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  “Nope. Well, I guess in a way it does. Somebody writes a book with a lot of notes. A lot of citations. It’s my job to read the book, and then have everything in alphabetical order at the back of the book. You’ve seen books like this, I swear. I do mostly biographies. Publishers call me up and send me manuscripts, and I filter everything out. You’ve seen it before. At the back of books.”

  I didn’t go into where I’d made major contributions: books by or about Kissinger, Nixon, Bush, Reagan, Lucifer, and Satan.

  “The backs of books. And now you’re here.”

  I said, “With a dog licking my knees.”

  Seth looked left and right, pulled out his cigarette twice, and exhaled. He said, “Bubba, this ain’t much of a town. What do you do in a town like this? What can I do for my dog here?”

  I looked across the way. I lived on Old Old Greenville Road, in a Victorian house that…sure, the ceilings fell down throughout, and the roof looked like some giant sat on it, the gutters hung like weird incisors, the floor sagged in a way that made it impossible to walk from den to dining room—but otherwise it seemed a perfect place to freelance indices. I said, “I don’t know. Here I am. But by goddamn I don’t have a sore on my leg.”

  “Well.”

  Pam the dog cocked her head. I thought about doing a couple deep knee-bends, but didn’t. I knew that I’d perform such things the next morning. I said, “It’s been good meeting you, Seth. Pam.”

  Seth said, “Uh-huh,” and looked at me like I was out of my mind. Index freelancer, you know. He said, “Tomorrow, Bubba. Tomorrow’s Sunday.” And then he gave me a look that might’ve said, I’ll kill you if you don’t come up with the money. Or maybe he gave me a look of You and me could drink some beer together. Sometimes I get those looks confused. I do know that my knees didn’t have a hair on either one of them, if that matters, after Pam got done.

  I PERFORM MY job the old-fashioned way: I keep a notebook open, I read, and I take notes with a pencil. Normally I place twenty-six little tabs at the top of the pages, A through Z. As I read, I place asterisks in the margins, and go to my notebook to jot down what I’ve found.

  Let’s pretend that I’m indexing a biography of, I don’t know, Pavlov. I might have to turn to the S’s under “Salivation” and write pages 1, 2, 4, 6-120, 122, 124-400, and so on. Under “Temper tantrum” I might only have to place down, “—with dog, 98,” “—with wife, 360,” or whatever. It’s a meticulous job that I never mind, but one that a spouse might find both all-encompassing and anally retentive. As a matter of fact, if my ex-wife indexed my biography she’d probably have pages one to the end marked for obsessive-compulsive behavior. I don’t care.

  Since I had moved to Gruel my job as a freelance indexer was more or less at a standstill. I wouldn’t call it a self-imposed hiatus, seeing as the publishing houses teamed together and quit sending me work. Evidently I’d gone too far on three successive books in a row from three separate presses—one on George Wallace, one on Jesse Helms, and another involving the 1994 Republican “Contract with America.” Each one had pretty much the same section that began with the letter I. Under “Idiotic behavior” I listed every page of each book. The same went for “Idiotic thought.” Then I listed my own name under “Rational thought.”

  Hell, who knew that someone actually read those indices back at the publishing house? I’d never had a copy editor chosen for my own work. As far as I was concerned, I was the copy editor, in a way. But then some newly graduated do-gooder from Smith or Sarah Lawrence or Vassar who got a job somewhere between intern and courier decided to take a look at my work, told on me, and so on. I think she’s probably senior editor now, at age twenty-three.

  But I’m not pouting. You’d think, seeing as Marissa left me soon thereafter and I moved to a town named after the worst breakfast ever invented, that I’d’ve gone to cutting myself or holding my hands too close to a flame (bad indexer, bad, bad indexer) in such a way that would give Pam the healing dog a challenge. I didn’t.

