Kojak put all four feet on the road again and walked around Stu with his tail between his legs. The tail was still flipping back and forth in suppressed joy despite its confinement, however, and Stu decided this one would never make much of a canine put-on artist.
Now he could see the owner of the voice-and of Kojak, it seemed like. A man of about sixty wearing a ragged sweater, old gray pants … and a beret. He was sitting on a piano stool and holding a palette. An easel with a canvas on it stood before him.
Now he stood up, placed the palette on the piano stool (under his breath Stu heard him mutter, "Now don't forget and sit on that"), and walked toward Stu with his hand extended. Beneath the beret his fluffy grayish hair bounced in a small and mellow breeze.
"I hope you intend no foul play with that rifle, sir. Glen Bateman, at your service."
Stu stepped forward and took the outstretched hand (Kojak was growing frisky again, bouncing around Stu but not daring to renew his leaps-not yet, at least). "Stuart Redman. Don't worry about the gun. I ain't seen enough people to start shootin em. In fact, I ain't seen any, until you."
"Do you like caviar?"
"Never tried it."
"Then it's time you did. And if you don't care for it, there's plenty of other things. Kojak, don't jump. I know you're thinking of renewing your crazed leaps-I can read you like a book-but control yourself. Always remember, Kojak, that control is what separates the higher orders from the lower. Control!"
His better nature thus appealed to, Kojak shrank down on his haunches and began to pant. He had a big grin on his doggy face. It had been Stu's experience that a grinning dog is either a biting dog or a damned good dog. And this didn't look like a biting dog.
"I'm inviting you to lunch," Bateman said. "You're the first human being I've seen, at least in the last week. Will you stay?"
"I'd be glad to."
"Southerner, aren't you?"
"East Texas."
"An Easterner, my mistake." Bateman cackled at his own wit and turned back to his picture, an indifferent watercolor of the woods across the road.
"I wouldn't sit down on that piano stool, if I were you," Stu said.
"Shit, no! Wouldn't do at all, would it?" He changed course and headed toward the back of the small clearing. Stu saw there was an orange and white cooler chest in the shade back there, with what looked like a white lawn tablecloth folded on top of it. When Bateman fluffed it out, Stu saw that was just what it was.
"Used to be part of the communion set at the Grace Baptist Church in Woodsville," Bateman said. "I liberated it. I don't think the Baptists will miss it. They've all gone home to Jesus. At least all the Woodsville Baptists have. They can celebrate their communion in person now. Although I think the Baptists are going to find heaven a great letdown unless the management allows them television-or perhaps they call it heavenvision up there-on which they can watch Jerry Falwell and Jack van Impe. What we have here is an old pagan communing with nature instead. Kojak, don't step on the tablecloth. Control, always remember that, Kojak. In all you do, make control your watchword. Shall we step across the road and have a wash, Mr. Redman?"
"Make it Stu."
"All right, I will."
They went down the road and washed in the cold, clear water. Stu felt happy. Meeting this particular man at this particular time seemed somehow exactly right. Downstream from them Kojak lapped at the water and then bounded off into the woods, barking happily. He flushed a wood pheasant and Stu watched it explode up from the brush and thought with some surprise that just maybe everything would be all right. Somehow all right.
He didn't care much for the caviar-it tasted like cold fish jelly-but Bateman also had a pepperoni, a salami, two tins of sardines, some slightly mushy apples, and a large box of Keebler fig bars. Wonderful for the bowels, fig bars, Bateman said. Stu's bowels had been giving him no grief at all since he'd gotten out of Stovington and started walking, but he liked fig bars anyway, and helped himself to half a dozen. In fact, he ate hugely of everything.
During the meal, which was eaten largely on Saltines, Bateman told Stu he had been an assistant professor of sociology at Woodsville Community College. Woodsville, he said, was a small town ("famous for its community college and its four gas stations," he told Stu) another six miles down the road. His wife had been dead ten years. They had been childless. Most of his colleagues had not cared for him, he said, and the feeling had been heartily mutual. "They thought I was a lunatic," he said. "The strong possibility that they were right did nothing to improve our relations." He had accepted the superflu epidemic with equanimity, he said, because at last he would be able to retire and paint full-time, as he had always wanted to do.
