On the radio, they talk about frying eggs on sidewalks downtown, and Nathan and I want to try it, but there are no sidewalks out where we live, only a gravel and tar road out front. We stay outside and in what shade we can find most of the time.
Daddy stays at the office late because there is some air conditioning down there. He comes home and changes his shirt two or three times before bed. He never walks around in underwear. No one does that here.
Once in a while, we drive out past the cotton fields, past the mesquite and hackberry windbreaks, out Preston Road to the country club, where we swim all day. But we can’t take Nathan anymore because of the way he acts, Mama says.
After dinner, I take the trash out. I stand looking at the moon, remembering how Daddy told me about it, and the billions of stars winking, sending me a message that someday I’ll have my own life, not like this.
Clouds pile on one side of the sky. The air feels heavy.
Then come dark clouds, thunder, lightning, and at last rain. Everyone jumps out of bed in the night and runs outside. We are all so happy about rain!
The next morning, everything seems alive again. I lift a pile of wet brush and find a green lizard, which skitters away, and I see a grass snake just slipping out of his old skin. I put the crinkly skin into my pocket. The sun comes out, clouds roll onto the other side of the sky, and Mama and May-May are moving washed diapers out to the clothesline, pinning them one by one to flap dry.
I call Nathan’s name out near his clubhouse. There’s no answer, but I hear voices out front, where there are deep ruts and puddles in the mud, gravel, and tar road in front of our house. Only the rare car passes.
Dams and lakes and rivers and canals can be made in the road, and there’s a whole system built by the time I get there, Nathan and the Breards from across the street working on it, so I join in. We make little walls out of sticks and pebbles, and little boats out of leaves and paper and twigs, and float them there in the street. We make canals connecting the puddles. I take out the snake skin and trade it to Nathan for a promise that I can borrow his Captain Marvel comics for a week. He has a huge stack in his room.
The littler kids, the two Annies, and the dogs Hap and Hazard play and run around us. Hazzy can barely walk. She lays her big belly full of puppies on the grass by the side of the road, but Hap keeps running around and around us.
After a while, Daddy’s car starts coming out. He stops at the end of our driveway, when all of a sudden a pickup truck comes around him from seemingly nowhere, honking its horn, going fast.
We jump aside for the truck to pass, mud splashing, but Hap is on the other side of the road. He tries to run across, but it’s too late and the truck’s front wheel hits him square. Both wheels run over him, and the truck just keeps going around the corner.
Hap squeals and squeals. He’s broken, bleeding, the back part of him stuck flat into the tar pavement, the front part of him yipping, whining, pulling, fighting to escape.
Daddy struggles out of his car.
We run to the spot, yelling, then all standing helpless. Hap is halfway lying in the street, his back part wrecked, bloody, and stuck in the tar. He’s trying to get up, but he can’t. Hazzy’s shaking all over, sniffing, licking him, yipping, whimpering.
Annie’s running on her four-year-old legs up to the house for Mama, who’s already running out across the lawn in her apron, saying, “Oh no, oh no.”
Then Mama’s kneeling in the wet, hot, tarry road, begging Hap not to die, sobbing, “Come on baby, come on,” and trying to unstick his legs, his belly, saying, “Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.”
Ricky Breard is saying how their dog Skippy got hit by a car once but now he’s fine.
“It wasn’t me, Jane; it wasn’t me!” Daddy shouts.
Mama does not look at Daddy.
Daddy comes over, saying, “It’s no use,” but she pushes him away.
Hap stops struggling. His eyes are fading. Hazzy licks Mama and whimpers and whines and shakes all over. Mama weeps openly, shaking all over, as well, picking Hap up carefully, saying things I don’t understand, holding him out in front of her, hurrying back to the house, and hiccupping like a little kid. I never saw her cry like that.
We follow in silent awe, Annie and Nathan and I. The other kids stand in the street. I look back at Daddy. Daddy turns and clump-CLUMPs toward the house as fast as he can.
In the house, Mama lays Hap on the back porch on a towel May-May brings and then calls the vet. Hazard howls outside the door. Mama cries into the phone. Annie and Nathan and I watch Hap make noises like a dog dreaming; then he stops. Hap is dead.
