Welcome to the Rejectorium 

Jake's Story

 

          It had been one of those days. First off, the car wouldn’t start. I spent about an hour trying this and that, including calling the shop and ordering a new battery, before it occurred to me to check and see if one or both of the battery cables were loose. They were. Five-minute job, and they’re fixed, and I wasted an hour trying to figure out what was wrong.

          Then, of course, I was late for work. I don’t like my boss anyway. He’s one of those people who rose through the ranks with a permanent butt print on his face. He took care of all his buddies, and gave the rest of us the shifts that were convenient only in European time zones.

Needless to say, he didn’t like me either; hence, the 5:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. shift, Tuesday through Saturday. Seems to me, that’s punishment enough for 42-year-old single guy who’s never been married and who ought to think about finding a spouse before he makes the turn into middle age.

          Actually, my boss – Courtney - shouldn’t have even been there when I arrived at 6:30ish (you know; there’s A.M. and P.M. and Ish). His boss had kept him around after his normal quitting time of 5 p.m., so he was already pretty torqued by the time I strolled in. He immediately got on my case about being late, and I said this, and he said that, and I suggested that his very existence was a waste of skin, and he informed me that insubordination was an actionable offense under the union rules, and I said it was a good thing there was a union to protect us all from promotion into the levels of incompetence where he operated, whereupon he said I was asking for a couple unpaid days off, so I said fine, and walked out before he could change his mind.

          I didn’t want to answer the phone when I got back home because my boss would just now be remembering that there were only a few other people who could do my job, and even fewer who would be willing to do my job at that time of day on that day of the week. The union rules stipulate that you have to give someone 12 hours notice for a shift change. If you didn’t give them 12-hour notice, the boss had to beg and plead, or do the shift himself. I felt better because of that on the way home. Courtney’d have to go looking for a replacement. If he couldn’t find one, he’d call looking for me. If I answered, I’d get in another big argument that actually might get me fired.

          So I didn’t answer the phone when it played the William Tell Overture; just listened to the

messages. One was from Courtney, and the other from my girlfriend leaving a “we have to talk” message. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with the fair sex, but “fair” doesn’t refer to rules of engagement. Fair refers to looks.

And the rules are malleable. They change as you go along, but some things are constant. “We have to talk,” usually portends doom for the guy. In my case, it meant she’d made a decision on which of us, me or her other

boyfriend (assuming there was only one) she was going to retain to make sure her future was emotionally secure. From the tone of her voice, I knew I

was the dumpee, so I didn’t feel like talking to her.

          She clearly wasn’t the kind of woman - girl, actually - who would spend her life with one guy, which was what I wanted. Best to get out of these things before you get into really deep water. After listening to her message, I checked the mail and found a letter from the IRS saying I owed them $1,200 in interest and penalties from not declaring as income some savings bonds my deceased aunt had left me five years ago.

           That was all the news that I needed to fill my cup that particular Saturday. I headed to the bar before any more bad news could find me at home. I didn’t head to my regular bar. I didn’t want to run into Tammi - the newly ex-girlfriend - and I really wasn’t in the mood to run into my usual drinking partners. I was tired of their stories, and they probably were tired of mine. I’d heard about this place over on Fourth Street, so there I went. New bar, maybe some new women, maybe some new friends. I knew them all at the old place. What the hey. I’ve had disaster after disaster in the area of male/female relationships. So try someplace new. The worst that could happen was I’d meet another woman with zero capacity for real love. I mean, why is it half the married couples can stay together their whole lives, and half have two or three or more marriages under their belts? What does the first group know that the other group doesn’t?

          Questions to ponder over a beer, I decided. It was early evening, so there were only a couple guys there. One looked like that portable asset most small bars have, a guy on a pension who comes in at noon every day and drinks himself into oblivion by 7 o’clock. The only cost associated with serving him is calling a taxi every night. But while the pensioner is there, he latches like a tick on to any walk-in, and then the boring begins. He already had a victim cornered and was telling him some story about how great his life had been. I sat down at the other end of the bar and tried not to make eye contact.

           “Don’t sit there,” the bartender said.

          I looked at him with my “Is this some kind of joke” expression on my face. I mean, the bar had maybe fifteen stools, and only three, including mine, were occupied. It had a row of seven booths in which no one was sitting; a pool table at which no one was shooting; a little dance floor on which no one was dancing, a couple video games at which no one was playing; and a couple restrooms. Unless the restrooms were occupied by fifty people about to come back and reclaim their seats, I couldn’t see what the problem was.

