Lou
“Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.”
Milan Kundera
We started traveling to get away from the cold. No one who has a home and a job and two kids and a car has any idea what it means to be truly cold—but they should. We moved South for years. Our pace was slow—like that of blind men because everywhere we went I had to look for it. Anyone who travels—really travels—knows what it is and would be hard pressed to explain it to people like you. You’re the type of people who have time to sit around and read other peoples stories because you never make any of your own and I, well, I’m the kind of person who tells stories to people like you.
You move South until it leads you back into the cold.
We traveled until I found myself to be an old man and, as an old man, in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, my story began and my companions ended and in Red Lion, Pennsylvania, it is cold—like the people. In the South, everything is slow and smooth—if water knew how to flow with patience a river would describe an Arkansan perfectly, but northerners are just plain ice when it comes to pilgrims like me and Lou.
For a long time I was shunned—I was nobody—and then came Ted.
To imagine the town all you have to do is remember the pictures from your high school textbooks of places like Georgetown or Gettysburg during the civil war. Replace the off tan colors and replace them with the color of the sky when it’s just barely raining. Now instead of gentlemen in top hats and women in intricately sewn dresses, fill the scene with blue collar nobodies and their angsty kids who are glued to their Motorolas and spending their allowances on sativa.
I wandered into a small bookstore at the bottom of a slow-rolling hill in the town square. Mostly, I went in to get warm and, of course, Lou had to stay outside. I found my way to the back of the store and picked up a novel called The Unbearable Lightness of Being which I was sure I had read before. I started to search for my favorite passage that I couldn’t recall from memory and, as I slowly got discouraged, I kept peering up to look at the three other people in the store: a profoundly swollen woman drinking coffee in the three table cafe, the shop owner, who could have been no older than my youngest granddaughter, and a man about my age with a Kangol hat, a pair of flip up sunglasses (flipped up) and trousers that were in desperate need of a hemming. As he stood in the relationship section, peering through a copy of the Kama Sutra, I chuckled a bit and immediately realized that he understood that my amusement was at his expense.
A few minutes passed by and I decided to leave because the old man with the sun glasses seemed fixated on me. As I slowly made my way to the door (with the novel tucked in the waistband of my pants) he made his way towards my end of the aisle and stuck his hand out to stop my progress. I immediately began to feel a pang of remorse build up in the pit of my stomach because while I spent the night in a warm county jail cell for stealing a Kundera novel, Lou would have to fight the cold alone—all because I had to chuckle at, what people like you would call, a “good samaritan.”
“Excuse me,” the tired eyed stranger begged “I’m sorry to intrude, but you aren’t from around here, are ya?”
“What gave me away?” I laughed, prompting my accuser to explode into a bellow of laughter followed by a long coughing fit. When it subsided, he asked,
“So where are ya from?” he said, wiping tears from his eyes.
“All over,” I shrugged. I began to make my way towards the door, still unsure as to whether or not I was about to be ratted out for stealing the novel but to no avail—he decided to walk beside me and continue the conversation
“Well, where ya gonna be staying tonight?”
I was, for nothing more than humors sake, entertaining the notion of admitting that I was expecting to spend the night in a prison cell, but I lied and said “Probably the YMCA if they have any cots left by the time I get there.”
“Naw, Naw,” he practically yelled “why don’t you come back with me?”
I wasn’t the only person in the store off-put by the offer. We were close enough to the shop owner(within screaming distance, that is) that he heard and, when I cocked my head to the side and looked around the store, I noticed him, standing behind the counter with a graphic novel in hand and his head cocked at exactly the same angle that mine was (I believe that the swollen woman was too infatuated with the muffin she was courting to hear a tornado, much less a bellowing 70 year old).
“I couldn’t, actually,” I replied after entirely too long “I have a dog tied up outside, but thanks any…”
“Nonsense!” he interrupted “you bring your pup too. I’m driving a pickup, he can ride in the back and when we get home he can sleep in the back yard…” As he paused I still hadn’t decided whether or not I would go with him but when he sputtered “…it’s even got a fence,” he somehow sealed the deal.
After I lifted Lou into the bed of the mans dilapidated F-250 super duty and stepped up into the cab, he asked me “So what brings you to Red Lion?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied, “but right now I’m feeling like I’m headed in the right direction. Do you live nearby?”
“Yeah, I’m right down the road,” he said, bringing into my mind the thought that, without a place of their own, a person is nobody.
As we pulled up to his one bedroom red and white chalked brick rancher he reached across his body with his calloused left hand and said
“I’m Ted McDowell.”
“Brian,” I said, taking his hand in mine.
