Seth retrieved a quart of Old Crow and sat down across from me. He got back up, found two jelly jars, and placed them on the table. "To be honest, it's not good for you to drink while Pam's at work. Drinking thins the blood. It's the same with tattoos, you know. My dog can't lick and lick if the blood's going to keep spewing."
I looked over at Seth and noticed how one eye wandered off funny. I'd known people with this affliction before, men and women who were tired, or got drunk, and then that one eye rolled around loose. I said, "Are you all right, buddy?"
"I'm you," he said. "I don't know anything about your personal life, but I'm betting that we're one in the same, if you know what I mean."
I looked down at Pam and said, "Hey, that kind of tickles."
"Don't think that I've always wandered around with a dog licking sores. I've not always been this way."
I nodded. I waited for him to tell me how he once worked on Wall Street or as a lawyer, maybe a lobbyist. I said, "Go on."
"You ain't from around here, are you?"
I said, "No sir. I'm not." Come on, I thought, tell me how you used to be a real doctor.
"People from around here will tell you about how I coached high school football. That's what I did until I couldn't take it no more. And maybe I wasn't the best coach in the world, but by God I could tape an ankle. I could put a halfback back out onto the playing field with a broke foot and he wouldn't even know it. He wouldn't feel the pain. I could talk a broken ankle into feeling like it only got a slight sprain, you know what I mean?" Seth took a drink of his jelly jar bourbon. The sun rose outside. A dog licked my feet nonstop.
I said, "Huh. That's weird."
"I taught history, and driver's ed, and PE. And I coached football down in Gig. Then I found Pam. Then I got fired for beating a kid on the sidelines during a game, and some parents didn't like that. It was only a placekicker."
What else could I say but, "Everybody's gotten politically correct about those kinds of things."
My knees felt invigorated. My feet immediately felt better. Seth said, "I'm telling you. I was out of there on a rail. A placekicker! That boy couldn't kick his sister's butt, much less a football through goalposts."
I drank from my own jelly jar and felt good. Not that I'm proud to admit it, but sometimes in the old days I got up at four A.M. and poured bourbon while doing my index work. I'm pretty sure it shows in that one biography I did of Truman Capote. There were things under "Q" that didn't need to be there.
"Do you know what it's like to pull off a perfect end sweep?" Seth said. "Do you know what it feels like to pull off a flea flicker when the defense has no idea it's about to happen?"
I said, "No sir."
"You ain't much of an athlete, are you? No offense, but you have no clue what I'm talking about, do you?"
I said, "Yes, I do. Fucker. I do. I'd go outside and challenge you in one-on-one basketball or a game of horseshoes, if my feet weren't all screwed up from your little game."
"You got any cards? While we're here we might as well play some poker." Seth threw down the twenty-dollar bill I'd given him earlier.
I had cards right there in the kitchen drawer, next to the couple spoons, couple knives, couple forks. I said, "No."
"You don't seem to be the kind of man who can take it," Seth said. "I've known men like you."
His demeanor certainly had changed since the afternoon before, of course. And I thought about saying, "Hey, buddy, I don't know where you come off giving me life lessons, seeing as you travel around with a licking dog." But I didn't. I said, "I've taken more than you could imagine."
"You got any dice? Hey, let's play rock-paper-scissors-dynamite!" Pam the dog kept licking. "Hey, you want to see a picture I got of a woman who lost her eye, and how Pam licked it back into seeing? This might be the scariest thing ever."
Pam the dog withdrew from my bleeding feet. She hacked a couple of times. And then she got up, wobbled away from us, fell over, and died.
***
Seth said, "If Jesus had a dog hanging around him, those stigmata wouldn't even be mentioned. We wouldn't even have no religion if a dog like Pam were around at that time."
We stood there in my kitchen with a big dead dog. What could I do? I never got trained to deal with such a situation. I said, "Jesus."
"I ain't got no land to bury her. Do you mind putting her in your backyard? I ain't got no land to bury her, outside of the old football field back in Gig. Right on the fifty-yard line. That would be kind of funny. And fitting."
