“I want to believe you,” I say.
The city office says the dog will have to stay in custody for eight days, in case he has an owner looking to claim him. Opening my computer, I get on Facebook to type a plea for someone to adopt this dog. In a show of utter selflessness, I will give up my love to save him, like a biblical martyr or the baroness in The Sound of Music.
Betty asks, “What were you and Barbara talking about so quietly?”
“Her stepson is gay.”
“Oh my,” Betty says. “Oh my.” She isn’t negative, just goes quiet. Or say more. Or ask more. I don’t know why I think she is going to this time. With us, the silences have always won.
I think I need another Oatmeal Creme.
8
My parents removed to Missouri in the early ’thirties; I do not remember just when, for I was not born. . . . The home was made in the wee village of Florida, in Monroe County, and I was born there in 1835. The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town.
—Mark Twain’s Autobiography
In the Paris post office, a mural, The Arrival of the Clemens Family in Florida, hangs, scrutinized occasionally by old schoolteachers in line for a book of stamps, gazing through their cataracts as they count out their change. Who else would stop to scan the nameplate? No tourists here, just hunters or fishermen passing through on weekends. Younger people have no inkling of the Clemens boy who became Mark Twain, or his birthplace, down the road, which no longer exists. Leveled when I was in high school, the place the Clemens family came to is underwater, the victim of huge road graders clearing the land for a lake project that did not, as it turned out, do much to boost the local economy. Stoutsville, Evie Cullers’s hometown, is down there too. Maybe, buried in mud, is a fork or spoon, a cup or saucer or pair of glasses worn by someone she knew.
In winter, I drive out to see the vapor rising from the ice over the water, a sight that almost makes the season worth trying to get through. This summer, the lake bottom is all but utterly dry with bare, spindly trees, vapor-thin themselves, rising out of the cracked earth. All a fisherman can catch near Twain’s old town is a near-fatal sunburn.
When I was a kid, I wanted to enter the annual fence-painting contest held annually during Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal, where I went once with Bill and June. We ate Kentucky Fried Chicken by the Mississippi, accompanied by a friend of June’s who had terminal cancer. I watched the slender woman milling through the crowds on a cane decorated with what she said were bull’s testicles, a decoration she was extremely proud of.
Glancing at the small dried objects, Bill eyed me mischievously and asked, “What do you think about that, Sport?”—a nickname no one had ever thought to call me. I knew I was no Sport. Still, it was good, this little clue that he had not realized what was true: I did not fit the nicknames other boys belonged to so easily they could pass them back and forth.
. . .
The lonely dog has been imprisoned two days. Worried about his surviving the heat, I take food and treats. My Facebook pleas on his behalf emphasize his most attractive features, minimizing his outdoorsy fragrance and yodel-like howls. In the picture I posted, he looks insane, curled up in a yellow bandana I arranged around his neck. I worked for seven years a few floors below Vogue magazine. I understand the impact of an accessory item.
The kid from the grocery store parking lot is mowing our lawn this morning, or what is left of it. Apparently he is part of our yardman’s crew. Bare-chested, lawn-mower boy wears tennis shoes with no socks and a pair of filthy shorts his waist barely holds up. A few curls trail down from his belly button. He’s twentysomething, but looks a teenager; his skin is clearly troubled. Nothing soothing has touched it lately. On his cheeks and shoulders are dozens of eruptions.