A black puppy waddled out from under the family’s shotgun pier-and-beam home one summer morning, stretching its tiny legs over piles of construction debris, ambling trough tuffs of overgrown grass and weeds. His 8 year old sadist grabbed its nape, made it squeal until he bored and flung it across the yard where it landed, yelped, and scrambled to find safety only to be picked by its nape then tossed again, eventually escaping, scurrying under the home, disappearing to the darkness until supper.
Years later, when the days were long and humid, the black German Shepherd sat under the shade of the unkempt hackberry tree behind the house, tethered by an eight-foot knotted chain that tightened the more he moved. He waited for sunset and daybreak, for meals, for his name, and the occasional pat on his head, kick to his jaw, or belly scratch.
The dog had a narrow view of the world beyond his prison. Through discarded appliances and heaps of scrap metal his captors saved for future use, he could see the broken street asphalt and tall weeds that hid the vacant trailer home across the street. He watched cars, people, and strays pass. A deep bark warned wandering cats and children who jumped the fence searching for errant baseballs or frisbees.
The food in his tray was covered with ants and his water dish, a repurposed refrigerator vegetable drawer, was mostly foamy slobber. He waited for the day to end. At night he listened to distant barks of other prisoners and returned their calls when they drew close. A window would open and the sound of his name excited him, Gunnershudup or Gunnershudafukup.
He barked louder, he loved the sound of his name, then the back door of the house opened and the screen door slapped against the door frame. A kick to his ribs or hind quarters ended the scene.
Every summer morning the boy would shake out the dog’s ant-covered food dish and add a cup of stale store brand kibble. He’d open the spigot and drag the hose to the dog’s dish, replacing the dog’s slobber with the city’s cool mineral rich hard water. The animal drank from the hose stream then licked the boy's hand. The boy caressed his wide head and mumbled words of approval, apology, and regret. He ran the dribbling water over the dog's face and washed off the dried crud around his eyes.
The boy's summer was cruel and full of surprises. He discovered his penis could provide unparalleled enjoyment quickly followed by paralyzing shame. There were days when he thought of nothing else, how to accomplish one without the other, a cost benefit analysis of time versus opportunity.
There were cold beers he and his friends took from the ice chests of family gatherings when the accordion ballads of narco-traffickers played on repeat and adults were too busy yelling at each other or too drunk to care. They smoked stolen cigarettes and marijuana out of crude tin foil pipes constructed by older boys. One evening they blew marijuana smoke through a cardboard tube secured to the dog’s muzzle by a freckled red-headed child with no neck. The fat kid held down Gunner for a few moments while the smoke worked its way into his lungs. Magic softened the dog’s jaw and muscles, bringing him down to his belly to a place where pain disappeared and the chain no longer existed. __________________________
A cat gave birth to a litter under the porch behind the boy’s home. The boy heard their collective squeals one morning in late June when the previous evening’s rain filled puddles of silty and oily water creating shallow ponds stretching to the main road, further eroding decades old asphalt, covering the carcasses of rusting lawn equipment, seeping under homes and tool sheds, slowly working past the barrier of dense clay inches below the topsoil to reach the ancient water table providing life to the regions ignorant and ungrateful inhabitants.
Through the dirty kitchen screen door he could see Gunner sitting on a wood pallet in the suffocating humidity of the dark and miserable morning. The clouds lifted in the afternoon and the sun began extracting water from everything, producing condensation on windows, suspending the odors of decomposing dog excrement, overflowing trash bins, and broken sewer lines ignored by the city.
The boy stepped out onto the deck and peaked through gaps of the deck boards to locate the crying kittens. He found six in the shallow water of a wet cardboard box by the far end of the deck amongst the boxes of trash and sun bleached yard toys. Two were motionless with their faces hidden beneath the water. He tossed their carcasses into the burn barrel behind the abandoned chicken coop at the edge of their property. The others were wiped clean and placed in a dry cardboard box with a small bowl of milk and diced hot dog wieners.
A third kitten died that evening. He tossed its carcass in the barrel where the others were decomposing. Saccades deafened the boys ears and mosquitoes swarmed his body the moment he stepped into the twilight. The dog watched the boy scamper past him toward the burn barrel then back across the porch light to the shadows of the house where other boys were smoking cigarettes. The dog lay on the wood pallet between his shelter and the hackberry tree, staying off the muddy ground and watching the orange pins of light from their cigarettes.