           I said, “Look, Pal, I just didn’t want to intrude on that guy’s life story down there. What’s wrong with this stool? Is it about to buck me off or something?”

          The bartender walked over and leaned on the bar. “That stool’s reserved for someone who might come in here later. You ever seen ‘Cheers?’ That’s Norm’s stool. Any one of the others would be fine,” he said.

          I would have thought that this bar’s Norm was the old guy pouring out his personal history at the other seven stools down. But who cares; I wasn’t about to get in a big argument over where I was sitting in an almost empty bar. I moved down a couple stools.

          “This better?” I asked.

          “That’s great,” said the bartender. “What can I get you?”

          “Beer.”

          “What flavor?”

          “Cold. Whatever comes out of that tap,” I said, and he went to fill the order. While the bartender was doing that, the guy who’d been cornered by the old drunk broke away and came down and sat next to me. “Hey, Chief,” he said. “Pretend like you know me. That old fart’s been bending my ear for an hour. I feel like I need to take it to a body shop.”

          I laughed. Maybe this guy wasn’t such a schmoe. “Name’s Al,” I said. “That’s why I sat down here. I didn’t want to listen to it either.” Then, for lack of anything else to say, I asked, “What’s with the chair?”

          “I’m Tom. You mean that chair? That’s Sue’s chair. Nobody sits there it. Kind of a bar tradition.”

          “So when does Sue come in?” I asked. “I’m between girlfriends as of this evening, one of about 900 reasons I’m here.”

          “Sue won’t be coming in today. Sue won’t be coming in tomorrow. Sue won’t be coming in, because Sue’s dead. Killed in a car accident about

five months ago,” Tom said.

          I chewed on that for a while. “Seems like a long time to keep a seat warm for someone who’s stone cold dead. She own the place or something?” I asked.

“Naw, she just came here a lot. That guy owns the place,” he said, pointing to the bartender. She was a good customer. So was her boyfriend, Ben. He was a real good customer. Used to come in here maybe three, four nights a week. After he and Sue got together, the first thing he’d do when he walked in here was look to see if she was sitting on that stool.”

          “And after she died?” I asked.

          “The first thing he’d do when he walked in here was look to see if she was sitting on that stool,” Tom said, taking a drink of beer. He looked at the ornate woodwork behind the bar for a moment, turned his head back to me. “He couldn’t accept that she was dead, y’see. He kept wishing that she’d be there, like if he wished hard enough, she would be there. And if

someone else was sitting there, he’d ask them to move.”

         “So what happened if they didn’t move?”

         “Ben would move them,” Tom said. “You didn’t mess with Ben. So Schappe” - he gestured at the bartender - “just won’t let anyone sit there. Stops a lot of fights before they happen.”

         “So does Ben still come around here?”

         “Nope,” said Tom. “Ben disappeared off the face of the planet about four months ago. Nobody’s heard from or seen him since. Didn’t quit his job, didn’t sell his condo, didn’t leave a note, nothing. Just vanished.”

          This was getting interesting. I made my living copy reading for a magazine and book publisher. I hadn’t told Tom that, so he wasn’t pitching me some story he was certain would be a best seller if he could just find a publisher. People do that when they find out you work for a book publisher.

And I had a whole night to waste, not having to worry about a hangover the next day. Way I saw it, the boss gave me two days off, which to me was one to get drunk and one to recover.

          I mentioned that to Tom, skipping the part about where I worked, and he said, “Ben used to say stuff like that. Like, he said you shouldn’t get a holiday off. You should get the day after the holiday off, to recover from your holiday party. He was hilarious. He’d sit at this end of the bar - this was before him and Sue fell in love - and just rant about anything. He was a great story teller. Half the bar would be crowded around this end listening to him yap.”

          “So is there some investigation about what happened to him? I didn’t hear anything about this on TV,” I said.

          “I don’t think TV ever picked up on it, don’t know that they would, this just being a random disappearance. I think it was in the local paper that he had left town with no trace, disappeared, but the cops said there didn’t seem to be any foul play - no body, no note, or anything like that. They said it was ‘under investigation,’ which around here means that they ain’t doing anything. But then again, maybe he just took off for Alaska or something. He really loved Sue, and her dying really messed him up; broke his heart, really,” Tom said.

