UPSTAIRS I FOUND SMOKE in the pockets of my daddy’s striped shirts. Hovering in the mouths of his cowboy boots like steam coming off a cauldron. In my mama’s top two drawers, smoke up under her fold-in-private things. Smoke in my nostrils, smoke curling round the coils of my ears.
Smoke from the broiling steak that way downstairs they were calling Chester drove me to raise my hand like I had a question and search the dark hall for the cord to the hideaway steps. Bare-bulb attic light turned boxes marked CHRISTMAS, HATTERAS, and BRIC-A-BRAC: MANTELPIECE a chicken-skin yellow. Chester smoke rose from them. I sat down on HATTERAS and hugged the stooped me that hid there for a half hour, bent up under the eave slope, straddling the attic ribs. Dogman, dogman calling to me for the first time in weeks.
I was careful not to breathe too hard lest insulation get sucked up inside me. It happened before. Men came to insulate and I climbed up to watch them unroll the thick pink blankets like sleeping bags, me thinking, all right now, hide out from the craziness in the kitchen, camp out up under the eaves. A voice called me down out of the way and I obliged and this is when it happened, me standing at the foot of the ladder, my head flung back so far my mouth led straight to my belly. A stray tuft went right down me, disappeared inside.
Something like that, bring it back up, it cuts you twice, better just to live with it. It’s possible to go on ahead, carrying such inconveniences; lots of people got holes in their hearts they don’t even notice after a while. So after making noise about suing some company’s ass off, which they shut him up by saying should I have been allowed to wag-tail down there like a table-scrap dog, my daddy made best-insulated-belly-in the-world jokes at me for a month, the length of his memory even if you were to shoot him. And I didn’t even miss any school days, it happening in high summer, but that pink tuft I carry within.
Up rose the voice my mama uses when company comes, blue, curvy, beautiful to a fault. I waited until she’d quit calling to make my descent. Frontwards down the hinged ladder, Chester smoke thickening. Don’t plunge or you’ll get the bends, I told myself while climbing down, and this self-administered advice tickled my insulated belly, allowing smiles for everyone when I entered the kitchen.
Where there was smoke from Chester mixed with Tareyton and pot smoke, where there was glass sparkle, plates chinking, King Crimson on the tape player. Some lady with Cleopatra bangs pasted to her forehead played the spoons, the men in the room watching her knit skirt surf a fishnetted knee. Daddy pulled a wide knife from the slotted block it took him six Saturdays to make, everybody bunched up to see Chester sliced. My mama and daddy continue to work their way through this world in the back of restaurants because they say it’s the only type job where the laughter don’t come in a can. Half of the restaurant help shows up at our house weekly to dispose of items they decide are overstock.
Greasy oven door banging down: Chester! George the sous-chef leaped toward the ceiling, jerked the beaded cord of the exhaust fan. As it cranked up, smoke shifted above our heads like flute-charmed cobras. Before I gave up Dogman I would have felt excitement in a situation similar, as if I was part of a group of older people just about to move off somewhere together. But that was before I gave up Dogman and at age fifteen and some change discovered what it is about groups of people.
— Cut the music down, called Daddy, grinding his knife in whetstone swirls I could tell he thought sexy.
— What exactly is Chester? A drunk woman asked this. I knew she was drunk because her words managed to sound lazy and exuberant at the same time.
— If you mean what cut, technically I believe Chester is a London broil. Somebody down in front said this without turning around, words passed overhead like bodies on stretchers.
Waving back the crowd with his hot mat mitt, Daddy pulled the oven rack out as far as it’d go, letting Chester bask and steam, laying him out for the group of them who’d named their dinner just to have an inside joke to get them through the deep drift of upcoming Tuesdays at work. Even Mama seemed moved as she stared at Chester who rose from the pan like a steep-sided island, greasy seas boiling at the bottom of his cliffs. Daddy, thumbing black plastic spatulas, shoveled Chester onto a cutting board and sliced so professional skinny you know he went to school for it. He’s CIA, all the way up to Hyde Park, New York, to take his degree, though Mama, when she’s pissed, calls his alma mater Culinary Institute of Alabama instead of America, says he don’t know snail from doorstep slug.
