“What are you talking about?”
But he knew, of course. Each marriage had its own language, its own code words, built of mutual experience. She said two of them now: “Fritz Meshaum.”
At each rotation of her spoon, it clicked against the ceramic of the mug—click, click, click. Like the combination dial on a safe.
4
Fritz Meshaum.
A name of ill repute, one Frank wished he could forget, but would Elaine let him? No. Shouting at Nana’s teacher that time had been bad, and the famous wall punch had been worse, but the Fritz Meshaum incident was worst of all. Fritz Meshaum was the dead rat she waved in his face whenever she felt pushed into a corner, as she did tonight. If only she could see they were in the corner together, on the same side, Nana’s side, but no. Instead, she had to bring up Fritz Meshaum. She had to wave the dead rat.
Frank had been hunting a fox, not that unusual in the wooded Tri-County area. Someone had seen one running around in the fields south of Route 17, not far from the women’s prison. It had its tongue hanging out, and the caller thought it might be rabid. Frank had his doubts, but he took rabies calls seriously. Any animal control officer worth his salt did. He drove out to the collapsing barn where the sighting had occurred, and spent a half hour stalking around in the puckies. He didn’t find anything except the rusted-out skeleton of a 1982 Cutlass with a pair of rotting panties knotted to the antenna.
On the way back to the shoulder where he’d parked his truck, he cut alongside a fenced property. The fence was a mix of junk, decaying planks, hubcaps, and corrugated sheet metal so full of holes it did more to invite attention than to discourage intruders. Through the gaps, Frank took in the peeling white house and shabby yard beyond. A tire swing on a fraying rope hung from an oak tree, black tattered clothes surrounded by circling insects were piled at the base of the tree, a milk crate full of iron scraps stood guard by the porch steps, a (presumably empty) oil can was carelessly pitched aside to rest like a hat on top of an unruly growth of bougainvillea which was itself partially draped over the porch. Glass fragments from a smashed second-floor window were scattered over the bare tarpaper roof, and a brand new Toyota pickup, blue as the Pacific, stood waxed up and parked in the driveway. Littered around its rear tires were a dozen or so spent shotgun shells, once bright red, now faded to pallid pink, as if they had been there a long time.
It was so perfectly country, the wreck of a house and the shiny truck, that Frank almost laughed out loud. He strolled on, smiling to himself, his mind requiring several seconds to compute something that hadn’t made sense: the black clothes had been moving. Shifting around.
Frank retraced his steps to a break in the hodgepodge fence. He watched the clothes. They breathed.
And it happened the way it always seemed to, as if in a dream. He didn’t slip under the fence and actually walk across the yard so much as he seemed to teleport the distance separating him from the black shape under the tree.
It was a dog, although Frank wouldn’t have wanted to guess which breed—something medium-sized, maybe a shepherd, maybe a young Lab, maybe just a country mongrel. The black fur was tattered and flea-bitten. Where the fur was gone, there were infected patches of exposed skin. The animal’s only visible eye was a small white pool sunk into a vaguely head-like shape. Twisted around the dog were four limbs, all of them askew, all clearly broken. Grotesquely—since how could it possibly have run away?—a chain was looped around its neck and fastened to the tree. The dog’s side lifted and fell with one breath after another.
“You are trespassin!” announced a voice behind Frank. “Boy, I got a gun on you!”
Frank put up his hands and turned around to behold Fritz Meshaum.
A little man, gnome-like with his stringy red hillbilly beard, he wore jeans and a faded tee-shirt. “Frank?” Fritz sounded perplexed.
They knew each other, though not well, from the Squeaky Wheel. Frank remembered that Fritz was a mechanic, and that some people said you could buy a gun from him if you wanted one. Whether that was true or not, Frank couldn’t have said, but they had swapped rounds a few months earlier, seated at the bar and watching a college football game together. Fritz—this dog-torturing monster—had expressed his fondness for the option play; he didn’t think the Mountaineers had the talent to air it out with any sustained success. Frank was happy to go along with that; he didn’t know much about the sport. Toward the end of the game, though, once Meshaum was full of beer, he had quit harping on the merits of the option and attempted to engage Frank on the subject of Jews and the federal government. “Them hooky-noses got the whole thing in their pocket, you know that?” Fritz had leaned forward. “I mean, my people come from Germany. So I know.” That had been Frank’s cue to excuse himself.
Now Fritz lowered the rifle he had been aiming. “What are you doin here? Come to buy a gun? I could sell you a good one, long or short. Hey, you want a beer?”
Although Frank didn’t say anything, some kind of message must have been transmitted by his body language, because Fritz added, in a tone of chagrin, “That dog worry you? Don’t let it. Sumbitch bit my neffe.”
“Your what?”
“Neffe. Nephew.” Fritz shook his head. “Some of the old words, they stick. You’d be surprised how—”
And that was the last thing Meshaum got out.
When Frank finished, the rifle butt he had taken from the bastard and used to do most of the work had been cracked and spattered with blood. The other man sprawled in the dirt, holding his crotch where Frank had repeatedly hammered the rifle butt. His eyes were buried under swelling, and he was spitting up blood with each shaky breath that he dragged out from under the ribs that Frank had sprained or broken for him. The possibility that Fritz would die from the beating had seemed, in the immediate aftermath, not unlikely.
Maybe he had not hurt Fritz Meshaum as badly as he thought, though—that was what he had told himself, even as, for weeks, he kept an eye on the obituary section, and no one came to arrest him. But Frank was without guilt. It had been a little dog, and little dogs couldn’t fight back. There wasn’t any excuse for it, for torturing an animal like that, no matter how ill-tempered it might be. Some dogs were capable of killing a person. However, no dog would do to a person what Fritz Meshaum had done to that pitiful creature chained to the base of the tree. What could a dog understand of the pleasure men could take from cruelty? Nothing, and it could never learn. Frank understood, though, and he felt calm in his soul about what he had done to Fritz Meshaum.
As for Meshaum’s wife, how was Frank supposed to know the man even had a wife? Although he did now. Oh, yes. Elaine made sure of that.
5