“Pleased to meet you Brian. Who’s my other passenger?” he asked, motioning to the cab and letting go of my hand simultaneously.
“Oh him?” I laughed “That’s Lou.”
***
I sat down at his kitchen table while he put a kettle over the gas burner of his stove. Tiny nick-knacks and pictures of grown children and growing grandchildren littered the shelves in the living room that I could see in its entirety from the kitchen. The only picture on the wall (aside from a few cheap landscape prints) was of a woman about my age. Her hair was silver with a black streak in the bangs and she was wearing a red button-down blouse and a set of pearl earrings to match her necklace.
“Is that your wife?” I asked as I sat rigidly in the dinning chair.
“Yep, that’s my Maggie—she was a beauty wasn’t she?” the charismatic old man asked, only looking back from the cupboard he was rooting through to dart a glance at her picture.
“She was,” I whispered “how long has it been?”
“Coming on four years now.”
“It’s been a little more than five since Danielle died,” I said, when all of a sudden he blurted
“Eureka!” startling me out of my stiff posture. He turned from the cupboard with a can of Folgers instant in his hand and admitted “I was starting to worry for a second there. Hope you like instant cuz it’s all we got.”
And when he said “we” I got a chill.
***
Ted didn’t have to work in his old age because he was a successful inventor. Apparently, among a number of As Seen on TV items, which he listed quite rapidly and was dumbfounded to find out that I had never heard of, he invented a blanket with arm holes in it that people went crazy over. Every two weeks he would go to the mailbox and pull out a sizable royalty check, and that check would fund our whiskey drinking and his minor carpentry projects. He had at least a dozen of these “Snuggies,” which he promised me he didn’t name himself, throughout his house. This included the original (the one that Maggie stitched together for him) that smelled a little gamier than your average blanket, which eventually became Lou’s. As for the others, there was at least one for every piece of furniture in the place: one for each bed, two on the love seat, three on the couch and even some in the backyard for the patio set. Every time Ted would relocate, he would tediously remove and fold his Snuggie and when he would sit back down he would stand, with a thousand yard stare, in front of his seat, unfold the blanket, slide his arms into the sleeves, and then lower himself into his seat, tucking the sides beneath him with the patience of a Buddhist monk on Prozac.
I only tell you this so that you understand—Ted was different.
The day after we met in the book store, I woke up to a faint but constant sound that seemed somehow familiar despite my complete inability to recognize it. I followed the noise through the short off white hallway to an offer white door that lead to I didn’t know where. When I opened it, I found myself standing in a tidy garage with tend standing in front of a pair of saw horses halving a two by four.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
I stood in front of him for a minute or so as he sawed and failed to further acknowledge me.
“Are you a carpenter?” I finally asked, instantly feeling like a jackass.
“No no, I’m an inventor. I’m working on a place for Lou to stay—I got to thinking last night while you were cleaning up before bed and I figure it ain’t fair for me to take you in and put a roof over your head without doing the same for him.”
“You shouldn’t…”
“Get over it already!” he jovially pounced “I got all this lumber just laying around, there ain’t no use in lettin’ it warp.”
As he measured and hammered, I stepped back inside, beaten into a homely state of submission, and investigated the house. I realized that I would have to stay for a while, and so I immediately began to seek out a means of distraction. I came across a room completely unlike the rest in the house. It was a study. The oak wall panels and the red cherry desk were nothing like the Ikea nest that Ted had made the the living room and the two bedrooms into and I would later find out that this is where Maggie spent the majority of her life. The wall behind her desk had a painting that looked very similar to, but wasn’t, a Dali, and around the Dali hung a number of diplomas and teaching awards.
“She was quite the scholar,” Ted would later tell me “Don’t even think about asking what she wanted with me because I never could get a straight answer out of her.”
The three other walls, however, were filled with literature and as soon as I started to investigate them I began to fall in love with Maggie. I had read most of the novels on the wall facing the desk, and I could imagine her finishing The Nicomachean Ethics and deciding “this one goes on that wall.” They were her favorites and, with a few exceptions, were mine too. I searched that wall, the wall facing the desk, for several minutes before I came across a book that I didn’t recognize and decided to devote the rest of my captivity to reading it. It was called In Persuasion Nation and I finished it long before I left.
And I loved it.
***
I stayed with Ted for weeks—my time with him was the longest I had spent standing still since Danielle’s wake and one night, as we sat in his living room in front of Maggie’s picture, he started in on me about my life—something he only ever did when we got out the Wild Turkey.
“First you say you travel to stay warm. Then you try to tell me you’re looking for something—but you can’t tell me what it is. Sounds to me like you got your head up your ass with your eyes wide open.”
