Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Timbuktu: A Novel
Timbuktu: A Novel
Timbuktu: A Novel
Ebook177 pages3 hours

Timbuktu: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Meet Mr. Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster's remarkable new novel, Timbuktu. Mr. Bones is the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, the brilliant, troubled, and altogether original poet-saint from Brooklyn. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza before them, they sally forth on a last great adventure, heading for Baltimore, Maryland in search of Willy's high school teacher, Bea Swanson. Years have passed since Willy last saw his beloved mentor, who knew him in his previous incarnation as William Gurevitch, the son of Polish war refugees. But is Mrs. Swanson still alive? And if she isn't, what will prevent Willy from vanishing into that other world known as Timbuktu?

Mr. Bones is our witness. Although he walks on four legs and cannot speak, he can think, and out of his thoughts Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in recent American fiction. By turns comic, poignant, and tragic, Timbuktu is above all a love story. Written with a scintillating verbal energy, it takes us into the heart of a singularly pure and passionate character, an unforgettable dog who has much to teach us about our own humanity.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 1, 2010
ISBN9781429900058
Timbuktu: A Novel
Author

Paul Auster

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, and Timbuktu. I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited, was also a national bestseller. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Read more from Paul Auster

Related to Timbuktu

Related ebooks

Literary Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Timbuktu

Rating: 3.603846149230769 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

650 ratings35 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Just a tad dull. Often clunky writing style, felt like it needed an edit. The ending had pathos, but the rest felt half-baked.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Timbuktu is a small morsel of a book, appetizing enough, and short enough not to dislike. But the morsel isn't fulfilling or mindblowing. That being said, the story is good, and the POV is one you don't get in most books.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    English literature counts a large number of novels in which the main protagonist is an animal, notably dogs and donkeys. Timbuktu is Paul Auster's contribution to the genre. When I first read Auster, in the early 90s, I immediately became hooked to this extraordinary author. I loved The Red Notebook, and as a student of German Expressionism, came to love Auster's New York trilogy, and subsequent absurd novels which often reminded me of Kafka's America. However, as time progressed, it seemed to me that publishers were exploiting this wonderful author, pushing hard to churn out as much profit as possible in the shortest possible time, as if there would be no tomorrow, exemplified by re-issues and collections of work which might as well be left unpublished, or in the case of other authors often is found in posthumous publications (speaking of Hand to Mouth). Timbuktu seems the product of such haste and pressure. A stilistically untypical work, of limited scope and very little interest. I almost lost interest in Auster, and the book remained unread on my shelves for many years. Although I think his most recent work is of a higher level again, though not as sublime as his early work, Timbuktu is disappointing. It left absolutely no impression on me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A melancholic story, more of a children's tale with some raw edges. Well written, emphatic, moving.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Timbuktu is a sweet little story. It diverted me on a train journey and gave me things to think about. It's about the relationship between a dog and his dying master and how the dog copes when his master dies. It's full of reflections on love, life and how to live to the best of your ability.It was quite slight, though, and that's what kept this as good, rather than great.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Short, sweet and typical of Auster, this novella introduces a novel narrator, the dog. Whilst this certainly allows for some original perspective, it unfortunately has one leg on either side of the fence of reality. One the one hand we want to believe all that the dog is telling us, but on the other hand we know we can't.
    After a dense and somewhat choppy start, the narrative zips along quickly (so quickly, one assumes, that the proof reader missed a glaring mistake in the first paperback edition, tsk-tsk) bringing us to a somewhat tense ending. Even on the penultimate page I found myself questioning the outcome with a sense of pure futility.
