“Have a seat,” said Tippett. Barry moved backward and slipped into a chair. Tippett watched him do it. “I’ll get the whiskey out,” said Tippett. “Help you unwind.”
“I’m quite relaxed,” said Barry defiantly, but Tippett got down a bottle from a pie safe that held the glasses too.
“You want water or S’em-Up?” asked Tippett.
“Neat,” said Barry.
“You what?”
“Just straight would be fine,” Barry said. Tippett served their whiskey and sat down next to his television set. His drink hand moved slightly, a toast. Barry moved his. It was quiet.
“You go to college?” asked Tippett.
“Yes,” said Barry, narrowly avoiding the words Ohio State. “And you?” he asked. Tippett did not answer, and Barry feared he’d taken it as a contemptuous question. Nevertheless, he decided not to go into anything long about college being a waste of time. In fact, Barry had a sudden burst of love for his old college. He felt a small ache looking around the bare room for days of wit and safety before he’d been our and about on unfathomable missions like this one. Dogs, tooth pictures, oil crooks, a secure future. Tippett was humming a tune and looking around the room. I know that tune, thought Barry, It’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” You bastards fired on our flag first. Fort Sumter.
“What’s that song you’re whistling?”
“Oh, a old song.”
“Really! I sort of remember it as a favorite of mine.”
“That’s nice. Yes, sir, that’s nice. Some of these songs nowadays, why, I don’t like them. They favor shit to me.” There was a worn-out shotgun in the corner, boots, a long rope with a snap on it.
“Let’s have a look at this famous dog,” said Barry.
“Ain’t famous.”
“Expensive.”
“Expensive? I got about twenty-five cents an ar to wuk the prick.”
Tippett whistled through his teeth, and a pointer came in from the next room on his belly and laid his head on Tippett’s knee. “There he is, Old Bandit.”
“He’s good looking,” said Barry.
“He get better lookin’ when you turn him a-loose. He’ll slap find birds. He a gentleman’s shooting dog De Ville. Use a section bean field in five minute. Fellow need enough country for a dog like Bandit. Bandit a foot dog, a truck dog, and a horseback dog. Bandit everything they is. He broke to death but he’ll run off on a fool, now.”
Barry had caught up on the word gentleman. A gentleman’s dog. He could see all this, somehow, in the words of the ardent old Tippett. He looked at fidelity writ large in the peaceful bird dog’s anciently carved head and was entirely unable to picture the kind of fool he’d run off on. This was a landowner’s dog, he sensed, and he mildly resented having to pack him to Louisiana.
“I wish I owned this dog,” said Barry.
“I do too,” said Tippett, staring once again at L. Michael Royce’s money. “This any good?” he asked, holding it up. Barry just nodded. He was entirely in the world of Tippett, feeling the senselessness of trading the money for Bandit. Now the atmosphere was heavy with the idea of lost dog.
A long silence followed. Barry felt that a kind of intimacy had formed. This man had something that he and Royce and the man in Louisiana wanted, but now he had gone over to the other side. When he took the dog to the car on a lead, Tippett said, “I was sixty-six in August. I’ll never have another dog like that.” When he went to the house, he didn’t pet Bandit; he never looked back.
Barry started down the road with Bandit on the seat beside him. As he went back through Blue Wood, the huge clouds he had noticed driving to Tippett’s seemed to enlarge with the massive angular light of evening, and the empty buildings of the town looked bombed out and derelict. A man was selling barbecue from an outdoor smoker. Barry stopped and ate some pork and slaw while he looked at the four-way roads trailing off into big fields. He thought, I’d like to give that dog a whirl. The man rolled down the lid on the smoker.
“Like anything to drink?”
“S’em-Up,” said Barry. He had decided he would run Bandit.
Barry drove alongside the vast soybean field with its tangle of stalks and curled leaves and long strips of combined ground. There were hedgerows of small hardwoods wound about with osage orange and kudzu. Some of the fields had gas wells, and at one county-road corner there was a stack of casing pipe and a yellow backhoe as battered as an army tank. When the road came to an end, the bean fields stretched along a stream course and over low rounded hills as far to the west as Barry could see. This is it, he thought, and stopped.
Bandit stirred and whined when the engine shut off. He sat up and stared through the windshield at the empty space. It made Barry apprehensive to not quite understand what riveted his attention so. I wish I had more information, he thought, a little something more to go by. Nevertheless, he turned Bandit loose and thought for the short time he saw him that Tippett was right, that he got prettier and prettier, in his burning race over the horizon.
He was gone. It was as though Mike Royce towered up out of the Mississippi horizon to stare down at Barry in his rental car, clutching the orthodonture photographs and Barry’s employment contract.
He got out and started running across the bean field. He ran so fast and uncaringly that the ground seemed to rise and fall beneath him as he crossed the hills. He hit a piece of soft plowed ground and it sapped his strength so quickly he found himself stopped, his hands gripping his knees. Oh, Bandit, he cried out, come back!
Just before dusk, he came through a grove of oak on the edge of a swamp. A cold mist had started up in fingers toward the trees, and at their very edge stood Bandit on point, head high, sipping the breeze, tail straight as a poker, in a trance of found birds. Barry thought he cried out to Bandit but he wasn’t sure, and he knew he didn’t want to frighten him into motion. He walked steadily in Bandit’s direction. The dog stood at his work, not acknowledging him. When he was about a hundred feet away, the covey started to flush. He froze as birds roared up like brown bees and swarmed into the swamp. But Bandit stood still and Barry knew he had him. He admired Tippett’s training in keeping Bandit so staunch and walked to the dog in an agony of relief. Good Bandit, he said, and patted his head, Bandit’s signal to go on hunting: He shot into the swamp.
The brambles along the watery edge practically tore his clothes off. His hands felt sticky from bloody scratches. By turns he saw himself strangling Royce, Tippett, and the man in Louisiana. He wondered if Royce would ever see him as a can-do guy again. From Cub Scouts on he had had this burden of reliability, and as he felt the invisible dog tearing it away he began to wonder why he was running so fast.
He reached higher ground and a grove of hickories with a Confederate cemetery, forty or fifty unknown soldiers. He sat down to rest among the small stones, gasping for air. What he first took to be the sound of chimes emerging distantly from the ground turned out to be his own ringing ears. It occurred to him that some of the doomed soldiers around him had gone to their deaths with less hysteria and terror than he had brought to the chase for this dog. Maybe it wasn’t just the dog, he thought, and grew calm. Maybe it was that little bitch and her crooked teeth.
It was dark and Barry gave himself up to it. A symphonic array of odors came up from the ground with the cooling night, and he imagined the Confederate bones turning into hickory trees over the centuries. Shade, shelter from the wind, wood for ax handles, charcoal for barbecue. S’em-Up. Bones.
But, he thought, standing, that dog isn’t dead yet; and he resumed his walk. He regained open country somehow and walked in a gradual curve that he thought would return him to his car. He thought his feet remembered the hills but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t care. His eyes recorded the increasing density of night until he could no longer see the ground under him. The moon rose and lit the far contours of things, but close up the world was in eclipse. In a while, he came to the edge of a pond. Only its surface could be seen like a sheet of silver hanging in midair. As he studied it, trying to figure out how to go around, the shapes of horses materialized on its surface. He knew they must be walking on the bank, but the bank itself was invisible and the only knowledge of horses he had was the progress of their reflection in the still water. When the horses passed, he walked toward the water until he saw his own shape. He watched it disappear and knew he’d gone on around.