  I woke up the next day at four a.m. as normal, and did my routine. In the old days I got out the book at hand and got to work. I know I’ve always told myself that I’d never be like my father, but I woke up two hours before dawn, got to work, and prided myself on being finished for the day before The Today Show finished. Then I could take a nap, watch the noon news, maybe practice horseshoes, most likely play about four thousand games of solitaire, wait for Marissa to get home from her job as a teacher of at-risk teens, listen to her stories about some nineteen-year-old tenth grader confused at there being a Washington, D.C., and an entire state with the same name, prepare supper for us, then go to bed. This occurred in Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro, Charleston, and Savannah. Let me make it clear that I could work anywhere, so we always moved only because my wife either “had” to move or “had a better offer.” I don’t want to start rumors, but I have a funny feeling now that she got “asked” to leave some of those jobs, that maybe she belittled students and colleagues alike. Who knows.

  So I got up at four, and walked around the kitchen drinking coffee, putting everything in alphabetical order. I don’t want to come off as some kind of seer, but I could feel someone standing on my front porch, so I went out there and turned on the outside lights to find Seth and Pam the dog. I opened the door and said, “What did y’all do, sleep in my front yard?”

  “How’re those knees feeling, friend?” Seth said. He wore the same thing as the day before. “Do a couple deep knee-bends right now and tell me you don’t feel better. I’m serious. If you can honestly say you don’t, I’m on my way. If you do, then it’s twenty dollars.”

  I said, “Now I can see how you make a living. If you’re waking people up at four in the morning and working till midnight, that makes sense.” Pam sat down and wagged her tail, sweeping a couple leaves and a ton of dust around.

  I did the knee-bends, and sure enough I didn’t feel the tendonitis/arthritis/effects of being thirty pounds overweight that I normally felt. My ligaments didn’t feel as though they stretched to the bursting point, is what I’m saying. “Come on in,” I said, like a fool.

  Seth and Pam ambled into the empty den—or probably the “parlor”—and stood five feet into my house. I went upstairs to find my wallet. When I came back down Seth said, “They’s a bunch of gurus living out at the old Gruel Inn. Did you know that? Pam and me went by there hoping to do some healing, and this one yoga fellow bent way over and licked the back side of his knee. It’s people like that might put us out of business.”

  I handed over one of those new twenty-dollar bills that look more like French money than American. I said, “I pretty much keep to myself,” but didn’t go into the whole I-might’vegone-crazy-for-a-little-while explanation.

  Seth said, “We appreciate it.” He bent down to Pam and said, “Dog food for a month, baby!” and showed her the money. Then he walked backward to the door and opened it.

  He said, “You don’t know how much this means. Hey, tell your friends about Pam the healing lick dog.”

  I said, “I will,” and didn’t go into an explanation about how I knew no one in Gruel outside of the woman with the Jesus crust bread and the trick shot players who said thanks. I said, “Good luck to you and yours,” for some reason.

  On the porch Seth said, “You know, on our way up here—on our way through your yard—I thought I saw some kind of snake hole you might want to be aware of. It’s right out here.”

  He pointed. I wasn’t afraid of snakes, but I’d overheard some people at Roughhouse Billiards talk about how there seemed to be a preponderance of snakes that infiltrated the town lately. I said, “Where?” and followed him out in the yard.

  I might’ve made it five or six steps barefoot before I felt what ended up being broken glass and tacks in the soles of my feet. I yelled out a couple damn-it-to-hells and made it back to the steps on my heels. Because, again, the porch lights were on I could see the blood flowing from the balls of my feet, from in
between my toes, et cetera. I said, “Ow-ow-ow.”

  “Uh-oh,” Seth said. “Hey Pam, get to work on this old boy’s sores.”

  The dog approached me on cue.

  OF COURSE I knew that Seth spread broken Coke bottles and tacks in my front yard and lured me out there to step on them early morning barefoot. And I didn’t hold it against him! He’d probably seen me go out every morning without shoes to pick up my newspapers—the paperboy drove a step van and delivered the local Forty-Five Platter, The State, and the Greenville News in three long swoops as he drove by in a way that made me walk from gravel driveway to property edge to retrieve them all. I figured that I’d only been cased, just like in crime drama movies.

  We sat down in the kitchen and Seth said, “That coffee smells good.”

  I said, “You can have some for twenty dollars a cup, peckerhead,” like that. Maybe I wasn’t as amused as I pretended.

  Pam the dog licked and licked my bare feet in a way that reminded me of my honeymoon, in a way that reminded me of a woman I’d worked with on an early biography of Rasputin. Seth said, “You look like the kind of man who might hold some bourbon around the house. You got any bourbon around the house? I like bourbon in my coffee.”

