"If you'd like to see some snapshots, I got them. And official documentation," the man said. "I have witnesses and phone numbers."
This was a Saturday morning. I'd lived in Gruel for a good year, trying to fit in. No one seemed anxious to make my acquaintance. The woman I bought bread from down at Gruel Bakery one time said, "You should try my special bread with Jesus crust," and two locals trying to perform trick shots down at Roughhouse Billiards once said, "Thanks" when I picked up their errant cue ball. But that was about it.
"I got a picture of a guy who says he zipped his pants up funny on his testicles. Oh it cut him to pieces. Personally I think he had something else happen to him, like maybe he tried to cross a bob-wire fence one night drunk and cut himself something awful. But that's neither here or otherwise. What matters is I got a picture of his things sliced, and a other of good old Pam licking the sore, and then a other of it healed." He lowered his head and said quietly, "I don't show that picture to the women, by the way."
The man had an old-fashioned army knapsack with him that he pulled off his right shoulder. His hair stood up wild and funny gray on his head, wiry. He dug in and started pulling out three-by-fives. I said, "Your dog's named Pam? Pam?"
"This is Pam. Say hey, Pam."
Pam sat down and stuck out her right paw. I waved, and looked out in the front yard to see if some kind of hidden camera posse stood nearby, like on one of those TV shows. I bent down and shook Pam's paw. "Good dog. Sorry I don't have any kind of sore," I said.
"Here's a picture of a boil, before and after," the man said. He handed me Polaroids of a giant neck pimple and then of smooth skin. I didn't say, "Anyone could take a picture of a giant dermatological abrasion, and then another of someone else's smooth skin." I said, "Huh. How about that."
"Here's some more." He handed over photographs of cuts, scrapes, possible leprosy, oozing sores of one variety or another. Then he had the supposed cured areas in vivid color. He said, "Five dollars. You can't beat that. Try going down to a doctor in Forty-Five. It's thirty-five dollars just to walk into the door. And then you got drugs, salves, and ointments to pay for later. Try going to the Graywood Memorial Emergency Room. You ever noticed how if you turn GMER around it comes out GERM? There's a reason for that."
He wore a T-shirt that read MIRACLES HAPPEN, but no picture of Jesus underneath the statement. I sat down on my steps and pet the dog. I said, "What do you do, travel from town to town, healing people with Pam here? That's kind of cool. Someone should make a documentary."
"It don't matter none my name," the man said out of nowhere. He stood stiff, and had a look on him mostly captured by Confederate soldiers posed brave and defiant. "Let's just say my name's Seth. If I were a real doctor I'd have me a Seth-a-scope, you know what I'm talking?"
I didn't. If I were a doctor named Seth I'd probably try to pick up women by saying, "You want a little of the Seth-a-scope," like an idiot, poking my groin back and forth.
I stuck out my hand and said, "I'm Curt." It's the first time I'd had the opportunity to introduce myself since moving to Gruel, I thought. "I'm Curt." My parents might as well have named me Angry or Short-tempered.
Seth shook my hand and Pam the healing dog stuck out her paw, all reflexes.
"You trying to tell me, Curt, that you ain't got a bruise, some joint pain, a blister, skin rash? Pam the healing dog can fix it all. Hey, I tell you what—you look honest enough—I can have her lick your needs, and then I'll come back the next day for the five dollars. I'll come back tomorrow. All's I'm asking is that you be honest with me."
Please understand that I'm not a sick man, physically or mentally, but for some reason I thought about this: What if I had some bad and persistent hemorrhoids? Would this Seth fellow allow his dog to lick a man's butt? I said, "Not a twinge, as far as I'm concerned. Hell, I'll give you five dollars if you're hurting for money, man."
Seth said, "I got pictures of Pam's work on sprained ankles. Tendonitis. This one old boy over in Forty-Five had a nervous tic she licked away, though it can't be documented very well on photographic paper. I needed to get me one them cameras with a fast shutter speed, so maybe the before picture would come out a blur what from the tic. Pam will lick away about anything, except hemorrhoids. I draw the line there. I won't let her lick some stranger's ass, excuse my language."
