Then Grunwald had put in an electric fence between his property and Curtis’s.
That Motherfucker.
It wasn’t especially high voltage, Grunwald said he could prove that and Curtis
believed him, but it had been of a voltage high enough to do for a slightly overweight old dog with a bad heart. And why an electric fence in the first place? The
Motherfucker had spouted a lot of bullshit having to do with discouraging potential
home-breakers—presumably creeping from Curtis’s property to that upon which La
Maison Motherfuckair reared its purple stucco head—but Curtis didn’t believe it.
Dedicated home-breakers would come in a boat, from the Gulf side. What he believed
was that Grunwald, disgruntled about the Vinton Lot, had put in the electric fence for the express purpose of annoying Curtis Johnson. And perhaps hurting his beloved dog.
As for actually killing his beloved dog? Curtis believed that had been a bonus.
He was not a weeping man, but he had wept when, prior to her cremation, he had
removed Betsy’s dog tag from her collar.
Curtis sued The Motherfucker for the price of the dog—twelve hundred dollars. If he
could have sued for ten million—that was roughly how much pain he felt when he
looked at the idiot stick lying, innocent of dogspit now and forever, on the coffee
table—he would have done so in a heartbeat, but his lawyer told him that pain and
suffering wouldn’t fly in a civil suit. Those things were for divorces, not dogs. He
would have to settle for the twelve hundred, and he meant to have it.
The Motherfucker’s lawyers responded that the electric fence had been strung a full
ten yards on Grunwald’s side of the property line, and the battle—the second battle—
was on. It had been raging for eight months now. Curtis believed the delaying tactics
being employed by The Motherfucker’s lawyers suggested that they knew Curtis had
a case. He also believed that their failure to propose a settlement, and Grunwald’s
failure to just cough up the twelve hundred, suggested that it had become as personal
to Grunwald as it was to him. These lawyers were also costing them plenty. But of
course, the matter was no longer about money.
Riding out along Route 17, through what had once been ranchland and was now just
overgrown scrub ground ( Grunwald had been raving mad to build out here, Curtis thought), Curtis only wished he felt happier about this turn of events. Victory was
supposed to make your heart leap, and his wasn’t. All he seemed to want was to see
Grunwald, hear what he was actually proposing, and put all this shit behind them if
the proposal wasn’t too ridiculous. Of course that would probably mean the roach-relatives would get the Vinton Lot, and they might well decide to put up their own
condo development, but did it even matter? It didn’t seem to.
Curtis had his own problems to deal with, although his were mental rather than
marital (God forbid), financial, or physical. They had begun not long after finding
Betsy stiff and cold in the side yard. Others might have called these problems
neuroses, but Curtis preferred to think of them as angst.
His current disenchantment with the stock market, which had fascinated him
ceaselessly since he had discovered it at sixteen, was the most identifiable component of this angst, but by no means the only one. He had begun taking his pulse and
counting his toothbrush strokes. He could no longer wear dark shirts, because he was
plagued with dandruff for the first time since junior high school. Dead white crap
plated up on his scalp and drifted down to his shoulders. If he scraped with the teeth of a comb, it came down in ghastly snow flurries. He hated this, but still sometimes
found himself doing it while sitting at the computer, or while talking on the phone.
Once or twice he’d scraped until he drew blood.
Scraping and scraping. Excavating that white deadness. Sometimes looking at the
idiot stick on the coffee table and thinking (of course) of how happy Betsy was when
she brought it to him. Human eyes hardly ever looked that happy, especially not when