  I didn’t say, “Here we go,” aloud, I don’t think, but I thought it. If I were indexing this scene for a book I’d’ve written “here we go” under “Bourbon request.” “Yeah, there’s some bourbon in the cabinet over there. By the way, I’m not paying you five bucks a quarter hour for this. I’m on to you, man.” I looked at the dog lapping my soles. “I’m on to you, too, Fido,” I said.

  Seth retrieved a quart of Old Crow and sat down across from me. He got back up, found two jelly jars, and placed them on the table. “To be honest, it’s not good for you to drink while Pam’s at work. Drinking thins the blood. It’s the same with tattoos, you know. My dog can’t lick and lick if the blood’s going to keep spewing.”

  I looked over at Seth and noticed how one eye wandered off funny. I’d known people with this affliction before, men and women who were tired, or got drunk, and then that one eye rolled around loose. I said, “Are you all right, buddy?”

  “I’m you,” he said. “I don’t know anything about your personal life, but I’m betting that we’re one in the same, if you know what I mean.”

  I looked down at Pam and said, “Hey, that kind of tickles.”

  “Don’t think that I’ve always wandered around with a dog licking sores. I’ve not always been this way.”

  I nodded. I waited for him to tell me how he once worked on Wall Street or as a lawyer, maybe a lobbyist. I said, “Go on.”

  “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

  I said, “No sir. I’m not.” Come on, I thought, tell me how you used to be a real doctor.

  “People from around here will tell you about how I coached high school football. That’s what I did until I couldn’t take it no more. And maybe I wasn’t the best coach in the world, but by God I could tape an ankle. I could put a halfback back out onto the playing field with a broke foot and he wouldn’t even know it. He wouldn’t feel the pain. I could talk a broken ankle into feeling like it only got a slight sprain, you know what I mean?” Seth took a drink of his jelly jar bourbon. The sun rose outside. A dog licked my feet nonstop.

  I said, “Huh. That’s weird.”

  “I taught history, and driver’s ed, and P.E. And I coached football down in Gig. Then I found Pam. Then I got fired for beating a kid on the sidelines during a game, and some parents didn’t like that. It was only a placekicker.”

  What else could I say but, “Everybody’s gotten politically correct about those kinds of things.”

  My knees felt invigorated. My feet immediately felt better. Seth said, “I’m telling you. I was out of there on a rail. A placekicker! That boy couldn’t kick his sister’s butt, much less a football through goalposts.”

  I drank from my own jelly jar and felt good. Not that I’m proud to admit it, but sometimes in the old days I got up at four a.m. and poured bourbon while doing my index work. I’m pretty sure it shows in that one biography I did of Truman Capote. There were things under Q that didn’t need to be there.

  “Do you know what it’s like to pull off a perfect end sweep?” Seth said. “Do you know what it feels like to pull off a flea flicker when the defense has no idea it’s about to happen?”

  I said, “No sir.”

  “You ain’t much of an athlete, are you? No offense, but you have no clue what I’m talking about, do you?”

  I said, “Yes, I do. Fucker. I do. I’d go outside and challenge you in one-on-one basketball or a game of horseshoes, if my feet weren’t all screwed up from your little game.”

  “You got any cards? While we’re here we might as well play some poker.” Seth threw down the twenty-dollar bill I’d given him earlier.

  I had cards right there in the kitchen drawer, next to the couple spoons, couple knives, couple forks. I said, “No.”

  “You don’t seem to be the kind of man who can take it,” Seth said. “I’ve known men like you.”

  His demeanor certainly had changed since the afternoon before, of course. And I thought about saying, Hey, buddy, I don’t know where you come off giving me life lessons, seeing as you travel around with a licking dog. But I didn’t. I said, “I’ve taken more than you could imagine.”

  “You got any dice? Hey, let’s play rock-paper-scissors-dynamite!” Pam the dog kept licking. “Hey, you want to see a picture I got of a woman who lost her eye, and how Pam licked it back into seeing? This might be the scariest thing ever.”

  Pam the dog withdrew from my bleeding feet. She hacked a couple of times. And then she got up, wobbled away from us, fell over, and died.