          I got to asking myself whether or not Tammi broke my heart. I concluded I hadn’t got that far with her, which was probably a good thing. I’d be in worse shape if I’d actually fallen in love with her, or worse yet, married her. I probably didn’t know what true love was, or I’d be broken like this guy Ben was. I was getting away from Tammi before I fell that far, I decided, or maybe I just didn’t want to find out what true, dedicated, absolute love was. You have thoughts like that while you’re swilling beer. These thoughts seem quite profound at the time you have them. Next day, you wish you hadn’t shared such moronic maundering with people who might remember what you said. Good rule in a bar; keep it short.

          “I think my girlfriend is going to Seattle to live with some guy on a boat. I’m so in love with her, I think I’ll let her go,” I commented, motioning to Schappe for another beer. I asked Tom if he wanted one, and added, “You’re telling the story. Does it have an end, or are you guys just going to sit around waiting for some dead gal to fill that seat?”

          “Schappe thinks he knows how it ends, but I think Schappe’s nuts,” Tom said.

          “So what does he say. This is getting interestinger and interestinger.”

          “Hey, Schappe, come over here,” Tom yelled at the bartender. “Tell this guy what happened to Ben.”

          Schappe looked at Tom. “What’d you tell him so far?”

          “I haven’t told him about Jake yet.”

          “Who’s Jake,” I asked.

          “That was Sue’s beagle,” Schappe said. “She was a vet tech. She rescued the dog from the animal hospital where she worked. You should have seen this dog, fat little guy,” Schappe said.

          “He didn’t start out fat,” Tom added. “The dog had heart worms, first of all. Second, it was abandoned on the street.”

          “And it had a collapsed throat or something,” Schappe added. ““They brought Jake in here one afternoon. Jake would go off in the corner and cough like its lungs were coming out of his mouth. The first time, I thought the damn dog was throwing up in the corner; the cough just sounded like that. Sue’s boss, the veterinarian, said the dog only had about three months to live. So she brought it home. Said she thought the dog should die in a nice place, not some cold cage in an animal hospital, all alone. She fed it milk and dog biscuits, made a little bed for it. Called him Jake. Even slept with him some nights. Well, after the mutt found himself in a nice home, good food, warm place to sleep, someone to love him, Jake perked right up.”

          “Yeah,” said Tom. “The vet gave him three months to live. Three years later - three years! - Jake’s still alive and weighing in at about twice what beagles ought to weigh.”

          Schappe started laughing. “Ben came in here one night a couple winters ago, and I asked, just to make conversation, ‘How’s Jake?’ He says, ‘Jake got high-centered down on the farm.’”

     “High centered? I asked. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You know that snow we got. It covered a cattle gate. You know what a cattle gate is?”

      I nodded. “Those parallel pipes on farm roads. Cars can drive across them, but cows can’t walk across them.”

     “Ben said they got about a foot of snow down at the farm - wet, sticky snow. Covered the cattle gate, so Jake didn’t see it and tried to run across it. His little legs went through, and his stomach got hung up on those pipes. He couldn’t reach far enough forward to get a grip on the pipe in front of him, so he hung there, all four of his little fat legs running like hell and Jake going nowhere. Ben said Jake finally stopped struggling and looked him as if to say, ‘A little help here?’ Ben said he couldn’t do anything, he was laughing so hard. But after a bit, he went and plucked him off the cattle guard. Saved him again,” Schappe recalled, looking down at the bar and laughing at the memory. “Ben could tell a story.”

          “That was the kind of girl Sue was,” Tom said, putting a damper on the humor. “Couldn’t stand to see an animal suffer. She just looked at that little dog at the vet’s office and fell in love with him, that little beagle face and big velvet ears. When Sue fell in love, Sue fell seriously in love. Same with Ben. Not like my ex.”

          “You got an ex?”

          “Yup. Two and a half years of wedded bliss. I should have read our wedding vows before the wedding. I think they said, ‘Till death do us, part, or two and half years, whichever comes first,’” Tom said, emptying his mug.

          I ordered another beer for the three of us. I liked Schappe. Unlike a lot of bar owners, he’d sit there and drink with you, not say something like “I’m on duty” like he was a cop or something.

          “Was this dog a hunter?” I asked.