Chester’s carved sides curled into the bubbly sea. Everything went grainy then, everyone had Dick Tracy dotted faces, corduroyed foreheads. Dogman, Dogman, loud and clear. They started to line up with their plates to their breasts like grade school or prison and before the first slice slapped plate I was out the door and half down the hill, smoke from Chester pushing and pulling me.
MY COUSIN MILLY’S the one took me up there first. Dogman’s always been so-so to her, take or leave, like cigs snuck in the bathroom during assembly. Though I have learned that people all the time take you to see things they don’t themselves appreciate nor understand. Museums for one. They’ll bus you over, snake you single file behind a teacher who’s looking only a water fountain that works. What do you owe those who bring you to places that touch or change you? Don’t owe them jack. They’re only vehicles, saggy camels delivering you to the sphinx. Ride them until they’re tongue-waggy, rub and chafe until their humps are threadbare as back-porch throw rugs, tweak their ears when you want down and when you dismount, don’t you even look back.
Milly knows this herself. Boys kept bringing her up to where Dogman’s supposed to roam, hoping she’d what? Fall willing under the spell of their clunky desires got up in man-dog costume and sent to prowl the ridges? Dogman the local Loch Ness monster, rivaled around here only by the Baby Bridge and the irrigation pond they raked for Floyd Japarks’s bloated corpse. Dogman standing in for the moonlit lane, the two Miller Lites, the skinny-dip, anything designed to introduce the friction. Dogman-as-aphrodisiac? It’s like thinking old Darwin’s seductive, which in a way his stuff sort of is, not that these boys would know Darwin’s stuff if it chased them down and bit them.
Driving up to see Dog that first time, Milly leans into her big idea boy, away from the door and the sidewalks just beyond, like the car’s hugging a constant curve. She wants to ask where he’s taking her but don’t. She’s heard talk of Dogman and wants to be a witness but yet you can’t come out and ask, you got to come up on him.
Dogman’ll run from you as he lives and breathes.
Milly wants to say she’s seen him, but the boys taking her up there don’t have foremost in their minds the tracking down of Dogman. You have to know where to park and all. You got to learn to follow clotheslines through the head-high dark as if they were flashlight beams frozen for you. There’s a sixth-sense semaphore out there, a complicated taking into account of things: crosstown sirens bouncing like hailstones off the sides of barns and train whistles shaking trees. One short and two long caterpillars underfoot. Smell the crunched grass not yet sprung back up. It’s a question of putting yourself out there by turning yourself inside out, which most would not want to do even if they knew how.
One night Milly claims to see something. They’re rounding the switchback on one of those logging roads that fork off Japarks Drive and come up on something standing there in the muddy crook. Moonlight strikes the puddle he straddles. Milly’s fuzzed on details because she says the light loses out to the clouds as they watch, but when I doubt her to her face she comes up with something: drawn-up paw, cheek dribble, dangling tongue, drool-coated fang agleam. She describes at it, conjuring things I would have said myself if you asked me back then what he looked like.
She’s back up there lots with that same boy, but when they go for a good month or two without a sighting she exchanges him for a few more. Sometimes she claims to see Dog for a second or two but always when he’s running away or behind a tree. Like I said, it’s to Milly like shoplifting Sucrets or sneaking into the drive-in. She doesn’t need it. Soon as she gets her license, Uncle Houston gives her that castoff Astro to drive, Mill loads the front seat with her big-haired girlfriends and goes looking Dog like four nights a week. Suddenly above using love to get up that hill. Love changes shape when you pass your driving test and get given a car, even an Astro the greenish of bad teeth. For some, this is independence: a half ton of sprung seat and dangly rearview, life course sighted by a hood ornament. I might could feel this way myself had not Milly told me about Dogman, had I not been born knowing what’s a vehicle and what teaches you things.
