The Dog of the South

  The doctor was too weak and confused to resist. I took his wallet again for safekeeping and we loaded him into the boat. I gave the boy a ten-dollar bill and promised him a twenty—a balloon payment to encourage compliance—upon delivery of the old man in Corozal. The boy jerked the rope many times before the engine started. Then he pushed off and I, with great misgivings, watched them leave, the little boat battering sluggishly through the whitecaps. The sun was going down. The doctor had lied to me about his funds. That wallet was packed with twenties and fifties.

  I drove back to the border crossing and had no trouble getting out of Mexico. At the other end of the bridge I had to deal with a British Honduras officer. He was a dapper Negro in shorts and high stockings and Sam Browne belt. I had shed my coat long ago but I was still wearing my tie. I was filthy and I needed a shave.

  He asked my occupation. I said I was a businessman. He pointed out that my spare tire was flat. I thanked him. Was I a doctor? What was I doing with a doctor’s bag? What was the silverware for? I had no very good answers for him. He poked into everything, even the ice chest. The ice had melted days ago and the cheese and baloney were spoiled. The water was brown from the rusting rims of the beer cans. At the bottom of this mess my Colt Cobra was washing about in the plastic bag. I had forgotten all about it. The old man had made me neglect my business! The officer wiped the pistol dry with a handkerchief and stuck it in his hip pocket. He shook his finger at me but said nothing. He was keeping it for himself.

  He asked if I planned to sell the Buick and I said no. He wrote his name and address for me on the back of a card advertising the Fair Play Hotel in Belize and said he would be happy to handle the sale. I took the card and told him I would keep it in mind. He said I didn’t look like much of a businessman to him. I described my Torino and asked about Norma and Dupree and the dog—and was I knocked for a loop when this bird said he remembered them. He remembered the car and the pretty girl and yes, the red dog, and the fellow with the glasses who was driving; he remembered him very well.

  “Played that ‘Sweet Lorraine’ on the mouth harp.”

  “No, that wouldn’t be him. That wouldn’t be Dupree.”

  “Yes, and ‘Twilight Time’ too.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Was it possible that some identical people had passed through here with a chow dog in a blue Torino? An antimatter Dupree playing tunes on a mouth organ! A young Meigs! The doctor had told me that I could expect the same old stuff down here but this didn’t sound like the same old stuff to me.

  I asked about the road to Belize. Was it paved? Should I chance it with no spare tire? He said it was an excellent road, much better than anything I had seen in Mexico. And not only that, but I would now be able to get some good gasoline for a change. The Mexican petrol was inferior stuff, he said, and it smelled funny. Here it had the proper smell.

  There was a T-head pier in Corozal and I stood at the end of it and waited anxiously in the dark. The wind had dropped off somewhat. Now it was cool. I supposed there was some colorful local name for it, for this particular kind of wind. I was just fifteen degrees or so above the equator and I was at sea level and yet I was chilly. A cool snap like this on the Louisiana island and the doctor would have a thousand coughing chimps on his hands. I could make out a few stars through the drifting clouds but not the Southern Cross.

  I began to worry more and more about that little boat in open water at night. It wasn’t the open sea but it was a big bay, big enough for trouble. Why had I suggested this? It would all be my fault, the sea disaster. Criminal folly! The boat would be swamped and the doctor, a nuisance to the end, would fail away in the water and take the Indian boy down with him.

  A Spanish-looking man joined me at the edge of the pier. He was barefooted, his trouser legs rolled up, and he was pushing a bicycle. He parked the bike and looked out at the water, his hands in his pockets, a brooding figure. I didn’t want to intrude on his thoughts but when the wind blew his bike over I thought it would then be all right to speak, the clatter having broken his reverie. I said, “Mucho viento.” He nodded and picked up his bike and left. Much wind. What a remark! No wonder everybody took foreigners for dopes.