As he laughed/ coughed I giggles, half at his summation of my journey, half at the strength of the whiskey, and said “I just don’t stay in one place very often. Not anymore. When you’re on the move you get asked a lot of questions—most of the time it’s ‘where ya goin?’ and when I started moving I’d tell people that most of the time we saunter through life in one place—it’s our minds that we let wander, not our bodies. I’m slowly finding out, I’d tell them, that if you let your body get lost your mind stays in one place—you find the ability to keep your head still if you let the rest of you get lost.”
“What do you say now?” he asked, sipping slowly.
“What?”
“You said that’s what you’d say when you started—what do ya say now?
“West.”
We sat together for a while, thinking about the words and glances that we’d never exchange and telling one another, through the silence, that it’ll all be over soon. When age catches up to you, when you have to run constantly to feel free, you come to find, like Ted and I did, that chance never runs a square establishment.
“I’ll tell ya what,” he said, suddenly filled with the stark liveliness that he normally reserved for sobriety “tomorrow, you and I are gonna take a trip with Lou to the park and let him run.”
“Lou doesn’t mind resting here,” I told him, minding my tone. “that dog’s seen a lot more in his six years than most people see in eighty. A lot of the time, when I hitchhike, I get a lot of questions about Lou. People wanna know why I burden myself with a dog when it’s so hard just to stay on your feet in the first place. They usually make the mistake of thinking I’m lonely but, to tell you the truth, all Lou gives me is direction. That dog knows where I want to go long before I figure it out—’Lou’s my compass’ I tell em, and most of the time they just get quiet, trying to get to where they can send me in a direction that they ain’t headed in anymore.”
It’s strange how you take on the voices of others when you spend enough time with them.
***
As I began to become acclimated to living with Ted, I knew that I would have to leave soon. His ways were as noninvasive as a persons ways could be but I somehow found myself loathing him for the little things he’d do—the way he put so much effort into his Snuggie routine and how he would stand at the kitchen window, looking into the backyard for minutes on end, only to turn to me and say something totally masturbatory like “Looks like Lou really likes his new place, doesn’t he?” And the way I would feel obliged to stroke his ego with a
“You did a great job.”
The day I decided to leave, Ted was building birdhouses like a boyscout with talent.
“Wanna go for a ride?” he asked without looking up from his workbench.
“Why not.” I said, and I meant it—why not?
We got in his truck and as he turned over the ignition, I asked “So what’s this all about?”
“We’re headin to a farm—that’s all you’re gonna find out for now. I want it to be a surprise.
We rode for about an hour, across the state line into Maryland. I pulled the Kundera novel out of my bag and, every once in a while, glanced up to see the trunks with twigs attached that we still call trees in the wintertime that littered the dead countryside. As we made our way into a town with a name that I can’t remember the roads were cut deep into the bedrock.
“We’re close,” Ted said.
The farm we ended up at was the kind of place that you arrive at twenty minutes before stopping your car. We pulled off of the paved road and wound our way through deep woods, crawling up an incline that was barely noticeable until there was a break in the trees revealing that we were, in fact, some three hundred feet above the town we’d driven through a half an hour earlier. As I looked down, I couldn’t help myself. “You know you’re driving me crazy with this, right?”
“Oh I know. I’ve been watching you fidget since we left.” he howled, “I guess you’ve suffered enough. I was looking through the paper the other day when I came across an ad in the classifieds said “BORDER COLLIES FOR SALE.” Well, I called the number up and a nice lady on the other side of the line told me her husband and her had a farm down in Maryland, and the dog they got down there had a litter of pups that they couldn’t keep. I told her I’d be coming down on Sunday, if that’s convenient, and she said it was. Figured Lou could use a girlfriend.”
“Geez Ted you shoulda said something.” I told him. I hadn’t even considered the fact that he might be expecting me to stay until that point—but I knew I’d have to be careful with the way that I put the fact that I wasn’t planning on staying. “What made you think Lou needs a girlfriend?”
“Well,” he spoke slowly “I don’t know, seems to me like a young pup like that oughta know a thing or two about the ladies, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah Ted, I think I know what you mean,” I said, trying to sound entertained, “thing is, I don’t think I’ll be able to take care of two dogs on the road.”
“Ha! What the hell do you mean ‘on the road?’ I said Lou needs a girlfriend, not a wife. When you and Lou leave, this ones sticking with me. I see the way you two are and, when ya leave, I reckon I’ll be missing ya a good bit so—what could be better for me than a female Lou?”