But maybe I was born not knowing squat, just like the rest of the world. Maybe I was nothing special until that moment I stood gawking up at black-attic heaven and received from on high a piece of glass disguised as county fair cotton candy. Had I stood a little to the left or shut my trap I would have grown up to be like my parents or Milly. Instead I carry within O pink hurt everlasting. I breathe, I bleed: invisible harm done with every doggy-dog pant.
Overstock rum from the restaurant flooded a weekend way back when. Seems like forever ago, but it was after Milly got her license, which she’s only had them six months so it must have been spring. Milly came by the house that Saturday. Overstock oysters roasted in foot tubs; there must have been twenty people from the restaurant, which led me to wonder was it even open or had they called an overstock strike. Me and Milly sneaking sweet rum punch and eavesdropping: heard one man say about his wife smack in front of her that all she ever did in this world was sit around and wait for books to come out in paperback, which Milly thought was funny but which got away with me so bad I begged Milly to go to ride. Which she agreed to only if I’d hunker down when she got whistled at, which I agreed to.
Wasn’t much whistling, wasn’t much hunkering. Mill took back roads through that neighborhood called Stairstep, where houses hang half off the ridge like they’ve been left there by high water. I could have got offended — Mill not wanting to be seen with me — but the main thing was we get up there and find Dogman.
We wound up Japarks, too fast past the unfinished church, skimpy tithing having left the roof a patchwork of shingle and tin. I used to ride up there on my bike when I was little and the church was an ancient ruin to me then, back in my junior archeologist period when all I wanted to do was dig up buried cities, cannonballs, dinosaur bones. What cured me finally was a program on public tube which told how these archeologists dig for years sometimes and don’t uncover much but a broken vase. Vase the narrator pronounced in the snooty-ass British manner — vozz — which, hell, I guess I would call it that too if it took me a year to dig one up.
— I wonder what do they call that style of architecture, said Milly, inclining her whole body toward the church.
— Run out of money, I said.
— That particular style you just mentioned could describe this entire town.
Milly’s all-of-a-sudden prissy diction made me picture her marrying a recruit in a few years time just to escape from our town. One day on base she’d blink awake on her dribbly pillow to stare at pink scalp beneath crew-cut stubble, hair running in feathery arrows like bones of filleted flounder and Milly hating fish. But I could not stop and feel sorry for her. Not when we were on our way up to see Dogman.
— Slow damn down some.
She sped up until we passed a car she thought she knew. She whistled, I hunkered. From the floorboard I watched Mill’s foot hesitate in a float between brake and gas before she decided she couldn’t be seen with me and heeled the gas. I came out of my crouch. It’s all vanity. On a personal quest, what do you care if someone spots you with your weird little cousin? Vanity or vengeance one, I decided, thinking of Mama and Daddy and how they thought they were getting over with their overstock parties, how many ways they’d found to make those binges sound rightfully theirs: food going to waste, low wage and long hour, customers getting gouged. That last one I loved best, them taking pity on the poor customers not while at work but at home and only when there’s a makeshift holding tank, Daddy’s beat blue pier-fishing cooler, full of lobsters for them to tong at and name crazy names. In my head I started writing a song called “People Got Their Wrong Wrong Reasons,” which Milly interrupted the very first stanza of.
— We ain’t going to see him tonight.
— And why aren’t we?
— Too damn dark, she said, tossing her tongues-of-flame-licking-headrest hair.
But we did see him, or I did, no thanks to Milly, who did everything she could to drive him away. I had to reach over and crank the car off so we could coast up the logging trail at the end of Japarks. The Astro rocked to a stop in a little lake swallowing the trail. To reach land we had to do splits. Milly kept up a bitchy stream I wagered my parents could hear over the Apache war cry album they loved to throw on around this time of the evening. It was bad dark out, limbs-clawing-you-before-you-even-know-you’re-up-on-them dark, Milly shadowing me after those first wet steps through the backhoe-tread puddles. Plainly she was a vehicle; the camel had kneeled.
