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  Miss Dupre didn’t even know the bad word, at least from the expression on her face. Later on I figured that she’d been trained thusly, in her education classes, in some course like Psychology of Pranksters or whatever.

  Tucker pointed at one of the Chucks. Chuck pointed at the other, and then that Chuck chose Bucky, in succession.

  From down the second-grade hallway I’m sure it sounded like a shipload of merchant marines were holding a sing-a-long.

  I know this because our principal, a stern, unamused man named Mr. Uldrick, happened to be taking a group of state legislators on a tour of Forty-Five Elementary at the time, hopeful that we’d get more funding to at least reroof the place so there wouldn’t be doves nesting in every classroom’s ceiling and attracting hunters during season, which subsequently made it difficult to comprehend Miss Dupre over the shotgun blasts.

  Uldrick motioned for us to stop, then took our teacher outside the door. I made out, “See me in my office after school,” and then Miss Dupre said, “My cookies came out funny. I didn’t take any home ec classes in a South Carolina state-supported college.”

  Compton held his shoulders almost to his ears and his eyebrows toward the doves’ nests. Glenn Flack said, “I heard my daddy say those bad words one time to my mom. He was talking about the Korean War.”

  Miss Dupre walked back in slower than she normally moved. Her red-and-white-polka-dot skirt didn’t swish. “I think we’re going to have to stop now, class. I think y’all did a wonderful job. But Mr. Uldrick says it’s very important that we have no fun until three o’clock. It’s officially quiet time. Y’all can pass out your cards to one another and come get two each of my cookies. But we can’t make noise. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t know at the time that presently we would have a new teacher who’d start each day singing a hymn, that Miss Dupre would quit and never teach again. But I swear I studied her face and noticed the same thing I would later see on my own wife’s face and on the faces of both men and women in a textile town gone bust during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

  We tiptoed across our linoleum floor and handed out those BE MINE, I’M ALL YOURS, and YOU’RE SPECIAL nonfolding cards. Shirley Ebo, the only black girl stuck in an otherwise nonintegrated school, gave me a card that must’ve been a reject or a second. Instead of LET’S BE FRIENDS it read only, LET’S FEND. She hadn’t signed it.

  I said, “Thanks, Shirley Ebo.”

  She said, “Does your name stand for something else, Mendal? I mean, is it short for something?”

  I said, “I don’t know. Men-doll. I doubt it.”

  Comp came over and said, “My mother says my name means ‘free,’ but she didn’t want to name me that.” Comp was my best friend from birth onward. In college, he would tell women that his name was short for Complimentary, Compulsive, Compatible, and Complex.

  Shirley said, “My last name means something in Africa. I’m a warrior.”

  I said, “Uh-huh,” and took more cards from my classmates. Miss Dupre sat at her desk, opened the drawer, and stared down. I had completely forgotten to sign a card for her and had no other choice but to approach the desk and hand Miss Dupre what Shirley Ebo had given to me earlier. “‘Let’s Fend,’” my teacher said aloud. “That’s funny, Mendal. Let’s fend. I agree with that.”

  And then she stood up, walked around her desk, took my face in her young hands, and kissed me on the forehead. When she hugged me, the side of my face wedged directly into her cleavage. My classmates let out an “ooh” in a way none of us could perform in music class. I blushed, almost cried, and then the bell rang.

  On my way out of school that day I passed Mr. Uldrick’s office. My teacher sat across from him, her face turned away. I stood there and watched the principal wave his arms. Then he leaned back in his chair and spread his feet on the desk. Miss Dupre stood up, pointed at him, then looked at me standing by the door.

  Years later I would say that she blew a kiss, mouthed, “Thank you,” and waved to me in a manner that meant for me to get away and keep going.

  HOW ARE WE GOING TO LOSE THIS ONE?

  ALEX MULL SAYS IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE PHONE book’s expired. What would it matter? It’s not like costume shops go in and out of business. Alex has a plan—first the costume shops, then the taxidermists. Taxidermists don’t go out of business, either. He doesn’t have any facts on hand, but he imagines that most men who mount animals learned from their fathers, and so on. The bartender hands it over and says, “Costs a dollar to use the phone,” because he’s never seen Alex. In most cases the bartender only charges a quarter for strangers, but since Alex wears a suit—no one has ever worn a suit inside Doffers Paradise Lounge—it doesn’t seem like too expensive a request.

