The Dog of the South Read Free Page A

offender.”
    â€œYou’ll have to get your own lawyer, Dupree.”
    â€œWhere am I supposed to get him? I’ve called every son of a bitch in the yellow pages.”
    A good lawyer, he thought, would be able to forestall the psychiatric examination at the prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. That examination was what he feared most, and with good reason, even though the finding would no doubt have provided a solid defense. In any case, he didn’t really need a lawyer, good or bad, because on the following Friday night he jumped bail and ran off with my wife in my Ford Torino.
    Since that night I had been biding my time but now that I knew where they were, more or less, I was ready to make my move. I had very little cash money for the trip and no credit cards. My father was floating somewhere on a lake near Eufaula, Alabama, in his green plastic boat, taking part in a bass tournament. Of course I had had many opportunities to explain the thing to him but I had been ashamed to do so. I was no longer an employee of the paper and I couldn’t go to the credit union. My friend Burke never had any money. I could have sold some of my guns but I was reluctant to do so, saving that as a last resort. Gun fanciers are quick to sniff out a distress sale and I would have taken a beating from those heartless traders.
    Then on the very day of my departure I remembered the savings bonds. My mother had left them to me when she died. I kept them hidden behind the encyclopedias where Norma never tarried and I had all but forgotten about them. Norma was a great one to nose around in my things. I never bothered her stuff. I had a drawer full of pistols in my desk and I kept that drawer locked but she got it open somehow and handled those pistols. Little rust spots from her moist fingertips told the story. Not even my food was safe. She ate very little, in fact, but if some attractive morsel on my plate happened to catch her eye she would spear it and eat it in a flash without acknowledging that she had done anything out of the way. She knew I didn’t like that. I didn’t tamper with her plate and she knew I didn’t like her tampering with my plate. If the individual place setting means no more than that, then it is all a poor joke and you might as well have a trough and be done with it. She wouldn’t keep her hands off my telescope either. But the Hope Diamond would have been safe behind those Britannicas .
    I retrieved the bonds and sat down at the kitchen table to count them. I hadn’t seen them in a long time and I decided to line them up shoulder to shoulder and see if I could cover every square inch of table surface with bonds. When I had done this, I stood back and looked at them. These were twenty-five-dollar E bonds.
    Just then I heard someone at the door and I thought it was the children. Some sort of youth congress had been in session at the Capitol for two or three days and children were milling about all over town. A few had even wandered into Gum Street where they had no conceivable business. I had been packing my clothes and watching these youngsters off and on all day through the curtain and now—the very thing I feared—they were at my door. What could they want? A glass of water? The phone? My signature on a petition? I made no sound and no move.
    â€œRay!”
    It was Jack Wilkie and not the kids. What a pest! Day and night! I went to the door and unchained it and let him in but I kept him standing in the living room because I didn’t want him to see my savings-bond table.
    He said, “Why don’t you turn on some lights in here or raise a shade or something?”
    â€œI like it this way.”
    â€œWhat do you do, just stay in here all the time?”
    He went through this same business at the beginning of each visit, the implication being that my way of life was strange and unwholesome. Jack was not only a bondsman and a lawyer of sorts but a businessman