The next morning when the ground was dry and the previous day’s humidity dissipated, the boy brought the remaining kittens to his dog. He set the box a few feet from the semicircle plowed by the dog’s chain. The animal emerged from his dark and musty plywood home, jaunting to the perimeter of his cell, stretching his muscular neck, lifting the chain, and pointed his nose toward the box. He smelled urine and fear.
The kittens made more noise as Gunner approached, swiveling their heads about the box, their open mouths exalting high pitched squeals. The boy pushed the box closer. The kittens clamored at the sides of the box, reaching for him, crying louder. He pulled one out and cradled its tiny body with both hands, thumbing its forehead. He stepped towards Gunner, holding the squealing kitten inches from the dog’s face. The kitten hissed and dug its sharp claws into the boy’s hand. The boy dropped the kitten. Gunner snatched it off the dirt, clamped its jaw, then dropped its limp body.
The boy’s chest and abdomen tightened, his face contorted. He could hear blood pulsing past his ears. He was horrified at what he’d accomplished. The dog looked to the boy for approval, waited for a kick to his belly, a pat on its head, or a “good boy”. The boy did neither. He dumped the box on its side and the remaining kittens scampered away under the piles of scrap lumber and metal rotting in the weeds behind the dog’s hovel. The dog returned to his shade.
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The boy decided to walk the dog on an evening after independence day when northern winds temporarily blew away their humidity and the world smelled of fresh cut grass and watermelon. He attempted to imitate the people who lived in the nice houses on the north side of the city's largest park. “How hard could it be”, he thought.
They looked happy and successful, enjoying walks with their well mannered dogs beside them. They carried paper coffee cups and wore expensive exercise clothing, brightly colored and well fitted spandex pants with matching tops. They gave the impression of having returned from yoga or a run, or were about to run or yoga. They stopped to greet each other as old friends. They made dog talk, exchanging dog history, sharing anecdotes, and never listening, just waiting to respond. One person stuck out their lower lip, feigned a frown, and the other would reciprocate. They were non-player characters. Their script was rarely edited.
One of these beings, a slender gray haired woman walked an ugly three legged dog at the same time every evening. She lived in the yellow bungalow with a heavy timber porch and large picture windows nestled in the hills amongst the dozens of other bungalows with large porches, lush lawns, wide sidewalks, and electric cars. Her neighborhood gave the best Halloween candy. They put up the best Christmas decorations, themed and curated. They had their own town square with red brick buildings, coffee shops, a greasy spoon diner, an organic grocer, an Italian restaurant with sidewalk tables, and a place that made their own ice-cream. The winter gods graced these neighborhoods with a light dusting of snow lingering long enough for building snowmen and donning scarves for evening walks with hot cocoa in hand.
The boy met the gray haired woman and her mutt on Halloween. Her front porch stage was adorned with a dozen artfully carved jack-o-lanterns directing the audience towards her and her basket of artisan candy. She wore the witch’s costume she’d kept from their community theater production of Wicked. October’s Texas heat had long forced the boy to remove his plastic Casper the Ghost mask. He greeted the tiny woman in green make-up with a sweaty sheepish smile while his fat parents waited by the sidewalk. Her mutt, wearing devil horns and a red cape, scampered on its three legs to greet the boy. He’d never seen such a hideous creature smile and not cower. He set down his bag and held the dog’s head with his hands while it licked the sweat off his face. He smiled. It felt good.
“He’s cute.”
“Thank you, this is Taj. He loves kisses.”
Another child reached to pet him. “Where did you find him? He’s missing a leg.”
“We rescued him from India. Do you know where that is?”
“It’s in Asia,” said a third child. “It’s one of the seven continents. We talked about them in social studies.”
“Wow, I'm impressed,” said the green-faced witch, tossing a chocolate bar into the trivia winner’s bag.
“We have a German Shepherd,” the boy added.
“What’s his name?”
“Gunner,” he remembered lying to witch, saying his father adopted the dog from Germany, that Gunner was well mannered, well trained, and responded to commands in German.
