by Sonny Brewer
TWENTY-THREE
LOU MET ME back at the bookstore. He was empty-handed, no collar. But he said he was satisfied there was nothing weird going on between the dog pound and Grossett.
“Tara told me she calls Grossett when they get a Golden Retriever, and at the end of a ten-day stay, he’s allowed to come and take them. She said it’s one less dog she has to put down.” Lou told me she had no apology for stonewalling me. “She’s a hard woman who doesn’t really like her job. And who would?” he asked.
I quizzed Lou again about the collar.
“Tara said she couldn’t find it,” Lou said, “and I believe her when she says she doesn’t know what happened to it.” I told Lou about the name Cognac for the Golden they had processed northward.
“The papers listed his name as Cognac, which sounds a lot like Cormac,” I said. “But, you know, there are a thousand more questions, most of which I’d ask the woman who delivered the dog to the pound. But I can’t stop every woman I see driving a red truck.”
“Right now, let’s find out if the dog in Connecticut is Cormac,” Lou said. “All our detective work comes to rest about twelve hundred miles north of where we’re standing.”
“You should just go,” Pierre chimed in.
“Is that your plan?” Lou asked.
“That’s Plan B,” I said. “Plan A is to talk to the people at Golden Love Agency in Connecticut. I’m sure they have photos they can email to me. There are some questions I can ask that might convince me it’s Cormac.”
“We aren’t getting any younger, Sonny. Let’s be asking the questions,” Lou said.
I agreed and both men followed me outside where I sat at the small marble-top café table on the sidewalk beside the front door. The March sun was warm in the light breeze that played down the street. Lou ducked his head beneath the Over the Transom sign and took the other chair, a good solid cast aluminum chair in the style of wrought iron filigree that could bear up under his weight. Pierre stood, his shoulder propped against the doorjamb. He had his eye on a pretty woman strolling along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.
I pushed redial on my cell, and the phone began ringing at Golden Love. “Good morning, Golden Love,” a young woman’s voice said. I looked at my watch. They had a half hour of morning left in Connecticut.
“Good morning. My name is Sonny Brewer. I’m in Fairhope, Alabama.”
“Oh, Mr. Brewer, we’ve been expecting your call. Let me get my supervisor. Hold the line for me please.” I waited for thirty seconds, each tick-tock deep in the workings of my wristwatch stretching into untold time.
“Hello, Mr. Brewer. My name is Fenton Jones. I’m the director of Golden Love Rescue Agency. How may I help you, sir?” My first thought was he already knew what I wanted if he had expected my call. Grossett had surely alerted them.
“I lost my Golden Retriever a couple of weeks ago. I believe he may have been processed into your agency,” I said, using their own jargon. “A dog matching the description of mine was pushed through from Mobile, Alabama, released from Boulevard Animal Clinic on the 23rd. His name is Cormac, but the name on his paperwork might be Cognac.”
“Yes, it’s Cognac. And let me say right away, sir,” said Fenton Jones, “that if Cognac is Cormac, then we want to get him back to you as soon as possible. We’ll discuss those details if that is in order, Mr. Brewer. Our foster family has agreed to speak to you. Mrs. Erma Blessing is waiting for your call now.” The director slowly recited her phone number to me. My hand shook as I took down the information. Pierre had stopped watching the woman stroll down the street, and Lou leaned toward me, his giant arms bent, his elbows resting on his knees.
“Thank you. I’ll call you back very soon.” I flipped my cell phone closed. I released my breath. I looked from Pierre to Lou, and gave them a thumbs-up. “Finally, I’m talking to a dog-lover. I can just tell. Now, let’s see what Erma Blessing can tell me about her foster doggins.”
As soon as she answered, Erma Blessing said, “Mr. Brewer, the word’s gone around that you are a very angry man. I don’t blame you. But do not talk mean to me, or I will hang up and I will not answer your call back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I open my home to the dogs that need a temporary good home,” Mrs. Blessing said. “I am paid for their food. That is all. I do this because I love dogs. I have six of my own.” She paused, and I could hear her take a breath. “Now,” she went on, “what can I tell you about this good-looking fellow at my feet?”
