West of Rome Read online

  “You may not!” Denny said. “You keep your fat Hollywood mouth out of this.”

  I stayed calm.

  “Listen, you cretin. You want to step outside and settle this man to man?”

  “Oh, shut up. I don’t want to hit a doddering old fool.”

  I put down my glass.

  “Let’s go, Buster.”

  I walked into the living room and out the front door and stood on the porch. My plan was to bash him in the mouth as he stepped through the door. I knew he could take me, and all I wanted was that first punch. He wouldn’t strike back. We had had these confrontations before, and they always came to nothing but smoke and no fire. For five minutes I waited. Finally the door opened. It was Harriet.

  I said, “Tell that insolent crud I’m waiting.”

  “He went to bed.”

  “It figures. Yellow too.”

  “Lock all the doors and leave a light for Jamie,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

  Before following her into the sack I made a last inspection of the dog. In the drizzle he seemed dead, his coat covered by a light mist, his mouth pressed deeply into the grass. There was no sign that he was even breathing, but my hand on his chest felt the thump of his heart.

  FIVE

  I awoke to my first thought—the dog—and staggered out of bed. Splashing water on my face I gazed out the window to the south. The day was a heart-breaker. The storm had washed and drip-dried the world. The sea was a vast blueberry pie and the sky brilliant as the madonna’s cloak. There was the fragrance of pines and salt air, and I could see the Santa Barbara Islands forty miles away, riding the horizon like a herd of blue whales. It was the kind of a day that tortured a writer, so beautiful that he knew it would rape him of ambition and suffocate every notion born of his brain.

  Harriet was making the coffee when I walked into the kitchen. She was radiant.

  “He’s gone!” she smiled.

  I needed more assurance than that, I had to see for myself, and I went outside. There wasn’t a trace of the beast. I crossed under the dripping pines and looked over the wall. I checked the garage, the corral beyond, and even the old, broken-down trailer which in years past had been a shelter for my pit bulls. There I found something that lulled me into sweet sentimentality. It was an old baseball bat, chewed in half by my great dead Rocco, who loved to devour bats, specially at the grips where he could savor the sweat of my sons’ hands.

  Breakfast was ready when I got back to the house. I sipped some coffee, lit my first cigarette, and felt the first tweak of a premonition nibbling at my psyche. That damned dog was still around. It was not my destiny to get off so easily. The son-of-a-bitch hadn’t left at all. An overwhelming apprehension lifted me out of the chair. He was here, under this roof. A powerful hunch sent me down the north wing of my Y-shaped house to Jamie’s room.

  I opened the door quietly and peered inside. They were both asleep, each on his right side, Jamie’s arm around the dog’s neck, both snoring. I liked what I saw. I liked boys sleeping with dogs. It was as close to God as they ever got. I closed the door and went back to the kitchen.

  “Jamie has a guest.”

  “Not that awful Shaw boy,” Harriet said.

  “Worse than that.”

  She looked up from a volume of Bernard Shaw’s plays and found my eyes.

  “The Castallani boy?”

  ‘The dog.”

  She trembled, the cup shaking in her hand as she sipped. “I can’t think about it now,” she said, spilling coffee on the page as she put down her cup. “I’ve got all this reading to do, all these plays. Did you ever try to read a Shaw play?” She pressed her hand over her eyes. “Oh, God, please! Don’t talk to me about that dog!”

  And so my day began, a thrill a minute in the romantic, exciting, creatively fulfilling life of a writer. First, the grocery list. Varoom! and I roar down the coast highway in my Porsche, seven miles to the Mayfair Market. Scree! I brake to a stop in the parking lot, leap from the car, give my white scarf a couple of twirls and zap! I enter the automatic doors. Pow! The lettuce, potatoes, chard, carrots. Swooshl The roast, chops, bacon, cheese! Wham! The cake, the cereal, the bread. Zonk! The detergent, the floor wax, the paper towels.

  Back to the car again varoom varoom up the highway, roaring past a surf creamy as enzyme detergent, the wild carefree author, filling his days with exquisite sensuality. But the wind in my face brought back the only reality and I choked over an ever-returning memory of Rome, a cup of cappucino at a little table on the Piazza Navonne, a raven-haired girl at my side, eating watermelon and laughing as she spat the seeds to the pigeons.

