Anthony could hear his grandfather talking through the thin walls of their farm home. He was mumbling gibberish for a while until Anthony heard the words “I killed him”. The crickets and frogs paused; the house fell silent. The room was dark and stuffy. It was almost two in the morning, he’d been tossing under and over his sheets for an hour. His grandma had left the window and door to his guest bedroom open. A breeze would pass through his room then disappear, leaving the scent of river willows and fresh cut grass. He slowed and deepened his breaths to improve the silence. His grandfather’s words softened to a low mumble.
The following day he took a long walk along the levy of a wide irrigation ditch which fed smaller distribution ditches that flooded the onion, jalapeno, corn, pecan groves, and alfalfa fields every other week. He carried a stick and slung it like a rifle, pretending to hunt ducks, doves, jackrabbits, and flocks of turkey vultures circling death in the distance. Then he faced off against the thickets of cattails along the ditch. Swinging the stick like a samurai sword, he’d hack away their corn dog tops yelling “bonsai!”. He picked up a top from the ground and marveled at the soft suede texture, rolling it across his cheek and nose.
He listened to the sounds of the brown silty water swirling below the banks. A warm breeze came from the desert beyond the western mesa that hid the valley. He noticed a turtle sunning on the bank. He thought of running back to his grandparents’ house for a box. He’d take it home and build a habitat for him with sticks and a wide plastic food container for him to swim. He’d give him a name. What if it’s a girl? What do they eat?
He looked back in the direction of the house. He could hardly see it, only making out the stand of cottonwood trees covering the white adobe house halfway between him and his grandparent’s home. It would take him at least an hour to run back, find a box, explain to someone what he was doing, someone was bound to ask, then hurry back. The turtle would be gone by then, or he could grab it by the sides of its shell and carry it home. It looked to be the size of a small plate. He heard they could bite. He stood there a moment and decided to sling dirt rocks and use it for target practice instead.
__________
Gloria and Arturo Benavente bought their 5-acre plot of land from Don and Errol Smith in February of 1950. The twin brothers returned from Europe in the fall of 1945 to find ailing parents and an alcoholic older sister about to lose the family ranch, 780 acres along the Rio Grande, straddling the Texas New Mexico border just northwest of El Paso, a sliver of the easternmost territory of the Gadsden Purchase brokered 91 years earlier. The property was prime agricultural land. The Rio Grande cut a wide valley several miles at its widest and over two-hundred feet at its deepest from the foothills of the Dona Ana mountains of Radium Springs, New Mexico, to the bottleneck between the Franklin Mountains of El Paso and Mount Cristo Rey before spilling southeast and splitting the desert into Mexico and the United States.
With their sister Josephine nowhere to be found, a father who could barely speak, and an odious foul-mouthed mother running off anyone who came to offer help, Don and Errol bent to the pressures of time and progress, accepting the wise advice of trusted friends and the family’s attorney. The boys sold large parcels to local farmers, smaller parcels to land developers, gifted a few to loved ones and loyal family friends, and forfeited too many to the governments for their interstate highways and Farm-to-Market roads dissecting the valley where Spanish Conquistadores once traveled to establish their northern outposts of Espanola and Santa Fe in search of Cibola, the lost city of gold. The boys donated 12 acres to the county for a park that bears their family name. A small public library, swimming pool, and senior center were later added to its infrastructure of baseball fields, softball fields, soccer fields, picnic pavilions, public restrooms, and winding black top roads guiding visitors to their desired location under the expansive shade of old poplars, cottonwoods, and sycamore trees.
Errol Smith met Arturo and his teenage wife at Abel’s Cafe for a lunch of Caldo de Res and Mexican Rice. They followed him down a narrow two-lane paved road on the other side of the river towards the New Mexico border line. After a few miles they turned right onto an unpaved washboard road that vibrated their teeth and their black 1940 half-ton pickup truck every time they sped up or slowed down. Errol’s pickup finally stopped in front of a small single-story pier-and-beam farmhouse well shaded under gigantic pecan and sycamore trees. Errol stepped out of his pickup and signaled the couple to wait in their vehicle. Errol met his twin brother Don by the side of the road. Don rode his horse to the meeting and held her by the reins as they walked and gestured. Arturo and Gloria studied the twins and established that Don smiled more and seemed more relaxed. Both men were younger than Arturo, they had starved and killed in the cold and snow covered forests of Northern Europe while Arturo died many times over on the boiling sands of Peleliu and Okinawa. The families knew each other. Arturo’s grandmother was the twin’s nanny. She introduced Josephine and the twins to Mexican customs and taught them Spanish, a skill used to the chagrin of their German captors. Arturo’s great grandfather, Emiliano Casares Benavente broke horses the Smiths bought or traded from the Mexican Army or friendly Apache. The three men knew madness only few would understand. The twins and the young couple walked the property together, traded family stories, and agreed on numbers.