“Ah—” I could not think of a thing to say. I could not think of a question to ask. “Ah, let me see.” I smiled. “Okay. What does he look like? Is he dark red?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Is he about, say 75 pounds?”
“He’s kind of skinny. I don’t think so. But this fellow has been on quite an adventure, I’m told.”
“Ah—let’s see.” I shook my head. “Oh I know, does he put one back leg underneath the other when he’s lying on his side, so that his other leg is kind of cocked up in the air?”
She laughed. “I haven’t noticed that,” she said. “Now, Mr. Brewer, I can send you some photos. My husband would have to take them when he gets home from the office.”
“He loves to take things in his mouth and, well, make these noises as though he’s trying to speak,” I said. Pierre and Lou liked that one.
“That’s a match!” Erma Blessing said. “This fellow will make his sounds around the tiniest thing he picks up. A plastic straw this morning he found on the ground outside was quite sufficient.” I turned loose of the hope I’d held in check and let it spill the way I’d spilled raw anger earlier.
“That’s it! I’ve got it,” I said in a rush. “Can I talk to him?”
Erma Blessing laughed. “We do that, too,” she said. “My husband and I talk to our dogs. It drives my son crazy, and he wants to hide if we do it in public. Yes, Mr. Brewer, here I’ll hold the phone for him. He’s here in the kitchen with me.”
I called Cormac by name, going high and falsetto, down low, growly, calling him Mickins, Cormac, Mick. “Are you my doggins?” Pierre and Lou looked away from me with their eyebrows cocked high. They slipped a glance at each other and sniggered.
Erma Blessing, on the other hand, came back on the phone, sobbing. “Mr. Brewer, this is surely your dog. This must be Cormac! He is on the floor with eyes like the moon, his face between his paws. Forgive the allusion to advertising nostalgia, but I do believe he’s heard his master’s voice.”
I leaped from my chair at the table, did a pirouette, yelling. Pierre and Lou did a high five and clapped me on the back. “I know what I told you, man,” said Lou, “but I don’t believe this. I cannot believe you found the mutt!”
I calmed myself, got back on the line with Erma Blessing. I walked down the sidewalk with my cell phone to my ear, listening as she told me how they’d spoiled this dog, how he had full sofa and bed privileges, how her thirteen-year-old son hardly even liked their own dogs, but had fallen in love with Cormac. I loved the way she called him by name with confidence. There was only a tiny corner of my mind where I would allow this dog in Connecticut to be other than my Cormac.
Then she told me why he was getting the royal treatment around her house. “My husband jogs every day along the river,” Mrs. Blessing said, “and on the second day Cormac was with us, he went along on the run. Jim fell and broke his ankle. He couldn’t get up. Our two Labs just kept right on going, playing, ignoring Jim on the ground. Cormac lay down beside Jim and would not move. Stayed right by his side until help came.”
“Wow! I’m proud of him.” Then, without missing a beat, I blurted out, “How do I get him home?”
“Now, that I do not know, Mr. Brewer. I expect Mr. Jones will have all that information for you,” Erma Blessing offered. “I’m aware the agency uses a pet transport person, and I guess you’ll have to pay something, but I don’t really know how it works.”
“Well
, I can’t thank you enough for making a home for Cormac,” I said. “You folks are probably the first nice thing to happen to him in this strange story. Truly a blessing to me and my dog.”
“Why, that’s a pun, isn’t it?” she asked.
I sighed, suddenly tired. “Yes,” I said, “and truly not intended except in deepest gratitude.”
TWENTY-FOUR
AFTER TELLING PIERRE and Lou the good news, I tried to phone Drew at his construction site. “Drew didn’t answer his cell,” I said to Pierre, stepping off the curb. “If he stops by the bookstore, tell him the good news, and to get in touch with me.”
“And so you’re sure this is Cormac?” asked Pierre. He and Lou followed me to the Jeep.
“I guess until I see him in person, I won’t know for sure,” I said. “But it all feels right.”