I pushed on through the dark, Milly siamesing me all the while, which cut down some on what I could pick up from that side. I was thinking all sorts of things like who do we owe, for what, how much, and why was it that I out of everybody — Milly and her horny boys, Mama and Daddy and their vengeful coworkers — got chosen to see good in the dark.
We came around a bend where the lights of the town glowed beneath and there he stood, so close that I could see the pipe cleaners curling out of his suit-coat breast pocket, white padded wires bent into tiny walking sticks. I could see the rusted buttons of his overalls and hear the hooks rubbing against them when his chest heaved with shallow pants, the whiskered face skin which in that little light was the up-underside gray of washed-ashore fish. I could see his hand draw into the curl of a run-over paw.
Seeing him made me want to gargle up some great strange yell. Quick, something inside me said, hook me up to a hot machine, one what sucks up the blood unleashed from that swallowed piece of pink. I turned to Milly to see did she hear, for I couldn’t tell if I’d cried out or dreamed such a cry, but Milly was not there. I clutched my chest, for I could feel it inside, hot salty river running wild.
THAT WAS THE END of me going to see Dogman with Milly. For a while that was the end of me going up there at all, but knowing that he was out there, that every night half the town was out stalking him, making up all kinds of hokey lore about him — that he was hybrid offspring of a Fice and a woman from down around Garland, that he was escaped mental, that he was a hermaphrodite and did his dog routine to cover up nature’s cruel error, that he bit Reggie Boyette to the bone, that he was Sue Talkington’s uncle — drew me back up the mountain.
I could find him every time. I could leave the house doing everything it’s possible might not allow me to locate him — wear flip-flops and gym shorts and that’s all in an ice storm, take the loop over Beaucatcher Mountain which it’s five miles around that way, crash through the bush like a backhoe — here he would still be waiting on me. No, I did not ever try to talk to Dog. No, I did not try to feed him tainted burgers from the Sonic or inquire as to his day job. All that concerned me in those days was that I could walk straight up to him.
Which I could do always, which nobody else could do, and which, this got around. Big-haired girlfriends of Milly’s came rumbling by the house, their boyfriends’ low Camaros idling like off-cycle washing machines out by the curb. Milly all of a sudden did not mind me sitting prominent in the sprung seat of her Astro, out the window went the system of hunker when whistled at. Vanity. She never said word one to me about what she’d seen up there that night; turned out she needn’t, since I heard it all from everybody else and it was all wrong, wronger even than the reasons that caused her to repeat it. At the overstock parties the restaurant people would draw me aside to ask how did I do it, where was Dogman that minute, let’s get up a posse and head up there now. Vengeance! Beat down people seeking someone to beat further down, and that the sad history of this world and my own mama and daddy a part of it, furious at me for not fingering a crude map in the bowl of overstock chocolate mousse held out to me one night, which they planned to carry up the ridge and illuminate with Tiki torches so that later, in the short-tempered steam of their kitchen shifts they could have that creepy hour to bring up and brag about. Wrong-reasoned people of this earth tugging and gnawing at me! How could I watch them turn Dog into the kind of anecdote trumped up to while away the tick of a time clock? What could I do but give up Dogman entirely?
This I did to become those three most invisible and untalked-to things on earth: a younger cousin, a quiet kid with braces and scruples, the teenaged son of your host at a party where tables are crammed with pricey things to slurp and chew.
Then Chester. Smoke from Chester. But how come Chester and not the fifty pounds of mahimahi liberated two weeks previous and broiled in shifts that kept the house smelled up fishy for a week? Why Chester? Who Chester? I had managed to stay away for six months during which not once had Dogman been spotted. Milly had given up searching. She’d started going out with a boy home from boot camp, my prophecy come true, though I did not relish being right. Obviously she’d outgrown Dogman, did not speak of him, didn’t speak to me at all. For a while people would bug me about it, but after a few weeks of my shruggy smiling back they left off.
