The Dog of the South

by Charles Portis

MY WIFE NORMA had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone.

They had taken my car and my Texaco card and my American Express card. Dupree had also taken from the bedroom closet my good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps some other articles. It was just like him to pick the .410—a boy’s first gun.

The line started in Little Rock and showed purpose as it plunged straight down into Texas. Then it became wobbly and disorderly. There was one grand loop that went as far west as Moffit’s Texaco station in San Angelo, where sheep graze, and there were tiny epicycles along the way that made no sense at all.

I should have paid more attention to Norma. I should have talked to her and listened to her but I didn’t do it. A timely word here and there might have worked wonders. I knew she was restless, and anxious to play a more active part in life. She spoke in just those terms, and there were other signals as well.

Now she was gone. She had gone to Mexico with Guy Dupree, for that was where my dotted line led. The last position

was the Hotel Mogador in San Miguel de Allende, where I drew a terminal cross on the map with my draftsman’s pencil and shaded it to give an effect of depth.

had accumulated enough college hours over the years for at least two bachelor’s degrees but I had never actually taken one. I had never stayed long enough in any one course of study. I had no education hours at all but I did have some pre-law at Southwestern and some engineering at Arkansas. I had been at Ole Miss too, where I studied the Western campaigns of the Civil War under Dr. Buddy Casey.

Norma and I had our squabbles, certainly, but never any scenes of rage like those on television with actors and actresses screaming at one another. It was give and take in our house. Two of my rules did cause a certain amount of continuing friction—my rule against smoking at the table and my rule against record-playing after 9 p.m., by which time I had settled in for a night of reading—but I didn’t see how I could compromise in either of those areas.

one of these country birds who, one second after meeting you, will start

telling of some bestial escapade involving violence or sex or both, or who might in the same chatty way want to talk about Christ’s Kingdom on Earth. It can go either way with those fellows and you need to be ready.

Gateway claims have always struck me as thin stuff because they can only mean that you’re not there yet, that you’re still in transit, that you’re not in any very well defined place.

had worked it out that the high mileage was not really a disadvantage, reasoning in this specious way: that a man who has made it to the age of seventy-four has a very good chance of making it to seventy-six—a better chance, in fact, than a young man would have.

slept for about four hours. It was a hard sleep and my eyes were swollen. A lot of people, the same ones who lie about their gas mileage, would have said they got no sleep at all.

Whenever that kind of thing came up, he would always say—boast, the way those people do—that he had no head for figures and couldn’t do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.

he thought of something pretty good to call me, which was “rat face.” He thought it was pretty good but it was old stuff to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I look more like a predatory bird than a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year.

There was a lot of old stuff on the jukebox and I who had never played a jukebox in my life had the waiter take my change after each drink and play “It’s Magic” by Doris Day. She was singing that song, a new one to me, when I first entered the place. I had heard of Doris Day but no one had ever told me what a good singer she was.

never saw him after that. He has no chin, you know.” “You told me that.” “Captain Hughes of the Rangers used to say that if they ever hanged old Ski they would have to put the rope under his nose.”

I had seen some strange birds down here from the States. Creeps! Nuts! Crooks! Fruits! Liars! California dopers!

drove home telling points in some dim quarrel while the boy Travis chirped out show-business quips. “Be my guest!” he would chirp, and, “Oh boy, that’s the story of my life!” and, “Yeah, but what do you do for an encore!” and, “Hey, don’t knock it if you ain’t tried it!” and, “How’s that for openers?” and, “You bragging or complaining!” and, “Welcome to the club, Ray! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” I had to sit there and take it on the chin from both the woman and Travis.

went to bed and reviewed the day’s events, a depressing exercise. I had not handled myself so badly, I thought, and yet there were no results. I must do better.

I can put up a

fairly bold show when representing some larger cause than myself.

A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.

Not Pynchon or DeLillo or any of the other usual suspects on the secret-society subject, but a maddeningly underappreciated American writer who in a brilliant and shockingly little-known novel has somehow captured more of the truth about this aspect of America, about the longing for Hidden Secrets, the seductions of secret societies, than all the shelves of conspiracy-theory literature.

The only man to penetrate the true heart of dimness. I’m speaking of Charles Portis and his now-almost-impossible-to-find novel (suppressed by You Know Who?), Masters of Atlantis.

he was a rising star at the legendary writers’ newspaper The New York Herald Tribune, eventually heading its London bureau, and that he departed abruptly in the mid-sixties to return to Arkansas to start turning out

a remarkable series of novels, beginning with Norwood in 1966.

writer who captures the soul of America, the true timbre of the dream-intoxicated voices of this country, in a way that no writers-workshop fictionalist has done or

is likely to do, who captures the secret soul of twentieth-century America with the clarity, the melancholy, and the laughter with which Gogol captured the soul of nineteenth-century Russia in Dead Souls.

Nora Ephron, one of the founding members of the Portis Society (as I’ve come to think of the circle of devotees), compares him in scope, sophistication, and originality to Gabriel García Márquez. “He thinks things no one else thinks,”

Roy Blount, Jr., has written of Portis’s third novel, The Dog of the South, “No one should die without having read it.” And that’s not even his favorite (although it is mine).

Portis’s narrator, Ray Midge, an Arkansas guy who’s retracing the steps of his runaway wife by using credit-card receipts, all Dr. Symes can talk about is the mysterious, elusive John Selmer Dix, a writer of inspirational books for salesmen. Symes is obsessed with Dix’s greatness, with the idea that in his last days Dix had somehow broken through to some new level of ultimate revelation that tragically was lost to the world with his death,

What Portis is getting at is the deep longing, the profound, wistful desperation in the American collective unconscious, to believe that somehow things do make some kind of sense, that life is not all chaotic horror and random acts of cruelty by fate, that there is an Answer, even if it’s locked in a trunk somewhere and we’ve lost the keys.