by Ed Kurtz
“A dog.”
“I can see it’s a dog, wise-ass. What the hell is it doing in my house?”
“I…I guess I adopted her.”
“You adopted her.”
“Yes. Someone beat her pretty bad. I rescued her, really.”
“That right? You a hero now? Super-Leon, the hero?”
“No, dad. I just—”
“You just decided to bring a goddamn dog in my house, I know. Good god, son! That’s the sorriest looking mutt I’ve ever seen.”
“Like I said, she got beat up…”
“Christ, Leon. How come you can’t save a woman and bring her home? Why do you got to get involved with some shitty dog that don’t even belong to you?”
“Dad…”
“What the hell is wrong with you, Leon? Are you stupid? Is that it?”
“I’m not stupid…”
“I swear to Christ sometimes I think you’re retarded, son. I think your head got crushed when your momma was squeezing you out.”
“Dad, come on.”
“Your head got crushed and your momma, she coddled you, is what she did. So you turned out both retarded and queer. Jesus Christ! I should have a kid like that? The hell’d I ever do?”
“Okay, pop. Okay. I got to get supper started.”
“The hell’d I ever do, Leon? Huh? The hell’d I ever do?”
“Spaghetti tonight,” Leon said on his way to the kitchen.
* * *
The headache was getting worse. After supper he took four extra-strength aspirins, but even after an hour there was no relief. The pressure kept mounting, punching against the inside of his skull. He lay down on his bed with a warm, damp washcloth on his brow and tried to go blank. The dog—permanently banished to his bedroom by Harold’s decree—lay quietly beside him. Both of them in pain, both suffering in silence. He could hear the television blaring in the living room, a raucous cop drama. Every actor on the show shouted every word they said. Every ten minutes or so there was gunfire and screeching tires. He wished he could ask his father to turn it down, but he knew that would be more trouble than it was worth. At the very least his bedroom was relatively free of the asphyxiating odor of cigarette smoke that permeated every other square foot of the house. He could breathe. The window he kept cracked open helped with that.
A few minutes after eleven the noise from the living room cut out when Harold switched off the television set. Leon heard his father grunt and groan as he lifted himself out of his chair and shambled across the house to his bedroom. For the next hour, Leon lay awake listening to the shuddering wet snores in the next room, filtered through the rhythmic throbbing in his head.
He felt the damp warmth under his legs around midnight. The dog had pissed on the bed. Leon sat up to take care of the mess, but his head swam and his vision blurred and he was compelled to lie back down immediately. The dog gave him a pitiful, repentant look. He stretched his arm out and scratched her behind the ears. He did not blame her. In her position, he decided, he’d probably piss the bed, too.
He moved over, away from the damp spot, and tried to fall asleep. When he finally did, at about half past one in the morning, he dreamt of Ami. He was at the edge of the lake and she was on the other side, but when she spotted him she walked right across the still surface of the water like Jesus in the Bible. She was stark naked, her smooth, dark skin rippled with sinewy muscles, and although it was only a dream Leon averted his eyes. She began to speak to him then, in a language he could not understand, her voice growing continually louder as she spoke until she was shouting at the top of her lungs. At long last, she screamed his name, over and over again, her voice grating and masculine and cruel.
“Leon! Get up, damnit!”
He awoke with a ragged gasp when his father hit him in the chest with the flat of his hand.
“That goddamn dog shit on my floor because you left your door open. Go clean it up. Right now.”
Leon examined his surroundings with bleary, sleep-deprived eyes. The dog was in the corner beside the closet door, her head between her paws and trembling slightly.
“Now, Leon,” Harold boomed as he limped out of the room. “That’s strike one. There ain’t gonna be a strike two.”
Leon dropped his legs off the edge of the bed and rubbed his face with his hands. The smell of the urine on the sheets hit him and he remembered the piss. His father hadn’t said anything about it, so he probably hadn’t noticed. Two packs a day for sixty years did not leave much in the way of olfactory acumen. Leon got lucky on that one.
As the scales fell from his eyes he looked at the alarm clock beside the bed and resolved at once to call in sick. He was too exhausted and his head was still killing him. And, of course, he had a mess to clean up.