    Rich in language and referents, less so in reality and canine understanding, this has all the airs of a "get it done and dusted" project. And this is what I have always admired in Auster, his relentless pursuit of an ending.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One hell of a serendipitous ride. My dog, Os approves.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I should clarify that the three star rating is comparing Timbuktu to other works by Paul Auster. I've often said that mediocre Auster is better than most author's greatest. If I were comparing it across the board, I'd give it a four. I'm sure it would be higher if I were a dog person, but I'm really not.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was feeling teary-eyed way too early on in this book to continue right away. Auster's writing is, of course, excellent, as usual. But, tell me stories about dogs and I crumble. I will continue reading it at a later time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was really great, but sad though. Not sentimental, and well written and interesting. Great for dog lovers. The main character is a dog named Mr. Bones.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found it entertaining to have a dog narrate this story. I was exposed to this different author because this book is a "book of the month" for a group on GoodReads.com that I belong to. The characters were believable and the plot was simple. There were some true emotions expressed in the book. The story allowed the reader to think about life as the story unfolded. I thought this was great writing done with just the right amount of details.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    3.75 starsMr. Bones is a dog whose master is Willy, a homeless man. Mr. Bones remembers when he and Willy lived with Willy's mom till she died, then they were living on the streets. Willy is dying and wants to find his high school English teacher, so Mr. Bones and Willy set out to try to find her. The story is told from Mr. Bones' point of view.A lot of the first half is Mr. Bones remembering various things about Willy's life, and unfortunately, I found Willy boring. However, the book really picked up for me in the second half, and I really enjoyed that part of the book. I did, of course, love that the book is told from the dog's point of view.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've been noticing an awful lot of books narrated by dogs lately--have been recommended a few and have politely demurred. I hate feeling emotionally manipulated and tend to avoid books that are intentional tearjerkers, which most animal stories are. Happily, this book, which chronicles the life and memories of one canine Mr. Bones (literary reference alert!) after his homeless master is lost. Auster is, I think, the type of author who tends to just collapse under the weight of his ideas; this is one of his few that has held up to the end. It's funny, and sad--& yet somehow managed to avoid the pitfalls of sentimentality that tend to pepper animal stories. I liked Mr. Bones' voice best & very much. Though he sometimes tended to the overly literary and destroyed the conceit, Mr. Bones on the whole was perfectly baffled and always doggy; when he was wise (which he was) it did not feel forced.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This kind of reminded me a bit of King by John Berger, which is also told from the perspective of a dog. I actually liked King a bit better to be honest. I love Paul Auster but I don't think this is his best book. I felt it ended too abruptly and wasn't long enough for my tastes. I would recommend reading City of Glass or Brooklyn Follies. The Red Notebook is also good for fans.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Mr. Bones believes that Timbuktu is where you go when you die. He picked this up from his longtime companion—a wandering street poet named Willy G. Christmas. W.G. Christmas may have the soul of a poet and sport a fabulous tattoo of Santa Claus, but the life he shares with his friend is never easy. This short book gets down, down to around a dog's height, as Mr. Bones is a mutt. In Timbuktu, Paul Auster looks through a dog's eyes to give the reader a completely different perspective from which to see life. The clean, sparse writing compliments perfectly the simpler life that our main character leads in his dog world. The needs and the confusions of life are much different for a dog, yet our species share many of the same desires. If everyone read Timbuktu, fewer people would want to be treated like dogs. This is a special little book that won't take anyone long to read, but most will remember it for a long time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Timbuktu is a 1999 novella by Paul Auster. It is about the life of a dog, Mr Bones, who is struggling to come to terms with the fact that his homeless master, Willy Christmas is dying. The story is set in the 90s. The title comes from the name Willy has given to the afterlife and Mr. Bones is afraid that he won’t be able to go to Timbuktu to be with Willy. My thoughts: The story is told from Mr. Bones perspective. It is the second book this year, having read Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein last December that is written from the dogs perspective. This one is similar in that both dogs are contemplating existential themes of the afterlife. Mr. Bones regrets that Willy didn’t teach him to read, Enzo wanted thumbs. Both dogs do a lot of thinking but Mr. Bone uses words like “peripatetic”. Now I have dogs and I believe they do learn a lot of human language as they live with us but I don’t believe