be coming to an end here shortly.”
“You get a job or something?”
“I have some prospects.”
After the accident that wound him up in the emergency room where he met my mom, she helped him get a job “managing” the pharmacy of a Drug Rite over in Statesboro. He was not actually a pharmacist, but something called a pharmacy technician, which, to my mind, seemed like the pharmacist’s equivalent to a nurse’s assistant. Maybe not even. More like a hospital candy striper. All a pharmacist does is count pills. What does the assistant do, hold the bottle for him? Anyhow, he was fired for reasons that were never fully explained to me (hmm, let me take a wild guess).
“I heard they were hiring over at the Crispy Chik,” I said. “You know you look like a rapist with your face pressed flat like that?”
“In your dreams, Flipper,” Hayes said.
“Nightmares,” I said.
“Hey,” Hayes said, putting his hands in his pockets and rocking back and forth from heel to toe. “Just let me in there for a sec to use the bathroom and then I’ll take off.”
“Nope. The order is, and I quote, ‘Hayes is not allowed in the house when I’m not here.’ The bathroom’s in the house. So, no bathroom. Anyway, you drank the last of the cough syrup. If you really got to go, just tinkle out there behind the camellia bush.”
His face drooped when I mentioned the syrup and he said, “Come on, now.”
“I’m walking to the phone now. I’m picking up the phone. I’m dialing the nurse’s station at the hospital.”
“You go ahead and be that way, but don’t expect no favors from me anytime soon.”
When the thumps came an hour later, I thought it was Hayes back to pester me some more. I’d shut the door and locked it. There were just the two thumps, like somebody hitting the door really hard with the heel of his palm, and then nothing.
I crept to the window and peeked out. There wasn’t anybody I could see on the stoop, unless he’d pressed himself right up against the door.
I went ahead and opened it. Not a soul on the front walk or anywhere in sight. Then I saw a little bit of shiny wet on the doormat and crouched down to look closer. I touched it and rubbed it between my thumb and index finger. Red, I thought. Even then I didn’t get it. But when I turned to go inside, I saw what was there. Stuck to the door with green punch pins were two fuzzy, gray ears. I knew them for what they were right away. Terrier ears.
I thought about the man on the phone with the cigarette-burned voice. Two bluebottle flies buzzed in a circle and landed on the red, wet edge of the ears. First one, then the other. I thought to take the sad, little things down before those flies laid their maggot eggs inside, but I didn’t want to touch them.
That man, I remembered suddenly, knew Mom was a nurse at the hospital and that we lived near it. I had a sudden picture of my mom’s ears nailed to the door.