by Sonny Brewer
“You’ll especially like Sostie,” I said to Cormac. “She’s such a cutie, and get this, as much a hound for peanut butter as you,” The doggins hiked up his ears and scooted over on the seat closer to me as if to indicate, “tell me more.”
I took my eyes off the road for a second and lowered my voice. “My pal Scott did time in Ethiopia in the Peace Corps. Now listen up, Mick. This gets technical.” I thought about Diana asking if we could skip my discourse on ancient Irish kings when telling people how Cormac got his name. “In Amharic, what they speak in Ethiopia,” I said, “the word for three is sost. Get my drift?”
Cormac looked at me like I’d grown antlers or something. I took my right hand off the steering wheel and put it on Cormac’s head. “Here,” I said, “I’ll quote Scott Cannon himself: ‘Sostie is the name for our 3-legged rescue mutt-puppy because I didn’t want Tripod or Lucky or some such goofy name.’”
I looked over at Cormac. “Oh, I said, she’s an older woman, and very pretty with her three legs. What else do you need to know?” I’d done my bit at matchmaking, but his expression asked if there was more to be told. I patted him, and he accepted that I was finished.
I stopped by Latte Da coffee shop and picked up a pound of full-city-roast Costa Rican beans for my guests. In my store I ground the coffee beans and got a pot going. Twenty minutes later, Scott and Betty and Sostie walked into the bookstore. Cormac had pranced to Sostie’s side before the door even closed. He was bigger than Sostie. They did the requisite sniffing, and some low-key posturing, and then settled down together in the middle of the bookstore floor on a braided oval rug in front of a burnt-sienna couch with lumpy cushions and well-worn arms. I poured the three of us a cup of coffee. Before I sat down I went back to the kitchen and got the peanut butter. I tossed the jar to Scott, along with a spoon.
“You do the honors,” I offered. Both dogs were on their feet. Scott spooned out a treat for Sostie and Cormac, right onto the floor.
“On the carpet?” Betty said. “Come on, Scott.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Look at this carpet.”
“That’s not the point, Sonny,” said Betty. “I’m still trying to train the dog.” She pointed to Scott. “Him.”
“Oh, just you watch,” Scott said. “Two tiny wet spots that will be dried and disappear within a week.”
Cormac finished his peanut butter and came to lie at my feet. Sostie jumped on the sofa between Betty and Scott. Scott asked about Cormac, said his face and demeanor reminded him of the Yellow Labrador who had stayed by his father’s side for fifteen years. I told him about Zebbie, about Drew adopting him, and about our finding Cormac some seven months ago. “He’ll be a year old March 21,” I told Scott and Betty.
“He’s going to be a big fellow,” Scott said.
“I think so. Maybe seventy-five pounds when he’s fully grown,” I said.
Betty stayed quiet. “So, Betty, how’s the new novel going?” I asked.
“Three weeks on the top ten best-seller list,” she said, offhandedly, as though the information were not important. “Look, Sonny, what about you? On this tour, I’ve heard of three independent bookstores closing. I’m talking about shops that have name recognition. T-shirt worthy. I want to know what’s going on with your store.”
“Well, I think I’m going to have to close Over the Transom,” I said, the words tumbling out. I couldn’t believe I’d just spoken aloud the thing that I’d been thinking in a dusty, cobwebbed corner of my mind for some weeks now. Saying it was like making real what had been before only a possibility. I was disconcerted as though I just got the news myself.
“You have to fight for it,” Scott said flatly. He got up and walked over to a bin of T-shirts. Sostie followed. So did Cormac. They sat and gazed up at Scott as he took a shirt and held it out in front of himself so he could read it aloud:
There is nothing so important as the book can be. –MAXWELL PERKINS
[Because] All that man has done, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. –THOMAS CARLYLE
Scott checked the size, declared it a fit. “Do you mean what you’ve got written here?”
“You know I do,” I said.
