"You could do that in a summer if you found a hook to hang your hat on and then stuck to it," he'd told Dykstra in a letter. (They hadn't progressed to using the phone and the fax at that point.) "And it would be twice as much as you'd make teaching classes in the June and August sessions down there at Mangrove U. If you're going to try it, my friend, now is the time--before you find yourself with a wife and two-point-five children." There had been no potential wife on the horizon (nor was there now), but Dykstra had taken Jack's point; rolling the dice did not get easier as one grew older. And a wife and kids weren't the only responsibilities one took on as time slipped quietly by. There was always the lure of the credit cards, for instance. Credit cards put barnacles on your hull and slowed you down. Credit cards were agents of the norm and worked in favor of the sure thing. When the summer-teaching contract came in January of '94, he had returned it unsigned to the department head with a brief explanatory note: I thought this summer I'd try to write a novel instead. Eddie Wasserman's reply had been friendly but firm: That's fine, Johnny, but I can't guarantee the position will be there next summer. The man in the chair always gets right of first refusal. Dykstra had considered this, but only briefly; by then he had an idea. Better still, he had a character: The Dog, literary father of Jaguars and houses on Macintosh Road, was waiting to be born, and God bless the Dog's homicidal heart. Do you know what that was?
