The Dog of the South

  “Anyway, Welch tried to talk to him there in the Odessa library, whisper to him, you know, across the table, but Dix wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t even admit he was Dix. He wanted to read his paper and every time Welch asked him a question Dix would just drum his feet under the table real fast, to show he was annoyed. Welch handled it all wrong. He got mad and grabbed the man by the throat and made him confess he was John Selmer Dix. Then Welch cooled off and apologized and Dix said that was all right but not to ever disturb him again while he was reading the Star-Telegram, that his private life was his own and all that. Now the question is, was that stranger really Dix? If it was Dix, answer me this. Where were all his keys? Everett Welch admitted to me that he saw no jumbo key ring on the man’s belt and that he heard no clinking of keys when he was shaking him. Even so, Welch swears it was Dix he talked to that day. Welch is an honest man but I wasn’t there and I can’t say. I just don’t know. The man may have been a very clever faker. There were plenty of fakers going around then, and they’re still going around. You’ve probably heard of the fellow out in Barstow who claims to this day that he is Dix. I’ve never believed it. He lives out there in the desert in a caboose with his daughter and sells rocks. Can you beat it? Dix in the desert with his delicate skin. Selling ornamental quartz out of an old Southern Pacific caboose. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Do you know what he says? He says the man who died in Tulsa was just some old retired fart from the oil fields who was trading off a similar name. He makes a lot of the closed coffin and the hasty funeral in Ardmore. He makes a lot of the missing trunk. Good points, you might think, but I’ve got a trump for him. Dix never had a daughter! There’s another faker, in Florida, who claims he is Dix’s half brother. Go see him out there on the edge of Jacksonville and he’ll let you look at the trunk for a fee. A trunk is more like it. He won’t dare to open it and you have to stand back about four or five feet behind a rope to even look at it. That little room is dark too, they say. Let me save you a trip to Florida, Speed. I’ve seen that crook’s picture. They ran a picture of him and his little Dix museum in Trailer Review and I can tell you he bears no resemblance whatsoever to Dix and is in no way related to him. You can look at a man’s ears and tell.”

  Here the doctor paused, having found the title abstract. He thumbed quickly through the pages until he came to the legal description of the island property. He showed me the authoritative figures, taking delight in the fractions and the “SW” and “NE,” and then he left for his room to draft another letter.

  I was desperate and shameless and I asked Melba if she could lend me ten dollars. She was willing enough but she couldn’t help me because she had cashed a check for Christine and had only a dollar or two left in her purse. She showed me the yellow check. It had been folded so long the creases were fuzzy. It was a two-party check on a bank in Mesa, Arizona. There was nothing left to do but go and see Leet.

  Eleven

  ALL THAT WAS LEFT of the old ink factory was a tall brick chimney, round and tapering, of the kind that often marks the site of a small college or government hospital. Leet’s Motor Ranch, a lesser dream, was a field of weeds that adjoined the factory grounds. It appeared to be more of a salvage yard than a used-car lot, more of a cemetery than a ranch. Two old industrial boilers from the ink factory were standing upright at the entrance to Leet’s drive, forming a kind of grand portal. I say “from the ink factory” but that is only a guess because I know next to nothing about the manufacture of ink, whether it is ever boiled or subjected to bursts of steam at any stage, and these boilers may have had an entirely different origin.

  I passed between them and drove down the lane and parked in front of Leet’s headquarters shed, which was also his dwelling place. It was lighted in front by a yellow bulb. Behind the shed there were three columns of derelict cars, their hoods and trunk lids raised as though for a military inspection. I could hear the steady hum of insects or of advancing rust in the damp field. The only operable vehicle I could see, the only one on wheels, was a Dodge Power Wagon with a winch and a wrecker boom on the back.

