Book Excerpt: Good Dog

In this scene, which begins in my mother’s room in the nursing home, I get to meet my brother’s ill-mannered mutt, Georgie. And Bruce and I discuss–or fail to discuss–funeral arrangements.

Even when my mother was in the hospital, it had been Bruce’s habit to stop by after work and watch Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune iwth her, though she showed less and less interest in TV. I didn’t know how well my brother would do on Jeopardy!, but on Wheel he’d probably do nicely, amassing a tidy sum by knowing when to spin and when not to. Now he stepped closer to my mother, feeling the need, as Louise had, to introduce me, to try to make sure Jennie knew I was there. “Hey, guess who’s here? All the way from Kansas City?”

Still moaning/breathing, she opened her eyes halfway, as if in response—a coincidence, I was sure; even a stopped clock was right twice a day. I tried to keep the tiredness, the bitterness out of my voice as I said, “Hi, Mom!” You’d think I’d just come home from school, bursting into the kitchen for a peanut butter sandwich. “Hey, I’m here,” I added, aiming for the sarcasm my brother had avoided. “All the way from Kansas City! Imagine that!” I took off my heavy jacket and draped it across the back of a chair. “Why don’t you take your coat off?” I asked Bruce. “Aren’t you hot?”

He stuck his hands in the pockets of his bomber jacket. “I never get warm.”

The unasked question in the room—How is she?—mainly just stood around, like Vanna White. I felt Mom’s forehead. “She was warm, a little anyway, this morning. Running a slight fever. They gave her a Tylenol suppository for it. Have you seen a nurse?”

His surprised-looking eyes grew wider, as if I’d asked him if he’d seen a kangaroo. “Oh, no.”

“I can’t tell if she’s still warm, or if it’s just that my hands have been so cold….” But it was Louise who had noticed her feverishness earlier, not me. No doubt about it, I wasn’t a good sickbed person. I wasn’t knowledgeable enough, or sensitive in the right way. My mother, on the other hand, had always cared for me when I was sick. Neglected as I may have been in some ways, when I was running a fever or struggling with a sore throat she was always there, with some family remedy: baking soda and water for an upset tummy, ginger ale for a cold. If I had been, in my brother’s famous phrase, stuck taking care of my mother, she would have been the one getting the raw deal.

The spinning of the Wheel of Fortune, which sounded like a stick rattling across a picket fence, was getting on my nerves. I found the remote control and switched it off. My brother, who had been pacing along the other side of the bed, stopped suddenly, as if the remote had switched him off too. He looked skinny, scrawny in his bomber jacket and white cords; he looked as if he belonged in bed. “How’s Greg?” I asked, just to get part of him moving again, even if it was just his mouth.

“Oh, he’s okay. His father was just in the hospital, with his umpteenth heart attack.”

My brother’s dislike of the sick, of the old: he never bothered to play it down. I got a flash, one of those nightmarish premonitions, of what it would be like if fate got kinky enough to ever place me in my brother’s care. Good luck, Wayne! Good luck to Greg, too: I’d been wishing him luck for nearly twenty years, and so far he was surviving—a nice guy from the start, still a nice guy when I’d seen him last. I knew from my own, shorter gay history that nice guys were the ones to hang onto. I asked my brother, “Did Louise tell you Ralph was coming up here?”

Bruce was pacing again. “She did. Is it tonight?”

I nodded. “I’ll have to leave to pick him up at the airport in a little while.”

Suddenly, as if to hold up her end of the conversation, my mother started trying to speak again. Ah wah wah wah…Ah wah wah wah…. “She’s been doing that a lot lately,” I said.

My brother stopped at the head of the bed and placed a hand on my mother’s brow. She rolled her eyes upward, toward the hand she couldn’t see: a hand with long, graceful fingers, so unlike mine. “Ssshh,” he said to her, “ssshh.” Then, “Wayne’s here, Mom.”

“She knows I’m here,” I said, a bit too sharply.

A puff of air escaped Bruce’s lips—it might have been a laugh or a cough or a belch. I knew what it meant when he made no reply to a question or remark, it meant he was having a delayed reaction. There would be comments later, sometimes much later.

My mother quieted, closing her eyes as my brother stroked her hair back from her forehead. It soothed me to see his hand there, gentle and natural, to know he could give comfort. When he took his hand away and put it in his jacket pocket, it was as if he were keeping it warm for her. Then he turned to me. “Hey, I’ve got Georgie out in the truck. Why don’t you come out and meet him.”

Georgie was my brother’s beagle, about two years old. “The hound” was what my mother and aunt had always called him; he was too wild for them. His name had originally been Georgia, back when my brother had thought he was a female—honestly, how could you make that kind of mistake with a dog? As we headed out into the parking lot, I could tell Georgie was in the truck, all right, even though I couldn’t see him: the vehicle was lurching from side to side, as if it had the hiccups.

“I have to keep him on a leash,” Bruce said. He opened the driver’s side door and stood there, his arms busy inside the cab, his body twisting and jumping as if he were wrestling with the Devil himself. Then he stepped away and the force sprang at me, knocking me flat on my back. I was glad there was some snow on the ground, it wouldn’t have felt good to have my head bouncing off concrete. But it didn’t feel good, either, to have Georgie on top of me, trying to lick my face as his long nails came close to puncturing my jacket. No, he wasn’t licking, he was trying to eat my face, his teeth raking through my beard. Bruce was no help; as I struggled to try to sit up he placed something round and heavy in my hand. In an instant Georgie was gone, while the thing in my hand whirred like a fishing reel. Too late I realized it was a reel, a leash reel, and it reached its end, jerking me upward to my feet with enough force to break a man’s back. “Jesus Christ!”