“If only we had that collar,” Lou said. “You’d know then.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll know soon enough. I’ll phone the agency as soon as I get home, and get things arranged to bring him home.” I told them I had to go back on the road Wednesday to finish up the stops on my book tour. “I’ll be home Sunday night,” I said. “Hopefully, I can arrange to get him down here on Monday or Tuesday.”
“Three weeks missing, and you got a lot done in one day,” Lou said. “You can rest up some tomorrow.”
“I will,” I said, thinking I’d really only be able to close my eyes for a good night’s sleep when I had him back. I got in the Jeep, rolled down my window and started the engine. “Thanks for hanging in there with me, guys.”
“Yeah,” said Pierre, “maybe I’ll get a dog myself. What do they call them, man’s biggest pain in the butt?” Lou clamped his hand around Pierre’s neck and slugged him on the arm.
“Go home,” Lou said to me, “before you witness cruelty to this animal.”
I smiled and waved and eased off, heading for Diana’s office. She was on the phone when I got there. I took a seat and looked out the window at the passing cars. I decided to try to keep the news for a minute. When she finished the call, she asked if I’d made any progress today on my rounds, or learned anything about Cormac. I held onto my poker face.
“I got a couple of leads, but they didn’t go anywhere,” I said. She told me not to get discouraged. We chatted about what I’d do tomorrow to continue the search for Cormac, about her work, about my last few tour stops later in the week. I told Diana I’d pick up the boys at school. I got up to go, stopped and leaned against the doorjamb and tempted her with an offer of pizza at Benny’s when she was done.
“You found Cormac,” she said, getting up and coming to stand in front of me. She crossed her arms. “Did you think you could fool me for long?” She smiled and shook her head. “John Luke and Dylan will be jumping when you tell them,” she said. “I think pizza is the perfect complement to the news.”
“Is that what gave it away?” I asked. “Since that’s where we went to mark our decision to get a puppy?”
“No,” she said. “We go for pizza like we go for a glass of milk in the morning. It was the goofy look on your face.”
“What? I thought I was a man in an iron mask.”
“Try silly putty,” Diana said. “Don’t you know by now that’s what Cormac does to you?”
“I suppose so,” I said, and I told Diana there was a slim chance the dog I found was not Cormac. “That’s when we’ll see what I’m made of. Either way, I think, the face is gonna go.”
TWENTY-FIVE
I WAS GOING TO see a woman about a dog. Her husband, a pet transporter with whom I had made all the arrangements so far, could not complete the delivery of the subject Golden Retriever.
Fenton Jones had recommended this driver, told me the man had made several other dog transports “down South.” But the driver would be stopping in Birmingham on other business, so his wife would be making the drop-off, though she could not drive all the way to the coast. He gave me his wife’s cell number, and we agreed to touch base as needed to coordinate the exchange in a Cracker Barrel restaurant parking lot at exit 231 on I-65, about thirty-five miles south of Birmingham. She would take only cash. Three hundred dollars.
It was Tuesday, April 5. Cormac had been gone twenty-five days.
Fenton Jones had said he would only release the Golden Retriever into the driver’s custody if I would take the dog and agree to keep it, even if the dog was not Cormac. All the coordinating of schedules had taken about a week, and I’d gone back on the road to New Orleans the previous weekend to make a scheduled appearance at the Tennessee Williams Festival. I had used about half of my allotted time on my panel there telling the story of losing Cormac, and how I’d probably found him and would see him in a few days. People in the audience had been more interested in the dog tale than my novel, and someone suggested I post the rest of the story on my website. Now as the saga’s arc would soon put me face-to-face with Cormac, the knot in my belly felt like the alligator sausage I had for breakfast two days ago was trying to bite me back.
It had been almost a month since I had seen Cormac. What kind of shape would he be in? I hoped for happy and hyper, not down and depressed, knowing he’d at least be somewhere off-center on the emotional scale. But, worst of all, what if Cormac were still missing? What if the dog in the van was a total stranger?
