thousand words.
“You could do that in a summer if you found a hook to hang your hat on and then
stuck to it,” he’d told Dykstra in a letter. (They hadn’t progressed to using the phone
and the fax at that point.) “And it would be twice as much as you’d make teaching
classes in the June and August sessions down there at Mangrove U. If you’re going to
try it, my friend, now is the time—before you find yourself with a wife and two-point-
five children.”
There had been no potential wife on the horizon (nor was there now), but Dykstra had
taken Jack’s point; rolling the dice did not get easier as one grew older. And a wife
and kids weren’t the only responsibilities one took on as time slipped quietly by.
There was always the lure of the credit cards, for instance. Credit cards put barnacles
on your hull and slowed you down. Credit cards were agents of the norm and worked
in favor of the sure thing.
When the summer-teaching contract came in January of ’94, he had returned it
unsigned to the department head with a brief explanatory note: I thought this summer
I’d try to write a novel instead.
Eddie Wasserman’s reply had been friendly but firm: That’s fine, Johnny, but I can’t
guarantee the position will be there next summer. The man in the chair always gets
right of first refusal.
Dykstra had considered this, but only briefly; by then he had an idea. Better still, he
had a character: The Dog, literary father of Jaguars and houses on Macintosh Road, was waiting to be born, and God bless the Dog’s homicidal heart.
Ahead of him was the white arrow on the blue sign twinkling in his headlights, and
the ramp curving off to the left, and the high-intensity arc-sodium lights illuminating
the pavement so brightly that the ramp looked like part of a stage set. He put on his
blinker, slowed to forty, and left the interstate.
Halfway up, the ramp branched: trucks and Winnebagos to the right, folks in Jaguars
straight ahead. Fifty yards beyond the split was the rest stop, a low building of beige
cinder block that also looked like a stage set under the brilliant lights. What would it
be in a movie? A missile-command center, maybe? Sure, why not. A missile-
command center way out in the boonies, and the guy in charge is suffering from some
sort of carefully concealed (but progressive) mental illness. He’s seeing Russians
everywhere, Russians coming out of the damn woodwork…or make it Al Qaeda
terrorists, that was probably more au courant. The Russians were sort of out as
potential villains these days unless they were pushing dope or teenage hookers. And
the villain doesn’t matter anyway, it’s all a fantasy, but the guy’s finger is
nevertheless itching to push the red button, and…
And he needed to pee, so put the imagination on the back burner for a while, please
and thank you. Besides, there was no place for the Dog in a story like that. The Dog
was more of an urban warrior, as he’d said at the Pot o’ Gold earlier tonight. (Nice phrase, too.) Still, the idea of that crazy missile-silo commander had some power,
didn’t it? A handsome guy…the men love him…looks perfectly normal on the
outside…
There was only one other car in the sprawling parking area at this hour, one of those
PT Cruisers that never failed to amuse him—they looked like toy gangster cars out of
the 1930s.
He parked four or five slots down from it, turned off the engine, then paused to give
the deserted parking lot a quick scan before getting out. This wasn’t the first time he’d stopped at this particular rest area on his way back from the Pot, and once he’d been
both amused and horrified to see an alligator lumbering across the deserted pavement
toward the sugar pines beyond the rest area, looking somehow like an elderly,
overweight businessman on his way to a meeting. There was no gator tonight, and he
got out, cocking his key-pak over his shoulder and pushing the padlock icon. Tonight
there was only him and Mr. PT Cruiser. The Jag gave an obedient twitter, and for a