  Leet was sitting under the yellow light on a disembodied car seat. He had put his picture book aside and he was listening to organ music that came from two disembodied car speakers. They were connected to a disembodied cassette player which was in turn hooked up to a disembodied car battery with two alligator clips. He was pink instead of white and he had the fat pink hands of a child, little star-shaped hands, remarkably clean for his trade. They were clasped across his belly and he was stretched out with his ankles crossed.

  I knew he had just polished off a big bowl of porridge or parsnips or some such dish, I having spotted him at once for a house pig like me who cherished his room and his kitchen treats and other solo and in-house indulgences. Beside him on top of a wooden ammunition box I saw a giant English chocolate bar, about ten inches by four inches by one inch, a stack of car magazines, and a three-gallon water cooler with a tin cup chained to it. Everything was within easy reach of the pink hands.

  He didn’t rise to greet me. He put on a pair of round glasses and said, “That looks like an old V-6 Buick.”

  “That’s what it is.”

  “Dual-path transmission?”

  “It’s air-cooled. I don’t know the name of it.”

  “Noisy timing chain?”

  “It’s a good car.”

  “No doubt, but it has a very rum transmission. Once it goes, that’s it. You can’t find spares.”

  “That should make it all the more valuable.”

  “In what way?”

  “This car could be a ready source of those hard-to-get spares, as you call them.”

  “There’s no market, my friend. The demand is zero. Do please give me credit for knowing my own business.”

  “I may sell the car if I can get my price.”

  “Not to me you won’t.”

  I confronted him with one of his leaflets. “You said you wanted this car.”

  “No, I don’t want that one. What’s the true mileage?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a good car. I made it down here all right. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I’ll give you that.”

  He took a flashlight and raised the hood. “What’s all that wire around the manifold?”

  “Coat-hanger wire. Engine restraint. Broken motor mount.”

  “Roadside repair?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s interesting.” He pulled the dipstick from the transmission and smelled the end of it. Then he started the engine and listened to it through a wooden yardstick, his ear at one end of the stick and the engine block at the other. Then he took a rubber mallet and went around tapping on the body panels. I drank a cup of his cold water.

  “Mind the bees,” he said. “They can smell fear.”

  There were white beehives in the shadows beside the shed. Striped bees that looked heavy were going about their deliberate business. I had never known they worked at night. Behind the hives I saw a Ford hulk. It was a long-hooded Torino covered with dried gray mud. The wheels were gone and it was resting flat on the ground amid some coarse flowers.

  Leet completed the inspection and returned to his seat, slapping his palm with the yardstick. “You’ve got bad rust, my friend. I happen to know something about oxidation and what you’ve got is out of control.”

  “Where did you get that Torino? That’s the first one I’ve seen down here.”

  “You don’t see many. These niggers like the full-size models. Galaxies and Impalas.”

  “I have one like that, only mine is blue.”

  “That one’s blue. Fellow burnt up the engine idling it. I hauled it in for a hundred dollars American and sold the air conditioner the same day for two hundred. I got another hundred for the radio and tape deck, and I got eighty for the tires and the baby moon hubcaps. Everything went but the sheet metal, and went fast too. I wish I had another one.”

  “How did
he burn it up idling it?”

  “He was idling it at about fifty-two hundred rpm’s. Fell asleep with his foot on the accelerator. Drunk, I suppose, or a nut case. Just sat there dozing away with the engine screaming until the pistons seized. Beautiful 351 Windsor engine. Clean carburetor, clean battery terminals. Clean valve covers until the paint was cooked. No mess or oil seepage. No corrosion. The car had been well cared for.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Yes, it’s a great pity. Nice windfall for me, of course.”

  I already knew the truth but I moved in for a closer look and I saw my Arkansas inspection sticker in the corner of the windshield. This muddy shell was my Torino. I wiped off some of the mud with my hand.

  Leet said, “I can give you two hundred for the little Buick. I pay the duty. It’s an orphan, as I say, and you won’t do any better than that.”

