The Dog of the South

  And he had certainly made the threats. I saw the letters myself. He had written such things to the President of the United States as “This time it’s curtains for you and your rat family. I know your movements and I have access to your pets too.”

  A man from the Secret Service came by to talk to me and he showed me some of the letters. Dupree had signed them “Night Rider” and “Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy” and “Hoecake Scarfer” and “Old Nigger Man” and “Don Winslow of the Navy” and “Think Again” and “Home Room Teacher” and “Smirking Punk” and “Dirt Bike Punk” and “Yard Man.”

  He was arrested and he called me. I called his father—they didn’t speak—and Mr. Dupree said, “Leavenworth will be a good place for him.” The U.S. Commissioner had set bond at three thousand dollars—not a great deal, it seemed to me, for such a charge—but Mr. Dupree refused to post it.

  “Well, I didn’t know whether you could afford it or not,” I said, knowing he would be stung by any suggestion that he might not be rich. He didn’t say anything for a long moment and then he said, “Don’t call me again about this.” Dupree’s mother might have done something but I didn’t like to talk to her because she was usually in an alcoholic fog. She had a sharp tongue too, drunk or sober.

  It certainly wasn’t a question of the money, because Mr. Dupree was a prosperous soybean farmer who had operations not only in Arkansas but in Louisiana and Central America as well. The newspaper was already embarrassed and didn’t want to get further involved. Norma put it to me that I ought to lend Dupree a hand since he was so absolutely friendless. Against my better judgment I got three hundred dollars together and arranged for a bondsman named Jack Wilkie to bail him out.

  Not a word of thanks did I get. As soon as he was released from the county jail, Dupree complained to me that he had been fed only twice a day, oatmeal and pancakes and other such bloodless fare. A cellmate embezzler had told him that federal prisoners were entitled to three meals. Then he asked me to get him a lawyer. He didn’t want Jack Wilkie to represent him.

  I said, “The court will appoint you a lawyer.”

  He said, “They already have but he’s no good. He doesn’t even know the federal procedure. He’ll start talking to this guy when he’s supposed to be talking to that other guy. He waives everything. He’s going to stipulate my ass right into a federal pen. A first offender.”

  “You’ll have to get your own lawyer, Dupree.”

  “Where am I supposed to get him? I’ve called every son of a bitch in the yellow pages.”

  A good lawyer, he thought, would be able to forestall the psychiatric examination at the prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. That examination was what he feared most, and with good reason, even though the finding would no doubt have provided a solid defense. In any case, he didn’t really need a lawyer, good or bad, because on the following Friday night he jumped bail and ran off with my wife in my Ford Torino.

  Since that night I had been biding my time but now that I knew where they were, more or less, I was ready to make my move. I had very little cash money for the trip and no credit cards. My father was floating somewhere on a lake near Eufaula, Alabama, in his green plastic boat, taking part in a bass tournament. Of course I had had many opportunities to explain the thing to him but I had been ashamed to do so. I was no longer an employee of the paper and I couldn’t go to the credit union. My friend Burke never had any money. I could have sold some of my guns but I was reluctant to do so, saving that as a last resort. Gun fanciers are quick to sniff out a distress sale and I would have taken a beating from those heartless traders.

  Then on the very day of my departure I remembered the savings bonds. My mother had left them to me when she died. I kept them hidden behind the encyclopedias where Norma never tarried and I had all but forgotten about them. Norma was a great one to nose around in my things. I never bothered her stuff. I had a drawer full of pistols in my desk and I kept that drawer locked but she got it open somehow and handled those pistols. Little rust spots from her moist fingertips told the story. Not even my food was safe. She ate very little, in fact, but if some attractive morsel on my plate happened to catch her eye she would spear it and eat it in a flash without acknowledging that she had done anything out of the way. She knew I didn’t like that. I didn’t tamper with her plate and she knew I didn’t like her tampering with my plate. If the individual place setting means no more than that, then it is all a poor joke and you might as well have a trough and be done with it. She wouldn’t keep her hands off my telescope either. But the Hope Diamond would have been safe behind those Britannicas.