I hear Daddy in the bathroom, door locked, throwing up. Then he comes out, grabs his cane, and drives away.
We bury Hap in a Neiman’s box next to the woods, Mama acting mad, not saying much, Nathan and May-May helping to dig the hole, May-May singing, all of us crying, Hazzy wagging her tail, licking our ankles as if pleading.
Nathan and I sit out there for most of the rest of the afternoon, something bad hanging over us. Then Nathan has to go home. I stay there with Hap, picturing him stuffed into that box, buried down there under all that dirt, stiff and matted now, alone.
I keep thinking of a dead pet turtle we buried once, how when Nathan and I dug it up later, only the shell was left. I draw a picture of the turtle shell in the dirt with a stick.
Then Hazzy starts digging, whining, digging with more and more excitement, and I can’t make her stop. I run in to tell Mama, who’s in there crying over a popping skillet of rice fritters. Mama turns off the stove, wipes her face with the dish towel, goes out and puts Hazzy into the pen, where she barks and whines and howls alone for the rest of the night.
Daddy comes back for dinner, acting like nothing’s happened. Mama feeds Trudy early and puts her to bed, and Annie spends the night with the Breards, so it’s the three of us at the table with creamed chipped beef on toast, which Daddy makes jokes about, saying how in the army they called it S.O.S., and Mama frowns about that, so Daddy starts getting in a bad mood, eating up all the rice fritters. When I ask for another one, he says I’m getting fat.
Daddy goes out to the toolshed after dinner, until Hazzy’s barking makes him come in mad again. Mama goes out and talks to Hazzy, but when she comes back in, the howling’s worse.
She puts me in the bathtub, where I carve the Ivory soap into the shape of a turtle as I listen to them fighting.
“If you’d just leave the dog alone out there, she’d stop.”
“She’s never been alone in her whole life, Dick.”
“So what! She’ll have to learn it now!”
“I just can’t be that heartless about it.”
“Really! You care more about those dogs than you do about me!”
Daddy slams out, roaring away again in his car. I wonder if Daddy will be killed in a car wreck, and I wonder if we will be sad.
I prop my Toni doll up on the table next to my bed, turn her head so that her blank eyes look over at me like a blind person might do.
Mama comes in, her face red and puffy. We say the “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” prayer, and we God-bless all the usual people, and tonight we God-bless Hap and Hazzy, as well. And we God-bless the puppies not yet born.
“Mama, do dogs go to Heaven?”
“I don’t know. But I think they should,” she says, kissing me on the cheek, then turns out the light and goes out. It surprises me the way she said this in such a real-sounding voice. Was she telling me that the truth is she doesn’t really know anything about Heaven?
I hear her making phone calls as I lie there in the dark wishing I had someone to talk to, thinking about how Hap was alive one second and crushed the next, how everything changed so fast. I keep picturing the back part of his body stuck into the tar, how shockingly flat and wrong it was, mushy, twisted, blood seeping out. How he wanted to leave that ruined part of himself behind.
The next morning, Daddy’s back again and in bed. Hazzy’s barking
again. We get up and Mama lets Hazzy out, and the dog runs straight to Hap’s grave and starts rolling on it, then digging, then rolling, whimpering, digging some more.
Mama makes me go back and watch Annie and Trudy. She puts Hazzy in the pen, then makes Cream of Wheat, and sits me down to feed Trudy. She drinks coffee, smokes a cigarette, makes phone calls, looks out the window, then goes outside again.
I feed Trudy, making sure most of it gets in, keeping her fingers out of it. Her little blue eyes look around and at me. I wonder what she sees looking up at us as if from the bottom of the pool, seeing the splashing undersides of things.
Daddy’s up. I hear him clumping in the living room, in the hall, then back in their bedroom. I try to finish the Cream of Wheat before he clumps in here in his bathrobe, all cheerful, saying, “Don’t you think your Mama would like it if I cook breakfast?” He paces up and down, clapping his hands, getting out the big black skillet, some bacon and eggs.
