his tail. He would run from the front of the cage to the middle of the cage, make a spin, and continue to the back. On his way back to the front of the cage, he’d make the same middle turn and then bounce back to the front where he’d stand on his hind legs and smile, yes, he SMILED, at me. Naturally, he, or she, was the one for me.
I immediately made my way to the door and rang the bell for assistance. After some time, a tall, black-haired, sallow-faced old man, whose nametag read Mr. Houndsman, came through the door and asked, “Hah mey I hep you?”. His voice immediately made me uncomfortable. When I say “tall”, he had to have been at least 7 feet tall. He looked to be about sixty years old and had a gray-green hue to his complexion. Reading a book by its cover, I anticipated he’d have a Barry White-esque voice to match is stature. Not the case. He had the voice and the accent of an old Asian lady just arriving from Thailand, very scratchy, very short worded and a bit hard to understand.
Again, he asked, “Hah mey I hep yu?”
Concealing my grin, I let him know that I was interested in the small black dog on the fifth row in and fourth cage down, and that I would like to meet him, or her, in person. Mr. Houndsman told me to “fowow” him, turned on his heel with no further instructions and walked back toward the entrance. As I followed him out of the kennel, I noticed that all of the other dogs, the same dogs who were initially only sitting at the front of the cages hiss-growling, had moved to the back of their cages, turned their backs to Mr. Houndsman and me, and looked to be “whispering” to one another. In hindsight, I can recognize that the whole experience was quite odd. Very, very odd. Unfortunately, as I was solely focused on finding my perfect pet, all of those readily observable “clues” that something was a bit “off” were shadowed by my stubborn blindness to anything other than leaving with my dog.
Mr. Houndsman and I took a left after leaving the kennel and made our way down a long and dim corridor until we came to a group of rooms at the end of the hallway. There were two rooms on the left and two on the right. The fire-engine-red doors were numbered and had large windows with security bars on each window. Houndsman led me to door number 4 and said “You wait heh, I bwing dog.”
The room was quite dim, also, and was starkly furnished with a small folding table and a metal folding chair. There was a bowl of dog biscuits on the table. I sat in the chair and awaited the meeting between the dog and I.
It took about ten minutes for Houndsman to return with my dog. He led him in on a small red leash, released him and quietly left the room, closing the door behind him. He stood at the door, bending slightly due to his height, and watched us through the window—I assumed this was to make sure no foul play occurred.
As I anticipated, the dog was amazing. It was a male and he was very friendly, immediately jumping in my lap and burying his face in the crook of my neck, as if he’d waited only for me to come for him his entire life. I gently stroked his back and said, “sit”. To my surprise and delight, he understood the command. He came down from my neck, sat in my lap and looked up at me with a…smile? Yes, a smile. I gave him one of the treats from the bowl on the table. Taking the treat and eating it, he gave an utterance of thanks—“rrraaawwww ruuuuuuu.” Wow, I thought, that sounds so close. He remained in my lap, still and smiling and looking into my eyes. I put him on the floor and stood. I wanted to see if he was a jump-all-over-you type dog or a sit-and-behave type dog. He sat, still and smiling. I walked to the door and waited. He didn’t move. I called him, “here doggy.” He bounced happily over to me and sat at my feet, looking up at me, still and smiling. “You’re the one”, I said.
The paperwork and the adoption fee were taken care of quickly by another tall, sallow-faced, black-haired elderly man behind a small glass window. It was five ‘til six when “Damien” and I left the Pecos Animal Shelter and headed for home.
The Last Things We Do
P. V. LeForge
I never met Grim Hosford, although I’ve seen torn and brown newspaper clippings of him tacked up around the bookstore. There’s a picture of him in Levi’s and an AC/DC t-shirt shelving books under the headline “Paperback Rack Rated Tally’s Top Book Shop.” There’s another—tattered and almost unreadable—that shows him selling a book to the newly elected School Superintendent. He was once Business Owner of the Month and sometimes gave talks to library groups about this and that.
