Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [104]
“Oh, it’s been back and forth since day one,” Red said. “My house is more convenient, but there’s always someone at the door. Then Libby has cats that need to be fed, and neither place has room for all our things, which is why we decided to build the castle on the hill.” Red walked around the truck and turned off the water. “Your little place working out okay?”
“Yeah, great. Stop by later and I’ll make you a cup of decaf.”
“Maybe I will.”
It was a hot night, all his windows were open, and Lewis could hear them across the way, their voice tones and bits of their sentences, Libby’s delighted laugh. Then, she played the violin, the first movement of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, music so sad and haunted, Lewis had to pace. He’d never heard her play before; when he’d known her, she’d been entirely disaffected with the violin. He drank coffee, waited for Red’s knock, roamed his four small, dingy rooms, which looked anonymous, like a film noir set, a good place to blow your brains out. By eleven o’clock, the occasional, indistinct syllable still floated through the windows, Red’s truck was still parked across the way, but all their lights had been extinguished.
BARBARA came up with Celia and Kip; they ate dinner at the Blue House, where the company of women, as always, was highly appreciated. Then, the three spoke as a panel at the AA meeting. Although Lewis had told him about it, Red didn’t attend. Afterward, Lewis and his friends drifted back to his bungalow.
“It is spooky here.” Barbara gave him a worried look. “You doing okay?”
“I came up here thinking it’d be old home week. Instead, I feel like an employee.”
“You are an employee,” Barbara said.
He hated her for saying that.
She only laughed. “Maybe you need to tell Red you’d like to see more of him.”
“Oh, right.” Even imagining such a conversation made Lewis pull at his own face.
Celia opened the Steinway, played a chord. “Who needs to drink? Just play this thing,” she said, and sang two new songs, which did indeed sound drunken and hilarious with such atonal accompaniment.
When everyone left, Lewis lay down on the bedroom floor, his cheekbone against the pine planking. He inhaled dust, exhaled a frustrated sob, and another, then stopped, having forgot what he was supposed to be crying about. Then remembered: I am so fucking lonely, God, I need a little backup here, please.
In the morning, a large brindled dog stood on the porch. He had goofy ears and a terrier’s coarse hair, matted and filthy. He cowered but wouldn’t move more than a foot when Lewis tried to run him off. He was all bones, clearly starving. Consulting the midget refrigerator, Lewis found only a hard cinnamon roll and last week’s fried chicken, no doubt teeming with salmonella. He took the chicken off the bone and put it in a bowl: gone in a snap. Same with the cinnamon roll. This dog was possibly more pathetic than David’s dead hound. Very funny, God, thought Lewis.
He placed an ad in the Rito River News and tacked up a sign at the Rito post office. As he expected, there was no response. Nobody wanted this dog. Someone, obviously, had dumped him.
When Lewis patted his head or talked to him, the dog wagged his tail, growling and pissing at the same time. He might wander in through the open door, but if Lewis spoke suddenly, he’d spurt outside, as if caught raiding the henhouse. Lewis tried coaxing him into the car, just for some company, but the dog, cringing and snarling, wouldn’t come; then, as Lewis drove off, he hurled himself against the fenders, barking insanely.
Lewis named him Gustave, after Flaubert, who also seemed willfully lonely and yet craved companionship, but then misbehaved whenever anyone actually took an interest in him.
LIBBY stood in the living room measuring windows. With her arms up over her head, she looked visibly pregnant for the first time. The windows offered an almost aerial view of the valley below. The Blue House, with its peaked roofs and turret, looked like a castle in a miniature golf