Knucklehead & Other Stories

by W. Mark Giles

  “Really, Colm. You’ve been over this and over this.” Beverly watches Zelle. She puts one foot forward, then draws it back. “Your daughter’s about to take her first steps. Shouldn’t you have a video camera or something?”

  Colm glances over from where he’s standing by the curtain just as Zelle makes a decision. She falls back on her bum, scoots onto all fours, then crawls over to the rooster. “Ma-ma-ma-ma.”

  “He’ll never pay the fines. That’s the thing. He’ll ignore it and just keep whipping that dog into a frenzy.”

  “So why bother.” Beverly crouches down, and stuffs the rooster back in the box. Zelle fingers the button that activates it. “A little harder, Zelle.”

  “Ma-ma-ma,” Zelle says. She pokes at the toy, and the rooster pops up.

  zelle @ 9 months

  [Gaddie’s Lament]

  You dropped Zelle. You didn’t drop her, she fell out of her high-chair. Beverly yells at you and you want to slap her face. You’ve never slapped a face in your life, never hit anyone, never spanked Colm as a boy, but you want to slap her face. You imagine the sting in the palm of your hand, the red outlines of your long slim fingers rising on her cheek. You know you did up the safety strap. Did you hear it snap closed? Beverly demands of you. You want to slap her. You turned your back for only a few seconds, you knew the strap was done up. Was it tight? You wonder if Zelle managed to undo it. There was a two-year-old boy in Utah who undid his car seat buckle and wandered away into the woods to freeze to death. Zelle’s only nine months old, she can’t even pick up her own food, for christ’s sake, Beverly says. She takes the Lord’s name in vain. Both of them. Their deliberate blasphemy.

  It would never have happened, you say, it would never have happened if you hadn’t had to scrub the highchair tray. You had to take the tray across the kitchen to scrub away its filth. Zelle was in the chair, but then you saw the crusted porridge, the smeared avocado, the gluey banana bits. You wouldn’t serve your granddaughter on such a filthy tray. Your granddaughter deserves better. It would never have happened if. Does it ever get washed? You are too old, you think, to be cleaning house for your lazy godless daughter-in-law and your feckless son. Not too old physically. You are able to walk to great distances, carry heavy burdens, bear privation and austerity. You proved that in Africa on your mission. But for this. Why does she insist on going to work? Why does Colm allow it? The most important job she has is here, at home, with her child, with your granddaughter. You stayed home. Even after Alec died, you stayed home. You ask now if they have life insurance and they scoff at you. You could tell them. The tray was filthy. Zelle is fine, babies are resilient, you say. But you called Beverly anyway. You called and she left the rehearsal hall and now she says she’ll never get another contract with that theatre and it’s your fault because Zelle fell out of the highchair. Are you happy? Isn’t this what you wanted? A stay-at-home daughter-in-law?

  Beverly goes back to work and you move the fridge and stove and sweep up the dust bunnies and dried elbow macaroni and shrivelled peas and toast crusts and hardened bits of orange peel. You put Zelle in her crib where she’s perfectly safe and let her cry and cry and cry and cry, but in twenty minutes or a half an hour she’s asleep and she sleeps and sleeps, and you clean behind the fridge and stove and save the sweepings in the dustpan on the counter to show Colm when he comes home from work. Look what was behind the stove. And Zelle wakes and she cries, but you finish the last of four loads of laundry, folding the clothes and towels into towering stacks on their queen-size bed. You pick up, you dust, you chop vegetables for supper. When Colm comes home, the house is neat and clean and smelling of onions and the laundry is clean and piled high on the bed, and the dustpan of sweepings is on the counter. You say nothing, you hold Zelle, quiet and smiling in your arms, you say nothing, let the home speak for itself.

