The Dog of the South (14 page)

The recurring dream made me sweat and writhe in the damp bedclothes. I couldn't trace it back to any event in my waking life, so to speak. I relate this dream, knowing it is illmannered to do so, because of its anomalous character. Most of my dreams were paltry, lifeless things. They had to do with geometric figures or levitation. My body would seem to float up from the bed, but not far, a foot or so. There was no question of flying. In this Belize dream there were other people. I was sitting at a low coffee table across from an intelligent, welldressed woman who wanted to “have it out.” She had a fat son named Travis who was about seven years old. This boy was encouraged by his mom to have opinions and make pert remarks. The three of us were always seated around the coffee table on the stylish woman's pneumatic furniture. She drove home telling points in some dim quarrel while the boy Travis chirped out show-business quips.

“Be my guest!” he would chirp, and, “Oh boy, that's the story of my life!” and, “Yeah, but what do you do for an encore!” and, “Hey, don't knock it if you ain't tried it!” and, “How's that for openers?” and, “You bragging or complaining!” and, “Welcome to the club, Ray! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” I had to sit there and take it on the chin from both the woman and Travis.

Ruth sent for me early on the third day. I took a bath and shaved and put on some clean clothes. My legs were shaky as I went down the stairs. Ruth wanted her room money and her Pet milk money. I had heard nothing from Little Rock. Norma had abandoned me, and now, it seemed, my father as well. I tried to figure out how many days I had been gone. It was just possible that he had not yet returned from the Alabama bass rodeo. Flinging his plastic worm all over the lake! His Lucky 13! His long-tailed jigs! He caught fish that weighed three pounds and he talked about them “fighting.” Killer bass! It was possible too that he was tired of fooling with me, as with Mr. Dupree and Guy. Weaned at twenty-six! Places like Idaho had governors my age. The great Humboldt was exploring the Orinoco at my age instead of sniveling about a money order.

Ruth was hard to deal with. Her Creole speech was hard to understand. She wouldn't look at me when I spoke to her and she wouldn't answer me or give any sign of acknowledgment. I was thus forced to repeat myself and then she would say, “I heard you the first time.” But if I didn't repeat myself we would just stand there in a silent and uneasy impasse.

I offered to let her hold some bonds until my money arrived. She wanted cash and she wanted it at that moment. I didn't know what to say to her, how to keep talking in the assertive Dix manner. She glowered and looked past me. A crackpot like Karl had the run of the place but my E bonds were no good. That was her idea of fair play. Webster Spooner was listening to all this. He was reclining in his box and working in his notebook but he was listening too.

“He have money in that long notecase,” he said. “Big money.”

It was true. I still had the doctor's wallet and I had forgotten about it. I went back to the room and got it from the suitcase. I paid Ruth twenty American dollars and I thought this would put me on a new footing with her, but it seemed to make her even more disagreeable. I asked her where the government agriculture office was and she ignored me. I asked her where the police station was and she turned her back to me and went through the curtain to her living quarters. I rang the bell but she wouldn't come back.

I was annoyed with Webster for poking around my room while I was asleep but I didn't mention it. I asked if he could run an errand for me. He said nothing and kept working in his notebook. He and Ruth both had decided that I was the sort of person they didn't have to listen to. There were certain white people that they might have to listen to but I was not one of them. I spoke to him again.

“I'm busy,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm drawing the car of tomorrow.”

“Yes, I see now. It looks fast. That's nice work. Everything will have to wait until you're finished with it.”

I went out into the soft tropic morning. Roosters were crowing all over Belize. My two-day torpor was gone and I was ready for business. Webster had put his tomato plant out on the sidewalk for the sunlight hours. There were two green tomatoes on it.

The little Buick was filthy but it appeared to be intact. There was a leaflet under the windshield wiper. The letters at the top of the sheet were so big and they were marching across the paper in such a way that I had to move my head back a little from normal reading range to make out the words.

I threw it away and got my Esso map from the glove compartment and retrieved the doctor's flashlight from under the seat.

Where were the government buildings? I set out toward the arched bridge to find them. No one was about on the streets. I stopped to read signs and posters. A band called the Blues Busters was appearing at an all-night dance. The movie house was featuring a film of a Muhammad Ali fight. I made a plan for breakfast. I would stop at the second restaurant that I came to on my left.

It was a Chinese place and not a restaurant as such but rather a grocery store with a coffee machine and an ice-cream machine and a few tables. An old Chinese man was wiping off the stainless-steel ice-cream machine. Maintenance! The firemen of Belize were gathered there at two tables for coffee and rolls. A piece of luck, I thought, my hitting on the very place that the firemen liked. They looked at me and lowered their voices. I didn't want to interfere with their morning chat so I bought a cone of soft ice cream and left.

Across the way on the bank of the river there was a public market, a long open shed with a low tin roof, where bananas and pigs and melons were sold, though not this early in the morning. Outside the shed on the dock there were three men skinning a giant brown snake that hung from a hook. There, I said to myself, is something worth watching. I went over and took up a close viewing position and ate my ice cream. The job was soon done, but not with any great skill. The long belly cut was ragged and uncertain. It might have been their first snake. They kept the skin with its reticulated pattern and dropped the heavy carcass into the river where it hung for a moment just beneath the surface, white and sinuous, and then sank.

As I thought over what I had seen, very much puzzled as to how the specific gravity of snake flesh could be greater than that of water, someone came up behind me and pinched my upper arm and made me jump, as before, in Chetumal. I had come to fear this salute. It was Webster Spooner this time. He had his newspapers and greeting cards. He seemed to be embarrassed.

