The Dog of the South (17 page)

“You had some good friends in Ferriday,” Mrs. Symes said. “Don't tell me you didn't.”

“Not real friends.”

“You went to their barbecues all the time.”

“The kind of people I know now don't have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. Some of them can even move their ears. They're wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and watch for chances.”

Melba said, “That was the road of life you chose, Reo. It was you who sought out those low companions.”

“You're absolutely right, Melba. You've done it again. You've put your finger on it. A fondness for low company. I wasn't born a rat or raised a rat. I don't even have that excuse. I wasn't raised a heathern. My mother and father gave me a loving home. They provided me with a fine medical education at Wooten Institute. I wore good clothes, clean clothes, nice suits from Benny's. I had a massive executive head and milliondollar personality. I was wide awake. I was just as keen as a brier. Mama can tell you how frisky I was.”

She said, “I was always afraid you would be burned up in a night-club fire, baby.”

The doctor turned on me. “Listen to me, Speed. A young man should start out in life trying to do the right thing. It's better for your health. It's better in every way. There'll be plenty of time later for you to cut these corners, and better occasions. I wish I had had some older man to grab my shoulder and talk turkey to me when I was your age. I needed a good shaking when my foot slipped that first time, and I didn't get it. Oh, yes. My face is now turned toward that better land, but much too late.”

Mrs. Symes said, “You had a good friend in Natchez named Eddie Carlotti. He had such good manners. He never forgot himself in the presence of ladies like so many of your friends would do. He drove a Packard automobile. It was an open car.”

“A human rat,” said the doctor. “The world's largest rodent. He's four times the size of that rat Leon used to show. That wop is probably in the Black Hand Society now, shaking down grocery stores. I could tell you a few things about Mr. Eddie Carlotti but I won't. It would turn your stomach.”

“What about the Estes boy who was so funny? He always had some new joke or some comical story to tell.”

“Chemical story?” said Melba.

“
Comical
story! He and Reo were inseparable chums at one time.”

“Another rat,” said the doctor. “And I'm not talking now about brown
norvegicus
, your common rat, I'm talking about
Rattus rattus
himself, all black and spitting. Walker Estes would trip a blind man. The last time I saw him he was stealing Christmas presents out of people's cars and trucks. Working people too. I can tell you who didn't think he was funny. It was that sharecropper's little daughter who cried on Christmas morning because there was no baby doll for her, and no candy or sparklers either.”

Melba said, “It's amazing what people will do.”

“Listen, Melba. Listen to this. I'd like to share this with you. There used to be a wonderful singer on the radio called T. Texas Tyler. Did you ever hear him?”

“When was he on the radio?”

“He was on late at night and he was just a fine fellow, a tremendous entertainer. He had a wonderful way with a song. He sang some lovely Western ballads. They always introduced him as ‘T. Texas Tyler, the man with a million friends.' I used to envy that man, and not just for his beautiful voice. I would think, Now how in the world would they introduce me if I had a singing program on the radio? They couldn't say, ‘The singing doctor,' because I was no longer a licensed physician. They wouldn't want to say, ‘The man with a few rat friends,' and yet anything else would have been a lie. They wouldn't know what to do. They would just have to point to me and let me start singing when that red light came on. Don't ask me what happened to Tyler, because I don't know. I don't have that information. He may be living in a single-wide trailer somewhere, a forgotten old man. Where are those million friends now? It's a shame how we neglect our poets. It's the shame of our nation. Tyler could sing like a bird and you see what it got him in the end. John Selmer Dix died broke in a railroad hotel in Tulsa. It wasn't a mattress fire either. I don't know who started that talk. Dix had his enemies like anybody else. The lies that have been told about that man! They said his eyes were real close together. A woman in Fort Worth claims she saw him flick cigarette ashes on a sleeping baby in a stroller cart. And Dix didn't even smoke! He published two thin books in forty years and they called him a chatterbox. He had the heart of a lion and yet there are people who believe, even to this day, that he was found cowering in the toilet when they had that big Christmas fight at the Legion hut in Del Rio. Anything to smear his memory! Well, it doesn't matter, his work was done. The New York jumping rats have already begun to tamper with it.”

