Beside it was a battered bookshelf my father had left to me, filled with his eclectic collection of books: Leaves of Grass; James Joyce’s Ulysses and The Dubliners; Winesburg, Ohio; Moby Dick; The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay; Byron’s Don Juan; Poetry and Prose of William Blake; A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield; A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises; War and Peace; The Red Badge of Courage; Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness; two Dashiell Hammett novels, The Glass Key and Red Harvest; a collection of Shakespeare’s works, Roget’s Thesaurus and a Webster’s dictionary, and his favorite, The Great Gatsby.
When I was a kid, he read aloud to me from all these books, although I didn’t understand most of the words at the time. In his fading years, when the gas he had inhaled on the Western Front had taken its toll and breathing came hard to him, I took up the chore and read to him. It was an evening ritual. He sat in his rocking chair and I would read for an hour or two until he finally fell asleep. He slept sitting up; breathing was particularly difficult when he lay down. Sometimes I would simply open a book and start reading passages to him or he would ask me to read something in particular. He loved poetry, and would often stop me and correct my cadence.
Some quotes had stayed with me through the years, and sometimes after a particularly difficult day I would turn to the bookcase and read aloud to myself. Among his favorite verses were the opening lines of “The Dream,” which he often recited to my mom:
Love, if I weep it will not matter,
And if you laugh I shall not care;
Foolish am I to think about it,
But it is good to feel you there.
But I think his favorite was Shakespeare’s sonnet:
When, in disgrace
With fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries…
As he neared death, his choices became more melancholy and he often asked me to recite the last lines of Millay’s “To a Poet Who Died Young”:
Many a bard’s untimely death
Lends unto his verses breath;
Here’s a song was never sung:
Growing old is dying young.
My mother was never the same after his death. She kept the flag from his coffin, still so carefully folded by the honor guard at his funeral, on a night table beside her bed, sweeping her hand gently across it each evening as she said good night to him. Within a year of his passing, she had fallen into a deep depression. She died in the state hospital for the insane.
That experience-going to visit her, holding her hand as she stared bleakly and unspeaking at the ceiling, ignoring the occasional screams and hyena-like laughter of the other patients-still invaded my nightmares at times.
I opened up some windows to air the place out and let Rosebud into the backyard. The tenant before me had dogs, which accounted for the fenced-in backyard. The dogs also had dug up the yard until it looked like a bunch of archeologists had been digging for dinosaur skeletons back there, which accounted for the “no pets” edict. The landlord had made a halfhearted attempt to iron out the yard and had thrown some rye grass around, but now there were more weeds than grass. Near the back there were a yucca plant and a couple of shrubs, which would give Rosebud something to pee on.
I wasn’t good about lawns. I didn’t like cutting them, I didn’t like watering them. And I didn’t like sitting on them in a canvas beach chair reading dime novels. So basically, the backyard looked like a deserted battlefield from the Great War.
I let Slugger out and he immediately laid claim to the yucca plant, the shrubs, and everything else over six inches tall in the yard.
I went into the office and put my case on the table and emptied it, making neat stacks of things so I could find them easily, then went into the living room and piled a stack of ten records, randomly selected, on the player. The first to come up was Basie’s “Sent for You Yesterday and Here You Come Today.” It got my blood running and I went in the kitchen, poured myself a slug of Canadian Club, dropped one cube of ice in it. I went back to my office and sorted through the check receipts, putting them in order, and then listed them by bank and date on the blackboard, looking for patterns. But there wasn’t anything to really go on. It was like trying to play a tune on a piano with no black keys.
So I packed it in for the night, took a hot shower, sprinkled on a little talcum powder, got into my silk pajama bottoms, and went into the living room. Rosebud was sitting in front of the record player with his head cocked to one side, listening to Benny Goodman’s “China Boy.” He looked like that cute little white RCA dog who had grown up and turned out to be a big ugly mutt.
I turned off the player, locked the doors, turned off the lights, and got in bed. Rosebud came up beside the bed, looked at me for a moment or two, then made that little circle like he was chasing his tail in slow motion, lay down, and snorted.
A minute after I turned off the light and arranged myself for sleeping, I felt him crawl onto the bed. He did it with sly caution. A leg, then another leg, then his back legs, then his body sliding across the covers. It took him about five minutes to make the journey. Then he crept around again in that little circle he made before lying down. He settled in, gave a big slobbery sigh, and he was out.
He snored.
CHAPTER 4
I awoke from a deep sleep to hear Rosebud scratching on the back door. A moment later he came into the bedroom, sat next to the bed, and growled at me. I opened one eye and stared at him.
“Don’t you ever bark, Slugger?” I said.
I hip-hopped barefoot back to the kitchen, let him out and left the door cracked for him, fed him and filled his water dish. I went to my bathroom, shaved and showered, and put on my dark suit, the one I wear when I’m going to be talking to nice, decent, everyday people who are anxious to cooperate with the law and usually tell you more than you want to know. Muscle and blackjack not required.
I put another can of dog food in Rosebud’s bowl, refilled the water dish, and put them outside in the little cave under the alcove.
He watched every move, and when I started back into the house, those dark eyes followed me to the door.
“Try not to bark or make a ruckus,” I told him. “Spend the day looking for Slugger.”
Fifteen minutes later I was tooting the horn in Ski’s driveway. I picked him up every day. He had a brand-new Plymouth but his wife, Claire, used it to take kids to school, go shopping, and do whatever women do all day long to make life pleasant for the rest of the family.
My five-year-old used Olds needed new shocks, the fan belt squealed like a pig on the way to the slaughterhouse, and I had to stand on the brakes to slow down, not an easy thing to do since I had to move the seat all the way back to accommodate Agassi’s frame and drive with the tips of my toes. There was a hole in the upholstery on the passenger side, which was covered by a blue embroidered pillow with a couple of palm trees framing yellow letters that said “Welcome to San Diego.” And it had that old-car smell, a mixture of oil, gasoline, cheap carry-out food, and an ashtray that hadn’t been emptied since Hitler was selling hand-painted postcards on the streets of Vienna. It got me there, which was all that mattered.
We stopped at Wally’s coffeehouse, which is on the way, and got coffee in paper cups and a bag of sinkers, and Ski read the newspaper as he always did, running an occasional headline by me if it was something he thought I needed to know or a comical item like: escaped kangaroo kicks preacher to death at bus stop.
As we pulled away from the curb, a flatbed truck went by, going the other way. There were two large billboards on the bed. Red letters on a field of white: buy bonds keep America free join the armed forces today