  I heard the engine popping and then I saw the boat low in the water. Choppy waves were breaking against it. The boy was angry because the doctor had vomited marshmallows and Coke in his boat. The old man was wet and only semiconscious. We laid him out on the pier and let him drain for a minute. It was like trying to lug a wet mattress. I gave the boy an extra ten dollars for his trouble. He helped me get the doctor into the car and then he fearlessly took to the dark water again.

  Part of the road to Belize was broken pavement and the rest was washboard gravel. Great flat slabs of concrete had been wrenched out of place as though from an earthquake. What a road! Time after time the Buick’s weak coil springs bottomed out, and I mean dead bottom. When we came bounding back up on the return phase, I feared that something would tear loose, some suspension component. I worried about the tires too. The gravel part was only a little better. I tried to find a speed at which we could skim along on the crests of the corrugations but with no luck. We skittered all over the roadbed. The doctor groaned in the back seat. I too was beginning to fade. My head throbbed and I took some more of the bitter orange pills.

  Six

  IT WAS LATE when we reached Belize and I didn’t feel like asking directions and floundering around in a strange place. It wasn’t a big town but the streets were narrow and dark and irregular. I found a taxicab at a Shell station and I asked the Negro driver if he knew a Mrs. Nell Symes, who had a church here. It took him a while to puzzle it out. Did I mean “Meemaw?” Well, I didn’t know, but I hired him to go to Meemaw’s anyway and I trailed along behind in the Buick.

  The church was a converted dwelling house, a white frame structure of two stories. Some of the windows had fixed wooden louvers and some had shutters that folded back. The roof was galvanized sheet iron. It was just the kind of old house that needed the Midgestone treatment.

  A wooden sign beside the door said:

  Unity Tabernacle

  “Whosoever will”

  The house was dark and I rapped on the door for a long time before I roused anyone. I heard them coming down the stairs very slowly. The door opened and two old ladies looked out at me. One was in a flannel bathrobe and the other one was wearing a red sweater. The one in the sweater had wisps of pink hair on her scalp. It was a bright chemical pink like that of a dyed Easter chick. I could see at once that the other one was Dr. Symes’s mother. She had the same raccoon eyes. She used an aluminum walking stick but she didn’t appear to be much more decrepit than the doctor himself.

  “Mrs. Symes?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have your son out here in the car.”

  “What’s that you say?”

  “Dr. Symes. He’s out here in the car.”

  “Reo. My word.”

  “He’s sick.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Ray Midge. He rode down from Mexico with me.”

  “Are you with the postal authorities?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “We weren’t even thinking about Reo, were we, Melba?”

  The other lady said, “I sure wasn’t. I was thinking about a snack.”

  Mrs. Symes turned back to me. “Has he got some old floozie with him?”

  “No, ma’am, he’s by himself.”

  “You say he’s in the car?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is he staying in the car? Why doesn’t he get out of the car?”

  “He’s sick.”

  “Go see if it’s really him, Melba.”

  Melba came out to the car. I opened a door so the dome light would come on. She studied the rumpled figure in the back seat. “It’s Reo all right,” she said. “He’s asleep. He’s lost weight. His clothes are smoking. He’s wearing those same old white pants he had on last time. I didn’t know pants
lasted that long.”

  Mrs. Symes said, “He may have several pair, all identical. Some men do that with socks.”

  “I think these are the same pants.”

  “What about his flashlight?”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s in there somewhere,” I said.

  Neither of the ladies was able to help me unload the doctor. I couldn’t carry him but I managed to drag him inside, where I laid him out on a church pew. He was limp and his flesh was cool and his clothes were indeed steaming. Then I went back and got his grip. Mrs. Symes was not much concerned about his condition. She seemed to think he was drunk.

  “That poison has to be metabolized,” she said. “You can’t hurry it along.”

  I said, “He’s not drunk, ma’am, he’s sick. I believe he needs a doctor.”

