The Dog of the South (2 page)

As for his height, I would put it at no more than five feet nine inches—he being fully erect, out of his monkey crouch—and yet he brazenly put down five eleven on all forms and applications. His dress was sloppy even by newspaper standards—thousands of wrinkles! It was a studied effect rather than carelessness. I know he had to work at it, because his clothes were of the permanent-press type and you can't make that stuff wrinkle unless you bake it in a dryer and then crumple it up. He had a nervous habit of rubbing his hands back and forth on his trousers when he was seated and this made for an unsightly condition called “pilling,” where the surface fibers form hard little balls or pills from being scuffed about. Pilling is more often seen on cheap blankets than on clothing but all of Dupree's trousers were badly pilled in front. His shirts were downright dirty. He wore glasses, the lenses thick and greasy, which distorted the things of the world into unnatural shapes. I myself have never needed glasses. I can read road signs a halfmile away and I can see individual stars and planets down to the seventh magnitude with no optical aids whatever. I can see Uranus.

For eleven miserable months Norma was married to Dupree and after some of the things she told me I was amazed that she could go back to him. His kissing frenzies! His carbide cannon! Still, there it was. I had no idea that anything was going on. How had he made his new approaches? What were his disgusting courtship techniques? Had the cycling club been a ruse? There had been some night meetings. But Dupree already had a sweetheart! A friend at the paper told me that Dupree had been seeing this person for several months—a mystery woman who lived upstairs in a gray house behind the Game and Fish Building. What about her?

Norma and I were getting along well enough, or so I thought. I have mentioned her restlessness. The only other thing I could put my finger on was a slight change in her manner. She had begun to treat me with a hearty but impersonal courtesy, something like a nurse dealing with an old-timer. “I'll be right with you,” she would say, or, when presenting me with something, “Here we are, Midge.” She had always called me by my last name.

I think now this coolness must have started with our algebra course. She had agreed to let me practice my teaching methods on her and so I had worked out a lecture plan in elementary algebra. I had a little blackboard, green actually, that I set up in the kitchen every Thursday at 7 p.m. for my demonstrations. It was not the kind of thing you like to ask a person to do but Norma was a good sport about it and I thought if I could teach her ninth-grade algebra I could teach just about anything to anybody. A good sport, I say, but that was only at the beginning of the course. Later on she began to fake the answers on her weekly tests. That is, she would look up the answers to the problems in the back of the textbook and copy them without showing me her step-by-step proofs. But wasn't this a part of teaching too? Wouldn't I have to deal with widespread cheating in the raucous classrooms of our public schools? I handled it this way with Norma. I said nothing about her dishonesty and simply gave her a score of zero on each test. Still she continued to look up the answers, whether I was watching her or not. She would complete the test in two or three minutes and sign her name to it and hand it to me, saying, “There you go, Midge. Will there be anything else?”

Of course I knew she felt sorry for Dupree in his recent troubles and I suppose she must have come to see him as a romantic outlaw. I didn't feel sorry for him at all. The troubles were entirely of his own making. You can't go around bothering people and not expect some inconvenience yourself. The trouble was politics. He had lately become interested in politics and this had brought his nastiness into bloom.

That is, it was “lately” to me. I didn't see Dupree much for seven or eight years, when he was away at all those different schools, and the change was probably more gradual than it appeared to me. He had once been a funny fellow. I don't often laugh out loud, even when I can recognize a joke as being a good one, but Dupree could always make me laugh when he did a thing called The Electric Man. As The Electric Man or The Mud Man he could make anyone laugh. And sometimes he would go out one door and come in at another one, as though he had just arrived, having moved very quickly in concealment between the two points. It wasn't so funny the first time—but he would keep doing it!

To the best of my knowledge he had never even voted, and then someone must have told him something about politics, some convincing lie, or he read something—it's usually one or the other—and he stopped being funny and turned mean and silent. That wasn't so bad, but then he stopped being silent.