they learn words like peripatetic. When you read Auster, at least in my experience so far, you know the ending isn’t going to be a feel good ending. I felt so bad that Mr. Bones was going to be abandoned in a strange town with no friends when Willy dies but the rest of the story loses my sympathy. It really goes on with the difficulties of adjusting to new families and the loss of Willy. The ending, and I won’t give it away, but it is an Auster ending. Quotes that I liked: “Even now, as I enter the valley of the shadow of death, my thoughts bog down in the gunk of yore. There’s the rub, signore. All this clutter in my head, this dust and bric-a-brac, these useless knickknacks spilling off the shelves.” References to memory-- “wallpaper, background music, zeitgeist dust on the furniture of the mind”.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    To get inside a dog, to understand each character so deeply is an amazing gift. I try to read all of Paul Auster. His work is quirky and fills your mind. Reading reviews I found a new great word, "Nostomania," which means homesickness, and that's what this magnificent neglected dog has.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Timbuktu is narrated by Mr. Bones, a faithful canine companion to William Gurevitch, a Brooklyn born son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, AKA Willy G. Christmas, a peripatetic, loquacious, vagabond who expires midway through the novel. Mr. Bones, now alone in the world, casts out on his own adventures, encountering kindness and cruelty alike. Paul Auster seems to be having fun with this novel. It's not clearly about anything, but does life itself have any great meaning? Unlike some novels without a clear message or theme, e.g. Charles Portis's Gringos, Timbuktu does not evoke a strong sense of place or character type. But it is playful and Mr. Bones, despite being a dog, is more fun and human than the doleful and humorless autistic narrator of say, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a short novel about a dog, Bones, and his master, Willy. Essentially this is a classic dog story about the loyalty, love and dependence of Bones on Willy, who is a bum, a misfit in American society, but who in turn loves Bones even though he doesn’t prepare him for their separation—when Willy dies. The book is simply written with no great efforts at description, yet it is funny and touching and clever. Bones in the end proves independent and courageous. Underlying it all is that Bones wants to go home to Willy. I couldn’t put the book down. It made me want to read more of Auster.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    There’s a reason I don’t like books written from the point of view of animals (with an obvious exception of Animal Farm). The action tends to unfold from the supposed simplicity of the animal narrator, leading either to uninspired action or weird anthropomorphic desires I can’t quite (or don’t want to) grasp. Having been thoroughly turned off to Paul Auster after taking in his latest book squandering (Sunset Park…or Pretty White People With Problems), I wasn’t sure if I was ready to jump into any of his other entries, though seeing as how they had been ordered and were just collecting dust, waiting to be read, I decided to pick up the book with the shortest page length. Timbuktu is what that was.The novella follows Mr. Bones and his master, Willy G Christmas, who leaves his mother’s home in Brooklyn to amble up towards Baltimore, taking in whatever sights the journey lends. The two appear comfortable with their squalor so long as man and dog are still together, but by the time they arrive in Baltimore (Christmas seemingly inspired to track down a former teacher) Mr. Bones finds himself without his master and spends the remainder questioning and following his doggy desires…in grassy fields and forlorn, school-aged children. A great deal of time is spent by Mr. Bones ruminating on the specifics of Timbuktu, a supposed afterlife concocted by Christmas, but there’s hardly any spiritual aspect here that makes up for what this story seems to concern itself with…a search for identity in a cruel, unforgiving world.This one should’ve been a short story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book deals with Mr. Bones' struggles to see life past his masters' imminent death.Mr. Bones is an adorable and loyal mixed-breed canine that hasn't known life without following his homeless master (Willy) everywhere. During the novel, in third person, we offered Mr. Bones point of view and concerns about Willy and life without him.The plot is simple, as well as the dialogues and its characters. It mixes funny moments with some other tragic/sad passages. The dog has an uncanny ability to understand human dialogues, and actually tries hard to speak like them (obviously he is not successful). It is interesting, as well as movable, the way you come to explore the dog's mind, his hopes and fears and his dreams.This is no literary jewel, but it is a book worth reading if you love dogs. The final part of the book was awesome from my point of view, because Auster is trying to provoke some profound thoughts about life in general, love, death, loyalty and some other stuff regarding the society and its values. As I see it, this short straight story is just a way to make the reader reflect on some other matters, but without reaching the threshold of fables.I liked it very much; both amusing and reflective. Recommended for those of us readers who like reading between the lines.