As she rides by

by myself for a change? Why not indeed, I thought after she rang off. Maybe I’d check out what was playing at the local Pussycat this week, that’d be all sorts of fun. Then there was go-carting—gee, I hadn’t done that for a coon’s age. I wound up by starting a terrific book by Dick Francis, Proof, which was all about watered-down Scotch whisky and Yugoslavian red wine pretending to be French. I found out that the word proof, when relating to the alcoholic content of booze, means that if you mix a few drops half and half with gunpowder, then light it, and it burns with a blue flame, you have 100 percent proof said booze is at least 50 percent alcohol. I thought this so interesting I immediately went over to Jim’s to tell him about it, then I told Dave, at Dave’s, then I told a fat guy with a cast on one leg who was on the next stool to me at the Four Aces.
    “No shit?” the fat guy said. “And if you mix much more than a few drops half and half, you get proof of something else—Look, ma, no face.”
    Sunday we went for a drive. Me and King, I mean, not me and the fat guy, or me and E.L. Shirley, or me, the fat guy, King, and E.L. Shirley, just one man and his dog.
    Near the turnoff for the Burbank airport there is a short street called Domingo. In the last house on the left on Domingo dwelt my friend Wade, his brother Willy, his sister-in-law Cissy, a black widow spider called Marfa, and any number of cats, dogs, pythons, and other house pets. Wade ran a photo service out of the garage. Willy invented seemingly useless gadgets and games and puzzles and what-have-you, from which he made sizable sums in royalties. It was he who invented the toothpaste tube with a cap on both ends, which was marketed throughout California as “The Marriage Saver,” although some might quibble that it would take more than an extra toothpaste cap to save a Californian marriage in these footloose times.
    His “ Tower of Benares ,” the adult model of which took 58 billion years to do (not million, I had it wrong before) if you didn’t make a silly mistake, was still, after ten years, a steady seller in novelty shops. Cissy did astrological charts, read palms, wove, Taroted, healed, natural child-birthed, took care of the menagerie, and sculpted in glass. A run-of-the-mill, normal, humdrum California household, in other words, complete with Harley-Davidson in the drive and pot plantation out back near the mice cage (for the python).
    All of the above but one were home that Sunday morning—Wade’s skinny frame in the hammock out front, Cissy’s more than ample one in the kitchen, Willy out back unenthusiastically weeding the veggie garden. At my arrival, with a superhuman effort, Wade raised himself a good three inches out of the hammock, looked blearily in my direction, said, “Hey, man,” then sank down again. Cissy waved at me through the open kitchen window, called out, “Hey, stranger, you’re just in time. I just took my spinach muffins out of the oven,” then bustled out to be introduced to and greatly fuss over King. Willy joined us a moment later, his full black beard glistening with perspiration. Aside from the beaver, all he was wearing was a tatty-looking loincloth.
    “Ah, drat!” he said, fooling nobody at all. “Wouldn’t you know. Just when I was really getting into it, just when I was really warming up, what happens? Along comes some palooka to distract me.”
    “You hope,” Cissy said.
    “And not in vain,” I said. “Prof, I got a problem. Can we perhaps retire to some shady nook so I can fill you in while the muffins are cooling?”
    “Sho’ ‘nuf,” he said amiably. “Yonder is the very nook we seek.”
    A moment later we were stretched out in two faded deck chairs under the spreading avocado tree, right next to a row of somewhat scraggly-looking runner beans. “Four cinemas,” I told him, “is the problem.”
    “Why?”
    I told him why. He looked grim, then reached down and gave King, who was lying at his feet, panting, a good scratch where dogs like to be scratched most, which is almost anywhere. I knew he was thinking of one of his dogs, Susha, a beautiful Golden Labrador some creep had clubbed to death before breaking into Wade’s garage a while back. The creep was duly dealt with most satisfactorily, I may say, by a posse of avengers led by none other than Yours Truly. “So where’s Rags?” I said then, referring to his other mutt, a huge and ancient sheepdog.
    “At