  Jamie was having breakfast as I carried in the groceries. The dog lay at his feet. By now he was so familiar it seemed he had come with the house.

  “I see you two have met,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s okay.”

  “Has he tried to screw you yet? Last night he almost scored with Rick.”

  “He tried, but he’s kinda stupid. That’s why I like him. I’m sick of smart dogs.”

  “Jamie wants to keep him,” Harriet said.

  “No chance.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve had it with dogs, and because he belongs to somebody else, and because I don’t want him around here.” I decided to carry it a step further. “In God’s name give a thought to your father. I can’t work in this madhouse. I need peace and quiet. If you only knew what a writer goes through to…”

  He threw up his arms.

  “Okay, okay! I’ve heard that before!”

  He pushed back his chair and stormed out the back door, shouting to the dog, “Come on, Stupid!”

  The dog rose promptly and followed him out. Stupid. The name suited him perfectly. I picked up the phone and began dialling the County Animal Shelter.

  From the yard came the thump of a basketball. That was Jamie, draining off his anger by shooting baskets through the hoop on the garage wall. He was the best kid I had. He didn’t smoke pot, he didn’t drink booze, he didn’t sleep with black women, and he didn’t want to become an actor. What more could a father ask? There was something wholesome and refreshing about a son like that.

  From childhood he had had an abiding love for animals, had raised chickens, ducks, rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs. I had seen him kiss guinea pigs on the mouth in gushes of affection at their cuddly warmth, and all of one summer he had slept with two king snakes coiled lovingly at his bosom. Now he was nineteen, with a student deferment from the draft, a math whiz with a bright future. He had an after-school job at the supermarket, saved every cent he earned, and planned for a degree in business administration. Most important, he was my best hope for a happy old age. The others, including Tina, would throw me out the way I was banishing the dog, but my Writers’ Guild pension, plus social security and a monthly stipend from Jamie promised serenity in my sunset years. So why muck up my own future? Let him keep the dog. How would he feel ten years from now if he remembered his old man as the heartless bastard who had consigned Stupid to the county gas chamber? No, I didn’t want that. I hung up and went out to discuss the matter with him.

  “You can keep him if you’ll promise to take care of him,” I said.

  “I don’t want him, Dad. You’re right. They’re too much trouble.”

  “What’ll we do with him?”

  “Let’s take him down to the beach,” Jamie said. “He’ll wander off on his own and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “Good idea.”

  The dog lay half-buried in an ivy bed.

  “Come on, Stupid,” I said.

  He ignored it, but when Jamie called he rose immediately. So far, so good. I walked into the house and told Harriet our plan. She was so relieved that she kissed me. I swore she had seen the last of the dog.

  “Now be strong,” she said. “Don’t chicken out.”

  “You know me. Iron man. Besides, it’s the only humane way of getting rid of him. He’ll mosey on down
the coast and that’ll be the end of it.”

  I joined Jamie and the dog at the front gate and we started down the road. It was a quarter of a mile to the gate that led to the beach, one-acre tracts on either side of the road, a house on each tract, at least one dog, and usually two at every house. Point Dume was dog country, a canine paradise of Dobermans, German shepherds, Labradors, boxers, weimaraners, Great Danes and dalmatians.

  All hell broke loose as we moved down the road. The Epsteins’ prize boxers, Elwood and Gracie, came roaring out of their driveway and smashed into Stupid before he knew what was happening, sweeping him off his feet. Howls, yawps, and yelps filled the air as fur exploded in a swirl of dust at the side of the road. It looked at if they were tearing Stupid to shreds, but he recovered quickly, his bearish jaws wide as a shovel as he fought back. There was a shriek of pain from Gracie and she ran limping away.

  On his back, Elwood’s teeth were in the thickness of Stupid’s neck, pulling out mouthfuls of fur. Stupid stomped him with his paws and his cavernous mouth sank into the boxer’s throat. But he didn’t hurt Elwood. He only held him down firmly, pressing his heavy body upon the boxer. Then the carrot flashed, emerging like an orange dagger just as Mrs. Epstein in curlers opened the front door and watched in consternation the intended assault upon her pride and joy. Seizing a dust mop, she rushed to the fight.

