The Dog of the South

  I asked the doctor what his mother was doing in British Honduras.

  “Preaching,” he said. “Teaching hygiene to pickaninnies.”

  “She’s not retired?”

  “She’ll never retire.”

  “How does she happen to be in British Honduras?”

  “She first went down there with some church folks to take clothes to hurricane victims. After my father died in 1950, she went back to help run a mission. Then she just stayed on. The church bosses tried to run her off two or three times but they couldn’t get her out because she owned the building. She just started her own church. She says God told her to stay on the job down there. She’s deathly afraid of hurricanes but she stays on anyway.”

  “Do you think God really told her to do that?”

  “Well, I don’t know. That’s the only thing that would keep me down there. Mama claims she likes it. She and Melba both. She lives in the church with her pal Melba. There’s a pair for you.”

  “Have you ever been down there?”

  “Just once.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Hot. A bunch of niggers.”

  “It seems a long way off from everything.”

  “After you get there it doesn’t. It’s the same old stuff.”

  “What does your mother do, go back and forth to Louisiana?”

  “No, she doesn’t go back at all.”

  “And you haven’t seen her but once since she’s been there?”

  “It’s a hard trip. You see the trouble I’m having. This is my last shot.”

  “You could fly down in a few hours.”

  “I’ve never been interested in aviation.”

  “I’m going down there after a stolen car.”

  “Say you are.”

  He kept twisting about in the seat to look at the cars approaching us from behind. He examined them all as they passed us and once he said to me, “Can you see that man’s arms?”

  “What man?”

  “Driving that station wagon.”

  “I can see his hands.”

  “No, his arms. Ski has tattoos on his forearms. Flowers and stars and spiders.”

  “I can’t see his arms. Who is Ski?”

  He wouldn’t answer me and he had no curiosity at all about my business. I told him about Norma and Dupree. He said nothing, but I could sense his contempt. I was not only a schoolboy but a cuckold too. And broke to boot.

  He nodded and dozed whenever I was doing the talking. His heavy crested head would droop over and topple him forward and the angle-head flashlight on his belt would poke him in the belly and wake him. Then he would sit up and do it over again. I could see a tangle of gray hair in his long left ear. I wondered at what age that business started, the hair-in-the-ear business. I was getting on myself. The doctor had taken me for thirty. I felt in my ears and found nothing, but I knew the stuff would be sprouting there soon, perhaps in a matter of hours. I was gaining weight too. In the last few months I had begun to see my own cheeks, little pink horizons.

  I was hypnotized by the road. I was leaning forward and I let the speed gradually creep up and I bypassed Mexico City with hardly a thought for Winfield Scott and the heights of Chapultepec. To pass it like that! Mexico City! On the long empty stretches I tried to imagine that I was stationary and that the brown earth was being rolled beneath me by the Buick tires. It was a shaky illusion at best and it broke down entirely when I met another car.

  A front tire went flat in a suburb of Puebla and I drove on it for about half a mile. The spare was flat too, and it took the rest of the afternoon to get everything fixed. The casing I had driven on had two breaks in the sidewall. I didn’t see how it could be repaired but the Mexican tire man put two boots and an inner tube in the thing and it stood up fine. He was quite a man, doing all this filthy work in the street in front of his mud house without a mechanical tire breaker or an impact wrench or any other kind of special tool.

  We found a bakery and bought some rolls and left Puebla in the night. Dr. Symes took a blood-pressure cuff from his grip. He put it on his arm and pumped it up and I had to drive with one hand and hold the flashlight with the other so he could take the reading. He grunted but he didn’t say whether it pleased him or not. He crawled over into the back seat and cleared things out of his way and said he was going to take a nap. He threw something out the window and I realized later it must have been my Zachary Taylor book.

  “You might keep your eye peeled for a tan station wagon,” he said. “I don’t know what kind it is but it’s a nice car. Texas plates. Dealer plates. Ski will be driving. He’s a pale man with no chin. Tattoos on his forearms. He wears a little straw hat with one of those things in the hatband. I can’t think of the word.”

  “Feather.”

  “No, I can think of feather. This is harder to think of. A brass thing.”

  “Who is this Ski?”

  “Ted Brunowski. He’s an old friend of mine. They call him Ski. You know how they call people Ski and Chief and Tex in the army.”

  “I’ve never been in the service.”

  “Did you have asthma?”

  “No.”

  “What are you taking for it?”

  “I don’t have asthma.”

  “Have you tried the Chihuahua dogs in your bedroom at night? They say it works. I’m an orthodox physician but I’m also for whatever works. You might try it anyway.”

  “I have never had asthma.”

  “The slacker’s friend. That’s what they called it during the war. I certified many a one at a hundred and fifty bucks a throw.”

  “What do you want to see this fellow for?”

  “It’s a tan station wagon. He’s a pale man in a straw hat and he has no more chin than a bird. Look for dealer plates. Ski has never been a car dealer but he always has dealer plates. He’s not a Mason either but when he shakes your hand he does something with his thumb. He knows how to give the Masonic sign of distress too. He would never show me how to do it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “I understand what you’ve said so far. Do you want to talk to him or what?”