And I was off, the dog nearly invisible at the end of the great length of leash that was now my leash, directing where and how fast I would go. The plowed parking lot was too tame for him, we were heading for the large untouched circle of snow in the center of the drive, a pristine patch of white marked only by the flagpole rising from its middle. I dug my heels into the pavement, not wanting to be the one to disturb that smooth surface. But it was too late, Georgie was already there, kicking up snow all over the place, dragging me into it up to my knees. I thought he would want to explore the whole space, which would give me a chance to rest, having only to stand in the center and let the leash form the radius of his rounds; but no, he kept heading straight across, toward the staff parking lot and, frighteningly, the woods behind the facility.

“Georgie! No!” I was not going to be pulled through bushes and knocked against trees. As the dog darted between two parked cars I managed to plant one of my boots against a bumper, giving me some leverage to try to hold him in place. But it wasn’t enough, I had to plant my other boot against the other car. So there I was, suspended in an absurd water-skier position, when Bruce came ambling around the circle drive. One speed, my mother used to say about him, he’s got just that one speed.

True enough; I’d never seen Bruce hop, skip, jog, or run. It had never annoyed me before, though. “Damn,” I kept saying, waiting for him to free me from the agony of the leash. “Damn!” Finally he was close enough for me to get my feet on the ground and push the reel at him. “Damn, Bruce.”

Bruce called his dog. “Hey, Georgie!” With his Maine accent it sounded like “Jaw-jee!” The leash slackened a little. “C’mere, boy!”

It was only in small increments, and possibly by chance, that Georgie headed back in our direction. “He gets pretty wild when he’s outside,” Bruce said, and I gaped at him. Even now, with the leash back in my brother’s hand, it was obvious he was on no easygoing dog owner’s stroll. It cost him a lot of effort to keep the dog on the plowed drive, to not be pulled into a snowbank; his upper back and shoulders kept twisting and jerking as if he were having convulsions. Now I was the one who strolled, lighting a cigarette and moving at my brother’s one speed.

When we got back to the truck Bruce opened the door and Georgie jumped in. The cab once again became his cage, gently rocking as if it were glad to see him. “I don’t know how you can handle that dog,” I said. I had seen enough of Georgie, when he was close enough to stand on my chest, to see how powerfully developed he was, like a souped-up version of the beagle I usually thought of as a family dog, a gentle Snoopy.

“He’s a good dog, really,” Bruce said.

Just then a sound came from the cab. It made me shiver, raised hairs on the back of my neck as if I were in the woods after all, surrounded by ravenous wildlife. It was Georgie howling, howling for no reason, the cab rocking more swiftly now, battered by sound waves of insane force. “Good God, what an unholy racket!”

“Sometimes he does that in the house,” Bruce said. “For no reason at all he just starts howling. Startles you, all right.”

We were standing on the outer edge of the circle drive, looking toward the thinner strip of woods that separated the facility from its nearest neighbor on Ocean Avenue. I let a silence build, like a pause between selections, before I changed the subject. “You know,” I said, “the charge nurse had Louise and me call a funeral home this morning.”

“Yup.”

“Since Hay and Peabody isn’t around anymore, we called this other place, not far from here, near Woodfords Corner.”

“Yup.”

One speed, one syllable. What was he conserving himself for? “Louise said Mom didn’t want a funeral.” Too late I realized I’d said didn’t, not doesn’t. That extra betraying “d” seemed to burn now where my tongue had tapped it out on the roof of my mouth.

“Yup,” Bruce said.

“Well, what do you want?” I asked, too loudly.

Looking at the ground, my brother shuffled a step or two away from me. If only he knew how often, over the years, I’d wanted to get words out of his mouth, even if I had to shake him till his bones rattled, or reach down his throat and clip the words loose, like tonsils. How often I’d even fed him lines, cued him on what to say, as if the least he could do was repeat after me, like a recording device. Right now, all he had to do to keep my lower lip from trembling, to halt the waterworks groaning to life in my sinuses, was to tell me that he wanted something. He had to want something, or else give up—just give up on being human, for now and forever.

“I don’t want anything,” he said, repeating his sentiment of the night before. “Whatever you and Louise want to do is fine. I’m keeping out of it.” He opened the door of his truck, hopped up into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut. He cracked his window open enough to say, “I’d better get home now.” Georgie was all over him; Bruce pushed him gently away as he backed the truck out onto the circle drive. It was so like my brother not to say “Have a good night,” or “See you tomorrow,” as if even that much might tempt fate by invoking a future that was by no means certain, not when each present moment was so difficult. I watched the truck skid a bit onto the straight part of the driveway that led to Ocean Avenue, then it was gone.

The silence of the night was incredibly deep. The untouched snow—what was left of it, after Georgie’s rampage—sparkled here and there, its gleam echoed by the stars, as if they were close enough to be sharing some ancient, not-quite-forgotten language. I listened, and listened, and heard nothing.