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  I cradled my dog and pulled her down to the floor. I said, “Damn.” I meant, “Damn—you just ruined my respect for you.” I said, “You ever found a microchip on Holly?”

  My vet laughed. “Sometimes I go beep when I’m scanning her, just for fun. No. From what I understand, back when you could just park in front of an airport and walk in even if you weren’t flying anywhere, Holly used to walk through the metal detectors. She used to take off her jewelry, you know, and walk through in hopes of setting the thing off.”

  Dr. Page touched my chest. Well, no, she pushed me out of the examination room, in a way to let me know gently that her time with Tapeworm was over. I walked back to the waiting room with my dog. Dr. Page took a different turn, and ended up on the other side of the counter. She said, “Is Tapeworm on heartworm medication?”

  I said, “She’s inside the house, or with me. She never gets in a rabid animal situation. I have a privacy fence.”

  “Mosquitoes transmit heartworm, Edward. Mosquitoes can pretty much find ways to buzz over fences.”

  I felt like an idiot, of course. I said, “Oh. Well, then, I guess she’s not.”

  “You need some protection, I promise. Especially now, what with the rain.”

  I said okay—she might’ve been flirting with me, what with that “You need some protection” comment—and Dr. Page turned to pick up a year’s worth of Heartgard Plus tablets. She said, “Shots and check-up come to a hundred bucks. The heartworm protection’s eighty.” She typed on her computer. “Let’s call it an even one eighty.”

  I hadn’t spent a hundred and eighty dollars on my own health care in the previous decade. I said, “We need veterinary health care reform.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dr. Page said. She said, “We need to make sure there’s mental health coverage for that new girlfriend of yours, if you ask me. And for other people who’ve been in my life, I suppose.”

  I thought maybe she made reference to Dr. Leck’s accidental overdose of horse tranquilizers. “You looking for a partner?” I meant, of course, “Are you looking to bring another vet in here to help you out?”

  Dr. Page said, “I’m not a lesbian, Edward.”

  Back in my dreams! I thought. I said, “That’s not what I meant,” and handed over nine twenties. That’s the thing about basket weavers. We have cash, always.

  “Have fun with Holly. Hope to see you again one day.”

  I wanted to talk more, but the door opened and a man came in with a limping beautiful mutt. I knew the guy. I saw him sometimes talking to himself down at Laurinda’s, or I saw him driving slowly with his face dangerously close to his windshield.

  Dr. Page said, “Hey, Stet, what’s up?”

  He said, “Someone’s setting traps around.”

  WHAT SHOULD A divorced basket weaver do when tempted by a microchip-believing hippie woman intent on drinking before noon? I said to Tapeworm, “You want to go to a bar? Does Tapeworm want to go for a ride to the bar?” but I swear to fucking God I said it all in a normal voice, as if I might be talking to a friend from college, or my crazy aunt.

  Tapeworm Johnson said nothing. Tapeworm Johnson sat upright on the truck’s bench seat and looked straight out the windshield, as good found stray bird dogs are wont to do.

  I drove down Scenic Highway 11 past my driveway, and past Looper’s landscape rock operation, and past Laurinda’s until, finally, I took a couple macadam roads and turned into Gus’s Place. I tried not to go to this particular bar on the Saluda River very often. One time I showed up there and three men hid behind the counter, saying that someone had a gun. Another time I went in and a homeless drifter insisted that she was one of the premier book critics in the country. For the record, I would rather be in a bar with a possible gun toter on the loose than a drifter book critic. I remember telling Tapeworm that day, “Remind me to pay my tab immediately should someone next to me at the bar ever use the term ‘postmodern.’”

  I parked next to Holly’s VW, the only car in the gravel parking spots. Inside, Gus stood behind the counter, mouth dropped open, staring at Holly. She’d leashed Loretta to one of the stools, which Loretta tipped over and dragged behind her in order to sniff my dog’s butt.

  “Haven’t you ever ordered a scotch and Mr. Pibb?” Holly asked me.

  Gus didn’t close his mouth or move his mouth visibly, though his eyes shifted to me. I said, “I can’t say that I’ve ever gotten to that point.” To Gus I said, “I’ll have whatever you have on draft that’s not light.”

