Larry & the Dog People Read online

  Helen, whose eyes were increasingly glassy these days, smiled at her husband and occasionally nodded, but otherwise appeared to be in another room as he described his last day at the office. ‘How does macaroni and cheese sound?’ she asked out of nowhere.

  ‘It sounds wonderful, dear, but just let me finish the story and then I’ll start dinner.’

  Unlike her husband Helen MacCabe was as quiet as the proverbial church mouse, in many ways the complementary yin to Larry’s yang. As she attached little importance to most things in life, she consequently thought there was little point in talking about them or holding opinions of any kind for that matter, and while more than happy for Larry to talk, at no time felt it necessary to actually listen to him. Although in her own way she loved Larry, like all things in life she attached little importance to him and sometimes wondered if she’d married him simply to escape her parents. Having never expected much from life, however, Helen’s marriage to Larry had been no more disappointing than a birthday card with no money inside, but while quite happy to be with him herself she could easily understand why others went out of their way to avoid him.

  Helen wasn’t academically inclined and had gone to college only to please her parents. There she’d graduated unspectacularly with a degree in Liberal Arts and then gone to work as a cashier in the bank where Larry deposited his cheques on a Friday lunchtime. A plain and unworldly soul, she’d mistaken his winks and incessant chatter about abaci, sand tables and slipsticks as acts of romantic interest and come to the conclusion that Larry was about to ask her out. When he didn’t she determined to take matters into her own hands and ask him out. By nature, however, Helen was timid, and was only able to contemplate such an act after taking two of her mother’s anti-anxiety pills, which one Friday morning she did – about an hour before Larry walked into the bank. By the time he was standing in front of her Helen was completely relaxed though yawning heavily. Straightaway she asked him to the bank’s annual picnic and Larry readily accepted. With the aid of another cashier he then escorted her to the staff lounge where she spent the rest of the afternoon asleep on the floor.

  It turned out that Larry and Helen had a lot in common: he’d never had a girlfriend and she’d never had a boyfriend. To make up for lost time they decided to marry in what most people would have considered haste, and two years later – and a year after they’d mastered the act of sex – Helen gave birth to twins: Rutherford and Grover – the Christian names of Larry’s two favourite presidents. As Helen thought names were unimportant she was happy for Larry to decide them, and only smiled when he told her they now had a balanced ticket. (Rutherford Hayes was a Republican and Grover Cleveland a Democrat, he would have explained to her if she’d thought it important enough to ask.)

  Although fully intending to be present at the birth of his children, Larry had inadvertently embroiled himself in a conversation with one of the hospital’s elevator attendants and missed the actual delivery. It appeared to Larry that the attendant had been more than interested to learn that the first elevator had been built by Archimedes in 236BC, and encouraged by the man’s reaction he’d gone on to explain the differences between various types of hoist mechanisms. ‘You see there’s a traction elevator with its worm gears, Gary – it is okay if I call you Gary, isn’t it – okay then, so where were we? Worm gears, that’s right…’ It was only after he’d got to describing the self-ascending climbing elevator with its own propulsion system that he remembered his actual reason for being in the hospital: his wife was doing a bit of propelling herself!

  Two years after Larry retired Helen died. She rose from bed one morning and immediately felt strange: light-headed and slightly nauseous. She returned to bed and stayed there for three days, refusing to see a doctor. Her malaise, she told Larry, was too vague to be of any importance and she fully expected to be back on her feet by the end of the week. On the fourth morning Larry brought her coffee and two slices of toast and placed the tray on the bedside table. He then ran errands for the next three hours, errands that would have taken another person only thirty minutes. Larry’s problem, however, was that he never stopped talk… (His talking was endless.)

  Larry returned to the house just before midday and sat down at the end of his wife’s bed. He talked to Helen for two hours, telling her about the operation of the Desert Land Act in California and Nevada and how, when the act had been drawn up, it had addressed surface water and agricultural uses only and never given a second thought to ground water or the fact that water might be used for recreational purposes. He then looked at his watch and told her he’d leave her to get some rest. He kissed her gently on the forehead and only then did it dawn on him that something was wrong: his wife was cold as a block of ice. He then noticed the untouched coffee and toast.

  The subsequent autopsy revealed nothing untoward, and the coroner ruled that Helen’s death had been natural. He noted, however, that her liver had been at a more advanced stage of deterioration than would normally have been expected of a woman her age, and also expressed dismay that a well-educated man like Professor MacCabe had conducted a conversation with a corpse for two hours. Those who knew Larry, however, showed no such surprise and at least one thought he should have been charged with manslaughter for having talked his wife to death.

  Larry and Helen had been married for thirty-one years when she died and her departure hit him hard. He’d loved Helen and instinctively known that she too had loved him. He could never remember a time when she’d actually told him this, but he’d known. Larry had always known. For how could a wife of thirty-one years not love her husband? And how could a mother of estranged children not love their estranged father? And, come to think of it, where the hell were Rutherford and Grover these days? Larry had no idea if they were alive or dead.

