The Birthing House Read online

  Conrad held the phone out. Nadia shook her head slowly.

  Conrad experienced a ridiculous, eleventh-grade thrill. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie, she is unavailable. Can I take a message?’

  ‘She won’t talk to me?’

  ‘She’s not available, Eddie. Would you like me to tell her you called, or is there some other message?’

  Eddie breathed into the phone. ‘Are you f-f-fucking her now?’

  Conrad resisted the urge to laugh. The boy’s emotionally induced stutter induced pity and he did not want to be cruel. Well, not in front of her.

  ‘You know, Eddie, I realize at your age that must be the most important thing in the world. But girls don’t like it when boys talk out of school. So what do you say, guy, think you can rise above it?’

  Nadia frowned and Conrad made a ‘chill, it’s under control’ wave of his hand.

  ‘Oh, you f-f-fucker,’ Eddie moaned. ‘Y-y-you are! And if you aren’t, you’re t-t-tryin’ to! You f-f-fuckin’ asshole!’

  Something banged in the background and Conrad pulled the phone away from his ear. ‘Hey, hey. That kind of language is uncalled for. Now it’s none of my business, Eddie, but if you two aren’t exactly best friends these days, this temper of yours might be part of the problem, you know what I’m sayin’? If she wants to talk with you, she’ll call. Personally, I’ll advise her not to, but she’s a big girl. She can make up her own mind.’

  Eddie’s breathing filled the line before he cranked up again. ‘PUT NADIA ON THE PHONE, YOU MOTHERFUCKER! ’ Sans stutter. ‘I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU IF YOU DON’T PUT HER ON THE PHONE!’

  Nadia reached for the phone, but Conrad waved her off. He wanted to own this little shit now. Reach through the phone and break his skinny red neck.

  A repeated banging sound on Eddie’s side.

  ‘Eddie?’ Conrad said. ‘You want to stop pounding your fist into your trailer wall for a minute?’ The pounding stopped. ‘You’re taking out your frustrations on your wall because it’s that cheap wood paneling they put in doublewides like yours. That’s right, I know where you live. You make a threat like that, normally it’s none of my business. But the Grums hired me to watch out for their things while they’re away and Nadia happens to be one of those things. So for a few more days, guess what, it is my business.’

  ‘Asshole, asshole, asshole—’

  ‘Now I want to give you a piece of advice. Are you listening? Eddie, are you listening?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Good. Now, when you make a threat. The first thing you have to do is stay calm. Because when you sound like a hysterical little bitch, no one takes you seriously. The person you’re yelling at thinks, no, this guy sounds like a girl, he’s just blowing off steam, he ain’t gonna do anything. Are you with me, Eddie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rule number two. Make sure you know something about the person you’re threatening. This is very important because the last thing you want to do is make a threat you can’t deliver on. Now, I haven’t exactly kept my fighting weight over the years, but I’m capable, Eddie. Last asshole who threatened me, in front of my wife? Well, I plumb went sideways, Eddie. Put his head through a window at Ruth’s Chris in Westwood. Paramedics had to pull glass out of his neck. Why do you think I had to leave LA? The stress, Eddie.’

  This was fiction, of course. But it seemed to be working. Eddie was silent. Nadia watched him with her arms crossed.

  ‘B-b-bullshit.’

  ‘Now see, you just skipped ahead to rule number three, Eddie. You gave yourself away by hesitating. And you never hesitate when you make a threat. It’s too late - the other guy knows he’s got you.’

  ‘You can’t threaten me! I’ll call the cops!’

  ‘Yes, you call the cops, Eddie. File a report if you like. Do whatever makes you feel like a man, Eddie, so long as you stay away from Nadia. Because here’s what will happen. Are you listening? If you come around here again, if you drive by and maybe decide to poke your nose into the Grums’ house or make any more threatening phone calls or do anything other than mind your own sad business, I will come to your house and I will beat you silly with a cinder block. I’ll drop it on your chest, Eddie. I will leave you bleeding and alone, unable to jerk off with your two broken arms. Now, is that what you want?’

  Eddie was crying. It couldn’t be from this speech, either. There was a lot more behind it. Most likely a broken heart. Conrad’s stomach lurched.

