The Accidental Tourist Read online

“Oh, yes.”

  “I’m supposed to send you some more, but first I have to buy nine-by-twelve envelopes. All we’ve got left is ten-by-thirteen. It’s terrible when things don’t fit precisely. They get all out of alignment.”

  “Ah,” Julian said. He looked at her for a moment.

  Macon said, “We wouldn’t want to keep you, Rose.”

  “Oh! No,” she said. She smiled at Julian, hoisted her groceries higher, and left the room. Charles retrieved his bag from Julian and slogged after her.

  “The Macon Leary Nine-by-Twelve Envelope Crisis,” Julian said, sitting back down.

  Macon said, “Oh, Julian, drop it.”

  “Sorry,” Julian said, sounding surprised.

  There was a pause. Then Julian said, “Really I had no idea, Macon, I mean, if you’d let me know what was going on in your life . . .”

  He was jiggling a Docksider again. He always seemed uneasy when he couldn’t do his Macon Leary act. After Ethan died he’d avoided Macon for weeks; he’d sent a tree-sized bouquet to the house but never again mentioned Ethan’s name.

  “Look,” he said now. “If you want another, I don’t know, another month—”

  Macon said, “Oh, nonsense, what’s a missing wife or two, right? Ha, ha! Here, let me get what I’ve typed and you can check it.”

  “Well, if you say so,” Julian said.

  “After this there’s only the conclusion,” Macon said. He was calling over his shoulder as he made his way to the dining room, where his latest chapter lay stacked on the buffet. “The conclusion’s nothing, a cinch. I’ll crib from the old one, mostly.”

  He returned with the manuscript and handed it to Julian. Then he sat on the couch again, and Julian started reading. Meanwhile, Macon heard Porter come in the back way, where he was greeted by explosive barks from Edward. “Monster,” Porter said. “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you?” The phone rang over and over, unanswered. Julian looked at Macon and raised his eyebrows but made no comment.

  Macon and Julian had met some dozen years ago, when Macon was still at the bottle-cap factory. He’d been casting about for other occupations at the time. He’d begun to believe he might like to work on a newspaper. But he’d had no training, not a single journalism course. So he started the only way he could think of: He contributed a freelance article to a neighborhood weekly. His subject was a crafts fair over in Washington. Getting there is difficult, he wrote, because the freeway is so blank you start feeling all lost and sad. And once you’ve arrived, it’s worse. The streets are not like ours and don’t even run at right angles. He went on to evaluate some food he’d sampled at an outdoor booth, but found it contained a spice he wasn’t used to, something sort of cold and yellow I would almost describe as foreign, and settled instead for a hot dog from a vendor across the street who wasn’t even part of the fair. The hot dog I can recommend, he wrote, though it made me a little regretfulbecause Sarah, my wife, uses the same kind of chili sauce and I thought of home the minute I smelled it. He also recommended the patchwork quilts, one of which had a starburst pattern like the quilt in his grandmother’s room. He suggested that his readers leave the fair no later than three thirty, since you’ll be driving into Baltimoreright past Lexington Market and will want to pick up your crabs before it closes .

  His article was published beneath a headline reading CRAFTS FAIR DELIGHTS, INSTRUCTS. There was a subhead under that. Or, it read, I Feel So Broke-Up, I Want to Go Home. Until he saw the subhead, Macon hadn’t realized what tone he’d given his piece. Then he felt silly.

  But Julian Edge thought it was perfect. Julian phoned him. “You the fellow who wrote that hot dog thing in the Watchbird?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Ha!”

  “Well, I don’t see what’s so funny,” Macon said stiffly.

  “Who said it was funny? It’s perfect. I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  They met at the Old Bay Restaurant, where Macon’s grandparents used to take the four children on their birthdays. “I can personally guarantee the crab soup,” Macon said. “They haven’t done a thing to it since I was nine.” Julian said, “Ha!” again and rocked back in his chair. He was wearing a polo shirt and white duck trousers, and his nose was a bright shade of pink. It was summer, or maybe spring. At any rate, his boat was in the water.