________
Anthony rode his single gear bicycle down Nimitz Road to Smith Farms Park. He pulled into the neighborhood a mile before the park and knocked on the door of a shit brown with white trim double wide trailer home. A stocky mulberry tree shaded a small patch of overgrown bermuda grass that stretched to the old and cracked blacktop pavement absorbing the midday sun. A barefoot blond-haired teen with sprouting breasts under a white tank top opened the door, releasing the cool air trapped inside and soothing his sun baked face.
“Matt’s not home” looking him up and down.
He continued on to the park without his friend. He rode his bike up the slope to the 6-foot chain link fence of the swimming pool and looked for his friends. One of the lifeguards recognized him and waved. A few adults were sitting on benches and lounge chairs in the shade while kids splashed in the shallow area. Teenage boys were taking turns belly flopping into the deep end. The blonde lifeguard on the lifeguard chair looked bored and asleep behind her dark sunglasses. The whole place smells of chlorine and sunscreen. His friends were not there.
He rode down to one of the pavilions, layed on the cool concrete picnic table and stared at the names of couples, bands, and the local high school's football game scores scratched or written with black marker on the ceiling of the pine log roof. He dozed off in the valley’s dry heat and woke when the sun was lower in the sky and the immigrants were arriving to the north end soccer fields for their nightly games. They were there every evening except for religious holidays and weeks when the park supervisors closed certain fields to heal the grass. These were serious people playing a serious sport. They wore team uniforms and carried banners. Their families and friends chanted and cheered from small metal bleachers along the sides of the fields. Anthony marveled at their speed and athleticism, even the older fat ones moved with the alacrity of ballet dancers. The team in sky blue uniforms was his favorite. The team in orange and white had a few anglo players. The team in bright green uniforms had three black men who spoke Spanish with a strange accent. This he knew from the few times he’d stopped to watch them play.
He mounted his bike and began his 4-mile trek north to his grandparents’ house. He rode with traffic. Farm trucks and cars pulled up behind him and carefully maneuvered around him. Most of the traffic was heading towards the park. He passed Matt’s neighborhood. Another mile down, in the stretch barren of trailers and houses, where the levy of the Rio Grande far to his right and the levies of irrigation ditches ahead boxed in a desert habitat of mesquite brush, ocotillo, desert willows, and jackrabbits. He heard the deep heavy bark of a dog in the brush to his right, a warning to speed up. He stood on the pedals and stomped down one, then the other, moving faster. He looked over his right shoulder and saw the animal in a dead run, kicking up the orange dust from the shoulder of the road. He barreled down. A rush of excitement charged his heart and muscles. He peddled hard. He was going to beat this thing or the next moments would be painful. The dog was now a few meters behind him. In a glance he made out its furrowed face and vacant expression. Anthony saw death in moments. He would lose this race. His peddling turned to a violent waddle. He hit a deep pile of dust on the shoulder of the road and his body traveled the distance his bike had relinquished, slamming face first into a deep thicket of dry tumbleweed stacked between a stop sign and the irrigation levy.
The animal punctured Anthony’s buttocks and lower back then clamped its jaw on his right leg and dragged him out of the weeds. Anthony clawed at the dirt and rocks, swallowing clouds of dust. Then he heard the thunder punch of a shotgun to his left, then another, and the dog let go of his leg.
Anthony rolled over in the dirt and watched a man bury three pistol rounds in quick succession into the dog’s body. It growled, huffed, and collapsed to the ground. The woman with the shotgun was crouched next to him. He looked at her green eyes, wrinkled leather face, and yellow teeth. She smelled of cigarettes and sweat.
“What 's your name, son. ¿Cómo te llamas?”
