by Adam Lowe
The big man pushed himself away from the workbench and his smile widened. “We’re going to play a game. You like games?”
“Sure. What are we going to play?”
The man opened the cage door and took the puppy out. The puppy wagged his tail and licked the man’s hand. Quick as a snake, the man’s fingers shot out and grabbed the puppy’s tongue.
At first, Keenan thought it was a joke, the man holding the little pink tongue, the puppy’s rump up in the air as he tried to pull away from the man’s grasp. But when the puppy started whining, Keenan shifted uneasily. “Hey, mister. I think you’re hurting him. Maybe you should let him go.”
The man just grinned and held on. The puppy’s whining turned to that high, screeing sound that’s halfway between a moan and a cry, rising as the pain got worse. The man picked the puppy up and dangled him, as the puppy shrieked and its oversized paws clawing desperately at nothing.
Keenan leaped to his feet, heart pumping furiously. The cuff kept him from standing straight, but he reached out and grabbed at the man’s free arm, trying to get his attention. “Mister, put him down! Please put him down! You’re hurting him! Stop it!”
The man gave the boy a sly look, and bounced the helpless dog in the air once, twice. Then he slowly lowered the puppy back to the table, shoving him back into the cage. The little dog cringed into the corner, still screaming, as the man shoved the door shut and clicked the lock.
“You didn’t like that game? I’ve got another one. Let’s see what you think of this.”
IV
Jauncey leveraged himself up from the bed, away from the boy who had been nearly crushed beneath him. The boy’s body was covered with clammy sweat, his skin pale from shock. He had stopped screaming long ago, needing every bit of energy he had just to keep breathing.
After much experimenting, Jauncey found that, like his old man, he preferred the young to the old, boys to girls. Although, Jauncey conceded to himself with a smirk, he was much more diversified than his old man, who had only one victim as far as Jauncey knew. Jauncey was working on two dozen, and baker’s dozens at that.
In his considered opinion, children made much better victims. Kids were so much more hopeful, in every way. Hopeful that they could convince him to stop, hopeful that someone would rescue them, hopeful almost right to the very end that heaven, at least, would reach out to them and end their pain. Most adults had no such illusions; they weren’t nearly so much fun.
Girls weren’t nearly as much fun as boys. He’d finally decided that girls, somehow, already knew on some fundamental level that they were going to get it. Boys were so much more shocked by the whole thing. For girls, it was just a matter of who and when. Some rich shit-for-brains hubby after they graduated from high school and were married nice and proper in a church somewhere, or some asshole john in a stinking hotel room, that big prick was inescapable in the end. The thought made him smile. A joke! He’d made a joke. He thought about sharing it with the shivering boy on the bed, then decided to go grab a beer instead.
As he walked around the bed, he trailed his fingers against the wires of the puppy’s cage. The little dog cried and tried to back into the corner.
Looked like the dog might turn out to be smarter than the kid. At least for the first round.
V
In the days that followed, the man always followed the same pattern. He would enter the little room, filling it to bursting just by stepping through the door, and start with the dog. When the boy could no longer bear the puppy’s screams of pain, when a protest forced from him by his conscience, regardless of his intentions, the man would smile and turn to him.
Then the pain would start. And go on, and on, and on, until his mind short-circuited and went away. Most often, the man would stop then, uninterested in proceeding if Keenan was not an active participant in the pain.
After the man tired of whatever he was inflicting and left, Keenan would pull together the shattered pieces of who he used to be and wait for the next onslaught. He dreamed of rescue, plotted his escapes, which were many and brilliant and always entirely in his mind.
Sometimes, Keenan would stretch out on the bed full length, his body straining away from the leather cuff, and reach out with his feet to to the tall table. If the man didn’t jostle the cage too much when he took the puppy out and put him back in, Keenan could reach the cage with his foot. Sometimes, he could feel the little dog’s soft fur, the shivering that matched his own. Shivering that didn’t come from cold, but from whatever terrors had been inflicted on them that day.
