Free Last Days of the Dog-Men by Brad Watson

and me, in the pickup.”
    I thought maybe the others had already gone on down in Ivan and MaeRose’s Caddy, a 1972 Seville, powder blue. I looked at him and he shrugged.
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    So then he told me, blurting it out in about two sentences, this huge story: He and Eve had been having an affair, she told Dave about it last night, and Dave called up MaeRose and told her.
    Jesus Christ.
    â€œIt’s been going on awhile, she couldn’t stand it anymore,” Ivan said. He looked at me, then looked away. “Look, I’ll make a confession. We’ve been meeting each other here in your place the last couple of months. I don’t know, maybe longer.”
    â€œHere?” I couldn’t believe it. I’d loaned Ivan a key so he could use my computer while I was at school. Or so he’d said.
    â€œIn my bed?” I said.
    â€œIn the bed, yeah.” He patted the sofa cushion. “On the couch. On the floor, on that rug there. Out on the screened porch. In the car, one day, down by the bamboo, when you were home.”
    I went to the window and looked down there.
    â€œI didn’t see you.”
    Ivan stood up and went into the bathroom, dropped his cigarette into the toilet, took a piss, flushed. He came back out and sat down on the sofa. “The fact is, I’m going to need a place to stay for a while. MaeRose asked me not to come back until she leaves. She’s gonna stay with her parents for a while.”
    â€œWill you try to work it out?”
    He shook his head, looked at his watch.
    â€œShe’s filing for divorce right about now, I imagine.” He lit another cigarette. “You know, she hasn’t been exactly immaculate, herself.”
    I didn’t know anything about it. Ivan got up to go into the kitchen. He rummaged in the cabinet for the bourbon, found my bottle of Ezra, pulled the cork and took a swig, corked it, and put it back into the cabinet. He came back into the living room. He was lookingaround at the walls, as if there was something missing, a painting or a window or something.
    â€œSo, you still want to go?” he said. “I’m going. I got to get away until this all calms down a little bit.”
    I stood in the living room trying to comprehend it all. You think you know what’s going on around you, what your friends are up to, and then they turn out to have these secret lives. I couldn’t believe he and Eve had been fucking in my bed. When was the last time I’d gotten laid in that bed? As a matter of fact, I myself had fantasized about Eve in that bed, because she’d flirted with me at a party. In fact, she’d flirted with me in front of Dave, and I’d wondered what the hell she was up to. Another time, during a party at their house, Eve and I had been in her study, talking. Dave opened the side door, from the bathroom, stuck his head in, glared at us, then pulled his head out and slammed the door. So, yeah, I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what. I wondered what the hell she was up to.
    Fucking Ivan the whole time. I was a little depressed by the news. I’d been depressed in general for something like five or six years. This little setback, of course, was different. Nothing like the real thing. But it all adds up. I’d gone back to school, and I was hanging in there but not too well. I hadn’t gone in with a plan. I’d tried moving in with a buddy of mine and that didn’t work, I couldn’t suppress my desire to hole up, hide. I’d moved into this apartment when the old fellow living here died, he’d been holed up chainsmoking in it for twenty years. He was a retired professor of mathematics, a recluse who’d scrawled his lastmessage on a scrap of notebook paper in shaky pencil: “Gone out—be back in a few minutes.” And then he didn’t go out, he took an overdose of pills and went to bed and died. A friend of mine who