  Seth said, “If Jesus had a dog hanging around him, those stigmata wouldn’t even be mentioned. We wouldn’t even have no religion if a dog like Pam were around at that time.”

  We stood there in my kitchen with a big dead dog. What could I do? I never got trained to deal with such a situation. I said, “Jesus.”

  “I ain’t got no land to bury her. Do you mind putting her in your backyard? I ain’t got no land to bury her, outside of the old football field back in Gig. Right on the fifty-yard line. That would be kind of funny. And fitting.”

  I said, “Let’s just put her down here in my backyard. I would be honored to have Pam in my yard.” What else could I say? I didn’t mean it whatsoever, but Seth seemed to want to hear such.

  I creaked around on my swollen and defective feet, sidestepping the dog. Pam’s tongue stuck out funny and her open brown eyes clouded over minute by minute. I said, “Well. There’s a shovel outside. We can find a couple sticks of wood for a cross, if you want. Hotdamn.” I got the bottle of bourbon and brought it back to the table.

  “You’re walking better,” Seth said. “The least you could do is give me twenty more dollars for your feet.”

  I looked at him as if he were insane. What did he mean? This big dead dog lay or lied or laid out in my kitchen. “I’m sorry, buddy. I’m sorry that you lost your job as a high school coach. But this ain’t my problem. I have enough problems right now.”

  Seth knelt down to his dog and pet it. He said, “Pam, Pam, Pam,” and I have to say that I almost cried right there and then.

  I said, “This is weird, man.”

  “I don’t even know you,” he said, crying. “I don’t even know who you are, Curt. And here I am crying in front of you.” His hair flowed around like an old sea anemone. “That’s my dog,” he said, pointing.

  Pam almost looked like she only slept. The dog didn’t move, of course.

  “Come on,” I said. In my mind I thought about how I could index such a scene—Seth crying, Seth weeping, Seth in disbelief—all in alphabetical order.

  “What do I do now? What do I do now?” Seth said.

  I circled the dog a couple of times, and then approached Seth. “I’m not so sure I can lift her up what with my feet
all mangled.”

  Seth said, “Do you have any good liquor? I don’t like this stuff. You got any smooth liquor?”

  I heard “Licker” more than anything else. I didn’t say it, though. That’s what kind of got me in trouble with Marissa—saying what came into my mind at inopportune moments. Somebody should write a book about it—I could do the index. I said, “This is all I got,” and pointed toward my bottle of what, by the way, I considered great bourbon.

  Seth pointed at my legs, halfway down. He said, “Well, come on.”

  We grabbed Pam. I took the shoulders and Seth took her haunches. He walked backward out of the house, and down the steps, and into the backyard. We set her down at the foot of a wild fig. I said, “Figs are supposed to be recuperative,” just like that. Recuperative! I hadn’t used the word in my entire life, even in indexing.

  “Well,” Seth said. He looked over at an old shed on the back of the property, an eight-by-sixteen tongue-and-groove structure I’d not even figured out what to do with. Up to this point I only kept a shovel and a rake inside. “Hey, there’s another house there.”

  I said, “If I ever get a riding lawn mower that’ll be its resting place.”

  Seth said, “I ain’t got a place to live.”

  I walked over and got the shovel from inside. When I opened the swinging door, though, I envisioned Seth inside, sitting there atop an empty and upside-down drywall bucket. I foresaw myself going to pick him up at night, walking with him to Roughhouse Billiards. We’d get inside and wait out the trick shot players, then spend hours trying not to knock the eight ball in at wrong moments. Whenever I bent over hurting he’d say, “We need Pam about right now.”

  I said, “Here’s the shovel.”

  He didn’t scoop into the earth daintily. I tried not to think of what a healing dog couldn’t do with the rest of us treading ground in an uncertain manner.

  Seth said, “Good dog. Good dog. I’m sorry. Good dog.”

  On his way off my property—and I don’t know how to convince anyone that I knew how he’d never come back—he let out a low howl. He turned his head to the rising sun and let one loose, not unlike what a bloodhound emits when a fire engine’s siren’s far, far away. I hobbled my way back inside. Later that day I turned on one of those business channels and stared at what happened with the major indices, elsewhere.