Larry and the Dog People

Praise for Last Bus to Coffeeville

‘exceptionally good… the characters and plot are fantastic and I really couldn’t praise it enough’ – Bookseller

‘I found myself laughing out loud with the characters. I really enjoyed this story’ – Jane Brown, Book Depository

‘A wonderful cast of eccentric people in the best tradition of old-time American writers like Capote and Keillor. I was enthralled throughout and recommend it to anyone who wants a feel-good read’ – New Books Magazine

‘There is heartbreak… black humour… and the charm of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ – Daily Mail

‘A fascinating and poignant novel’ – Woman’s World

‘… the shimmering humour and life values Henderson explores are certainly something you wouldn’t want to miss’ – The Star Online

‘A funny road trip story… but this brave debut novel also tackles sensitive issues and does so in a confident manner’ – We Love This Book

‘Deftly handled with an offbeat humour and a deal of worldly compassion’ – Sunday Sport

‘J. Paul Henderson is someone to watch out for’ – The Bookbag

‘One of the best feel-good books I have ever read!’ – culturefly.co.uk

‘An interesting delight… a brilliant debut’ – Our Book Reviews Online

‘It’s rare to find a first novel that has as sure a touch as this one, with the writing being a combination of Bill Bryson travelogue with humour from James Thurber and Garrison Keillor * * * * *’ – Goodreads

‘If The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared was a book you enjoyed then I’m sure this book will delight and entertain you just as much’ – Library Thing

‘This is a book well worth reading * * * * *’ – Shelfari

‘Overall I thought the book flowed beautifully and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There will inevitably be comparisons with The Hundred-Year-Old Man – and I’m certain that if you enjoyed that book you will love this one too * * * * *’ – Goodreads

Praise for The Last of the Bowmans

‘An amiably weird take on family life’ – Daily Mail

‘There were some bittersweet moments, some strange moments and some outright funny moments… a lovely, surprising read’ – Novel Kicks

‘laugh-out-loud funny’ – Reviewed The Book

‘The black comedy mixed with a bittersweet and compassionate drama frequently reminded me of the late, great David Nobbs in style’ – Shiny New Books

‘There’s a rich vein of surreal black comedy throughout The Last of the Bowmans’ – The Book Bag

‘A quirky story using black humour to help us feel connected to and to understand events that we could all at some time have to face’ – Helen Appleby, Library Thing

‘This was a gorgeous little story… you will not want to stop reading’ – Sarah, Goodreads

‘This is an enthralling tale full of eccentric characters whose stories are cleverly woven together’ – Anna Elliot, Waterstones

For the Bassets: Hope, Mic, Bert, Rachel and Martine (1983 to the present)

Contents

Kapitel 1

Kapitel 2

Kapitel 3

Kapitel 4

Kapitel 5

Kapitel 6

Kapitel 7

Kapitel 8

Kapitel 9

Kapitel 10

Kapitel 11

Copyright

Oct 5, 2015. Explosions Rock Georgetown Church

Three people were killed and seventeen injured when a dog and pipe organ exploded in the Church of Latter-Day Lutherans yesterday, the Feast Day of St Francis of Assisi. Congregants were gathered for the annual Blessing of the Animals and a large number of pets also died in the blast.

Oct 8, 2015. Body Found in East Village

Police investigating the St Francis Day Massacre raided a house in the East Village of Georgetown yesterday and recovered the body of a man in his late sixties. Another man, thought to be in his early thirties and severely injured, was taken to Georgetown University Hospital where he remains in a critical condition. The FBI is anxious to talk to Laurence MacCabe, the owner of the property.

Oct 21, 2015. Georgetown Man Arrested

Laurence MacCabe, an emeritus professor of Georgetown University, was arrested yesterday and taken to Metropolitan Police Headquarters. He is being held in connection with the bombing of the Church of Latter-Day Lutherans and the deaths of two men found in the East Village. He is also being questioned in relation to the July shooting of Lydia Flores.

1

The Lonely Professor

Larry MacCabe was a man who needed people more than most. The problem for Larry was that most people had little need for him. It was an equation without solution.

