The winter meeting was going to be shortened and therefore compressed because Mike Royce had just decided that he hated the South. So everyone was on edge and the orthodonture issue seemed quite inflamed the longer Royce contemplated his daughter’s mouth. Barry could see the pressure forming in his boss’s face as he stared past the crab boats making their way across the dead-slick bay. Barry arranged to have some pictures same-day delivered, and he was with his boss when he thumbed through the snapshots.
“I could shit,” said Royce from a darkening face. “These kids around here have straight teeth and their folks can’t change a lightbulb.”
A number of the things Mike Royce said were irritating to Barry, and when Royce was angry he expressed everything in a blur of exposed teeth that made part of Barry think of self-defense. But Barry saw himself on the cusp of failure or success. At thirty, a backward move could be a menace to his whole life; and while he knew he wouldn’t be in Royce’s employ forever, he wanted to stay long enough to learn oil lease trading so that he could go out on his own. Once he was free he could do the rest of the things he wanted: have a family, tropical fish, remote-control model airplanes. The future was an unbroken sheen to Barry, requiring only irreversible solvency. One of Barry’s girlfriends had called him yellow. She went out with the morning trash. Having your ducks in a row does not equal yellow. Barry was cautious.
On the last day of their stay at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama, Mike Royce rang for Barry. Barry went down to his room and found Royce in a spotted bathrobe, his blunt feet hooked on the rungs of his chair, staring at the photographs of his daughter arranged chronologically. The little girl’s square head did seem to change imperceptibly from picture to picture, though Barry could not tell the influence of hormones from the influence of orthodontic wire. From left to right, the child seemed to be losing character. In picture one she was clearly a vigorous young carnivore, and by picture seven she looked insipid, headed nowhere. It seemed a lot to blame on the dentist, who, Mike Royce pointed out, would be on the carpet Monday first thing. Barry wanted what Mike Royce wanted. So Barry wanted those teeth right.
Now Royce turned his attention to Barry. He did not ask Barry to sit down but seemed to prefer to regard him from his compressed posture in his bathrobe.
“Billy Hebert,” he said. “Remember him?” He was spot-checking a mental note.
“Lake Charles,” said Barry.
“That’s right, a feature player in that deal down there. Now Billy’s main lick, for fun, is to hunt birds.” He reached Barry a slip of paper. “That dog is in Mississippi. I want you to get it and take it to Billy in Lake Charles.”
“Very well.”
“If you remember back, we need to be doing something out of this world for Billy. Anyway, chop-chop.”
Barry could see the rows of private piers from Royce’s window. A few people had gone out carrying crab traps, towels, radios. They seemed to mock Barry’s dog-hauling mission with their prospects. But it was better than hearing about the girl’s teeth.
A late fall haze from the paper mills outside Mobile hung on the water. The causeway bore a stream of Florida-bound traffic. Bay shrimpers plied the slick, and play-off games sounded from every window of the resort. He knew cheery types lined up in the lobby for morning papers. It wasn’t that Barry had less sense of fun than anyone else. He had once alienated a favorite lady friend by yelling “wee!” during sex. But when riding mowers hummed with purpose on a December day in the Deep South, it seemed cruel and unusual to have to haul a dog from Mississippi to a crooked oil dealer in Louisiana.
The road to the small town in Mississippi on Royce’s note wound up from the coastal plain past small cities and shanty-towns. Barry ate at a drive-in restaurant next to an old cotton gin and drove up through three plantations that lay along the Tombigbee in what had been open country of farms and plantations. Arms of standing water appeared and disappeared as he soared over leggy trestles heading north. Barry began to be absorbed by his task. Where am I? he thought. He liked the idea of hauling a dog from Mississippi to Louisiana and didn’t feel at all demeaned by it as he had back at the Marriott. He passed a monument where the bighearted Union Army had set General Nathan Bedford Forrest free, and he felt giddily — no matter how many GTOs and pizza trucks he passed — that he was going back into time, toward Champion Hill and Shiloh. It seemed every third house had a fireworks stand selling M80s and bottle rockets, and every fifth building was a Baptist church. Oh, variety! he thought, comparing this to Ohio.
He reached Blue Wood, Mississippi, shortly after noon and stopped at a filling station for directions to the house of Jimmy F. Tippett, the man who had advertised the dog. Hearing his accent, the proprietor of the filling station, a round-faced man in coveralls, asked Barry where he came from.
“Chillicothe, Ohio.”
The man looked at Barry’s face for a moment and said, “Boy, you three-fo’ mile from yo’ house!”
He took a dirt road out past a gas field, past a huge abandoned WW II ammunition factory and rail spur. The town of Blue Wood had the air of an Old West town with its slightly elevated false-front buildings. Half the stores were empty, and the sidewalks had a few Negroes as the sole pedestrians. Barry drove slowly past the hardware store, where a solitary white man gripped his counter and stared through the front door waiting for customers. “My God,” Barry murmured. He couldn’t wait to grab that bird dog and run. The teeth of Mike Royce’s daughter were behind him, familiar and secure.
Jimmy F. Tippett’s house was on the edge of a thousand-acre sorghum field. It was an old house with a metal roof and a narrow dogtrot breezeway. Because of its location, Barry thought it had a faint seaside atmosphere. But above all it spoke of poorness to Barry, and dirty stinking failure; his first thought was, How in the world did this guy lay hands on any dog Mike Royce would buy? Hunching over in the front seat after he’d parked, Barry gave way to temptation and opened Royce’s envelope with a thumbnail. Inside was two thousand dollars in crisp hundreds. This, thought Barry, I’ve got to see.
He got out of the car, walking around the back of it so he could use it as a kind of blind while he looked things over. There were great big white clouds in the direction past the house and a few untended pecan trees. There had been a picket fence all around, but it looked like cattle or something had just walked it down into the ground. Here and there a loop of it stood up, and the pickets were weathered of most of their white paint and shaped at their ends like clubs in a deck of cards. Barry tried vainly to relate this to his career. In fact, how would Mike Royce and his accountants view this trip? He guessed it would have to be Travel and Entertainment.
The pattern of shadows on the screen door changed and Barry interrupted his thought to recognize that one of the shadows must now be Jimmy F. Tippett. So he strode up to the house, gulping impressions, and said, “Mr. Tippett, is that you?”
“Yes, sir,” came a voice.
“I’m Barry Seitz. I represent Mr. L. Michael Royce. I’m here about a dog.”
The screen door opened. Inside it stood a small man about sixty years of age, in khaki pants and starched white shirt. He had an auto insurance company pen holder in his pocket and a whistle around his neck. His face was entirely covered by fine dark wrinkles. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked Barry over as though he were doing a credit check. “Tippett,” he said. “Come in.”
Barry walked in. It appeared that Tippett lived entirely in one room. “I can’t stay but a minute. I’ve got to get this dog to Louisiana.”