by Tim Lockette
“It’s good to hear you say it,” he said. “I’m gonna kill you anyway. I just wanted to see how easy it was to make you say it. You’re so weak. A pudgy, soft freak. ‘Oink oink, nobody loves me!’”
Suddenly something fell into place. Something so shocking, it overwhelmed my fear for a minute.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re Princess P! You’ve been texting me all this time!”
Cloudy Hair nodded. “You see, you can’t get away. I’m inside your head. I’m there all the time. You can’t get away from me. I win.”
All the texts from Princess P flooded back. It did, in a weird way, make sense. Cloudy Hair knew, when nobody else knew, that Easy was evidence in a crime. He knew that every time we posted a flyer with Easy’s photo, every time someone forwarded the news story about him, there was a chance someone would recognize the murder victim’s dog and start asking questions. So all of that trolling—the fat pig stuff, the stuff about my mom’s suicide—it was all just a dumb, weak attempt to make my work harder for me.
Suddenly, I was angrier than I was scared. I stood up on my little piggy feet, pointed a hoof right in Cloudy Hair’s face.
“Just hold it right there,” I said. “All this time you’ve been lecturing me about who’s a freak who can’t survive. But you killed your own brother-in-law. For money!”
Cloudy Hair just stared at me with dead eyes, but he didn’t shoot. I took another step forward.
“You couldn’t cut it in business, so you killed your best friend!” I said. “You couldn’t cover that up, so you’re going to kill a twelve-year-old girl!”
Cloudy Hair didn’t move. I took another step.
“I may be a pig, I may be weak, but you’re a MURDERER!” I shouted.
What happened next happened very fast. I could see Cloudy Hair blink, dumbfounded, and I knew I’d landed an insult that really hurt him. I could see the muscles in his forearm flex as he started to pull on the trigger. I heard nothing, but I did see a flash, just a blip of light on the end of his gun. And I saw a blur of black and white that seemed to pull Cloudy Hair down to the ground.
It was Easy! Where he came from or how he happened on us, I don’t know, but in an instant, Easy had Cloudy Hair on the ground, his teeth locked into the old man’s upper thigh.
I don’t know if you have ever seen a man attacked by a dog, but it isn’t a pretty sight. Cloudy Hair screamed like he was being eaten alive, and Easy wasn’t letting up. There was blood. I saw Cloudy Hair’s gun on the ground, and initially thought of picking it up and holding him at gunpoint. But not with pig hands. So I kicked it, and it skittered into the leaves.
Later, as he struggled to crawl across the alleyway, Dudley dropped his knife, too. I kicked it away.
Then I heard a blip from a police car’s siren. At the exit of the alleyway, cops were silhouetted in red-and-blue light.
“Don’t hurt the dog!” I shouted, throwing myself on top of Easy. “The dog is fine! The dog’s protecting me! Don’t shoot!”
Dudley tried to limp away, and got caught and cuffed by one cop. The other came up to me and Easy, hands held open. It was Troy Butler.
“Atty Peale?” he said. “Is that you in there? Are you injured?”
Butler’s voice was shaking a little, something I’d never heard from him. That scared me. Was I injured? I started patting myself down with my piggy hands, looking for a bullet hole.
“Looks like you had a close call,” Troy said, reaching up to touch the side of my head. I heard a POP of breaking string and Troy held out a fuzzy costume pig ear. “You’re lucky, Not Ham. He shot your ear half off. An inch or two down and to the right, and that bullet would have hit your head, instead of your costume.”
From time to time, people ask me if working at an animal shelter is fun.
“Yes,” I tell them. “But I don’t think my shelter experience is typical.”
Not every shelter volunteer gets to meet the governor. And even though that’s not anything any sensible kid really wants to do, meeting the governor might turn out to be useful after all.
And not every shelter volunteer gets a free pig suit. The costume company wouldn’t take the suit back, with an ear blown off and stains on it from crawling around in the woods. They wouldn’t even cut us some slack because I was the victim of attempted murder. (I know they knew about it. It was all over the news as far away as Orlando.) Dad and Taleesa had to fork over $300 for it, and because we didn’t know how to clean the thing, it’s hanging in my closet now, dirty and smelly as it was the night of the attack.
Toni says that’s probably not healthy. Toni’s my therapist. Yes, I have a therapist now. I’m talking about a therapist for your head—a psychologist—not a therapist for your body. Dad and Taleesa set up weekly sessions for me because of Cloudy Hair’s attack on me.
Being a crime victim is weird, even if you’re the lucky one the bullet missed. After they hauled Gary Dudley away that night, a couple of young deputies—Sam and Lizzie were their names—examined me like I was a captured alien. Or really, I guess, they examined the pig suit while I was still in it, taking photos and collecting fuzz samples in little bags. Then the paramedics did a medical check on me. Then we went back to the jail, which is also the sheriff’s office headquarters, and they made me tell the story of the attack again and again, which I told the same way again and again just like I told it to you. Even the part where, with a gun pointed at me, I renounced everything I believe in. That part seemed to bother me more than it bothered anybody else.
Still, the whole story bothered somebody, because they gave Dad and Taleesa a bunch of brochures about post-traumatic stress disorder and warned them that I should get into therapy to avoid any problems down the road, including—duh duh duuuh—depression. Dad had me set up with Toni the next day.
I like therapy, because I like Toni. She’s in her late twenties, I guess, and has a cute short haircut—like, boy-short—and big, thick, but totally fashionable glasses, and she’s always wearing cool retro fashions, like combat boots and flannel shirts. Her office shelves are full of plaques with punchy slogans: “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” or “Be the change you want to see in the world.” She even has a cross-stich sampler that says “Hell is other people.”
