Everything's Eventual

I guess if I have a favorite in this collection of stories, "L.T." wouldbe it. The origin of the story, so far as I can remember, was a "DearAbby" column where Abby opined that a pet is just about the worstsort of present one can give anyone. It makes the assumption thatthe pet and the recipient will hit it off, for one thing; it assumes thatfeeding an animal twice a day and cleaning up its messes (bothindoors and out) was the very thing you had been pining to do. Sofar as I can remember, she called the giving of pets "an exercise inarrogance." I think that's laying it on a bit thick. My wife gaveme a dog for my fortieth birthday, and Marlowe—a Corgi who'snow fourteen and has only one eye—has been an honored part ofthe family ever since. During five of those years we also had arather crazed Siamese cat named Pearl. It was while watchingMarlowe and Pearl interact—which they did with a kind of cautious respect—that I first started thinking about a story where thepets in a marriage would imprint not upon the nominal owner ofeach, but on the other. I had a marvelous time working on it, andwhenever I'm called upon to read a story out loud, this is the oneI choose, always assuming I have the required fifty minutes it takes.It makes people laugh, and I like that. What I like even more isthe unexpected shift in tone, away from humor and toward sadness and horror, which occurs near the end. When it comes, thereader's defenses are down and the story's emotional payoff is a little higher. For me, that emotional payoff is what it's all about. Iwant to make you laugh or cry when you read a story . . . or doboth at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If youwant to learn something, go to school.

My friend L.T. hardly ever talks about how his wife disappeared, or how she's probably dead, just another victim of the Axe Man, but he likes to tell the story of how she walked out on him. He does it with just the right roll of the eyes, as if to say, "She fooled me, boys—right, good, and proper!" He'll sometimes tell the story to a bunch of men sitting on one of the loading docks behind the plant and eating their lunches, him eating his lunch, too, the one he fixed for himself— no Lulubelle back at home to do it for him these days. They usually laugh when he tells the story, which always ends with L.T.'s Theory of Pets. Hell, I usually laugh. It's a funny story, even if you do know how it turned out. Not that any of us do, not completely.

   "I punched out at four, just like usual," L.T. will say, "then went down to Deb's Den for a couple of beers, just like most days. Had a game of pinball, then went home. That was where things stopped being just like usual. When a person gets up in the morning, he doesn't have the slightest idea how much may have changed in his life by the time he lays his head down again that night. 'Ye know not the day or the hour,' the Bible says. I believe that particular verse is about dying, but it fits everything else, boys. Everything else in this world. You just never know when you're going to bust a fiddle-string.