The Dog of the South (3 page)

I said, “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.

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 car 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.

I bought a quart of transmission fluid in Dallas and I stopped twice to cash bonds. The girl teller in the bank at Waco stared at me and I thought I must be giving off a dog smell. I got a roll of quarters from her and hefted it in my fist as I drove along.

Just south of Waco I looked about for some sign of the big gas line, the Scott-Eastern Line, but I could never determine where it crossed under the highway. My father and Mr. Dupree had helped build it, first as swabbers and then as boy welders. The Sons of the Pioneers! They had once been fairly close friends but had drifted apart over the years, Mr. Dupree having made a lot more money. My father resented his great success, although he tried not to, always giving Mr. Dupree credit for his energy. The hammer and the cutting torch, he said, were Mr. Dupree's favorite tools. My father's touch was much finer, his welding bead smoother and stronger and more pleasing to the eye, or so I am told. Of course he no longer made his living at it but people still called him on occasion when there was a tricky job to be done, such as welding airtight pressure seams on thin metal, or welding aluminum. Thin metal? Give him two beer cans and he'll weld them together for you!

In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn't going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel.

Then I saw an old man walking up the median strip pulling a wooden cross behind him. It was mounted on something like a golf cart with two spoked wheels. I slowed down to read the hand-lettered sign on his chest.

I had never been to Jacksonville but I knew it was the home of the Gator Bowl and I had heard it was a boom town, taking in an entire county or some such thing. It seemed an odd destination for a religious pilgrim. Penance maybe for some terrible sin, or some bargain he had worked out with God, or maybe just a crazed hiker. I waved and called out to him, wishing him luck, but he was intent on his marching and had no time for idle greetings. His step was brisk and I was convinced he wouldn't bust.

The third interesting thing was a convoy of stake-bed trucks all piled high with loose watermelons and cantaloupes. I was amazed. I couldn't believe that the bottom ones weren't being crushed under all that weight, exploding and spraying hazardous melon juice onto the highway. One of nature's tricks with curved surfaces. Topology! I had never made it that far in my mathematics and engineering studies, and I knew now that I never would, just as I knew that I would never be a navy pilot or a Treasury agent. I made a B in Statics but I was failing in Dynamics when I withdrew from the field. The course I liked best was one called Strength of Materials. Everybody else hated it because of all the tables we had to memorize but I loved it, the sheared beam. I had once tried to explain to Dupree how things fell apart from being pulled and compressed and twisted and bent and sheared but he wouldn't listen. Whenever that kind of thing came up, he would always say—
boast
, the way those people do—that he had no head for figures and couldn't do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.

I
N LAREDO I GOT a six-dollar motel room that had a lot of posted rules on the door and one rubber pillow on the bed and an oil-burning heater in the wall that had left many a salesman groggy. It was the kind of place I knew well. I always try to get a room in a cheap motel with no restaurant that is near a better motel where I can eat and drink. Norma never liked this practice. She was afraid we would be caught out in the better place and humiliated before some socialites we might have just met. The socialites would spot our room key, with a chunk of wood dangling from it like a carrot, or catch us in some gaffe, and stop talking to us. This Laredo room also had a tin shower stall and one paper bath mat.