I said, "Let's just put her down here in my backyard. I would be honored to have Pam in my yard." What else could I say? I didn't mean it whatsoever, but Seth seemed to want to hear such.
I creaked around on my swollen and defective feet, sidestepping the dog. Pam's tongue stuck out funny and her open brown eyes clouded over minute by minute. I said, "Well. There's a shovel outside. We can find a couple sticks of wood for a cross, if you want. Hotdamn." I got the bottle of bourbon and brought it back to the table.
"You're walking better," Seth said. "The least you could do is give me twenty more dollars for your feet."
I looked at him as if he were insane. What did he mean? This big dead dog lay or lied or laid out in my kitchen. "I'm sorry, buddy. I'm sorry that you lost your job as a high school coach. But this ain't my problem. I have enough problems right now."
Seth knelt down to his dog and pet it. He said, "Pam, Pam, Pam," and I have to say that I almost cried right there and then.
I said, "This is weird, man."
"I don't even know you," he said, crying. "I don't even know who you are, Curt. And here I am crying in front of you." His hair flowed around like an old sea anemone. "That's my dog," he said, pointing.
Pam almost looked like she only slept. The dog didn't move, of course.
"Come on," I said. In my mind I thought about how I could index such a scene—Seth crying, Seth weeping, Seth in disbelief—all in alphabetical order.
"What do I do now? What do I do now?" Seth said.
I circled the dog a couple of times, and then approached Seth. "I'm not so sure I can lift her up what with my feet all mangled."
Seth said, "Do you have any good liquor? I don't like this stuff. You got any smooth liquor?"
I heard "Licker" more than anything else. I didn't say it, though. That's what kind of got me in trouble with Marissa—saying what came into my mind at inopportune moments. Somebody should write a book about it—I could do the index. I said, "This is all I got," and pointed toward my bottle of what, by the way, I considered great bourbon.
Seth pointed at my legs, halfway down. He said, "Well, come on."
We grabbed Pam. I took the shoulders and Seth took her haunches. He walked backward out of the house, and down the steps, and into the backyard. We set her down at the foot of a wild fig. I said, "Figs are supposed to be recuperative," just like that. Recuperative! I hadn't used the word in my entire life, even in indexing.
"Well," Seth said. He looked over at an old shed on the back of the property, an eight-by-sixteen tongue-and-groove structure I'd not even figured out what to do with. Up to this point I only kept a shovel and a rake inside. "Hey, there's another house there."
I said, "If I ever get a riding lawn mower that'll be its resting place."
Seth said, "I ain't got a place to live."
I walked over and got the shovel from inside. When I opened the swinging door, though, I envisioned Seth inside, sitting there atop an empty and upside-down drywall bucket. I foresaw myself going to pick him up at night, walking with him to Roughhouse Billiards. We'd get inside and wait out the trick shot players, then spend hours trying not to knock the eight ball in at wrong moments. Whenever I bent over hurting he'd say, "We need Pam about right now."
I said, "Here's the shovel."
He didn't scoop into the earth daintily. I tried not to think of what a healing dog couldn't do with the rest of us treading ground in an uncertain manner.
Seth said, "Good dog. Good dog. I'm sorry. Good dog."
On his way off my property—and I don't know how to convince anyone that I knew how he'd never come back—he let out a low howl. He turned his head to the rising sun and let one loose, not unlike what a bloodhound emits when a fire engine's siren's far, far away. I hobbled my way back inside. Later that day I turned on one of those business channels and stared at what happened with the major indexes, elsewhere.
Scotch and Dr Pepper
WHEN I FOUND MYSELF believing that the entire town of Gruel was after me for accidentally misrepresenting myself as some kind of historian and memoirist, I had no choice but to answer an ad in Tryon, North Carolina, that read, in part, "Choose your hours." The rest of the job description seemed similarly vague: creative person needed, salary negotiable, ex-convicts welcome to apply, and so on. I'd chosen Tryon because I remembered from my old days as a speechwriter for the lieutenant governor that the average age here stood at something like eighty. Who would look for a runaway masquerader amid retirees? I figured. If my former acquaintances in Gruel wanted to find me, they'd probably send out envoys to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Gulfport, or any of those Native American casino towns where ex-speechwriters and faux memoirists hole up.
