If I can learn you one thing about tar, it’s this. Don’t try to paint over it.
Not on a summer morning when the mercury on the shop window’s already reading eighty-seven. Tar don’t want to be covered up, it wants to bubble and ooze. Throw a brush at it, and it’ll just grab on.
Only thing you can do, really, is cool it down with ice till it gets brittle. Then scrape off what you can. Cool it down some more. Scrape some more. Then rub in some Wesson oil, real hard, till the last specks is gone. It ain’t the work of a few minutes, believe you me, and here it was Monday morning and the first truckers half an hour off.
“Unless my eyes deceive me,” said Hiram, “it was just the columns that got hit.”
“So what?”
“So grab all the tarps you can find from the garage. I’ll grab some rope. We’re going to wrap these columns up but good.”
“Supposing somebody asks what’s underneath.”
“Tell them it’s a surprise.”
Well, off we went, the two of us, and it were that very morning that Earle Hoyle decided to wake his damn self up. Guess he couldn’t live another second till he’d shared that porte cochere with humanity. So he come running on out, eyes sprung wide. It’s the one time I was ever sorry he could read.
“That weren’t for you to see,” I said.
He didn’t say nothing.
“That’s just fools talking. Ain’t a lick of truth behind it.”
Still nothing.
“You ain’t to tell Janey now,” I said. “You ain’t to breathe a word.”
Well, me and Hiram set to wrapping, and I’ll say this. Once we was done, there weren’t a splash of tar to be seen. Hiram checked his pocket watch.
“Six fifty-five. I suggest we put some smiles on our faces. What do you say, Earle?”
The boy was nowhere to be seen.
We checked round the house, went calling up and down Strasburg Pike. Not a sign.
Now, Earle was famous for lighting out whenever he got in a stew, but morning passed into afternoon, and he was as gone as ever.
It was fearful hot that day. The air sharp as copper, steam rising off the asphalt. Mamas running from the sound of their own babies, and drummers and preachers chasing sales that weren’t never coming, and good old boys strutting round with cigarette packs in their rolled-up undershirt sleeves, looking for a fight. Ain’t no easy living to be had on a day such as this. More than once, I confess, I was moved to curse Earle’s name for leaving us in the lurch, but each time, I thought back to how he’d looked, reading those words.
Five o’clock rolled by. Then six. A little after seven, I told Hiram I was going to take a walk, but all I did was stroll to the edge of the road and swing my head every which way, trying to picture where he might be. Lake John? Squabble Creek? Cauthorn Mill Road? Could’ve been any of those places or none.
Just when the sun was starting to drop, I saw a figure far down the road. A lank, rawboned thing with a boy’s shoulders and man-sized arms. His face was in shadow, and he kept turning his head like he was talking to somebody.
Dear God, I thought. That brother of mine has gone and lost his marbles.
By now, Hiram and Janey had followed me out to the road. Earle saw us, I guess, ’cause his hand shot up. Then something came skittering out from behind him, and I knew that whatever he’d been talking to was flesh and blood.
Four spindly legs, brittle as peppermint sticks. A coat the color of dead grass. A saggy head with black-rimmed eyes and ears at wrong angles to each other. And, sprouting from those ears, fringes of old-man hair.
“Why, that little devil,” said Hiram.
’Bout ten feet away from us, the creature stopped and drooped its head so low you couldn’t even see its eyes.
“This here’s our new guard dog,” said Earle.
“Walks funny,” said Janey.
“He can’t help that, he’s bowlegged. Look, I already taught him a trick. Hey, you, roll over!”
Critter did just like it was asked, and it was the saddest thing you ever seen. And then, instead of springing back up, like a normal dog would do, he just laid there on the side of the road, scrunchy with fear.
“Guard dog written all over him,” I said.
“He ain’t never had nothing to guard before,” said Earle. “We give him a home, he’s gonna look after it.”
“Don’t look too smart,” I said. “Probably wouldn’t know his own name.”
“We ain’t named him yet.”
“Or find his own food.”
“I’ll feed him.”
My eyes twitched down to that pale yellow belly, patchy and scabby.
“I reckon he’s crawling with ticks and fleas,” I said. “We’ll all come down with lice before the week is done.”
“I’ll brush him out.”
Janey knelt down and commenced to scratching behind the thing’s ears. “Why,” she said, “he looks like a little deer, don’t he?”
And now it was Hiram, running his fingers along the thing’s spine. “He just needs a job. Like any other working stiff.”
I reckon I could’ve held out a while longer. ’Cause if only you could’ve seen this mutt—I mean, life had gone and washed its hands of him. But then I made the mistake of asking myself what Mama would’ve done.
“He damn sure needs a bath,” I said.
“’Course,” said Earle.
“And I ain’t lifting a finger for him. Y’all can feed him and pick up his shit and whatever else.”
“What’re we gonna call him?” said Earle.
Janey didn’t miss a beat. “Gus.”
“Why Gus?” I said.
“Lord, Melia. That’s what he looks like.”
I’m sorry you’re so dumb.
“He don’t look no more like a Gus than a Walter,” I said. “Or a Pierre.”
But the seed was already planted, and before I knew it, the other three was whispering it in his ear. “Hey, Gus.… You hear that, Gus?”
Feeling a little encouraged, the dog made his way toward the store. Sniffed around by the door, then pushed his head under the stoop and come back out with something in his mouth.
“Would you look at that?” cried Earle, eyes blazing. “He’s hunted down his first critter.”
Whatever he’d hunted down, he weren’t in no hurry to show us. Dropped it at our feet like an apology.
It was the redbird. The one that’d been pecking away at our window for all these weeks. Hardly a mark on him now—he’d gone to his maker long before Gus ever got there.
I stood there, staring down at his stubby carcass, thinking, You should’ve quit while you was ahead.
“Well, now,” I said, feeling my jaw go tense. “Maybe next time this fool dog will catch us something that weren’t already dead.”