Can he read minds? I thought. "Okay. Now that you mention it. I was just trying you out, seeing how persistent you were. A long time ago I was a distance runner. This was maybe twenty-five years ago. Right into my freshman year in college. Anyway, I ran and ran, and I'm starting to think that the cartilage in my knees is pretty much worn away. Especially on wet fall days, my knees ache and throb."
"I've seen it before," Seth said. Pam the dog pricked up her ears. "Roll up your pants leg, son. Ready yourself for a miracle."
I have to admit that Pam's healing session was more than pleasant. Not that I've ever spent money on a massage therapist of any kind, but I imagined that my experience with the dog was similar in a "non-deep tissue" kind of way. That dog licked and licked for a good hour. Seth walked around my front yard smoking cigarettes. I pet Pam's head and said things like, "You a good girl, aren't you?" Every once in a while she pulled back her lips and kneaded my knees for fleas in that way that only dogs can maneuver.
I said to Seth, "How can y'all live off five bucks a session? There's no way."
He said, "Well, it's five bucks for fifteen minutes, officially. I guess I should've mentioned that. Technically, you owe twenty dollars. But it's up to you. So far, Pam ain't had to take no more than fifteen minutes to heal a wound, you know."
I kind of felt the way I did when I first said, "Oh, hell, yeah—go ahead and give me some cable TV," not knowing that every little religious station added on at Charter Communications' whim would cost me more monthly. I said, "Yeah, you probably should've said something about that."
"But it don't matter. It's up to you. Tomorrow I'll come by, and you'll be honest, and you'll tell me whether or not your knees feel better. And then you'll either pay me what Pam deserves or you won't."
I stood up and rolled my pants legs down. I looked at the dog and said, "Thanks." To Seth I said, "It's been a known fact for years that a dog licking an open wound makes it heal quicker. I mean, when I was growing up and had a scab, my dog Dooley'd lick it."
Seth lit another cigarette. He looked out toward the Gruel skyline, which meant the back sides of four one-story brick buildings. "That's true, Curt. But I've had Pam's salivary glands tested. And I have documentation right here," he patted his wallet, "that states her spit—for some unknown reason—contains higher levels of stearic acid, sodium borate, allantoin, and methyl paraben. The doctor up at Duke who conducted all the tests said she also has a way of secreting acetaminophen that he'd never seen before. Oh Pam's a medical mystery."
I'm no idiot. I understood that it didn't take much for a man like Seth to memorize the ingredients of any burn cream, plus an extra-strength headache powder. I thought to myself, In a way that's my job, in a way. I said, "Well. Whatever. I'd like to talk to that Duke boy. He might've gone to too many basketball games."
"Here you go," Seth said. "Goddamn it. It's true. Most people I run into haven't even heard of medical research, man. I'm glad to talk to someone who's been around. What're you doing in Gruel, of all places?"
I didn't go into how my wife left me for another man—a high school guidance fucking counselor she worked with up in Greenville where she taught social studies to tenth graders who couldn't pass the class in seventh, eighth, or ninth. I didn't say how I threw a goddamn dart hoping to hit Montana or Maine, that I'd made a promise to myself to go wherever it landed, and how the stupid thing landed only fifty miles south. I didn't say how there weren't many places in America where you could buy an antebellum house in need of slight repair for ten thousand dollars. I didn't say, "Fuck, if my dart had landed in the Bermuda Triangle I would've moved there." I said to Seth, "I could live anywhe
re. I work as a freelance indexer."
Pam sniffed my crotch. I tried not to view this as a sign.
"A freelance indexer. That has something to do with fingers?"
"Nope. Well, I guess in a way it does. Somebody writes a book with a lot of notes. A lot of citations. It's my job to read the book, and then have everything in alphabetical order at the back of the book. You've seen books like this, I swear. I do mostly biographies. Publishers call me up and send me manuscripts, and I filter everything out. You've seen it before. At the back of books."
I didn't go into where I'd made major contributions: books by or about Kissinger, Nixon, Bush, Reagan, Lucifer, and Satan.