          “Sure was,” Tom said. “But he’d only hunt for Sue, and Sue wasn’t a hunter. Ben said the two of them would take walks, and Jake would run nearby and flush rabbit after rabbit. He said one time, Jake ran a rabbit righ 

between the two of them. The rabbit ran by, and neither Sue nor Ben was hunting. They were just out for an autumn walk. Ben said Jake came puffing up the trail, stopped, and looked at them as if to say, ‘Why didn’t you shoot that darn rabbit? I worked pretty hard for that rabbit!’”

          “Ben said he tried to take the dog out hunting once. He went in one direction, and Sue went in the other. Ben had Jake on a leash, ‘cause he knew the dog, given a choice, would stick with Sue. He waited until he thought they were about two miles apart, and let Jake loose. Jake took off, but not to hunt. The dog went to go look for Sue. And found her, miles away, cross a couple hills, woods, a creek. Amazing nose on that dog. Ben didn’t see him again until Sue came in from her walk. That dog’d only hunt for her, his way of thanking her, I guess, for saving his life.”

          I pondered that story in the context of the rest of the tale – I do that in my line of work – and asked, “So what happened to Jake?”

         Schappe and Tom looked at one another, as if some quiz show host had stumped the both of them. Finally Schappe said, “We think he’s with Ben and Sue. He ain’t around here. We all looked for him after Ben disappeared. We figured the cops wouldn’t think of that angle. We kept checking at the pound, put ads in the paper, put posters up. That dog there,” Schappe said, pointing at the wall.

          I could see why this particular beagle might stand out in a crowd of the breed. First of all, his face was almost white. Old dog, I thought. Second, he was fat. Most beagles, especially hunting dogs, are pretty lean. Looking at that picture of a fat dog with stubby little bow legs, I could visualize Jake being high-centered on a cattle guard. Third, Jake’s back saddle was almost black, like a shepherd, not light brown or tan like most beagles.

          I noticed something else. Whoever took the picture was a good photographer. Jake’s face filled the frame so you could see every detail, even his whiskers against a dark, blurred background. Whoever took the picture knew something about focus and depth of field. And Jake was smiling. Some dogs can smile, and Jake was clearly grinning. Happy dog, I thought.

          “Who took the picture?”

          “Sue did,” Schappe said. “She was an excellent photographer.”

          “Sure was,” I said. “I’m in the publishing business, and that would be a magazine quality shot. If that dog was around here, and you guys put posters up, someone would have found him.”

          “Oh yeah. We put posters all over the place. We raised $1,000 for a reward from the regulars here and anyone else we could con into making a donation, plus Tom here raised about $300 on the pool table from unwilling donors. Ben was pretty well liked. We had this idea if we found the dog, we’d find a clue about what happened to Ben, and Ben’s condo, for that matter,” Schappe said.

          “Ben’s condo?”

          Tom and Schappe traded that look again. Schappe shrugged. “Ben’s condo disappeared not long after Ben disappeared,” he said, giving me a Believe It Or Don’t look.

          I shrugged too. “I think I’ve been in enough bars to know when I’m being fed a turd sandwich. There a punch line here? His house disappeared?”

          “Honest. I knew where he lived - No. 11 at Lakeside Landing, right on Lake St. John. We all knew where he lived. We had some great parties there,” Tom said. “Except you go to Lakeside Landing now, there are only ten condos down by the lake. They’ve never heard of any Ben Clayton.”

          “This is getting a little weird,” I said. “We’ve only had three beers.”

          Schappe said, “And number four coming up. On me.” He put his elbows on the bar and looked at me. “And that ain’t all. Ben ran three McDonalds in this town. Now, almost six months after he’s gone, only the McDonald’s on Fifth Street remembers him. The other two say he never worked there. We know he managed those places. I say we, Tom and I and a couple other guys. It’s damn peculiar, but a bunch of guys that used to come in here don’t remember Ben all that well. Some who didn’t come in here very often, don’t remember him at all. Hell, he used to do what amounted to stand-up comedy in here. Guy tried to buy him a drink one time. ‘No thanks,’ Ben said. ‘I got pretty drunk last night.’ The guy says, ‘How drunk?’ Ben says, ‘Let me put it this way. Me and Jerry were sitting at that table over there. One of us got up to take a piss, and the other guy sat there trying to figure out which one of us left.’”

          Tom guffawed. “Yeah, and you didn’t want to argue with him. He’d put you down quick. One night, he told this idiot, ‘I’m not going to argue with a guy with a room temperature IQ.’ Took the idiot a half hour to figure out he’d been insulted.”