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautiful story told from the perspective of a dog, Mr Bones, whose master is homeless. Raises thought-provoking questions about love, loyalty, society, mental illness, personal value, and homelessness. This gorgeous story which will undoubtedly stick with me for a long time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This might have made a good short story. Told from a dog's point of view, but not by any means narrated by the dog. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. Almost too obviously, it had a beginning, a middle and an end. Short as it was (181 pages) it went on too long, and there just didn't seem to be any point to it. I hate to disagree with Salmon Rushdie, who apparently loved it, but I don't see this as anything extraordinary. I already know what things look like from a dog's perspective, and so does anyone else who has lived with and loved one. I think Auster might have been capitalizing on his name with this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dog lovers must read this poignant, humorous, and devoutly canine novel by Paul Auster. Meet Willie Christmas, a homeless man who prepares his dog for the trials he will face upon Willie's death, such as, the dog pound if he is not careful. Meet Polly, who institutes her own set of rules for her beloved dog. Above all, meet Mr. Bones, who shares with us his and Willie's conception of the afterlife, better known in this book as "Timbuktu". Read it and weep!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Heartwrenching and beautiful... I love the perspective. Quick read and well worth it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A must-read for anyone who loves dogs. Auster perfectly captures the very essence of a dog's nature in the main character, the wonderfully named, Mr Bones. He is a loyal companion and intelligent, but very much a canine creation, driven by impulses based on hunger and smells and frustrated by his inabilty to communicate properly with humans.Mr Bones' orginal owner is the erratic poet wanderer Willie G Christmas, a truly original character. He is responible for much of the sadness in the book, but also the wit, in particular his musings about teaching dogs to read was pure genius.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is the story of Mr Bones, a dog. I really liked the book, but can't give it more than 3 stars because of the first 50 pages. The first 50 pages (and the book only has 180 total) were slow, and focused not on Mr Bones, the real protagonist of the book, but on Willy Christmas, his owner. Willy is an eccentric bum, and eccentric to the point of absurdity. For the most part, his eccentricities don't seem to contribute anything to the real story. Worst of all, several times we have to read page after page of nonsensical ramblings from the verbose Willy. That said, once you get past that first quarter of the book, the rest is really good. Told in the third person, but very much from the dog's point of view. The rest of the book is heartwarming, sad, and surprisingly realistic.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Willy G Christmas (a surname he took on following a revelation) and Mr Bones travel together, with occasional wintertime respites at Mama-Sans apartment . It's an interesting life, and Mr Bones can't imagine anything better. Willy has never denied him the opportunity to savor an interesting smell and has never treated him anything less than equal. What a sweet and tender book this was. Anyone who has ever loved a dog will be thrilled to learn that our best friends understand Ingloosh, are blessed with prescience, and never, ever, forget us. I cried like a little baby when it ended, but this is a far cry from the token sentimentality of "Marley and Me." Here you have a tough life as seen by the dog who lives it. It's a wonderful concept, and a book that has changed the way I see my own dog, one that I will think about for a long time to come.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    For those used to the almost psychedelic complexity of Auster’s novels, Timbuktu will come as something of a shock. It’s short, sweet, and utterly simple: a lovely and moving story of a dog that loses his master. The story is told in omniscient third person, but it takes the dog’s point of view and never wavers from it. There are no subtexts, few literary allusions, and even the idea of a dog capable of serious thought comes across as completely straight and oddly believable. The book is clean, and suitable for young adult readers. The protagonist is Mr Bones, the dog whose thoughts drive the narrative. As the book opens, Mr Bones’ master, Willy G Christmas, is dying, and is on a mission to find Mr Bones a new home before that happens. But homeless himself, schizophrenic, and on his last legs, Willy isn’t particularly successful. Mr Bones’ journey as he tries to come to terms with the loss of a master he had come to love, while looking after his own increasingly desperate welfare forms the plotline of the book.