  Zelle cries in her crib, but she hushes as soon you hold her. She coos and giggles and settles for you like she does for no one else. The grandma factor, Colm says. She fusses and cries, but she settles for you. So different from Colm as a baby. But the same too, the same wonder of the little life in your arms. You can get lost staring at a baby’s face. Alec loved to watch Colm sleep. Zelle looks like her grandfather in her eyes and her little ears. Your husband had the smallest, cutest ears, perfect shells with hardly any lobe. Zelle has his ears, you can stare at them as Zelle coos in your arms. Colm was a calm baby, so small, smaller than Zelle ever was. A wee bairn, not even five pounds, they wanted him in the incubator but you pleaded, and old Dr. Williams showed up at last smelling like whisky and pipe tobacco, he missed the delivery, and he said, Oh, he’s a fine healthy lad, he just needs his mom. So Colm stayed with you in your ward, the nurses cluck-clucked, it was out of the ordinary in those days, but Alec’s insurance covered a private ward, this was before Medicare, you had your own insurance then. Dr. Williams was so old-fashioned, he even delivered babies at home, he’d be right up-to-date today. He did insist that bottle-feeding was best for a baby, especially a small one like Colm, so those first few days in your private ward, you held Colm in your lap and let him suck from the easy-flowing rubber nipple of a glass bottle. When your milk let down, the nurses bound your breasts with a wide elastic bandage—oh how they ached, a burning throbbing ache—but after a day or two you stopped leaking milk every time Colm cried and the ache went away.

  Beverly and Colm insist on breastfeeding Zelle. Those first few weeks they stayed with you at your condo before they moved into this house, Zelle crying and crying, Beverly in tears. Colm blocked the doorway while you tried to enter the room with a bottle. He was always so stubborn. All of them. They made their choice and would not listen to your reason. Sometimes mother does know best, you would say. Beverly was mad. Angry and unreasonable. Her nipples cracked and bleeding, she forced her breast into tiny Zelle’s crying mouth. Colm hovered over them both, mother and child, trying to offer advice, getting his own hands in there to help, until Beverly would explode and push him away and run to the bathroom where she would lock herself in with Zelle.

  The dog next door starts barking, and a car with a loud muffler roars to life in the street. You hear the profane voices of men hollering gruff goodwill to each other. The dog barks. You warned them about this neighbourhood. It’s old, it’s second generation, no kids, bad schools. Indians from the Sarcee reserve are bussed in and cause trouble. One of the women in your ladies’ auxiliary at the church works for the school board, you know the trouble spots. Beverly always corrects you when you say Indian: First Nations, she says, and they call themselves Tsuu T’ina. You warned them about this neighbourhood. It is beneath their potential. Full of old people who can’t keep up their houses. Men who run plumbing and heating businesses from their garages. Revenue properties rented out to who-knows-what. You hear their neighbour’s dog barking and Zelle stirs. She spits out the nipple of the bottle of expressed breast milk you are feeding her. Her bright blue eyes are wide, beseeching you. There, there, you say, rocking her gently. You sing her a song. Jesus loves you, this I know. The dog barks again and Zelle squirms and sets up her crying. You take her to show her the dog through the side window. There’s the doggie, you say. The happy terrier runs to and fro in the back yard on the other side of the chain-link fence. The man stands in full view, smoking. He is unkempt and unruly, swearing at the terrier and another big dog who does not bark. You wave to him when he looks your way, and you lift crying Zelle’s hand and wave it too. You do not like the look of this man, but you believe in the Christian responsibility to be kind to your neighbours. You are ashamed too of Colm and his behaviour, the escalation of bylaws and enforcement officers and community mediation with strangers over a barking dog. It is unneighbourly and ungodly. How is this man Colm such a stranger to you now, when Colm the baby was your world?

  Sometimes Colm would let you take him in your arms, an unfamiliar embrace, when Beverly locked herself and Zelle in the bathroom of your condo. You would lead him downstairs and tell hi
m stories of how he was so small as a baby, and how you fed him bottle after bottle he was such a greedy gus, and you would get him to admit that formula might not be such a bad idea. But Beverly refused to consider it, and Colm always fell under her sway, and then he would block the doorway, refusing you, his mother, near. They haven’t seen the babies you have seen starving to death in Africa on mother’s milk. They haven’t witnessed the miracles that you have—that after two days on formula the African babies have a glow you can see even through their black skin, the hollowness in their eyes gives way to the unmistakable signs of spirit. They haven’t seen what you have. And look at Colm, a formula baby. Beverly too, you suspect.

  Zelle @ 15 months

  Colm’s dog is sick. He goes to the back yard and calls, “Doxie! Doxie!” He has a bowl of canned dog food in one hand, and a horse pill in his pocket that he needs to get her to swallow. She doesn’t come to his calling. “Doxie, c’mon girl.” There aren’t many places a dog the size of Doxie could hide in the back yard.