  “You’ve already bought my car, Leet. This Torino is my car. I have the title to it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a bit late to be speaking up.”

  “Dupree had no right to sell it.”

  “He had the car.”

  “Are you going to make it good?”

  “Say again?”

  “I say, are you going to make it good?”

  “Do you mean am I going to reconstruct that car for you? Nothing of the kind. What a hope.”

  “I mean compensation.”

  “It’s not on, my friend. I bought it in good faith.”

  “I don’t believe you did. You said yourself it was a windfall. You spoke of Dupree as a nut case.”

  Leet flexed his shrimplike fingers. “I would hardly make those admissions again, would I? To a third party.”

  “Dupree had no papers. You bought it without a title.”

  “Listen to our little lawyer.”

  “I’ll have to see about this in town.”

  “See about it all you please. Your word against his. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “It’s more than my word. I have the papers.”

  “All right, here’s some law for you, chum. The car was licensed in Arkansas and the boy had an Arkansas driving license. He had possession of the car. It was not for me to assume he was a thief. I would have been wrong to do so. That’s nothing more nor less than good English law.”

  “Is it English equity?”

  “Say again?”

  “Equity. Fair play, like the hotel.”

  “Equity’s grandmother. You can’t put it all on me. You have a duty to look after your own stuff.”

  “That’s just what I’m doing. I’ll have to see about this.”

  “I thought the car was his to sell. I bought it. That’s it. Bob’s your uncle. Now you come along and say it’s your car. Very well, I pay you too. Now tomorrow a third man comes to the Motor Ranch and makes a similar claim. Do I pay him, and the fourth and fifth man as well? How long could I stay in business, paying for the same car day after day? Not six years.”

  “Your third man wouldn’t have the papers.”

  “You and your bleeding papers.”

  As a sign that our business was concluded, he picked up his book, Flags of the World, and found his place, Morocco and Mozambique, and fell into a deep study of these banners. It was an English or European book from the looks of the murky colors, or maybe it was the yellow light that made them appear so. I had a fellow-pig feeling for him, and I had the feeling too that he was the last of the Leets, that the House of Leet was winding up here in this tropical junkyard.

  I said, “To tell the truth, Leet, I don’t care about that car. It’s not even mine. My father paid for it like everything else I have. I hate to find it here like this but my quarrel is not with you. I see that now.”

  These friendly words dispelled the chill somewhat.

  He said, “The boy was odd and I suspected something. I’ll give you that.”

  “He has a lot to answer for.”

  “I knew it was a funny business, I can’t say I didn’t. But then you get a lot of funny business in this place.”

  “It wasn’t the car at all. I see that now.”

  “I knew he was a lunatic when I played this. Give a listen. I found this tape under the seat. You’ll think it’s a comedy recording like I did. I don’t know what it is, a dramatic reading or some loony recitation.”

  He put the cassette into the tape player and the voice of Dr. Buddy Casey rang out across the dark field.

  “ ‘Can you help us, Captain Donahue?’ he cried. ‘Yes, Major,’ came the stout reply, ‘my men are fresh and they are just the fellows for that work!’”

  Leet laughed. I snatched the tape from the machine. “That’s mine too, Leet.” The sudden noise had made the insects stop their racket for a moment but they were soon at it again.

  I drove away in the Buick, not deigning to sell it, and I put the whole thing out of my mind, as though Leet had never been cast upon this shore with his fat fingers. I thought instead of Christine and her wet hair. I speculated on squeezing her, and more, being married to her, our life together in Vermont. She was a very good-natured girl. Resourceful too. Would she have to go to the doctor a lot? They all seemed to collapse right after the vows, even the robust ones like Christine. Female disorders. There are one or two points on female plumbing that I have never been clear on. And yet there was Mrs. Symes, in the pink for her age, and Otho in his grave these many years. But what would Christine and I talk about on long drives, or even on short ones? And what about Victor? Turn him over to Dean maybe. Pack all his little shirts and trousers and socks—doll socks!—in a box and send him to Dean. Tag him for Phoenix and put him on an express bus. Then Christine and I could have our own son, little Terry, a polite child, very nimble and fast on his feet.