Mama comes in. “Why are you doing this, Dick?”
“I thought you might like some breakfast, Jane.”
“You’re a little late for breakfast.”
“Well, how about lunch, then?”
“Oh, all right, go ahead, I guess.”
Daddy looks at her for a long moment.
“Oh come on, Jane, it’s not the end of the world, is it?”
She won’t look at him.
“If you want to help me, why don’t you come out back and help me dig up Hap. We need to make that hole deeper and rebury him.”
“Jane! This is my day off. Isn’t that what we have a yardman for?”
The skillet’s smoking, bacon burning. “Uh-oh,” he says.
“Well, why would you make a big mess in here for me to clean up on the maid’s day off? Don’t I ever get a day off?” She picks up the baby and walks out.
Smoke is filling the kitchen. Daddy takes the skillet outside all the way to the woods and throws it down, and then he stays out there. I can see him from the kitchen window and through the trees smoking cigarettes and stomping around, and then he disappears into the toolshed.
The week before this, I’d heard them fighting in their room, Mama saying, “But why would he do that?” Daddy slamming doors, pacing like a madman, then rushing through the house to the back door, Hap and Hazard scurrying away, Daddy yelling, “Why? Because he’s a bastard, that’s why! He’s a goddamn bastard!”
Mama’d said he shouldn’t talk that way, and then said, “Why would they?”
“Because I’m the goat, Jane, I’m the goddamned goat!”
“The goat? What does that mean, the goat?”
“Can’t you ever just once try to see it my way?”
“I don’t understand why you can’t just get along.”
“There’s one hell of a lot you don’t understand, Jane!”
Then he put his cane through the glass door on the back porch, Hap had peed on the door-mat, and Daddy had hit at him with his cane.
Now I go back to my room and listen to the radio. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. Lamont Cranston traveled to far-off lands, where he found the power to “cloud men’s minds” so he could sneak around watching them, and they couldn’t see him. That sounds good to me. But I’d rather have the power to fly up away from them, just lift off like swimming, push high up out of their way, hover above them and watch. Then I wouldn’t need any other powers.
The next morning, George comes and digs up Hap’s box, which is already fraying, and sits it next to the hole as he digs deeper. Hazzy watches from the pen, yip-barking, biting the chain-link fence, trying to dig under it. Nathan’s here to watch. George keeps stopping to wipe his face with a big red handkerchief. Dirt keeps falling back into the hole.
“I think that’s deep as I can go right here, ma’am,” he says.
George puts the box in, starts shoveling damp black dirt back in.
I ask Mama why Hazzy won’t stop howling, and Mama says, “Because she thinks he’s still there, and she has to stay loyal to him no matter what.”
“But why?”
“Because she has to, that’s all.”
LATER, DADDY TAKES ME WITH HIM to a company ball game, where we see Uncle Ted talking to some friends, but he never speaks to us, even though we are right there. Daddy drinks from a flask and gets into a fight in the parking lot, and his driving scares me all the way home.
As we careen into the driveway, Mama comes rushing from the dog pens carrying something. She hurries in the back door, and Daddy and I go in after her.
“The puppies! The puppies are coming!” She’s on the phone, begging somebody to please get off the party line.
“Maybe that dog will settle down once she’s had those puppies,” Daddy says, heading down the hall to their room.
“But it’s too early! It’s not time yet!” Then she’s talking to the vet. I stand there until she looks at me and says, “Go to bed; you’ll see them tomorrow. It’s late.”
I go to bed. Hazzy’s not howling. Mama’s rushing around in the kitchen, then goes out. I can’t hear Daddy. The house is quiet, but the attic fan is turning, turning.
Finally. Early morning. Six puppies, tiny, hairless, pink, wet-rat things, not like the cuddly fat puppies I remember ever seeing. They’re in a nest Mama has made of frayed towels and an army blanket, out in the toolshed. The newborn smell is strong.
“You can’t play with newborns,” she says, “but they’re big enough to live, and they’ll grow soon.”
Hazzy’s trembling, licking the blind pink wormy things all over, until finally some start to nurse. Mama kneels down with a happy, tired look on her face. I like Mama’s face with no makeup.
