by Lisa Rusczyk
CLEO
I’ll jump right into where the important things happened, the ones that would take me to where I am now. I can tell you have a busy life and I’ll try to keep things as relevant as possible. A little background is necessary, but I’ll start with the person who shaped my entire life. Patrick.
I was born in Nebraska and raised on a farm. My father was a veterinarian and my mother never left the house. My younger sister was a blonde and bragged to me about it from the first time my Dad called her Barbie. It became her nickname.
In 1970, I was sixteen. Barbie was fifteen. We went to school in the nearby town. It took Dad forty minutes to drive us there every morning, and then he would go to his clinic a few streets over. After school we’d walk to the clinic and work there until he drove us home.
I loved the clinic. It smelled like horse hay and dog baths. My sister hated it. She said her ears rang from the barking kennel dogs.
Nebraska is beautiful country. Don’t guess you’ve been there. You seem like you’ve never been south of Maryland. That’s not an insult, just an observation.
I was feeding a black lab after she came out of surgery on the day I met Patrick. She had her front left paw removed. Her owner ran over it with his riding mower. It was four A.M. when we met the man at the clinic for emergency. He had smelled like piss and cherry wine when he brought the screaming dog in.
It was a Saturday in September, one month after tenth grade year started for me.
I fed the doped-up dog puppy food that I’d soaked in water to soften. She licked her bandaged paw-stub and whistled through her nose like an old car that is tired of stopping for traffic lights.
I got angry, but Dad was a professional. He came up behind me when I was staring at the poochie - her owner had named her Buck even though she was a she - and he loosed my hands from the cage bars. He said, “Accidents happen, Cleo. That’s what we’re here for.”
Around six that evening, I turned off the office lights and went back to look at Buck. Her owner had not come back to pick her up. Dad was doing something with the horses in the care stable, and I was waiting for him. When I heard the office doorbell ring, signaling a visitor, I felt fresh anger, thinking about the neglectful man who had finally come to get his crippled pup. But it wasn’t the man waiting for me when I reached the front desk. It was Patrick, and here’s how he looked the first time I saw him.
The clinic faced west, and the daylight’s end shined around him. I could see sweat glistening off his tan skin, and short, raven curls of hair clung to his temples and forehead. His hair was a little longer than most boys I’d known. It touched his ears, like a boy on TV. His eyes looked black in the shadows, but somehow I knew they were as multi-faceted as the coat of a rabbit pausing on new morning snow.
He said, “Hello, Beautiful.”
I answered with, “Enough of that. Can I help you?”
“I’m here for Gypsy.” His voice was like chocolate milk where you pour way too much chocolate in the mix when your mother’s not looking.
My voice was steady, but my hands behind my back shook like faulty sprinklers. “We have no Gypsy.”
“My Pa brought her in. She lost her foot.”
“Buck,” I said, and I covered my mouth.
He said, “You’re excused. Now, can you get my dog for me so I can see what the bastard did?”
I smiled at his cursing. I thought he must be at least seventeen. “Follow me,” I said.
I led him back to the black dog who was digging her teeth into the top of a bandage.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and stood and stared, then wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. I opened the cage.
“Gypsy,” I said to her in my doggie voice. “Look who’s here.”
Her eyebrows poked up to her master, and again came the squeaky brakes. “I know,” he said to her and rubbed her behind the ears. The way he looked at me then I’ll never forget. How did he look at me? What was it like? It was as though he said aloud, “You know, only you know.”
I didn’t watch him out to the parking lot, but I found out later he only rode a little green bike to and from where he needed to go. How he rode home with that dog I never found out.
But isn’t Gypsy a nice name?
It turned out Patrick was an Irish boy, and a Catholic. His family had just moved from Philadelphia. Some vague reason, something about property inherited, though no Catholics had ever lived in or around the town. Patrick and his four brothers began attending our school soon after that Saturday. Although Patrick was two grades older than me, his brother Sean was in my class. They all had vibrant blue eyes, but not Patrick. What I had thought at first was a tan was his normal skin tone. He was darker than the other brothers, and there was gossip, of course. Small towns love gossip about new folks, as much as they love their reverends. We found out from the dime store owner that the mother was only half-Irish and had brown eyes. That stopped the Catholic-haters’ slandering for a while.
Nobody found out about Gypsy. My dad and I were the kinds that don’t tell.