“Anthony”
“Anthony, what?”
“Benavente”
“Do you know where you’re at?”
“On the ground” his lower lip began to quiver as the adrenaline dissipated. The old woman laughed.
“Yes, you are on the ground. You’re Arturo’s grandson, aren’t ye?” He looked at her and nodded. The bites to his back and leg began to throb.
__________
Corry and Juan rode in the back of Grady’s Silverado, holding the roll bars with one hand and their rifles in the other. Grady kept a slow and steady pace on the levy then rolled down into the brush following a two-track road through groves of tall mesquite, stump sized juniper, and desert willows. They passed an abandoned camp littered with empty beer cans with faded labels, bottles, tires, and a filthy twin sized mattress, probably used for fucking. A large fire ring sat in the center of the clearing. Juan tapped the metal roof of the pick-up. Grady slowed then parked and idled his truck. Juan adjusted the iron sights of this .308 and squeezed off a shot.
When they crossed the cattle guard onto Wayne’s property, the boys had killed a white pitbull, two large shepherd mixed mutts, and a pitiful black labrador mix covered in ticks. When they picked up the labrador’s caracas they followed the sound of yelping puppies coming from under rusted sheets of corrugated metal stacked on rotting scraps of construction lumber. They put the four malnourished puppies in a milkcrate. The boys drove out of the valley and up the mesa to the eastern desert of Southern New Mexico where they dumped the bodies of the dogs into a deep arroyo and drove back to Grady’s.
Wayne met them at the truck when they parked. He looked over at Juan, “How’s that .308?”
“Clean, got a heat shot on one of them.”
Grady, “We got 4 of ‘em. What are you smoking?”
“I got some ribs on mesquite chips and your mom’s roasting them hatch chiles we got this morning. Corry, ask Juan if he wants to stay for supper.”
Corry glanced over at Juan and pointed to the house with his chin. Juan smiled and nodded.
Wayne looked into the bed of the pick-up. “What are you gonna do with those?” pointing at the pups.
“We’ll figure something out.” Corry lifted the milk crate out of the back of the pick-up and carried it to the barn.
________
Irene Garcia-Benavente brought her son home and slept with him in the spare bedroom of her in-law’s home. In the morning she bathed him and dressed his wounds while Dona Gloria made huevos rancheros, refried beans, and cafe de olla. Don Arturo left early, returned around noon.
“Wayne’s boys shot 4 yesterday.” The wood framed screen door slapped the door frame. He greeted his daughter in-law and walked to the counter to pour a cold cup of morning’s coffee.
Irene exhaled. “There’s more. There’s always more. People keep dumping them out here.”
“Is he still sleeping? Did he eat?”
“He ate a lot. I think his meds made him sleepy. He’s been out for about an hour. I laid him down on the couch. He wanted to watch The Price is Right.”
Don Arturo stretched his wrinkled face into a grin. He walked into the living room and ran his sausage sized fingers through the boy’s thick black hair. The boy opened his eyes, smiled back at his grandfather, and went back to sleep. Television ads for Mutual of Omaha and trial lawyers soliciting mesothelioma victims played on a loop, then a soap opera came on and Irene turned the television off. Dona Gloria was in the kitchen preparing dough for flour tortillas.
In the mid day sleep, Anthony dreamt of his father, Raphael Benavente, he had been sick for years. The poison sprayed on the jungle canopy of his war had worked its way into his skin, nose, and mouth, and began the process of devouring his organs, killing him over the next 25 years. Anthony saw him in his wheelchair at the back door of their home, looking toward the late afternoon thunderclouds building over the Organ Mountains of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Anthony opened his eyes and remembered the last day of school and his father’s cold and stiff arm, his uncle on the other side of the hospital bed, weeping.
————————
Anthony found a 3-foot stick of scrap lumber in the pile behind the tool shed. A small garden snake escaped toward the tall weeds by the irrigation ditch. He put three nails through one end and sanded the other. He was going to slam these nails into anything that chased him. He was looking for a fight. He was going to the park. He considered bringing his gas-powered pellet gun. A foolish idea, too weak of a shot and he’d have to stop and reload. His grandfather’s rifles were of limits.