But I don’t know what Grim Hosford is doing now. Since he sold the bookstore to Lisa a few years ago, he has disappeared. Some people—including Lisa, who should know—said that he got married and moved out to a farm in another time zone. But I have heard other rumors. One man told me that he was certain that Grim had thyroid cancer and had gone to live with a relative in Alaska; another said that he had become a best-selling novelist writing under a pseudonym. A retired professor said she had seen him in England. A fourth maintained that he had seen Grim walking along near the cemetery with Lloyd Shingles, both in ragged clothes and carrying duffle bags. Take your pick, I guess.
I’m not going to tell you my own name—just think of me as one of the hundred or so students who were helped through college by working at The Paperback Rack. And with the economy as poor as it is there is no guarantee that the bookstore will be able to continue much longer. The stock of new books has gone down even in the year I have been working here and their shelves remind me of closets where only a few shirts are hanging. Most of the college professors have had to go back to using the university bookstores to stock books for their classes and Lisa had to stop using the major distributors when she got behind in her payments. Right now it’s rent and taxes first, employees second, then anything else, although there’s not much left for that “anything else.” I know because I’m the one who does the ledgers now. That’s what I was doing when this guy I’ve never seen before—large with a reddish beard and wild hair—came in with a box of books, followed by a boy of about ten carrying a shopping bag.
“I hope you don’t want cash,” I told the man as he placed the box on the desk. It’s best to get that out of the way as soon as possible. When people get behind in their house payments, their books are among the first things they try to sell. Lisa told me that Grim Hosford used to pay cash to almost everyone, but that was in better times.
The man shook his tawny head and took the bag from his son and placed it near the box. “These are donations,” he said. “My mother used to know the owner years ago. She has Alzheimer’s now so she doesn’t do much reading any more. But hey, the economy sucks right now and these might do you all some good. I have a few more boxes in the car.”
After they had brought in half a dozen boxes from a van parked outside, the man and his son lingered over a cup of cappuccino and a Pepsi. I thought that he might be trying to hit on me—and certainly he did a little flirting, even with his son sitting there—until I realized that he was just lonely for good old American conversation. He told me that he was a missionary in Mongolia and had only returned to help his mother move into an assisted living arrangement. He told me that she had arranged her future very carefully, making sure that she would not be a burden on him. With his calling, there was no telling if he would ever see her again. The delivery of the boxes of books had been important to her, and it was his last task before he returned to Asia.
He asked a lot of questions about me—what I was studying, what I planned to do when I graduated, whether I had any boyfriends—and I guess my answers were okay. His questions made me seem interesting and attractive and when he got up to leave, it was with a wistfulness that I shared. I wondered what it might be like to go with him on his adventures, but most bookstore clerks are not bold enough to take on that kind of hardship, and it was with mixed feelings that I watched his taillights leave the parking lot and disappear down Monroe Street.
I looked down at my green ledger sheet, but I no longer felt like writing pinched figures in small boxes. I shoved the ledgers aside and got up from the desk. A woman
with a fading memory had given Lisa a slew of books, kind of like a legacy. And it was important enough to her that she had to have them delivered personally by her son. The two rolling book carts were empty so I brought them up front to put the new arrivals on. It was another very slow night and I was there, as always, alone (gone were the days when Grim Hosford had two or three people working the same shift). I had a couple of hours until closing, so I sucked in my breath and hoisted one of the boxes up to the desk.
No, it wasn’t that golden cache that booksellers dream about. But it wasn’t the ordinary dime-a-dozen, Goodwill pile of dog-eared bestsellers, either. There were a lot of Kerouac, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Stein. Most were older paperback editions, but with their pages clean and their spines only lightly creased. There were books on theology and music theory that had originally been pretty costly. I also found a signed copy of John Rechy’s first novel, in a very good dust jacket. Oh sure, there was the occasional bit of fluff—everyone has something like that in their house—but this chaff was far outweighed by the kernels. I did a quick, ballpark calculation and realized that we
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