“That looks familiar,” I said the first time I saw it. “Where did you get it?”
“I bought it from a middle-school kid on Etsy,” she said.
Toni wants me to talk about Cloudy Hair, about my bouts of what she calls “depression,” about my mom and how she died. But I try my best to talk instead about Toni’s love life. I know she has kids—I’ve seen the photos on her desk—but there’s no wedding ring. And her desk also has photos of her hiking and canoeing with cute hipster guys. I really want to know the story there.
“I imagine you living this perfect life,” I say. “Climbing mountains, growing huge vegetables in your garden, flitting from boyfriend to boyfriend, writing papers about all of us screwed-up people in Alabama and presenting them at a conference in Stockholm.”
“That’s transference,” Toni said. “There’s a point in therapy when the therapist becomes your idol. It will pass. Usually we’ve made more progress than this before transference happens.”
Toni hasn’t said it, but I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m tough patient to crack. I have a problem with this whole post-traumatic stress disorder thing. I mean, if I get shot at, and later I have nightmares or flashbacks about it, how is that a disorder? I mean, isn’t that normal for a person who’s been shot at?
Anyway, Toni says I need to work out some issues in case I have to testify against Gary Dudley in court. But you and I know that won’t happen. If Jethro Gersham felt like he had to cut a plea deal—when he knew all along he was innocent—then surely Cloudy Hair will cut a deal, too. After all, they’ve got a statement from the victim, a weapon with his prints
on it, and a thousand photos of a pig costume with a bullet hole in it. And that’s just from his attempt to murder me, not to mention the murder he successfully committed.
Jethro is of course out of prison, and maybe that’s what I really need therapy for. What do you say to a guy who’s been through this? He came by the house a few days ago, to say thank you. He brought me flowers and brought Martinez a football.
“I thank God for you,” he said to me. “I know the light of God is in you, because you saved me. You saved my life.”
For once, I kept my mouth shut. I could have said that Martinez did most of the work on his case, which was true, and I could have said that his life wasn’t really at stake because he was already about to plead down to a non-capital charge. Instead, I just hugged Jethro, and that seemed like exactly the right thing.
Taleesa says flowers are losing their smell. It’s something about the way they grow them, in greenhouses. Sniff the flowers on sale at the grocery store and you’ll see. But the flowers I got from Jethro that day—purple, spiky-looking blooms, sprigs of green ferny stuff—had a perfumey smell to them. I still wonder where he got them.
We didn’t really see much of Jethro after that visit, which I guess was just as well. The last time we drove by his place, the city’s warning sign was gone, the yard was trimmed nicely, and the painting was done. I like to think of him puttering around the house happily all day like McNutters, though even McNutters has times when the hot tub won’t heat and the cork won’t come out of the champagne bottle.
According to Wikipedia, kids suffering from post-traumatic stress sometimes experience regression. In other words, after a big shock, you might go back, for comfort’s sake, and start doing little-kid things you did a couple of grades ago. I tried to milk that for all it was worth, reserving plenty of time to play with McNutters in his dollhouse. It was fun at first, but after a while I started to think that McNutters’s life of luxury wasn’t as interesting as it used to be. Why lounge in the hot tub when you can climb mountains and fight injustice, the way I imagined Toni did in her off hours?
Maybe this “transference” was really a thing. I found myself thinking more and more about Toni’s life during my daily work at the shelter. Cleaning litter boxes, walking dogs, devouring name-your-baby books and thesauruses in search of new names and descriptions to liven up the pet-of-the-week column. It all felt like a long climb up a mountain, but I wasn’t always sure we were getting any higher.
“Megg,” I said one day. “Remind me again why we can’t have a no-kill shelter like they have in San Francisco or wherever? A shelter that commits to not killing a single animal?”
“I don’t think those no-kill shelters are always as no-kill as they make out to be,” Megg replied. “I think some of them are just less-kill shelters. And state law pretty much says we have to kill the dogs that bite. But I never said we can’t have a no-kill shelter. There are just a lot of reasons we don’t. A lot of people here can barely afford to feed themselves, much less their pets.”
“Maybe we can find a way to be the first poor county to have a no-kill shelter. An honest-to-gosh place where no animal has to be killed,” I said. “Maybe there’s a way no one’s considered.”
“Maybe it’s possible,” Megg said. “But it would take a while. It might take twenty years.”
“I guess we should start planning now, then,” I said.
Megg smiled at me. “Atty, I think you could do just about anything you set your mind to,” she said. “Bring me a twenty-year plan to set up a no-kill shelter and I’ll present it to the county commission. I’ll put everything I have behind it, I promise.”
And so here I am, on my bed with my dog, about to start writing my plan.
Oh, I didn’t tell you about Easy? He’s ours now. After the incident with Cloudy Hair, Taleesa gave in and said we could adopt him if J. D. Ambrose’s family didn’t claim him. Megg took the dog to Ambrose’s only heir, the same sister who was married to Cloudy Hair, and was told she and the dog could both go rot.
So now Easy sleeps at the foot of my bed. And when I go to school, he sleeps on the wood floor in the foyer. And when I come back, he sleeps in front of the couch at my feet. He’s like a real-life McNutters, living a life of luxury.
And he’s a great help if you’re writing. I’ve started talking out loud when I write, bouncing ideas off him. He listens earnestly to everything but never says a word, good or bad.
Like just now, when I’m telling you and Easy this story, when I should be writing the introduction to my twenty-year plan.
“What should I start with?” I say, looking down at Easy. “I need an inspiring story of an animal someone saved from being put down.”
Easy yawns.
“What’s that, boy?” I say. “That’s a great idea. I’ll start with you.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR