Year of the Dog by Shelby Hearon Read Free Book Online Page A

just remembered you were supposed to do that. “We’d been looking for something. We didn’t want to be roommates, at twenty-seven.”
    â€œYou’re a kid,” I said, surprised that he was older than I was. He didn’t have that lived-in look that came, I guess, with marriage.
    â€œI guess everybody’s a kid till they have kids.” He shifted his shoulders and experimented with a grin.
    I liked that idea. Picturing Curtis Prentice, former stud, becoming a daddy. Dropping by the pharmacy withcombedover hair, his mind on the risks of adjustable rate mortgages and the fact that his wife Millie was putting on weight. Turning into his own daddy.
    â€œYou wanna see where Pete lives, in the back?” He led us down a narrow gravel driveway and pointed to a former one-car garage, also painted bright blue, with a window set into the front and also the back, so you could look right through to the water. Then we walked back to the cottage, where, taking an audible breath and fiddling a minute with his watch strap, he led us up the steps and through his front door.
    Those guys in school who sat in front of me, the ones like James with layers of old t-shirts and Klondike shoes, who aced their tests and went off, or so we heard, to serious schools and later fame—they had no other existence for me but the classroom. Since I had never gone out with one, they seemed to me to exist like the chalkboards at school, coming to life when the janitors turned on the lights. Now, inside the home of one, what had I expected? A heap of flannel shirts (this being Vermont) on top of a cot, a couple of calculators, fourteen pairs of shoes and wads of dirty socks and a bathroom you didn’t dare enter.
    Instead, the place was beautiful; I felt Beulah should wipe her paws. Gleaming wood floorboards sanded smooth as velvet, the old nails hammered flat and shiny. In the room we entered, James had a polished wooden desk and facing it an elderly rust-colored settee and a black-painted straight chair which matched one at his desk. On the wall, he’d mounted a pen and ink drawing labeled OX HOIST, quite technical and baffling to me, with arrows indicating elm drums, ash wheels, chestnut poles, walnut tubes, elder rollers. And, below that, a smaller ink drawing on heavy paper of a CRANE, with instructions for eight pine beams, two elm trunks, and one large walnut tree for screws. Also on that wall: a closed door. To his bedroom?
    I had entered a different country. But then I’d never gone into a man’s house before, not one he had done himself, not a place he’d made for himself to inhabit. Curtis and I had gone from our folks’ houses to student rentals and then, back in Peachland, to a two-bedroom of our own. A small house we’d tried to fix up more or less in the style we were used to. In that way, I guess we’d been still kids, no longer living at home, but not grownups who knew what they wanted.
    While I stood taking in this glimpse of him, James put down a towel and a bowl of water in the kitchen for Beulah, turned on a tape of a deep raspy voice singing “I’m Your Man,” telling me we were listening to Leonard Cohen, then changed his mind and turned it off again.
    â€œYou want some orange juice?” he asked. “Or a beer or something?”
    â€œAre these for your students?” I asked, gesturing to the elaborate drawings, thinking maybe these were details from famous structures abroad, having to do with cathedrals or mills or some other ancient building they’d be studying. Getting comfortable on the settee and tucking my feet up, I was wondering if maybe all teachers had stuff like this. He didn’t seem like any teacher I’d ever had, though maybe I’d have benefited from one like him. Could I imagine Janey Daniels, playing basketball but wishing she was a track star, going into a class taught by a Mr. James Maarten? It would have gone over my