Mrs. Symes said, “Reo, you were speaking of rats and that made me think of the river rat named Cornell something who used to take you duck hunting. A famous duck-caller. Cornell something-or-other. His last name escapes me.”

“Cornell Tubb, but it's no use going on with this, Mama.”

“I remember his full name now. It was Cornell Tubb. Am I wrong, Melba, in thinking that you have some Tubb connections?”

“My mother was a Tubb.”

“It's no use going on with this, Mama. I tell you I have no friends. Cornell Tubb was never my friend by any stretch of the imagination. The last friend I had on this earth was Rod Garza, and he was completely dismembered in his Pontiac. They put a bum in his car and blew him up.”

“You're not eating. You asked for this jello and now you're just playing with it.”

“I wonder if you would do me a favor, Mama.”

“I will if I can, Reo.”

“I want you to tell Speed here the name of my favorite hymn. He would never guess it in a hundred years.”

“I don't remember what it was.”

“Yes, you do too.”

“No, I don't remember.”

“‘Just as I am, without one plea.' How I love that old song. And I'll tell you a secret. It means more to me now than it ever did. The theme of that hymn, Speed, is redemption. ‘Just as I am, though tossed about, with many a conflict, many a doubt.' Can you understand the appeal it has for me? Can you see why I always request it, no matter where I am in my travels? I never go to these churches where all their hymns were written in 1956, where they write their own songs, you know. Don't look for me there. I'm not interested in hearing any nine-year-old preachers either.”

Mrs. Symes said, “I'll tell you what I do remember, Reo. I remember you standing up there in the choir in Ferriday in your robe, just baying out, ‘I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold!' and all the time you were taking advantage of the deaf people of Concordia Parish. You were taking their money and putting those enormous Filipino hearing aids in their ears that squealed and buzzed when they worked at all, and in some cases, I believe, caused painful electric shock.”

Melba said, “It's amazing what people will do. Look at the ancient Egyptians. They were the smartest people the world has ever known—we still don't know all their secrets—and yet they worshiped a tumblebug.”

The doctor was still holding the green jello in his spoon, quivering and undelivered. This annoyed Mrs. Symes and she took the spoon from him and began to feed him, thus shutting him up.

She and Melba conferred on their plans for the Tarzan showing. Folding chairs would have to be borrowed to accommodate the crowd. Perhaps Father Jackie would lend them his self-threading and noiseless and yet powerful new projector, in which case standby fuses would be needed.

I asked questions about this Father Jackie and learned that he had been a maverick priest in New Orleans. There he had ministered to the waifs who gather about Jackson Square. One night these young drifters surrounded his small Japanese car, shook it for a while, and then turned it over. They dragged him out into the street and beat him and left him bleeding and unconscious. When he had recovered from the assault, his bishop pondered over the problem and then decided that Belize would be a good place for Father Jackie. Mrs. Symes objected to his breezy manner and his preposterous doctrines and his theatrical attire, but, deep down, she said, he was a genuine Christian. She was well pleased with her Tarzan deal.

I said, “Wait a minute. I've heard of this fellow. I've handled news accounts about this man. This is the well-known ‘Vicar of Basin Street.'”

“No, no,” she said. “This is another one. Father Jackie has a steel plate in his head. He plays the cornet. He's an amateur magician. He claims he has no fear of the Judgment. I don't know anything about the other fellow.”

Dense heat was building up in the house. I helped the doctor back to his bed. Mrs. Symes went to her own room to nap. There was a box fan in the central room, where we had eaten, and I lay down on the floor in front of it to rest for a minute or two. I was heavy and sodden with jello.