Then smoke sending me upstairs, away from daddy demonstrating butterfly techniques on a piece of Chester did not fit into the pan. Smoke sending me up to where those pink blankets stretched into the dark angled eaves like the curve of this earth, where I hunkered, wondering, Why Chester? Who Dogman?
Scene of the crime. Often I retreated here, despite its dangers — sentimental bric-a-brac from some earlier innocent time neatly boxed and shoved into corners, utter and airless isolation of the stripe not healthy for a soul likes to go around feeling like he’s a universe of only, and of course the acres of pinkness beckoning. Lay me down to sleep. I thought I could escape there, but smoke rises and Chester smoke, hell: it’s only purpose was to hunt me down, root me out, send me off on my final journey. Why Chester? No real reason except for my random time done come. Oh I could claim it was the name Chester triggered something deep and significant within, I could up and decide the senseless slaughter of some cow they named a sliver of was what got away with me that day. The truth was, as usual, way less sexy: number come up.
As for Dog, well: Dogman was Dogman. Every town had one: the man who crows like a rooster at first light, the woman who pushes a grocery cart crammed with cats whose flea-ridden house has to be fumigated by neighborhood decree. They’re everywhere. They ain’t right. Heard recently of a woman down in Garland who shows up in Family Foods wearing on her head a pair of sheer panties across which is Magic Markered the word Head. Dogman’s just another one of these. Not right in the head. Man thinks he’s a dog.
By the time I got through settling big questions, Chester smoke had driven me down out of the attic. Back in the kitchen, two crooked fingers of smoke settled in front of my nostrils. I slipped out the side door while everyone was loading their plate with bloody slabs and in no time was up the hill past the church ruined or unfinished one, didn’t matter, immaterial, couldn’t tell, so socked in by Chester smoke.
There’s big moon up there that night, all the yard art of upper Stairstep lit by it, scum water glowing green in birdbaths, satellite dishes tilting their wide mouths to the heavens. I’d never been up there when there was this much moon, never seen Dogman on a night so bright. I tried to abandon myself to that sixth-sense semaphore but nothing came, everything was blocked, Chester smoke canceling out everything. There was a rustling below, voices rising above a throaty chorus of cars. Next hairpin I looked down to see a line of folks coming up the trail, each of them carrying a candle in a bag of sand. Overstocked from the restaurant of course. I heard my mama’s blue curvy words, my father’s whiskyed ones, all of them climbing to the rhythm of spoon against fishnet knee. Crouching on the shoulder of a switchback, I spotted Milly sliding out of the car with her boyfriend in tow. In that praise be quiet that comes whenever the Astro is cranked off, Milly turns to him and says, We’ll see him, we’re going to see him this time, my little cousin can find him every time.
Would he show for such a little cousin like me? My senses were dulled by Chester smoke, the burnt smell of him, the carboned taste of him which I didn’t take bite one but still this purloined meat had somehow ended up rank within. Chester, too, in the bellies of those fools following me. Dogman come on and show yourself so I can turn you over to them and go damn home.
But he didn’t. Chester smoke thickened the higher we climbed; it rose off the hillside until the whole forest was on fire with it, and I ran from it and into it too. Seeing me run, they followed: vengeful workers, big-haired girls, Mama, Daddy, Milly, and her skinthead ticket out of here. Half the town was behind me when I tripped and fell to the ground.
That pinkness within: something too dangerous to let back out, better to let it settle. But what with all the running it had begun to bloat up big as Chester, and besides, what had my suffering brought me but the ability to see good in the dark?
Up there on the ridge, moon hitting me like spotlights, I mashed my fingers to my face like a baby’ll do you. I found my lips and parted them. Fingernails tapped teeth, grazed stalactite tonsil. What the rest of them found when they came around the bend was a boy making noises known neither to dog nor man, trying to bring up that piece of pink but in the process flushing Dogman out from a cloud of Chester smoke.