The boy remembered their interaction while he affixed a spiked training collar to Gunner’s dusty and greasy neck. He concocted what he’d say if he ran into the old woman in the park; “My dad was the only one who knew the German commands but Gunner now understood English”. “Gunner was also part wolf”, he would add, spicing up the conversation, leading it away from the German issue.
An hour before sunset the boy and his dog set off towards the park. The boy held the leash taught while the 100 pound beast dragged him from mailbox to mailbox, bush to bush, marking their route to the park where he barked angrily at other dogs and took an enormous shit by the crowded playground where fit women held their white babies and herded their toddlers away from the aggressive animal. They stared with privileged disapproval at his animal, the barbaric spiked training collar, the yellow plastic utility rope he procured as a leash, his old clothes, and his poverty. He pantomimed looking through his pockets for a trash bag to pick up the turd. There was no bag. A thin man with black framed glasses whined a serious whine and pointed to a green post by the walking path where free shit bags were dispensed. He felt their laughter in his chest, burned into his memory.
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The next morning the boy and his younger brother walked through their weed covered front yard to the next door neighbor’s to buy eggs. Ms. Garcia stepped out from her dark air conditioned cavern into the morning’s heat wearing shiny silver and black basketball shorts, pink flip flop sandals, and an oversized shirt hiding her fat body. They followed her to the back yard. They could see Gunner sitting at his post through the plastic slats of the chain-link fence and the busted refrigerators their father purchased years ago for parts. Ms. Garcia ducked into the large coop, her hens danced around her while she rummaged through their nests to fill the boy’s reused foam egg containers.
The boys loved the brown speckled shelled eggs and their dark yellow yolk. They were bigger and tasted better than the shitty white ones from the superstore. The chickens were beautiful, plump and healthy. She fed them soaked oats mixed with expensive feed and all the roaches, worms, grubs, and grasshoppers she could cultivate in the fenced garden occupying a quarter of her backyard. A yearly crop of cherry tomatoes, jalapenos, ochre, pumpkins, and squash was shared with relatives and neighbors. The garden’s tall grasses, heavy oak and pecan logs used for edging the vegetable boxes and the perimeter of the garden produced a healthy source of bugs. Once a week she’d open the coop and garden gate allowing the hens wreak havoc on the insects.
The hens and their eggs were Ms. Garcia’s passion. Catching rats on glue or snap traps was a weekly occurrence, most came from her neighbors' unkempt poverty. She kept live traps around her home and by the back fence to catch and remove racoons and opossum. She owned a Remington AR-15 for the Coyotes pacing her back fence on moonless nights and a pump action shotgun loaded with birdshot to scare off owls, hawks, buzzards, and neighborhood poachers.
A raccoon died in one of the live traps on a weekend when Ms. Garcia and her boyfriend were out of town and the heat index remained above 100 from Friday to Sunday. The racoon died of thirst, madness, confinement, fear, and unrelenting heat. It was bloated and decomposing by the time they returned from Corpus. Her boyfriend, a bald barrel chested motorcycle chap with a beard, aviator sunglasses, and a shiny bald head double bagged the entire trap with black plastic yard bags and tossed it into the community dumpster at the end of their street. Its stench lingered on for a few days. The boys caught a whiff while waiting for Ms. Garcia to fetch their eggs.
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That evening their father brought home a new dog, a muscular white Pitbull with clipped ears and a pink nose. With a scowl, blue eyes, and an alligator snout it stared down the boys, it looked more weapon than pet. Their father insisted the boys pet the new inmate. They lay their hands on its wide head, patting it nervously and caressing its bristly short hair. The dog growled low and deep then licked their hands and panted. The boy’s brother put his thin little arms around its neck, hugging him tightly. The dog’s stubby clipped tail oscillated happily. He stood on his hind legs, threw his torso onto the boy, knocking him down, standing over him and licking his face. Gunner ran to the end of his chain, unleashed a salvo of anger. Their father yanked on the Pitbull's leash, pulling it off the child.
“Don’t let him stand over you, he’s showing dominance”
“He’s a puppy”
“We don’t need bad habits.”