  “Oh, Elwood!” she wailed. “Poor Elwood!”

  She beat the mop against Stupid’s back as he tried to ram the dagger home. But it slid off harmlessly to one side and then the other, and sometimes poking the ground, gradually diminishing and finally disappearing. Only then did he disengage himself, his face clouded with bewilderment, the dust mop flailing him. Unhurt but embarrassed, Elwood sprang to his feet and lunged for a parting snap at Stupid’s thick hide. Then he ran off to join Gracie at the side of the house.

  Jamie and I faced Mrs. Epstein. She was panting, furious, glaring at Stupid.

  “What is that filthy thing?”

  “An Akita,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A Japanese dog.”

  “Bull terriers, and now this. Can’t you own a civilized dog?”

  “He didn’t start it, Mrs. Epstein,” Jamie said. “Your dogs attacked him.”

  “Can you blame them? Look at that horrible beast! He doesn’t belong in a nice neighborhood. Did you see what he did to Elwood?”

  Tongue out, panting and covered with dust, Stupid sat there staring at Mrs. Epstein.

  “I’m going to report him,” she said, striding back to the house. Pausing in the doorway, she called her dogs. “Elwood! Gracie! You get in here, this minute!” They raced into the house. She lobbed a vile look in my direction and closed the door.

  We bent over Stupid as he licked his paws and cleaned himself after the brawl. A fistful of fur was missing from under his chest, but there were no wounds. I slapped his belly admiringly.

  “This guy can fight,” I said.

  “Think he could take Rocco?”

  “1 wouldn’t go that far,” I said. “Still, he routed two boxers. He’s got great promise.”

  “He’s a fag, Dad.”

  “So was Caesar. And Michelangelo.”

  “Wish we could keep him.”

  “Your mother would blow a fuse.”

  We moved on down the road, the canine alarm system preceding us and in full operation: the collie at the Hamer place, the hysterical beagles at the Frawleys, the Borchart Doberman, a score of dogs big and small on both sides of the road protesting the alien in their midst.

  They saw him between Jamie and me, each of us gripping his collar, they got a whiff of a beast from foreign parts and they went wild with fear and outrage at his presence, some racing up and down behind chain link fences, others retreating to garages and porches where they cracked their throats with howls that brought women and children to the windows to peer anxiously from behind curtains, wondering what monster rambled over Point Dume.

  Tongue out and head high Stupid enjoyed the attention, straining at the collar like a horse impatient to break from the starting gate. As we passed the Bigelow house their fawn-colored Great Dane loped to the fence and cut loose with a few asthmatic bellows. Stupid sneered and flashed a wicked white fang.

  Beyond the Bigelows a final challenge awaited us before we reached the iron gates to the beach—a savage antagonist too formidable to think about or whisper his name. And yet we knew he lay in wait just around the bend in the road.

  His name was Rommel, and his owner’s name was Kunz, an executive with the Rand think-tank in Santa Monica. Rommel. Flown in from Berlin, he was the reigning monarch of Point Dume’s canine empire. He was a black and silver German shepherd who lived in the last house on that road, and who took it upon himself to guard the gates leading to the beach below. An awesome dog, a gauleiter with an uncanny instinct for screening out strangers and dropouts (and wagging his tail at anyone in uniform), handsome as Cary Grant and ferocious as Joe Louis, a mighty king among dogs, but in my mind inferior to Rocco, my bull terrier, cut down by an assassin’s bullet a year before Rommel made the scene.

  Even as we approached the cul de sac Rommel presented himself, the warning system from his minions having already alerted him for whatever intruder, man or beast, came down Cliffside Road.

  My heart began to rev up and all at once I knew that my only reason for leading Stupid to the beach was this encounter. I looked at Jamie. His face was flushed, his eyes sparkling. The only one among us, man or beast, who was unaware of the impending menace was Stupid. Apparently his sense of smell was as imperfect as his eyesight, for he swaggered into view without seeing Rommel, his big tongue flapping and a grin on his bearish face.

