The Dog of the South

  “Do you pray every night for all the little babies in Little Rock?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t.”

  “What kind of Christian do you call yourself?”

  “I attend church when I can.”

  “Cards on the table, Mr. Midge.”

  “Well, I think I have a religious nature. I sometimes find it hard to determine God’s will.”

  “Inconvenient, you mean.”

  “That too, yes.”

  “What does it take to keep you from attending church?”

  “I go when I can.”

  “A light rain?”

  “I go when I can.”

  “This ‘religious nature’ business reminds me of Reo, your man of science. He’ll try to tell you that God is out there in the trees and grass somewhere. Some kind of force. That’s pretty thin stuff if you ask me. And Father Jackie is not much better. He says God is a perfect sphere. A ball, if you will.”

  “There are many different opinions on the subject.”

  “Did you suppose I didn’t know that?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What about Heaven and Hell. Do you believe those places exist?”

  “That’s a hard one.”

  “Not for me. How about you, Melba?”

  “I would call it an easy one.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised either way. I try not to think about it. It’s just so odd to think that people are walking around in Heaven and Hell.”

  “Yes, but it’s odd to find ourselves walking around here too, isn’t it?”

  “That’s true, Mrs. Symes.”

  “All the children call me Meemaw. Why don’t you do like they do and call me Meemaw?”

  “Well. All right.”

  “Have you read the Bible?”

  “I’ve read some of it.”

  “Do you go through your Bible looking for discrepancies?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “That’s not the way to read it. I have a little test I like to give to people like you who claim to be Bible scholars. Do you mind taking a little test for me?”

  “Is it a written test?”

  “No, it’s just one question.”

  “I don’t mind taking your test, Meemaw, but there is a misunderstanding here. You asked me if I had read the Bible and I said I had read some of it. I did not say I was a Bible scholar.”

  “We’ll soon know, one way or the other. All right, the wedding feast at Cana. John 2. Jesus turned six pots of water into six pots of so-called wine. His first miracle. His mother was there. Now do you believe that was alcoholic wine in those pots or unfermented grape juice?”

  “What does the Bible say?”

  Melba said, “The Bible just says wine. It says good wine.”

  “Then that’s what I say. I say wine.”

  Mrs. Symes said, “It’s your notion then that Jesus was a bootlegger?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “He was no more a bootlegger than I am. That so-called wine was nothing more than fresh and wholesome grape juice. The word is translated wrong.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Do you claim to know the meaning of every word in the Greek language?”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t know one word of the Greek language.”

  “Then why should your opinion be worth anything in a matter like this? Father Jackie is bad enough and you don’t even know as much as he does.”

  Melba said, “Let’s see what he knows about Swedenborg.”

  “He won’t know anything about Swedenborg.”

  “It won’t hurt to see, will it?”

  “Go ahead and ask him then.”

  “What do you know about a man named Emanuel Swedenborg, Mr. Midge?”

  “I don’t know anything about him.”

  “He personally visited Heaven and Hell and returned to write an astonishing book about his experiences. Now what do you think of that?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  Mrs. Symes said, “Have you read Mrs. Eddy’s books?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What is your work in this world?”

  “I don’t know what it is yet. I’m back in school now.”

  “It’s getting pretty late in the day for you to have so few interests and convictions. How old are you, Mr. Midge?”

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  “Later than I thought. Think about this. All the little animals of your youth are long dead.”

  Melba said, “Except for turtles.”

  Something small and hard, possibly a nut, dropped on the tin roof and we waited in silence for another one but it didn’t come. I asked directions to the Fair Play Hotel, and Meemaw, as I now addressed her, told me I would be more comfortable at the Fort George or the Bellevue. I was agreeable and didn’t pursue the matter, but the man at the border had given me a card for the Fair Play and it was there I meant to stay. The lights came back on and in a very few minutes Melba’s electric coffeepot began to bubble and make respiratory noises like some infernal hospital machine. Mrs. Symes looked me over closely in the light.

  “I know you’ll excuse a personal reference, Mr. Midge. Are you handicapped?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  She lifted one of my trouser legs an inch or so with the tip of her aluminum cane. “Your feet, I mean. They look odd the way you have them splayed out. They look like artificial feet.”

  “My feet are all right. These are new shoes. Perhaps that accounts for their unnatural fullness.”

  “No, it’s not that, it’s the way you have them turned out. Now there, that’s better. You remind me a whole lot of Otho. He never could get the hang of things.”

  “I’ve heard you mention Otho two or three times but I don’t know who he is.”

  “Otho Symes, of course. He was my husband. He never could get the hang of things but he was just as good as gold.”

  Melba said, “He was a nervous little man. I was afraid to say boo to him.”

  “He wasn’t nervous until he had his operation.”

  “He was nervous before his operation and after his operation both.”

  “He wasn’t nervous until they put that thing in his neck, Melba. I ought to know.”

  “You ought to but you don’t. This boy doesn’t want to hear any more about Otho and I don’t either. I want to find out something about his wife and why she left him. He hasn’t told us that.”

  “I don’t know why she left.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “No, I was very much surprised.”

