TWO THICK-ARMED men in tight T-shirts pulled into my driveway with an array of supplies and wire-burying tools. Neither would step out of the pickup when the big reddish-brown dog bounded up to greet them. My friendly Cormac, a tail-swishing 75-pounder, standing down a 400-pound pair of men.

"Cormac! Leave the fellows alone. They don't love you the way I do," I said. My voice wasn't loud enough to be heard over the rumble coming from the hole in the truck's m.u.f.fler. Neither did my smile get to them. They were stone-faced, frowning, and not about to step out of their truck until I did something with Cormac. The driver switched off the engine.

"Don't worry, men," I told them.

They didn't budge.

"I'll take him inside the house," I offered.

"You want this wire buried in the dirt, you'll do that," the driver said. It seemed odd to me that these men who installed underground dog fences would be afraid of dogs. But I guess it wasn't in their job description to deal with dogs, only to bury wire.

Cormac headed for the front door, every few steps looking over his shoulder toward the men still in the truck. I let him cross the threshold then closed the door. I walked back outside to discuss the work with the guys, each now taking a small machine trencher from the bed of the truck. I turned back to look at the house. Cormac had gone into my son's bedroom and straight to the window there. He found the blinds raised and the curtains drawn back. He took his post, and fixed us in his stare the way a bank security guard watches a man with sungla.s.ses and a ball cap third in line for the teller window.

I introduced myself. The driver, John, was the leader. I shook hands with both men, and showed them the layout of my two acres, told them I wanted to be sure the wire was set deeply enough that it didn't migrate upward into the blade of my lawn mower. "We know 'bout that," said John.

"Yes," I said. "I imagine you do." I told them I was grateful they'd responded so quickly to my call. Again John spoke. "We go where we sent. And we ain't gettin' nothin' done talkin'." Without so much as a word pa.s.sing between them, the two men fell in tandem to their work, each starting the engine on his trencher and tilting the spinning blade into the soil of my yard. Dirt spewed as they cut the narrow slit, going off in opposite directions from a single starting point. Their work was precise, their movements fluid and graceful, and they spoke not a word.

They'd not covered twenty yards each when Cormac came out the garage doors. I'd forgot the downstairs door was open into the garage, and the garage doors were open. This time the canine confrontation went differently-for two reasons, I think: First: The men were working.

When a man gets going with his work, gets in the groove, not much can keep him from his appointed rounds. The task is not about excavating a trench of a certain length. It's about putting one foot in front of the other, hands sure and deft on the machine, and then a ditch happens.

This time Cormac did not faze these men. Maybe not even lightning splitting the heavens would have disturbed their trenching. I once watched a man dig a ditch in the rain of a thunderstorm and every time the sky burst with lightning and thunder shook the trees, he sped up. A trenching machine could not have dug a hundred feet any faster.

Second: Cormac looked goofy and sounded silly with my son's football jammed crossways in his mouth, open so wide it looked as though his jaw had come loose at the hinge. His eyes bulged and he was trying to talk around the football. Drew would love to see this, I thought.

The men were now compelled to look at the dog standing a few feet away from them. They let their machines come to a quiet idle. Cormac stopped still, not approaching them any closer, as if respectful of their work. This time the mens' eyes conveyed not caution or fear, but a kind of incredulity at the mumbling dog.

Cormac's articulations, shall we say, have two distinctly different voices. The first one he accomplishes with something in his mouth. Cormac's second voice is a kind of purr he uses when he's really laid back, like just waking up in the morning, a language I think he learned from our cat, Smokey. He will sit and look up at me as I'm putting on my socks, and with each exhale he goes, "awwwrrrrhhh." Of course, I echo his sound, but only when we've got the room to ourselves. Our family hasn't yet witnessed or overheard our unusual dialogue.

The men surveyed the spectacle before them, looked at each other, and both grinned and shook their heads. Cormac's football and humming had completely hooked them. The bigger man, John's helper, laughed aloud. "Look there," he said. "Ain't that dog a sight?"

"Cormac, put down the football! That's not yours," I said. He dropped his head, got a case of sad eyes, but kept his clamp on the pigskin. "Dylan's gonna tie your ears together." I put my fists on my hips and cooked up my best fake scowl. "Cormac!"

"Hey, man. Why you wanna call a good dog like him somethin' nasty like Floormat?" John rested, using his trencher handle like a walking cane. He caught his breath behind a laugh. Still flashing a good smile he said, "You oughta call him King, or somethin'. Floormat ain't a name for a dog."

"No," I said, catching the smile. "Not floormat. His name is Cormac. C-O-R-M-A-C."

