The Dog of the South

Table of Contents

 

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 1999 by

 

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 1979 by Charles Portis Afterword copyright © 1998 by Ron Rosenbaum

 

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Portis, Charles.
The dog of the south / Charles Portis.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3566 O663N'.54—dc21 99-10234

 

eISBN : 978-1-590-20658-4

. . .
Even Animals near the Classis of plants seem to have the most restlesse motions. The Summer-worm of Ponds and plashes makes a long waving motion; the hair-worm seldome lies still. He that would behold a very anomalous motion, may observe it in the Tortile and tiring stroaks of Gnatworms
.

—SIR THOMAS BROWNE

M
Y WIFE NORMA had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone. I was biding my time. This was October. They had taken my car and my Texaco card and my American Express card. Dupree had also taken from the bedroom closet my good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles. It was just like him to pick the .410—a boy's first gun. I suppose he thought it wouldn't kick much, that it would kill or at least rip up the flesh in a satisfying way without making a lot of noise or giving much of a jolt to his sloping monkey shoulder.

When the receipts arrived, they were in lumpy envelopes and the sums owed were such that American Express gave way to panic and urged me to call B. Tucker in New York at once and work out terms of payment. It was my guess that this “Tucker” was only a house name, or maybe a hard woman who sat by a telephone all day with a Kool in her mouth. I got out my road maps and plotted the journey by following the sequence of dates and locations on the receipts. I love nothing better than a job like that and I had to laugh a little as the route took shape.

What a trip. What a pair of lovebirds! Pure Dupree! The line started in Little Rock and showed purpose as it plunged straight down into Texas. Then it became wobbly and disorderly. There was one grand loop that went as far west as Moffit's Texaco station in San Angelo, where sheep graze, and there were tiny epicycles along the way that made no sense at all.

I was reminded of the dotted line in history books that represents the aimless trek of Hernando De Soto, a brave soldier who found no gold but only hardship and a wide muddy river to which his body was at last committed—at night, they say. What a man! I was at that time fascinated by the great captains of history and I sometimes became so excited when reading about such men as Lee or Hannibal (both defeated, it occurs to me) that I would have to get up and walk around the room to catch my breath.

Not that there was space for any real strolling in our apartment on Gum Street. Norma wanted to move to a bigger place and so did I—to a bigger and
quieter
place—but I resisted going to the houses and apartments she had scouted out because I knew from experience that they would not be suitable.

The last one had been a little chocolate-brown cottage, with a shed of the same rich color in the backyard. The real-estate fellow showed us around and he talked about the rentlike payments. In the shed we came across an old man lying on a cot. He was eating nuts from a can and watching a daytime television show. His pearly shins were exposed above his socks. A piece of cotton covered one eye.

“That's Mr. Proctor,” said the real-estate bird. “He pays fifty a month for the shed and you can apply that, see, on your note.” I didn't want an old man living in my back yard and the real-estate bird said, “Well, tell him to hit the road then,” but I didn't want to do that either, to Mr. Proctor. The truth was, we couldn't afford a house, not even this cottage, living on my father's charity as we were, and Norma either could not or would not find an apartment with thick walls made of honest plaster. I had specified this as against the modern drywall material, which not only conducts sound readily but in many cases seems to amplify it.

I should have paid more attention to Norma. I should have talked to her and listened to her but I didn't do it. A timely word here and there might have worked wonders. I knew she was restless, and anxious to play a more active part in life. She spoke in just those terms, and there were other signals as well.

She announced one day that she wanted to give a party in our apartment with the theme of “Around the World in 80 Days.” I couldn't believe my ears. A party! She talked about applying for a job as stewardess with Braniff Airlines. She bought a bicycle, an expensive multi-geared model, and joined a cycling club against my wishes. The idea was that she and her chums would pedal along leafy country lanes, shouting and singing like a bunch of Germans, but from all I could see they just had meetings in the damp basement of a church.

I could go on and on. She wanted to dye her hair. She wanted to change her name to Staci or Pam or April. She wanted to open a shop selling Indian jewelry. It wouldn't have hurt me to discuss this shop idea with her—big profits are made every day in that silver and turquoise stuff—but I couldn't be bothered. I had to get on with my reading!

Now she was gone. She had gone to Mexico with Guy Dupree, for that was where my dotted line led. The last position was the Hotel Mogador in San Miguel de Allende, where I drew a terminal cross on the map with my draftsman's pencil and shaded it to give an effect of depth.