  Alex says, “I got my cell phone.” He pats the inside of his coat pocket. He turns to the Yellow Pages and tries to think of other places besides costume shops and taxidermists.

  Doffers Paradise Lounge is three streets over and down from where Poe Mill stood before it burned down from either arsonists or the homeless, like about every other ex-cotton mill not yet turned into condos in South Carolina. At one time every stool and booth filled with men and women off their shifts, pockets full of money, hair full of lint. Nowadays the place attracts only what few retirees remain in the mill village, or college kids out trying to gain some real-world experience beyond Starbucks, or daring men and women alike willing to ask the bartender if he knows where they can find some crack.

  “Are you Doffer?” Alex asks. Then he says, “I guess I’ll have a Bud,” and points to a display of choices behind the bar. There are no light beers, only Budweiser, Pabst, and regular Miller, all in cans.

  From where Alex sits, he can look at the mirror and see out the window behind him to a house where, a week earlier, a crudely tattooed black man not more than twenty years old adopted a medium-sized stray mutt from the Humane Society where Alex has worked for three years. Alex got out of college with his degree in sociology, went straight to graduate school for a master’s in public relations, and—despite offers from advertising firms in Atlanta and Charlotte—settled down in Greenville. His parents tell him that he should’ve never taken an elective course in ethics and a seminar on Darwin. His parents tell him one person cannot make a diference when it comes to behavior, whether human or canine.

  That’s about the same thing his ex-fiancée Laurie said, and thus why she’s getting married to another man tonight at seven o’clock. It’s why Alex wears a suit, in case he gets the courage to show up at the wedding on the other side of town, unannounced and uninvited.

  The bartender, who’s wearing a work shirt with “Slick” above the left pocket, says, “Young man like you from not around here wouldn’t know.” He sets the beer can in front of Alex and says, “Two dollars.”

  “I live here,” Alex says. “I’m from here. My name’s Alex.” He sticks out his hand.

  Slick shakes it firmly. He says, “Doffer’s a job. Not a spinner or weaver. Doffer.” He doesn’t offer up his name.

  Alex looks through the Yellow Pages, places a finger on a costume shop’s phone number, and pulls out his phone. When a woman answers he says, “Y’all got any bear suits?”

  The door opens, and an older man steps in, leaning on a carved stick. He says, “Another day, another doldrum.” Slick reaches into the cooler and extracts a PBR. The customer reaches into his pocket, pulls out four quarters, and stacks them beside the can. Slick slides them closer to his side of the counter.

  Alex says, “Thank you anyway,” and hangs up. He looks at the new man’s stick and says, “Cool. Did you carve that yourself?”

  The man sets it lengthwise on the counter. There are snakes and frogs carved into it mostly, but the handle’s a dog’s head. He says, “Yessir. That’s about all I do now. Sell it to you for forty dollars.”

  Alex thinks, That would make a great wedding present. He says, “Let me think about it.”

  The man says, “Shupee.”


  Alex smiles. He thinks it might be some local way of saying, “Hurry up,” or, “I’ll be here until you decide.”

  “I sign every one of them, right down at the bottom.” He points. “Shupee. That’s my name right there.”

  “Among other things,” says Slick. He laughs and looks at Alex. “You just come back from a funeral? I hope you ain’t going to one with beer on your breath. That ain’t right.”

  Soon enough, Alex thinks, he will explain, in detail, the entire situation about Laurie. And he’ll admit that the man she’s marrying is some kind of national mountain bike champion named Todd, that they’re going on their honeymoon to a number of trails so he can keep up his regimen, so Laurie will learn to love the sport as much as he, so they can—this is Alex’s theory—use the entire honeymoon as a tax write-off. Alex figures he will even ask the bartender and Shupee what they think about his plan: to dress up in a bear suit and try to scare the new groom on one of the trails they’re going to ride up in the Blue Ridge.