  “Now, here’s my plan,” he said over the soup. “I own this little company called the Businessman’s Press. Well, little: I say little. Actually we sell coast to coast. Nothing fancy, but useful, you know? Appointment pads, expense account booklets, compound interest charts, currency conversion wheels . . . And now I want to put out a guidebook for commercial travelers. Just the U.S., to begin with; maybe other countries later. We’d call it something catchy, I don’t know: Reluctant Tourist . . . And you’re the fellow to write it.”

  “Me?”

  “I knew the minute I read your hot dog piece.”

  “But I hate to travel.”

  “I kind of guessed that,” Julian said. “So do businessmen. I mean, these folks are not running around the country for the hell of it, Macon. They’d rather be home in their living rooms. So you’ll be helping them pretend that’s where they are.”

  Then he pulled a square of paper from his breast pocket and said, “What do you think?”

  It was a steel engraving of an overstuffed chair. Attached to the chair’s back were giant, feathered wings such as you would see on seraphim in antique Bibles. Macon blinked.

  “Your logo,” Julian explained. “Get it?”

  “Um . . .”

  “While armchair travelers dream of going places,” Julian said, “traveling armchairs dream of staying put. I thought we’d use this on the cover.”

  “Ah!” Macon said brightly. Then he said, “But would I actually have to travel myself?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “But just briefly. I’m not looking for anything encyclopedic, I’m looking for the opposite of encyclopedic. And think of the pay.”

  “It pays?”

  “It pays a bundle.”

  Well, not a bundle, exactly. Still, it did make a comfortable living. It sold briskly at airport newsstands, train stations, and office supply shops. His guide to France did even better. That was part of a major promotion by an international car-rental agency—slipcased with The Businessman’s Foreign Phrase Book, which gave the German, French, and Spanish for “We anticipate an upswing in cross-border funds.” Macon, of course, was not the author of the phrase book. His only foreign language was Latin.

  Now Julian restacked the pages he’d been reading. “Fine,” he said. “I think we can send this through as is. What’s left of the conclusion?”

  “Not much.”

  “After this I want to start on the U.S. again.”

  “So soon?”

  “It’s been three years, Macon.”

  “Well, but . . .” Macon said. He gestured toward his leg. “You can see I’d have trouble traveling.”

  “When does your cast come off?”

  “Not till the first of November at the earliest.”

  “So? A few weeks!”

  “But it really seems to me I just did the U.S.,” Macon said. A kind of fatigue fell over him. These endlessly recurring trips, Boston and Atlanta and Chicago . . . He let his head drop back on the couch.

  Julian said, “Things are changing every minute, Macon. Change! It’s what keeps us in the black. How far do you think we’d get selling out-of-date guidebooks?”

  Macon thought of the crumbling old Tips for the Continent in his grandfather’s library. Travelers were advised to invert a wineglass on their hotel beds, testing the sheets for damp. Ladies should seal the corks of their perfume bottles with melted candlewax before packing. Something about that book implied that tourists were all in it together, equally anxious and defenseless. Macon might almost have enjoyed a trip in those days.

  Julian was preparing to go now. He stood u
p, and with some difficulty Macon did too. Then Edward, getting wind of a leavetaking, rushed into the living room and started barking. “Sorry!” Macon shouted above the racket. “Edward, stop it! I figure that’s his sheep-herding instinct,” he explained to Julian. “He hates to see anyone straying from the flock.”

  They moved toward the front hall, wading through a blur of dancing, yelping dog. When they reached the door, Edward blocked it. Luckily, he was still trailing his leash, so Macon gave one crutch to Julian and bent to grasp it. The instant Edward felt the tug, he turned and snarled at Macon. “Whoa!” Julian said, for Edward when he snarled was truly ugly. His fangs seemed to lengthen. He snapped at his leash with an audible click. Then he snapped at Macon’s hand. Macon felt Edward’s hot breath and the oddly intimate dampness of his teeth. His hand was not so much bitten as struck— slammed into with a jolt such as you’d get from an electric fence. He stepped back and dropped the leash. His other crutch clattered to the floor. The front hall seemed to be full of crutches; there was some splintery, spiky feeling to the air.