He killed 7 feral cats with his Winchester .22 rifle over Christmas break. The 7th wouldn’t die. It kept hissing at him. He picked it up by the tail and took him to the backside of the property where the land dropped off into the fallow agricultural fields covered in tumbleweeds. He laid it against the irrigation ditch levy behind the property, took a few steps back and flinched a stray bullet tearing off the cat's left ear. It hissed harder. It wanted to live. Anthony reloaded, put the barrel up to its face. He had to shoot. He didn’t want to shoot. He wanted to walk away. It hissed harder. He took a step closer and shot. The dust behind the cat kicked up. The cat hissed pitifully, it looked away. Anthony’s face contorted and his chest burned. He reloaded and silenced the animal. His hands were trembling. His jaw was locked.
“Nothing wants to die”, a voice carried from his right.
Anthony caught his grandfather standing by the lone sycamore on the levy, a witness to the murder. Anthony wanted to take it back. He wanted the cat to live. He apologized profusely but words never came out. He lost track of time. It was cold and his shadow was purple. His grandfather walked down to where he was, took the rifle and gave the boy a shovel.
“Bury him”. Don Arturo’s voice wasn’t angry or disappointed, it was direction, the next step in a process Anthony had forced. Don Arturo walked back to the house. Anthony dug the hole and covered the animal. Anthony’s parents and sisters soon arrived to make tamales. Uncles, aunts, and cousins arrived later. They made an assembly line, Dona Gloria cooking, a dozen brown hands spreading masa on softened corn husks, others filled and wrapped the tamales. They carefully stacked them in deep metal pots where they’d steam on the stove for several hours while the children drank store brand soda, champurrado, and Mexican hot chocolate. They watched a stop-motion movie about a talking deer with a glowing red nose. The adults drank teswin, tequila, and coffee with a splash of Presidente brandy while playing cards and planning summer trips. Outside the temperature dropped into the low 30’s; a smell of chimney fires and a clear moonless night lit by the glowing dust of a billion stars.
__________
Anthony rounded Vinton Road onto Nimitz and looked toward the desert brush to his left where the dog had appeared. His pulse quickened, pumping fear and anger to every cell in his body. He fantasized slapping the nails into the sides of the beast. He practiced swinging the stick to his right, then his left while gaining speed. He peddled hard. Nothing came from the brush on his left or the alfalfa fields to his right. Cumulus clouds started forming high above, an imminent afternoon shower like the one yesterday.
Matt and Caesar waited for him at the park. Anthony showed them his scars and bruises. They complimented his home-made weapon.
(Continued)
“Were you scared?” Matt studied him.
“Shit, yes. That dog wanted to kill me.”
“Pitbull?”
“Yeah, big ass brown one, like Adrian’s, but bigger.”
“Did you see any right now?” Cesar sucked the last of his soda through a red straw, ice crackled at the bottom of his foam cup.
“No. Getzler’s sons killed 4 last week in that same area. Judy’s brother was with them.”
“Juan’s a good shot. He’s going to the Marines.” Cesar nodded in admiration.
The boys left the park. They rode south on the narrow shoulders of Chisholm Boulevard, a four-lane highway that runs parallel to the Rio Grande, connecting the westside of El Paso to Old Mesilla and Las Cruces, New Mexico. They rode past large plots of undeveloped private land, home owned gas stations with faded window ads for cheap cigarettes, auto salvage lots with tall sheet metal walls, small Mexican cafes, Viramontes Ranch Supply and Feed warehouse, mobile home parks, and small Mexican tire shops painted in bright colors with funny names like “El Llantero Chido”, the “Bad Ass Tireman”.
They reached Angel's Comic Book Shop in northwest El Paso by midafternoon, the air conditioning soothed their skin and the place smelled of new carpet. They bought copies of the 300th anniversary issue of the Amazing Spider Man with the hologram cover and waited out the brief rain shower. Anthony left his crude weapon outside with the bicycles. They rode back north in the cool afternoon under brisk moving cumulus clouds. Riding with comic books in one hand and a stick with nails in the other became untenable. Anthony tossed the stick into a weed patch. They stopped at Fernie’s firework stand hoping to get free blackcat firecrackers. The teenage girls said he was out delivering fireworks to vendors in Socorro and San Elizario and wouldn't be back till later in the evening. The boys bought nothing and rode down Nimitz past the park, escorting Anthony back to his grandparents’ home. They stopped at the T-intersection of Nimitz and Vinton where Wayne and Patrcia Getzler shot down the animal that attacked Anthony. They dismounted. He walked through the events as best as he could remember. The distance between the sand mound where he lost control and the levee berm where he landed was much shorter than he remembered.
