Mr. Wells rarely went by his first name, preferring the slightly more dignified Lazarus. His mother told him Lazarus meant "God has helped." When he asked his mother what Hoodoo meant, she would glare at his father and his father would laugh. Hoodoo Lazarus Wells was named after a dog.

The dog Hoodoo was an establishment in Meredith Falls. Everybody who owned a car hated him, as he would unerringly amble into the road in front of you wherever you drove. This strange ability to appear out of the ether is what might have earned Hoodoo his name, but no one really knew for sure. No one ever recalled the dog being a puppy, having teeth, or more than one eye. He was as old as dirt and seemed to be perpetually on death’s door. "That damn dog," Lazarus’s father would say, "has a hate so big that even hell can’t hold him." Hoodoo caused so many accidents as to be officially named a public nuisance, running up a fine of five dollars. Needless to say, Hoodoo never paid.

One of Lazarus’s childhood pastimes, besides the requisite baseball and fascination with cherry bombs, was to meditate on the origins of the hated animal. In church, Lazarus would imagine his namesake being alive and well (and old as hell) at the beginning of all things, staring with his one eye, bitterly, at all this newfangled existence. Pastor Mitchell said that God created beautiful things. God, the young Lazarus thought, could not take credit for Hoodoo’s gnarled frame and toothless sneer. If God didn’t make Hoodoo, no one did.

Hoodoo Lazarus wasn’t named after the dog immediately, though. At first he didn’t have a name at all. When he was born his mother wanted a biblical name, but his father hadn’t believed in God since Château-Thierry. And so, for the first two years of his life, Lazarus was just "the boy," or "that damn boy," depending on the day and the volume of his crying. It’s entirely possible that he could have gone nameless his entire life had he not, at the age of two, lost his left eye to the corner of an antique coffee table his father had lugged out of the trash. It was at this point that he started being called Hoodoo Lazarus—first as a joke, and then on paper.

No one in Meredith Falls had ever seen a baby with an eyepatch before, and soon young Lazarus would become a local oddity on the level of the famed noseless woman of Louisville. His mother was deeply ashamed and would often put a large, floppy hat on the toddler. His father, however, found the situation hilarious. "He’s got a God damn eyepatch, Gretchen," he’d say. "I should sell tickets." Lazarus was just upset because it meant being a pirate every Halloween.

Lazarus’s childhood and adolescent life was, of course, overshadowed by the taunts of cruel peers and the stares of bewildered substitute teachers. Like most one-eyed children named after a dog named after ancient African witchcraft, he was forced to grow thick skin. It was common for him to come home from school with his good eye blackened and dried blood under his nose. Hoodoo Lazarus grew up with raw knuckles and a storm in his eye.

When the War came, Lazarus had to sit it out. He tried to enlist, but his physical didn’t work out. "Son," the doctor said, "depth perception is critical when hand grenades are involved." Lazarus would be bitter about this for the rest of his life. Even when his mind was fading, a question about the War would always bring the same answer: "They let me drive a car but I’m not fit to put a hole in a Kraut. Nazi bastards." No one was ever sure whether the last sentence referred to actual Nazis or just doctors.

It should also be noted, though, that Lazarus was not actually allowed to drive a car. It was simply that no one stopped him, which he took as consent. However, he never got behind the wheel of a car after 1946. He was driving to his fiancée’s parents’ house one afternoon when a frail, brown shape stepped gently into his sizeable blind spot.

His fiancée, Susan, would always remember hearing Lazarus burst into her parents’ house. "Susan!" he yelled in the doorway, his voice cracking and scaring her. "That God damn dog!" And then the sound of the screen door slamming and pounding, running footsteps on the porch and down the gravel driveway. She found him a ways down-road, kneeling helplessly over Hoodoo. "I didn’t see him," he said. He looked up and she saw tears on his cheek. "I didn’t see him."

After he killed the most hated animal in town, Lazarus never drove again. His father helped him bury Hoodoo in a field a few yards from where he died. When they were done the sky was darkening. "You probably did him a favor, boy," his father said, leaning on his shovel. "Animals," he said, "animals know when it’s time."

Hoodoo Lazarus Wells would see his namesake three more times after he killed him on the road in Meredith Falls.

At the age of 33, Lazarus fell off his roof. He was attempting to rig up an enormous plastic light-up Santa in order to piss off his neighbor, Reverend Perkins. They had an ongoing feud in regard to a fence that ran along both properties.

"I don’t want that thing on my house, Lazarus," Susan said gingerly.

"It’s a matter of honor, Susan."

"He’s a man of God, Lazarus."

"He’s an asshole, Susan, and this bright bastard is going to be looking in his window for the next month."

He suffered several broken bones and a good amount of internal bleeding. One night, while recovering in the hospital, he woke up to see Hoodoo sitting between his feet. His fur was dusty and mangy and he smelled like the air used to smell before highways. He smelled like grass and earth, like the field in which they buried him. Cloudy with morphine, Lazarus whispered, "Go away."

In the morning, Hoodoo was gone and Lazarus was released. It would be years until he would remember seeing the dog that night. He would always, however, know in his heart that Reverend Perkins had tried to kill him.

When he was in his fifties, Susan left Lazarus. In keeping with her Protestant upbringing, she left him a note politely listing her various grievances. Among the six pages and seventy-two bulleted crimes of H. Lazarus Wells were the following: unwarranted curmudgeonry; leaving socks on the coffee table; in October of 1960, wiping his hands on a curtain when no napkin was available; lying about wiping his hands on the curtain even though she had seen him do it; and never giving her children. It was, however, grievance number seventy-two that drove Lazarus to drink. The last bullet of the last page of Susan’s note read, simply, "Depth perception is critical when marriage is involved."

Lazarus remained drunk for several days after that, sitting in the dark and not paying attention to the TV. On the ottoman in front of him was his father’s revolver. He sat there, in his pajamas, and stared at it. After a few days of this, he reached for it. As his arm was moving, however, he smelled again that strange scent of old things—the smell of wet earth and thunderstorms and fireflies. Hoodoo was sitting beside him, his one eye looking over the armrest of his chair.

Lazarus stopped. "Go away," he whispered.

In the morning, again, Hoodoo was gone and Lazarus was sober.

Lazarus saw his namesake one more time, on the last day of his life. For a year before that, Lazarus’s age had held his mind submerged in the random chaos of memory. He sat in his wheelchair in the common room of Golden Oaks, The Old Fuck Club, staring at the floor but seeing any number of things: blowing out the candles on some unknown birthday, kissing Susan in the park on VE Day, Reverend Perkins calling him a devil-worshipping Cyclops, and on and on. On that day, the procession stopped, suddenly, in a darkening field in 1946. His father stood over him, leaning on a shovel. Lazarus was on his knees, his hands patting down a mound of earth. His cheek was wet.

H. Lazarus Wells looked up and saw Hoodoo sitting in front of him in the common room. The dog’s single eye stared deeply into his. "Go away," Lazarus whispered, and closed his eyes.