  They’ll think that they’re talking some sense into him.

  Alex checks the mirror. He sees the black man come out on his porch, the mutt beside him on a leash.

  ALEX HADN’T CONSIDERED the danger when he volunteered to track men who adopt probable pit-bull bait. He’d said to his boss, “If we can just get it in the breeders’ heads that we’re on to them, that’ll slow things down somewhat. And we can also get some of them arrested.”

  His boss, rightly, said, “No.”

  But Alex made a decision. Until today, he hadn’t realized that perhaps he profiled pit-bull breeders as young African American men with barely visible green tattoos on their biceps, and that more often than not he found himself following these men out into the country or back to the failing clapboard houses that surrounded mill villages. He took notes. Sometimes he came back at night and circled the prospective breeders’ neighborhoods, looking for incriminating activity; in his mind he saw himself calling 911 while watching men, hundred-dollar bills waving above their heads, betting on dogfights in the front yard of one of these residences.

  Laurie had warned him about this. She had said, “I bet if you got on the Internet and did some research, you’d find out that there are little old white women adopting pit bulls, or adopting stray dogs used in training pit bulls.” Alex knew that she probably had a point. As a nod to her—even after she left him, met the guy who wore a helmet on his head more often than not just like some kind of shell-shock victim, and got engaged within a few months—Alex followed every tenth old white woman home. They all seemed to have whirligigs in their yards, he noticed. That had to mean something sociologically, he thought.

  AFTER THREE BEERS Alex looks at his watch and reminds himself to set a pace. Four hours until the wedding. The black man with the stray mutt has gone back inside his house.

  Shupee says, “No. Whatever you do—and Slick will agree with me on this one—don’t go dress up in a bear suit and try to scare your old girlfriend and her husband. First off, you’ll get caught somehow. And when you get caught, you’ll come across as—what’s the right word here?”

  Slick says, “Idiot. Insane. Pathetic.”

  “Those are right about on target,” Shupee says. “No, you need to do the opposite of all that. I ain’t talking the opposite of a bear costume. What would be the opposite of a bear costume?”

  They all think for a moment, and then Alex says, “Salmon.”

  “I ain’t asking you to consider going up to the mountains wearing a salmon costume, I’m asking that you act as though she don’t matter none to you anymore. Do the opposite of pining. You don’t want to appear that you pine for her.” Shupee picks up his stick and looks at it. “This is from a tulip poplar. It ain’t pine. Maybe you need to carry this stick around with you all the time as a way to remember.”

  Alex smiles. He shoves the telephone directory back to Slick. He says, “I think you’re probably right. How much did you say that stick costs?”

  “Sixty dollars.”

  “Let me keep thinking about it. I might go fifty.”

  Slick pulls out an Iwanna newspaper from under the bar. He says, “I might get me a pop-up camper. I made the mistake of promising a pop-up camper for the grandkids. I might get me one and just park it in the back.”

  Alex thinks of this as a perfect opportunity to say, “I read the other day where people are keeping their pit bulls in pop-up campers so as to make them meaner. Something about the confined space, you know, and they get meaner.”

  Alex tries to read their faces. Slick turns the page of his newspaper. Shupee says, “That sounds pretty dumb, but I wouldn’t know.” He looks at his wristwatch. “Daggum it. Today is Friday, right? I got to go get Francine’s baby. I keep forgetting that I promised to get Francine’s baby. Hold my spot,” he says. He takes his cane off the bar and leans it between his stool and the counter.

  Alex waits until Shupee’s gone. He says to Slick, “All that talk about pit bulls seems to have him a little antsy. Is it my imagination, or did he seem a little uncomfortable?”

  Slick says, “What? No. Shupee just forgot about his wife’s new boy. He keeps him on Fridays and Saturdays so Francine and her husband can have some alone time.”

  Alex nods. He thinks, You mean grandson. Who would keep his ex-wife’s kid if it wasn’t his?

  He looks at the mirror behind Slick and notices the black man again, this time sitting without the dog. Alex turns around to look out the window. He says to Slick, “What’s the story with that guy?”