The only other time I remember feeling the way I felt as I drove north on I-65 toward Birmingham had been on a certain Friday afternoon some twenty-five years earlier. My stomach, then as now, was queasy, my breathing was in the top of my lungs, my heart was going fast, my tongue was kind of dry. The other time I headed for a rendezvous that had me going like this was when I was headed to see Emily when she was a little girl of two. Emily’s mother and I had divorced and I had thought what I needed was to turn off my brain and bend my back in some good old-fashioned heavy labor. That would be the right way to fend off all that mopey stuff that finds its way into country song lyrics. So I called a friend who owned some tugboats and asked him if he’d let me crew. He asked me if I could pack a grip and be ready to ship out the following morning at five. I did, and physically separated myself from the land by working on the deck of a boat rolling on the river. The emotional distance was just the antidote I needed for a wrecked marriage.
Only thing, I stayed on the river too long.
Every day aboard that tugboat got harder and harder, missing Emily. I’ve still got a photo of me in the tug’s galley holding a chocolate layer cake I’d baked on her second birthday. I wrote her name and age on the cake with Cheerios. Missing her birthday did it. I quit working as a deckhand soon as the vessel was docked in the port of Mobile. Hollow echoes of that angst reached me as I drove toward Birmingham.
I rolled past the off-ramps on the interstate, counting upward to my exit. I worried more and more whether it was Cormac I was going to meet. When I would put that fret aside, I’d drag up another one, troubling over what Cormac would do when he saw me. I began to think I should have brought Pierre and Lou with me for some manly emotional support: neither would brook much hand-wringing.
Diana had offered to come. She’d even suggested keeping the boys out of school and bringing them, too. I told her if I knew for a fact it was our Cormac, we’d definitely make this a roadside family homecoming. But since there was at least some chance Cormac was still missing, I didn’t think John Luke and Dylan could handle the disappointment if a dog other than our Cormac was on his way from Connecticut. Diana knew that was bull, reminding me we’d told the boys over pizza there was a chance we’d be getting a new dog out of this. She said it was me who’d be a spectacle not fit for family viewing if the dog that hopped out of that van was not Cormac.
Exit 231, one mile the sign said. My heart rate started speeding up. The thumping became so pronounced that I wondered about the physiology of the autonomic response. I considered the advice to take a deep breath. I did. It didn’t work, didn’t slow down the beating of my heart.
I took the exit, turned
right on the service road, and left into the Cracker Barrel parking lot. I stopped the Jeep in the farthest corner, near the grassy median. There was only one way I could do this. I’d have to go inside the restaurant and look out the window. If it was not Cormac in the van, I would need the time, if only a minute, to adjust my attitude toward my new Golden Retriever.
I marched quickly toward the restaurant, refusing to look around, or over my shoulder to see if an unmarked van had arrived bringing my “package.” I walked through the store part of the Cracker Barrel to a window at the end of the register counter. I lingered by the T-shirt display, standing there like I belonged with the store fixtures, like a cigar store Indian. Wooden. I think I stopped breathing.
Then I saw the delivery van, a white Chevy. Ironically, it took the parking spot beside my Jeep. The driver stepped out, a woman in jeans and a blue flannel shirt. She rounded the rear of the van and went to the passenger side, where she slid back the door. A dog bounded out. The woman snagged his leash. He had to pee and went straight to the grassy median in front of the van, so that I wasn’t able to get a good look at him. I put my hands on top of my head and waited for the dog to walk out so I could have a clear view of him. The woman stood in plain sight, holding a red web leash, the dog at its end still in front of the Chevy. Then she stepped back a couple of paces and she and the dog moved away from the van.
It was Cormac. Woo hoo!
And I ran from the restaurant like it was on fire. I didn’t look back to see if I’d caused a panic. I just kept running. I yelled Cormac! At the top of my lungs I yelled his name again. He spun around on the leash and when he got me in focus, he bolted, snatching the leash from the woman’s hand. She took off after him, afraid for his safety in the parking lot, I’m sure. But he got to me and I got to him before she had a chance to intervene. If our lope toward each other could be shown in slo-mo, it would be more beautiful than the way the model ran and tossed her blond hair in that long-ago Breck shampoo commercial: Cormac’s red hair flying, my arms outstretched.
