The Dog of the South

  I slept and dreamed fitfully. In one dream I was looking through a Sears catalogue and I came across Mrs. Symes and Melba and the doctor modeling lawn furniture. They were wearing their ordinary clothes, unlike the other models, who were in bright summer togs. The other dream took place in a dark bar. The boy Travis was sitting on a stool with his legs dangling. That is, he looked like Travis, only his name seemed to be Chet this time. He was drinking from a tall frosted glass and he was waiting for five o’clock and victims to chirp at. I took a seat at the other end of the bar. He didn’t see me for a while and then when he did see me he shifted around and said, “So how you been, Ray? You never come around anymore.” I said I was all right and I asked about his mother. Chet said she was fine. He offered to buy me a drink and I said I had to go to Texarkana.

  I woke early and saw that I had been drooling on the pillow. The ear hair couldn’t be far behind now. I washed and dressed and ate the rest of the sardines and drove back to the Dupree place.

  The hairy monkey was up early too. I had no sooner parked in the turnout than he came to the door with the .410. He said nothing. I opened all the car doors to catch any breeze that might come up and sat in the driver’s seat with my feet outside on the garbage. Dupree went back inside. The medicine bottle full of four-dollar capsules was still standing in the road where I had left it.

  Now and then I would get out as though to start across the road and he would instantly appear at the door. He must have been sitting just behind it in the shadow. I called out for Norma. I told her that I had her medicine and her silver and that if she would just come to the fence for a minute I would give it to her. There was no answer.

  After the engine had cooled off, I sat on the hood with my heels hooked on the bumper. At the end of each hour, just as the second hand hit twelve, I called out for her. Late in the morning Dupree came out and sat in the hammock with the gun on his lap. He read a magazine, holding it about five inches from his eyes.

  He wouldn’t answer me when I spoke. His plan, I could see, was to keep silent and not acknowledge my presence, except for the countering moves with the shotgun. When he looked about, he pretended not to see me, in the way of a movie actor whose eyes go professionally blank when tracking across the gaze of the camera. The dog picked up on his mood and he too ignored me. Dupree sat there with his magazine, feigning solitude and peace. He fondled his belly and chest with his fingertips the way some people do when they find themselves in swimming trunks. I got one of the rusty cans of warm beer from the trunk and made a show of opening it and drinking it.

  Around noon he stood up and stretched. He strolled out into the yard and peered down the road with his watery eyes. I had been waiting for some such move.

  “Popo is not coming today,” I said. “He’s not coming tomorrow either.” I held up his eyeglasses but he wouldn’t look at me. “I have your glasses here, Dupree. They’re right here. I have your aspirins and your dope too. Look. Here’s what I think of your dope.” I poured the yellow pills out and crushed them into the garbage with my foot. He couldn’t see what I was doing and the effect was thus lost.

  He made no reply and went over to the green tractor and climbed up on it and tried to start it. It was a diesel and by nature hard to start. Dupree lacked patience. His contempt for machinery was unpleasant to watch. He slammed and wrenched things about. A gentler touch and maybe a shot of ether into the breather and it probably would have cranked right up, but Dupree, the farmer’s son, knew little of these matters. When he might have been learning how to start a tractor, he was away at various schools, demonstrating in the streets and acquiring his curious manners and his curious notions. The student prince! He even had a place to run to when things got hot.

  He went back to the porch and sat on the hammock. I drank another can of warm beer. He suddenly made up his mind to speak, saying, “I suppose you’ve told everybody where I am, Burke.”

  “Not yet, no.”

  He was calling me Burke! There followed a silent interval of about an hour before he spoke again. He said, “Those aspirins are for my dog.” I had been quietly thinking over the Burke business and now I had to think about the aspirins and the dog. I should explain that Burke worked on the copy desk with us. It is true that Burke and I were only dimly perceived by the world and that a new acquaintance might have easily gotten us confused, might have hailed Burke on the street as “Midge,” or introduced me to another person as “Burke,” but Dupree knew us well from long association, knew the thousand differences between us, and I could only conclude that he was now so far advanced in his political thinking that he could no longer tell one person from another. I should say too that Burke was by far the best copy editor on the desk. Even Dupree was better at the work than I, who have never had a firm grasp of English grammar, as may be seen. The flow of civic events that made up the news in our paper was incomprehensible to me too, but Burke shone in both these areas. He was always fretting over improper usage, over people saying “hopefully” and “finalized,” and he talked knowledgeably about things that went on in the world. That’s enough on Burke.

  I got the St. Joseph bottle from my pocket and threw it across to the porch. Dupree picked it up and took it back to the hammock and ate four or five aspirins, making a show of relishing them, as I had done with the beer. He said, “My dog never took an aspirin in his life.” You couldn’t believe a word he said.