And Cormac sounds phonetically close to cognac. When I would later be on the trail of my lost dog, and a veterinary a.s.sistant would tell me they'd had a Golden Retriever in their clinic whose name was Cognac, I believed that whoever had brought him there had read the name Cormac off his tag. I knew also my name and contact information on the same tag had been ignored.

"Cormac, you say?" John asked. "What kinda name is that?"

"The name of a king in old Ireland," I answered.

"Why don't you jus' call him King? Be easier, wouldn't it?"

"I expect it would," I said. I thought of Diana's entreaty to drop the talk of Irish kings. It seemed unavoidable. "But he likes his name. You hear him talking, don't you? He told me himself he likes to be called Cormac." I could not have known this talking thing I kidded about would one day help me ID him, and help the negotiations to get him home.

John just shook his head. "Come on, man," he said to his partner. "We don't get to diggin' my truck payment be callin' me Nate the Late."

The wire was laid in less than two hours. I thanked the men, who told me the trainer would be along soon after they left. "We supposed to call quick as we hit the driveway. He be right along with the bill." John bent to rub Cormac's head. "You just take good care of old King here," he said. "He a good dog."

I called Cormac away from his inspection of the newly turned earth lining the edge of our yard. I lay down on the warm gra.s.s. Closed my eyes against the morning sun. Cormac came to stand right above me. He stood still, his handsome head poised above me. He looked down at me for a long minute. Then he shook his head, his ears and lips flapping, and walked away like he had business and couldn't lollygag around with me. Already taking over security. I was so proud of him.

Turns out, he was on his way to say good morning to Bailey, the neighbor Golden. I like to think our neighbor Janet so loved our Cormac that when her c.o.c.ker Spaniel died of old age, her first thought for a new pet was a Golden.

The trainer soon showed up and went right to work putting little white flags into the ground every few feet along the trench around the entire perimeter of our property. He installed the transmitter on the wall of the barn. I was beginning to think I'd have to learn on my own how to train Cormac, when he came walking toward me with a green collar that had a receiver attached to it about the size of a box of matches.

"My name's Ken," he said. "You'll want to listen up here while I tell you how to do this." He instructed me matter-of-factly to walk my dog along the flagged perimeter, but away from the shock zone that extended five feet on either side of the wire. "A smart dog," Ken said, "is gonna get it with only two, not more than three 'corrections.' He'll hear that little beep and bounce away." Ken grinned for the first time.

"And what about our morning walks down Moseley Road?" I asked. "Do I take off his collar and lead him across the wire buried under the driveway?"

"Oh, no. You can't do that," Ken said abruptly. "That would just confuse him. You'll have to load him into your car without the collar and haul him to the end of the drive. That way he thinks the only way across is in a vehicle." It sounded bothersome, but it made sense. That's the way we'd do it.

Ken had me snap a leash on Cormac and walk him near the flags but outside the shock zone, now activated. He told me to walk the entire line slowly. "Should I let him get a correction?" I asked, frowning.

"No. You never lead him into the shock zone," Ken said. "Never call him into the shock zone."

"I'd never do that," I said.

"Some people are stupid," Ken said, looking away. He told me to take the leash off Cormac. "The dog's curious. He'll check it out, and learn his first lesson. It'll take more than once, probably."

Cormac, brilliant animal that he is, got it with one zap. Afterwards, he refused to go within twenty-five feet of those angry white flags, though he could not figure out why Bailey could wander around the flags with impunity.

TEN.

IT WAS A twenty-minute walk from my house to the round house where the idea for my new book was conceived. I put my laptop in the leather and canvas bag, slung the strap over my shoulder, and took my cap from one of the pegs on the old hat rack near the front door. From one of its hooks, I took down Cormac's leash.

I glimpsed my image in the hall mirror. Odd, I thought, I don't look like a man who is almost finished with a novel. I looked the same as I did yesterday. I had believed for decades that book writers breathe rarefied air so laced with the bearded sorcerer's most powerful and sparkliest dust that they become transubstantiated into different beings. I really thought sometimes I had opened a bookstore for proximity to the magic. But the mirror revealed no change. At least I had not gone invisible there like a vampire. These last four months, I'd been so totally absorbed in writing the book that on some days I'd behaved like a creature in a scary movie.

Like yesterday.

Diana had walked into my study. I didn't acknowledge she was there because I was struggling at that moment to fix a transition in the story. Every sentence I wrote was clunky and awkward. "Still working on the ending?" she asked. I looked at the clock on the wall opposite my desk.

"Try an hour on the same paragraph," I said, my eyes on the words on the screen. I kept my fingers on the keyboard, and didn't look at Diana, hoping she'd cut short her visit.