Keenan would whisper to Buddy when gaps in the plank walls told him it was dark out. Secrets always seemed safer in the dark. He would talk about foster homes he had lived in, friends he had made, things he would eat when he got away from the man.
“Ho Hos, Buddy,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse. The man had done things to him that day that had made him beg for mercy. The things had gone on for a long time. So had Keenan’s screams. “You break ‘em open and lick all the cream off, then eat the frosting, then throw away the rest. You’re going to like ‘em so much! I’ll use ‘em to teach you to do tricks, Buddy. And I’ll never, ever hit you if you don’t get them right. No matter how much you screw up. I’ll never, ever hit you . . . ” Hot tears slid down and hit the thin wool blanket.
Keenan had started to think he would never, ever get away from the man. Neither would Buddy. He couldn’t see the little dog so good anymore, because of something that the man had done to Keenan’s left eye. But he didn’t think Buddy was feeling so hot. The puppy didn’t cry out so much anymore, no matter what the man did to him. Keenan thought maybe Buddy was starting to give up hope.
Keenan wasn’t feeling so hopeful himself.
Slowly, fighting a thousand aches, he inched down the bed as far as the cuff would let him. The skin under the cuff was rubbed raw and bleeding from futile attempts to get away from the man’s tortures. He stretched out a battered leg, forcing it high enough to reach the table, inching along in search of the dog’s cage. Unexpectedly, his foot found the cage a good two inches closer than it usually was.
The puppy edged closer inside the cage, pressing his body against the wires, so that boy and dog could touch.
A daring thought shot through Keenan’s brain, and he reached with his toes, curling them around the vertical wires and pulling the cage, and the little dog, toward himself.
As if the puppy understood what Keenan was doing, it made soft fearful noises, the kind a small child might make, caught in by a night terror. There was no way this would end well. The man would come back, catch them, and the punishment would be terrible.
“Shh, shh, Buddy, don’t make any racket,” said Keenan, and continued pulling the cage toward him with his toes, but he could feel the entire cage shaking with the dog’s fear. “He’s gonna get us anyway, Buddy. We might as well be together when he does.”
He eased the cage closer.
Closer.
It balanced precariously on the edge of the table.
Keenan gave it a last, gentle tug, and the cage fell.
He thought he’d be able to catch it, but his aching muscles were slow and the cage crashed to the floor.
The dog gave out a little shriek.
“I’m sorry, Buddy,” said Keenan, swinging his body around on the bed so he could reach the door of the cage with his hands.
Keenen pulled out the long nail that served as a linchpin on the door and eased the little dog out. He cradled the puppy gently, burying his face in fur that had gone patchy and dull. One of the dog’s paws was horribly maimed. It had been crushed in a vise. His ears were ripped and torn. His left eye was gone, burned with a cigar. Ichor crusted around the oozing socket.
The dog moaned and squirmed closer, licking Keenan’s arm.
For a minute, the briefest sliver of time, they were simply a boy and his dog.
The door crashed open and the man burst in.
“What the fuck was t
hat noise?” he screamed.
The man stepped inside, crowding out air and light with menace.
His eyes swept the bed, the boy and the dog curled together. “Well, isn’t this a nice moment,” he sneered.
The boy shifted, shoved the dog under the bed, out of the man’s easy reach.
Keenan half knelt, half stood on the bed, looking at the man with steady eyes.
“I guess we’re both about used up,” he said. “Why don’t you just finish this now?”
“You think you’re ready to die, you little fuck? You have a lot of pain to go yet before I’m gonna let you go. A lot of pain. I’m gonna cut that fucking dog open and pull out his guts. Real slow, just like I did to my old man. And when the dog dies, I’m gonna cut off your dick and your balls, and I’m gonna make you fucking swallow them before I kill you, you fucking bastard.”
The man grabbed Keenan by the throat with one big hand and lifted him off the thin mattress.
He held the boy up in the air, face inches away, and bared his teeth as Keenan choked and gasped for air.