  Mrs. Symes said, “Are you trying to tell us that you and your wife were on cordial terms?”

  “We got along all right.”

  “Never a harsh word?”

  “She called me a pill sometimes.”

  “A pill, eh.”

  “That was her mother’s word but Norma took it up.”

  “They were both calling you a pill to your face?”

  “Yes. Not, you know, day and night.”

  “Did she open your mail and read it?”

  “No, ma’am. That is, I don’t think she did.”

  Melba put her rouged face in mine again and said, “One moment, Mr. Midge. You told us just a while ago that you didn’t get any mail. Now you’re talking about people intercepting your mail. Which is it? Do you get any mail or not?”

  “I said I didn’t get much mail. I get some.”

  Mrs. Symes said, “I’ll bet the little girl’s kitchen was just filthy all the time.”

  “No, it wasn’t either.”

  “Can she cook anything that’s fit to eat?”

  “She’s a pretty good cook.”

  “Can she make her own little skirts and jumpers?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never seen her sewing anything.”

  “What about raisins? Does she like raisins?”

  “I’ve never seen her eating any raisins.”
r />   “I’ll bet she likes yellow cake with hot lemon sauce poured over it.”

  “I believe she does, yes. I do too.”

  “What about chocolate cake?”

  “She likes all kinds of cake.”

  “All right then, tell me this. When she’s eating chocolate cake late at night, does she also drink sweet milk from a quart bottle till it runs from the corners of her mouth?”

  “I’ve never seen her do that.”

  “That’s a picture I have of gluttony.”

  “I don’t know how you got the idea that Norma is a glutton, Meemaw. The fact is, she eats very little. She’s very particular about what she eats and how she eats it.”

  “A clean feeder then, according to you.”

  “Very clean.”

  “Melba used to do that very thing late at night. That cake thing with the milk.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “There never was a bigger lie. I don’t know why you keep telling people that.”

  “I know what I know, Melba.”

  The lights went off again. I thanked them for the supper and the hospitality and got up to leave. Melba asked me to wait a minute. She had the burning lamp in her hand and she had turned the wick up a notch or two for a bright flame. Then she went to a dark corner and struck a pose there with the lamp, holding it above her head. She said, “Now I just wonder if you two can guess who I am.”

  Mrs. Symes said, “I know. The Statue of Liberty. That’s easy.”

  “No.”

  “Florence Nightingale then.”

  “No.”

  “You’re changing it every time I guess it.”

  “I’m the Light of the World.”

  “No, you’re not, you’re just silly. You’re so silly, Melba, it’s pitiful. It’s downright embarrassing to me when we have guests.”

  This time I did leave but before I got all the way down the stairs Mrs. Symes called after me. She asked if I thought there was any chance that Reo was going about doing good by stealth. It wouldn’t have hurt me to say yes, there was an excellent chance of that, but I said I just didn’t know. She asked if I had any Lipton’s dried soups in the car, or a fall and winter Sears catalogue. Of course I didn’t and I felt bad because I had nothing like that to give them, even though they had roughed me up a little with their hard questions.

  Seven

  I LEFT DR. SYMES steaming in the dark chapel and made my way back to the arched bridge over the little river that ran through Belize. I had guessed, correctly, that this bridge was the center of town. Two or three blocks upstream I found the Fair Play Hotel, which was a white frame house like the tabernacle. I parked the car in front and again went through the unpleasant business of waking people up.

  A thin Negro woman was the manager of the place. She was surly, as anyone might have been in the circumstances, but I could sense too a general ill-feeling for me and my kind. She woke a small Negro boy named Webster Spooner, who slept in a box in the foyer. It was a pretty good wooden box with bedding in it. I knew his name because he had written it on a piece of paper and taped it to his box. At the foot of his makeshift bed there was a tomato plant growing in an old Texaco grease bucket.

  I wrote and addressed a brief message to my father asking him to wire me $250. The woman said she would have Webster Spooner attend to it when the cable office opened in the morning. I gave her a five-dollar bill and a few ten-peso notes—all the money in my pocket—and she pinned it to the message and put it away in a shoe box.

  Would my car be safe on the street? It might be or it might not be, she said, but in any case there was no enclosed parking. I thought of removing the cable from the coil to the distributor so as to foil thieves but I was too weary to fool with that car anymore. The woman, whose name was Ruth, went back to bed. Webster Spooner carried my bag upstairs and showed me to my room. He said he would keep an eye on the car. I didn’t see how he was going to do that from his box. I knew he was a sound sleeper. The woman Ruth had almost had to kill him to get him awake.

  My room overlooked the black water of the little river or creek. I opened a window and I could smell it. One drop of that stinking water would mean instant death! As soon as I arrive at any destination, my first thoughts are always of departure and how it may be most quickly arranged, but it was not so in this case. Fatigue perhaps. I settled in. I went to bed and stayed there for two days.

  Twice a day Webster Spooner came by and took my order for a bowl of sliced bananas and a small can of Pet milk. I had the same thing each time and he carefully wrote it down each time in his notebook.