  I retrieved the bonds and sat down at the kitchen table to count them. I hadn’t seen them in a long time and I decided to line them up shoulder to shoulder and see if I could cover every square inch of table surface with bonds. When I had done this, I stood back and looked at them. These were twenty-five-dollar E bonds.

  Just then I heard someone at the door and I thought it was the children. Some sort of youth congress had been in session at the Capitol for two or three days and children were milling about all over town. A few had even wandered into Gum Street where they had no conceivable business. I had been packing my clothes and watching these youngsters off and on all day through the curtain and now—the very thing I feared—they were at my door. What could they want? A glass of water? The phone? My signature on a petition? I made no sound and no move.

  “Ray!”

  It was Jack Wilkie and not the kids. What a pest! Day and night! I went to the door and unchained it and let him in but I kept him standing in the living room because I didn’t want him to see my savings-bond table.

  He said, “Why don’t you turn on some lights in here or raise a shade or something?”

  “I like it this way.”

  “What do you do, just stay in here all the time?”

  He went through this same business at the beginning of each visit, the implication being that my way of life was strange and unwholesome. Jack was not only a bondsman and a lawyer of sorts but a businessman too. He owned a doughnut shop and some taxicabs. When I said he was a lawyer, I didn’t mean he wore a soft gray suit and stayed home at night in his study reading Blackstone’s Commentaries. If you had hired him unseen and were expecting that kind of lawyer, you would be knocked for a loop when you got to court and saw Jack standing there in his orange leisure suit, inspecting the green stuff under his fingernails. You would say, Well, there are a thousand lawyers in Pulaski County and it looks like I’ve got this one!

  But Jack was a good-natured fellow and I admired him for being a man of action. I was uneasy when I first met him. He struck me as one of these country birds who, one second after meeting you, will start telling of some bestial escapade involving violence or sex or both, or who might in the same chatty way want to talk about Christ’s Kingdom on Earth. It can go either way with those fellows and you need to be ready.

  He had some big news for me this time, or so he thought. It was a postcard that Norma had sent to her mother from Wormington, Texas. “Gateway to the Hill Country,” it said under the photograph of a low, dim structure that was the Wormington Motel. Gateway claims have always struck me as thin stuff because they can only mean that you’re not there yet, that you’re still in transit, that you’re not in any very well defined place. I knew about the card already because Mrs. Edge, Norma’s mother, had called me about it the day before. I had met her in front of the Federal Building and looked it over. Norma said she was all right and would be in touch later. That was all, but Jack wanted to stand there and talk about the card.

  I studied the motel picture again. Next to the office door of the place there was another door opening into what must have been a utility room. I knew that Norma with her instinct for the wrong turn had opened it and stood there a long time looking at the pipes and buckets and tools, trying to figure out how the office had changed so much. I would have seen in a split second that I was in the wrong room.

  I sai
d, “They’re not in Wormington now, Jack. It was just a stopover. Those lovebirds didn’t run off to Wormington, Texas.”

  “I know that but it’s a place to start.”

  “They’ll turn up here in a few days.”

  “Let me tell you something. That old boy is long gone. He got a taste of jail and didn’t like it.”

  “They’ll turn up.”

  “You should have told me he was a nut. I don’t appreciate the way you brought me into this thing.”

  “You knew what the charge was. You saw those letters.”

  “I thought his daddy would be good for it. A slow-pay rich guy maybe. I thought he just meant to let the boy stew for a while.”

  “Guy has given Mr. Dupree a lot of headaches.”

  “I’m going to report your car stolen. It’s the only way.”

  “No, I can’t go along with that.”

  “Let the police do our work for us. It’s the only way to get a quick line on those lovebirds.”

  “I don’t want to embarrass Norma.”

