And it did seem apropos often enough. Robert was touring the country, depending for his locomotion upon the kindness of passing motorists. As charitable as his hosts were, they were apt to insist upon a quid pro quo of conversation, and Robert had learned to converse extemporaneously upon a variety of subjects. One of these was that of recycled blue jeans, a subject close at once to his heart and his skin, and Robert’s own jeans often served as the lead-in to this line of conversation, being either funky and mellow or altogether disreputable, depending upon one’s point of view, which in turn largely depended (it must be said) upon one’s age.
One day in West Virginia, on that stretch of Interstate 79 leading from Morgantown down to Charleston, Robert thumbed a ride with a man who, though not many years older than himself, drove a late-model Cadillac. Robert, his backpack in the backseat and his body in the front, could not have been more pleased. He had come to feel that hitching a ride in an expensive car endowed one with all the privileges of ownership without the nuisance of making the payments.
Then, as the car cruised southward, Robert noticed that the driver was glancing repeatedly at his, which is to say Robert’s, legs. Covert glances at that, sidelong and meaningful. Robert sighed inwardly. This, too, was part of the game, and had ceased to shock him. But he had so been looking forward to riding in this car and now he would have to get out.
The driver said, “Just admiring your jeans.”
“I guess they’re just beginning to break in,” Robert said, relaxing now. “I’ve certainly had them a while.”
“Well, they look just right now. Got a lot of wear left in them.”
“I guess they’ll last for years,” Robert said. “With the proper treatment. You know, that brings up something I’ve been wondering about for a long time.” And he went into his routine, which had become rather a little set piece by this time, ending with the question that had plagued him from the start. “So where on earth does that Rockford company get all these jeans? Who provides them?”
“Funny you should ask,” the young man said. “I don’t suppose you noticed my license plates before you got in?” Robert admitted he hadn’t. “Few people do,” the young man said. “Land of Lincoln is the slogan on them, and they’re from Illinois. And I’m from Rockford. As a matter of fact, I’m with that very company.”
“But that’s incredible! For the longest time I’ve wanted to know the answers to my questions, and now at long last—” He broke off. “Why are we leaving the Interstate?”
“Bypass some traffic approaching Charleston. There’s construction ahead and it can be a real bottleneck. Yes, I’m with the company.”
“In sales, I suppose? Servicing accounts? You certainly have enough accounts. Why, it seems every store in the country buys recycled jeans from you people.”
“Our distribution is rather good,” the young man said, “and our sales force does a good job. But I’m in Acquisitions, myself. I go out and round up the jeans. Then in Rockford they’re washed to clean and sterilize them, patched if they need it and—”
“You’re actually in Acquisitions?”
“That’s a fact.”
“Well, this is my lucky day,” Robert exclaimed. “You’re just the man to give me all the answers. Where do you get the jeans? Who sells them to you? What do you pay for them? What sort of person sells perfectly good jeans?”
“That’s a whole lot of questions at once.”
Robert laughed, happy with himself, his host, and the world. “I just don’t know where to start and it’s got me rattled. Say, this bypass is a small road, isn’t it? I guess not many people know about it and that’s why there’s no other traffic on it. Poor saps’ll all get tangled in traffic going into Charleston.”
“We’ll miss all that.”
“That’s good luck. Let’s see, where can I begin? All right, here’s the big question and I’ve always been puzzled by this one. What’s a company like yours doing in the recycled jeans business?”
“Well,” said the young man, “diversification is the keynote of American business these days.”
“But a company like yours,” Robert said. “Rockford Dog Food, Inc. How did you ever think to get into the business in the first place?”
“Funny you should ask,” said the young man, braking the car smoothly to a stop.
The Gentle Way
I was at the animal shelter over an hour that morning before I found the lamb. She was right out in plain sight in the middle of the barnyard, but the routine called for me to run through the inside chores before taking care of the outside animals. I arrived at the shelter around seven, so I had two hours to get things in shape before Will Haggerty arrived at nine to open up for business.
First on the list that morning was the oven. Will and I had had to put down a dog the night before, a rangy Doberman with an unbreakable vicious streak. The dog had come to us two months ago, less than a month after I started working there. He’d been a beloved family pet for a year and a half before almost taking an arm off a seven-year-old neighbor boy. Two hours after that the Dobe was in a cage at the far end of the shelter. “Please try and find a good home for Rex,” the owners begged us. “Maybe a farm, someplace where he has room to run.”
Will had said all the right things and they left, smiling bravely. When they were gone Will sighed and went back to look at the dog and talk to him. He turned to me. “We could put a fifty-dollar adoption tag on him and move him out of here in a week, Eddie, but I won’t do it. A farm — now this is just what your average farmer needs, isn’t it? Good old Rex is a killer. He’d rip up cats and chickens. Give him room to run and he’d go after sheep and calves. No Dobe is worth a damn unless he’s trained by an expert and the best experts won’t get a hundred percent success. Train one right and he’s still no family pet. He’ll be a good guard dog, a good attack dog, but who wants to live with one of those? I know people who swear by them, but I never yet met a Dobe I could trust.”
“So what happens now?”
“We tag the cage ‘Not For Adoption’ and give the poor beast food and water. Maybe I’ll turn up a trainer who wants to take a chance on him, but frankly I doubt it. Rex here is just too old and too mean. It’s not teaching him new tricks but making him forget the ones he already knows, and that’s a whole lot easier said than done.”
Rex was the first animal we had to put away since I went to work for Will. There must have been a dozen people who walked past the cage and asked to adopt him. Some of them wanted to give him a try even after they heard why he wasn’t available. We wouldn’t let him go. Will worked with him a few times and only confirmed what he already knew. The dog was vicious, and his first taste of blood had finished him; but we kept him around for weeks even after we knew what we had to do.
We were standing in front of the Doberman’s cage when Will dropped a big hand on my shoulder and shook his head sadly. “No sense putting it off anymore,” he said. “That cage is no place for him and there’s no other place he can go. Might as well get it over.”
“You want me to help?”
“He’s a big old boy and it’d be easier with two of us, but I’m not going to tell you to. God knows I got no stomach for it myself.”
I said I’d stick around.