Just Bill

by Barry Knister

  “That’s true.”

  “She really wants to go back to work. She’s going crazy now, she told me. I’d like to know her better. Someone young for a change.”

  “The club will give her time to relocate,” he says. “We’ll have her to dinner. I’m sorry you didn’t see her with Ruby.”

  “The pottery class.”

  “Right.”

  “You and your secrets.”

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, they get an early start. At I-75, they turn south. This is the beginning of the grind, the tedious, unappealing stretch of road leading from flat southern Michigan through flat Ohio. This is the opening phase of the snowbirds’ Chisholm Trail, the annual southbound roundup. Starting in late October, Conestoga wagons re-invented as thousands of minivans and SUVs begin rolling all one way, heading for the peninsula jutting down from Georgia like the boot of Italy.

  They listen to books. All day, Elmore Leonard’s Riding the Rap keeps them interested. Numbed by road vibration and the low-key anxiety of high-speed travel, they drive in two-hour shifts. They stop to fuel themselves and the van, stretch, buy coffee and soft drinks. They say little and listen to the book.

  At night, they always stop north of Atlanta. When he leaves the expressway and asks if she wants a Marriott this time, she says, “What’s wrong with the Red Roof Inn?”

  “Nothing. We always stayed there because of Bill. I thought you might like something more upscale.”

  “The Red Roof is fine,” she says.

  They check in, wash their faces and change into clean polos, then drive to the casual restaurant they know from previous trips. A combination sports bar and roadhouse steak restaurant, its walls flash with dozens of TV screens. Green-shaded lamps hang over the booths. They are shown to one by the manager. Looking twelve to both of them, the boy-man wears a rep tie and dress shirt. It seems to Fred like a school uniform. His wife orders house chardonnay, he asks for a rob roy on the rocks.

  When the drinks come, Fred holds up his glass. “A good day,” he says. “We make a good team.”

  “We do.” She clinks his glass. “So young,” she says of the manager.

  “How did it happen?” he asks. “I can’t believe managers of anything ever looked like that. It adds a whole different angle to someone like Glenda.”

  “She won’t stay,” his wife says.

  “Probably not.”

  “She’s still young. Donegal is too old a crowd.” Sipping her wine, she regards him. She puts down the glass, still looking at him, smiling now. “Oh hell, you keep your secrets,” she says. “I’m no good at it. Bill’s coming back.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Glenda would keep him, of course. ‘He’s a great dog. He’s no Hotspur but no dog could be—’ That’s what she said last week. We talked again, we girls. She says he stares out the window. She thinks he’s looking for you.”

  “That’s crazy.” He hears the emphasis in his voice, for himself, not her. “That’s what they do,” he says. “He does it all the time.”

  “I know, but it’s what she thinks. Plus, there’s the ‘grandfather’ business. It applies to you but not her. I called the club manager. I told him Glenda was just keeping Bill for us. I can tell a fib or two myself, you know.”

  “I see that.”

  He smiles at his wife. From what he knows of her after only forty-four years, he determines now, with some confidence, that everything’s already been worked out. By the girls, he thinks. He sips his drink, hearing crowd sounds from the wall-mounted sets. Young men at the bar erupt, pounding the counter. He turns away, seeing himself at Glenda Gilmore’s front door, the door opening. The damned thing can’t stop leaping, scolding—Where were you! Why went you! How could you!—barking, leaping, big paws on his chest and the mister holding them, looking at the dog, delighted to be known, being told off but welcomed. Okay okay, come on now—

  One summer when I was alone in Florida to write, the novel I thought I wanted to work on was going nowhere. I realized I was evading the project by spending time on dog-rescue websites. Inspired by a friend who had saved a stray dog near his home in western Michigan, my wife Barbara and I had decided to adopt a dog. I thought this was my reason for visiting the rescue websites, but I was just running away from a failed project.

  Who can say how someone finds his way to the story he should write?

  In that month, I read a book by Stanley Coren, The Intelligence of Dogs: Canine Consciousness and Capabilities. Coren made the case for dogs as conscious, thinking beings, and this fit with my lifelong appreciation of dogs. My friend and the dog he saved, plus images of dogs for which adoption websites were seeking a “forever home” joined with Coren’s inspiring words to set me in motion.

  In the heart of storm season in muggy, summer Florida, I drafted Just Bill. Each time a thunderclap shook my house, picture frames banged the walls. Today, I think that tropical sturm und drang is part of what energized me to finish my draft in two weeks. Nothing so fast had ever come to me as a writer. Nor has it since. Years passed before the story was ready to publish, but most of Just Bill has remained unchanged.

  Perhaps you can see why, years later, I think of Bill as having rescued me.

  After a career of college teaching, Barry Knister returned to writing fiction. The Dating Service, his first novel, was published by Berkley. He's written four other novels, including Just Bill, The Anything Goes Girl, Deep North, and Godsend. Knister is the past secretary of Detroit Working Writers, and the former director of the Cranbrook Summer Writers Conference. He has published travel and humor in local markets, and writes an occasional blog/column for the Naples (Florida) Daily News. He lives in Michigan with his wife Barbara, and their Aussie shepherd, Skylar.

  Visit the author at:

  www.bwknister.com