The Wooden Sea

But it was only one in a swirling, illusive combination of cherished smells. Cut grass, wood smoke, hot asphalt, sweat on a woman you are making love with, Creed’s “Orange Spice” cologne, fresh-ground coffee... my list of favorites and there were more. All of them were there together at the same time in the air. Once it had my full attention, neither my conscious nor unconscious mind could believe it.

I had to stand up, had to find where it was coming from or I’d go crazy. The trail led to the garage. I remembered that in our conversation earlier, Magda had said how good it smelled in there. What an understatement! No room freshener out of a can could have matched that deliciousness. Cloves now, the warm healthy smell of puppies. Pine, rain on pine trees.

The car was parked there looking friendly and cooperative. Hadn’t the mechanic come yet? If so, why wasn’t Magda using it now? The smell of new leather, a new book, lilacs, grilling meat. I kept a tool kit in the trunk. I hadn’t tried to start the car yet, but since I was standing right there, why not get out the tool kit just in case?

What registered first—what I saw or smelled? I opened the trunk. The intensity of the odor multiplied by ten. And lying in there was the body of Old Vertue. Again. Under his red collar were the feather from the Schiavo house and the bone I had found in the hole I dug for him. 

Ape of My Heart

George Dalemwood is the strangest person I know and one of my best friends. He is not strange in a “lives in a treehouse, wears chipmunkskin underwear and a red crash helmet” way. He’s just odd. I certainly would not like to live inside his head, but I love hearing what comes out of it so long as I am at a safe distance. And for all his eccentricities, the great paradox is what George does for a living—he writes instructions for how to make things work. How do you get that complicated new camera going after it’s out of the box? Read the instructions, George Dalemwood wrote. They are invariably clear, confident, and precise. Boot a computer program and get nothing but crashes? Read George and you’ll be rocking in no time.

Most important, as a friend, he was unjudgmental and carried no preconceived notions about anything. Because I could not deal with what had just happened, I got into the car without another thought and drove to his house, dead dog passenger and all. Yes, the car started immediately, but I was too dazed to give that any thought. I just wanted to talk to George.

His place is a few blocks from ours. Nothing special about it—one floor, four rooms, a porch that should have been fixed twenty years ago. When I arrived his young dachshund, Chuck, was sitting on a porch step licking its balls. I stepped over it and rang the bell. No answer. Damn! Now what? Then I remembered the engine in my car was supposed to be dead. The dead dog that was supposed to be buried was in the trunk of the car that was supposed to have a dead battery. Damn!

I looked up at the sky hoping for divine guidance, or something, and saw George sitting on his roof staring at me.

“What are you doing up there? Didn’t you see me ring your bell?”

“Yes.”

“Well get down here, man, I need help!”

In a toneless voice he said, “I would prefer not to.” Which, in spite of everything going on, made me smile. Because George had been rereading Bartleby over and over for the last two months and said he would continue until he understood it. Before Bartleby he had been reading and trying to figure out Mount Analogue and before that, all of the Doctor Doolittle books. Every fookin’ one of them. George hoped when he died if he went to heaven, it would be Puddleby on the Marsh—Doolittle’s hometown. He was serious.

“Would you like a Mars bar?”

George ate three things and only those three: boiled beef, Mars bars, and Greek mountain tea.

“No. Listen, I’m begging you as a friend, please come down and listen to me.”

“I can hear fine from up here, Fra

“What are you doin’ up there anyway?”

“Deciding the best way to describe erecting a satellite dish.”

“So you have to sit up there to see?”

“Something like that.”

“Jesus! All right, if you’re going to be that way about it—” I went back to the car, started it, and reversed onto his perfectly kept front lawn until I was as close to the house as possible. I opened the trunk and pointed accusingly at the carcass. George slid on his ass down the roof a ways so he could see better.

He was unimpressed. “Got a dead dog in there. So?”

Hands on hips, afternoon sun directly in my eyes, I described what had happened with Old Vertue the last two days. When I was finished he asked only about the feather and the bone. He wanted to see them. I handed them up. He leaned over the edge of the roof to get them and, stumbling, almost fell off.

“Goddamn, George! Why do you make life so difficult? Why don’t you just come down for ten minutes? Then you can climb back up there and be an ante

He shook his head. After settling himself into a comfy position, he touched the bone to his tongue. If I hadn’t known him I would have protested, but my friend had his own way of doing things. If you were going to hang around with him you had to accept that. After a few licks, he delicately bit it with his front teeth but not enough to break it. Standing below, I could hear the high click of his teeth against it. Sort of like castanets. I got a shiver down my spine at the thought of putting that nasty thing in my mouth.

“What does it taste like?”

“I don’t know if it’s really bone, Fra

“It’s been lying in the ground, George! Probably soaked up a lot of—” I stopped when I saw he wasn’t listening. No matter what you were saying, if George wasn’t interested he stopped listening. It was a never-ending lesson in both humility and careful word choice.

Next came the feather. That piece of evidence he smelled a long time but gave it only a glancing swipe with his tongue. That was somehow more revolting than the bone, and I looked away. I noticed Chuck had stopped licking his plumbing and joined me in staring up at his master.

“You lick your nuts and George licks feathers. No wonder you two live together.” I picked him up and kissed his head while waiting for the lab report from the roof.

George pointed the feather at me. “This has a great deal to do with what I was thinking about before you arrived.”

“And what was that, pray tell?”

“Conspiracy theories.”

“You’re on the roof being an ante

He ignored me. “On the Internet there are over ten thousand sites devoted to the different secret plots people believe led to the death of Lady Diana. The essential motivation behind all conspiracy theories is egotism—I am not being told the truth. The same thing applies here, Fra

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“There are two ways of approaching this—as mischief or metaphysics. The first is simple: Someone saw you burying the dog and decided to play a trick. When you left the forest they dug up the body and found a way to put it in your trunk when neither you nor your family were watching.”

“What about the bone? I left that in my coat pocket. How’d they get it?”

He held up an index finger. “Wait. We’re only theorizing now. They used the body to play a macabre clever trick on you. Which worked because look how upset you are.

“The other possibility is it’s a sign from a greater power. It happened because you’ve been chosen for some reason. The dog reappears, the feather and the bone are together, and your car starts when it was supposedly broken. I’m assuming if this is the case, it wouldn’t start for Magda because the dog was already back in the car, waiting for you to find it. All this is supposition; there will be no understandable logic here because our logic doesn’t apply in matters like these. Wait a minute.” He moved to the far side of the roof and climbed down an old wooden ladder leaning against the house.