  Webster said he had other jobs. He washed police cars and he sold newspapers and greeting cards. The tomato plant was one of his projects. He sometimes referred to the woman Ruth as his “ahntee,” which is to say his aunt, but I got the impression that they were not actually related. He said she took half his earnings.

  He always had a fresh question for me when he caught me awake. Could a Dodge Coronet outrun a Mercury Montego? How did you keep score in the game of bowling? They got very few American guests here at the Fair Play, he said, and the ones they did get drove sorry-looking cars like mine or else they were hippies with dirty feet and no cars at all. Ruth didn’t like the Americans but he, Webster, rather liked them, even if they did keep him hopping with their endless demands for ice and light bulbs and towels and flyswatters. Even the wretched hippies expected service. It was in the blood.

  I discovered later that Ruth called me “Turco” and “the Turk” because of my small pointed teeth and my small owl beak and my small gray eyes, mere slits but prodigies of light-gathering and resolving power. What put it into her head that these were distinctive Turkish features, I had no way of knowing, nor did I know why she should be down on the Turks too, but there it was. “See what the Turk wants now,” she would say to Webster, and, “Is Turco still in bed?”

  I had him get me some envelopes and an assortment of colorful stamps and I addressed some British Honduras covers to myself in Little Rock. I slept off and on and I had a recurring dream. I read the Dix book, or tried to. My mind wandered, even on the strong passages that the doctor had underlined. I read a guidebook. The writer said the people of this country were “proud,” which usually means “barely human” in the special lingo of those things. But wasn’t Ruth proud? The very word for her. I calculated the trip expenses. In the bathroom down the hall I found a paperback book with no covers and took it back to bed with me. I read almost two pages before I realized it was fiction, and worse, a story set in the future. Some bird was calling up for a “helicab.” I dropped it on the floor, which is to say I didn’t fling it across the room, although I could tell it had been flung many times. I listened to the radio that was always playing in the next room. That is, I listened to the English portions. There were alternate hours of broadcasting in English and Spanish.

  I paid particular attention to a California evangelist who came on each morning at nine. I looked forward to this program. Was the man a fraud? He was very persuasive and yet there was a Satanic note in his cleverness. I couldn’t work it out.

  The headboard of the bed was covered with some cheap white synthetic material—in this land of mahogany—and the name KARL was carved into it in block letters. Each time I woke up, I was confused and then I would see that KARL and get my bearings. I would think about Karl for a few minutes. He had thought it a good thing to leave his name here but, ever wary, not his full name. I wondered if he might be in the next room. With his knife and radio he might be on the move constantly, like J. S. Dix.

  The recurring dream made me sweat and writhe in the damp bedclothes. I couldn’t trace it back to any event in my waking life, so to speak. I relate this dream, knowing it is illmannered to do so, because of its anomalous character. Most of my dreams were paltry, lifeless things. They had to do with geometric figures or levitation. My body would seem to float up from the bed, but not far, a foot or so. There was
no question of flying. In this Belize dream there were other people. I was sitting at a low coffee table across from an intelligent, welldressed woman who wanted to “have it out.” She had a fat son named Travis who was about seven years old. This boy was encouraged by his mom to have opinions and make pert remarks. The three of us were always seated around the coffee table on the stylish woman’s pneumatic furniture. She drove home telling points in some dim quarrel while the boy Travis chirped out show-business quips.

  “Be my guest!” he would chirp, and, “Oh boy, that’s the story of my life!” and, “Yeah, but what do you do for an encore!” and, “Hey, don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it!” and, “How’s that for openers?” and, “You bragging or complaining!” and, “Welcome to the club, Ray! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” I had to sit there and take it on the chin from both the woman and Travis.

  Ruth sent for me early on the third day. I took a bath and shaved and put on some clean clothes. My legs were shaky as I went down the stairs. Ruth wanted her room money and her Pet milk money. I had heard nothing from Little Rock. Norma had abandoned me, and now, it seemed, my father as well. I tried to figure out how many days I had been gone. It was just possible that he had not yet returned from the Alabama bass rodeo. Flinging his plastic worm all over the lake! His Lucky 13! His long-tailed jigs! He caught fish that weighed three pounds and he talked about them “fighting.” Killer bass! It was possible too that he was tired of fooling with me, as with Mr. Dupree and Guy. Weaned at twenty-six! Places like Idaho had governors my age. The great Humboldt was exploring the Orinoco at my age instead of sniveling about a money order.

  Ruth was hard to deal with. Her Creole speech was hard to understand. She wouldn’t look at me when I spoke to her and she wouldn’t answer me or give any sign of acknowledgment. I was thus forced to repeat myself and then she would say, “I heard you the first time.” But if I didn’t repeat myself we would just stand there in a silent and uneasy impasse.

  I offered to let her hold some bonds until my money arrived. She wanted cash and she wanted it at that moment. I didn’t know what to say to her, how to keep talking in the assertive Dix manner. She glowered and looked past me. A crackpot like Karl had the run of the place but my E bonds were no good. That was her idea of fair play. Webster Spooner was listening to all this. He was reclining in his box and working in his notebook but he was listening too.