    Of course there are aspects of this book which can be read as metaphor. Mr Bones’ struggle to find food and shelter while remaining true to the memory of his owner, provide a poignant reminder of the all too common difficulties of human homelessness. The prejudices that Willy and Mr Bones encounter are those that most people reading the book will recognise in themselves. But Mr Bones is more than metaphoric, and Timbuktu provides the reader with more than simply a case of anthropomorphism. Mr Bones is a character that readers will identify with and like simply for his own dogginess: his integrity and honesty. Mr Bones is unusually intelligent, and his knowledge of English is due in part to Willy’s constant chatter: “a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool logomaniac who scarcely stopped talking from the instant he opened his eyes in the morning unti he passed out drunk at night”(6). But Mr Bones’ hungers and desires are very much dog ones, and his perception of the human character is as much of interest as his situation. His perspective, however deep it sometimes gets, is not without humour.

    The book follows Mr Bones’ struggle to survive on his own, moving through a succession of homes and realities and come to terms with his own identity. He does all sorts of normal doggy things such as chasing pigeons, chasing female dogs, and attaching himself to kind children in exchange for food and affection. But Mr Bones’ attachment to Willy runs deep, and his love for that crazy wordsmith, and his implicit acceptance of the picture of heaven that Willy provides him with override even a warm bed. Mr Bones struggles with his conflicting desires for freedom and comfort, and as we follow him, we are reminded that this dogged journey is also a human one.

    Timbuktu is a delicately presented, beautifully written book which will appeal to children as well as adults. Mr Bones’ quizzical look at the human race makes perfect sense, and the book reads quickly and easily. The overriding desire for meaning beyond this short life is one which infuses the book, but Auster never allows a human narrative voice to interfere with Mr Bones’ perspective. Clever, funny, lighthearted and serious all at the same time, this is a stylistic departure for Paul Auster which nonetheless makes full use of his gifts.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Definitely an odd and style-defining work. This book is written from the dog's perspective. It is a unique and intriguing insight into the story that would otherwise be banal.

Book preview

Timbuktu - Paul Auster

1

Mr. Bones knew that Willy wasn’t long for this world. The cough had been inside him for over six months, and by now there wasn’t a chance in hell that he would ever get rid of it. Slowly and inexorably, without once taking a turn for the better, the thing had assumed a life of its own, advancing from a faint, phlegm-filled rattle in the lungs on February third to the wheezy sputum-jigs and gobby convulsions of high summer. All that was bad enough, but in the past two weeks a new tonality had crept into the bronchial music—something tight and flinty and percussive—and the attacks came so often now as to be almost constant. Every time one of them started, Mr. Bones half expected Willy’s body to explode from the rockets of pressure bursting against his rib cage. He figured that blood would be the next step, and when that fatal moment finally occurred on Saturday afternoon, it was as if all the angels in heaven had opened their mouths and started to sing. Mr. Bones saw it happen with his own eyes, standing by the edge of the road between Washington and Baltimore as Willy hawked up a few miserable clots of red matter into his handkerchief, and right then and there he knew that every ounce of hope was gone. The smell of death had settled upon Willy G. Christmas, and as surely as the sun was a lamp in the clouds that went off and on every day, the end was drawing near.

What was a poor dog to do? Mr. Bones had been with Willy since his earliest days as a pup, and by now it was next to impossible for him to imagine a world that did not have his master in it. Every thought, every memory, every particle of the earth and air was saturated with Willy’s presence. Habits die hard, and no doubt there’s some truth to the adage about old dogs and new tricks, but it was more than just love or devotion that caused Mr. Bones to dread what was coming. It was pure ontological terror. Subtract Willy from the world, and the odds were that the world itself would cease to exist.

