“Damn it,” said Bernie, as we pulled up in front of our place on Mesquite Road, not entering the driveway on account of Mindy Jo already being there, busy unloading Sea of Love, if I’d caught the name of the blue boat. Our place on Mesquite Road is the best place in the whole Valley, in my opinion, and probably yours, too, after you come to visit. We’ve got the canyon out back, and on one side are the Parsonses, this old couple—maybe not doing so well these days—and my pal Iggy. On the other side lives old man Heydrich. Not long ago we found out—actually from our buddy Mr. Singh of Singh’s Pawnbroker and Financing for All Your Needs, who I think I may have mentioned already, although I may not have gotten to Mrs. Singh’s curried goat, a reason to visit even if you have no needs—that old man Heydrich collects Nazi memorabilia. Whatever those might be, Bernie’s not a fan, but that’s not the worst thing about old man Heydrich. What’s worse is the way he waters his lawn—not a desert-style lawn like ours and the Parsonses’, mostly about rocks and cactuses and dirt, really the nicest kind of lawn, Bernie says, but the green-grass golf-course kind, which is the worst. Even if it feels the best under your paws, but that last part’s just between you and me.
Now, switching off the engine, Bernie said, “There’s only one aquifer—what’s so hard to understand?” Possibly he raised his voice a bit, but I would never have called it shouting. It didn’t matter. Old man Heydrich wasn’t out there to hear, so the only answer was the hiss of his sprinklers spraying water high in the air, making a rainbow, yes, which had to be good, but also a puddle out on the street, and that was bad.
Bernie glared at that rainbow for a moment, then gave his head a quick little shake. I do the very same thing sometimes. We’re a lot alike in some ways, me and Bernie. Then, not looking angry anymore, he walked up the driveway to where Mindy Jo was at the controls of the winch, slowly lowering Sea of Love beside the house. I gave my head a quick little shake and followed.
“Anything I can do to help?” Bernie said.
“Pour me a cold one,” said Mindy Jo.
Bernie went into the house. I stayed outside. The boat touched down without making a sound. Mindy Jo started unhooking the hooks, paused when she saw me watching.
“One fine hombre, arn’cha?” She glanced toward the house. “Make that two f—”
Whatever was coming next didn’t come, because the side door of the Parsons’s house opened and out stepped Mr. Parsons, not actually stepping, but stumping on his walker, one of those hospital bands on his wrist.
“Hi, there,” he said. “I see Bernie got himself a—”
Boat.
That was my guess on where Mr. Parsons was headed with this. But I might have been wrong. The point was that Mr. Parsons didn’t get the word out because at that moment who squeezed between his leg and the door frame, a very small space? Why, that would be Iggy!
One thing about Iggy: he can squeeze through spaces even when there are no spaces. Once—this was before the electric fence guy got the Parsonses to put one in, an electric fence they could never get to work right, meaning nowadays Iggy was pretty much inside—when we were roaming in some distant neighborhood where the mailman left a biscuit in the box outside every house that included a member of the nation within—Iggy had actually jumped up—an amazing jump for such a little guy—and squeezed himself into a mailbox, the opening of which was way smaller than he was! And then he’d hopped out with that biscuit in his mouth and a crazy look in his eyes that got crazier when a sort of howling rose up from the nearest house. Around then was when I snatched the biscuit from Iggy—it seemed like the right thing to do—and he chased after me going yip-yip-yip, his tongue, astonishingly long, flopping out the side of his mouth. Of course there was no way Iggy could catch me unless I let him, which I did, although by that time there was no biscuit to be had. What a great game, and we’d made it up all on our own! We played that game over and over—the game of Iggy snatching biscuits out of mailboxes and me snatching them away from him—going from one neighborhood to another until the mailman checked his rearview mirror and hit the brakes. After that came a period of confusion, involving animal control, thornbushes, and several members of Valley PD, including one I happened to know, namely Leo “Kittycat” Leone, so everything turned out all right. Did I poop or what the next day! Poop and poop and—
But maybe too much information. And not really the point, which was all about Iggy squeezing through narrow spaces, just like he was doing now, and the next moment he’d be on the loose and headed for the hills, and me right with him. Iggy! My best buddy! I got ready to ramble and rumble and who knows what? But at the very instant when Iggy was popping free, Mindy Jo glanced his way, stuck a thumb and one finger in the corners of her mouth and whistled.