He wrote abusive letters to the President, calling him a coward and a mangy rat with scabs on his ears, and he even challenged him to a fistfight on Pennsylvania Avenue. This was pretty good coming from a person who had been kayoed in every beer joint in Little Rock, often within the first ten minutes of his arrival. I don't believe we've ever had a President, unless it was tiny James Madison with his short arms, who couldn't have handled Dupree in a fair fight. Any provocation at all would do. One of his favorite ploys was to take a seat at a bar and repeat overheard fatuous remarks in a quacking voice like Donald Duck. Or he would spit BB's at people. He could fire BB's from between his teeth at high velocity and he would sit there and sting the tender chins and noses of the drinkers with these little bullets until he was discovered and, as was usually the consequence, knocked cold as a wedge.

I will have to admit that Dupree took his medicine without whining, unlike so many troublemakers. I will have to admit that he was not afraid of physical blows. On the other hand he did whine when the law came down on him. He couldn't see the legal distinction between verbal abuse and death threats, and he thought the government was persecuting him. The threats were not real, in the sense that they were likely to be carried out, but the Secret Service had no way of knowing that.

And he had certainly made the threats. I saw the letters myself. He had written such things to the President of the United States as “This time it's curtains for you and your rat family. I know your movements and I have access to your pets too.”

A man from the Secret Service came by to talk to me and he showed me some of the letters. Dupree had signed them “Night Rider” and “Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy” and “Hoecake Scarfer” and “Old Nigger Man” and “Don Winslow of the Navy” and “Think Again” and “Home Room Teacher” and “Smirking Punk” and “Dirt Bike Punk” and “Yard Man.”

He was arrested and he called me. I called his father—they didn't speak—and Mr. Dupree said, “Leavenworth will be a good place for him.” The U.S. Commissioner had set bond at three thousand dollars—not a great deal, it seemed to me, for such a charge—but Mr. Dupree refused to post it.

“Well, I didn't know whether you could afford it or not,” I said, knowing he would be stung by any suggestion that he might not be rich. He didn't say anything for a long moment and then he said, “Don't call me again about this.” Dupree's mother might have done something but I didn't like to talk to her because she was usually in an alcoholic fog. She had a sharp tongue too, drunk or sober.

It certainly wasn't a question of the money, because Mr. Dupree was a prosperous soybean farmer who had operations not only in Arkansas but in Louisiana and Central America as well. The newspaper was already embarrassed and didn't want to get further involved. Norma put it to me that I ought to lend Dupree a hand since he was so absolutely friendless. Against my better judgment I got three hundred dollars together and arranged for a bondsman named Jack Wilkie to bail him out.

Not a word of thanks did I get. As soon as he was released from the county jail, Dupree complained to me that he had been fed only twice a day, oatmeal and pancakes and other such bloodless fare. A cellmate embezzler had told him that federal prisoners were entitled to three meals. Then he asked me to get him a lawyer. He didn't want Jack Wilkie to represent him.

I said, “The court will appoint you a lawyer.”

He said, “They already have but he's no good. He doesn't even know the federal procedure. He'll start talking to this guy when he's supposed to be talking to that other guy. He waives everything. He's going to stipulate my ass right into a federal pen. A first offender.”

“You'll have to get your own lawyer, Dupree.”

“Where am I supposed to get him? I've called every son of a bitch in the yellow pages.”

A good lawyer, he thought, would be able to forestall the psychiatric examination at the prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. That examination was what he feared most, and with good reason, even though the finding would no doubt have provided a solid defense. In any case, he didn't really need a lawyer, good or bad, because on the following Friday night he jumped bail and ran off with my wife in my Ford Torino.

Since that night I had been biding my time but now that I knew where they were, more or less, I was ready to make my move. I had very little cash money for the trip and no credit cards. My father was floating somewhere on a lake near Eufaula, Alabama, in his green plastic boat, taking part in a bass tournament. Of course I had had many opportunities to explain the thing to him but I had been ashamed to do so. I was no longer an employee of the paper and I couldn't go to the credit union. My friend Burke never had any money. I could have sold some of my guns but I was reluctant to do so, saving that as a last resort. Gun fanciers are quick to sniff out a distress sale and I would have taken a beating from those heartless traders.