Such was the quandary Mr. Bones faced that August morning as he shuffled through the streets of Baltimore with his ailing master. A dog alone was no better than a dead dog, and once Willy breathed his last, he’d have nothing to look forward to but his own imminent demise. Willy had been cautioning him about this for many days now, and Mr. Bones knew the drill by heart: how to avoid the dogcatchers and constables, the paddy wagons and unmarked cars, the hypocrites from the so-called humane societies. No matter how sweetly they talked to you, the word shelter meant trouble. It would begin with nets and tranquilizer guns, devolve into a nightmare of cages and fluorescent lights, and end with a lethal injection or a dose of poison gas. If Mr. Bones had belonged to some recognizable breed, he might have stood a chance in the daily beauty contests for prospective owners, but Willy’s sidekick was a hodgepodge of genetic strains—part collie, part Labrador, part spaniel, part canine puzzle—and to make matters worse, there were burrs protruding from his ragged coat, bad smells emanating from his mouth, and a perpetual bloodshot sadness lurking in his eyes. No one was going to want to rescue him. As the homeless bard was fond of putting it, the outcome was written in stone. Unless Mr. Bones found another master in one quick hurry, he was a pooch primed for oblivion.

And if the stun guns don’t get you, Willy continued, clinging to a lamppost that foggy morning in Baltimore to prevent himself from falling, there’s a thousand other things that will. I’m warning you, kemo sabe. You get yourself some new gig, or your days are numbered. Just look around this dreary burg. There’s a Chinese restaurant on every block, and if you think mouths won’t water when you come strolling by, then you don’t know squat about Oriental cuisine. They prize the taste of dog, friend. The chefs round up strays and slaughter them in the alley right behind the kitchen—ten, twenty, thirty dogs a week. They might pass them off as ducks and pigs on the menu, but the in-crowd knows what’s what, the gourmets aren’t fooled for a second. Unless you want to wind up in a platter of moo goo gai pan, you’ll think twice before you wag your tail in front of one of those Chink beaneries. Do you catch my drift, Mr. Bones? Know thine enemy—and then keep a wide berth.

Mr. Bones understood. He always understood what Willy said to him. This had been the case for as long as he could remember, and by now his grasp of Ingloosh was as good as any other immigrant who had spent seven years on American soil. It was his second language, of course, and quite different from the one his mother had taught him, but even though his pronunciation left something to be desired, he had thoroughly mastered the ins and outs of its syntax and grammar. None of this should be seen as strange or unusual for an animal of Mr. Bones’s intelligence. Most dogs acquire a good working knowledge of two-legged speech, but in Mr. Bones’s case there was the advantage of being blessed with a master who did not treat him as an inferior. They had been boon companions from the start, and when you added in the fact that Mr. Bones was not just Willy’s best friend but his only friend, and then further considered that Willy was a man in love with the sound of his own voice, a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool logomaniac who scarcely stopped talking from the instant he opened his eyes in the morning until he passed out drunk at night, it made perfect sense that Mr. Bones should have felt so at home in the native lingo. When all was said and done, the only surprise was that he hadn’t learned to talk better himself. It wasn’t for lack of earnest effort, but biology was against him, and what with the configuration of muzzle, teeth, and tongue that fate had saddled him with, the best he could do was emit a series of yaps and yawns and yowls, a mooning, muddled sort of discourse. He was painfully aware of how far from fluency these noises fell, but Willy always let him have his say, and in the end that was all that mattered. Mr. Bones was free to put in his two cents, and whenever he did so his master would give him his full attention, and to look at Willy’s face as he watched his friend struggle to make like a member of the human tribe, you would have sworn that he was hanging on every word.

That gloomy Sunday in Baltimore, however, Mr. Bones kept his mouth shut. They were down to their last days together, perhaps even their last hours, and this was no time to indulge in long speeches and loopy contortions, no time for the old shenanigans. Certain situations called for tact and discipline, and in their present dire straits it would be far better to hold his tongue and behave like a good, loyal dog. He let Willy snap the leash onto his collar without protest. He didn’t whine about not having eaten in the past thirty-six hours; he didn’t sniff the air for female scents; he didn’t stop to pee on every lamppost and fire hydrant. He simply ambled along beside Willy, following his master as they searched the empty avenues for 316 Calvert Street.