Larry wasn’t a bad man. On the contrary, he was an innately nice person. He liked people, enjoyed their company and could find something of interest in anyone he met. People such as Larry, however, who tend toward friendship with the multitude rather than the few, often fall into the category of being a friend of everyone and a friend of no one. Niceness, too, is often accompanied by dullness, and this was certainly true of Larry who had amassed the quality in spades. He created no controversy, avoided argument at all costs and never spoke badly of anyone, living or dead. On first meeting, or in short bursts, Larry’s company was easy enough to bear but never willingly sought, and that he and his wife had been invited to functions rather than more intimate gatherings when she’d been alive, told a story.

In many ways Larry’s presence in a room was no more disturbing than the magnolia paint that coated its walls, and in all likelihood he would have remained a part of life’s invisible filler but for one thing: he got on people’s nerves. It wasn’t his physical appearance that agitated them – his jug ears and large forehead, for instance, or the unfortunate tic that caused him to blink every thirty seconds – but the fact that he talked too much, and invariably about subjects that were of little interest to anyone but himself.

Larry assimilated information as easily as blotting paper absorbs ink, and nothing, absolutely nothing, escaped his interest. His mother had been overwhelmed by the facts and figures he’d trotted out as a child and wondered, largely on account of his large forehead, if her son was a genius. Larry’s father, who for a time had worried that Larry’s forehead was a manifestation of hydrocephalus, was happy to agree with this prognosis but suggested that it might be better for them – and certainly for him – if Larry took his burgeoning knowledge outside the house and shared it instead with the neighbourhood kids. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he’d said, ‘but that boy’s chatter is about to drive me up the wall. I don’t need to know how a kettle works, and I sure as hell don’t want to hear another word on tic-borne diseases! I mean, I love the kid and all, but, well… you know what I mean.’ His wife did, but maternal instincts dictated that she sprang to Larry’s defence. ‘I think he’s interesting,’ she’d said. ‘God in Heaven, woman!’ her husband had exclaimed. ‘Jesus Christ Himself wouldn’t find Larry interesting. You’ve got to stop kidding yourself!’

A compromise of sorts was worked out. While Larry’s mother was allowed to encourage her son’s pursuit of knowledge and affirm the interesting nature of his conversation, she was also to stipulate that it would be better if he shared it with his friends rather than his father. It was important, she told him, that his father’s mind remained blank: ‘We don’t want him coming home from the production line with any missing fingers, do we?’ Effectively, Larry’s parents washed their hands of their son’s peccadillo, and in doing so unwittingly unleashed it on an unsuspecting world, in much the same way as Larry had described the letting loose of rabbits and camels in Australia.

Larry’s contemporaries proved as unreceptive to his enthusiasms as did his parents. Until this time they’d considered him a regular kid – one of them. Sure, he was a geek kid, all that blinking and everything, but a geek kid whose forehead came in handy for noughts and crosses when no one had paper. Once Larry started to hold forth, however, their opinion of him quickly changed. They didn’t want to hear about the workings of a washing machine or the theory of continental drift. They weren’t in school, for God’s sake! And who in God’s name cared if the state capital of North Dakota was Bismarck or the capital of Niue, Alofi? His conversation, they also noted, was structured rather than spontaneous and always accompanied by bullet points: one, two, three; firstly, secondly, thirdly. They started to avoid him, leave him to his own devices rather than encourage him to share in theirs and, if cornered, would simply drift away and leave Larry mid-sentence.

If someone in Larry’s younger years had actually mentioned to him that he talked too much or told him once in a while to shut the fuck up, then Larry might have learned to moderate his discourse and embrace the accepted to-and-fro of conversation. But surprisingly, considering the innate cruelty of children, no one ever did, and Larry’s stunted personal skills were such that he never even realised there was a problem. The clues, however, were always there: he stopped being invited to parties, never got a second date with a girl and eventually no dates at all. He went to the Senior Prom with his mother and, for a person who supposedly liked the company of others, found himself spending an inordinate amount of time alone in his room, reading books or playing solitaire.

Larry’s attributes, however, if not fitting him well for society at large were eminently suitable for a career in academia, where one-sided discourse was the rule and audiences captive. No one, therefore, was in the least surprised when he took a position in the history department of a well-known university after completing his doctorate. There he taught the same course – The Emergence of Modern America – for thirty-seven years, and during that time became the country’s – and therefore the world’s – leading authority on the Desert Land Act of 1877, probably the dullest piece of legislation to have ever rolled over Capitol Hill.