Then on the very day of my departure I remembered the savings bonds. My mother had left them to me when she died. I kept them hidden behind the encyclopedias where Norma never tarried and I had all but forgotten about them. Norma was a great one to nose around in my things. I never bothered her stuff. I had a drawer full of pistols in my desk and I kept that drawer locked but she got it open somehow and handled those pistols. Little rust spots from her moist fingertips told the story. Not even my food was safe. She ate very little, in fact, but if some attractive morsel on my plate happened to catch her eye she would spear it and eat it in a flash without acknowledging that she had done anything out of the way. She knew I didn't like that. I didn't tamper with her plate and she knew I didn't like her tampering with my plate. If the individual place setting means no more than that, then it is all a poor joke and you might as well have a trough and be done with it. She wouldn't keep her hands off my telescope either. But the Hope Diamond would have been safe behind those
Britannicas
.

I retrieved the bonds and sat down at the kitchen table to count them. I hadn't seen them in a long time and I decided to line them up shoulder to shoulder and see if I could cover every square inch of table surface with bonds. When I had done this, I stood back and looked at them. These were twenty-five-dollar E bonds.

Just then I heard someone at the door and I thought it was the children. Some sort of youth congress had been in session at the Capitol for two or three days and children were milling about all over town. A few had even wandered into Gum Street where they had no conceivable business. I had been packing my clothes and watching these youngsters off and on all day through the curtain and now—the very thing I feared—they were at my door. What could they want? A glass of water? The phone? My signature on a petition? I made no sound and no move.

“Ray!”

It was Jack Wilkie and not the kids. What a pest! Day and night! I went to the door and unchained it and let him in but I kept him standing in the living room because I didn't want him to see my savings-bond table.

He said, “Why don't you turn on some lights in here or raise a shade or something?”

“I like it this way.”

“What do you do, just stay in here all the time?”

He went through this same business at the beginning of each visit, the implication being that my way of life was strange and unwholesome. Jack was not only a bondsman and a lawyer of sorts but a businessman too. He owned a doughnut shop and some taxicabs. When I said he was a lawyer, I didn't mean he wore a soft gray suit and stayed home at night in his study reading Blackstone's
Commentaries
. If you had hired him unseen and were expecting that kind of lawyer, you would be knocked for a loop when you got to court and saw Jack standing there in his orange leisure suit, inspecting the green stuff under his fingernails. You would say, Well, there are a thousand lawyers in Pulaski County and it looks like I've got this one!

But Jack was a good-natured fellow and I admired him for being a man of action. I was uneasy when I first met him. He struck me as one of these country birds who, one second after meeting you, will start telling of some bestial escapade involving violence or sex or both, or who might in the same chatty way want to talk about Christ's Kingdom on Earth. It can go either way with those fellows and you need to be ready.

He had some big news for me this time, or so he thought. It was a postcard that Norma had sent to her mother from Wormington, Texas. “Gateway to the Hill Country,” it said under the photograph of a low, dim structure that was the Wormington Motel. Gateway claims have always struck me as thin stuff because they can only mean that you're not there yet, that you're still in transit, that you're not in any very well defined place. I knew about the card already because Mrs. Edge, Norma's mother, had called me about it the day before. I had met her in front of the Federal Building and looked it over. Norma said she was all right and would be in touch later. That was all, but Jack wanted to stand there and talk about the card.

I studied the motel picture again. Next to the office door of the place there was another door opening into what must have been a utility room. I knew that Norma with her instinct for the wrong turn had opened it and stood there a long time looking at the pipes and buckets and tools, trying to figure out how the office had changed so much. I would have seen in a split second that I was in the wrong room.