Free Taking Care by Joy Williams

drink?” The running water made so much noise, she couldn’t hear herself saying it.
    J.J. zipped up his jacket and opened the door. He whistled sharply. Nothing happened. He jumped off the deck, not bothering to shut the door, and they heard him get in the truck and start the motor.
    “We’ll be going now,” Cale sighed. “I guess them houndsmight be waiting on the highway.” He started out the door and almost collided with J.J., who was coming back in.
    “You’ll be watching out for them dawgs and keeping them for us then when they come by?” J.J. said, jerking his eyes over Lola. She tried not to pay attention to him. He wore baggy trousers with rows of flap pockets extending all the way down to the cuff. From one of the pockets, he took out three quarters and laid them on the table. “Jest tie em up and give em a bucket of water and this here is for food. One name Don, the black ‘n’ tan.”
    “They won’t be coming through here,” Lola said. “You’ll find them someplace else.”
    J.J. looked at her with no curiosity at all and, with Cale following, went back out to the truck.
    “Bye fer now,” Cale said.
    The truck tore away recklessly, leaving a smell of oil on the air.
    It was six o’clock, the light almost gone, and time for the newscast. Lola turned on the television. She made a drink and drank it, then picked up the quarters from the table. On the television, something was being said. She turned off the sound and went outside, on the deck. The woods were wild at nightfall. She heard dim crashings and splashes and the bark of a dog, and through the gaps in the trees was a mottled sky of fading pink and grey discs, microbes moving toward the west.
    She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldn’t save her. She lay down on the deck with the woods all around her. She lay on her stomach and stretched out her arms. She could see the ground through the spaces between the pine planking. Over the months, things had spilled down there. She saw a cigarette lighter and a pencil. She saw a spoon down there, dully twinkling, offering to her the blurred, quite unrecognizable image of her face.

Shepherd

     

 
     
     
     
     
     
    I T had been three weeks since the girl’s German shepherd had died. He had drowned. The girl couldn’t get over it. She sat on the porch of her boyfriend’s beach house and looked at the water.
    It was not the same water. The house was on the Gulf of Mexico. The shepherd had drowned in the bay.
    The girl’s boyfriend had bought his house just the week before. It had been purchased furnished with mismatched plates and glasses, several large oak beds, an assortment of green wicker furniture and an art deco ice bucket with its handles in the shape of penguins.
    The girl had a house of her own on the broad seawalled bay. The house had big windows overlooking shaggy bougainvillea bushes. There were hardly any studs in the frame and the whole house had shaken when the dog ran through it.
    The girl’s boyfriend’s last name was Chester and everyone called him that. He was in his mid-thirties. The girl realized she was no kid herself. She was five years younger than he was. Chester favored trousers with legs of different colors and wore sunglasses the color of champagne bottles. He wore them day and night like a blind man. Chester had a catamaran. He loved to cook. “It’s just another way to cook eggs,” he’d say as he produced staggeringly delicious blintzes on Sunday morning. Chester had a writing dentist who had serviced the Weathermen in college. Chester had wide shoulders, great handsand one broken marriage on which he didn’t owe a dime.
    “You have fallen into the pie,” the girl’s friends told her.
    Three days before the shepherd had drowned, Chester had asked the girl to marry him. They had known each other almost a year. “I love you,” he said, “let’s get married.” They had taken a Quaalude and gone to bed. That had been three