"Sometimes," she said, "when you get stuck it's best to walk away and come back with fresh eyes." She had stepped over beside me, laying her hand on my shoulder. "Maybe you'd like to put down the writing for an evening of dinner and a movie with the boys and me."

I shrugged my shoulder as if to dislodge her hand.

"You know," Diana said, moving to the corner of my desk. I looked up at her. "We've given you about all the s.p.a.ce you could ask for since before Thanksgiving. You've hardly joined us at all for anything away from the house. One night wouldn't-"

"I've got to get this problem worked out now," I said. "If I take an interruption, I might lose the little bit of progress I've made."

"An interruption?" Diana asked, her voice tight. "You could call it a break. You could call it family time." She left me alone in my study. By the time I'd stopped sulking and was ready to apologize, to ask what movies were playing, all the voices in the house had become silent behind the shutting of the front door. I sat for a moment longer, and then noticed Cormac was not in the room with me. I went out front and called him.

It was dusk, and I waited for him to stroll into the faint light spreading onto the porch and into the yard. I didn't see him, didn't hear the jingle of tags on his collar. I called him again, louder. Still no Cormac. I felt a nudge of panic. Three days ago, I'd left him outside in the afternoon, and he'd run across the wire to go exploring. I was buried in the book, and hadn't even thought of him until I got a call from a neighbor that Cormac was at their house. Now I'd let him run off again. I yelled his name and headed down the steps. He came running full tilt around the corner.

"You scared me," I said. His look said he had wondered when I'd miss him. Priorities was a word spoken in my head. Cormac sat, his tail still, and stared up at me. I made a mental note to call the people who sold me the underground fence again. I'd phoned once to complain Cormac was charging out of the yard.

"There's a better transmitter and receiver," Ken had said. We agreed on another two hundred and fifty bucks for a system upgrade. "I guarantee no dog, and only a few elephants will cross this baby," he had said, his attempt at comedy. But I had not yet heard back from Ken.

Cormac and I were both oblivious just now to transmitters and receivers. We were headed for a walk. I had his leash in my hand and he was jumping like a mullet on a run. Every time I got his leash and for one reason or another delayed snapping it to his collar, he'd do a kind of bouncing levitation act. I swear I can't see how he's bending his legs and bunching his muscles when he does this. He gets happy for a walk and springs into the air, his body still mostly horizontal, grinning, his big tongue flopping out of his mouth. On the fourth or fifth airborne maneuver you want to say, "Jeez! It's just a walk, just like the last one we took, just like the next one we'll take." But what you really want is to find a way in your complicated human mind to let go and get some of his simple, saturated joy for yourself.

I had to wait for him to come in for a landing to clip on his leash.

"Come on, Mick, let's go put a bow on this package," I said. I wanted to work on the book's last pages at the round house of Henry Stuart. I first saw it twenty-five years ago, a strange-looking circular hut with a domed roof made of hand-poured concrete blocks. It sat in the middle of a paved parking lot situated between two rows of office buildings. Shaded by a single huge live oak with thick branches that dangled with Spanish moss, the hermit hut, as some know it, looked transported from a movie set, or a Hobbit shire.

In 1982 I became divorced and I was free to make some changes in my life. I went looking for a job that gave me more free time to write during the day. First, to help clear my head of emotional baggage, I spent six months of muscle-wringing work, barebacked under a hot sun tending the decks of barges shoved by a tugboat up and down the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway.

Then I thought about moving to New York or Los Angeles, but my daughter, Emily, was living near Fairhope, and I wouldn't miss my weekend visits with her. So, if not a writerly loft in Manhattan, then a garage apartment in Fairhope and real estate sales seemed a good next option. Opening a bookstore, at this point, was not even a twinkle in my eye.

When I'd shown up for my first real estate cla.s.s at an office complex just north of Fairhope, I was surprised to find the odd little round house squarely in the middle of the parking lot. It looked dropped there from some ancient time, seeming all the more out of place with asphalt crowding it on three sides. When I asked, a woman told me I was looking at "some kind of a house" built in the 1920s by an eccentric old man. The life story of that man, Henry James Stuart, would come to inform a book I'd write twenty-some years later.

When Cormac and I took our little hikes, I could hear Henry's voice better, his story became more accessible. Strolling with Cormac I was more receptive to Henry Stuart's ghost floating above the land. So a regular part of our schedule was long walks with Cormac to keep my mind open to the character. Two-thirds of The Poet of Tolstoy Park was stirred loose in my imagination by those walks. The best advice for writer's block, for me: "Go walk the dog." I knew I'd write imperfect fiction. But G.o.d didn't stop with a few fine examples of pine trees, and I had decided to raise up my own tree in the forest.