“We should see if there’s anymore.” Matt looked towards the brush.
“That’s a terrible idea.” Cesar shot back. Anthony's heart beat faster, aroused. His face changed and the taste of iron came back to his mouth.
“Not right now, tomorrow, with guns.” Matt was determined.
“I can’t tomorrow.” Cesar excused himself. “My mom wants to go to Juarez.”
Matt looked at Anthony. “Your grandpa has guns. I know he does.”
Anthony remembered the feral cats and the one that wouldn’t die. “I can ask.”
“Ok, ask. I’ll bring my .22 and ammo.”
“What do we do if we kill one?”
“Nothing. Fucking leave’em. Fuck ’em.”
“What time?” Anthony was swayed.
“Close to sunset, don’t you think? Or early morning?”
“Morning. I don’t want to be riding around in the dark.”
“Ok, let's meet here, sunrise.”
————————
Anthony listened to his grandfather’s bootsteps and clanks of ceramic coffee cups coming from the kitchen. The seeping yellow light under the door vanished when the back door opened, closed, and the wood framed screen door slapped twice. He waited a few minutes and heard the moaning of the shower's ball valves opening inside the walls. He waited for the restroom door to close before he slid off and put on his dirty sneakers. He’d slept in yesterday’s clothes. He made his bed before he left his room, walking along the wall of the hallway to avoid the creaks of the 90-year-old floorboards that announced the pacing of ghosts and angry fathers. The door to the living room’s coat closet squealed quietly. He pushed away the heavy woolen and leather coats to reach his grandfather’s gun case that kept two shotguns, two rifles, the .22 Winchester his grandfather took from him, and a Smith & Wesson .40 revolver on the ammo shelf above the armory. In the corner of the closet was a sword in a weathered leather scabbard, his grandfather’s souvenir from the war he’d heard stories and watched movies about, the good war, Americans versus Japs and Hitler, an atomic bomb and John Wayne.
He rode down Sage with the .22 slung across his back, a pocket full of ammo, and the Japanese sword spanning the width of his bike’s handlebars. The cold desert air filled his lungs with the scent of the morning’s dew-soaked mesquite. He made a left on Hickory then a left on Vinton then spotted Matt and Cesar sitting on their bicycles at the “T” intersection of Vinton and Nimitz.
“That’s your grandpa’s sword, huh?” Matt was impressed.
Anthony grinned and handed the weapon to Matt for inspection. Anthony looked over at Cesar, “I’m glad you’re here.” Cesar nodded.
Matt pulled the sword out of its scabbard and ran his fingers across the etched symbols. “My grandpa had a Luger and a bunch of other Nazi stuff. He had this long dagger that said, ‘Alles fur Deutschland’.”
“What does that mean?”
“Everything for Germany”
“How do you know that?”
“My mom told me.”
“Where’s it at?”
“My mom’s boyfriend pawned it.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah. Fucking idiot.”
Each carrying a rifle, they patrolled the 30-acre desert habitat adjacent to the Rio Grande where Juan and the Getzler boys killed four dogs and salvaged a milkcrate of their mutts. They stayed on two track dirt roads of hard washboarded earth packed over years of farmers cutting through to access the river, shameless contractors dumping their refuse, or bored locals looking for privacy to drink, fuck, shoot cans, shoot bottles, and light camp fires where they stayed all night until the beer ran out or it was too cold to watch the last of the orange embers consume the scrap lumber littering the area. The boy’s forearms and teeth rattled as they sped over ripples of dirt and rock. Doves fluttered out of the brush; a jackrabbit scampered across the road. The sun climbed higher, drying out the mesquite and desert sage, releasing a perfume imprinted in the senses of all who’ve lived here. They came across an abandoned camp area with a blackened fire ring, a mosaic of broken beer bottles, decomposing fast food containers, empty beer cans strewn about, and a dirty mattress under the shade of a desert willow, no sign of dogs.