  Colm checks the long, narrow space between the garage and the fence. He looks under the skirt of the blue spruce by the back gate. “Doxie-kins. Dr. Ballard’s special treat.” Canned dog food is a sick-dog meal. She isn’t by the composter either, but he almost slips and falls when he steps in a fresh runny stool. In that corner of the yard, near the vegetable patch, the lawn is freckled with yellow-green splashes of Doxie’s diarrhoea. “Damn,” Colm says. “Doxie! Doxie!”

  At that moment, Ted seems to kick his way out of his house. He has one arm wrapped around an enormous stainless steel bowl that is mounded high with what looks like popcorn topped with gravy. In his other hand, he grips the Yorkshire terrier.

  The sleeves of Ted’s black AC/DC T-shirt have been ripped or hacked away, exposing beefy arms dotted with blue smudges of tattoos. His green sweat pants are greasy and stained. Grey jockey shorts peek through a collection of holes just to one side of his crotch, suggesting a long-ago accident with battery acid. Yellow bedroom slippers are wedged over his feet. His long hair, shot through with grey, is gathered in a loose ponytail. The whiskers of his thick beard have been gathered into braids, like dreadlocks on his chin. The small dog squirms in the man’s encyclopedia-sized hand, emitting a breathy sound like an orchestra of cats coughing up hairballs.

  A chain rattles on the neighbour’s patio as the other dog, the rottweiler the size of a small pony, cautiously emerges from a collection of lumber, a lean-to-like kennel of boards piled against the side of the house. He slinks towards the man, the stump of his tail and anvil-shaped head kept low. “C’mere, Fuckface,” Ted says to the big dog. He puts the bowl down. “Here’s your fucking snack.” Ted eats a couple of handfuls—it is popcorn covered in gravy—then offers some to the snuffling terrier clenched in his fist. The small dog slurps up the food, then hisses and snaps in the direction of the rottweiler. Fuckface hesitates, then inches forward. He slurps up the food in a few gulps, and then licks the bowl clean, keeping his eyes on the terrier.

  Colm tries not to look. “Doxie?” he calls. He checks the gate latch and the door to the garage to make sure they’re shut tight. He’s aware that his neighbour is watching him, and he can hear the other man laughing with a slow chuckle, “Heh-heh-heh.” Colm ignores it. Ted leans on the low chain-link fence between the two yards, laughing harder. The terrier gasps in his arms.

  Colm swings towards him. “What exactly is so funny?” He is much closer than he would ever wish to be. If he’d hold out the dog dish in his hand, the terrier would eat the food.

  “I can see your shit-eatin’ Doxie,” Ted says. “And she’s not looking so hot. Heh-heh-heh.” Colm looks where he is looking, and sees a single paw protruding from underneath his deck. “Doxie!” he says with alarm. There doesn’t seem to be enough room for a Labrador retriever in that narrow space. He scrambles to his hands and knees; with difficulty he pulls Doxie from her hiding place. Her chocolate-brown fur is matted with feces. Her eyes are half-open and glazed. Frothy drool hangs from her slack jaw. Colm puts his ear to her chest cavity. Her heartbeat is racing and irregular.

  Ted still snickers, and his dog barks silently and madly. Colm turns on him. “Stop that! She might be dying.” He picks up Doxie, who makes an awkward bundle in his arms. “Doxie, girl, it’s all right. We’ll get help.”

  The neighbour hawks and spits into Colm’s peonies. “It’ll serve you right if your fucking dog croaks.” He smashes his way back into the house.

  Zelle @ 12 months

  [The Dogcatcher’s Soliloquy]

  I am not the most popular person to appear on your doorstep. I am in league with those workers who are almost universally despised—the meter maid, the traffic cop, the clerk at the vehicle impound lot, the tow truck driver, the bill collector, the tax assessor, the security guard at the airport, gate, the clerk at the unemployment office, the customs officer. We are the low-level functionaries of the bureaucracy who are inevitably the source of your grief. If we don’t cost you money, we cost you time. And we try your patience. If there is a positive result from your encounter with us (you get your automobile back, your unemployment cheque is issued), it is only achieved through hardship (your car was towed, you lost your job). I know only too well the bittersweet reaction engendered by my presence at your door.