Scott draped the T-shirt over the crook of his arm while he pulled off his own white oxford and dropped it on the floor. Bare-chested, he pushed out his chest and curled his arms into a muscle-man pose, then pulled the T-shirt over his head.
Betty looked at me. “You want him back?” Scott and I had once been partners in a small publishing concern. Cormac, in the meantime, had grabbed the shirt on the floor and made off with it, dragging it to his spot behind the counter. Sostie trailed him, hopping along on her one front leg. Scott went after them, patting Betty’s shoulder as he went past.
“Haven’t you got something you could sell?” Betty asked.
“Everything I’ve got is mortgaged for more than it’s worth.” I told Betty and Scott that I thought I should schedule an appointment with a bankruptcy lawyer. “Just to discuss my options, you know.”
“Oh, my God!” Betty said. “You can’t be serious.”
“Completely, I’m afraid.” I told them the money I had in my store checking account could cover overhead for two more months.
“Does Diana know this?”
I told Betty she knew about the store’s cash flow drying up. “But we didn’t talk about meeting with a lawyer.”
“Good,” Betty said. “We’ve got to talk some sense into you.” She got up and paced back and forth. She stopped and faced me. “What about the novel you’ve been working on? Why don’t you sell that?” Her question surprised me.
“I don’t think anybody would buy that book,” I said. “And I still lack a hundred pages or so to finish it.
“How do you know no one will buy it?” she replied. “I sold my last three books on proposal. If you’ve got a good start, and they like it, they’ll offer you a contract to complete it.”
“What have you got to lose?” Scott chimed in.
“I will use my considerable influence in New York to get the manuscript read,” she offered, completely serious.
Cormac pranced and capered, following Scott back to the middle of the room. Sostie came along as well. Scott said, “Betty can get this done. Her agent will read it right away and tell us what she thinks.”
Cormac stood, put his muzzle on my thigh, and rolled his eyes upward at me. He did this more and more these days, and each time he parked his face there the world seemed a little less with me. This must be the part of being near a dog that’s been shown to lower old people’s blood pressure in assisted living places and such. I reached out my hand and rubbed his head. He wagged his tail. “Cormac thinks it’s a good idea,” I said, smiling.
“What more validation do you want?” Betty asked.
“It’s a long shot, you have to admit,” I said, wanting to bring some reality to the fantastical notion that a publisher would buy my book.
“Sure it is,” Betty said. “But you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”
“It beats sitting for the life insurance underwriter’s exam,” Scott said. I agreed and said I’d think about it. They said they had to get rolling to Tallahassee. As I walked them to the door, I wondered how Cormac would behave as Sostie left the building. Had she smitten this young dog with her beauty? It seemed no. Cormac only walked as far as the front door. At the threshold he turned and went back to his place behind the counter, curling down for a nap.
I stepped onto the sidewalk to watch my friends walk away and felt the first drops of rain. Several parking spaces on the street were empty and I saw no pedestrians. This damp, gray day could be well-spent at home relaxed in my leather chair, my sock feet propped on the hassock. Since I was fantasizing, I took it further, imagined my laptop on my knees, coffee on a tray table beside me as I worked on the great American novel. It was not a picture I could bring into clear focus.
I went back insid
e. It was 10:30. An hour and a half into a business day without a customer. I went to my stool behind the counter and woke up the Toshiba’s screen: one internet order for a $35 used book, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son by William Alexander Percy, a good 1941 hardcover 4th printing with a clean dustjacket. I looked at Cormac, asleep on a small rug. The hair on his shoulders was a little darker red than the rest and getting curly. He was a handsome, laid-back doggins.
“You make it look so easy, Mick.”
He didn’t even blink. “If I get a book published, pal,” I said, “I’ll sure thank you for your part.” I went to find the Percy book, wondering at the little hope stirring in my head, hope that I’d have to make good on my promise to Cormac.
I walked, pacing slowly between rows of shelves sagging only just perceptibly with their quiet books. Cormac was at my heels, his pink tongue hanging from the side of his mouth, his eyes bright with expectation that we were going on some adventure, tail swishing.
