Free The Dog of the South by Charles Portis Page B

or Mississippi, which?’ I say what the hell difference would it make? One side of the river looks just like the other. You think it would be cheap? All that machinery? Gears and chains breaking every day? You’d have to hire two or three union bastards full time just to keep it working. What about your light bill? A thousand dollars a month? Two thousand? You’d have to charge eighteen dollars for a steak to come out on a deal like that. And just so some sap and his family can see three hundred and sixty degrees of the same damned cotton fields. I don’t like it myself. Do you have the faintest notion of what it would cost to erect a fifty-story tower? No, you don’t, and neither does Bella Vurro. And you probably don’t care. I’m the poor son of a bitch who will have to shoulder the debt.”
    â€œLook here. Dr. Symes, I know that Bragg should have been relieved earlier. Everybody knows that today. Joe Johnston too, but that’s a long way from saying they lost the war.”
    â€œWhat line of work are you in, Speed?”
    â€œI’m back in college now. I’m trying to pick up some education hours so I can get a teaching certificate.”
    â€œWhat you are then is a thirty-year-old schoolboy.”
    â€œI’m twenty-six.”
    â€œWell, I don’t guess you’re bothering anybody.”
    â€œThe Civil War used to be my field.”
    â€œA big waste of time.”
    â€œI didn’t think so. I studied for two years at Ole Miss under Dr. Buddy Casey. He’s a fine man and a fine scholar.”
    â€œYou might as well loiter for two years. You might as well play Parcheesi for two years.”
    â€œThat’s a foolish remark.”
    â€œYou think so?”
    â€œIt’s dumb.”
    â€œAll right, listen to me. Are you a reader? Do you read a lot of books?”
    â€œI read quite a bit.”
    â€œAnd you come from a family of readers, right?”
    â€œNo, that’s not right. That’s completely wrong. My father doesn’t own six books. He reads the paper about twice a week. He reads fishing magazines and he reads the construction bids. He works. He doesn’t have time to read.”
    â€œBut you’re a big reader yourself.”
    â€œI have more than four hundred volumes of military history in my apartment. All told, I have sixty-six lineal feet of books.”
    â€œAll right, now listen to me. Throw that trash out the window. Every bit of it.”
    He reached into his grip and brought out a little book with yellow paper covers. The cellophane that had once been bonded to the covers was cracked and peeling. He flourished the book. “Throw all that dead stuff out the window and put this on your shelf. Put it by your bed.”
    What a statement! Books, heavy ones, flying out the windows of the Rhino apartment! I couldn’t take my eyes from the road for very long but I glanced at the cover. The title was With Wings as Eagles and the author was John Selmer Dix, M.A.
    Dr. Symes turned through the pages. “Dix wrote this book forty years ago and it’s still just as fresh as the morning dew. Well, why shouldn’t it be? The truth never dies. Now this is a first edition. That’s important. This is the one you want. Remember the yellow cover. They’ve changed up things in these later editions. Just a word here and there but it adds up. I don’t know who’s behind it. They’ll have Marvin watching television instead of listening to dance music on the radio. Stuff like that. This is the one you want. This is straight Dix. This is the book you want on your night table right beside your glass of water, With Wings as Eagles in the yellow cover. Dix was the greatest man of our time. He was truly a master of the arts, and of some of the sciences too. He was the greatest writer who ever lived.”
    â€œThey say Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived.”
    â€œDix puts