  “You don’t want to embarrass yourself. You’re afraid it’ll get in the paper. Let me tell you something. The minute that bail is forfeited, it’ll be in the paper anyway and by that time you may not even get your car back.”

  There was something to this. Jack was no dope. The paper didn’t run cuckold stories as such but I thought it best to keep my name out of any public record. That way I could not be tied into Dupree’s flight. Tongues were already wagging, to be sure. Everyone at the paper knew what had happened but what they knew and what they could print—without the protection of public records—were two different things. All I wanted to do now was to get my car back. I was already cuckolded but I wouldn’t appear so foolish, I thought, if I could just get my car back without any help.

  Jack stood there and reviewed the whole case again. He did this every time, as though I might be confused on certain points. When his eyes became adjusted to the murky light, he saw my suitcase on the couch and I saw him taking this in, a suitcase fact. He said, “I don’t forfeit many bonds, Ray.” I had heard him say that before too.

  He left and I quickly gathered my E bonds and stowed them in the suitcase. I selected a .38 Colt Cobra from the pistol drawer and sprayed it with a silicone lubricant and sealed it in a plastic bag and packed it next to the bonds. What else now? The lower-back capsules! Norma never went anywhere without her lower-back medicine and yet she had forgotten it this time, such was her haste in dusting out of town, away from my weekly embraces. I got it from the bathroom and packed it too. She would thank me for that. Those capsules cost four dollars apiece.

  I made sure all the windows were locked and I found a country-music station on my big Hallicrafters radio and left it playing at high volume against the kitchen wall. There was a rock-and-roll twerp with a stereo set in the next apartment and his jungle rhythms penetrated my wall. Noise was his joy. He had a motorcycle too. The Rhino management had a rule prohibiting the repair of motorcycles in the parking lot but the twerp paid no attention to it. One night I called him. I was reading a biography of Raphael Semmes and I put it down and rang up the twerp and asked him if he knew who Admiral Semmes was. He said, “What!” and I said, “He was captain of the Alabama, twerp!” and hung up.

  Everything was in readiness. My checklist was complete. I called a cab and typed a note and tacked it to the door.

  I will be out of town for a few days.

  Raymond E. Midge

  The cabdriver honked and picked his way slowly down Broadway through the little delegates to that endless convention of Junior Bankers or Young Teamsters. Their numbers seemed to be growing. I had left the Buick Special with a mechanic on Asher Avenue to get the solenoid switch replaced on the starter. The cabdriver let me out in front of a filthy café called Nub’s or Dub’s that was next door to the garage. Nub—or anyway some man in an apron—was standing behind the screen door and he looked at me. I was wearing a coat and tie and carrying a suitcase and I suppose he thought I had just flown in from some distant city and then dashed across town in a cab to get one of his plate lunches. A meal wasn’t a bad idea at that but it was getting late and I wanted to be off.

  The mechanic told me I needed a new motor mount and he wanted to sell me a manifold gasket too, for an oil leak. I wasn’t having any of that. I wasn’t repairing anything on that car that wasn’t absolutely necessary. This was a strange attitude for me because I hate to see a car abused. Maintenance! I never went along with that new policy of the six-thousand-mile oil change. It was always fifteen hundred for me and a new filter every time.

  And yet here I was starting off for Mexico in this junker without so much as a new fan belt. There were Heath bar wrappers, at least forty of them, all over the floor and seats and I hadn’t even bothered to clean them out. It wasn’t my car and I despised it. I had done some thinking too. The shock of clean oil or the stiffer tension of a new belt might have been just enough to upset the fragile equilibrium of the system. And I had worked it out that the high mileage was not really a disadvantage, reasoning in this specious way: that a man who has made it to the age of seventy-four has a very good chance of making it to seventy-six—a better chance, in fact, than a young man would have.