  “Sanity arrives,” Gus said. “I don’t even carry Mr. Pibb. Do they still make it?”

  Holly scooted a stool a few inches my way and told me to sit down. She said, “No, but I have a stockpile, and I thought maybe you did, too. We’ve been to the vet’s. We met at the vet’s office. What a romantic story this’ll be one day!”

  “Tell your dog not to drag my stool around,” Gus said. I got up, told my own dog to sit. She did, and I righted Loretta’s stool and slid it over to the bar counter.

  To Gus, Holly said, “Well, then, surprise me. But I can’t drink beer. It has to be liquor, and it can’t be straight.”

  Gus said, “You got it.” He turned around and stared at his bottles, picked out the vodka, then turned around and stared at his mixers in a cold box.

  No music played. The walls were bare, though squares and rectangles of a different shade proved that Gus, at one time, kept something nailed up which, I would bet, weren’t Norman Rockwell reproductions. “All my dogs used to start barking at five o’clock every morning, wanting to go outside,” Holly said. “Unless it was raining. If it rained, they all acted as if they didn’t need to use the bathroom. So you know what I did? I bought one of those noise machines where you can click on to whales pinging, or ocean surf, birds of the Amazon, and rain. I put it on a timer in the kitchen, so it goes off at four o’clock every morning until seven. The dogs haven’t figured it out yet. They sure don’t whine and bark anymore until about five minutes after the machine clicks off. How about that? Pretty ingenious, huh?”

  Gus placed a martini glass in front of Holly. He said, “Vodka and Jarritos. It’s some kind of mango soda all the Guatemalans order. Cheers.”

  Holly said, “Cheers,” and I thought about lifting my glass but I said, “That’s not your dog,” and pointed at Loretta.

  Holly downed her poor man’s screwdriver as if it were a shooter. She held her chin down to her throat and grimaced. Gus wiped his hands on what may have been the first bar towel ever made. It looked like a nicotine-stained tatter of cheesecloth. He said, “I normally wait until noon,” and pulled a can of Schlitz out of the cooler.

  Holly said, “Hooooo! That went straight through me. Can you watch my dog? I have to pee.”

  I nodded.

  And then, of course, I went through her pocketbook that she left on the bar. I found a flask, a pack of that rolling tobacco, some papers, and two rolls of quarters. She had a skein of uncompromised two-dollar scratch-off tickets. Holly had some kind of Friend of the World Wildlife Fund membership card, and another from PETA.

  Gus said, “Do you know her?” in a whisper.

  I said, “Do you?”

  “She’s been here before. One time she brought in a snapping turtle, lodged in one of those cat litter boxes with a top that snaps on. Scared the shit out of my customers. That thing kept shooting its head out, like a foot-long pecker.”

  I said, “The vet says she’s nuts.”

  I found no driver’s license, social security card, credit card, or passport. Who doesn’t have those things, outside of people on the lam, children under the age of fifteen, or illegal aliens who sit around drinking Jarritos mango soda in their spare time?

  Gus cleared his throat. I understood it to be the international signal for “She’s coming back out of the restroom.”

  I shuffled everything back into her purse, looked down at the dogs, said, “Hey, Loretta,” and noticed that the dog didn’t look up at me. Her name�
��s not Loretta, I thought.

  “Sure she’s my dog,” Holly said upon her return. “It’s my dog. Did that bitch Janie Page say I brought in dogs that weren’t mine? Why would I do that? She’s hated me since I started going there. I’d go somewhere else, but the next vet’s something like thirty miles away, you know. She’s hated me! You wouldn’t believe how many women hate me!”

  My ex-wife used to say the same thing. That’s what made me so surprised when she left for someone named Michele, before I learned that it was someone named Michel, a French-Canadian guy who’d come down south in order to write a book on folk artists.

  Gus said, “You want another? If you drink them that fast, I can make you a triple and put it in a regular glass like his.”

  Tapeworm Johnson barked twice for some reason and began panting. She looked at Loretta, then chewed toward the base of her own tail.

  Holly said, “Hell, man, if you have a tumbler I’ll take a double-triple. I’m finished for the day. I’ve finished my work for the day. I’ve done my job, for the most part.”