  The twins were in fact alive, but it was debatable if they were well. Rutherford and Grover had grown up in a house full of their father’s words and eventually been overpowered by them. When they were small and the words in the house only ankle deep, the boys had paddled and splashed in them untroubled, but as they’d grown older and the words from their father’s mouth continued to fall, they became anxious. By the time they were seven the level of words in the house had reached their knees, by twelve their waists and by fifteen their chests. Increasingly the boys struggled to wade through their father’s outflows and by their eighteenth birthdays, fearing they would drown, left home for college and decided never to return. There they became reclusive and some would say strange. They avoided people, made no friends and rarely spoke to each other. They graduated at the top of their respective classes, shook hands at the campus gates and parted company forever, each determined to pursue a life as free from words as possible. Rutherford became a Trappist monk in rural Oregon, and Grover went to live among the Kodiak bears in Alaska.

  ‘Not even a postcard,’ Larry ruminated as he stared at a photograph of Helen and the two boys. And then he started to cry, big blobs of tears that splashed on the protective glass. ‘Who am I going to talk to now, Helen?’ he groaned. ‘There’ll never be another person like you.’

  Despite the fact that Helen had remained mute most evenings, Larry had always considered his wife the perfect conversationalist. She’d sit quietly in her chair as he recounted his day – out of interest for what he was saying, he’d always supposed – sipping from, and occasionally refilling, a tumbler of what Larry had assumed was iced water. (That Helen had been largely comatose and living on another planet during these conversations only dawned on Larry after he discovered a slew of empty vodka bottles in the back garden, buried close to the rhododendrons.)

  For the first time in his life Larry felt completely alone. The silence of the house deafened him, his own company threatened him and he feared he would never adapt to life as a single person. He needed someone to talk to, someone to listen to him and affirm his existence. And as his sex drive had crashed years ago this companion would in all
likelihood be a man; the last thing he wanted was to get involved with a woman still revved up and ready to go.

  This thought led him to his next-door neighbour, a retired plastic surgeon called Dr Young and one of the few people Larry actually disliked. In his opinion Dr Young had a poor set of ethics for a doctor and an even worse set of morals for a man, trawling as he did through the divorce and death notices in the town’s newspaper for the names of recent widows and divorcees he’d previously encountered in a professional capacity. ‘I built these women,’ he’d once bragged to Larry. ‘And I know exactly what I’m going to find once I get their damned clothes off and into their pants. It’s payback time, MacCabe. Know what I mean?’ A lascivious grin had then crossed his face and a small piece of tongue poked through his teeth. His manner had made Larry squirm, and on the occasions he’d later seen Dr Young with a woman on his arm, he was unable to escape the thought that the women looked more like the victims of a fire than the beneficiaries of a doctor’s scalpel.

  ‘Larry, Larry, old son,’ he said to himself in the shaving mirror one morning. ‘You’ve got to get a grip on yourself. There’s a world out there and it’s waiting for you. You’ve another twenty years left in you yet, and there are people out there wanting to meet you. Now get your tail in gear and get on out there!’

  But where? The university might have been the obvious choice, but Larry tended not to go there these days. It wasn’t just the fact that its sidewalks and corridors parted like the Red Sea whenever he visited the campus, but the uncomfortable truth that he was, at least for the time being, as estranged from the Desert Land Act as he was from Rutherford and Grover. The coroner’s words still rang in his ears: how could a well-educated man like you, Professor MacCabe, have conducted a conversation with a corpse for two hours? Why, he wondered, had he been telling his wife about the Desert Land Act when he could have been saving her life? He’d watched her die and found it hard to forgive himself, and even harder to forgive the Desert Land Act which, ultimately, he held more responsible for her death than he did himself. (Larry was being too hard on both himself and the act: Helen had died during the night. Not only had Larry talked to a dead corpse, he’d also slept with one – and for more than any two hours.)

  It was then Larry remembered a man living further down the street, a widower by the name of Cotton who was close to his age and educated to a similar level. He recalled bumping into Mr Cotton shortly after the man’s bereavement and was pleased to think that in a small way his detailing of the concept of reincarnation had alleviated his neighbour’s grief. ‘Who knows, Mr Cotton,’ he’d said. ‘That pigeon on the roof over there might well be your wife.’ He remembered the man pointing to the pigeon droppings on his car and Helen tugging at his sleeve. ‘Not now, Larry,’ she’d whispered.

  He decided to pay Mr Cotton a visit and one day knocked on his door. He introduced himself, reminded the man that they’d met shortly after his wife died and suggested, now that his own wife was dead, that they start meeting for coffee on a regular basis. Mr Cotton had no intention of becoming Larry’s best friend simply because they enjoyed widowhood. He well remembered their conversation on reincarnation and Larry’s effrontery to suggest that his wife had returned to earth as a pigeon, and as far as he was concerned that conversation had been one too many. (If such a notion did have validity, his wife would have returned to earth as a princess or a Mother Teresa figure with conjugal rights, and not some damn scavenger.) He also recalled that it had taken him fifteen minutes to extricate himself from Larry’s gibbering and that the man’s incessant blinking had brought on one of his optical migraines – and one that had lasted far longer than its usual twenty minutes. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, Mr MacCabe, but I think I have more in common with a parrot than I do you.’ He then – rather rudely, Larry thought – shut the door in his face.

