“A dog?” From where he stood he could see her in the kitchen take from the ice box the two chops for supper and wrap them again.
“But certainly, friend,” she said. “Get your hat.”
It was evening, the hot August, the neon flashed and glared, alternately corpse- and hell-glowing the faces in the street and their own too as they walked, she still carrying the two chops in the thick slick clammy butcher’s paper. Within the block they met McCord. “We’ve lost our job,” she told him. “So we’re looking for a dog.”
Presently it began to seem to Wilbourne that the invisible dog was actually among them. They were in a bar now, one which they frequented, meeting perhaps twice a week by chance or prearrangement the group which McCord had brought into their lives. There were four of these (“We’ve lost our job,” McCord told them. “And now we’re waiting for a dog.”) present now, the seven of them sitting about a table set for eight, an empty chair, an empty gap, the two chops unwrapped now and on a plate beside a glass of neat whiskey among the highballs. They had not eaten yet; twice Wilbourne leaned to her: “Hadn’t we better eat something? It’s all right; I can—”
“Yes, it’s all right. It’s fine.” She was not speaking to him. “We’ve got forty-eight dollars too much; just think of that. Even the Armours haven’t got forty-eight dollars too much. Drink up, ye armourous sons. Keep up with the dog.”
“Yah,” McCord said. “Set, ye armourous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves.”
The neon flashed and glared, the traffic lights blinked from green to red and back to green again above the squawking cabs and hearse-like limousines. They had not eaten yet though they had lost two members of the party, they were six in the cab, sitting on each other’s knees while Charlotte carried the chops (they had lost the paper now) and McCord held the invisible dog; it was named Moreover now, from the Bible, the poor man’s table. “But listen,” McCord said. “Just listen a minute. Doc and Gillespie and I own it. Gillespie’s up there now, but he will have to be back in town by the first and it will be empty. You could take your hundred bucks—”
“You’re impractical,” Charlotte said. “You’re talking about security. Have you no soul?—How much money have we got now, Harry?”
He looked at the meter. “A hundred and twenty-two dollars.”
“But listen,” McCord said.
“All right,” she said. “But now is no time to talk. You’ve made your bed; lie in it. And pull the covers over your head.” They were in Evanston now; they had stopped at a drugstore and they had a flashlight now, the cab crawling along a suburban and opulent curb while Charlotte, leaning across McCord, played the flashlight upon the passing midnight lawns. “There’s one,” she said.
“I don’t see it,” McCord said.
“Look at that fence. Did you ever hear of an iron fence with a wreath of pansies in each panel that didn’t have an iron dog inside of it? The house has got a mansard roof too.”
“I dont see any house,” McCord said.
“I dont either. But look at that fence.”
The cab stopped, they got out. The torch beam played on the iron fence with scrolled spear-tipped panels set in concrete; there was even a hitching-post in the effigy of a negro boy beside the small scrolled gate. “You’re right,” McCord said. “There’ll be one here.” They did not use the light now, but even in the faint starlight they could see it plainly—the cast iron Saint Bernard with its composite face of the emperor Franz Josef and a Maine banker in the year 1859.
Charlotte placed the chops upon the iron pediment, between the iron feet; they returned to the cab. “Listen,” McCord said. “It’s completely equipped—three rooms and kitchen, bedding, cooking things, plenty of wood for the chopping; you can even bathe if you want to. And all the other cottages will be empty after the first of September and nobody to bother you and right on the lake, you can have fish for a while yet, and with your hundred dollars in grub and the cold wont come until in October, maybe not until November; you could stay up there until Christmas or even longer than that if you dont mind the cold—”
McCord drove them up to the lake on the Saturday night before Labor Day, the hundred dollars worth of food—the tins, the beans and rice and coffee and salt and sugar and flour—in the rumble. Wilbourne contemplated the equivalent of their last dollar with a certain sobriety. “You dont realise how flexible money is until you exchange it for something,” he said. “Maybe this is what the economists mean by a normal diminishing return.”