  That afternoon he tried the tractor again. He got it to chug a few times but the black smoke and the noise of the cold idle knock startled him and he shut it down at once. I stayed there all day. It was a blockade. I was ready to intercept any delivery or visitor, but no one came. There was nothing, it seemed, beyond this place. I watched the windows for Norma, for flitting shadows. I was always good at catching roach movement or mouse movement from the corner of my eye. Small or large, any object in my presence had only to change its position slightly, by no more than a centimeter, and my head would snap about and the thing would be instantly trapped by my gaze. But I saw no sign of life in that house. All this time, of course, I was also watching and waiting for the chance to dash across the road. The circumstances were never quite right and, to put it plainly, I funked it again.

  It was still daylight when I got back to Belize and I drove aimlessly about town. Sweat stung my eyes. The heat was such that I couldn’t focus my mind. The doctor and Webster Spooner and I had all contrived to get ourselves into the power of women and I could see no clear move for any one of us. It was hard to order my thoughts.

  I stopped at the Fort George Hotel for something to drink. The bar was on the second floor and it overlooked a kind of estuary. The water was still and brown and not at all inviting. Out there somewhere, I knew, was a coral reef with clear water and fish of strange shapes and dazzling colors. The bar itself was nice enough. I was up to my old trick of rooming in a cheap place and drinking in a better place. I saw the American woman and the boy sitting on a couch by the windows.

  Low tumbling clouds approached from the Caribbean. I drank a bottle of Falcon beer. It had a plain label. There were no boasts about choice hops and the stuff had won no medals at any international exposition but it was cold and tasted like every other beer. Exercise, that was what I needed. That always cleared the brain. I could jog around the entire city and look for my car at the same time. But wouldn’t children jeer at me all along such a circuit? Pelting me, perhaps, with bits of filth. And what about the town dogs, all at my heels? It would be much more sensible to install some muscle-building spring devices in the privacy of my room. A stationary bicycle. But Webster would have the devil of a time getting that stuff up the stairs. No, a brisk swim. That would be just the thing. An isolated beach and some vigorous strokes in foamy salt water.

  The clouds drew closer and gusts of wind ruffled the surface of the brown water. Drops of rain struck the windows. I left my stool and moved across the room for a better look at things, taking a table next to the American woman. Four pelicans
in a column were gliding over the water, almost touching it. Behind them came two more. These two were flapping their heavy wings and they were climbing up to the misty edges of the cloud. A shaft of lightning struck the second bird and he contracted into a ball and fell like a rock. The other one took no notice, missing not a beat with his wings.

  I was astonished. I knew I would tell this pelican story over and over again and that it would be met with widespread disbelief but I thought I might as well get started and so I turned to the woman and the boy and told them what I had seen. I pointed out the floating brown lump.

  She said, “It looks like a piece of wood.”

  “That’s a dead pelican.”

  “I heard the thunder but I didn’t see anything.”

  “I saw the whole thing.”

  “I love storms.”

  “I think this is just a convective shower. Afternoon heat.”

  This woman or girl was about thirty years old and she was wearing blue jeans and one of those grain-sack shirts from Mexico with the faded printing on it. Her sunglasses were parked high on her head. I asked if I might join her. She was indifferent. She had a hoarse voice and both she and the boy had sunburned faces. Her name, I learned, was Christine Walls. She was an artist from Arizona. She had a load of Arizona art in her van and she and the boy had been wandering about in Mexico and Central America. She extended an index finger across the table, for shaking, it finally dawned on me, and I took it and gave it a tentative shake.

  I told her that I had recently dreamed of just such a tableau as this—a woman and a small boy and I seated before a low table. She didn’t know what to make of me. First the pelican and now this. The details, I should say, didn’t correspond exactly. Christine didn’t have nice clothes like those of the woman in the dream and Victor didn’t appear to be a little smart-ass like Travis, although he was clunking his heels against the seat in a rhythmic way that I found irritating. Still, the overall picture was close enough. Too close!

  She asked my date of birth. We exchanged views on the heat. I remarked on her many sparkling rings and said that my wife Norma was also fond of silver and turquoise. She asked me what the prevailing colors were in Little Rock and I couldn’t remember, I who am so good on colors. She said her former husband was a Mama’s boy. His name was Dean Walls and he wouldn’t make a move without first consulting his mother. He was a creepy spider, she said, who repaired watches in a well-lighted cubicle on the first floor of a large department store. We talked about the many different vocations in life and I had to confess that I had none. The boy Victor was being left out of our conversation and so I asked him if he was enjoying his travels. He didn’t answer. I asked him how many states he had been in and he said, “More than you.” Christine said she planned to return to college one day and study psychology, and that she would eventually make her home in Colorado or San Francisco or maybe Vermont. An earlier plan to marry again had collapsed when her fiancé was killed in a motorcycle accident. His name was Don and he had taught oriental methods of selfdefense in a martial arts academy.

  “They called it an accident,” she said, “but I think the government had him killed because he knew too much about flying saucers.”

  “What did he know?”

  “He knew a lot. He had seen several landings. He was a witness to those landings outside Flagstaff when they were kidnapping dogs.”

  “What kind of dogs?”

  “What kind of dogs were they, Victor?”

  “Collies and other work dogs. The aliens stunned them first with electric sticks.”

  “Yes, and Don had seen all that and so the government had to silence him.”

  I asked if she and the boy would like to join me in a swim before dark.