The puppy darted out from under the bed and sank his teeth into the man’s calf.
The man gave out a strangled scream.
As hard as he could, Keenan slammed the nail from Buddy’s cage door into the man’s greasy ear.
The man screamed again, this time a high, thin scream. He reached up with a hand suddenly gone vague and useless, as if he were going to pull the pin out, but seemed unable to grasp it.
He dropped Keenan back on the bed. The boy stared up as the man started to topple, not sure which way to roll to keep the man from falling on him.
The man took a step back, then fell to the floor. His eyes were wide and unfocused.
His body twitched.
Keenan had lived for a while in a foster home with a kid that had seizures, and he knew what they looked like. He thought maybe the man was having a seizure because of the nail, buried several inches deep in his brain.
The little dog growled loudly.
A thick line of drool flowed sluggishly from the man’s mouth to the floor.
A stink filled the room. The man had pissed himself.
Keenan and the little dog watched as the man shuddered and flopped on the floor.
After several minutes, the man stopped moving, except for a ragged panting breath that came and went.
Keenan looked at the little dog. “He’s got a knife on his belt, Buddy. I could cut my way out of this cuff. Think it’s safe to try and get it?”
The little dog looked from the boy to the man and growled again, as if to say. “I got your back, Keenan. Go ahead.”
Slowly, Keenan reached out and grabbed the sheath of the knife.
The man moaned. Small bubbles formed in the spittle on his lips. His eyes were fixed on a spot on the wall.
Keenan tugged the blade free, slowly, slowly.
After a full minute, when the man showed no reaction at all, Keenan began to saw frantically at the cuff on his wrist.
The little dog sat at his feet as he cut, cut, cut. The leather, stained with Keenan’s blood and sweat, separated reluctantly.
Finally, the cuff fell away. Keenan stood and took wobbly steps away from the bed that had been his whole world for eight weeks. He looked down at the man on the floor, and felt the heft of the bitter sharp blade in his hand. He could almost feel the knife slipping through the man’s pasty flesh to the organs below, tasting blood, tasting heart blood, slitting the throat and watching blood fountain up until the man was dead—as dead as he had promised to make Keenan and the little dog.
It wasn’t in him. Keenan opened the door and whistled softly for the little dog. He threw the knife in a scrubby bush and began to hobble slowly toward freedom.
VI
It took nearly an hour of labored walking to reach a main road. Keenan had followed the drive that led away from the man’s disreputable cabin, and found a rutted dirt road. The light of the moon was thin, but it looked to Keenan like more tracks ran in and out along the left hand side of the road than the right, so that’s the way he headed. Buddy followed, limping on three paws.
After the first mile, Buddy just laid down and quit, and Keenan ended up carrying him, teeth gritted against the effort. “Neither of us have had much of anything to eat,” he explained to Buddy. “You know what I’m gonna eat once we get back to people?” Obligingly, Buddy licked his hand, as if encouraging him to go on. The boy looked down and smiled before he continued. “Ice cream. About a gallon. Cookie dough. Or maybe chocolate mint chip. What do you think?”
The little dog sighed and snuggled in, closing his good eye. Keenan, his bare feet raw, staggered on through the cold night air.
The road seemed to go on and on forever, but just at the point that Keenan might have given up, curled up on the ground somewhere and floated away, the slight breeze carried a noise to him. The sound of a motor of some kind--a car? No, a truck. A big one. Diesel. Then a car. He walked faster now, and realized he was close to some kind of major road, because he could hear one vehicle after another zooming past.
With a last burst of his failing energy, Keenan made it to the top of a small embankment and crested it to see a paved road.
He half fell, half raced down the gentle slope. He held the puppy with one hand and thrust the other out in the air. “Stop! We need help!” he said, stepping out into the road in front of an oncoming car.
As the driver slammed on the brakes and swerved to avoid him, Keenan collapsed on the road.
The car screeched to a stop, straddling both lanes. Other cars coming up behind him had no choice but to stop, too.