  “Whoa, there!” Julian said. He spoke into a sudden silence. The dog sat back now, panting and shamefaced. “Macon? Did he get you?” Julian asked.

  Macon looked down at his hand. There were four red puncture marks in the fleshy part—two in front, two in back—but no blood at all and very little pain. “I’m all right,” he said.

  Julian gave him his crutches, keeping one eye on Edward. “I wouldn’t have a dog like that,” he said. “I’d shoot him.”

  “He was just trying to protect me,” Macon said.

  “I’d call the S.P.C.A.”

  “Why don’t you go now, Julian, while he’s calm.”

  “Or the what’s-it, dogcatcher. Tell them you want him done away with.”

  “Just go, Julian.”

  Julian said, “Well, fine.” He opened the door and slid through it sideways, glancing back at Edward. “That is not a well dog,” he said before he vanished.

  Macon hobbled to the rear of the house and Edward followed, snuffling a bit and staying close to the ground. In the kitchen, Rose stood on a stepstool in front of a towering glass-fronted cupboard, accepting the groceries that Charles and Porter handed up to her. “Now I need the n’s, anything starting with n,” she was saying.

  “How about these noodles?” Porter asked. “ N for noodles? P for pasta?”

  “E for elbow macaroni. You might have passed those up earlier, Porter.”

  “Rose?” Macon said. “It seems Edward’s given me a little sort of nip.”

  She turned, and Charles and Porter stopped work to examine the hand he held out. It was hurting him by now—a deep, stinging pain. “Oh, Macon!” Rose cried. She came down off the stepstool. “How did it happen?”

  “It was an accident, that’s all. But I think I need an antiseptic.”

  “You need a tetanus shot, too,” Charles told him.

  “You need to get rid of that dog,” Porter said.

  They looked at Edward. He grinned up at them nervously.

  “He didn’t mean any harm,” Macon said.

  “Takes off your hand at the elbow and he means no harm? You should get rid of him, I tell you.”

  “See, I can’t,” Macon said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, see . . .”

  They waited.

  “You know I don’t mind the cat,” Rose said. “But Edward is so disruptive, Macon. Every day he gets more and more out of control.”

  “Maybe you could give him to someone who wants a guard dog,” Charles said.

  “A service station,” Rose suggested. She took a roll of gauze from a drawer.

  “Oh, never,” Macon said. He sat where she pointed, in a chair at the kitchen table. He propped his crutches in the corner. “Edward alone in some Exxon? He’d be wretched.”

  Rose swabbed Mercurochrome on his hand. It looked bruised; each puncture mark was puffing and turning blue.

  “He’s used to sleeping with me,” Macon told her. “He’s never been alone in his life.”

  Besides, Edward wasn’t a bad dog at heart—only a little unruly. He was sympathetic and he cared about Macon and plodded after him wherever he went. There was a furrowed W on his forehead that gave him a look of concern. His large, pointed, velvety ears seemed more expressive than other dogs’ ears; when he was happy they stuck straight out at either side of his head like airplane wings. His smell was unexpectedly pleasant—the sweetish smell a favorite sweater takes on when it’s been folded away in a drawer unwashed.

  And he’d been Ethan’s.

  Once upon a time Ethan had brushed him, bathed him, wrestled on the floor with him; and when Edward stopped to paw at one ear Ethan would ask, with the soberest courtesy, “Oh, may I scratch that for you?” The two of them watched daily at the window for the afternoon paper, and the instant it arrived Ethan sent Edward bounding out to fetch it—hind legs meeting front legs, heels kicking up joyfully. Edward would pause after he got the paper in his mouth and look around him, as if hoping to be noticed, and then he’d swagger back all bustling and self-important and pause again at the front hall mirror to admire the figure he cut. “Conceited,” Ethan would say fondly. Ethan picked up a tennis ball to throw and Edward grew so excited that he wagged his whole hind end. Ethan took Edward outside with a soccer ball and when Edward got carried away—tearing about and shouldering the ball into a hedge and growling ferociously—Ethan’s laugh rang out so high and clear, such a buoyant sound floating through the air on a summer evening.