I walked back to the counter, then behind it. Cormac stopped on the customer side and stared at me. His tail stopped. He pulled his tongue into his mouth and cocked his head. His eyes signaled confusion, as if, “Okay, so what are we looking for?” He sat, continued to look at me. I looked at him.
“I’m thinking about something.”
For about the fifth time that day, as the day passed, I strolled the floor of my empty bookstore.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’ve made up my mind.”
I looked at the big grandfather clock in the corner near the front door. “It’s five o’clock and time to go home, boy.” I snapped the leash to Cormac’s collar before stepping onto the sidewalk. I still couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t dash in front of a car coming down the street. He was a good heeler ninety percent of the time; the other ten percent he’d sprint without warning and ignore all commands, even the call of his name. These times a dog or cat or a person had one hundred percent of his attention. Until we got that behavior modified, the leash was the only safe option for going from the bookstore to the Jeep. I let Cormac jump into the passenger’s seat, rolled down his window halfway, and closed his door. I went around and slid behind the wheel.
“Well, today we walked several hundred miles in a bookstore,” I told Cormac. “But it paid off.” I looked over at him. He was on full alert, his ears perked up as he watched a cat ease out from between some bushes and onto the sidewalk. “I made up my mind to send out the manuscript myself,” I said. Cormac put his head out the window and barked. His tail swatted me on the face. I read somewhere that cats sleep about sixteen hours a day, two-thirds of their lives. This big red dog of mine, I believed, would spend about half his life wagging his tail. If Cormac wore T-shirts, I think his favorite would read: Wag more, bark less.
SEVEN
“YOU KNOW HOW I feel about your writing,” Diana said, rinsing her hands in the kitchen sink. “I’ve told you for a year that you should send out your novel. You know how to write,” she told me, “and you’re writing a good book.” She asked me what had broken the inertia. I told her the plan was mostly Cormac’s doing, and slipped a little grin.
“So, does Cormac also have a plan for submitting your unfinished novel to an editor?” she asked. “You don’t know how to make a publishing deal.” I told her I’d just take it one step at a time, maybe start with an editor I’d met the previous October at the Southern Book Festival in Nashville.
“She invited me at the time I met her to send my book,” I said.
“Why don’t you include a photo of Cormac, and a cover letter from him as your agent?”
Diana joined me at the kitchen table. Cormac, on hearing his name spoken, came over and put his chin on my knee. “Probably not a bad idea,” I said, and rubbing his head. I told Diana I’d just read that a photo of a Golden Retriever was almost as effective at demanding attention in advertising as a scantily clad woman.
“Maybe so,” she said, pointing out that the real estate sign on the house for sale just down the street bore a Golden Retriever’s face. “Should I take the photo then?” Diana asked, teasing. “Or will you?”
The next morning I decided to walk to the bookstore. In the night the late September wind had shifted around to the north and the air was clean and crisp, and the sun had a cloudless blue sky all to itself. The incomplete manuscript of my novel was in a manila envelope under my arm. Cormac was smart, easy on the leash, only now and again muscling away from me and drawing his collar against his neck so that he coughed. I’d give the leash a little snap, then tell him sternly, heel, and he’d stop pulling.
He was putting on weight: sixty-three pounds last vet check and growing quickly. But he wasn’t fat. With our daily walks, he would stay in good shape.
By the time we’d covered half the distance to the store, I had made up my mind to call an old friend in San Francisco. He had once told me that when I was ready to submit my novel, he knew an agent who’d help me put it into the right hands. When I had opened the store, I called him, told him the big day had arrived. He said he’d call the agent right away, and ask her to phone me herself.
She phoned within the half hour, introduced herself as Amy Rennert. She said, “So you’ve got a book I should look at?” Easy as that, this thing was rolling. She invited me to email the first thirty pages to her, and she’d get back to me. She phoned back the same day and offered to represent me. She said she believed we could sell my unfinished book.