The intention of the act was to help settlers acquire and reclaim land in the western desert areas of the United States. On the understanding that the land was to be irrigated and brought to cultivation within three years, the government sold single tracts of 640 acres to prospective small farmers at a special price of eight hundred dollars. Although well intentioned the legislation was ill-conceived and idealistic, for there was little economic opportunity for the common man in these areas. Cattle companies, irrigation companies and speculators moved into the void, and when it became apparent that the act was benefitting special interests rather than the intended small family man there were calls for the law to be repealed. The Desert Land Act, however, remained on the statute book, a silent acknowledgement that practical men in the land of the free had every right to utilise poorly drawn laws.

While most historians shared the opinion that the act deserved no more than a footnote in American history, Larry viewed it as a representation of the American story in microcosm, and to his way of thinking – and his alone – Bill Clinton was as much a product of its passage as he was of Hope, Arkansas. There was, however, another reason for Larry’s interest in the Desert Land Act, and one he wisely kept to himself. In the same way that squirrels are lured by nuts, he was drawn to sand!

The aberrational spell was cast in California when Larry was sixteen months old. He and his parents had gone to Santa Monica for a vacation and it was here, on the beach, that Larry took his first mouthful of sand. Until the gritty nature of his bowel movements and the developing diaper rash had been recognised for what they were, Larry had been eating this new-found source of food by the handful. It gave him goose bumps, soothed his gums, and he relished its textured and salty taste. Larry’s parents naturally tried to discourage this practice, and on subsequent visits to the beach encouraged him to take an interest in sand as a building material or hiding place rather than a three-course meal. Larry’s father dug holes with him, built castles with defensive moats that filled with water when the tide came in, buried small coins and pieces of inexpensive jewellery his wife wore to the beach and then sat back while Larry went in search of lost treasure. At the time these diversions appeared to work, but Larry’s pica-esque behaviour never fully abated and in later life, when backs were turned or no one present, he continued to take the occasional pinch of sand whenever he visited a beach or made research trips to western desert areas.

Longevity of service in the department and a stream of published articles in scholarly journals secured Larry the title of professor but no real friendships, and on the occasion of his retirement only two people showed up for his send-off: the head of department who had to be there and who spent most of his time detailing the reasons why others couldn’t, and a janitor named Clive, whose job it was to clean the room after the party ended.

Though disappointed by the turnout Larry was pleased to see Clive there. He had fond memories of their conversations over the years – especially their discussions of cleaning products and Clive’s mop technique – and he’d always found the janitor a ready and interested listener. But like most people Larry talked to, that was all Clive ever was – a listener. He’d never encouraged these conversations and on occasion had locked himself in the storage room and pretended not to hear Larry’s knocks on the door: ‘Clive? Clive? You in there? Walmart’s got a new floor polish in stock and I think it’s better than the one you’re using. Clive? Clive?’ If by any chance Larry was still in the corridor when he exited the closet, Clive would simply tell Larry that he had an ear infection and couldn’t hear a damn thing. ‘No point trying to talk to me now, Professor MacCabe: I’m as deaf as a post.’

When the head of department made his own excuses and left the room – a CT scan, he explained to Larry a little too cheerfully – a shiver ran down Clive’s spine. It was now just the two of them, and it would only be a matter of time before Professor MacCabe started banging on about the Desert Land Act again. He looked at his watch.

‘The Head’s a good man, Clive. We got a good one when we got him – even though he is a mediaevalist. I don’t know whether you know this, Clive, but the mediaeval period dates from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and runs through to the fifteenth. Of course it’s subdivided into other ages – early, high and late, for instance – but not one of them has a Desert Land Act! That’s my real interest, you know, even though most people do think it’s a dry old subject.’ He waited for Clive to register the joke, which Clive had probably done a thousand times before, and when no smile was forthcoming he continued. ‘Get it, Clive? Desert? Dry? It’s an old joke but it still cracks me up. My students loved it. Humour’s always the best way to connect with people, don’t you think?’

Clive thought that he’d connect better with Professor MacCabe if the man was dead, but said nothing and instead gave a weak smile. Then a thought struck him. ‘Tell me, Professor MacCabe. Once you retire,’ which by his watch was in about three minutes, ‘will you still hold any sway in the department?’

