The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

The crowd cleared out when the prices went up and then I had the bar pretty much to myself. I could see a man standing at the far end writing a letter with a pencil. He was laughing at his work, a lone bandit writing cruel taunts to the chief of police

took the card to bed and studied it. Tiny things take on significance when I’m away from home. I’m on the alert for omens. Odd things happen when you get out of town. At the top of the card there were two crossed American flags printed in color.

he got up and flounced out, stopping for a moment under the archway as he thought of something pretty good to call me, which was “rat face.” He thought it was pretty good but it was old stuff to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I look more like a predatory bird than a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year

Pure baloney,” he said. “I’ve seen every kind of addict there is and I’ve never known one person who was addicted to codeine. I’ve taken fifty gallons of the stuff myself. Wine will drive you crazy faster than anything I know and you can buy all the wine you want. Well, that’s your Washington smarties. They know everything

I asked him if he was going to British Honduras on vacation and he said, “Vacation! Do you think I’m the kind of man who takes vacations?” “What are you going down there for?” “My mother’s there. I need to see her.” His mother! I couldn’t believe it. “Is she sick?” I said. “I don’t know. I need to see her on some business.” “How old is she?” “She’s so old she’s walking sideways

Well, my father believed it. Pollard was his man. A fellow named Pollard, he said, wrote the only fair account of the thing.” “I’ve read Pollard. He calls Lincoln the Illinois ape.

What line of work are you in, Speed?” “I’m back in college now. I’m trying to pick up some education hours so I can get a teaching certificate.” “What you are then is a thirty-year-old schoolboy.” “I’m twenty-six.” “Well, I don’t guess you’re bothering anybody.” “The Civil War used to be my field.” “A big waste of time.” “I didn’t think so. I studied for two years at Ole Miss under Dr. Buddy Casey. He’s a fine man and a fine scholar

might as well loiter for two years. You might as well play Parcheesi for two years.” “That’s a foolish remark.” “You think so?” “It’s dumb.”

I’ve known him for years. I used to play poker with him at the Rice Hotel. I gave distemper shots to his puppies. I removed a benign wart from his shoulder that was as big as a Stuart pecan. It looked like a little man’s head, or a baby’s head, like it might talk, or cry.

He said you must save your money but you must not be afraid to spend it either, and at the same time you must give no thought to money. A lot of his stuff was formulated in this way. You must do this and that, two contrary things, and you must also be careful to do neither. Dynamic tension! Avoid excessive blinking and wild eye movement, Dix said, when talking to prospects

I’m not riding any bus.” “What are you going to do then?” “I’m not going off a cliff in a Mexican bus.” His old carcass was very dear to him

Melba joined me and fell to on a second supper. She ate heartily for a crone, sighing and cooing between bites and jiggling one leg up and down, making the floor shake. She ate fast and her eyes bulged from inner pressures and delight. This remarkable lady had psychic gifts and she had not slept for three years, or so they told me. She sat up in a chair every night in the dark drinking coffee.

Melba joined me and fell to on a second supper. She ate heartily for a crone, sighing and cooing between bites and jiggling one leg up and down, making the floor shake. She ate fast and her eyes bulged from inner pressures and delight.

gifts and she had not slept for three years, or so they told me. She sat up in a chair every night in the dark drinking coffee.

I didn’t know who Otho was but it was hard to believe that any person in Louisiana had ever keeled over from fraud shock.

“What is your work in this world?” “I don’t know what it is yet. I’m back in school now.” “It’s getting pretty late in the day for you to have so few interests and convictions. How old are you, Mr. Midge?”—

The lights came back on and in a very few minutes Melba’s electric coffeepot began to bubble and make respiratory noises like some infernal hospital machine.

She woke a small Negro boy named Webster Spooner, who slept in a box in the foyer. It was a pretty good wooden box with bedding in it. I knew his name because he had written it on a piece of paper and taped it to his box. At the foot of his makeshift bed there was a tomato plant growing in an old Texaco grease bucket.

I discovered later that Ruth called me “Turco” and “the Turk” because of my small pointed teeth and my small owl beak and my small gray eyes, mere slits but prodigies of light-gathering and resolving power.

I read a guidebook. The writer said the people of this country were “proud,” which usually means “barely human” in the special lingo of those things. But wasn’t Ruth proud? The very word for her. I

I was annoyed with Webster for poking around my room while I was asleep but I didn’t mention it. I asked if he could run an errand for me. He said nothing and kept working in his notebook. He and Ruth both had decided that I was the sort of person they didn’t have to listen to. There were certain white people that they might have to listen to but I was not one of them. I spoke to him again. “I’m busy,” he said.

The doctor had been removed to a bed upstairs. I found him awake but he was still gray in the face and his eye looked bad. He was sitting up, shapeless as a manatee in a woman’s pink gown.