Cormac looked at the package I’d tossed onto the floor. Who needed hard copy in a quick-transference world? He sat on his woven rug, mostly looking out the window, his nose to the daylight outside. But when he’d turn his head back inside the store, he’d look again down at the manila envelope on the floor.
“It’s my book,” I told him. “What do you think of the first two hundred pages of The Poet of Tolstoy Park?” His interest was elsewhere. He just looked at the envelope, then rolled his big eyes at me, without even sniffing in its direction. I moved from the counter and sat in my favorite overstuffed chair, a funky green wingback near the front window with plenty of light streaming in. I called Cormac over. Area rugs were scattered all around the store, and close by was a favorite oval number. He lay down immediately, as if he knew we were in for the long haul.
I really don’t know why, but something about the big reddish brown dog stretched out on the braided rug in the middle of the bookstore made me think of a Kerouac poem. A couple of lines from The Scripture of the Golden Eternity: “Everything’s alright, we’re not here, there, or anywhere./ Everything’s alright, cats sleep.”
And in the midst of my little turmoil, my dog asleep. I studied him lying there. In this very present moment, and in every moment we shared, I could count on his empathy. His sweet brown eyes said he’d fix it all for me, always.
Within the week, Amy called to say a publisher was going to make an offer. Two days later, I talked to Drew, told him I thought we were close to making a deal on the book. I told him I’d not heard back from my agent, but I didn’t want to jinx the deal by seeming impatient.
“Seeming impatient? Man, you are impatient,” Drew said. “With good cause, son. Take a man pill and call your agent,” I told him I would do that before going home from the store that day. I waited until I had locked the door of the bookstore to call Amy. I was behind the wheel of my Jeep, Cormac on the seat beside me. I was nervous and could hardly aim my fingers at the keys on the cell phone.
“I was just about to phone you,” Amy said, and I swear I heard a note of defeat in her voice. But before I could further catastrophize the moment, Amy said, “Here’s what I got you.” She went down the list of deal points.
I sat there in broad daylight with tears in my eyes. I blinked and looked over at Cormac. He had curled down on the seat. His eyes were closed. Then my agent tested the strength of my man pill.
“That’s the good news,” Amy said.
Everyone knows the phrase that follows: And now for
the bad news.
What in the sweet name of Jesus could that be? In the nanosecond pause, my mind scrolled through a half dozen devastating possibilities. “This is October,” Amy said, “and they want the book by May 1. Can you write the rest of the book sustaining what you’ve got going in those first two hundred pages?” She reminded me that I had a wife and children and Thanksgiving and Christmas and et cetera to consider. “Not to mention a bookstore,” she added. She told me we’d be signing a contract and that it would not be a good thing to miss my first deadline. I interrupted her. “Just tell me where to sign.”
Yes, yes, yes.
I put my hand wide-fingered on the head of my Mickins. He opened his eyes and cut them over at me. He knew something was up. He got up on the seat and stared at me, his ears alert. He pushed his face near my own. He licked my cheek, pulled back to see if that helped. I grinned like Alice’s cat and his tail thumped the door panel.
EIGHT
IT WAS CLEAR that I’d have to stay home to write to meet the deadline for The Poet of Tolstoy Park. I had to figure out what to do about keeping the bookstore open for walk-ins.
Cormac and I went to Pierre’s baseball card and vintage LP record store to ask for advice. I found him putting away a stack of albums. “Check this out,” he said. “The Beatles’ White Album on the Apple label, 1968. It’s an original copy, with the poster and four photos. Picked it up at the thrift store for a quarter. I might get fifty bucks for it.” I told him that was a good margin of return.
“So what’s up?” Pierre asked. He patted Cormac on the head, who stayed at his knee only for a moment. He headed off to check out the rest of the record store. “What brings you to my little corner of world trade?”
I told him I had to figure out how to keep my store open while I knuckled down at home to finish the novel and a rewrite before May. “No problem,” he said, still shuffling records, like this was the easiest thing in the world. “I’ll move into your store and take care of everything.” He told me he’d already been thinking about it. Word had quickly traveled around town about my book deal.