  I couldn’t tell if she wanted me to ask what she did for a living, or if I was supposed to comprehend that taking someone else’s dog to a vet, getting ten of its toenails clipped, and having her own neck area scanned for microchips constituted a full day’s activities. So I was happy when Gus asked, “What kind of work is it that you got, lets you be done before noon? I want that job, unless it’s third shift.”

  I said, “Me, too,” just to be one of the boys. I didn’t even want the flexibility of being a basket weaver, to be honest. In another life I kind of wanted to be an astronaut, seeing as by then they’d have most of the kinks worked out.

  “Oh, you know. I do what I do,” Holly said. “I’ve been a couple things in corporate America, and then I got out before the bubble burst. Now I do what I do. Right now I’m helping some people raise money and awareness toward the plight of the Nepalese. I’m a fundraiser. If I feel like working in the middle of the night, I call potential donors in Japan. I have an altitude training tent that I sleep in and everything, just in case I get a call and need to fly to the Himalayas on short notice.”

  Gus said nothing. I stared at Holly way too long, trying to gather it all in. I said, “I’ve seen those things. It’s like what a bubble boy lives in. Hey, what’s your last name, anyway?”

  Holly said, “I’m down to fifteen percent oxygen.”

  On my way to the men’s room an hour later I thought about how Holly might’ve killed some brain cells. I had seen a documentary one time about some mountain bikers readying themselves for the Leadville 100 out in Colorado. They’d slept in an altitude training tent for three months. None of them could tie their shoes or figure out a zipper, much less sing the National Anthem or name two rivers east of the Mississippi. They could ride bikes up steep inclines, though. I thought, Will it be immoral to have sex with a woman who’s only using fifteen percent of her brain? I thought, As bad as corporate America’s doing, I’m glad Holly isn’t involved with it now, only using fifteen percent oxygen.

  I thought all kinds of things. I wondered how come I tuned Holly out with all her talk of Sherpas between my first and fifth beer, and obsessed with how Wanda would say, “I told you so, I told you so,” like a mantra should she have entered the bar. I daydreamed about Dr. Page showing up not wearing scrubs, and telling me what a good, faithful friend I’d been for Tapeworm. I thought about how I couldn’t get so drunk that I got talked into donating a series of honeysuckle vine baskets so the indigenous people of Nepal could carry them atop their heads like indigenous people. I read the graffiti in the men’s room and wondered if whoever wrote, “The joke’s in your hand, Stet,” referred to the same man Dr. Pate greeted at her office as I left.

  I came back to the bar proper to find Gus alone. Out the window I could see Holly’s Volkswagen not parked next to my truck. Gus stood leaned over the drink box, wringing his hands with the bar towel. “Where the fuck’s my dog?” I said. I walked straight out the door and ran to my truck. Gus followed. I yelled, “Which way did that woman go?”

  Gus said, “She paid the tab.”

  I yelled out, “Tapeworm, Tapeworm, Tapeworm!” in the hope that she’d merely gone out the door, that she went looking for me.

  “She took both dogs,” Gus said. “She paid the tab and left me a big old tip, and then she said she needed to walk the dogs. I heard her car start up and the door close, but I wasn’t thinking.”

  I didn’t want to cry in front of Gus. I got in my truck, and drove way too fast and impaired away from the direction where I lived. Wanda leaving me was one thing, but losing Tapeworm would’ve sent me to Gus’s Place daily. I rolled down the windows and yelled for my dog about every fifty yards.

  When the road finally came to a four-way stop sign I pulled over and listened for the remnants of a puttering VW engine. When I called a 911 operator and explained the situation—unstable woman who steals dogs, thinks there’s a microchip implanted between her shoulder blades, fundraiser for the impoverished goat herders of Nepal—the man on the other end informed me that it was a felony to misuse the 911 system, but I felt pretty sure that it was only a misdemeanor.

  I made a U-turn, slowed down to see no one parked at the bar, and continued until I got to Dr. Page’s vet clinic to see if she had this Holly woman’s phone number and address. The lot was empty. I’m not too proud to say that I opened my glove compartment, found some old paper napkins from Captain Del Kell’s Galley Bell, wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

  Tapeworm sat in the waiting room alone, the handle of her leash looped around that doorknob attached to the counter.