“Are you vexed with me, sor, for going through your things?”

“I am a little, yes.”

“I was looking for a President Kennedy dollar.”

“I don't have one.”

“I know you don't.”

“You missed the big snake. There was a monster snake hanging up there just a minute ago. Some sort of constrictor.”

“I see him last night.”

“How would you like to tangle with that big fellow?”

Webster twisted about and gasped as though in the clutches of the snake. “He be badder than any shark.”

“I saw your tomatoes. They looked pretty good.”

“A bug done eat one of 'em up.”

One bug! A whole tomato! I asked again about the government offices and this time Webster was helpful and agreeable. But it was Sunday, I was surprised to learn, and the offices wouldn't be open. I unfolded the blue map and spread it out on one of the market tables.

“All right, Webster, look here. You will recognize this as a map of your country. An American named Dupree owns a farm here somewhere. I need to find that farm. I want you to go to your police connections and get them to mark the location of that farm on this map. I'm going to give you five dollars now and that's for the policeman. When you bring the map back to me, I'll have five dollars for you. How do you like that?”

He took pains to get Dupree spelled right in his notebook and he didn't whine or raise difficulties, as might have been expected from the corrupt Travis. I described my Torino and told him to be on the lookout for it. He asked me if I could get him a Kennedy dollar. He had that coin on the brain. Every time he got his hands on one, he said, Ruth took it away from him.

“I'll see if I can find you one,” I said. “It's a half dollar and I should tell you that it probably won't be silver. All our coins now are cupronickel tokens of no real value. I want that Dupree information just as soon as you can get it. I'll be walking around town for a while and then I'll be at the Unity Tabernacle. I'll wait for you there. Do you know that church?”

Webster not only knew it, he was a sort of lapsed member. The tomato plant in the Texaco bucket had started as a church project. He didn't go much anymore, he said, because he had seen all the movies. He liked the singing and the Christmas program and the Easter egg hunt and he didn't mind seeing the Heckle and Jeckle cartoons over and over again. But the rest of it was too hard. And Mrs. Symes, no fool, had rearranged the schedule so that the Bible quiz was now held
before
the movie—and no one was admitted late.

He showed me his selection of greeting cards. I bought one, and a newspaper too, the first one I had ever seen that was actually called the
Daily Bugle
. It was made up entirely of political abuse, mean little paragraphs, and I threw it away.

For the next two hours or so I made figure-eight walking circuits of all the downtown blocks. I saw a good many Ford Galaxies, the big favorite here, but no sleek Torino of any model. Some of the dwelling houses had cozy English names . . . Rose Lodge, The Haven. I stopped at the Fort George Hotel for coffee. Some British soldiers were there, still a little drunk from the Blues Busters dance, and they were talking to an American woman who was at the next table with a small boy. They asked her why Americans said “budder” and “wadder” instead of “butter” and “water” and she said she didn't know. I asked them about their regiment and they said it was the Coldstream Guards. Were they lying? I couldn't tell. The Coldstream Guards! The hotel desk clerk was a woman and she said she vaguely remembered a Mr. Dupree, remembered his renting a car, and she thought his farm was south of town somewhere but she wasn't sure.

The door of Unity Tabernacle was bolted against quizdodgers. I hammered away on it until I was admitted by a boy monitor wearing a safety-patrol belt. The chapel was dark. Mrs. Symes was showing a George Sanders movie to a dozen or so Negro children who were scuffling on the pews. She herself was running the projector and I stood beside her and watched the show for a while. It was a Falcon picture. A wild-eyed man with a tiny mustache was trying desperately to buy a ticket in an enormous marble train station. Mrs. Symes said to me, “He's not going anywhere. The Falcon is laying a trap for that joker.” Then she gave me a pledge card, a card promising an annual gift of $5 ( ), $10 ( ), or $25 ( ) toward the support of the Unity mission. I filled it out under the hot inner light of the projector. The name and address spaces were much too short, unless you wrote a very fine hand or unless your name was Ed Poe and you lived at 1 Elm St., and I had to put this information on the back. I pledged ten dollars. It was just a pledge and I didn't have to pay the money at that moment.

The doctor had been removed to a bed upstairs. I found him awake but he was still gray in the face and his eye looked bad. He was sitting up, shapeless as a manatee in a woman's pink gown. He was going through a big pasteboard box that was filled with letters and photographs and other odds and ends. His hair had been cut, the jaybird crest was gone. He needed a shave. Melba gave me some coffee and apiece of cinnamon toast. She said that the three of us presented an interesting tableau, what with one person in bed, one in a chair, and one standing. Dr. Symes was fretful. He wouldn't talk until Melba had left us.

“What happened to your hair?” I said.

“Mama cut it with some shears.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Yes, I do. They won't let me have any medication, Speed. They've put my bag away. They don't even keep a thermometer. I've lost my money and I've lost my book. I can't find my grooming aids. Some Mexican has got my flashlight.”

I gave him his wallet and his flashlight and told him that the Dix book was safe in my room. This brought him around a little. He fingered through the money but he didn't count it.

“I appreciate this, Speed. You could have put the blocks to me but you didn't do it.”

“I forgot all about it.”

“Where in the world have you been?”

“Asleep.”

“Is that asthma acting up on you?”

“No.”

“Where are you staying?”

“At a hotel down there on the creek.”

“A nice place?”

“It's all right.”