  Slick meanders around the bar counter and looks out the window. He goes to the door, opens it, and yells out, “Hey, Lawrence! Man in here wants to know your story.”

  Alex says, “Shhh. Shhh.” He laughs. He reaches for Shupee’s carved stick.

  Lawrence waves and goes back inside his house. Alex turns around to Slick and says, “Don’t do that, man.” He points for another beer, then presses down on Shupee’s cane to test its rigidity.

  THE DOOR OPENS, and Shupee walks back in with a baby in a car-seat carrier. He sets the thing atop the counter and says to Slick, “Some things don’t change. I got yelled at for being a half hour late.”

  It’s a boy. He doesn’t cry.

  Alex points Shupee’s stick back his way and says, “That’s your son, or grandson?”

  Slick says, “There he is. You can ask him yourself,” as Lawrence walks into Doffers Paradise Lounge. He wears a sleeveless T-shirt, and his blue jeans ride low. Shupee says, “What’s up, Lawrence?”

  Lawrence says, “Hey,” and turns his head around to look at Alex. “I know you. I got my dog from you.”

  At first Alex thinks about denying it all, about saying something like, “I’ve never seen you in my life,” or, “I have an identical twin.” He says, “You wouldn’t have a bear suit by any chance, would you?”

  “Are we back on that?” Shupee says. He takes a beer from Slick. “I thought we had that all settled before I left. Goddamn. I can’t leave for five minutes. Loosen your tie, son.”

  Lawrence sits down between Shupee and Alex. He says, “I know you from the Humane Society. I saw you four or five days ago, man. You were right there.”

  Shupee asks Slick to turn on the television. He says, “The Braves are playing an afternoon game. I want to see how we’re going to lose this one. They’re playing the Cubs. I want to see how either one of them’s going to lose.”

  Alex nods his head at Lawrence and says, “That’s right. I’ll be damned. You got that old mutt.”

  Lawrence stares at Alex, then looks to the bartender. He says, “Hey, Slick, I’ll have a Miller’s and a Goody’s Powder.” To Alex he says, “That ain’t no mutt. That dog I got from you has some of that dog-jump-off-the-ship-when-the-Spanish-Ramada-sank-offshore in him. You know what I’m talking about? Wheaten terrier. Those dogs jumped off and swam to shore.”

  Alex thinks, I don’t think Ramada’s the right word. He thinks, That dog you got is not whatever
you’re thinking. If anything, it’s a wirehaired pointing griffon. He says, “I’ve had too much to drink.” Then he imagines his ex-girlfriend and her new husband checking into a Ramada Inn somewhere outside of Barcelona, ready to take on any mountain bike trails of the far-off Pyrenees.

  “He’s thinking about going to his ex-wife’s wedding,” says Shupee.

  “No, man!” says Lawrence. “Big mistake.”

  “She was just a girlfriend. She wasn’t my ex-wife. Shupee’s exaggerating. She wasn’t my wife ever.”

  Slick opens up the Iwanna again. He says, “I’m thinking I might get me a tiller. I need me a good tiller.”

  Shupee’s wife’s son raises his hand and groans. Shupee looks up at the television set and says, “They’ll find a way to lose, believe me. They should be called the Atlanta Confederates, or the Atlanta Rebels. No offense, Lawrence.”

  Lawrence says, “I got you, Shupe.”

  “I know you’re thinking this got to be my grandboy, but it ain’t,” Shupee says to Alex. “Let’s just say that my wife and I split up, and she got remarried, and then this come out. Who’d’ve known? It ain’t like we didn’t have a child. We got us two children, both went to college as a matter of fact. And then she got remarried and had another at age fifty-two. It’s not some kind of record. I mean, it might be some kind of record here on the mill hill, but it ain’t no kind of world record. I checked up on that. I thought I might could get us all some money for that.”

  Shupee shakes the jar of pickled eggs on the bar so that they swirl around like a poor man’s lava lamp. His ex-wife’s son turns his head slowly and smiles. He lets out another groan. Shupee nods.

  Lawrence says, “How they going to lose today?” and jerks his head at the screen. “You got your error, your blown save, your walk-off home run. Who wants to make a bet? I say walk-off homer.”