Last Days of the Dog-Men by Brad Watson Page A

the redwing blackbirds and grackles gathered mornings and evenings in the bamboo thicket outside my screened porch. I have sat there and watched them, as evening ticked down, swoop in twos, threes, fours, and disappear into the bamboo until the whole thicket was alive with birds hidden by the bamboo leaves, invisible birds, the noise like a thousand old doors swinging on rusty, creaking hinges. In the mornings as they wake they take it up again, and burst from the thicket in bunches. It makes for some pretty strange dreams.
    Sometimes in the dawn hour, the birds get so loud they wake me up and I lie there surrounded by their weird cacophonous voices, thinking about the Great Fuckup, and imagining all their beady little eyes darting around in that jungle green like all my quirky little demons. I’d married so young and didn’t know anything about it, and lost my wife and baby son when Iwas twenty-one years old, let them go with a kind of despair I could not begin to even recognize. It was true I didn’t love her at all. But it was just like Ivan had joked as we’d left that morning: she left the furniture, the silverware, the pots and pans, the television, the books, the carpet, the food, the car, her prescription medicines, her shower cap, shampoo, toothbrush, hairbrush, stuffed animals collection, inessential clothing, old letters and postcards, sheets and towels, cheap framed prints on the walls, stereo, and all the photo albums except the one devoted to our little boy. And she took him. And over the next few years things had shut down inside me with the regularity of lights in an empty warehouse where a night watchman is pulling the switches one by one. I moved around, went back to school, moved in with a friend and then moved out again, into the old man’s empty apartment. And finally one morning that spring I lay there awake, the small bedroom full of the blackbirds’ strange and beautifully dissonant warbling, and couldn’t think of what I really cared about anymore.
    I said to Ivan, “Did you ever fuck Eve while those blackbirds were all out there in the bamboo?”
    He poked at the fire a minute.
    â€œWhat, when they’re all out there raising hell? It’s like fucking in the middle of a goddamn asylum,” he said. “You don’t know where you are when it’s over.”
    I said, “In my bed.”
    He laughed.
    I said, “What are y’all going to do?”
    He didn’t say anything, and tossed another split log onto the fire.
    â€œI don’t know,” he said then. “It’s not going to be much fun for a while.”
    â€œI don’t think I could ever do it again,” I said. “Go through a divorce. I don’t think I’d ever divorce again, at least not with children.”
    â€œThen don’t remarry,” Ivan said.
    â€œAt least you don’t have children.”
    We left the rabbit over the coals while we ate the quail, rice, and green beans. It was quiet in the room and warm. Ivan held up a glass of wine. I held mine up.
    â€œWell,” he said, “fuck all of them, Jack. You know?”
    â€œFuck them each and every one,” I said, and had to shut my mouth and look away. I got up and went into the living room to the fire, put oven mittens on my hands, and lifted the spit with the rabbit out of its cradles. That took a little while. I carried it back into the dining room and laid it across the plate with the birds. Cooked, the rabbit wasn’t as disturbing to me. But the meat was tough and gamy.
    â€œShould’ve at least put a little butter and salt and pepper on it,” Ivan said.
    â€œI wish we hadn’t shot it,” I said.
    â€œEnough about that!” Ivan said. “We’ll give it to Mary.”
    â€œThat’s a good idea.”
    â€œMary killed it. She finished it off.”
    â€œIn innocence.”
    â€œExactly. It’s Mary’s