As he divided the dessert (a Sara Lee poundcake) and handed Stu his half on a paper plate, he said, "I'm a horrible painter, horrible. But I simply tell myself that this July there is no one on earth painting better landscapes than Glendon Pequod Bateman, B.A., M.A., M.F.A. A cheap ego trip, but mine own."
"Was Kojak your dog before?"
"No-that would have been a rather amazing coincidence, wouldn't it? I believe Kojak belonged to someone across town. I saw him occasionally, but since I didn't know what his name was, I have taken the liberty of rechristening him. He doesn't seem to mind. Excuse me for a minute, Stu."
He trotted across the road and Stu heard him splashing in the water. He came back shortly, pantslegs rolled to his knees. He was carrying a dripping six-pack of Narragansett beer in each hand.
"This was supposed to go with the meal. Stupid of me."
"It goes just as well after," Stu said, pulling a can off the template. "Thanks."
They pulled their ringtabs and Bateman raised his can. "To us, Stu. May we have happy days, satisfied minds, and little or no low back pain."
"Amen to that." They clicked their cans together and drank. Stu thought that a swallow of beer had never tasted so good to him before and probably never would again.
"You're a man of few words," Bateman said. "I hope you don't feel that I'm dancing on the grave of the world, so to speak."
"No," Stu said.
"I was prejudiced against the world," Bateman said. "I admit that freely. The world in the last quarter of the twentieth century had, for me at least, all the charm of an eighty-year-old man dying of cancer of the colon. They say it's a malaise which has struck all Western peoples as the century-any century-draws to a close. We have always wrapped ourselves in mourning shrouds and gone around crying woe to thee, O Jerusalem … or Cleveland, as the case may be. The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague-the black death-decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We've become so used to the idea of the flu-it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it?-that no one but the historians seems to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist.
"It's during the last three decades of any given century that your religious maniacs arise with facts and figures showing that Armageddon is finally at hand. Such people are always there, of course, but near the end of a century their ranks seem to swell … and they are taken seriously by great numbers of people. Monsters appear. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden. Charles Manson and Richard Speck and Ted Bundy in our own time, if you like. It's been suggested by colleagues even more fanciful than I that Western Man needs an occasional high colonic, a purging, and this occurs at the end of centuries so that he can face the new century clean and full of optimism. And in this case, we've been given a super-enema, and when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. We are not, after all, simply approaching the centenary this time. We are approaching a whole new millennium."
Bateman paused, considering.
"Now that I think about it, I am dancing on the grave of the world. Another beer?"
Stu took one, and thought over what Bateman had said.
"It's not really the end," he said at last. "At least, I don't think so. Just … intermission."
"Rather apt. Well said. I'm going back to my picture, if you don't mind."
"Go ahead."
"Have you seen any other dogs?" Bateman asked as Kojak came bounding joyously back across the road.
"No."
"Nor have I. You're the only other person I've seen, but Kojak seems to be one of a kind."
"If he's alive, there will be others."
"Not very scientific," Bateman said kindly. "What kind of an American are you? Show me a second dog-preferably a bitch-and I'll accept your thesis that somewhere there is a third. But don't show me one and from that posit a second. It won't do."
"I've seen cows," Stu said thoughtfully.
"Cows, yes, and deer. But the horses are all dead."
"You know, that's right," Stu agreed. He had seen several dead horses on his walk. In some cases cows had been grazing upwind of the bloating bodies. "Now why should that be?"
"No idea. We all respire in much the same way, and this seems to be primarily a respiratory disease. But I wonder if there isn't some other factor? Men, dogs, and horses catch it. Cows and deer don't. And rats were down for a while but now seem to be coming back." Bateman was recklessly mixing paint on his palette. "Cats everywhere, a plague of cats, and from what I can see, the insects are going on pretty much as they always have. Of course, the little faux pas mankind commits rarely seem to affect them, anyway-and the thought of a mosquito with the flu is just too ridiculous to consider. None of it makes any surface sense. It's crazy."