Mimi's Bar, Jane Halpern, Page 7

When Mimi got to Karen's house, it was getting dim. She came around a bend in the river, and sensed, more than saw, a large embankment to one side of her, thick with brushy redbud that had not yet bloomed. (In this borderline edge of the swamp, water and "dry land" intermingle freely and create a boundary so fiendishly complex that it has caused more than one cartographer to throw up his hands and his t-square, then duck as the t-square part of the equation came down.)

Mimi did not look closely at the brush embankment - she had gone around thirty of them already - until she heard dogs yelping. She saw the kennel - thirty feet of chain-link fence, punctuated by the paws of beagles standing on their hind legs and baying - before she saw the house, which was hidden up in the brush and dark-sided. Karen was coming down the bank, waving.

Mimi turned the boat carefully and moved it toward shore. "Hi," she yelled over the engine. "Where do you want it?"

"Right here would be fine," Karen said, pointing to the large eucalyptus tree she had tied her own boat's bowline to. Mimi nudged the nose of her boat in, careful not to ding the other, which seemed as placid on the water surface as if it had been painted there.

"Don't worry, they won't hurt each other," Karen said. "No waves through here."

Mimi finished tying her bow line around the worn, shiny bark at the base of the eucalyptus tree, and used the gnarled, exposed roots hanging out over the water as a stepping stone to get off the boat. They stood a moment before hugging, awkwardly and briefly.

"Did you find the place all right?" Karen asked, as they started their way up the bank, hands in their pockets.

"Yeah, it wasn't too hard," said Mimi, pulling something out of her pocket - the paper napkin map. "I had this," she said, showing it to Karen.

Karen laughed. "Oh, that thing! It's a wonder I didn't send you to Baton Rouge with that."

"No, it was fine. I knew exactly where I was going."

"The No Trespassing signs didn't throw you?"

"I figured they weren't yours." Mimi had seen No Trespassing signs at more or less regular intervals of twenty yards or so for about four miles, on only one side of the river. They were metal, rusting, and the barbed wire they were tied to the trees with was choking the trees. Barbed wire is insidious - a tree may survive for years getting sliced through, slowly, by a wire, but eventually it will die. Mimi was taking a gamble that Karen didn't do this to trees, or like the people who did.

"You got that right," Karen muttered under her breath as they reached the top of the bank, between the dog kennels and the house. "Someday I'm gonna take a wire clipper to the son of a bitch who put those up. And then I'm gonna rescue his trees." She grinned wickedly.

They stood at the top of the embankment and looked around.

"Well, this is it," Karen said. "You wanna see the dogs?"

"Sure."

The kennel was not, as Mimi had previously thought, one big rectangle. It was two narrower enclosures with a walkway between them, swinging chain-link doors off to each side. It was sort of like the setup in an animal shelter. The beagles ran back and forth in their pen on the right side, their nails skittering on the concrete, yapping and pressing their noses up against the chain-link. There were about six of them, most fairly young.

"I only bring out two at a time when I hunt, that's all I can handle. And most of these are still in training. But when they're old enough, I'll sell them to folks around here. People will buy a good hunting dog, whereas they'll let a puppy get put down. I save them the trouble of training the dogs, they pay for all the Purina."

She went to the other cage and shook it gently. An old german shepard lifted her head from the ground near her house.

"This is Layla. You're a good girl, aren't you, Layla?" Karen crouched down and offered her fingers through the wire. Layla got up and licked at the digits, and Karen fed her a dog biscuit from her coat pocket. "I would keep her out of the cage during the day, but she just stands there and whines, looking at the other dogs. She likes being around the puppies. And she's not very athletic any more, are you, old girl? She's got arthritis."

"How long have you had her?"

"Fifteen years."

Mimi said nothing like "wow, that's old" or "you must be very attached to her", because Karen had worked her wrist through the chain link and was petting the old dog's head. Layla was nudging at Karen's palm with her nose, looking for more dog biscuit, and anything Mimi could possibly have said would have been superfluous.

Adjacent to Layla in the right-hand cage was a little black dachshund with a ginger face. "I don't know what I'm going to do with her."

After that were the dachshund's puppies, a squirming black bunch. "I really don't know what I'm going to do with them."

And finally, one gorgeous white chow the color of new milk. The chow had eyes remeniscent of Victorian paintings of mischievous elves, and a happy curled tail that coiled tightly over the back.

"Now she, she's a handful."

"I can see that," said Mimi, but they both couldn't refrain from grinning back at the chow.

The mad glee in the chow's eyes intensified, the ears perked, and the tail wagged so frantically it seemed it would unfurl.

"I get up in the morning, she's under the porch. I lock her in the cage, two minutes later she's under the porch. I tie her to a tree, she's back to the porch before I am. I'm about to give in and let her live there, but the thing is she digs around the supports and I'm afraid the porch will collapse. And I'll be on it when it happens."

Mimi grinned.

"And she whines and begs for hamburger patties when I cook them, and she steals them off the barbecue grill if I barbecue them, and she chases the cats and the ducks, and is generally not a nice girl!" Karen rattled the cage for emphasis on the last words. The chow whimpered and bowed, and laid her ears down and looked goofy, and both Karen and Mimi burst out laughing.

They went inside and ate dinner, which was stew involving turkey, then went and sat out on the porch. They had a beer and talked till late into the night, even though the mosquitoes were chewing them up, the air was chilly, and they could hear the sounds of digging underneath the floorboards. Sometime around eleven Karen went inside to see if she could dig up the bug zapper she could vaguely remember getting for Christmas, and came out saying, "You know, I wonder how that dog does get out of her cage. I'm gonna find out." She hung the bug zapper and turned it on, and a blue glow diffused through the night. She hopped off the porch and Mimi squinted to see her in the dark as she led the chow by the collar to the pen. The dog went in obediently and Karen came back wiping her hands. "Now we'll see how that dog gets out."

They sat on the porch and waited. Silence from the dog cage. Karen looked up at the bug zapper. "Wouldn't you know it, the second you put one of these out, the mosquitoes stop for the night." As she said it, a slight movement from the kennel made Mimi look up.

"Don't move," Karen whispered. The chow was climbing over the fence. It jumped high enough to get its front paws on the top bar, then scrabbled with its back paws, looking for a hold. When it found it, it tenuously hung there for a second, claws caught in the chain-link, belly bluish-white in the light from the bug zapper, then one little twist, a jerk, and the chow was over the fence and down on the ground outside. It sniffed the ground, looked up hesitantly at Mimi and Karen, who were sitting open-mouthed on the porch, and set off into the dark around the house.

"Son of a..." Karen muttered. "That's gotta be ten feet."

"More," Mimi said.

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