The driver got out and ran to Keenan were he lay on the pavement.
The boy was starved, bones protruding sharply from skin that was bruised, cut or bloody over his entire body. He wore a pair of filthy cotton underpants and nothing else. One eye was swollen shut, and a finger on his left hand was gone, a small oozing stump in its place.
There was the sound of car doors slamming, as people got out to see what was going on. They approached Keenan cautiously. He looked more like a small, demented skeleton than a boy.
“I didn’t hit him,” said the man Keenan had stepped in front of. “I swear. He must have passed out or something. He just collapsed on the pavement right in front of my car.”
“I called 9-1-1,” another man said. “They’ll have an ambulance there in a few minutes. Anybody got a blanket to put over him till they get here?”
Keenan’s lids fluttered. His good eye opened and he fixed it on the man who had just spoken. “I’m alright, mister, but I think my dog is awfully thirsty. Could you find him a drink of water, do you think?”
A teenage girl crouched down to inspect them both. She looked doubtfully from Buddy to Keenan. “Kid, your dog is in pretty bad shape. I’m not sure--”
Somebody said something sharply, and she stopped talking, stood up, took a step back.
A woman came forward with a water bottle and poured some into a paper cup, offering it to the dog. Buddy lifted his head to lap it up weakly then sank back into the safety of Keenan’s arms.
In the distance, Keenan could hear sirens. He frowned and lifted his head to look at the small crowd gathered around him. “There’s a really bad man back there. There’s a road right behind that little hill. Follow it back to a trailer a couple of miles back. He’s in the shed behind the house.”
And with that, the little dog still clutched tightly to his chest, Keenan fell back into unconsciousness.
As he was loaded into the ambulance, he roused briefly as the EMTs debated what to do with the dog.
“He’s not going to make it,” said one. “I can run him to the shelter after we drop the kid off. Jesus, it’s going to take a frickin’ miracle for the kid to make it.”
Keenan opened his good eye and looked at the man who had spoken. “He saved me,” Keenan said earnestly. “He needs help. We’ll help him, right? I can’t get better if he can’t.�
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“Well,” said another voice, after a moment’s silence. “I guess that’s that. Dog goes to the hospital too.”
“Docs are going to love that.”
“Fuck ‘em. You heard the kid. Package deal.”
On the stretcher, Keenan smiled.
VII
When the police made it to Jauncey’s house, he was still alive, still sucking in those faint, rattling breaths and bubbling spit at the corners of his mouth. But he was completely unresponsive to the crowd of lawmen and EMTs that surrounded him, loaded him onto a stretcher, took him to the hospital. He died two days later, without ever regaining consciousness.
Investigation turned up twenty-six bodies on Jauncey’s property. The older ones varied in age, in size, even in sex, but the last thirteen or so were much like Keenan, young boys, on the cusp of puberty, defenseless against the outpouring of sadistic rage that seemed woven into the very fibers of Jauncey’s being. Each one had been buried with a puppy.
There had been no one to mourn them, or even miss them, when they had entered his orbit. No one but Keenan. When he finally turned eighteen, was out on his own, he had found out everything he could about each and every boy. When he could, he got pictures of them, old school pictures, file pictures from social services, and put them up on the narrow halls of his home. When he was alone there, except for Buddy, he talked to them as if they were old friends.
VIII
A thin, pale man in his early thirties sat on the park bench, clad in a black suit and spotless white shirt. He wore dark sunglasses in heavy frames. He was a study in black and white, except for the sunny white-gold spill of hair that flowed down to his collar and across his forehead.
A puppy played in front of him, a stick in its mouth, staggering here and there as the weight of the stick overbalanced it first this way, then that.
A small girl was working her way with deliberate nonchalance toward man and puppy.
The man studied her intently from behind the dark glasses. Long, thin fingers stilled and came to rest on the back of an decrepit-looking dog at his side on the bench. The dog had only one eye; its left leg was missing as well. Its fur was traced with scars and bald patches that had never grown back.