This was a whistle like none I’d ever heard, except maybe one time when Bernie and I were mixing it up with a couple of perps on a railroad track in the middle of nowhere and a train suddenly came zooming round the mountain. That train whistle, somewhere between a scream and a roar: the scariest sound I’d ever heard. The perps gave up and raised their hands immediately—when the right move actually was to leap off the tracks and get clear of that train, which was what Bernie and I had done. So then we had to go back and get them, with the train now practically on top of us! And they didn’t even thank us later that day when we went to check on them in their cells.
But forget all that. The only reason I brought it up is on account of that train whistle and Mindy Jo’s whistle being pretty similar. Cleared my head, I can tell you, and it was clear to begin with. Mr. Parsons’s mouth opened wide and he leaned back a bit, as though facing a storm. As for Iggy, he forgot about being on the loose, wheeled right around and darted back into his house.
To look at someone in awe—is that an expression? If so, that was how Mr. Parsons was looking at Mindy Jo. She looked at him in alarm.
“You okay, pal?”
“Perfectly okay.”
“Whew,” Mindy Jo said. “Thought for a second there you were having a stroke.”
“That was last week,” said Mr. Parsons. He went back inside and closed the door.
Not long after that we were out on the patio back of our place and having drinks—beer for Bernie and Mindy Jo, water for me. The swan fountain—the only thing Leda left behind after the divorce—made soft splashes, just the sound cooling off the day a bit. The sound of water! I came close to having a thought about that.
A lot of humans have trouble with the heat, but not Bernie and not Mindy Jo. They sat at the little round table, both relaxed in that easy way strong bodies have when they’re relaxing. Mindy Jo took a big sip of beer.
“What’re you going to do with the boat?” she said.
“Fix it up.”
“Yeah?”
“Am I hearing something in your tone?” Bernie said.
“Don’t know what you’re hearing,” said Mindy Jo, “but what’s in my mind is no frickin’ way.”
Uh-oh. Had Mindy Jo just said something not nice about Bernie’s fixing things up skills? Was it possible he and Mindy Jo would soon be throwing down out here on the patio? No way—Bernie could never hurt a woman, not even a big strong one like Mindy Jo.
And in fact he started laughing. He laughed and laughed, all of a sudden so happy. Mindy Jo laughed, too. They polished off their beers. Bernie went inside and brought out two more. They clinked glasses.
“Nixon always says you’re a special guy, Bernie,” Mindy Jo said. “And I agree. Older, true, but special.”
“Well,” said Bernie, “um, I wouldn’t say they’re mutually exclusive. No reason you can’t—”
“I had an older boyfriend once.” Mindy Jo leaned across the table, held one of her muscular arms so Bernie could see. She pointed at one of the tattooed faces, halfway down her forearm. “This guy,” she said.
Bernie peered at the tattoo. “Hard to really tell a whole lot from—” he began.
“Never again,” Mindy Jo said. “That’s what I told myself about older men.”
“Kind of sweeping, but—”
“You know why?”
Bernie shook his head.
“Take a guess.”
Bernie looked up at the sky. A plane was flying by high above, trailing one of those long white tails. Tails of any kind were always interesting, of course, but Bernie seemed to gaze at it for a very long time. Finally he said, “They start doubting themselves.”
“Exactly!” Mindy Jo punched Bernie’s shoulder, not particularly gently. “And then they stop being fun. How did you know that?”
Bernie smiled this quick little smile he has. You hardly ever see it. I think it happens when he’s pleased with himself, but don’t go by me. “I just tried to imagine myself in the shoes of an older guy,” he said.
“Ha!” said Mindy Jo. “Ha!” She started to make a fist, as though to give Bernie’s shoulder another pop, and then stopped. What was going on? I checked Bernie’s footwear, saw he was wearing flip-flops, got no further ahead. Meanwhile Mindy Jo was looking at Bernie in a new way. But he’d gone back to watching that plane, so he missed it.
“Bernie?” Mindy Jo said.
His gaze came back down. “Yeah?”
“Got any tattoos yourself?”
He shook his head.
“Look down your nose at people with tats?”
Look down your nose? I’d never heard that before, and it sounded like something I should have known about. I sat up straight, tried looking down my nose and … and found I could do it easily! And what a nose, by the way! Absolutely fascinating, especially from this angle. It went on and on and on, a total champ of a nose. Who’s got it better than me?