  “Just let me know if you see him.”

  “Is there some possibility of trouble?”

  “There’s every possibility.”

  “You didn’t say anything about this.”

  “Get Ski out of sorts and he’ll crack your bones. He’ll smack you right in the snout, the foremost part of the body. He’ll knock you white-eyed on the least provocation. He’ll teach you a lesson you won’t soon forget.”

  “You should have said something about this.”

  “He kicked a merchant seaman to death down on the ship channel. He was trying to get a line on the Blackie Steadman mob, just trying to do his job, you see, and the chap didn’t want to help him.”

  “You should have told me about all this.”

  “Blackie was hiring these merchant seamen to do his killings for him. He would hire one of those boys to do the job on the night before he shipped out and by the time the body was found the killer would be in some place like Poland. But Ski got wise to their game.”

  “What does he want you for?”

  “He made short work of that sailor. Ski’s all business. He’s tough. He’s stout. I’m not talking about these puffy muscles from the gymnasium either, I’m talking about hard thick arms like bodark posts. You’d do better to leave him alone.”

  All this time the doctor was squirming around in the back trying to arrange himself comfortably on the seat. He made the car rock. I was afraid he would bump the door latch and fall out of the car. He hummed and snuffled. He sang one verse of “My Happiness” over and over again, and then, with a church quaver, “He’s the Lily of the Valley, the bright and morning star.”

  I tuned him out. After a while he slept. I roared through the dark mountains, descending mostly, and I thought I would never reach the bottom. I checked the mirror over and over again and I examined every vehicl
e that passed us. There weren’t many. The doctor had given me a tough job and now he was sleeping.

  The guidebook advised against driving at night in Mexico but I figured that stuff was written for fools. I was leaning forward again and going at a headlong pace like an ant running home with something. The guidebook was right. It was a nightmare. Trucks with no taillights! Cows and donkeys and bicyclists in the middle of the road! A stalled bus on the crest of a hill! A pile of rocks coming up fast! An overturned truck and ten thousand oranges rolling down the road! I was trying to deal with all this and watch for Ski at the same time and I was furious at Dr. Symes for sleeping through it. I no longer cared whether he fell out or not.

  Finally I woke him, although the worst was over by that time.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “I’m not looking for that station wagon anymore. I’ve got my hands full up here.”

  “What?”

  “It’s driving me crazy. I can’t tell what color these cars are.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Ski!”

  “I wouldn’t worry about Ski. Leon Vurro is the man he’s looking for. Where did you know Ski?”

  “I don’t know Ski.”

  “Do you want me to drive for a while?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Out of the mountains anyway. We’re near Veracruz somewhere.”

  I kept thinking I would pull over at some point and sleep until daylight but I couldn’t find a place that looked just right. The Pemex stations were too noisy and busy. The doctor had me stop once on the highway so he could put some drops in his red eye. This was a slow and messy business. He flung his elbows out like a skeet shooter. I held the army flashlight for him. He said the drops were cold. While I was at it, I checked the transmission fluid and there were a lot of little blue flashes playing around the engine where the spark-plug cables were cracked and arcing.

  He napped again and then he started talking to me about Houston, which he pronounced “Yooston.” I like to keep things straight and his movements had me confused. I had thought at first that he came to Mexico direct from Louisiana. Then it was California. Now it was Houston. Ski was from Houston and it was from that same city that the doctor had departed in haste for Mexico, or “Old Mexico” as he called it.

  “Who is this Ski anyway?”

  “He’s an old friend of mine. I thought I told you that.”

  “Is he a crook?”

  “He’s a real-estate smarty. He makes money while he’s sleeping. He used to be a policeman. He says he made more unassisted arrests than any other officer in the colorful history of Harris County. I can’t vouch for that but I know he made plenty. I’ve known him for years. I used to play poker with him at the Rice Hotel. I gave distemper shots to his puppies. I removed a benign wart from his shoulder that was as big as a Stuart pecan. It looked like a little man’s head, or a baby’s head, like it might talk, or cry. I never charged him a dime. Ski has forgotten all that.”

  “Why did you tell me he was looking for you?”

  “He almost caught me at Alvin. It was nip and tuck. Do you know the County Line Lounge between Arcadia and Alvin?”

  “No.”

  “The Uncle Sam Muffler Shop?”

  “No.”

  “Shoe City?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it was right in there where I lost him. That traffic circle is where he tore his britches. I never saw him after that. He has no chin, you know.”

  “You told me that.”

  “Captain Hughes of the Rangers used to say that if they ever hanged old Ski they would have to put the rope under his nose.”

  “Why was he after you?”

  “Leon Vurro is the man he really wants.”

  The highways of Mexico, I thought, must be teeming with American investigators. The doctor and I, neither of us very sinister, had met by chance and we were both being more or less pursued. What about all the others? I had seen some strange birds down here from the States. Creeps! Nuts! Crooks! Fruits! Liars! California dopers!