  In the weeks that followed Larry struggled with lonesomeness. He switched on the television, turned on the radio and filled the house with disembodied voices. He cleaned the house, pottered in the garden, spoke to spiders and talked to birds, counted the number of stairs in the house (27), the number of windows (14) and the pairs of socks in his drawer (28). Occasionally, he called talk radio stations but rarely got through, and if he did get through was invariably cut off before he could finish saying what he’d intended. He took aimless taxi rides for the sake of conversing with cabdrivers, phoned companies whose stickered vehicles asked for feedback on their drivers only to find that the people answering his calls weren’t in the least bit curious as to what he thought, and certainly not interested in pursuing any other conversations. He visited garden centres and asked about plants, asked if there was any horticultural reason for empty vodka bottles to be placed close to rhododendron shrubs. He made unnecessary appointments with doctors and dentists, had tradesmen call at the house to discuss renovations that would never take place and ate out in cafes and restaurants and attempted to draw waiters and other customers into idle conversation.

  It was only after colliding with an eighty-three-year-old woman in a supermarket he frequented on an unnecessarily daily basis that he hit upon the idea of becoming a voluntary worker in a retirement home. It was without doubt a win-win situation, and he kicked himself for not having thought of this before. Starved of company, and more often than not unable to walk, old people represented the perfect captive audience and one that would be glad of his or any company. Immediately he contacted the nearest residential centre and arranged to visit the home for three hours daily. He told the care administrators that he expected no recompense for his services and that brightening the lives of senior citizens was compensation in itself. The administrators thought Larry a saint and were overjoyed to accept his offer. Three weeks later, however, they changed their minds and banned him from the premises.

  It was mid-way through the third week of Larry’s visits that the managers started to become alarmed. They noticed that those residents who weren’t deaf became agitated whenever Larry walked into the room, and on a closer examination of the people he talked to on a regular basis discerned an actual deterioration. These old-timers described Larry either as a man sent by the Devil to torment them or as a crazy person meaning them harm. Either way, Larry didn’t come out of these discussions looking too good, and on the Friday morning the head of the residential care centre called him to her office.

  Although a tough administrator Ms Parker was a kindly person, and having spent a lifetime caring for sorrowful souls recognised in Larry many of their traits. She didn’t tell him that the old people there thought he was an emissary of the Devil or a lunatic on the prowl – descriptions she thought more suited to some of them than Larry – but did make it clear that his services would no longer be required at the centre. Larry was dumbfounded by the news. ‘I know most of the old folk here are challenged, Ms Parker – that’s what we say these days, isn’t it: challenged – but I know for a fact that Frank’s always glad to see me. He nods away at everything I say.’ Ms Parker tactfully explained that Frank had Parkinson’s disease and nodded at everyone.

  For once in his life Larry decided to save his breath. Ms Parker, he realised, wasn’t about to change her mind. Dejectedly he stood up, and Ms Parker walked with him to the door. They shook hands and she watched as Larry walked to his car with his shoulders slumped. It was then a thought struck her and she called after him. ‘I know it’s none of my business, Professor MacCabe, but have you ever thought about getting a dog?’

  Larry thought about what Ms Parker had said. It was true that dogs had a reputation for being man’s best friend, but having been bitten six times by six different dogs he was unsure if a dog was ever likely to be his best friend. The first occasion had been on a lake shore in Maryland. He’d been skimming stones at the time, and for no apparent reason a Bluetick Coonhound had jumped up and bitten him on the arm. He remembered the incident less for the discomfort of the bite and more for his father sucking the woun
d and spitting his blood on the ground. ‘That’s snakes, Dad,’ he’d said. ‘You only do that if a snake’s bitten you.’ His father had ignored the comment – just as he had his son’s succeeding recitation of the twenty species of venomous snakes living in the United States – and, after a few more sucks, taken Larry for what would be the first of many tetanus shots. He was subsequently bitten by a German Shepherd (butt), a West Highland White Terrier (ankle), a Rough Collie (thigh), a McNab (calf) and a Plott Hound (hand).

  The only bite Larry could ever understand from a dog’s point of view was the one delivered by the Rough Collie. Then he’d been in a Greek restaurant looking for the restroom and misinterpreted a server’s sideways nod of the head to indicate that he should climb a nearby flight of stairs. Though wondering why no sign pointed to the restrooms being this way, he’d followed the waiter’s advice and eventually found himself standing at the open door of the owners’ living quarters. By then he’d been desperate and called to anyone who might have been inside. When no answer was forthcoming, and rationalising that the proprietors of the establishment would have no issue with him using their private facilities after he’d already paid for two of their early-bird specials, he’d ventured through the door and into the apartment. It was then, seemingly out of nowhere, that a Collie had appeared and sunk its teeth deep into his thigh. Larry had stumbled back down the stairs but mentioned nothing of the incident to the owners. Instead he’d returned to the table where Helen was sitting and asked if it was okay if they stopped by the hospital for a tetanus shot on the way home. ‘Not again, Larry!’ Helen had sighed.