“I was up all night with them,” she says.
“Can I get Nathan?”
“Not now.”
On the school bus, I tell Nathan the puppies have come. The kids gather. “I want one!” “Can I have one?” Girls ask if they’re cuddly and cute.
“Not yet, but they will be when they get bigger,” I say, acting like I know all about it.
Later, I run out to look. They’re not wet, but they’re still blind and pink. And one is not moving, out on the edge. Mama takes it away and calls the vet. Now there are five.
Daddy comes home from work late, yelling in a garbled not-language. He goes to the wood bin. Mama and I stand in the kitchen, looking at each other, hearing him slam back out of the house again, but we don’t hear the car. Mama picks up Trudy.
“Bring Annie,” she says as she hurries us back to our bedroom. “I want you to stay in here with the babies.” Then she goes.
I stand in the doorway, listening. I hear Daddy return to the house, bumping into things, talking like he’s being strangled, Mama following him, saying, “Dick! Dick!”
Then it’s quiet. I sneak down the hall, get a glimpse of Daddy with a gun in his hand.
“Dick, you just can’t do that!”
“He’s trying to kill ME, isn’t he?”
I hear the car starting up. I hear Mama dialing, talking to Nana. Then I hear her making more calls.
Daddy bursts back into the house. I run and jump into bed, pulling the covers over my head, and Annie climbs under there with me. Trudy’s already asleep in her crib. Then we hear nothing for a long time.
I wake to the sound of a car outside. The next thing, strange men are talking in the living room, Daddy shouting. Something falls; something else crashes.
Mama’s shouting, “Dick, just go along! Don’t make it worse!”
Daddy yells with a cry so terrible, I hold my breath. More garbled noises, scuffling, bumping, loud bangs, crashing, a door slamming, then a car with a siren driving away.
I run down the hall into the living room. All the lights are on. Things are broken, chairs fallen, the bonsai tree with the little fishing Chinaman, broken, dirt across the floor.
Daddy’s gone.
Mama stands in the middle of the room, her white body tense, her
white face not crying. She’s not going to tell me.
“What are you doing in here?” she shouts, “What did I tell you? Get back to your room right now!”
I’m not included. I’m not even liked. I lie in bed, looking at the dark.
But I am included with the puppies. The day after they take Daddy away, another puppy dies. Mama and I bury it next to Hap’s grave.
The vet comes out to our house, looks at Hazzy, gives her a shot. He says something is wrong with the dog, with her milk or something. She has a fever. She can’t nurse the babies. We have to take the puppies away and put poor Hazzy back out into the pen by herself, and she starts up again with an even more righteous howl.
Mama comes in my room in the dark early mornings with a flashlight, saying, “Come help me,” and we go out to the toolshed to feed the puppies with eyedroppers and dime-store doll bottles, with hot-water bottles, with a ticking clock in a blanket.
She shows me how to hold a puppy and gently urge his tiny lips to crack open and start pulling in the milk. She talks to the hairless pink thing and to me constantly, urging each puppy in turn to take something. Sometimes it works, but not for long. We can’t tell if they’re getting enough, and outside we hear Hazzy whimpering and howling.
Another puppy dies. Three left. We change the formula. We feed more often.
I follow Mama, do what she does, carry things, stand by, ready to help. Mama is unflagging, never late, never failing, a dutiful soldier in her schedule of feeding, winding the clock, refilling the rubber bottles with hot water, no matter what time of day or night. But even with all the things Mama does, every day they get weaker. You can tell when one is about to die because it will just give up, like it’s too hard to eat or keep breathing. Another one dies, then another, until there’s only one pup left.
It was always the strongest one, and Mama thinks we can keep it alive. We’ve never checked if it’s male or female, but Mama gives it a name and calls to it, putting the tiny drops on its tiny pink lips, tries to gently pry the dropper into its mouth. Once in a while, some milk slips into its mouth. Once in a while, it moves its lips as if to start sucking, but it won’t keep this up for long. It will not act like it wants to take the milk.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 14