  ‘Let me know you understand what I’m telling you, Eddie.’

  ‘C-C-Can I please! S-S-s-speak with Nadia?’

  Unbelievable. The kid had crossed over from stupid to pathetic and brought stupid with him along the way.

  ‘Eddie, give it up. The girl is gone. Gone gone gone. Now please, for everyone’s sake, go away.’

  ‘She’s a whore! Tell the whore that the father of her—’

  Nadia reached for the phone and Conrad clicked off.

  ‘Sorry, he had to go.’

  She yanked the phone away. ‘Asshole!’

  ‘What? Are you telling me you still like this creep?’

  ‘You don’t know him!’

  ‘What’s to know?’

  She stormed upstairs. Conrad stood in the kitchen and finished his coffee, staring at the IN USE light on the phone’s cradle. The light was off. Unless she was using a cell, she did not call Eddie back.

  Time to go. He’d done enough work for one day.

  He went to Dick’s and bought some groceries. More iced tea and one of those sun tea bottles to brew it on the deck. He paused in front of the newsstand and flipped through baby magazines. Threw three in the cart for Nadia. He paid for his groceries and drove around front to wait for them to be loaded - they had a number system and you just sat there while the kid in the apron filled your trunk. No tips allowed.

  The front door was unlocked. He made a mental note to start locking it. He was halfway to the kitchen when he noticed the blood and shattered glass on the floor. The frames were broken, three of Jo’s matching mirrors from the front living room destroyed. Leading out of the glass shards, the paw prints.

  When had he last seen the dogs? Had he fed them this morning? He could not remember.

  ‘Alice! Luther!’

  He ran yelling their names as he searched the house, at once hoping and fearing that the perpetrator was still in the house.

  25

  His dogs were bleeding, and had been bleeding for some time judging by the paw prints and smudges and stripes of blood on the floors, walls and couch. He ran calling their names into the dining room and made a U-turn into the front parlor. The TV room. The kitchen.

  No dogs.

  Conrad’s pulse went off the chart. If something has happened to my dogs, he thought, if someone hurt my first and only real babies, I will simply run amok.

  He’d hung the mirrors high on the walls. No way the dogs jumped up and dragged them down - and why would they? Someone was here, broke them, and left the dogs to cut themselves. Or worse. Someone - Eddie! That little fucking shit, Eddie! - broke in and went fucking nuts and maybe there was a struggle. Maybe the dogs attacked him and he had pulled the mirrors down, scaring them before—

  When he had checked the entire first floor, he circled back to the front stairway.

  ‘Alice, Luther! Daddy’s home!’

  He stopped halfway up the stairs and listened. Was that . . . ? Yes, familiar whining. He pounded up the stairs and lurched into the library bent over at a forty-five-degree angle, head turning like a cop in a police drama. The library was clear.

  The upstairs felt wrong. You learned to sense where your dogs were at all times and the upstairs felt empty.

  The master bedroom was also empty.

  ‘Alice! Luther! Come on, babies!’

  A sound like rocks falling on hollow walls - whock-whock-whock!

  The basement.

  Jesus, he hadn’t even thought of the basement. He had been meaning to take the broom down and give th
e whole works a good spring-cleaning and refill the water softener system with salt pellets while he was at it, but, like most things he had been meaning to do, he had forgotten.

  He took the front stairs two at a time, rounded the foyer and careened back into the kitchen, yanked the basement open and tripped over her.

  Alice had been at the door, scraping her paws on the wooden steps and the door. His feet caught on her legs and he tripped, then skated down two more steps, his hand snapping the rail as he slammed down tailbone first, lost his wind, and slid down the six remaining stairs until his feet stopped against the foundation wall and sprawled him on the landing.

  He saw more blood on the door above him and trailing from her as Alice came down after him.

  She’s on her feet, how bad can it be?

  And where is Luther?

  Alice’s claws scratched his chest and legs as he stood and sucked in the first, pained breath, getting his wind back. He inspected her through watery eyes. He couldn’t see a wound that required immediate attention, but she was shaking, her bristly brindle coat bunching up more in confusion than in pain. Maybe anger for being banished to the basement.