  I still call myself a dogcatcher, though my title is Animal Services Bylaw Enforcement Officer. But “dogcatcher” has an old-timey feel to it, like “chimneysweep” or “fishmonger.” When I think of myself as a dogcatcher, I can place myself in a tradition—my professional forebears helped keep the streets safe from rabid mongrels, protected children from packs of wild dogs. There was likely a dogcatcher in attendance when Socrates drank his hemlock (or perhaps on the tribunal that condemned him). I can imagine a dogcatcher in a Charles Dickens novel, during the plague of London in 1666, in Roman times. I’m surprised there is no “Dogcatcher’s Tale” in Chaucer.

  Mirabile dictu, the dispute between Mr. Cope and Mr. Sinclair is not the most extreme to which I have been a party. I say “a party to,” because, alas, the dogcatcher is never a neutral player in these dramas. My part is usually that of the intermediary agent who holds the power, but who stands aside of the central conflict—Creon to Oedipus, Virgil to Dante, Merlin to Arthur, Tashtego to Ahab. As agent of the complainant, the dogcatcher does the duty of avenger, more often than not taking possession of someone’s cherished pet; as the unwelcome messenger, the dogcatcher makes parley with the offending party, offering the terms and conditions for the return of the captive. Emotions can run high, and not infrequently these emotions are directed at me. I vividly recall the vicious dog court hearing at which I testified, where the judgment went against the owner. He went berserk—he threatened me, he threatened the neighbour whose Pekingese had been killed, and whose son had been bitten and required forty-two stitches in the face. He threatened the judge, he threatened the court bailiffs. His was the rage of Achilles who would challenge the very gods. The case of Sinclair v. Cope was mild indeed.

  For one thing, Mr. Cope never attempted to lay a counter claim. In a barking dog dispute, particularly after multiple citations, the defendant usually turns the tables. I know Mr. Sinclair has his own dog, a fine-looking Lab, but it was never the object of my duty. Both, men, while harbouring obvious antipathy towards the other, remained civil. When I suggested to Mr. Sinclair, as is our policy, that the two could engage (free-of-charge) the services of a community negotiator trained in conflict resolution, he was polite but firm: “I don’t speak with Mr. Cope. This is not a point for negotiation. His dog is a nuisance.” Mr. Cope’s response was equally blunt: “I don’t like to go out of my house,” he said. “And what’s to talk about? My neighbour’s a jerk, he harasses me, I could sue his ass. But I’ve got a thick skin. Like Shakespeare said, Is not a terrier a dog? And does not a dog bark?”

  On the one hand, I sympathized with Mr. Cope—I issued a total of ten notices with fines and three warnings in a period of ba
rely seven months. (Not that Mr. Cope ever made any effort to pay his penalties.) Yet I understood Mr. Sinclair’s position too—the law puts the duty of controlling a dog to its owner, and the same law allows for citizen complaints, the levy of penalties and the intervention of the court. And I must add that I never attended Mr. Cope’s home when his dog was not barking.

  In the end, it was only when I fulfilled the destiny of my role that the situation escalated beyond the limits of civility. Having determined that Mr. Cope owed $2,700 in fines, having heard from his own lips that he had no intention of changing his or his dog’s behaviour, having witnessed the dog and its never-ceasing barking, having consulted the Animal Services Department’s Policies & Procedures, having discussed and documented the matter with my supervisor, I recommended that the matter be brought before the court and the dog be declared a nuisance dog. The law allows for this. By a quirk of the legislation, it does not allow for the entry to the owner’s premises and seizure of a nuisance dog as it does for a dangerous dog. First we must catch it running at large. But I knew that was inevitable. It is what I do. I catch dogs.

  Zelle @ 3 to 8 months

  They spent several Saturdays arguing their way through furniture stores. Eventually, piece by piece, they bought:

  ☐ A queen-size bed with an arts and crafts headboard

  ☐ A refectory table at an auction

  ☐ An antique sideboard at an estate sale

  They couldn’t decide on a couch. As the months rolled by, they began to leaf through the flyers that arrived in their mailbox every Wednesday and Sunday. They found they needed:

  ☐ A lawnmower, hedge clippers, rakes, shovels, hoes, spades, garden forks, peat moss, manure, soil in plastic bags, a hammer, a drill, a saw, a tool box

  ☐ A coffee maker