They followed a separate path into the overgrown mesquite woods to another camp area. Here they found similar trash decor and the skulls of deer and their rib cages cleaned of all their flesh glowing white in the morning shade, and the corpses of enormous carp with their brittle decomposed scales exposing long bony spines. Under an uprooted cottonwood they found an abandoned dugout furnished with an old sleeping bag, dirty blankets, three worn paperback novels and a slender stack of porno mags. “I bet those are Mexican pornos,” Matt grinned as Cesar shook one out.
“How do you know?”
“Check out all that bush. I can see it from up here.” Matt stood a good distance away. Their only exposure to adult flesh had been artfully curated photos of naked women in the Playboy’s Matt stole from his mother’s lover. Anthony remembered the supple white breasts and smooth thighs of blond women laying on couches or sunbathing by a pool. He wondered how Matt’s sister looked without clothes.
Cesar flipped through the pages, giggling, “fuck yes, these are awesome. Full penetration. Full bush. They’re old as shit, probably from the 70’s. They’re in Spanish.”
Each boy took a magazine. They were amazed at the treasure they’d found, making mental notes of where to locate this precious bounty of water damaged and faded images of large breasted women wearing only lipstick, contorted in various positions, their hairy crotch penetrated by the girth of hairy overweight men resembling average middle aged hombres from Juarez or El Paso. Anthony thought of angry men scowling behind gas station counters or wearing orange vests and hard hats, wielding heavy machinery on the shoulders of roadways while the sun singed their forearms and softened their boots. Anthony felt they were being watched. Matt and Cesar agreed. The magazines were carefully placed in the dugout to appear undisturbed, and they rode out of the woods and onto the levy, riding slowly, scanning the desert area below.
By midmorning the boys had grown bored of hunting wild dogs. They abandoned the dirt roads and gravel paths for the paved Farm-to-Market roads leading west towards La Union, New Mexico, a small village near the base of the mud cliffs before the land rises above the mesa spreading onto the desert and mountains of southern New Mexico. They were bound for La Union Station, a century old adobe and stucco hacienda turned restaurant where Cesar’s eldest sister waited tables and the owners fed the boys, skimming Marisol’s tips. Sodas and iced tea in translucent red plastic cafe glasses were on the house, one refill was afforded, and they were allowed to eat in a side dining room or the garden courtyard but never the main restaurant. Anthony liked the cool earthen air trapped inside the adobe walls and gazing at the ancient pine trussed ceiling. He wished his future home looked like this.
They crossed into New Mexico where the pavement changed color and consistency from a crumbling gray asphalt to a freshly laid and rust tinted charcoal gray pavement with newly painted white and yellow lines, gravel shoulders, and sturdy concrete ditches framing the two-laned road that led to La Union. The county road was flanked with pecan groves on the left and newly harvested onion and cabbage fields dotted by abandoned produce along the deep furrows of the plowed earth on their right. The sun extracted a stench from the produce familiar to their summers. The boys rode swiftly. Anthony slowed and stopped to adjust the grip of the sword on his handlebars. The other boys turned around and rode back to their friend.
A lone farmhouse surrounded by cottonwoods stood deep in the distance straddling both onion fields. Anthony switched grips uncomfortably then tucked his shirt and slid the sword inside the back of his shirt, securing it between the rifle and his back, pushing the end into his pants. Matt and Cesar gaze engaged with the farmhouse.
“We better get going”, Matt spoke dryly.
Cesar’s eyes grew large and white. “What the fuck is that?”
Anthony looked to the farmhouse and saw two trails of dust heading in their direction like zippers opening the earth. The dogs advanced closer by the second and their deep angry barks could now be heard. The boys moved with purpose, swinging around their bikes, gripping handlebars, stomping pedals, kicking up gravel, grinding teeth, lungs sucking and pumping, muscles flexing, arteries pushing, veins pulling, and their vision fixed on the adobe parapet of La Union Station standing above the pecan groves still miles away.