  Then he saw her ear. The seam where the ear connected to her head was gaping pink and white tissue like a second, smaller mouth. Pat-pat-pat went the blood on the floor, but it wasn’t flowing, so that was something.

  ‘Okay, baby, calm down, calm down. Where’s Luther?’ Like she could tell him.

  Conrad ducked under the ventilation ducts and wooden crossbeams in the basement proper, peeking around makeshift walls and unfinished rooms. There weren’t many hiding places. He charged forward, knocking into the water heater and doorframes. The only closed room was Laski’s abandoned workshop: a wall of pegboard, a plywood bench set upon four by fours, scraps of indoor-outdoor carpet. No blood.

  There was another, deeper space left of the shop’s entrance, with a separate light. Conrad flailed for the beaded string hanging below the bulb. Cha-chink.

  Luther wasn’t in here. There was still the backyard. On the way to the short wooden door that opened to the backyard, he stopped and pivoted, heading back to the one place he hadn’t checked.

  In the basement at the front of the house was a smaller space, lower to the ground, where the furnace was tucked behind the stone support wall under the fireplace and chimney. At the very front of that, in the deepest recess where the foundation floor became a pile of dirt and cast aside rocks, the ground sloped up as if reaching toward some forgotten cellar door or coal chute.

  Conrad crouched, shimmied forth, and found his dog.

  Luther was huddled in the corner, hopping gecko-like from one front paw to the other as if the ground were too hot to stand on. He was staring at the wall, like the teacher had called him a bad boy and sent him to stand in the corner.

  ‘Luther? Luther!’

  When Luther turned, the dog’s eyes were two pinpoints of gleaming white, his black and white cow spots shivering. The dog had been intent on something on the stone foundation wall. Now he looked confused, and Conrad’s skin crawled. He took a step and Luther growled. It broke his heart and worried him all over, but he needed to get past the dog’s fear and tend to the wounds, if there were any.

  Conrad came in fast but steady, speaking in his gentlest voice, ‘It’s me, Luther, it’s okay, good dog . . .’

  Luther lashed out in a snapping bark that missed Conrad’s hand (the one that had just finished healing) by inches. Conrad scooped up his dog and crouch-dragged him backward, and it was like dancing in a cave with a wet seal. Finally they were clear and Luther stopped fighting and then it was a half-blind spree up the stairs into the kitchen.

  He spent half a roll of paper towels trying to staunch the flow before he realized the dogs, in their agitated state, were going to bleed out before he got them under control.

  Compared to Alice, Luther looked as if he’d attempted to tightrope walk a fence barbed with concertina wire. Luther’s legs and paws were cut in at least six places. The front of his chest just below the throat was a coin purse, and Alice’s ear was still hanging halfway off her narrow marbled head like so much furry lunchmeat.

  Conrad snatched the keys from the kitchen table, scooped Luther up and bolted for the car. He left the front door wide open and Alice did not need to be told to follow.

  He opened the rear driver’s side door with one hand and spilled Luther into the backseat; Alice brought up the rear. Then he was behind the wheel, weaving up the street, the blood spattering on the seats and doors and windows and up to the passenger visor as the dogs jumped from backseat to front and back again. He yelled at them to calm down as he blew through the first stop sign and floored it past the Kwik-Trip. He had gone a mile up the old Highway 151 business loop before he realized he didn’t even know where the vet kept offices, or if the town even had one.

  She answered the door dressed in jeans and a faded Abercrombie tee, and for once his eyes did not settle on her belly. Her face went pale when she saw the blood.

  ‘My dogs are hurt. Can you take us to the vet?’ For one agonizing moment he saw the hesitation, that moment of distrust even the best neighbors have before they decide to jump into the scene of impending tragedy. ‘Please help me, Nadia.’

  God love her, she nodded quickly and followed him.

  ‘You drive while I try to get them under control.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’ She saw the inside of the car.

  ‘Yeah. Come on, I don’t know where the vet is.’

  Nadia stared at the stick shift.

  ‘It’s just dog blood,’ he said. ‘Move!’

  ‘I can’t drive stick!’

  ‘Just put in second and pop the clutch when I say go.’

  The car rolled down hill a ways. ‘Go!’