‘None whatsoever, Clive. By tomorrow morning I’ll be a yesterday’s man. You’ll probably see me on campus from time to time, because I still have work on the Desert Land Act to do, but it’s a labour of love now – a lot like you polishing floors…’

Clive glanced at his watch and walked out of the room: the three minutes were up and tomorrow morning he’d use his mop any damn way he pleased!

Larry returned home that evening with a small box of personal belongings and set it down on the kitchen counter. ‘It was a lovely send-off, Helen,’ he told his wife, ‘and there’ll be more than one person in the department sorry to have missed it. You know how it is though – dental appointments, family emergencies, research trips – it’s like herding cats trying to get everyone in the same room these days. Clive was there though, the janitor I’ve told you about: the one who can’t stop talking and just about chews my ear off every time he sees me.’ He paused for a moment when he remembered Clive’s abrupt departure from the room, but quickly gathered himself. ‘Did I ever tell you how I got the job in the first place? How they’d been let down by their first choice of candidate and didn’t have time for another round of interviews…’

Helen, whose eyes were increasingly glassy these days, smiled at her husband and occasionally nodded, but otherwise appeared to be in another room as he described his last day at the office. ‘How does macaroni and cheese sound?’ she asked out of nowhere.

‘It sounds wonderful, dear, but just let me finish the story and then I’ll start dinner.’

Unlike her husband Helen MacCabe was as quiet as the proverbial church mouse, in many ways the complementary yin to Larry’s yang. As she attached little importance to most things in life, she consequently thought there was little point in talking about them or holding opinions of any kind for that matter, and while more than happy for Larry to talk, at no time felt it necessary to actually listen to him. Although in her own way she loved Larry, like all things in life she attached little importance to him and sometimes wondered if she’d married him simply to escape her parents. Having never expected much from life, however, Helen’s marriage to Larry had been no more disappointing than a birthday card with no money inside, but while quite happy to be with him herself she could easily understand why others went out of their way to avoid him.

Helen wasn’t academically inclined and had gone to college only to please her parents. There she’d graduated unspectacularly with a degree in Liberal Arts and then gone to work as a cashier in the bank where Larry deposited his cheques on a Friday lunchtime. A plain and unworldly soul, she’d mistaken his winks and incessant chatter about abaci, sand tables and slipsticks as acts of romantic interest and come to the conclusion that Larry was about to ask her out. When he didn’t she determined to take matters into her own hands and ask him out. By nature, however, Helen was timid, and was only able to contemplate such an act after taking two of her mother’s anti-anxiety pills, which one Friday morning she did – about an hour before Larry walked into the bank. By the time he was standing in front of her Helen was completely relaxed though yawning heavily. Straightaway she asked him to the bank’s annual picnic and Larry readily accepted. With the aid of another cashier he then escorted her to the staff lounge where she spent the rest of the afternoon asleep on the floor.

It turned out that Larry and Helen had a lot in common: he’d never had a girlfriend and she’d never had a boyfriend. To make up for lost time they decided to marry in what most people would have considered haste, and two years later – and a year after they’d mastered the act of sex – Helen gave birth to twins: Rutherford and Grover – the Christian names of Larry’s two favourite presidents. As Helen thought names were unimportant she was happy for Larry to decide them, and only smiled when he told her they now had a balanced ticket. (Rutherford Hayes was a Republican and Grover Cleveland a Democrat, he would have explained to her if she’d thought it important enough to ask.)

Although fully intending to be present at the birth of his children, Larry had inadvertently embroiled himself in a conversation with one of the hospital’s elevator attendants and missed the actual delivery. It appeared to Larry that the attendant had been more than interested to learn that the first elevator had been built by Archimedes in 236BC, and encouraged by the man’s reaction he’d gone on to explain the differences between various types of hoist mechanisms. ‘You see there’s a traction elevator with its worm gears, Gary – it is okay if I call you Gary, isn’t it – okay then, so where were we? Worm gears, that’s right…’ It was only after he’d got to describing the self-ascending climbing elevator with its own propulsion system that he remembered his actual reason for being in the hospital: his wife was doing a bit of propelling herself!

Two years after Larry retired Helen died. She rose from bed one morning and immediately felt strange: light-headed and slightly nauseous. She returned to bed and stayed there for three days, refusing to see a doctor. Her malaise, she told Larry, was too vague to be of any importance and she fully expected to be back on her feet by the end of the week. On the fourth morning Larry brought her coffee and two slices of toast and placed the tray on the bedside table. He then ran errands for the next three hours, errands that would have taken another person only thirty minutes. Larry’s problem, however, was that he never stopped talk… (His talking was endless.)