         “I don’t understand. You guys remember him, you remember Sue, and the dog. What’re you trying to say, that the memories of these two are fading out, is that what you think?” I asked.

         Tom and Schappe got serious again. Schappe said, “Yeah, that’s what we think. We don’t remember as much about him as we think we should. I mean, we were all in the Lions Club for, I don’t know, how long, Tom?”

         Tom started to say something, then shook his head. “I don’t know.  I joined in 2019. I think Ben was a member when I joined, so I don’t know when he joined.”

         “See, I don’t think Ben was a member in ‘19. I don’t think he joined until we got the kids baseball team going in ‘21,” Schappe said.

          “He was the first coach, wasn’t he?” said this guy behind me. He’d apparently wandered over to join the conversation. I turned around and offered a hand. “Al Schaffer,” I said.

          “Doug McInnis,” he said, shaking my hand.

           “Doug and Ben were damned good friends, partners at that farm,” Schappe explained.

           “So what’s your take on all this,” I asked.

           “Have another beer, and I’ll give you my theory,” Doug said.

           “Have another beer and a shot, if you want Doug’s theory,” Tom said.

           “And some drugs,” Schappe said, turning to get more beer. “Why don’t you guys just get a pitcher. It’d be cheaper, and I wouldn’t have to make so many trips to the tap.”

           “Fine with me,” I said. “I got girlfriend woes, job woes, IRS woes. Right now, I’m looking at the world through woes-colored glasses.”

           Doug chuckled. “You remind me a little bit of Ben. You read science fiction?”

           “I read everything. I read books and magazine articles and stories for a living. I’m a copy editor for McGregor Publishing over in Brookfield. I live here, work there.”

           “You ever read anything about alternate universes?” Doug asked.

          “Here we go,” Tom muttered.

          “Hey, bald-on-top, you haven’t come up with any other answer,” Doug snapped.

          “So true,” Tom conceded.

         “Ben used to tell me there’s no purer love than a dog has for a good master. Or mistress, in this case. It’s clear, unwavering, unquestioning. He’d say a dog doesn’t care if its master is pretty or pretty ugly; black, white, green; drunk, sober; whatever. A dog’s love is unequivocal, total, absolute,” Doug remembered.

          “You want an Absolut?” Schappe said, returning.

          “No,” Doug said. “I was talking about dogs,” and he and Schappe got into it about something.

          I keep thinking about this thing called love. I don’t have a dog. I’m never home, so it wouldn’t be fair. I’ve got a girlfriend, though. Or had. We go together two years. She’s almost living at my house. I go away for one week, and she jumps in bed with some guy who hangs out at my previous drinking establishment. Then lies to me about it, like I won’t find out.  Then she admits it, says she’ll love me forever. Except now, she’s going to live with a guy on a boat in Seattle. Maybe you wouldn’t want your woman to be a dog, but something even like that kind of love would be refreshing in humans."

          “I’m sorry,” I said. Doug had been saying something, and I’d been lost in my thoughts.   

          “I said Sue was killed driving back from the farm. There’s a cliff along Highway 7, and a rock fell off the cliff. Big sucker, weighed about 650 pounds. Went right through her windshield, killed her instantly.”

          “You’re kidding.”

          “True story. If she’d have driven by one second later, or one second earlier, she’d be sitting in that chair right now,” Doug said, pointing to the still-empty stool. There must have been thirty people in the saloon now. Schappe’s wife had come in and was tending bar, plus they had a waitress and a cook on duty. I hadn’t even noticed the place filling up. But no one was sitting in Sue’s spot, right next to our little group.

          “Where was Ben when that happened?” I asked.

           “About a half hour behind her. He’d had to work late in town, so they’d taken two vehicles down to the farm. They were driving back, one after the other. He drove up on the accident scene right after it happened, police and fire trucks all over the place. He knew something bad had happened to Sue.”

           “I thought he was the first on the scene,” Tom said. “Didn’t he call it in?”

           “Naw, he didn’t even have a cell phone then,” Doug said, shaking his head.

           “Yeah, he did. He just didn’t have it in that old Chevy pickup he drove down to the farm,” Schappe said.

            “I thought that was Sue’s pickup,” Tom said.

            “Whatever,” Doug said in a tone that indicated it wasn’t important. “The accident scene was along this cliff next to a big meadow. There’s a small stream that runs through that meadow, then some hills beyond.”