"The backs of books. And now you're here."
I said, "With a dog licking my knees."
Seth looked left and right, pulled out his cigarette twice, and exhaled. He said, "Bubba, this ain't much of a town. What do you do in a town like this? What can I do for my dog here?"
I looked across the way. I lived on Old Old Greenville Road, in a Victorian house that ... sure, the ceilings fell down throughout, and the roof looked like some giant sat on it; the gutters hung like weird incisors; the floor sagged in a way that made it impossible to walk from den to dining room—but otherwise it seemed a perfect place to freelance indices. I said, "I don't know. Here I am. But by goddamn I don't have a sore on my leg."
"Well."
Pam the dog cocked her head. I thought about doing a couple deep knee bends, but didn't. I knew that I'd perform such things the next morning. I said, "It's been good meeting you, Seth. Pam."
Seth said, "Uh-huh," and looked at me like I was out of my mind. Index freelancer, you know. He said, "Tomorrow, Bubba. Tomorrow's Sunday." And then he gave me a look that might've said, I'll kill you if you don't come up with the money. Or maybe he gave me a look of You and me could drink some beer together. Sometimes I get those looks confused. I do know that my knees didn't have a hair on either one of them, if that matters, after Pam got done.
***
I perform my job the old-fashioned way: I keep a notebook open, I read, and I take notes with a pencil. Normally I place twenty-six little tabs at the top of the pages, A through Z. As I read, I place asterisks in the margins, and go to my notebook to jot down what I've found.
Let's pretend that I'm indexing a biography of, I don't know, Pavlov. I might have to turn to the'S's under "Salivation" and write [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], and so on. Under "Temper tantrum" I might only have to place down "—with dog, 98," "—with wife, 360," or whatever. It's a meticulous job that I never mind, but one that a spouse might find both all-encompassing and anally retentive. As a matter of fact, if my ex-wife indexed my biography she'd probably have pages one to the end marked for obsessive-compulsive behavior. I don't care.
Since I had moved to Gruel my job as a freelance indexer was more or less at a standstill. I wouldn't call it a self-imposed hiatus, seeing as the publishing houses teamed together and quit sending me work. Evidently I'd gone too far on three successive books in a row from three separate presses—one on George Wallace, one on Jesse Helms, and another involving the 1994 Republican "Contract with America." Each one had pretty much the same section that began with the letter I. Under "Idiotic behavior" I listed every page of each book. The same went for "Idiotic thought." Then I listed my own name under "Rational thought."
Hell, who knew that someone actually read those indices back at the publishing house? I'd never had a copy editor chosen for my own work. As far as I was concerned, I was the copy editor, in a way. But then some newly graduated do-gooder from Smith or Sarah Lawrence or Vassar who got a job somewhere between intern and courier decided to take a look at my work, told on me, and so on. I think she's probably senior editor now, at age twenty-three.
But I'm not pouting. You'd think, seeing as Marissa left me soon thereafter and I moved to a town named after the worst breakfast ever invented, that I'd've gone to cutting myself or holding my hands too close to a flame (bad indexer, bad, bad indexer) in such a way that would give Pam the healing dog a challenge. I didn't.
I woke up the next day at four A.M. as normal, and did my routine. In the old days I got out the book at hand and got to work. I know I've always told myself that I'd never be like my father, but I woke up two hours before dawn, got to work, and prided myself on being finished for the day before The Today Show finished. Then I could take a nap, watch the noon news, maybe practice horseshoes, most likely play about four thousand games of solitaire, wait for Marissa to get home from her job as a teacher of at-risk teens, listen to her stories about some nineteen-year-old tenth grader confused at there being a Washington, D.C., and an entire state with the same name, prepare supper for us, then go to bed. This occurred in Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro, Charleston, and Savannah. Let me make it clear that I could work anywhere, so we always moved only because my wife either "had" to move or "had a better offer." I don't want to start rumors, but I have a funny feeling now that she got "asked" to leave some of those jobs, that maybe she belittled students and colleagues alike. Who knows.