  I passed a sandy turnoff with a sign that said “TO THE BEACH” or something like that, and I fixed the location in my mind. I would take Christine there, to that very spot, for a night swim. It was just the kind of thing that would appeal to her, a moonlight swim. Perhaps Melba would make us some sandwiches. We would go in the van. If that van could talk! I would teach her how to swim in the luminous sea. She probably thought she would die if she put her face under water.

  When I drove up to the church, a jeep was pulling away and Christine was in it. She shouted something back to me. The driver was a bearded man in a monk’s robe and a planter’s straw hat. One of his sandaled feet was cocked up on the floor sill of the jeep in swaggering G.I. Joe fashion. I waved and called after them but they didn’t stop, my voice never having arrested anything in flight.

  The movie had started. The chapel was packed with excited boys and I could hardly get in the door. I had always liked Tarzan well enough but I didn’t see why this white lord of the jungle should be such a favorite with Negroes. Their own people were shown in these films as jabbering and rolling their eyes and dropping their packages and running away at the first sign of trouble. For solid action give me a submarine picture or a picture that opens with a DC-3 having engine trouble over a desert. I pushed my way through to the projector table where Mrs. Symes was leaning on her aluminum cane. The boy Victor was sitting there on her stool, hunched forward and looking like Jack Dempsey. He had been into Mrs. Symes’s paper stars and he had stuck one on each of his fingernails.

  Sweat was trickling down the poor old lady’s powdered cheeks. She was trembling from the heat and intensity in the room. She was wearing a long black dress for the occasion and some pearl devices on her earlobes. The old projector clattered away, Father Jackie not having seen fit to bring along his deluxe machine. The lip movements on the screen were just a beat or so behind the voices.

  I told Victor to get up and let Mrs. Symes have the seat. He made a move but she said no, she would rather stand. There was a bright green fly on her veined hand and she didn’t seem to feel it. The fly was so still and so cleanly articulated that it didn’t look quite real; it looked like something from a jewelry shop
or a joke shop.

  “Christine wants you to look after Victor,” she said to me.

  “Look after Victor?”

  “She’s gone with Father Jackie.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Father Jackie wanted to show her the coconut dolls at the folk art center.”

  “At night? How long will that take?”

  “She wants you to look after Victor till she gets back.”

  “I can’t look after Victor.”

  “I’m busy, Mr. Midge. It’s too hot to talk. I’m trying to watch this, if you don’t mind.”

  “What about Father Jackie’s mother? You said she was here. Why can’t she look after him?”

  “I’m trying to watch this.”

  It was an old Tarzan picture I had somehow missed on television. He seemed to be in the Coast Guard this time. He was patrolling the bayous of Louisiana in his cutter and he was having trouble with Buster Crabbe, who was some sort of Cajun poacher or crook. They were squabbling over the same sweetheart too, and the girl didn’t know what to do. She had the foolish notion that she might be able to reform Buster Crabbe. Everyone was addressing Johnny Weissmuller as “Dave” or “Skipper” instead of Tarzan. A clever wrinkle, this undercover business, but we were all impatient for him to shed his uniform and go into some Tarzan action with vines and big cats and crocodiles. It seemed to me they were putting it off too long.

  The boys had settled down by the time Mrs. Symes changed the reel. Some were asleep. I saw Webster Spooner standing against the wall, rocking slowly like a small bank guard, his hands behind his back. It was hot and close in that room and I had no place to sit. I was hungry too. I wanted to flee but I was stuck with Victor. Look after Victor! If the kid broke his arm or got sick or run over by a truck, it would all be my fault! Maybe I could get Webster to act as a companion and relieve me of some of the burden.