Watch out for the florr! When I woke up, it was almost 3:30 in the afternoon. What a piddler! Melba was in her chair looking at me. No slumber for Melba. That is, I thought she was looking at me but when I stood up, her dreamy gaze did not move from some point in the void where it was fixed. The temperature was about 97 degrees in that room and she was still wearing her red sweater. It wasn't for me to instruct Melba in her Christian duties but surely she was wrong to be trafficking with these spirits.

T
HE POST OFFICE itself wasn't open but there was a man on duty in the cable office. He leafed through the incoming messages and found nothing for me. I walked back to the hotel. The young men of Belize were shadowboxing on the streets and throwing mock punches at one another. Webster Spooner was in front of the hotel dancing around the tomato plant and jabbing the air with his tiny fists. He too had attended the matineé showing of the Muhammad Ali fight.

“I'm one bad-ass nigger,” he said to me.

“No, you're not.”

“I'm one bad-ass nigger.”

“No, you're not.”

He was laughing and laying about with his fists. Biff Spooner! Scipio Africanus! I had to wait until his comic frenzy was spent. He had taken care of the map business all right, but instead of bringing the map to me he had fooled around town all morning and then gone to the movie.

I saw that I could count on Webster to do one thing but not two things in immediate succession. On the other hand I didn't have his five dollars, or his Kennedy coin. I did have a little money that I had diverted into my own pocket from the doctor's wad, though not as much as five dollars. Webster shrugged and made no fuss, being accustomed to small daily betrayals.

In the white margin at the top of the map the policeman had written, “Dupree & Co. Ltd. Bishop Lane. Mile 16.4.” This Bishop Lane was not printed on the map and the policeman had sketched it in, running west and slightly south from Belize. He had marked the Dupree place with a box. Nearby was a Mayan ruin, as I could see from the pyramid symbol. He had marked another place in the south—“Dupere Livestock”—but the spelling was different and this was clearly an afterthought. In the bottom margin he had signed his name: Sgt. Melchoir Wattli.

So at long last I had found them and now I was ready to make my move. Leet had left another leaflet on the windshield of the Buick and I threw it away. I inspected the hood for cat tracks and I had a look underneath. Then I remembered the roll of quarters and I got it from the glove compartment and gave it to Webster, showing him how to conceal it in his fist. It stuck out from one end and made his fingers bulge in a dead giveaway.

The quarter was not a very interesting coin, I conceded, and I said it was true that Washington, whose stern profile was stamped on it, had a frosty manner, and that he was not a glamorous person. But, I went on, warming to this theme, he was a much greater man than Kennedy.
¡Gravitas!
The stuffed shirt, the pill—this sort of person had not always been regarded as a comic figure. I had enormous respect for General Washington, as who doesn't, but I also liked the man, believing as I did that we shared many of the same qualities. Perhaps I should say “some of the same qualities” because in many ways we were not at all alike. He, after all, had read only two books on warfare, Bland's
Exercises
and Sim's
Military Guide
, and I had read a thousand. And of course he was a big man while I am compact of build.

Webster pointed out that Sergeant Wattli had used a pencil instead of a pen so as not to permanently mar the beautiful blue map. I decided that I would make a gift of the map to the officer when I was done with it, though I said nothing to Webster at the time. That was my way. These flashy people who make a show of snatching off a new necktie and presenting it to someone on the spot, to someone who has admired it—that was never my way.

The filthy Buick started on the first shot. Detroit iron! You can't beat it! Bishop Lane began as a city street and then at the edge of town it changed abruptly into two sandy ruts, which comfortably absorbed the tire thump. There were no suburbs, not even a string of shanties. I drove across pine flats and I was much surprised at finding this conifer in the tropics. I had heard or read somewhere that the taproot of a pine tree plunges as deep into the earth as the tree grows tall, the identical length, and I didn't see how this was possible. I thought about the happy and decent life of a forest ranger. A fresh tan uniform every morning and a hearty breakfast and a goodbye peck from Norma at the door of our brown cottage in the woods. It was a field well worth looking into.