David by Ray Robertson Page A

Fair or believing that they’re going to heaven. Dogs are born Buddhists.
    As soon as Henry sees George and me shake hands, he’s wagging hard and moving in, waiting for his new friend to give him the rubs between the ears that common greeting courtesy demands, but I tell him, “Lie down, Henry, get your bone and lie down.” Puzzled, he pauses, then does what he’s told.
    â€œHe’s a good dog,” George says without looking at him, the same thing he says every time he arrives, and begins to unbutton his overcoat on the way to the kitchen. No former slave keeps a dog. None but me. I keep Henry away from George when he visits, and George acts like it’s perfectlynormal to allow a wild animal that’s been known to hunt down our ancestors to live in one’s home.
    George settles his bulk around his chair while I pour out our first drink. I already opened the bottle to help pass the time, but my glass is as clean as his. The best part of drinking is getting drunk; or, if drinking with another, getting drunk together. Drunkenness itself is never as intoxicating as slowly sipping sobriety behind, everything not as it should be gradually dissolving into everything it should, body and soul both exulting with every additional swallow in the inevitable libation liberation.
    â€œYou look good,” George says, watching me pour his drink. This is the second thing he always says.
    â€œYou don’t look too bad yourself,” I answer. “Considering what you’ve got to work with, I mean.”
    George laughs, rubs his fat stomach like Henry wished he’d rubbed his. “Two weeks ago Mary made me go see the doctor on account of how I was a little short of breath whenever I’d climb the stairs at home and how the joints in my knees were aching a little. I told her it was nothing to worry about, I felt just fine otherwise, but she made me go anyway, that’s Mary.” George laughs harder now, pats his stomach even more affectionately. “Five dollars later, the doctor said the only thing I was suffering from was too much good living. I said to Mary when I got home, ‘He should have given me five dollars, I could have told him that.’”
    George laughs so loud this time, Henry looks up from his bone, wags his worship at the joyful noise coming from the kitchen. I hand George his whiskey.
    George wears every hard-earned badge of well-deserved worldly success there is: a hand-cut, three-piece suit; always-shining shoes, a different pair for every day of the week; a gold pocket watch he’ll one day hand down to one of his two sons; and a bulging, nearly perfectly round stomach that serves notonly as a convenient resting place for his folded hands but also as an emblem of everything that his life—and the lives of his wife and their five children—has come to exemplify: accomplishment, satiation, pride. Skinny folks are poor folks are slaves. George, and George’s children, will never be poor again.
    We sit, sip. The first glass of whiskey is always for tasting, especially when it’s whiskey as good as this; after that, alcohol’s sundry other pleasures tend to elbow appreciation to the back of the line. We listen to the trees outside creak in the cold; to the wood in the fireplace crackle its warm, dry heat. It’s good to grow up poor together. To know that the wall that separates you from the freezing wind is as arbitrary as it is necessary. To know it and not have to say it.
    â€œHow’s business?” George says.
    Business is Sophia’s, of course, but since Sophia’s is an illegal business, whenever George and I talk, it’s just called business .
    â€œGood, good. Not bad. You?”
    And, as usual, George proceeds to tell me all about all of the expansion they’re considering at the factory and all of the new products they’re hoping to develop and all of the new markets in Michigan and Ohio and as far