            “What’s that got to do with anything?” I asked.

            “Cause that’s where Ben went the day he disappeared. He took Jake with him, drove down there, and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of the man or

the dog since. You know why?”

          “Why?” I asked.

          “Cause him and that dog found Sue,” he said, slapping his hand on the bar. “More beer,” he shouted in no particular direction. Schappe just grimaced. His wife grinned and started filling another pitcher. Must have been some bar ritual, I thought.

          “Bullcrapo,” Tom said, pulling out some money to pay for this round. “He went looking for Sue, right enough, but him and that dog fell down some sinkhole in the woods. That’s why they’ve never been found.”

          “So what happened to his truck?” Schappe said, taking the pitcher from his wife.

          “It’s probably sitting in the front yard of some Ozark trailer home right now, right next to a couch and a fat kid with dirt around his mouth. You’ve seen some of those guys down there - eyes really, really close together,” Tom said. “You know what a family tree looks like in the Ozarks?”

          “What?”

          “No branches.”

          “Talk about old jokes,” I said. “So Doug, didn’t he have any family or anything? What did the police down there say?”

          Doug laughed. “No family, and let’s just say the sheriff down there isn’t an FBI Academy graduate. I don’t think they’ve solved a felony down there in ten years. They spend most of their time trying to catch floaters on the river smoking dope, or littering, or some such major felony. Last time I checked, the sheriff couldn’t even remember the case.”

          “So you think he’s in another dimension?” I asked.

          Doug replied, “You’ve read about this. You know how it works. Every time we make a decision, we create another dimension. There’s one where I decided to come here today, and one where I didn’t; two different time lines.”

          “And there’s one where I think you’re an idiot, and one where I actually pay attention to you,” Tom said.

          “Shut up, Tom. Let ‘im finish,” Schappe said.

          “I’m familiar with that", I said. “It’s one of the oldest plot lines in science fiction. They write whole books, hell, whole series of books based on alternate time lines, alternative histories, like if Germany had won World War II.”

          “Right, like that. So Ben said, ‘Suppose Sue had left the house five seconds later. Two seconds. She’s going 60 mph down the road, a mile a minute. That’s 88 feet per second. She leaves one second earlier, a half second earlier, that rock misses her by forty feet. Her current dimension could be that close,’ he said, holding his thumb and index finger so close they were almost touching. ‘But the longer I wait, the further it goes away. I’ve got to go now,’ Ben said.”

          Doug continued, “I asked him, how are you going to find this dimension? He said, ‘I’m not. Jake will. He could always find Sue, no matter where she was.

And he wants to, I can tell. He looks at me like he’s saying ‘Gimme a chance, Ben, please.’ So I gotta go. It’s been real. I love you guys, I really do. But this is Sue.’ And that was the last I ever saw of him,” Doug concluded.

          “That’s the last anyone ever saw of him,” Schappe added.

          I thought about that for a moment. “Then why the chair, if they’re both gone?” I asked.

          Schappe kind of dithered for a moment, then said something he probably wouldn’t have said if he hadn’t been drinking. “We want ‘em back here. I thought maybe if there was some kind of anchor to draw them back, if they’re that close…”

         After that, the conversation kind of veered away from Ben, Sue and Jake and got lost in a haze of beer, pool games, life stories and “Hey, man, you’re the best” kind of backslapping and professions of love and friendship you only hear when everybody’s drunk and doesn’t have to prove out the next day.

          I staggered out of there about midnight because I couldn’t speak anymore. At least, I couldn’t speak English. I do remember, though, as I stumbled out the door, that Sue’s chair was empty. There must have been Fifty people jammed into that little bar, but no one sat on Sue’s stool.

         I spent the next day on the couch nursing my hangover and thinking about life and love. I really liked Tammi, but did I love her? Would I do anything for her, like Jake would do for Sue? Or like Ben did? Would I drop everything and go traipsing across some tick-infested meadow and into the Ozarks on the very long chance that some dumb dog could find her? Probably not.

         I think I liked the sex, and she was a beauty. I don’t know what she saw in a potato face like me, but it was fun having her around, showing her off. Then again, it wasn’t like Ben and Sue. What’d he do? I wondered. Just let Jake out and start across that field, into the woods? Jeez, Ben could have spent the next few days following Jake, who was probably following a rabbit, who was probably wondering why he got picked on by a couple nut cases that day, one a delusional dog with an excellent nose, and one a sad and confused man.