Larry returned to the house just before midday and sat down at the end of his wife’s bed. He talked to Helen for two hours, telling her about the operation of the Desert Land Act in California and Nevada and how, when the act had been drawn up, it had addressed surface water and agricultural uses only and never given a second thought to ground water or the fact that water might be used for recreational purposes. He then looked at his watch and told her he’d leave her to get some rest. He kissed her gently on the forehead and only then did it dawn on him that something was wrong: his wife was cold as a block of ice. He then noticed the untouched coffee and toast.

The subsequent autopsy revealed nothing untoward, and the coroner ruled that Helen’s death had been natural. He noted, however, that her liver had been at a more advanced stage of deterioration than would normally have been expected of a woman her age, and also expressed dismay that a well-educated man like Professor MacCabe had conducted a conversation with a corpse for two hours. Those who knew Larry, however, showed no such surprise and at least one thought he should have been charged with manslaughter for having talked his wife to death.

Larry and Helen had been married for thirty-one years when she died and her departure hit him hard. He’d loved Helen and instinctively known that she too had loved him. He could never remember a time when she’d actually told him this, but he’d known. Larry had always known. For how could a wife of thirty-one years not love her husband? And how could a mother of estranged children not love their estranged father? And, come to think of it, where the hell were Rutherford and Grover these days? Larry had no idea if they were alive or dead.

The twins were in fact alive, but it was debatable if they were well. Rutherford and Grover had grown up in a house full of their father’s words and eventually been overpowered by them. When they were small and the words in the house only ankle deep, the boys had paddled and splashed in them untroubled, but as they’d grown older and the words from their father’s mouth continued to fall, they became anxious. By the time they were seven the level of words in the house had reached their knees, by twelve their waists and by fifteen their chests. Increasingly the boys struggled to wade through their father’s outflows and by their eighteenth birthdays, fearing they would drown, left home for college and decided never to return. There they became reclusive and some would say strange. They avoided people, made no friends and rarely spoke to each other. They graduated at the top of their respective classes, shook hands at the campus gates and parted company forever, each determined to pursue a life as free from words as possible. Rutherford became a Trappist monk in rural Oregon, and Grover went to live among the Kodiak bears in Alaska.

‘Not even a postcard,’ Larry ruminated as he stared at a photograph of Helen and the two boys. And then he started to cry, big blobs of tears that splashed on the protective glass. ‘Who am I going to talk to now, Helen?’ he groaned. ‘There’ll never be another person like you.’

Despite the fact that Helen had remained mute most evenings, Larry had always considered his wife the perfect conversationalist. She’d sit quietly in her chair as he recounted his day – out of interest for what he was saying, he’d always supposed – sipping from, and occasionally refilling, a tumbler of what Larry had assumed was iced water. (That Helen had been largely comatose and living on another planet during these conversations only dawned on Larry after he discovered a slew of empty vodka bottles in the back garden, buried close to the rhododendrons.)

For the first time in his life Larry felt completely alone. The silence of the house deafened him, his own company threatened him and he feared he would never adapt to life as a single person. He needed someone to talk to, someone to listen to him and affirm his existence. And as his sex drive had crashed years ago this companion would in all likelihood be a man; the last thing he wanted was to get involved with a woman still revved up and ready to go.

This thought led him to his next-door neighbour, a retired plastic surgeon called Dr Young and one of the few people Larry actually disliked. In his opinion Dr Young had a poor set of ethics for a doctor and an even worse set of morals for a man, trawling as he did through the divorce and death notices in the town’s newspaper for the names of recent widows and divorcees he’d previously encountered in a professional capacity. ‘I built these women,’ he’d once bragged to Larry. ‘And I know exactly what I’m going to find once I get their damned clothes off and into their pants. It’s payback time, MacCabe. Know what I mean?’ A lascivious grin had then crossed his face and a small piece of tongue poked through his teeth. His manner had made Larry squirm, and on the occasions he’d later seen Dr Young with a woman on his arm, he was unable to escape the thought that the women looked more like the victims of a fire than the beneficiaries of a doctor’s