Anthony and Matt stayed in step, Cesar, the larger and more developed 12-year-old, powered three bike lengths ahead, then four, then five. Matt glanced over and saw the first dog leap across the concrete ditch and continue its stride without pausing. “Fucking Rottweilers, fucking Rottweilers.” Anthony looked behind and saw the snarl and slobber of the muscular animal now 15 yards behind. Further behind them the second dog leaped over the ditch, adjusted its gait and gained speed. Cesar made a sudden right turn onto a dirt road alongside a wide irrigation ditch. The dog closest to the boys broke chase, jumped back across the concrete ditch and cut the corner of the field toward Cesar. The second rottweiler closed the distance behind the other boys. Anthony veered right onto the dirt road after Cesar and into the cloud of dust with Matt close behind. The first dog bounded over the last furrows and shot across their path coming within feet of Cesar’s right heel before Cesar turned left into the thicket of cattails lining the ditch and dove into the water. Still peddling, Anthony reached his right hand behind his head, found the sword, drew and held it outstretched to his right, his wrist adjusted the way he’d practiced with the stick, preparing to hack the neck of the dog who now stood broadside, facing the ditch where Cesar had just escaped. The rottweiler turned its head. Anthony and the dog locked eyes and he realized he could not swing the sword across his body without cutting himself, the sword should've been in his left hand, he should’ve sharpened the sword, he should’ve practiced swinging the sword, the sword weighed more than the stick with nails, his rifle now swung to his left like a messenger bag, it’s butt banging against his left hand, it’s weight affecting his balance, the rifle strap burning into his shoulder, the dog was larger than he’d anticipated, and now it was in front of him.
The bike knocked over the dog and the collision sent Anthony rolling into the dust. With dirt in his mouth, he patted the ground around him for the sword and attempted to get up but landed back on his face. His left forearm was now perpendicular and of no use. He used his right arm to sit up and sling the rifle over his head. He held the rifle like a pistol, its weight straining the ligaments and tendons of his wrist. He pulled on the trigger. The safety was still engaged. The beast now stood over his feet.
Anthony attempted thumbing the metal button on the side of the handle to disengage the safety, but the rifle was too heavy for his trembling hand and it dropped between his legs. He laid on his back, covered his face with his forearm and grit his teeth in anticipation of the pain. He felt its weight hovering inches above. Its musty odor filled his nose, and he felt its wet nose sniff his hands. Its tongue licked his hands and then his forehead. It drooled on his face and licked his cheek. Anthony’s shoulders relaxed. His lungs deepend and he started crying. The rottweiler hurriedly licked Anthony’s tears and he started laughing. He reached his right hand to its head and caressed the dog's left cheek. He laughed and breathed and continued laughing while the dog licked his ear and his neck. Then the dog's shoulders buckled with the loud crack of a rifle.
The rottweiler composed itself, huffed and staggered off Anthony. Another shot rang out, snapping the air between Anthony and the wounded animal. He sat up and saw Matt kneeling on one knee, shouldering his rifle and aiming for another shot.
“Don’t shoot!” He yelled at Matt. Anthony’s left forearm was pulsating. Matt shot again and missed again.
“Stop shooting, you stupid motherfucker! Stop shooting!!”
Matt ran up to Anthony with wet and swollen red eyes, his hands trembling. “I thought he was biting you”.
Anthony shook his head and looked towards the swaying and panting dog. It sat for a moment, laid down on his belly and rolled over onto its side, its rib cage and abdomen rising and falling. The other dog trotted over, cowering and glancing at the boys as it approached its wounded friend.
Anthony kept his gaze on the dying animal. He’d seen this before. “You’re gonna have to shoot him again.”
“It’s gonna die.”
“Shoot him again. You can’t leave him like this.”
“Ok.” Matt wiped his eyes and took aim.
“No, go up there and shoot him in the head.”
“Ok.” Matt walked up to the dog. The other dog moved away, trotting into the scraped onion field. Matt stood over the dog, took aim and fired. The wounded rottweiler groaned and whimpered.
“It won’t die.”
“Shoot him again.”
“I can’t.”
Anthony pushed off the ground and stood up. Cradling his left forearm with his right forearm he searched the immediate area for the sword and found it at the edge of the vegetation by the ditch. He handed the sword to Matt, “Dig this straight down, all the way down,” pointing at an area under the animal’s armpit. “You’ll stop his heart.”
Matt gave the sword back and kneeled by the dog. “I can’t”.
Cesar, soaking wet, walked up to the boys, took the sword and drove it into the spot Anthony marked with his finger. Anthony kneeled on both knees, cradled his throbbing arm and laid his cheek on the dog's cheek, listening for its breath to cease.