We went outside on the porch to greet the April morning's warmth, and struck out for the round house. I led Cormac to the Jeep to load him up for his short ride down the driveway, across the shock zone. "You know," I said to him. "This is a pain in the neck. I wonder if-hmmm?" It suddenly seemed to me that a vehicle is a vehicle and a child's red wagon qualifies as a vehicle for transporting a dog down a driveway. "Let's try this," I said. Cormac seemed game.

I went to the garage and got the boys' wagon. The wooden side rails seemed perfect, would give the d.o.g.g.i.ns a more secure ride. I pulled the wagon by its handle onto the driveway, and called for Cormac to get aboard. I bent over at the front, snapped my fingers inside the wagon. He started to get excited, picked up a piece of pine straw and vocalized his enthusiasm and curiosity and confusion. His tail swung back and forth with such energy that it would have raised a welt if it had struck a leg. Then it dawned on me. When loading him in the Jeep, I always said the same thing to him: "Get in the Jeep."

So I snapped my fingers over the wagon and said, "Cormac, get in the Jeep." He jumped right in, and took a seat, his tail hanging off the back of the wagon like a rudder moving side to side. We must have looked perfectly ridiculous. The drivers in both cars that pa.s.sed as we rolled down the driveway broke into wide grins when they saw us, a man tugging a wagon load of reddish-brown dog. I didn't care. And we crossed the fence that way each morning that we walked until we moved to another house years later.

Once at the street, I called Cormac from the wagon and we continued our hike to the round house. We dawdled, stopping two or three times for Cormac to sniff out some mysterious pa.s.sage written on a bush or in the gra.s.s, which he occasionally snacked on after a brief reading.

"There have been some pa.s.sages by McCarthy or Marquez that have made me feel the same way, Mickins," I said at one such stop. I could have added other names of other writers who wrote stuff good enough to chow down on, but I don't think Cormac would have recognized them. Ah, so much good writing, so little time. The great writers I love to read were an influence on my writing, but they also kept me from trying my own hand at fiction. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy. I stood in stunned awe of their work. What was the point? If I couldn't write that well, why spend the ink?

When we got to the round house, Cormac yipped and wiggled. He looked at the door, then back at me, then back at the door. I thought there might be some animal inside, a mouse, a stray cat. I thought of a snake, like the one I'd written into a scene in the book. I opened the narrow double-doors slowly, Cormac nudging at my calves. There were no visitors inside. At least that I could see. As my dog pushed past me into the circular room I wondered, for the twenty-third time, if Henry might be on the premises, and Cormac knew it. He looked around, sniffed the chair I always chose at the table, then struck his lizard-on-a-rock pose, stretching out flat as a rug on the floor. Before I could get my laptop out of the bag and powered-up, the novel file opened, Cormac's eyes were closed. He'd made himself at home in Henry's place.

Somehow in that mysterious place Henry seemed nearer. He'd called his land Tolstoy Park, and I talked myself into believing I could also feel Tolstoy there in the background.

I sat down at a table near a window. I slipped off my shoes and stretched my toes over to scratch Cormac's back. He immediately rolled onto his side and kicked his legs up. He wanted a belly rub. Somebody once told me that a dog turns over onto its back to indicate submission. And if they're signaling a human, they will either curl their tail to cover their privates, or, if they trust you they won't bother to cover up. Cormac's tail was relaxed. He hadn't given up on me.

I opened my notes file, scrolled down to find the list of people whose names I'd put into the acknowledgements section at the front of the book. I enjoyed constructing a brief narrative that told of each person's help to me as I wrote The Poet of Tolstoy Park. When I finished, I'd added a page and a half to my ma.n.u.script. I was about to save and close the file, when Cormac gave a big sigh and turned over on his side, so completely at rest that I thought about joining him on the cool, shiny concrete floor of the round house. I watched his chest and belly rise and fall, watched his eyebrows twitch following the dream show in his head, and put my fingers back on the keyboard and wrote: "And good old Cormac, my dog, lay so patiently near me as I wrote the book reminding me, like Kerouac's cat, there is, finally, nothing so great about human endeavor or failings that should disturb our rest."

It is interesting to me, this touch of irony: that Cormac himself inspired the counter maxim to his paragraph in my book's acknowledgements. For when I lost my good dog Cormac, oh, how that failing disturbed my rest, and, curiously enough while walking in the bookwriter's shoes.

ELEVEN.

FIRST, THE LOUD whump startled me. Second, it surprised me to discover its source.