  Before I could get out of town, I remembered the silver service that Mrs. Edge had passed along to Norma. What if it were stolen? I wasn’t worried much about my guns or my books or my telescope or my stamps but if some burglar nabbed the Edge forks I knew I would never hear the end of it. My note would invite a break-in! I returned to the apartment and got the silver chest. On my note saying that I would be out of town for a few days a smart-ass had written, “Who cares?” I ripped it off the door and drove downtown to the Federal Building where Mrs. Edge worked. She wore a chain on her glasses and she had a good job with a lot of seniority at the Cotton Compliance Board.

  She wasn’t in the office and no one could tell me where she was. What a sweet job! Just drift out for the afternoon! I called her house and there was no answer. I wondered if she might have found a place where she could dance in the afternoon. She was crazy about dancing and she went out almost every night with big red-faced men who could stay on the floor with her for three or four hours. I mean smoking soles! She called me a “pill” because I would never take Norma dancing. I say “never” and yet we had scuttled stiffly across the floor on certain special occasions, although our total dancing time could be readily computed in seconds, the way pilots measure their flying time in hours. I believe Mrs. Edge did prefer me over Dupree, for my civil manner and my neat attire if nothing else, but that’s not to say she liked me. She had also called me “furtive” and “a selfish little fox.”

  I decided that she was probably out for an afternoon of city obstruction and I went to the west side of town and cruised the parking lots of the big shopping centers looking for her car. On certain days of the week she and several hundred other biddies would meet at these places and get their assignments, first having taken care to park their Larks and Volvos and Cadillacs across the painted lines and thus taking up two parking spaces, sometimes three. Then they would spread out over town. Some would go to supermarkets and stall the checkout lines with purse-fumbling and check-writing. Others would wait for the noon rush at cafeterias and there bring the serving lines to a crawl with long deliberative stops at the pie station. The rest were on motor patrol and they would poke along on the inside lanes of busy streets and stop cold for left turns whenever they saw a good chance to stack up traffic. Another trick was to stick the nose of a car about halfway into a thoroughfare from a side street, thereby blocking all traffic in that lane. Mrs. Edge was a leader of this gang. Turn her loose and she would have a dancing academy in the post office!

  It was dark when I gave up the search. This silver wasn’t old or rare or particularly valuable and I was furious with myself at having wasted so much time over it. I didn’t feel like going all the way back to the apartment, so I just left the chest in the c
ar trunk.

  I was off at last and I was excited about the trip. The radio didn’t work and I hummed a little. When I reached Benton, I was already tired of driving that car. Twenty-five miles! I couldn’t believe it. I had a thousand miles to go and I was sleepy and my arms were tired and I didn’t see how I was going to make it to Texarkana.

  I pulled in at a rest stop and lay down on the seat, which had a strong dog odor. My nose was right against the plastic weave. This rest stop was a bad place to rest. Big diesel rigs roared in and the drivers left their engines running and made everybody miserable, and then some turd from Ohio parked a horse trailer next to me. The horses made the trailer springs squeak when they shifted their weight. That squeaking went on all night and it nearly drove me crazy. I slept for about four hours. It was a hard sleep and my eyes were swollen. A lot of people, the same ones who lie about their gas mileage, would have said they got no sleep at all.

  It was breaking day when I reached Texarkana. I stopped and added some transmission fluid and put through a call to Little Rock from a pay station and woke up Mrs. Edge. I asked her to call my father on his return and tell him that I had gone to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and would be back in a few days. The silverware was safe. What? Mexico? Silver? She was usually pretty quick but I had given it to her in a jumble and she couldn’t take it in. It was just as well, because I didn’t want to discuss my private business with her.

  The drive to Laredo took all day. Gasoline was cheap—22.9 cents a gallon at some Shamrock stations—and the Texas police didn’t care how fast you drove, but I had to keep the Buick speed below what I took to be about sixty because at that point the wind came up through the floor hole in such a way that the Heath wrappers were suspended behind my head in a noisy brown vortex. It was late October. The weather was fine but the leaves weren’t pretty; they had just gone suddenly from green to dead.