“Taking to your bed won’t get it. You need to get after it.”

She said one couldn’t judge these things by the conventional standards of worldly success. Noah preached for six hundred years and converted no one outside his immediate household. And Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, he too was widely regarded as a failure. All you could do was your best, according to your lights. She told me that there was no one named Raymond in the Bible and that drunkenness was the big social problem in this country.

Melba had been stirring her iced tea violently for about four minutes. She put her face in mine and winked and said, “I’ll bet I know what you like.” From her leering expression I thought she was going to say, “Nooky,” but she said, “I’ll bet you like cowboy stories.”

“The kind of people I know now don’t have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. Some of them can even move their ears. They’re wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and watch for chances.”

“Listen to me, Speed. A young man should start out in life trying to do the right thing. It’s better for your health. It’s better in every way. There’ll be plenty of time later for you to cut these corners, and better occasions. I wish I had had some older man to grab my shoulder and talk turkey to me when I was your age. I needed a good shaking when my foot slipped that first time, and I didn’t get it. Oh, yes. My face is now turned toward that better land, but much too late.”

Don’t ask me what happened to Tyler, because I don’t know. I don’t have that information. He may be living in a single-wide trailer somewhere, a forgotten old man. Where are those million friends now? It’s a shame how we neglect our poets. It’s the shame of our nation.

I’ve handled news accounts about this man. This is the well-known ‘Vicar of Basin Street.’” “No, no,” she said. “This is another one. Father Jackie has a steel plate in his head. He plays the cornet. He’s an amateur magician. He claims he has no fear of the Judgment. I don’t know anything about the other fellow.”

Dense heat was building up in the house. I helped the doctor back to his bed. Mrs. Symes went to her own room to nap. There was a box fan in the central room, where we had eaten, and I lay down on the floor in front of it to rest for a minute or two. I was heavy and sodden with jello.

The doctor himself had told me that she had fed more tramps during the Depression than any other person in Louisiana.

This was the original frame-up. I was suspended for six months. They accused me of practicing homeopathy, of all things. Can you imagine that?” “I’ve heard of homeopathy but I don’t know what it is.” “The hair of the dog. There’s a little something to it but not much. There’s a little truth in everything.

This was the original frame-up. I was suspended for six months. They accused me of practicing homeopathy, of all things. Can you imagine that?” “I’ve heard of homeopathy but I don’t know what it is.” “The hair of the dog. There’s a little something to it but not much. There’s a little truth in everything. I never practiced it but any stick was good enough tobeat a dog like me."

“A patient named J. D. Brimlett developed osteomyelitis,” said the doctor. “That was the claim anyway. I’m convinced he already had it. He had everything else. Emphysema, glaucoma, no adrenal function, you name it. Two little hard dark lungs like a pair of desiccated prunes. He belonged in a carnival instead of an arthritis clinic. The world’s sickest living man. No blood pressure to speak of and you couldn’t find a vein to save your ass. Renal failure on top of everything else. The Mayo brothers couldn’t have pulled that chump through, but no, it was my zinc that killed him. A Class B irritant poison, they said. I should have screened him out. I should have closed my eyes and ears to his suffering and sent him on his way. I didn’t do it and I’ve been paying for that mistake ever since. There’s always a son of a bitch like Brimlett hanging around, doing anything to get attention, dying even, and just ruining things for everybody else. Do you want it in a nutshell? I was weak. I was soft.”

have screened him out. I should have closed my eyes and ears to his suffering and sent him on his way. I didn’t do it and I’ve been paying for that mistake ever since. There’s always a son of a bitch like Brimlett hanging around, doing anything to get attention, dying even, and just ruining things for everybody else. Do you want it in a nutshell? I was weak. I was soft.”

Symes then told Melba that he didn’t like the idea of his mother being buried here in this Honduras mud, so far from her real home in Louisiana where Otho lay. Melba said it was a question of a person’s wishes. Mrs. Symes had insisted on burial in the Belize cemetery with the pirates and drowned children and nameless wanderers, and a person’s last wishes, when reasonable, had to be respected.

Much later we learned that Dupree had gone overland—walked! in cowboy boots! bumping into trees!—down into Honduras, the genuine Honduras. He went first to a place on the coast called La Ceiba and then caught a ride on an oil-survey plane to the capital city of Tegucigalpa. I looked for him to come dragging in after a few months. A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later.

Then in April, after the last frost, Norma became restless again. She went to Memphis to visit a friend named Marge. “Goodbye, goodbye,” she said to me, and the next thing I knew she had her own apartment over there, and a job doing something at a television station. She said she might come back but she didn’t do it and I let her go that time. It’s only about 130 miles to Memphis but I didn’t go after her again.