"You are kicking me out of the house and yet I should help you."
"You don't have to."
"Have to help you or have to leave?"
Either one was at her lips but she could not release that wisp of air and her bottom lip began to tremble. She suddenly realized that she was not watching someone else say these things that she thought should not have been said and not say things that should have been said. "Help me. You don't have to, but you do have to leave"
"No," he whined as tears weltered in the confines of his confused eyes. "You can pain me but I wouldn't want to pain you." He said this in such dulcet ingenuousness. He was like that child he once was— the child who had taken an empty tray of a TV dinner, filled it with water, and picked wild flowers to bring to his beloved mother.
Going into the kitchen he tried to think, as he looked for the pills, what words he might enchant to propitiate her, his sustenance; but his howling dog, chained up near the swimming pool, kept destroying his concentration so he went to the deck to silence it.
"Bitch," he yelled as he looked down from the balustrade, "shut your fucking snout!" The dog continued to howl and so he repeated himself with a more angered vehemence. Only after trudging halfway down the steps did the howling stop. He bent down over the railing and looked at the dog again. His eyes dropped into the dog's like stones and the animal began to whimper. He glanced up at the darkening clouds, sighed, and sensed that he and the dog were the same; and then a visceral malaise about the futility of all things began to permeate all his thoughts and his vitriol mitigated. "Upset that she brought in the cat instead of you? I'm sure you are but you're thrown your bones and are nicely kept here ignored and forgotten. What's wrong with that? You're back home after two weeks in the kennel. It seems you should be happy with that."
He sat down on one of the lower steps, whittling away an edge near his feet with his pocketknife. At first he hoped to see answers in his current dilemma, but then deciding that there were none unless that gained by time and obscurity he thought, "Maybe she won't think like this in a few days. I'll keep out of sight and ride it out—not look too anxious for the car. See how it goes. That's the best thing to do."
He spoke to the dog. "Get back. Such stinking breath, bitch." The dog backed away a few steps. "So, you were in a cage at the kennel. She knew that I'd never take care of you when she made that trip to Thailand to buy paintings for this so called gallery of hers—just a partitioned backroom, more like a closet, that caused her to rename the store into 'The Gallery.' Me, the arsonist, was in my own little kennel—a cheap hotel room. But then yours was a little worse wasn't it? You did not get any money deposited into your bank account from which to buy booze and a bitch. I never need a whore—just a willing patron, but you have to take them to expensive restaurants and treat them like they are the center of the universe, be soft to them. Takes up a lot of time, so I'm always tempted to get more professional whores that you can buy outright but sometimes they are too expensive. Not that I haven't had some. If you pawned off something of hers, all things are possible."
Whittling the wood was more than merely the whittling of the minutes of life but a wistful hope that time itself would carve a purpose to his days that no patriarch had done. Expressed in the subliminal connotations of gestures defacing property it was hope hopelessly rendered as boyhood tagged him and ran off leaving the stark ogre of manhood overtaking and merging into him. The dog came to him, ringing the saliva-drenched towel to dry on the rack of his face like a gift. The unbidden intimate gesture of the dog was so repugnant that he drove the knife into the bitch. He was startled by how the clay of flesh was so easily pierced. Not wanting to hear the agonized yelping of the bitch he re-obtained the knife from its sheath of flesh and cut the throat in one little action that would end life suddenly.