So I got up at four, and walked around the kitchen drinking coffee, putting everything in alphabetical order. I don't want to come off as some kind of seer, but I could feel someone standing on my front porch, so I went out there and turned on the outside lights to find Seth and Pam the dog. I opened the door and said, "What did y'all do, sleep in my front yard?"
"How're those knees feeling, friend?" Seth said. He wore the same thing as the day before. "Do a couple deep knee bends right now and tell me you don't feel better. I'm serious. If you can honestly say you don't, I'm on my way. If you do, then it's twenty dollars."
I said, "Now I can see how you make a living. If you're waking people up at four in the morning and working till midnight, that makes sense." Pam sat down and wagged her tail, sweeping a couple leaves and a ton of dust around.
I did the knee bends, and sure enough I didn't feel the tendonitis/arthritis/effects of being thirty pounds overweight that I normally felt. My ligaments didn't feel as though they stretched to the bursting point, is what I'm saying. "Come on in," I said, like a fool.
Seth and Pam ambled into the empty den—or probably the "parlor"—and stood five feet into my house. I went upstairs to find my wallet. When I came back down Seth said, "They's a bunch of gurus living out at the old Gruel Inn. Did you know that? Pam and me went by there hoping to do some healing, and this one yoga fellow bent way over and licked the back side of his knee. It's people like that might put us out of business."
I handed over one of those new twenty-dollar bills that look more like French money than American. I said, "I pretty much keep to myself," but didn't go into the whole I-might've-gone-crazy-for-a-little-while explanation.
Seth said, "We appreciate it." He bent down to Pam and said, "Dog food for a month, baby!" and showed her the money. Then he walked backward to the door and opened it. He said, "You don't know how much this means. Hey, tell your friends about Pam the healing lick dog."
I said, "I will," and didn't go into an explanation about how I knew no one in Gruel outside of the woman with the Jesus crust bread and the trick shot players who said, "Thanks." I said, "Good luck to you and yours," for some reason.
On the porch Seth said, "You know, on our way up here—on our way through your yard—I thought I saw some kind of snake hole you might want to be aware of. It's right out here."
He pointed. I wasn't afraid of snakes, but I'd overheard some people at Roughhouse Billiards talk about how there seemed to be a preponderance of snakes that infiltrated the town lately. I said, "Where?" and followed him out in the yard.
I might've made it five or six steps barefoot before I felt what ended up being broken glass and tacks in the soles of my feet. I yelled out a couple damn-it-to-hells and made it back to the steps on my heels. Because, again, the porch lights were on I could see the blood flowing from the balls of my feet, from in between my toes, et cetera. I said, "Ow-ow-ow."
"Uh-oh," Seth said. "Hey Pam, get to work on this old boy's sores."
The dog approached me on cue.
Of course I knew that Seth spread broken Coke bottles and tacks in my front yard and lured me out there to step on them early morning barefoot. And I didn't hold it against him! He'd probably seen me go out every morning without shoes to pick up my newspapers—the paperboy drove a step van and delivered the local Forty-Five Platter, the State, and the Greenville News in three long swoops as he drove by in a way that made me walk from gravel driveway to property edge to retrieve them all. I figured that I'd only been cased, just like in crime drama movies.
We sat down in the kitchen and Seth said, "That coffee smells good."
I said, "You can have some for twenty dollars a cup, peckerhead," like that. Maybe I wasn't as amused as I pretended.
Pam the dog licked and licked my bare feet in a way that reminded me of my honeymoon, in a way that reminded me of a woman I'd worked with on an early biography of Rasputin. Seth said, "You look like the kind of man who might hold some bourbon around the house. You got any bourbon around the house? I like bourbon in my coffee."
I didn't say "Here we go" aloud, I don't think, but I thought it. If I were indexing this scene for a book I'd've written "here we go" under "Bourbon request." "Yeah, there's some bourbon in the cabinet over there. By the way, I'm not paying you five bucks a quarter hour for this. I'm on to you, man." I looked at the dog lapping my soles. "I'm on to you, too, Fido," I said.
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