I won't go into detail about my escape from Gruel here, but let me say that I left town with only the clothes I wore and a sock filled with cash money stuffed into my underwear. That last detail might explain why it wasn't hard to hitch a ride up Highway 25 the 120 miles between Gruel and Tryon from a woman named Cynthia in an old Chevy LUV pickup truck, even though she only planned on going as far as Greenville. She looked as though she'd spent about six years doing aerobics daily, and wore a modified blond pageboy haircut not normally found on southern women.
I was a gentleman the entire way, and when she dropped me off in front of Preston's Bar, she seemed to let me know how much she didn't appreciate my self-control and valor. I showed her where this copperhead had snagged me twice earlier in the day, but she seemed unimpressed. Cynthia peeled down the main drag before I could offer her gas money, before I even had two feet on the macadam.
I went in the bar, ordered a bourbon, went to the men's room, and pulled the sock out of my drawers. I placed ten thousand dollars in each shoe and four grand in my wallet. I put the sock back in its place.
"Did you say bourbon and Coke, or scotch and Dr Pepper?" the woman behind the bar asked me when I returned. "That's a bad scrape on your elbow."
I said, of course, "Scotch and Dr Pepper? Who drinks that?"
"We host a slew of retirees," she said. "People drink such stuff" She made my bourbon and Coke, though I noticed how the dispenser had Pepsi.
I looked at my elbow and slid my sleeve back down. I knew, also, that I had similar abrasions on both knees and shoulder blades.
Maybe when I jumped out of the step van as my ex-wife drove me to Graywood Emergency Regional Memorial Hospital I should've tried to run instead of opting for the roll-in-the-field approach. "You should see my foot. I got bitten by a copperhead twice earlier today. Or yesterday. I couldn't get any antivenin."
"You mean antivenom?" She set my drink in front of me. She said, "My name's Cynthia, in case you need me again," and then she walked over to the end of the bar where two men wearing plaid sat, drinking, I supposed, scotch and Dr Pepper. I thought, of course, Cynthia? Well this isn't going to be good if I ever tried to really write an autobiography—two Cynthias in the same day.
The Tryon Bulletin—a little tabloid-sized daily newspaper—set in front of me and I read all about the upcoming steeplechase; the upcoming barbecue festival; the upcoming blood drive; the upcoming Meals-on-Wheels benefit; and a human interest item about Junior Miss Tryon, a sixteen-year-old girl whose parents died the previous year at ages eighty-four and fifty in a tragic automobile accident. It was the father's second marriage, after he retired as the vice president of Exxon, the article read, for some reason. The wife had originally hailed from Atlanta, and graduated cum laude from Agnes Scott College. The Junior Miss's talent involved turkey calling and clog dancing.
I said, "Hey, Cynthia, is there a hotel or motel nearby?"
She said something to one of the retirees about me, I could tell, then turned to say, "They's a bunch of bed-and-breakfasts. They's a Days Inn between here and Columbus, off 1–26." She turned back to the retirees, listened to what one of them said, then said back to me, "They's a bunch of little rock cabins over that way you can rent by the night, week, or month." She pointed south.
One of the retirees said, "Or hour."
I said, "Thanks," and turned to the last pages of the newspaper, where I saw the classified ad for a creative, ex-convict, negotiable person. I reached in my pocket and pulled out a pen.
'As long as I shoot less than my IQ, I'm happy," one of the men at the bar said. "My IQ's 128."
"Are we talking nine or eighteen holes?" the other guy asked.
Cynthia came back to me and said, "Another scotch and Dr Pepper?"
I said, "Oh, okay, what the hell." She made it. The two retirees, for some reason, got up from their seats and came down my way. One guy had a pince-nez! The other one's splotched bald head looked a lot like those islands coming off of Alaska. I said, "Hey, fellows," to them, for I was trained to be polite to the elderly.
"I noticed you circled one of the classifieds," the guy with the pince-nez said. "I got an ad in there for a claw-foot tub. That's not what you want, is it?"