Their father tied the dogs nylon rope to a metal post of the chain link fence separating their property from Ms. Garcia’s. The boys brought the dog a wooden pallet from the scrap pile behind their yard, set it down between the two doorless junk refrigerators, and laid an old rug on the pallet. They brought him a blue plastic salad bowl for a water dish and a lidless Tupperware container for food. The father named it Maximus after the main character of a ridiculous movie he watched on nights when he drank cheap beer and gave the history channel a rest. He silenced Gunner’s barking with a kick to his ribs.
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The following morning the boys woke to his father stomping around the house, cursing, talking to himself, looking for his boots. Maximus had chewed through his leash and escaped. The boys followed their father up and down the street, looking for the Pitbull, calling out his name as if the dog had learned its name overnight. They spotted him on the next street walking among a group of Jehovah Witnesses. The youngest among the Christians had fashioned a lanyard around the dog's neck, leading him back to their vehicles.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” The father yelled. “That’s our dog!” The group turned and watched the sweaty overweight man in boxer shorts and sandals stomp his way toward them. He gave them words. They made no expression. He cinched down a new rope around his neck and dragged Maximus home. The father tied him to the fence post again and kicked him several times, teaching the dog a lesson. The boy saw Ms. Garcia watching through her window. The Pitbull scurried into the narrow space between a refrigerator and the fence. Their father looked up, catching Ms. Garcia’s face through the dusty window screen, scowled and went back inside.
The white dog escaped twice that week. The first time time he managed to slip loose of the yellow utility rope and was found rummaging in the dumpster. The boy’s father jumped into the dumpster, tied a rope around its muscular neck, fished out the 60 lb. dog with his adrenaline, and dragged him home. A group of teenagers playing basketball stopped to watch. One asked him if he was ok, another said “nice dog”, a third shook his head, and another asked if he needed help. He told them to mind their own business.
By the time they returned home, the dog’s fat owner, depleted of rage, didn’t bother to teach the dog another lesson. He tied him to the fence post and opened the hose to rinse off the maggots and the dumpster’s stench from his arms, legs, and cargo shorts. He barked at the boys to feed and water the dogs.
The second escape was his last. The father, determined to win the battle of dominance over the beaten and confused animal returned from Home Depot that evening with a utility chain, affixed it to the fence post and told the boys to fetch Gunner’s spiked training collar but the Pitbull’s neck was too thick and the collar couldn’t be adjusted. The fat man engineered the problem by using the chain as a collar. He cinched it down snug enough for his greasy fingers to fit between its neck and the chain. He twisted a plastic covered electrical wire to tie the links. The chain’s weight brought the dog down to the ground. Maximus rested on the wooden pallet, staring through the fence into Ms. Garcia’s backyard. The motorcycle man and Ms. Garcia were sipping beer on their plastic Adirondack chairs watching the evening’s feature of anger and despair.
By morning, Maximus had dug his way under the fence and was resting on the cool soft dirt between the lemongrass shrubs planted along Ms. Garcia’s fence line. The back screen door opened. He listened to her calm voice and her man’s deep calm words. She walked barefoot towards the hen house and released her plump birds. They ran past her towards the fenced perimeter of the garden. Ms. Garcia opened the garden gate. The hens thundered into the fertile enclosure, flying over each other, scratching and digging the earth, moving over rotting wood with their beaks, spearing roaches and catching grasshoppers in mid flight. Maximus watched the may lay from his shaded blind.
Within 10 minutes the hens had annihilated the insects and were now roaming the greater yard, digging for grubs, scavenging the thick Bermuda grass for errant insects and lost feed. Two hens reached the lemongrass stalks by the fence when Maximus lunged from the shade, breaking his makeshift collar, catching one, slamming it to the ground, killing it then sprinting towards another into the eruption of feathers and squawking. Ms. Garcia chased after the Pitbull, swinging an old wooden dowel, yelling profanities, then striking it on its side before the dog spun and leaped towards her face. She caught the Pitbull’s jaws with her left forearm. Its force knocked her to the ground. Ms. Garcia’s boyfriend fired a shotgun into the air. The dog released the fat woman’s arm and sprinted towards the back fence. The man fired another shot into the air, marched toward the fence, and leveled the barrel at the dog.
