and glass cabinets filled with all kinds of canned goods, spices, and fine china. It was very neat and ordered, even the teacup set tidily in the copper sink spoke to the owner’s sense of order.
Dream Dog opened a cabinet and pulled down a box of Oreo cookies. He took out three and then placed the box back on the shelf.
“Axel keeps ’em for me,” he said. “My mom can’t eat ’em on account’a she’s got an allergy to coconut oil and sometimes they use coconut oil in these here. But you know I love ’em. An’ Axel keeps ’em for me on this shelf right here.”
There was a reverence and pride in Dream Dog’s words —
and something else too.
t h e l i v i n g r o o m
had three plush chaise lounges set in a square with one side missing. The backless sofas stood upon at least a dozen Persian rugs. The carpets had been thrown with no particular design one on top of the other and gave the room a definitely Arabian flavor. The smell of incense helped the mood as did the stone mosaics hung upon the walls. These tiled images were obviously old, probably original, coming from Rome and maybe the Middle East. One was of a snarling, long-tongued wolf harrying a naked brown maiden; another one was a scene of 6 4
C i n n a m o n K i s s
a bacchanal with men, women, children, and dogs drinking, dancing, kissing, fornicating, and leaping for joy.
In each of the four corners was a five-foot-high Grecian urn glazed in black and brown-red and festooned with the images of naked men in various competitions.
“I love these couches, man,” Dream Dog said to me. He had stretched out on the middle lounger. “They’re worth a lotta money. I told Axel that somebody might come in and steal his furniture while he was outta town, and that’s when he asked me to look out for him.”
“He outta town a lot?”
“Yeah. For the past year he been goin’ to Germany and Switzerland and Cairo. You know Cairo’s in Egypt and Egypt is part of Africa. I learned that from a brother talks down on the campus before they have the Congo drum line.”
“You think he’s in Cairo now?” I asked.
“Nah, he’s always down at the campus on Sunday talkin’ history before the drum line.”
“Not the guy at school,” I said patiently, “Axel.”
Dream Dog bounced off the couch and held an Oreo out to me.
“Cookie?”
I’m not much for sweets but even if I had a sugar tooth the size of Texas I wouldn’t have eaten from his filthy claws.
“Watchin’ my weight,” I said.
On a side table, set at the nexus where two of the loungers met, were two squat liquor glasses. Both had been filled with brandy but the drinks had evaporated, leaving a golden film at the bottom of each glass. Next to the glasses was an ashtray in which a lit cigarette had been set and left to burn down to its 6 5
W a lt e r M o s l e y
filter. There was also a photograph of a man, his arms around an older woman, with them both looking at the camera.
“Who’s this?” I asked my companion.
“That’s Axel and his mom. She died three years ago,” Dream Dog said. “His father passed away from grief a year and a half later.”
The younger Bowers couldn’t have been over twenty-five, maybe younger. He had light brown hair and a handsome smile.
You could tell by his clothes and his mother’s jewelry that there was money there. But there was also sorrow in both their smiles and I thought that maybe a poor childhood in southern Louisiana wasn’t the worst place that a man could come from.
“I told him that he should open the drapes too,” Dream Dog was saying. “I mean God gives sunlight to warm you and to let you see.”
“Where’s the bedroom?” I asked.
“Axel’s cool though,” my new friend said as he led me through a double-wide door on the other side of the room. “He comes from money and stuff, but he knows that people are worth more than money and that we got to share the wealth, that a ship made outta gold will sink . . .”
He flipped a wall switch and we found ourselves in a wide, wood-paneled hallway. Down one side of the hall were Japanese woodprints framed in simple cherrywood. Each of these prints (which looked original) had the moon in one aspect or another as part of the subject. There were warriors and poets, fishermen and fine ladies. Down the other side were smaller paintings. I recognized one that I’d seen in an art book at Paris Minton’s Florence Avenue Bookshop. It was the work of Paul Klee. Upon closer examination I saw that all of the paintings on that side of the wall were done by him.
6 6
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“I paint some too,” Dream Dog said when I stopped to exam-ine the signature. “Animals mostly. Dogs and cats and ducks. I told Axel that he could have some of my drawings when he got tired’a this stuff.”
It was a large bedroom. The oversized bed seemed like a raft on a wide river of blue carpet. The sheets and covers were a jaundiced yellow and the windows looked out under a broad redwood that dominated the backyard.