  Melba said, “We don’t use doctors.”

  “You’re lucky to have good health.”

  “Our health is not particularly good. We just don’t go to doctors.”

  The downstairs part was a chapel and they lived upstairs. Mrs. Symes asked if I would like some supper. I don’t like to eat or sleep or go to the bathroom in other people’s homes but this was an emergency. I needed food and I kept hanging about in hopes of just such an invitation. I followed them up the stairs.

  The electric lights flickered on and off and then failed altogether. I sat at the kitchen table in the soft yellow glow of a kerosene lamp. Mrs. Symes gave me some cold chicken and some warmed-over rice and gravy and biscuits. There was a bowl of stewed tomatoes too. What a meal! I was so hungry I was trembling and I made a pig of myself. Melba joined me and fell to on a second supper. She ate heartily for a crone, sighing and cooing between bites and jiggling one leg up and down, making the floor shake. She ate fast and her eyes bulged from inner pressures and delight. This remarkable lady had psychic gifts and she had not slept for three years, or so they told me. She sat up in a chair every night in the dark drinking coffee.

  Mrs. Symes asked me a lot of personal questions. She and Melba, unlike the doctor, found my mission romantic, and they pressed for details. I was dizzy and tired and not at all in the mood for a truth session but I didn’t see how I could leave abruptly after eating their food. Melba asked to see a picture of Norma. I didn’t have one. Some detective! Some husband! They could tell me nothing about Mr. Dupree’s farm. They had never heard the name. Their church work was concerned entirely with Negro children, they said, and I gathered that they had little to do with the other white people in the country. They did know some Mennonite farmers, from whom they bought milk, and they seemed to have an uneasy professional acquaintance with an Episcopal missionary whom they called “Father Jackie.” Mrs. Symes was suspicious of the doctor’s unexpected arrival.

  She said, “Do you know the purpose of his visit?”

  “He said he was worried about your health.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He said you had a church here.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s about all.”

  “How would you characterize his mood? Generally speaking.”

  “I would say it varied according to circumstances. He was not in one mood the whole time.”

  “I mean his feeling about coming here. Was it one of apprehension? Resignation?”

  “I can’t say it was either one of those. I don’t really know him well enough to answer your question, Mrs. Symes. To say whether his mood departed from normal in any way.”

  “Is that his automobile out there?”

  “No, ma’am. He has a bus but it broke down on him in Mexico.”

  “A bus?”

  “It’s an old school bus. It’s fixed up so you can sleep in it and cook in it.”

  “Did you hear that, Melba? Reo has been living in a school bus.”

  “A school bus?”

  “That’s what Mr. Midge here says.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “I didn’t either. I wonder how he gets his mail.”

  “He doesn’t live in the bus all the time,” I said. “It’s the kind of thing you take trips in, like a trailer.”

  “I’ll bet Reo talked your head off.”

  “Well, he didn’t talk so much tonight. He’s been feeling bad.”

  “He didn’t talk at all until he was six years old. He was a strange child. Otho thought he was simple. What did he tell you about Jean’s Island?”

  “He said he had some plans for developing it.”

  “Did he say he owned it?”

  “No, he didn’t say that. He said you owned it.”

  “That island was dedicated as a bird sanctuary years ago.”

  “I see.”

  “How can you develop a place, as you put it, if it’s already been dedicated?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I guess you can’t.”

  “If I turned it over to Reo, the bulldozers would be there tomorrow morning. It would be the biggest mess you ever saw. Some people just love to cut trees and the poor whites are the worst about it. I don’t know where Reo gets that streak. Man is the most destructive creature there is, Mr. Midge.”

  Melba said, “Except for goats. Look at Greece.”

  “I wouldn’t mind letting Reo have the place if he would live on it and farm it and behave himself, but he won’t do that. I know him too well. The first thing you know, Marvel Clark or some other floozie would get her hands on it. I know Marvel too well and she’s got enough of my stuff as it is. But she will never get her hands on that land as long as I have anything to say about it.”