Mr. Bones had nothing against Baltimore per se. It smelled no worse than any other city they’d camped in over the years, but even though he understood the purpose of the trip, it grieved him to think that a man could choose to spend his last moments on earth in a place he’d never been to before. A dog would never commit such a blunder. He would make his peace with the world and then see to it that he gave up the ghost on familiar ground. But Willy still had two things to accomplish before he died, and with characteristic stubbornness he’d gotten it into his head that there was only one person who could help him. The name of that person was Bea Swanson, and since said Bea Swanson was last known to be living in Baltimore, they had come to Baltimore to find her. All well and good, but unless Willy’s plan did what it was supposed to do, Mr. Bones would be marooned in this city of crab cakes and marble steps, and what was he going to do then? A phone call would have done the job in half a minute, but Willy had a philosophical aversion to using the telephone for important business. He would rather walk for days on end than pick up one of those contraptions and talk to someone he couldn’t see. So here they were two hundred miles later, wandering around the streets of Baltimore without a map, looking for an address that might or might not exist.

Of the two things Willy still hoped to accomplish before he died, neither one took precedence over the other. Each was all-important to him, and since time had grown too short to think of tackling them separately, he had come up with what he referred to as the Chesapeake Gambit: an eleventh-hour ploy to kill both birds with one stone. The first has already been discussed in the previous paragraphs: to find new digs for his furry companion. The second was to wrap up his own affairs and make sure that his manuscripts were left in good hands. At that moment, his life’s work was crammed into a rental locker at the Greyhound bus terminal on Fayette Street, two and a half blocks north of where he and Mr. Bones were standing. The key was in his pocket, and unless he found someone worthy enough to entrust with that key, every word he had ever written would be destroyed, disposed of as so much unclaimed baggage.

In the twenty-three years since he’d taken on the surname of Christmas, Willy had filled the pages of seventy-four notebooks with his writings. These included poems, stories, essays, diary entries, epigrams, autobiographical musings, and the first eighteen hundred lines of an epic-in-progress, Vagabond Days. The majority of these works had been composed at the kitchen table of his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn, but since her death four years ago he’d been forced to write in the open air, often battling the elements in public parks and dusty alleyways as he struggled to get his thoughts down on paper. In his secret heart of hearts, Willy had no delusions about himself. He knew that he was a troubled soul and not fit for this world, but he also knew that much good work was buried in those notebooks, and on that score at least he could hold his head high. Maybe if he had been more scrupulous about taking his medication, or maybe if his body had been a bit stronger, or maybe if he hadn’t been so fond of malts and spirits and the hubbub of bars, he might have done even more good work. That was perfectly possible, but it was too late to dwell on regrets and errors now. Willy had written the last sentence he would ever write, and there were no more than a few ticks left in the clock. The words in the locker were all he had to show for himself. If the words vanished, it would be as if he had never lived.

That was where Bea Swanson entered the picture. Willy knew it was a stab in the dark, but if and when he managed to find her, he was convinced that she would move heaven and earth to help him. Once upon a time, back when the world was still young, Mrs. Swanson had been his high school English teacher, and if not for her it was doubtful that he ever would have found the courage to think of himself as a writer. He was still William Gurevitch in those days, a scrawny sixteen-year-old boy with a passion for books and beebop jazz, and she had taken him under her wing and lavished his early work with praise that was so excessive, so far out of proportion to its true merit, that he began to think of himself as the next great hope of American literature. Whether she was right or wrong to do so is not the question, for results are less important at that stage than promise, and Mrs. Swanson had recognized his talent, she’d seen the spark in his fledgling soul, and no one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him. That’s a proven fact, and while the rest of the junior class at Midwood High saw Mrs. Swanson as a squat, fortyish woman with blubbery arms that bounced and wiggled whenever she wrote on the blackboard, Willy thought she was beautiful, an angel who had come down from heaven and taken on a human

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1