“Don’t shoot him!!!” Ms. Garcia yelled. He stopped short. The dog scanned the man’s face, swiveling his head left and right, weighing his options, deciding where to run, then cowered along the fence, and scurried into the garden. A random hen escaped the pen before the man closed the fence door. The boys watched from the top of one of the doorless refrigerators. Gunner’s barking broke through the dampening commotion of squawks, screams, and gunshots.
The boy's father ran into Ms. Garcia’s backyard through the side gate. He was angry for being inconvenienced, angry at the boys, angry for being poor, angry for being fat, angry for being unemployed, and angry for allowing this chaos to happen, then his anger dissolved the moment he locked eyes with Ms. Garcia. He saw feathers, hens scampering about, a dead chicken, his neighbor supporting her bloody forearm, and an enormous muscular man holding a shotgun. He apologized to them. He asked what he could do to fix everything and encouraged Ms. Garcia’s boyfriend to put down the dog, offering the dog’s life to save face. The dog shouldn’t have done this, he repeated. The boy’s father was tired and ashamed of being drunk.
Within 30 minutes two fat police officers costumed as pretend soldiers waddled onto the crime scene and took statements while animal control removed the Pitbull from the premises. The boy’s father was handed a violation for not having the Pitbull vaccinated and registered. Ms. Garcia was transported by EMS to the closest emergency department, her boyfriend followed in his vehicle.
The sun was now at its highest in the sky and its heat settled under the shade of everything. The boys walked over to Gunner. The dog sat up. The boys stroked his large head and felt his long sandpaper tongue lick their hands and faces. The older boy sent his brother into the house to fetch a set of tweezers and a mason jar. They spent the next half hour plucking ticks off Gunner’s body, dropping them into the jar. They took turns holding him while the other plucked.
When they finished, the boy sent his younger brother back inside the house for a bottle of shampoo, bath towels, and an old leather belt their father kept in the hallway closet. The boy set down two pallets next to the water spigot on the side of the house, undid Gunner's chain collar, and walked him onto the pallets. The older boy opened the faucet and ran the water down the dog’s head and back. The dog lapped at the cool water whenever the stream hit his face.
The younger boy returned with the shampoo. They squeezed a generous amount on Gunners head and back, the boys lathered up their friend, they spread froth to his belly legs, and paws. They scrubbed his snout and rubbed his ears clean. They squirted more shampoo onto each paw and kneaded out grime between each digit and under each nail. The boys rinsed the dog, running water down each leg, and spraying his underbelly. The dog smiled at the boys then shook his body, spraying off as much water as possible. The boys laughed and sprayed him with more water. He responded with another shake. They repeated this process until they were thoroughly soaked and Gunner’s coat was clean.
The boys dried him with the old towels. They used the old leather belt to measure and fit a new collar around his neck, cinching it down and scoring it for a proper length and a new prong hole. They cut the collar with a box cutter and used an ice pick to place the prong hole. They attached a rope to the collar and took Gunner for a walk up and around the neighborhood.
He peed on every other mailbox and dragged the boys like a bull plowing a field. They’d call his name and he’d stop to wait for them, then continue until they reached the city park where he selected trees to sprinkle his last drops of urine. He took a shit between two large sycamores not far from the children’s playground. A few families braved the mid-afternoon Texas sun to bring their little ones to the colorful plastic covered playscape, no one bothered to look their way and judge. The older boy grabbed a shitbag from the shitbag dispenser and handled their responsibility.
The boys returned a few hours later and brought Gunner into the house for the first time, when mid-February freezes dropped below 20 degrees for a week, Gunner spent his time outdoors, “where dogs belong” their father evangelized. The boys fed him left-over Kielbasa sausages from a recent cookout and set him a large salad bowl of cool faucet water. He lapped it up, making a mess of slobber spiling some water on the broken kitchen tiles.
The boys brought him into the living room. They turned on the television and sat on the couch. Gunner lay by their feet, dozing on the worn hardwood floors. The younger boy hopped off the couch, sat crossed legged by Gunner and ran his right hand over their dog’s enormous head. The boys waited for their father and his anger to wake or their mother to come home from work. They were tired of being afraid.