  Slinking toward him with menacing tread, one paw stealthily following another, his tail thrust straight out, his hackles rising, Rommel loosed a blood-chilling growl that silenced the yips and yowls along the road. The king had spoken and an awful silence prevailed. Stupid’s ears peaked as his eyes found Rommel thirty yards away. He lunged to break the grip on his collar, dragging us along until we released him. He did not crouch like his Teutonic rival. Instead, he walked into the battle with his head high, the loop of his plumed tail swirling like a flag over his rump.

  The thing unfolded like Main Street, Dodge City. Jamie licked his chops. My heart roared. We stopped to watch.

  Rommel hit first, driving his teeth deeply into the fur at Stupid’s throat. It was like biting into a mattress. Stupid tore himself free, high on his hind legs, the move of a bear, his forepaws keeping the Teuton at bay. They snapped at one another, face to face, as Rommel too rose to his hind legs. My Rocco, a street-fighter, would have disemboweled them both had the tactic been used against him. But Rommel was a stand-up fighter, a stickler for the rules, no biting at the under-belly, no attack except at the throat.

  He hit several times, but he could not hang on. Stupid, to my surprise, wasn’t biting at all. He snarled, his jaws snapped, he roared to match Rommel’s roars, but it was obvious that he wanted to wrestle and not kill. He was the same size as Rommel but his chest was more powerful and his paws slugged like clubs.

  After half a dozen charges the combat was a draw and there was a momentary pause as the dogs measured each other. The alert Rommel stood still as a statue as Stupid moved closer and began circling him. Rommel watched this maneuver suspiciously, ears up. By all the rules of a classic dog fight the battle should have ended a draw then and there, both animals retiring with honors unchallenged.

  Not Stupid. Circling a second time, he suddenly raised his paws to Rommel’s back. Touche! It was a fantastic ploy, unprecedented, daring, defiant and so unorthodox that Rommel froze in disbelief. It was as if Stupid would rather frolic than fight and it confused Rommel, a noble dog who believed in fair play.

  Then Stupid revealed his uncanny purpose, unsheathing his orange sword and leaping upon Rommel’s back, truly a bear now, squeezing Rommel with four powerful legs and endeavoring to si
nk home the sword. What finesse! What brilliance! My blood sang. God, what a dog!

  Snarling in disgust, Rommel thrashed to free himself from the obscene assault, his neck twisting to reach Stupid’s throat, his bottom dragged protectingly along the ground. Now he knew that his adversary was a fiendish monster with depraved intent and it put him in a panic of energy to disengage. Finally free, he skulked away, tail down and shielding his privates. Stupid romped after him as Rommel retreated to the lawn and planted himself with lips exposing a mouthful of dripping teeth. There was nausea and disgust in the sound that came from his throat, a shrinking away from this revolting adversary too loathsome to attack.

  He was beaten, routed. He had quit.

  “My God!” I said, going to my knees and throwing my arms around Stupid’s neck. “Oh, my God, Jamie! What have we here?”

  Jamie seized his collar.

  “Let’s get him away before it starts again.”

  “It’ll never start again. Rommel’s finished, wiped out. Look at him!”

  Rommel was walking up the Kunz driveway toward the garage, tail between his legs.

  “Let’s go,” Jamie said.

  “We keep him.”

  “You can’t. You promised mother.”

  “It’s my dog, my house, my decision.”

  “But he’s not yours.”

  “He will be.”

  “He’s trouble. He’s crazy.”

  “He’s a fighter with style. He wins without throwing a punch.”

  “He’s not a fighter, Dad. He’s a rapist.”

  “We keep him.”

  “Tell me why?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  We started back, Stupid between us, walking a gauntlet of barking dogs. I knew why I wanted that dog. It was shamelessly clear, but I could not tell the boy. It would have embarrassed me. But I could tell myself and it did not matter. I was tired of defeat and failure. I hungered for victory. I was fifty-five and there were no victories in sight, nor even a battle. Even my enemies were no longer interested in combat. Stupid was victory, the books I had not written, the places I had not seen, the Maserati I had never owned, the women I hungered for, Danielle Darrieux and Gina Lollobrigida and Nadia Grey. He was triumph over ex-pants manufacturers who had slashed my screenplays until blood oozed. He was my dream of great offspring with fine minds in famous universities, scholars with rich gifts for the world. Like my beloved Rocco he would ease the pain and bruises of my interminable days, the poverty of my childhood, the desperation of my youth, the desolation of my future.