  “I just can’t,” Macon said.

  There was a silence.

  Rose wrapped gauze around his hand, so gently he hardly felt it. She tucked the end under and reached for a roll of adhesive tape. Then she said, “Maybe we could send him to obedience school.”

  “Obedience school is for minor things—walking to heel and things,” Porter told her. “What we have here is major.”

  “It is not!” Macon said. “It’s really nothing at all. Why, the woman at the Meow-Bow got on wonderfully with him.”

  “Meow-Bow?”

  “Where I boarded him when I went to England. She was just crazy about him. She wanted me to let her train him.”

  “So call her, why don’t you.”

  “Maybe I will,” Macon said.

  He wouldn’t, of course. The woman had struck him as bizarre. But there was no sense going into that now.

  On Sunday morning Edward tore the screen door, trying to get at an elderly neighbor who’d stopped by to borrow a wrench. On Sunday afternoon he sprang at Porter to keep him from leaving on an errand. Porter had to creep out the rear when Edward wasn’t watching. “This is undignified,” Porter told Macon. “When are you going to call the Kit-Kat or whatever it is?”

  Macon explained that on Sundays the Meow-Bow would surely be closed.

  Monday morning, when Edward went for a walk with Rose, he lunged at a passing jogger and yanked Rose off her feet. She came home with a scraped knee. She said, “Have you called the Meow-Bow yet?”

  “Not quite,” Macon said.

  “Macon,” Rose said. Her voice was very quiet. “Tell me something.”

  “What’s that, Rose?”

  “Can you explain why you’re letting things go on this way?”

  No, he couldn’t, and that was the truth. It was getting so he was baffling even to himself. He felt infuriated by Edward’s misdeeds, but somehow he viewed them as visitations of fate. There was nothing he could do about them. When Edward approached him later with a mangled belt of Porter’s trailing from his mouth, all Macon said was, “Oh, Edward . . .”

  He was sitting on the couch at the time, having been snagged by an especially outrageous moment in Rose’s soap opera. Rose looked over at him. Her expression was odd. It wasn’t disapproving; it was more like . . . He cast about for the word. Resigned. That was it. She looked at him the way she would look at, say, some hopeless wreck of a man wandering drugged on a downtown
street. After all, she seemed to be thinking, there was probably not much that you could do for such a person.

  “Meow-Bow Animal Hospital.”

  “Is, ah, Muriel there, please?”

  “Hold on a minute.”

  He waited, braced against a cabinet. (He was using the pantry telephone.) He heard two women discussing Fluffball Cohen’s rabies shot. Then Muriel picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Yes, this is Macon Leary. I don’t know if you remember me or—”

  “Oh, Macon! Hi there! How’s Edward doing?”

  “Well, he’s getting worse.”

  She tsk-tsked.

  “He’s been attacking right and left. Snarling, biting, chewing things—”

  “Did your neighbor tell you I came looking for you?”

  “What? Yes, he did.”

  “I was right on your street, running an errand. I make a little extra money running errands. George, it’s called. Don’t you think that’s cute?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “George. It’s the name of my company. I stuck a flyer under your door. Let George do it, it says, and then it lists all the prices: meeting planes, chauffeuring, courier service, shopping . . . Gift shopping’s most expensive because for that I have to use my own taste. Didn’t you get my flyer? I really stopped by just to visit, though. But your neighbor said you hadn’t been around.”

  “No, I broke my leg,” Macon said.

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “And I couldn’t manage alone of course, so—”

  “You should have called George.”

  “George who?”

  “George my company! The one I was just telling you about.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Then you wouldn’t have had to leave that nice house. I liked your house. Is that where you lived when you were married, too?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I’m surprised she agreed to give it up.”

  “The point is,” Macon said, “I’m really at the end of my rope with Edward here, and I was wondering if you might be able to help me.”

  “Sure I can help!”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Macon said.

  “I can do anything,” Muriel told him. “Search and alert, search and rescue, bombs, narcotics—”