  Nadia popped the clutch. The Volvo sputtered . . . then shot down Heritage Street. Conrad crawled in back and tried to still his pets. By the time they reached the small farmhouse on the outskirts of town - it didn’t even have a sign, just a wooden figure of a horse next to the mailbox - Alice had her nose out the window like she was enjoying a Sunday drive. Luther was in Conrad’s lap, heavy with a kind of gulping motion sickness, eyes droopy.

  ‘Easy, boy. Easy.’

  Fifteen minutes after his wife phoned from the front desk, Dr Michael Troxler came in from the field wearing a pair of muddy wellingtons and Oshkosh overalls over a bright madras shirt. He had a streak of mud on the wire-framed glasses standing over thick gray moustaches. Dr Troxler was at least seventy years old, reeked of manure and moved like an aging linebacker who could still open-field tackle an errant calf.

  ‘What do we have here, young man?’ Troxler bent to scratch Luther’s head.

  ‘My dogs are cut up,’ Conrad said, fighting the urge to scream hurry up you old goat-fucker! ‘I think she’s got just the ear cut, but Luther here is gonna bleed to death if we don’t do something soon.’

  ‘Okey-doke. Folla me.’

  The examining room smelled of alfalfa and medicine. Conrad shot Nadia an evil look - are you kidding me?

  ‘He bite?’ Troxler had his back to the table, sorting bottles and syringes until he found the right combo.

  ‘No. He’s a good dog.’

  ‘Get him up on the table and hold him. I’m gonna stick him pretty good.’

  Conrad didn’t know what he’d expected, maybe some doggy version of ER with IVs, latex gloves and scrubs. But Troxler didn’t even bother to wash his hands. He just pulled Luther’s hackles up with one huge mitt and rammed a large needle into the fold.

  ‘That’s not gonna knock him out, but keep a watch on him cause he might feel like falling over. And we don’t wanna drop ya, do we buddy?’ Troxler patted Luther on the head.

  Conrad swayed on his feet as Troxler used a thimble and needle large enough to hook marlin to thread black cord through the many holes and slashes in Luther’s legs and undercarriage.

  ‘This breed’s rambunctious, got to use the thick stuff.’r />
  When he’d finished with Luther, Troxler said ‘Next’, and wound his pointer finger in a loop. Conrad set Luther on the barn-dirty floor and Nadia held Luther steady while Conrad heaved Alice up. Alice’s turn came and went much faster, having just the one deep cut in her ear.

  When he had finished with the sutures and was dabbing the outside of the wound with more gauze soaked in Betadine, the purple solution staining the doctor’s thick fingers a morgue yellow, Troxler said, ‘They fight like this often?’

  Conrad became the defensive parent. ‘They don’t fight. I think they knocked some mirrors off the walls or something. There was a lot of broken glass when I came home.’

  ‘They get into all kinds of mischief, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes. They do.’

  ‘That’ll do ’er.’

  Despite his earlier misgivings, Conrad felt like hugging the lumbering veterinarian. Even without the usual shaving and sterilizing, all the bleeding had stopped. And the old man’s calm through it all had helped.

  Nadia led the dogs to the car while Conrad settled up with Mrs Troxler. At the front desk, he thanked the doctor profusely and offered to clean up the blood on the floor.

  ‘Just get them critters home and make sure they drink some water when they come out of their stupor. The one lost some blood, and he’s gonna be slow for a couple days. You bring ’em both back in ten days we’ll pull the sutures out.’

  Mrs Troxler was filling out an invoice. ‘What’s your name, young man?’

  ‘Conrad Harrison. What do I owe you?’ As she tallied the work he patted his pockets. ‘Oh, hell. I was so worked up before we left the house, I didn’t bring anything with me.’

  ‘No trouble, dear. Bring it by anytime,’ Mrs Troxler said. ‘And tell your wife goodbye for us.’

  ‘She’s not—. Thank you. I will.’

  When they were halfway to the house, Conrad said, ‘Do you have any money?’

  ‘Twenty bucks or so.’ The car jerked as Nadia fought with the stick.

  ‘Stop here.’

  Nadia wheeled into the Kwik-Trip. ‘What for?’