  I tried not to show much interest in his story after the way he had dozed while I was telling mine. It didn’t matter, because he paid no attention to other people anyway. He spoke conversational English to all the Mexicans along the way and never seemed to notice that they couldn’t understand a word he said.

  The story was hard to follow. He and a man named Leon Vurro had put out a tip sheet in Houston called the Bayou Blue Sheet. They booked a few bets too, and they handled a few layoff bets from smaller bookies, with Ski as a silent partner. They worked the national time zones to their advantage in some way that I couldn’t understand. Ski had many other interests. He had political connections. No deal was too big or too small for him. He managed to get a contract to publish a directory called Stouthearted Men, which was to be a collection of photographs and capsule biographies of all the county supervisors in Texas. Or maybe it was the county clerks. Anyway, Ski and the county officers put up an initial sum of $6,500 for operating expenses. Dr. Symes and Leon Vurro gathered the materials for the book and did some work on the dummy makeup. They also sold advertisements for it. Then Leon Vurro disappeared with the money. That, at any rate, was the doctor’s account.

  “Leon’s an ordinary son of a bitch,” he said, “but I didn’t think he was an out-and-out crook. He said he was tired. Tired! He was sleeping sixteen hours a day and going to the picture show every afternoon. I was the one who was tired, and hot too, but we could have finished that thing in another two weeks. Sooner than that if Leon had kept his wife out of it. She had to stick her nose into everything. She got the pictures all mixed up. She claimed she had been a trapeze artist with Sells-Floto. Told fortunes is more like it. Reader and Advisor is more like it. A bullwhip act is more like it. She looked like a gypsy to me. With that fat ass she would have broke the trapeze ropes. Gone through the net like a shot. We had to work fast, you see, because the pictures were turning green and curling up. I don’t know how they got wet. There’s a lot of mildew in Houston. You can bet I got tired of looking at those things. I wish you could have seen those faces, Speed. Prune Face and BB Eyes are not in it with those boys.”

  “You must think I’m a dope,” I said. “You never intended to publish that book.”

  “No, it was a straight deal. Do you know the Moon Publishing Company?”

  “No.”

  “They have offices in Palestine, Texas, and Muldrow, Oklahoma.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s a well-known outfit. They do job printing and they put out calendars and cookbooks and flying-saucer books and children’s books, books on boating safety, all kinds of stuff. A Boy’s Life of Lyndon B. Johnson. That’s a Moon book. It was a straight enough deal.”

  “How much money did Leon Vurro get?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever was there, he cleaned it out. It’s a shame too. We could have finished that thing in two weeks. We were already through the M’s and that was halfway. More, really, because there wouldn’t be many X’s and Z’s. You never know. Maybe Leon was right. You have to know when to lay’em down. It was a weekend deal, you see. There’s a lot of mischief on weekends and not just check-kiting either. Leon cleared out the account on Friday afternoon. I was in San Antonio trying to sell ads for that fool book. The word got out fast on Leon but it didn’t get to me. It didn’t reach the Alamo City. I got back in my room in Houston on Sunday night. I was staying at Jim’s Modern Cabins out on Galveston Road. My cabin was dark and the window was open. You had to leave your windows open. Jim doesn’t have air-conditioning except in his own office. He’s got a big window unit in his office that will rattle the walls. I walked by my front window and I could smell Ski’s fruity breath. He has diabetes, you see. These young doctors tell everybody they have diabetes but Ski really has it. I knew he was waiting inside that cabin in the dark and I d
idn’t know why. I left with hardly any delay and then it was nip and tuck in south Houston. I made it on down to Corpus and traded my car for that hippie bus at the first car lot that opened up. I knew I didn’t have any business driving a car forty feet long but that was the only unit on the lot the fellow would trade even for. I thought it might make a nice little home on the road. Your top gospel singers all have private buses.”

  “Why would Ski be after you if Leon Vurro got the money?”

  “Leon’s wife was behind all that. Bella set that up. I never said she was dumb.”

  “How do you know all that stuff if you left town so fast? That part is not clear to me.”

  “You get a feel for these things.”

  “I don’t see how you could get a feel for all the circumstances.”

  “I should never have tied up with Leon. People like that can do nothing but drag you down. He didn’t know the first thing about meeting the public and he was never dressed properly. They’ll bury that son of a bitch in his zipper jacket.”

  “How did you know, for instance, that Leon had cleaned out the bank account?”

  “I always tried to help Leon and you see the thanks I got. I hired him to drive for me right after his rat died. He was with Murrell Brothers Shows at that time, exhibiting a fifty-pound rat from the sewers of Paris, France. Of course it didn’t really weigh fifty pounds and it wasn’t your true rat and it wasn’t from Paris, France, either. It was some kind of animal from South America. Anyway, the thing died and I hired Leon to drive for me. I was selling birthstone rings and vibrating jowl straps from door to door and he would let me out at one end of the block and wait on me at the other end. He could handle that all right. That was just about his speed. I made a serious mistake when I promoted Leon to a higher level of responsibility.”