I said, "No. No, not a claw-foot tub. I'd like to have a claw-foot tub, but right now I have to worry about a place to live and a job worth working." I looked back down to the want ads and searched for his claw-foot tub, just to see what he asked for it. Remember, I had twenty-four grand packed around my body in places.
Pince-nez and Melanoma got back up and went to their original seats. Cynthia handed me some kind of booze drink. On the television there was an infomercial about weight loss through eating nothing but fatback. Over behind the pool tables a mechanical-voiced video game yelled out, "Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready?"
I took one of those stone cabins—a quaint place right outside of Tryon—for a month. This only cost me six hundred bucks. I got a mini-refrigerator, a hot plate, and a mirror above the dresser, which I thought was a deal. The woman in charge didn't ask for me to show my driver's license. I never had to say, "My name's Novel Akers," is what I'm saying. I said, "Victor Dees," because I thought Victor, owner of Victor Dees's Army-Navy Surplus store back in Gruel, would be the most likely to hunt me down.
But that's another story. That's an entire novel that someone should write.
I didn't need to get out a calculator to figure out that I didn't have but two years to live off the money I had, minus what it would cost me for food and drink, minus clothes, minus shoes and the probable cigarettes I'd start smoking since it was North Carolina again. I could put twenty thousand in the bank and get .0109 percent interest, I thought, which meant about thirty dollars a month, more or less.
Two years wasn't enough for me to write what I needed to write about all the collusion and forgery and graft I'd seen in Gruel while I ran my ex-wife's weird inherited twelve-room motel and interacted with her childhood buddies who ran Roughhouse Billiards, the Gruel Bakery, and Gruel Normal School, among other places. Again, that's another story.
Anyway, I called the guy up with the opaque want ad and he met me at Tryon Stone Cabins—Day/Week/Month. Please suspend disbelief, as they say, at this point. I opened the door and the guy—which from now on will be called "The Guy" seeing as I never learned his name at my threshold, but figured out later through either deductive or inductive reasoning—said, "Oh, yeah. Seersucker's perfect for what I have in mind for you and me."
Looking back on it now, he kind of sounded like he made a pass at me, I guess. I had gone down to one of the three stores in town and bought up every pair of thirty-four waist, thirty-two length pants available, and luckily, some old widow must've cleaned out her d
ead husband's closet the week before. That's one thing about a retirement community, you can find all the seersucker you want, and this old fellow must've worn nothing but. I'm talking regular light blue stripes, but also a pale gray and a brown. There were matching coats, too, and seersucker shirts. I came out of there with enough outfits to wear over two weeks without ever doing laundry or dry cleaning.
To The Guy I said, "Your ad sounded interesting to me."
He came in and said, "It's a small town. I own a business, and I have no competition. But business is slow. People are counting pennies and cutting back on more frivolous needs. So. I got a feeling about you. I don't want to know your name, and I don't want you to know mine. You'll probably see me from time to time in Preston's Bar or Sidestreet Pizza. Pretend we never met. Trust me on this one, buddy. I don't want to know about your past. I don't want to see a résumé."
The Guy couldn't take me if we got in a fight, even if I did wear seersucker. He stood about five-five and appeared to have spent years bending over. His carriage looked like cement blocks hung from his wrists. I said, "I don't want to be involved in anything illegal. This job doesn't entail transporting an attaché case from one place to another, does it?"
"Not unless you carry your wine in a briefcase, man." He laughed. "Listen. I'll know when you're doing your job. And I'll pay you ten percent of my net. I'm figuring you can make upwards of a hundred dollars a day, working as little as two hours."
He opened my screen door and backed out. I said, "That sounds like a deal. What is it, again, that I'll be doing?" I looked out the door and noticed his car, a late model Land Rover.
"You go into any business or restaurant in the Tryon area. You can go as far south as Campobello and Gowensville, and as far northeast as Lake Lure. Make sure there's a carpet. Get yourself invited to parties. Order wine, and spill it on the carpet. When you spill the glass, make sure the stain comes out looking like the letter..." The Guy paused. "What's your favorite letter?"
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