of dusty oleanders under the windows, and a cyprus tree near the street. The front lawn was fairly respectable and was freshly mown. The kid three doors down made thirty cents every ten days cutting it for me.
All in all, a respectable family neighborhood without the desperate sense of community pride of Pacific Meadows. Nobody was trying to impress anybody. People minded their own business, and if you were a little on the eccentric side, and wanted to fill your yard with plastic purple doofus birds or cement over the grass and paint it chartreuse, nobody would give a damn.
I decided Rosebud needed a name change, so I was going to reprogram him simply by calling him Slugger from now on. When I was a kid, my first dog was a little white mutt with a black circle over one eye, kind of like the dog in the Our Gang comedies. I called him Skippy. My mother was always finding fault with him. “It’s sinful the way that dog goes around wetting on the trees,” or “It’s sinful the noise he makes when he drinks.” Everything Skippy did was sinful and ultimately he started answering to “Sinful” and ignoring “Skippy.” He lived until he was about thirteen and he was “Sinful” for most of his life.
I pulled up in the driveway, parked, got out, and went around to the other door and opened it.
“Okay, Slugger,” I said, “welcome home.”
He stared at me with his big tongue hanging out.
I stepped back, clapped my hands, and said, “Come on, Slugger, let’s go.”
Nothing.
“You Slugger, me Zeke,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He just looked at me.
“Damn it, Rosebud, I…”
He was out in a flash, walked straight to the mailbox and peed, then to the cyprus tree, then to a couple of the shrubs. Then he lay down in the middle of the lawn, rolled over, and began twisting to scratch his back. Then he got up, shook off with a great flapping of his big ears, walked to the front door, and sat down.
Reprogramming was going to take a while.
The house was a white bungalow with green trim that was built the year Calvin Coolidge was elected president. A nice living room, a kitchen with an alcove that protruded from the house and looked like it was an afterthought. It had a nice space under it where Slugger could get out of the sun or rain. The dining room could accommodate a table and about four people comfortably. Since I never had company anyway, I had turned it into an office, with a child’s blackboard and several different-colored chalk sticks, and two erasers so I could slap them together to clean them. The bedroom was large enough to fit a double bed, a dresser, two bedside lamps, and an easy chair and lamp for reading. The bathroom had a good-size tub and a stall shower.
My record player was the most expensive thing in the house. It was in the corner of the living room and had record shelves made of orange crates on both sides of it.
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.
