Carver’s Dog

That motherfucker, she fumed, I’m so pissed at him that I can very well envision living out the rest of my life without ever speaking to Trace again.

“But you wouldn’t want that, would you, Josephine?” the unyielding voice in her head barked like a dog from hell. Josephine hated that voice. It always tried to talk her into doing things she was not inclined to do, like hold down a steady job or accept personal responsibility for her actions. That voice also conspired to insinuate that she should try to see things through Trace’s point-of-view and understand that, as a writer, he is an emotionally complex creature. There is also the whole bi-polar thing to consider, that voice reminded her. And the drinking.

The drinking, Josephine stewed, if I ever even think about taking him back again that would have to stop. I managed to lay off the bottle and the beer, even while Trace continued drinking. His drinking will kill him someday.

And what will kill you, Josephine? the voice wanted to know. What will kill you first? The void or the bitterness? Because you know full well that if you write this e-mail you’re considering right now it will take a considerable amount of time to erase the impact of Trace from your life. You will need to take a very long vacation away from dating and other emotional entanglements with men while you meditate upon what this thing with Trace was all about. Knowledge is wisdom. Learn from your mistakes. Don’t let Trace happen ever again.

That was it! Don’t let Trace happen ever again. That was the key to the e-mail. What was it that Trace always said to her, usually in a scolding and condescending way?

“Jesus God, don’t be always be so fucking vague, Josephine.”

She would not be vague in the e-mail. She would be short and sweet and to the point, perhaps even a little cryptic, but the important thing was to refuse Trace an entry for counterpoint; once a back and forth dialogue got going, Trace always managed to make Josephine feel stupid and rabidly reactionary and before long she forgot what she was upset about in the first place.

Not this time. She poised her hands over the keyboard, dragged the mouse into the e-mail inbox window, and typed:

“I wish you the best of luck. I don’t think you are a monster, you’re just having a very difficult time, but you have lots of people around you now that care. We are all done here. Goodbye, Trace.”

She examined what she wrote. She studied it carefully, poring over every noun and verb obsessively. She let the message hover there, unsent, while she made a cup of tea and contemplated the words even further. She carried her cup of English Breakfast tea into the bedroom, sat back down at the computer, took a deep breath, and hit the SEND MESSAGE tab.

Today is going to be a good day, Josephine vowed.

The Original: Endings

Previously in Trace Remixed: The 99 Cent Store

Six hours a day ringing up the same monotonous figures hour after hour: ninety-nine cents, ninety-nine cents, ninety-nine cents, ninety-nine cents, Consuela manned the electronic cash register, bored, wishing she could be doing something more time-consuming instead, like stocking the shelves or replenishing the warehouse.

Her dark eyes scanned the aisles of shoppers, mostly brown-skinned people from her homeland. The man in aisle two always made her nervous. A tall man in close-cut hair hidden beneath a baseball cap. He was clutching a hand cart and examining a can of Scrub’n Bubbles carpet shampoo as if the directions on the can unleashed the secrets of life.  Consuela took him to be in his late forties, the ravages of some sort of hard life etched into his features like the coarse lines an artisan may etch into a life-like stone bust, permanent and immovable.

“No un hombre feo para un norteamericano,” Consuela thought, but regardless of his physical appeal he somehow made her nervous with each weekly appearance in the store. She couldn’t explain it to herself. He wasn’t there to rob the place but he was just so … unsettling. El diablo en él.

She smiled, weak but polite, when he appeared at the counter with his goods: carpet stain remover, cheap sponges, a bag of cat litter, a box of Kraft microwaveable macaroni and cheese, a package of lavender-scented votive candles, a red squirt gun, and 20 packs each of AA and AAA batteries.

He smiled nervously as she sorted through and scanned the mounds of batteries.

“They’re for toys,” he blurted, blushing. “Toys, yeah.”

“Forty-five dollars,” she said in the fractured and heavily-accented English that embarrassed her.

The man reached into the hip pocket of his dirty jeans and unfurled two twenties and a ten from a wad of currency. When he handed the bills to her the paper was soaked through with sweat. Consuela accepted the sweat-stained cash begrudgingly, suspecting that the sweat of this man’s labors was something she did not want to know about.

Dios mediante.

Further Reading: Trace in Toyland

“Did you get the Chester Himes book I left for you at the front desk, Trace?”

Trace grumbled into the receiver. “Why do you always drop them off at the hotel desk? Another missed opportunity for us to hook up. We don’t see each other often enough as it is, Amy.”

“I was in a hurry, Trace. Jenny had a ballet recital this afternoon and Josh is in trouble at school again. Look, I’ve got to go, honey. Evan and the kids’re going to be home at six and I still haven’t put dinner in the oven. I just wanted to make sure you got the book.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

Amy hung up and dropped the cell phone into her apron pocket. She had student compositions to grade and another chapter to write for her new novel — two weeks behind on deadline as usual — but Evan told her over breakfast that he had been craving her leg of lamb stuffed with basil pesto and she hadn’t done anything nice for her husband in awhile (except for that impromptu blowjob last Sunday afternoon while the kids were visting her mom — she still couldn’t believe how pissed off Trace got when she told him about that over lunch at The Castaway).

