of forlorn dogs occupied cages, but Milo walked directly to the middle of the center row in the kennel and said, “This one.”
She was a fifty-pound two-year-old Australian shepherd mix with a shaggy black-and-white coat, one eye blue and the other gray. She had no collie in her, but Milo named her Lassie.
Penny and I loved her the moment we saw her. Somewhere a gerbil and a turtle would remain in need of a home.
In the next three years, we never heard a single bark from the dog. We wondered whether our Lassie, following the example of the original, would at last bark if Milo fell down an abandoned well or became trapped in a burning barn, or whether she would instead try to alert us to our boy’s circumstances by employing urgent pantomime.
Until Milo was six and Lassie was five, our lives were not only free of calamity but also without much inconvenience. Our fortunes changed with the publication of my sixth novel, One O’Clock Jump.
My first five had been bestsellers. Way to go, Angel Ralph.
Penny Boom, of course, is the Penny Boom, the acclaimed writer and illustrator of children’s books. They are brilliant, funny books.
More than for her dazzling beauty, more than for her quick mind, more than for her great good heart, I fell in love with her for her sense of humor. If she ever lost her sense of humor, I would have to dump her. Then I’d kill myself because I couldn’t live without her.
The name on her birth certificate is Brunhild, which means someone who is armored for the fight. By the time she was five, she insisted on being called Penny.
At the start of World War Waxx, as we came to call it, Penny and Milo and Lassie and I lived in a fine stone-and-stucco house, under the benediction of graceful phoenix palms, in Southern California. We didn’t have an ocean view, but didn’t need one, for we were focused on one another and on our books.
Because we’d seen our share of Batman movies, we knew that Evil with a capital E stalked the world, but we never expected that it would suddenly, intently turn its attention to our happy household or that this evil would be drawn to us by a book I had written.
Having done a twenty-city tour for each of my previous novels, I persuaded my publisher to spare me that ordeal for One O’Clock Jump.
Consequently, on publication day, a Tuesday in early November, I got up at three o’clock in the morning to brew a pot of coffee and to repair to my first-floor study. Unshaven, in pajamas, I undertook a series of thirty radio interviews, conducted by telephone, between 4:00 and 9:30 A.M., which began with morning shows on the East Coast.
Radio hosts, both talk-jocks and traditional tune-spinners, do better interviews than TV types. Rare is the TV interviewer who has read your book, but eight of ten radio hosts will have read it.
Radio folks are brighter and funnier, too—and often quite humble. I don’t know why this last should be true, except perhaps the greater fame of facial recognition, which comes with regular television exposure, encourages pridefulness that ripens into arrogance.
After five hours on radio, I felt as though I might vomit if I heard myself say again the words One O’Clock Jump. I could see the day coming when, if I was required to do much publicity for a new book, I would write it but not allow its publication until I died.
If you have never been in the public eye, flogging your work like a carnival barker pitching a freak show to the crowd, this publish-only-after-death pledge may seem extreme. But protracted self-promotion drains something essential from the soul, and after one of these sessions, you need weeks to recover and to decide that one day it might be all right to like yourself again.
The danger in writing but not publishing was that my agent, Hudson “Hud” Jacklight, receiving no commissions, would wait only until three unpublished works had been completed before having me killed to free up the manuscripts for marketing.
And if I knew Hud as well as I thought I did, he would not arrange for a clean shot to the back of the head. He would want me to be tortured and dismembered in such a flamboyant fashion that he could make a rich deal for one of his true-crime clients to write a book about my murder.
If no publisher would pay a suitably immense advance for a book about an unsolved killing, Hud would have someone framed for it. Most likely Penny, Milo, and Lassie.
Anyway, after the thirtieth interview, I rose from my office chair and, reeling in self-disgust, made my way to the kitchen. My intention was to eat such an unhealthy breakfast that my guilt over the cholesterol content would distract me from the embarrassment of all the self-promotion.
Dependable Penny had delayed her breakfast so she could eat with me and hear all of the incredibly witty things I wished I had said in those thirty interviews. In contrast to my tousled hair, unshaven face, and badly rumpled pajamas, she wore a crisp white blouse and lemon-yellow slacks, and as usual her skin glowed as though it were translucent and she were lit from inside.
As I entered the room, she was serving blueberry pancakes, and I said, “You look scrumptious. I could pour maple syrup on you and eat you alive.”
“Cannibalism,” Milo warned me, “is a crime.”
“It’s not a worldwide crime,” I told him. “Some places it’s a culinary preference.”
“It’s a crime,” he insisted.
Between his fifth and sixth birthdays, Milo had decided on a career in law enforcement. He said that too many people were lawless and that the world was run by thugs. He was going to grow up and do something about it.
Lots of kids want to be policemen. Milo intended to become the director of the FBI and the secretary of defense, so that he would be empowered to dispense justice to evildoers both at home and abroad.
Here on the brink of World War Waxx, Milo perched on a dinette chair, elevated by a thick foam pillow because he was diminutive for his age. Blue block letters on his white T-shirt spelled COURAGE.
Later, the word on his chest would seem like an omen.
Having finished his breakfast long ago, my bright-eyed son was nursing a glass of chocolate milk and reading a comic book. He could read at college level, though his interests were not those of either a six-year-old or a frat boy.
“What trash is this?” I asked, picking up the comic.
“Dostoyevsky,” he said.
Frowning at the cover illustration, I wondered, “How can they condense Crime and Punishment into a comic book?”
Penny said, “It comes as a boxed set of thirty-six double-thick issues. He’s on number seven.”
Returning the comic to Milo, I said, “Maybe the question should be—why would they condense Crime and Punishment into a comic book?”
“Raskolnikov,” Milo solemnly informed me, tapping a page of the illustrated classic with one finger, “is a totally confused guy.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
I sat at the table, picked up a squeeze bottle of liquid butter, and hosed my pancakes.
“Trying to