“No,” Bernie said. He glanced at me, blinked, turned back to Mindy Jo. “Not at all.”
“Sorry,” said Mindy Jo. “My bad—didn’t mean to stereotype you.”
“No problem.”
Mindy Jo swallowed some more beer. “My first serious boyfriend played in a Beatles tribute band up in Vegas.”
“Yeah?” said Bernie. “Which mop top was he?”
“Ringo, of course,” said Mindy Jo. “Want to see?”
Here is where I should maybe describe our patio a little more. It’s fenced in on both sides with a high wooden fence and at the back a high adobe wall with a high gate, all this highness is really high so someone—say Bernie—would never have to worry about someone else—say me—taking off on what you might call an unplanned outing. A very smart idea and it had worked for the longest time, with that second someone not even dreaming of even taking a crack at leaping up and over. But then one night had come a sound unlike any other from across the canyon, namely the sound of she-barking. Bottom line: you don’t know what you’re capable of unless you try. For now let’s leave out the complications of the later appearance of a puppy supposedly resembling—if that’s the meaning of “spit and image”—me, a puppy now going by “Shooter” and living with Charlie—that’s Bernie’s kid—Leda and Daddy Malcolm, which was what Charlie was supposed to call Leda’s new husband, a rich dude with very long toes, Bernie being simply Daddy.
But forget all that, or at least part of it. The only point was the high fence on both sides, the Parsons side and the old man Heydrich side. On the Parsons side the fence has a door—the very door we’d come through after the boat was all nicely in place—now closed but not locked.
Okeydoke? Back to this Ringo person. A perp-type name, in my opinion, so if you’re out there right now, Señor Ringo, I hope you look good in orange.
“Uh, sure,” Bernie was saying. He glanced at Mindy Jo’s arms. “Which one’s Ringo?”
“His name wasn’t actually Ringo, of course,” Mindy Jo said. “It was Jerry.”
“Got it,” said Bernie, although that was where I myself stopped getting it.
“And he’s not with the others,” Mindy Jo went on. “Being my first, and all.”
“Ah.”
“Still want to see?”
“Um, well, maybe better to just let the imagination kind of—”
Right about then was the moment the side door of the fence opened and someone looked in. This someone was Eliza, sort of Bernie’s girlfriend now that Suzie didn’t seem to be speaking to Bernie these days. All so complicated, not at all how we handle these things in the nation within. When we first met Eliza, Bernie was still in Valley Hospital after the saguaro case—no way I’m getting into all that now—and she was Dr. Bethea to us, in charge of getting Bernie better. Which happened, just one of the reasons I’m a big fan. Also she turned out to be a cousin of Cleon Maxwell of Max’s Memphis Ribs, my favorite joint in the whole Valley! I was a big fan of Suzie, too, although I didn’t recall any of her cousins being in the same league as Cleon.
Bernie did not notice Eliza at the door. He was too busy watching Mindy Jo, who was trying to lower one shoulder of her T-shirt, and when that didn’t quite work out the way she wanted, moving on to just plain taking the whole thing off.
“Here we go,” she said, pointing to the now-visible tattoo of a long-haired dude with a big, crooked smile on his face. “You like?”
“Uh, remarkable,” Bernie said. “Remarkable, like, likeness.”
“You knew Jerry?”
“I meant of Ringo.”
“Jerry wasn’t really Ringo, Bernie. It was an act.”
“Right, right, of course. Line between art and life and all, and—” He tore his eyes off the sight, and that was when his gaze swept over the door in the fence, now closed again, with no sign of Eliza.
Mindy Jo’s phone buzzed. She checked the screen. “Wreck on the airport cut-off,” she said, jumping up. “Sanitation hauler and two eighteen-wheelers.” Ringo, or Jerry, or whoever it was, disappeared from view, and Mindy Jo was gone right after that.
Bernie and I sat quietly, Bernie gazing at the fountain and me gazing at him. All at once, he slapped his hand on the table. “Evaporation! What’s wrong with me?”
That was an easy one. Zilch, zip, nada. For some reason, Bernie went behind the fountain, shut off the water. The flow from the swan’s mouth dwindled to a trickle, then a few drops. He watched those last few drops.
“Why did Wendell ask us to go out there in the first place? That got lost in the shuffle.” Bernie turned my way. “What did he want to talk about?”
Our fountain? Hey! A pretty good guess by me! I felt tip-top.