  I said, “Do you think I should go downstairs and check on him?”

  “He’ll be all right. That poison has to be worked out through the breath. What did he tell you about his arthritis clinic in Ferriday?”

  “I don’t believe he mentioned that.”

  “Did he tell you about his Gifts for Grads?”

  “Gifts for Dads?”

  “Gifts for Grads. It was a mail-order scheme. He was advertising expensive watches at bargain prices in all kinds of sleazy magazines. People would send him money but he wouldn’t send them any watches. A postal inspector came all the way down here from Washington, D.C., looking for him. He said Reo was going all over the country making fraudulent representations and calling himself Ralph Moore and Newton Wilcox.”

  “Dr. Symes didn’t say anything about Gifts for Grads.”

  “Is that woman Sybil still living with him?”

  “I just don’t know about that. He was by himself when I met him in Mexico.”

  “Good riddance then. He brought an old hussy named Sybil with him the last time. She had great big bushy eyebrows like a man. She and Reo were trying to open up a restaurant somewhere in California and they wanted me to put up the money for it. As if I had any money. Reo tells everybody I have money.”

  Melba said, “No, it was a singing school. Reo wanted to open a singing school.”

  “The singing school was an entirely different thing, Melba. This was a restaurant they were talking about. Little Bit of Austria. Sybil was going to sing some kind of foreign songs to the customers while they were eating. She said she was a night-club singer, and a dancer too. She planned to dance all around people’s tables while they were trying to eat. I thought these night clubs had beautiful young girls to do that kind of thing but Sybil was almost as old as Reo.”

  “Older,” said Melba. “Don’t you remember her arms?”

  “They left in the middle of the night. I remember that. Just picked up and left without a word.”

  “Sybil didn’t know one end of a piano keyboard from the other.”

  “She wore white shiny boots and backless dresses.”

  “But she didn’t wear a girdle.”

  “She wore hardly anything when she was sunning herself back there in the yard.”

  “Her shameful parts were covered.”

  “That goes without saying, Melba. It wasn’t necess
ary for you to say that and make us all think about it.”

  “Dr. Symes didn’t say anything about Sybil to me.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he did. Did he tell you about the hearing-aid frauds of 1949?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he did. The shame and scandal killed Otho just as sure as we’re sitting here. Reo lost his medical license and he’s been a sharper and a tramp ever since. My own son, who took an oath to do no harm.”

  I didn’t know who Otho was but it was hard to believe that any person in Louisiana had ever keeled over from fraud shock. I tried to think about that dramatic scene and then Melba put her face in mine and started talking to me. Both ladies were talking to me at the same time.

  Melba said that her first husband had abandoned her in Ferriday and that her second husband, a handsome barber who didn’t believe in life insurance, had dropped dead in New Orleans at the age of forty-four. After that, she made her own way, giving piano lessons and selling foundation garments. She now received a tiny green Social Security check and that was her entire income. Five dollars of it went each month to Gamma chapter of some music teachers’ sorority. She didn’t remember much about the first husband but she thought often of the opinionated barber husband, idle in his shop in the quiet 1940 New Orleans sunlight, watching the door for customers and searching through the Times-Picayune over and over again for unread morsels.

  Mrs. Symes raised her voice. “I wish you would hush for a minute, Melba. I’ve heard all that stuff a thousand times. I’m trying to ask a question. It looks like I could ask one question in my own home.”

  Melba didn’t stop talking but I turned my head a bit toward Mrs. Symes.

  She said, “What I’m trying to find out is this. When you are at your home in Arkansas, Mr. Midge, do you get much mail?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Cards, letters. First-class matter.”

  “Not much, no, ma’am.”

  “Same here. I’m not counting all those absurd letters from Reo. Are you a witnessing Christian?”

  “I attend church when I can.”