She retrieved the Cuisinart food processor from the cabinet above the kitchen sink and placed it on the tiled counter. Amy deposited the pesto sauce ingredients into the processor’s feed tube with great care: fresh, tender basil leaves, generous chunks of garlic, the best pine nuts and parmesan cheese from Trader Joe’s, olive oil, sea salt and peppercorns. She secured the lid on the Cuisinart and punched the button for puree.

Pesto, Amy knew, came from the Italian word pestare, which means to pound or bruise. Trace had lately been accusing her of pounding him — that’s the exact word he used — pounding him with her problems. It was true that he was a good listener and she didn’t want to be a burden on him but he always started it. Trace was the one inquiring as to her state of mind so she couldn’t help it if he didn’t like the reply. Amy was nothing but painfully honest.

She turned off the Cusinart before the pesto became too soupy and retrieved the leg of lamb from the fridge. Amy made a mental note to remind Evan that they needed to buy a new refrigerator before the warranty on the Kenmore expired at the end of next year.

She reached for the sharp Ginsu knife on the cutting board and began de-boning and trimming the excess fat from the lamb. In a way, she envied Trace. Living in a residential hotel seemed exciting, an adventure that he was constantly asking her to share with him. But the accompanying lifestyle would prove unbearable: no kitchen to speak of (he had a microwave and a bar fridge and that was it), no privacy in which to write and to grade her papers, and, of course, there was Trace’s romance with the bottle. She couldn’t figure out if he always drank that heavily or only when he was in her presence.

She spread the pesto sauce all over the inside of the leg of lamb and tied it with butcher string. She recalled the last time she had paid Trace a visit at his hotel. There were so many books in the room that she had either bought him or loaned him.

“It’s as if I already live here,” she had said with an amused smile. She liked the way his eyes lit up when she tossed off that remark. Poor fool. He was never going to see the truth. For a writer he sure could be a blinded idiot sometimes.

Amy settled the lamb into the Swiss Diamond roasting pan. It had to stand for one hour before cooking. She set the GE Cafe range to preheat to 350 and poured herself a glass of Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio.

Sipping her wine, Amy meditated on the palm fronds swaying in the wind outside the kitchen window. As hard as she tried, Amy couldn’t grasp the grand importance of love or lust. The poets couldn’t explain it to her, the great novelists failed to unravel its mysteries. It was, she thought, just an odious burden that got in the way of everything else that’s important in life.

Related Reading: Dozen of Books

The old man hitched his pants over his bulging waistline and snorted. He stood on the porch, proudly surveying his freshly-spruced front lawn.

“Good job, Bruce. Right down to the last weed. Never seen it lookin’ so good since I bought the place. That was when Margie was still with us, of course. How much did you say I owed you?”

“Hundred bucks flat was the deal, Mr. Farmington.” Bruce had not eaten in days, except for an unclaimed Snickers bar he found in the vending machine at the bus station.

Farmington deeply inhaled the aroma of cut grass, the gray hairs in his wide nostrils twitching, and spat on the lawn. “Tell you what: you shave, say, thirty bucks off and I’ll give ya somethin’ really rare in exchange. Are you a reader, Bruce? Do you like books?”

I can’t eat books, Bruce thought. I knew the bastard would try to cheat me down.

“Yes, sir. I live by my wits, as you know, don’t have the luxury of a roof over my head, meaning I don’t watch TV except in the bar but mostly I prefer to stick my nose in a book. Helps me forget my troubles.”

Farmington snorted again. “Familiar with Raymond Carver?”

“Of course. He lived up the road apiece. I did his lawn once, not long ‘fore he died.”

“You maybe want one of his dogs? I got three pups from a litter. From his dog. Carver’s dog. That’s at least worth thirty bucks. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Bruce considered Farmington’s offer. A dog would be awfully burdensome, he knew, but a man needed friends and Bruce had not a friend in the world.

“I’ll take the dog, Mr. Farmington,” Bruce said. “Maybe I can teach him to hunt.”

Related Reading: Carver’s Dog (The Trace Tale)

“Next in line!” the library clerk chirped.

Eleanor shuddered when the tall man in the gray trenchcoat stepped forward. He visited the central branch of the Glendale Public Library several days a week, emitting a vibe that Eleanor found unsettling. If forced to confront exactly why the man’s presence displeased and unsettled her, Eleanor knew she would come up blank and wordless. The library clerk was a simple creature who dutifully obeyed her instincts and carried a profound mistrust of the ability of words to sum up what natural intuitive power says.

“I’d like to renew these,” he said in murmuring words laced with bourbon. She could smell stale beef on him. Beef and potatoes and bourbon dripping from his pores. He slid the two books across the counter. Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Ordinarily, the man checked out a vast assortment of books: Hemingway, Bukowski, Didion, McCarthy. But lately he seemed stuck on the West and Lowry novels, renewing their enlistment to his shadowy cause time and again, as if searching for some elusive, hidden meaning in the text.

“How are you today?” Eleanor forced herself to smile as she scanned the barcode on the back of his library card. The user profile on the computer monitor told her that his name was Trace. He lived a few scant blocks from the library.

“I’m … okay.” The words were forced, belying the truth. He was far from okay. Eleanor noticed a slight tremble in his right hand; to mask the tremor Trace drummed his fingers on the wood countertop.

Eleanor swiftly scanned the books and handed them back to him. “Happy reading!”

Trace shoved Nathanael West and Malcolm Lowry into his canvas tote bag and sidled away from the counter. “You, too,” he said absently.

Further Reading: Intoxicate Me