          I figured Tom was probably right. Jake probably fell in a sinkhole, and Ben, being Ben, went in after him. The Ozarks are full of holes and caves like that. The two of them probably starved to death in a wet, cold, dark pit nobody’s ever marked on a topo map. But what a great story, I thought, even if it wasn’t true.

          Ben’s friends had told me Ben and Sue hadn’t hit it  off right away, but Sue got dumped by her boyfriend. Ben had been hanging around in case something like that happened. He’d loved her from the moment he’d seen her. And she’d found in him what she’d been looking for over fifteen years and five or six guys.

          Wouldn’t that whole story be wonderful if it were true, I thought. What if Ben and Jake followed Sue over just a little bit into another dimension where that rock missed her car by forty feet? It was like he said. It wasn’t a big change, like Germany winning the war. It was just a little change, a slight deviation located not too far away from here.

          I read dog books too. This one writer was trying to make a case that dogs have more than five senses, although those five senses are pretty good. But how does a dog in the back of one car with the windows rolled up going 50 mph down a road know there’s dog in the back of another car going 50 mph in the opposite direction? They do. They get up, start barking. That other car goes by in the opposite direction, and you see a dog there barking at your dog. How do they do that?

          Jake could find Sue anytime, anywhere, Doug had said. Even in a nearby dimension? Maybe so. That’s strong love, I thought, the kind I’d like to find. I could see Jake, the fat little dog with stubby legs, taking a whiff of the air, then taking off, certain he was going in the right direction, to Sue. It wouldn’t have mattered to Jake if Ben was following or not. In the little dog’s mind, this would be complete dedication to his mistress. He would be on a mission to find her if for no other reason than she might need him for something. And if she didn’t need him, he’d lie down near her and wait, like Ben had waited for Sue. 

          And the reason that people were forgetting about Ben? That records and physical evidence about his existence in this dimension were disappearing? That’s easy; there has to be a balance. If some irresistible force, like the unbending determination of a dog to find his mistress, skews the balance between dimensions, more malleable forces will shift to correct that imbalance. All the forces in the universe couldn’t deter Jake, so other realities had to change.

          Wasn’t that an interesting thought; the love of a little beagle up against the mighty forces of the universe. People still remembered Sue, but probably for not much longer. Ben and Jake? They were over there when they should be here. The universe was correcting that little anomaly. It would be like a stretched rubber band snapping back to its original linear shape.

         So that was really the answer, I thought. If we do forget entirely about Ben and Jake, if there is no record of them ever being here, then Ben didn’t just die in some sinkhole; he made it. Jake led him across the meadow, across the stream, through those woods, up into the hills and across whatever kind of line separated the dimensions to find Sue. What a trip, I thought. What a love.

         And the irony of it all! The only way the tale could be proved true would be that everyone involved in the story would gradually lose all memory of it.

         Then the phone’s electronic orchestra played and interrupted my musings. It was Tammi.

          “Al, can I come over? I really need to talk to you. It’s good news, I promise. I just need to see you,” she said.

          “I don’t think so, Tammi. I think we’re history. I’m looking for something a little more permanent than what you’ve got in mind.”

          “Al, I love you. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Please let me come over. We can talk about it.”

           You wouldn’t know love if it walked up and poked you in the eye, I thought, but didn’t say it. “Tammi, I learned something about myself yesterday. You can have any guy you want, Jim in Seattle or Mike down at the bar. Not me. We’re not going to work out. You’d hang around a while, but you’d end up dumping me for some young, handsome buck. I learned a little bit about true love yesterday. I want one girl, one wife, someone who will stay with me till I die,” I said.

           Or even after I die, I thought. There was more conversation, but it was meaningless.

          I started going to Schappe’s place now and then until I got sent out of town for computer training at the company’s headquarters. It took six weeks. Then I had a couple more weeks of sharing my new knowledge with several trainees at the plant in Brookfield. That kept me out of the bars.

Three months passed before before I got back to Schappe’s. It was a Friday night, and the place was jumping. He had a band that night, a local group

that was popular in town. I had to kind of walk sideways just to get in, and of course, every seat at the bar was taken.

          I felt vaguely annoyed about there not being an empty seat at the bar. Which, with that big crowd, made perfect sense. I couldn’t figure out why something like that would bother me.

 

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