  I said, “Goddamn, I’m glad you’re here,” and bent down to hug my dog. Dr. Page came out of the back. Maybe I blurted out some blubbering sounds. I said, “That Holly woman stole my dog.”

  Dr. Page said, “What’re you doing back here?” She reached down and scratched Tapeworm’s jowl. “Did you forget something?”

  I said, “I’m serious. That Holly woman stole Tapeworm when I went to take a leak.”

  My veterinarian shook her head. She looked at me as if I made everything up. Then she walked over to one of the end tables and said, “You really ought to reconsider getting a chip for Tapeworm, and some of this lost-pet medical insurance.”

  I untethered my dog. Later, I would blame my irrational thought processes either on too many beers in too short a time, or from just thinking about an oxygen deprivation tent. “I might only be a honeysuckle-vine basket weaver who supplies a number of arts and crafts galleries in the South, but I know a scam when I see one. You hire out Holly to pretend to be crazy, then she kidnaps dogs and you get some kind of kickback from the pet insurance and microchip companies. You can’t fool me. You’re not going to get this by on me.”

  Dr. Page didn’t react one way or the other immediately. In future dreams, I would see her standing in my bedroom, wearing scrubs, acting nonplussed as a woven trivet. She would shake her head one way, her index finger working in tandem. I would feel guilty, as I did standing there with my dog’s leash handle in one hand and a pamphlet for the lost-pet insurance in the other.

  I could’ve walked out indignantly. I could’ve asked for Dr. Page to forget veterinarian-client privileges and give me Holly’s address and phone number so I could run her down and seek justice. Instead, I stood there, frozen, my dog Tapeworm wagging her tail ready to go for another ride, and wondered if this type of situation finally caused my first vet to overdose.

  “Maybe crazy Holly’s like that Christo artist who covers things up, then unveils them anew. Maybe she wanted you to realize what you’d taken for granted in a pet,” Dr. Page said.

  I was stunned. How could a woman awash in Norman Rockwell prints understand the avant-garde work of Christo? I asked her if she’d like to meet somewhere, like Gus’s bar, when she got off work. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and knew that no apology would work.

  Dr. Page said it might be bes
t if I leave.

  I could not make eye contact. I felt empty, empty. When I asked my dog’s veterinarian if she could sell me some horse tranquilizers, I tried to make it come off as a joke. I might’ve said, “Corporate America.” I might’ve thought, Choke collar.

  STAFF PICKS

  ACCORDING TO THE RADIO STATION’S RULES, CONTESTANTS were permitted to place their hands anywhere on the RV they felt comfortable. Staff Puckett chose the Winnebago’s spare tire, which was sheathed in vinyl emblazoned with the image of Mount Rushmore. Staff had considered visiting the granite sculpture, off and on, for twenty years, and now she vowed to herself that soon she’d make her way northwest on mostly back roads, then stare down those four faces whose stony expressions didn’t look much different from her own.

  But first she had to win the RV. She’d been one of the nineteen nineteenth callers during WCRS’s nineteen-day “19th Nervous Breakdown” marathon. Now she and the other eighteen contestants were gathered in the parking lot of State Line RV World, near the border of Georgia and South Carolina. The rules were simple: Contestants had to remain in contact with the RV. The last one standing got the keys.

  A man to Staff’s left stuck his hand on the taillight, and a woman with bleached hair reached up high onto the back window, which Staff thought a questionable move. The other sixteen contestants—including a doughy, balding man whose shirt blazed with advertising logos—chose the hood, windshield, door handles, random snatches of stripe.

  “Good morning,” the balding man said. While he waited in vain for Staff‘s reply, he gave what seemed to be a sincere smile, and Staff automatically believed that he wouldn’t last long.

  The bleached-hair woman said, “They say there’s going to be good prizes for everyone who makes it toward the end, like camp stoves and whatnot. Like tents and sleeping bags.” She said, “My name’s Marguerite,” but she didn’t offer a handshake, knowing better than to take her palm off the window and get disqualified first, probably to receive only a pack of matches or a road atlas of the southeastern United States.