I was so relieved at the fact that Ted understood that I wasn’t planning on staying with him permanently that I laughed. I realized soon after that it seemed to Ted that I was laughing at his upcoming loneliness but something inside of me told me not to care. As we sat in the car an anger swelled inside of me and I suddenly realized that it was the fact that Ted never considered the idea that I might want to stay that was upsetting me. “What if I did?” I was thinking. “Would he have even let me if I did?”
After a long silence he blurted “Well, it’s not just that. I was thinking about what you said when you got here—about Lou pointing your way for you all the time. I think I need something like that—I want something to show me the right direction.”
What the hell gave him the right to have a dog like me? And the same damn dog! Why not a schnauzer, or a shepherd, or a Great Dane or a Shitzu? Yeah, a Shitzu—that’s what kind of dog Ted needed, a pretty little Shitzu with a red bow in her hair to follow him around all day yipping and biting at his ankles and building birdhouses.
“Why the hell do you want a border collie though?” I snapped
“Oh,” he stumbled “Well I dunno—just caught my attention in the paper, what with Lou around and all I figured—”
“Yeah, well, I’ll tell ya something about Lou, he doesn’t want a goddamned girlfriend any more than he wanted that crummy dog house you built him.”
“Now you wait a fuckin’ second here Brian,” he boomed, immediately knocking the wind out of my tirade’s sails. He stopped for a couple of seconds, obviously picking his next words carefully before, slowly, saying “I don’t quite know what the hell your problem is here, but don’t you be insulting my doghouse building skills.” We both sat in the cab of his truck, now parked in front of a huge two story colonial farmhouse, staring each other down. One moment I was sure we were on the cusp of an old guy fist fight, but the very next he was laughing hysterically and, until that moment, I honestly hadn’t realized how ridiculous what he had just said was.
***
When we finished laughing, we stepped out of the truck to lean on the hood and I apologized.
“Hey, you don’t have to tell this old fart about being grumpy.” he chuckled.
“It amazes me, you know, the way you carry yourself so lightly. You’re a great man for it—I wish I could still love life the way you do.” I said, with, believe me, a complete understanding as to how corny it sounded—but it was true enough to say despite. The man was incredible and I completely understood how a woman like Maggie could love him. I still, to this day, regret not telling him that.
“Well shit, we all can’t travel the country to run you know—we all have our ways of wading through the bullshit. Let’s put it this way, I don’t feel like my good humor is gonna keep me on my feet much longer and, sooner or later, I’m gonna need someone there. Now that Lou of yours, he’s a hell of a dog—believe you me if I could have him around, I would, but I wouldn’t dream of taking your pup from ya. I respect a man with a job to do—even if he can’t tell me what the job is, exactly. Point is, you’re a traveler, and what would a traveler be without his direction, right?”
“Right—“ I said. I considered the question long after a gag-inducingly attractive young couple stepped out of the front door of their half-a-million dollar second home to welcome us in. We sat down in their den for coffee and an interview—these people were beyond yuppies. I kept quiet while Ted charmed their khakis off and, once they were satisfied, they lead us to the barn out back.
“They’re all right inside the doors there,” the pretty blonde wife said, raising the pitch in her voice on “right,” “we’ll let you two pick your new baby alone and come check on you in a bit.”
As soon as she was far enough away I asked Ted “Is this creepy or what?”
“What do you mean, they’re nice?”
“I guess you’re right,” I said, not wanting to distract him from the task at hand.
As we stood in the barn with our arms crossed and staring at the mother dog with a litter of four piled in front of her, fast asleep, I was still stuck on Ted’s inadvertent question. What would a traveler be without direction? All this time, I’ve been searching for it by way of following Lou’s lead—and Lou, like you, has had no idea what it is.
“I just realized, I have no idea how to do this.” Ted said, “how the hell do you even pick a dog out, anyway?”
“I think they say that the dog picks you, don’t they?”
“Well what do you do if they’re sleeping?”
“I guess you gotta pick them then.”
***
The past five years since that moment have been something like a dream—everything that used to mean one thing has meant another and, because of that, I really don’t have a whole lot of memory. What have been easiest to remember (relative to the rest, that is,) are the moments immediately after I realized what was happening—I told Ted something along the lines of “I gotta run out to the car quick.” He was distracted enough not to care, as I knew he would be, and I left him standing in the barn, arms crossed, before Lou’s new girlfriend. I opened the cab to his F-250, stepped up to grab the stolen novel off of his dash and stuffed it into my bag. As I walked into the pine filled woods, towards the hillside opposite the town with the name that I can’t remember, I thought of Lou and the places he’d take Ted in the years to come.
And I didn’t look back.