“You dont mean flexible,” McCord said. “You mean volatile. That’s what Congress means by a fluid currency. If it rains on us before we get this stuff under a roof, you’ll see. Those beans and rice and truck will boil us clean out of the car like three matches in a pail of home brew.” They had a bottle of whiskey and McCord and Wilbourne took turns driving while Charlotte slept. They reached the cottage just after dawn—a hundred odd acres of water surrounded by second growth spruce, four clearings with a cabin in each (from the chimney of one of them smoke stood. “That’s Bradley,” McCord said. “I thought he’d be out by now.”) and a short pier into the water.
There was a narrow finger of beach with a buck standing on it, pink in the Sunday dawn, its head up, watching them for an instant before it whirled, its white scut arcing in long bounds while Charlotte, springing from the car, her face swollen with sleep, ran to the water’s edge, squealing. “That’s what I was trying to make!” she cried. “Not the animals, the dogs and deer and horses: the motion, the speed.”
“Sure,” McCord said. “Let’s eat.” They unloaded the car and carried the things in and started a fire in the stove, then while Charlotte cooked breakfast Wilbourne and McCord carried the bottle down to the water and squatted. They drank from the bottle, saluting one another. Then there was one drink left. “Charlotte’s,” McCord said. “She can drink to the Wagon, the long drouth.”
“I’m happy now,” Wilbourne said. “I know exactly where I am going. It’s perfectly straight, between two rows of cans and sacks, fifty dollars’ worth to a side. Not street, that’s houses and people. This is a solitude. Then the water, the solitude wavering slow while you lie and look up at it.” Squatting and still holding the almost empty bottle he put his other hand into the water, the still, dawn-breathing liquid with the temperature of the synthetic ice water in hotel rooms, the ripples fanning slowly from his wrist. McCord stared at him. “And then fall will come, the first cold, the first red and yellow leaves drifting down, the double leaves, the reflection rising to meet the falling one until they touch and rock a little, not quite closing. And then you could open your eyes for a minute if you wanted to, remembered to, and watch the shadow of the rocking leaves on the breast beside you.”
“For sweet Jesus Schopenhauer,” McCord said. “What the bloody hell kind of ninth-rate Teasdale is this? You haven’t near done your share of starving yet. You haven’t near served your apprenticeship to destitution. If you’re not careful, you’ll talk that stuff to some guy who will believe it and’ll hand you the pistol and see you use it. Stop thinking about yourself and think about Charlotte for a while.”
“That’s who I’m talking about. But I wouldn’t use the pistol, anyway. Because I started this too late. I still believe in love.” Then he told McCord about the cashier’s check. “If I didn’t believe in it, I’d give you the check and send her back with you tonight.”
“And if you believed in it as much as you say you do, you would have torn that check up a long time ago.
“If I tore it up, nobody would ever get the money. He couldn’t even get it back from the bank.”
“Damn him. You dont owe him anything. Didn’t you take his wife off his hands for him? Yah, you’re a hell of a guy. You haven’t even got the courage of your fornications, have you?” McCord rose. “Come on. I smell coffee.”
Wilbourne didn’t move, his hand still in the water. “I haven’t hurt her.” Then he said, “Yes I have. If I hadn’t marked her by now, I would—”
“What?”
“Refuse to believe it.”
For a full minute McCord stood looking down at the other as he squatted, the bottle in one hand and the other wrist-deep in the water. “Shit!” he said. Then Charlotte called them from the door. Wilbourne rose.
“I wouldn’t use the pistol,” he said. “I’ll still take this.”
Charlotte did not take the drink. Instead she set the bottle on the mantel. “To remind us of our lost civilization when our hair begins to spread,” she said. They ate. There were two iron cots in each of the two bedrooms, two more on the screened porch. While Wilbourne washed the dishes Charlotte and McCord made up the cots on the porch with bedding from the locker; when Wilbourne came out McCord already lay on one cot, his shoes off, smoking. “Go on,” he said. “Take it. Charlotte says she dont want to sleep any more.” She came out at
