Apologizing to Dogs - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joe Coomer is the author of Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God, The Loop, Sailing in a Spoonful of Water and an award-winning book of nonfiction, Dream House. He lives in Texas and Maine.

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Friday, October 3

8:17 Verda in her tight pants out to get her paper. She has a habit of pulling her dress out of her rear crack when she gets up out of a chair and I noticed she did the same with the pants after she'd bent over to pick up her paper. I was on my front porch watering my pot plants.

The bar was cool that day and he was thirsty and that was all he was thinking about, that and whether or not he'd remembered to tighten down the clamp on the condensation drain of unit number four. If it leaked they'd call. No, that wasn't right. He'd go back first thing in the morning and check on it. He'd spent the day installing six commercial air-conditioning units at a new business on Hulen Street. His elbows rested on the bar and his two front teeth sat on his lower lip like a washer and dryer, the washer having wobbled away on spin cycle leaving a gap between his teeth large enough to see a pink wad of lint which was his tongue. After each gulp of beer, he poked the lint back with the wing bone of a chicken. He'd sucked on a chicken bone for as long as he could remember, so long that some people called him Bone rather than Marshall. He didn't mind. He'd tried and failed to give up the bone, but the bone was stronger than he was. It wasn't such a bad habit. Chicken wings were cheap. His teeth were as white as a dog's. But he knew that the bone frightened women. They stared and then winced and acted as if the bone were in their own mouths. So he avoided people, installed air-conditioning units, heat pumps, ran the ductwork, and took all the solace and flavor he could from his bone. There had been this way of life since he'd graduated from high school seventeen years earlier. He'd scored eighteen points in his final game at Northside High. He was a six-foot-eight, 160-pound second-string center, and when the other boy broke his ankle at the beginning of the second half, Marshall bit through his own bone and went in. He could recall each of the nine baskets but never brought this up in conversation. Lots of people thought he was called Bone for his slender build, then they'd see the bone. The bone he sucked on that evening was relatively fresh. He could still taste the marrow leaching through the epiphysis.

The first thing he noticed that had anything to do with Aura was her drink. Down at the far end of the bar was a short, squat glass containing an aquamarine liquid protected by a little umbrella. It looked as if someone had slit open a blue freezer pack and drained it into a glass. Behind the drink, in shadow, something caught the light. It flashed again and once more. Something like a nickel spinning in midair. For a moment he forgot the bone and it tumbled between his two front teeth, slipped off his lower lip and bounced on the bar. He put it back in his mouth as carefully as he might reinsert a false eye. A hand came out of the shadows and took the cool drink, withdrew. It gave him a chill. The hand was all palm; its fingers hardly protruded from the thick, pumpkin-rind flesh. Marshall put his own hands beneath the bar and clasped them. That flash again. He almost recognized it. He rolled his bone across his teeth and touched the brim of his cap. He had the oddest sensation. He felt as if someone's ankle was on the verge of snapping. He picked up his beer and moved around the bar in three strides, his long legs always carrying him to places and events sooner than his eyes could interpret them.

"Have a seat with us," she said, and she reached out to pat the stool next to her but her arm was too short. In the half-light of the bar she resembled a malted milk ball, round and dark. Her skin was unusually tan for a fat woman. Her cleavage merged with the cleft in her chin. She wore a light cotton T-shirt dress with the distorted face of Felix the Cat suckling her breasts.

"Please sit down, Mr. Lennox," she said.

"Oh no, my name's Marshall. I install Lennox air conditioners." He sat down and his knees hammered the bar.

"Someday, perhaps," Aura said, "I'll be able to call you Marshall without feeling like I'm Festus Haggen on Gunsmoke."

He was unsure for a moment but then realized she was comparing him to Matt Dillon, a character he respected.

"Hello," Marshall said.

She rolled a mint across her tongue. That same flash.

"Right now," Aura said, "we're at a loss for words." The mint clacked against her teeth and this was when Marshall saw that the mint was no mint but a sliced white ring of ham bone. The translucent puck of marrow it once contained was still a glistening slick on her porcelain teeth.

"It's very hot, don't you think?" she asked.

"I could keep you cool," Marshall said, "I install air conditioners," and he moved the shaft of chicken bone between his molars where he could lock it down.

"We hope you don't find anything more than you need here," Aura whispered.

He sniffed her bony breath.

"We should include ourselves," she said.

Marshall took her fingertips in his, afraid that she might melt in his hands. He felt an immense heat radiating from her body. But he knew that only a face as sharp as his own could reach her recessed lips. He bent lower, falling into the shadow of her tan, and touched her mouth, first with his chicken bone, then with his teeth and finally with his lips. She gave in to him with the same rubber refusal and release of a refrigerator door. It seemed the whole world was swallowed. The circle of pork slid over the shaft of bone, and Marshall, for the first time in his life, felt included, contained.

8:29 I forgot to mention yesterday that Mose washed his car yesterday but intentionally left his license plate dirty.

8:34 Aura and Marshall's car parked so I cannot see them load and unload it, unless I am in my backyard.

8:42 White Plymouth -- license 458-HCJ -- still in front of Nadine's. Two days now. Bumper sticker on car -- Reagan/Bush '84 and Lucky Me, I Twirl a Baton.

8:44 Tradio and his man friend sitting on their porch like a couple of VULCHERS, waiting to see what else they can get from Effie.

Mose switched off the vacuum cleaner, bent down and gave the roller a good rap with the pair of pliers he always kept in his back pocket. A small screw he'd lost a week earlier from an antique radio dropped out. He must have kicked it from the shop into the bedroom. Mose sold and repaired antique radios, fans, telephones, clocks, almost anything electrical, but his true passion was his search for the idea or invention that would make him rich. He picked up the screw, finished vacuuming in that corner, then backed up to appreciate a clean carpet. The many tracks of the vacuum were plainly visible. How about designing a rug with the pattern of the vacuum cleaner tracks molded into the pile? Your carpet would always look freshly vacuumed. He'd approach his next-door neighbor, Nadine, with this idea.

8:47 Mr. Haygood walking to the store. He was laughing as he passed my house and couldn't help but look my way even though he tried not to.

"What a fine idea, Mose. But your carpet would still be dirty, wouldn't it, even if it looked clean?"

"Well, yes, I suppose, but that's sort of the idea, the beauty of it, Nadine, honey."

"But, Mose, it's not honorable, it's not chivalrous, an invention that's, after all, a deceit."

Mose put his hands in his pockets. There was a washer, a wire tie and a penny there. "I didn't think about it that way, Nadine."

"I'm so sorry, Mose. You'll come up with something, sweetie. Now, Mose, have you ever considered the pure fact that if the first vowel in your name were simply another, your name would be Muse, rather than Mose? Why didn't your mother think of that? She had nine months to think of that, and I've only been thinking about it for a little while and came up with it."

"I don't know, Nadine."

"I love vowels. I wish...