  “In the pool?”

  “No, I’m not a guest here. I was thinking about the beach.”

  “I love to walk the beach but I can’t swim.”

  “How does it happen that you can’t swim, Christine?”

  “I don’t know. Have you been here long?”

  “Just a few days.”

  “How was your trip down?”

  “It was a nightmare.”

  “A nightmare. I love that. Have you had much trouble with the money?”

  “No, I haven’t exchanged any yet.”

  The boy Victor clapped one hand to his forehead and fell back against the seat and said, “Oh brother, is he in for it!”

  Christine said, “You’re not just a-woofin’, buddy boy. This money is really something else. They call it a dollar but it’s not the same value as ours. It’s worth some odd fraction like sixtyeight cents. Even Victor can’t get it straight. Hey, Ray, I want to ask you a question before I forget it. Why are there so darned many hardware stores in Belize?”

  “Are there a lot? I hadn’t noticed that.”

  “I’ve seen two already.” She touched my arm and lowered her voice. “Don’t stare but wait a second and then look at that fantastic girl.”

  “Where?”

  “That black waitress. The way she holds her head. See. Her regal bearing.”

  Two hardware stores didn’t seem like a lot to me. This was Staci talk. Nerve gas. I would have to stay on my toes to follow this stuff. She suddenly went into a contortion, trying to scratch a place on her back that was hard to reach. She laughed and twisted and said, “What I need is a back scratcher.”

  I thought she meant just that, a long bronze rod with little claws at one end, and maybe she did, but then I saw what a good chance I had missed for an initial intimacy, always so awkward. The moment had passed, needless to say, the itching abated, by the time I had worked it all out.

  Christine wasn’t a guest at the Fort George either. She was looking for a place to take a bath. She had tried to rent a room with a bath for an hour or so instead of an entire day but the Fort George didn’t offer that plan and neither did it accept works of art in payment. I volunteered the use of the communal bath at the Fair Play. She quickly accepted and began to get her things together.

  Then I thought about trying to get her past Ruth without paying. I wasn’t in the mood for any hotel comedy. I had spoken too soon. The towels were never quite dry at the Fair Play. The bathroom was a foul chamber too, and the door wouldn’t lock, the knobs and the brass mechanism being completely gone, the wood all splintered around the hole, where some raging guest had forced an entry or an exit. I knew what would happen. This boy Vic would say, “P.U., Mom!” and make me look bad. So I took them instead to the Unity Tabernacle. They followed me in the van. It was a Volkswagen and it made a four-cylinder micro-clatter. There were decals of leaping green fish and bounding brown deer on both sides of the vehicle, a sporting touch I would not have associated with Christine and Victor—or with Dean, for that matter.

  Ten

  MRS. SYMES WAS in front of the church. She was wearing a man’s felt hat and she was talking to a gang of boys who were milling about, waiting to see Tarzan. She was upset because Father Jackie had not yet delivered the film for the big showing.

  This Christine distraction annoyed her further but she told me to take the girl in and show her the bath. I expected no less, even though I knew that Mrs. Symes’s tangled creed must be based more or less on faith rather than works. The doctor himself had told me that she had fed more tramps during the Depression than any other person in Louisiana.

  Christine decided to do her laundry too, and I helped her carry it up the stairs, sacks of the stuff. There is always more to these pickup deals than first meets the eye. She proceeded to steam up the place. First she scrubbed Victor down and then she washed her Arizona clothes in the bathtub and hung them about inside on tables and lamps and other fixtures.

  Melba didn’t like this intrusion. She sat in her chair sulking and chewing on something brittle, or munching rather. Dr. Symes, hearing the stir, peered out from his bedroom. He saw me and he waved a sheet of paper and he came over to join me on the couch.

  “Good news, Speed,” he
said. “Hold on to your hat. Mama has agreed to write a letter for me.”

  “What kind of letter has she agreed to write?”

  “A wonderful letter of authorization. It’s a new day.”

  She still refused to lease him the island but he had persuaded her to let him use the island in some ill-defined way. Or so he said. In fact, Mrs. Symes had written nothing. The doctor had written a legal-sounding statement on a sheet of Melba’s crinkly airmail paper that gave him the right “to dig holes and erect fences and make such other improvements on Jean’s Island as he may deem necessary or desirable.” It only remained, he said, to get the old lady’s signature, and a notary public to witness it and to squeeze the paper with his plierslike seal.

  Notarized or not, the letter didn’t impress me much. “What about your financing?” I said. “The banks will want more than this.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “My father is in the construction business.”

  He read through the statement. “This would be enough for me. What more could they want?”

  “They want to see a lease or a land contract. They want something that will hold up. Your letter doesn’t even describe the property.”

  “It says Jean’s Island plain enough.”

  “Maybe there’s another Jean’s Island. They want metes and bounds.”

  “I don’t believe you know what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I’ve never believed it. I don’t believe you know your ass from first base. I was closing deals before you were born. Mama owns the land outright and that makes her the principal. This letter makes me her agent. Will you sit there and tell me that the law of agency has been repealed?”