The house was empty except for me. Diana had gone to work, and the boys were off to school. I hadn't noticed the gathering dark in the clouds to the west. There was a low sonorous roll of distant thunder. I went to the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The wind rose, whipping the tall pines in my front yard.

There was the sound again. A thud, like something striking a wall. It was coming from inside. I went back into the house. The big thump came again. I went down the hall, into the kitchen. Then I saw Cormac, outside on the back porch, heaving himself against the French door. He stood on his hind legs to reach as high as he possibly could. I let him inside and, whining, he went around and around my legs. I sat down at the dining room table and patted my knees. Cormac came to lie on the floor, looking at me with his face between his paws. When the thunder boomed again, he jumped up and looked over his shoulder, then sat on his haunches between my knees. I looked at him, then sat on the floor and petted him, rubbing his head and down his back, until his breathing slowed to a normal rhythm.

I could not imagine what had changed for the d.o.g.g.i.ns. Last week he had paid no mind to rumbling in the heavens; today the sound of thunder terrified him. It would come to pa.s.s that even the sound of rain would give him the jitters-Pavlov's bell and all that. Cormac had, on some esoteric cue, reached back into his canine ancestry, back to a cave and the sound of a giant boulder rolling down a hill, to one of his forefathers smushed by the big rock, broken like the skull of a saber-tooth under the maul of one of the two-leggeds. The imprint on the gene coding was indelible.

Cormac, when he looks for a place to hide because thunder shakes the sky, would crawl into my lap if he'd still fit there. I wondered what that great trembling sound in the heavens represented to him and his kin. If an animal's fear response is triggered by an adversary, what kind of Thing from the Mind of Stephen King could be romping around up there, hidden in those roiling black clouds? And, with this first experience, I just couldn't fathom what had flipped the switch in his head.

Of course, when I told Drew about Cormac's reaction to thunder, he said he doubted it was something new, that I'd only just noticed it.

"Are you suggesting I'm not paying attention to my dog?" I asked.

"No," Drew said. "Anyway, it's kind of a moot point to ponder," he said.

And he was right. There was only the question of what to do about it. I phoned Belle, and asked her what could be done for Cormac. "Can he be trained to get over his fear of thunder?" I asked. She said no, and we talked about the condition, not uncommon among dogs. "I'm sorry, Sonny," she said, "I'm afraid it's Cormac's cross to bear, and something of a thorn in your side."

"Is it that biblical?" I had to smile. "Is there no salvation here?"

"Well, if there's such a thing as situational salvation," she replied, "then the answer is yes. There is relief for Cormac and for you." I stood on tiptoes, waiting for her to bring down the tablet from the mount. I almost laughed when Belle offered to write a prescription for "doggy downers." She told me that many pet owners keep a supply on hand.

I was stunned, and told her so. I told her there was no way I was going to turn Cormac into some kind of junkie. She laughed and said such would not become the case. I told her about my doctor asking me to get on medicine to bring my cholesterol down from the stratosphere, how I'd told him I'd get it down my own way, how I ate like a monk and walked two miles a day for six months, how I lost twenty pounds. I told her I wasn't sure that I was trying to bring down my cholesterol, as much as I was trying to stave off being on some pharmaceutical for the rest of my life.

"Did your plan work?" she asked.

"No," I said. "My LDL numbers actually went up after all that."

"So you're on the drugs?"

"I am."

"But you don't want to use drugs on Cormac?"

"No. There are a million thunder boomers that roll across Mobile Bay like Patton's army come to Lower Alabama," I said, and she agreed that living on the Eastern Sh.o.r.e means frequent invasions. "It seems to me," I went on, "when the twentieth, or thirty-seventh, storm occurs without harm, there should come an end to the fear."

"It doesn't work that way," the vet said. "The fear is primal and anti-intelligent."

When I watched the movie Because of Winn-Dixie, adapted from Kate DiCamillo's novel, I thought little Opal's preacher dad was surely going to give Winn-Dixie, her newfound dog, his walking papers when he freaked out and transformed into a wild beast during a thunder storm and almost wrecked their mobile home.

But they were committed to the big, rambunctious dog.

They would take care of him no matter what.

Not all dogs, of course, have the phobia. Our neighbor's Golden is completely oblivious to thunder. Bailey sits licking his paws and yawning while his friend from our side of the fence is freaking out.

I thanked Belle for her advice. I told her Cormac and I would work this out drug-free. Somehow. For one thing, I took my electric saw and cut a hole in the garage door and put a kennel crate in there in case I wasn't home when thunder came calling. I put a piece of carpet on the floor and sides of the kennel so it would be quieter and more comfortable. I thought again that we really needed that stronger electronic fence signal. But Ken had said the transmitter was on back order.