One Dog Happy

Wishbone

9 2 Wishbone One Wednesday afternoon at three thirty-five, a girl hung out the school bus window as it slowed for the stop sign on Gordon’s corner. She was fat, with a black, ratted nest of hair and dark lipstick. She crossed her eyes at Gordon, then made a circle with thumb and index finger and plunged a third digit in and out of this circle, as if cleaning a miniature toilet bowl. Gordon was glad that his own girls lived in town and didn’t ride the bus. He wouldn’t want them to associate with such a specimen. It happened in much the same way the day after, except there were three girls instead of just one. The black hair and lipstick seemed to be the ringleader, while the second made a whinnying sound with the toilet bowl gesture. The third yelled, “I’m in W i s h b o n e 9 3 love!” Gordon was missing a tooth and had no illusions that the girl was in love with him. Gordon’s ex-wife called him at the end of the same week. There was something that she had to speak with him about, she said. He hadn’t heard from her in six months. Whenever they talked, he got nervous and joked too much, and this was no exception. “You want a date, Mama?” he yelled. “Gordon,” she answered gravely, “I want to meet with you. About the girls.” Gordon had been a bad husband to Vivian. They had married young, and she had not kept house like Gordon’s mother. She said she loved him, but everything she neglected in the house seemed to say otherwise. He knew that times had changed, but he expected that these changes applied to a married woman who didn’t love her husband enough to give up a few things for him, in order to make his life softer and easier. Why should she see this as a sacrifice? His family had farmed, and men had worked hard, and women made things clean for them, and fed them, and got them the telephone, and when the call finished, hung it up again because they understood that the body was tired at the end of a day of work. They did not mind it. Gordon’s parents had died in a car accident while he was still in high school, but he could remember his father tapping his water glass with a fork when he wanted more meat. Gordon couldn’t do that kind of thing with Vivian; she would just glare at him and walk away. If he complained about what she cooked, she would take his plate and throw it in the garbage. When she crossed him like this, he felt disrespected and raised his voice, and she’d yell right back, insulting him. He would not know where to put his anger then, and he even hit her once. Once was enough for Vivian. She moved out, filed for divorce, and received full custody of their twin daughters. A few years after the divorce, Gordon was thought of around town as a natural bachelor, a man so far gone in terms of grooming you could never imagine his living with a woman. This decline had started immediately after Vivian and the girls had left. Gordon had stayed on in their old farmhouse and neglected things: he neglected to clean; he neglected to pay the phone bill; he neglected to repair the caulking on the windows, which came loose and jiggled in their frames as drafts blew from the kitchen 9 4 W i s h b o n e through the living room. Gordon drank to keep warm and to keep himself company. He showed up drunk at work three times past his initial warning and lost his job. Raccoons moved from the empty barn to the attic of the farmhouse and from the attic to the top-floor bedrooms. The refrigerator stopped working and then the stove, and on many days Gordon neglected to eat much more than the jerky or candy bars he picked up at the Amoco station. He neglected to see a dentist when his gums became swollen and sore, and his front tooth became as loose as the windowpanes and fell out. The raccoons then descended to the first-floor fireplace, where their excrement dried in...