The last receipt was just twelve days old. Our Mexican friends have a reputation for putting things off until another day and for taking long naps but there had been no snoozing over this bill. I looked at Dupree's contemptuous approximation of my signature on the receipt. On some of the others he had signed “Mr. Smart Shopper” and “Wallace Fard.”

Here he was then, cruising the deserts of Mexico in my Ford Torino with my wife and my credit cards and his blacktongued dog. He had a chow dog that went everywhere with him, to the post office and ball games, and now that red beast was making free with his lion feet on my Torino seats.

In exchange for my car he had left me his 1963 Buick Special. I had found it in my slot at the Rhino Apartments parking lot, standing astride a red puddle of transmission fluid. It was a compact car, a rusty little piece of basic transportation with a V-6 engine. The thing ran well enough and it seemed eager to please but I couldn't believe the Buick engineers ever had their hearts in a people's car. Dupree had shamefully neglected it. There was about a quarter-turn of slack in the steering wheel and I had to swing it wildly back and forth in a childlike burlesque of motoring. After a day or two I got the hang of it but the violent arm movements made me look like a lunatic. I had to stay alert every second, every instant, to make small corrections. That car had 74,000 miles on it and the speedometer cable was broken. There was a hole in the floor on the driver's side and when I drove over something white the flash between my feet made me jump. That's enough on the car for now.

This business came at a bad time. Just a month earlier—right after my twenty-sixth birthday—I had quit my job on the copy desk at the newspaper to return to school. My father had agreed to support me again until I had received a degree of some sort or at least a teaching certificate. He had also presented me with the American Express card, he having had a good business year sprucing up old houses with Midgestone. As I say, the birthday was my twenty-sixth, but for some reason I had been thinking throughout the previous year that I was already twenty-six. A free year! The question was: would I piddle it away like the others?

My new plan was to become a high-school teacher. I had accumulated enough college hours over the years for at least two bachelor's degrees but I had never actually taken one. I had never stayed long enough in any one course of study. I had no education hours at all but I did have some pre-law at Southwestern and some engineering at Arkansas. I had been at Ole Miss too, where I studied the Western campaigns of the Civil War under Dr. Buddy Casey. Don't talk about Virginia to Dr. Bud; talk about Forrest!

For a long time I had a tape recording of his famous lecture on the Siege of Vicksburg and I liked to play it in the morning while I was shaving. I also played it sometimes in the car when Norma and I went for drives. It was one of those performances—“bravura” is the word for it—that never become stale. Dr. Bud made the thing come alive. With nothing more than his knuckles and the resonating sideboards of his desk he could give you caissons crossing a plank bridge, and with his dentures and inflated cheeks and moist thick lips he could give you a mortar barrage in the distance and rattling anchor chains and lapping water and hissing fuses and neighing horses. I had heard the tape hundreds of times and yet each time I would be surprised and delighted anew by some bit of Casey genius, some description or insight or narrative passage or sound effect. The bird peals, for instance. Dr. Bud gives a couple of unexpected birdcalls in the tense scene where Grant and Pemberton are discussing surrender terms under the oak tree. The call is a stylized one—
tu-whit, tu-whee
—and is not meant to represent that of any particular bird. It has never failed to catch me by surprise. But no one could hope to keep the whole of that lecture in his head at once, such are its riches.

I say I “had” the tape. It disappeared suddenly and Norma denied that she had thrown it away. After making a few inquiries and turning the apartment upside down I let the matter drop. That was my way. I once read about a man who would not let his wife know how he liked for things to be done, so that she could offend him. That was never my way. Norma and I had our squabbles, certainly, but never any scenes of rage like those on television with actors and actresses screaming at one another. It was give and take in our house. Two of my rules did cause a certain amount of continuing friction—my rule against smoking at the table and my rule against record-playing after 9 p.m., by which time I had settled in for a night of reading—but I didn't see how I could compromise in either of those areas.

Norma was married to Dupree when I met her. She had golden down on her forearms and a little blue vein or artery that ran across her forehead and became distended and pulsed noticeably when she was upset or expressing some strong opinion. You hardly ever see the wives of people who work for newspapers and I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember the occasion of our first meeting. I had sat next to Dupree on the rim of the copy desk. In fact, I had gotten him the job. He was not well liked in the newsroom. He radiated dense waves of hatred and he never joined in the friendly banter around the desk, he who had once been so lively. He hardly spoke at all except to mutter “Crap” or “What crap” as he processed news matter, affecting a contempt for all events on earth and for the written accounts of those events.