* * *
In the afternoon, after he carried the dog outside for the sixth time in four hours, Leon went into the garage to check up on his arthropods. He saw Pablo right away.
“My God,” he rasped.
It was almost exactly like the ant, only larger, as if to accommodate the larger host. Green fuzz speckled the dead spider’s head and eyes and mandibles, blossomed out into a coarse, scaly conglomerate of knobby buds, and two looping horns comprised of tightly woven fibers jutted out from the center. The soil surrounding the corpse was littered with tiny green spores, as were parts of the clear plastic walls on the inside. In the opposite corner, the sole surviving cricket clambered in a perpetual circle. Leon watched it for several minutes, as captivated as he was aghast. The cricket never slowed down. It, too, was obviously infected.
Leon took the terrarium to the backyard and burned it with some kerosene from the garage. The flames erupted quickly and the smoke was black and oily. Leon stood away from the blaze to avoid breathing in the fumes.
Seventy-five bucks up in flames, he thought ruefully.
7
The fat man at the door showed up unexpectedly while Harold was watching his afternoon court programs and Leon was napping with the dog. Harold screamed across the house for Leon to answer the door, and when he did—his eyes still crusty with sleep and his hair sticking out in every direction—the big man immediately jabbed a thick finger in Leon’s chest and started shouting.
“Who in the Sam Hill do you think you are taking my dog?” he hollered as if they stood several yards apart. He wore a tattered mesh ball cap with the stars and bars and red capital letters that spelled out southern pride. “That’s theft, you oughta know. I can report you to the police.”
He pronounced the word poe-leese.
Leon gawped with a furrowed brow and his mouth hanging open. His sleep-addled brain required a minute to process the encounter, but once it caught up he closed his mouth and pursed his lips. He played it cool.
“Excuse me, but who are you and what are you talking about?”
“Don’t you try that crap with me, boy,” the fat man growled. “I checked every vet in a ten mile radius from my house. You took her in, and then you took her home. That dog is private property, and that makes you a thief. Get her out here right this minute or I’m gonna have you arrested.”
“Give the man his dog, Leon,” Harold called from the relative safety of his easy chair.
Leon narrowed his eyes and sighed.
“Dad, do you mind?”
“I mind very much, thank you. I mind having that piece of shit dog in my house. I mind my son stealing other people’s property. Yeah, wise-ass—I mind. Give him the dog.”
The fat man smiled a nasty, yellow smile.
“Mind your daddy, son,” he said through his tobacco-stained teeth.
“You know, I could have you arrested for what you did to that poor animal,” Leon seethed. “What do you think about that?”
“I think you’d need a lot more than your word to make something of it. And something tells me your old man sure as hell ain’t aiming to back you up, neither.”
“Man’s right,” Harold said. “I ain’t.”
“You
see?” said the fat man. He hooked his thumbs into the belt loops on his blue jeans and stared Leon down.
Leon stood firm.
Harold, conversely, heaved himself up from his chair, shuffled to the back of the house, and seized the dog by the collar. He then commenced dragging the terrified animal to the front door, where he nudged Leon aside and presented the dog to the fat man.
“Sir,” Harold wheezed. “I’m Harold Weissmann, and this sorry sack of shit is my boy. Now I’m awful sorry about what he did, but I’d be mightily obliged if you’d take your dog and not press any charges. Thing is, the boy’s not exactly right in the head.”
The man bent over to take the dog, who whined and winced from being forced to walk on its broken paw.
“Well,” he began, “far as I can tell he found Bess in the wood back of the house. I don’t guess that’s the same as taking her from my yard or nothing.”
“Not the same,” Harold agreed. “Dumb as all hell, but hardly criminal.”
“Dad…”
“Shut it, Leon. Mister, you have my apology. And if there’s anything else I can do…”
“Dad!”
“I said shut up, damnit!”
“This asshole nearly killed this dog!”
Harold hauled back and slapped Leon across the face as hard as he could. He was a frail man, but the slap had enough force to knock Leon back and stun him considerably. Leon gingerly touched his face, which stung from the impact. His father’s eyes went wide and wild, a familiar, quiet rage building behind them. The Weissmanns stood still and regarded one another, one with anger and the other with fear.
It was the fat man who broke the silence. He dragged the quivering dog away from the door and said, “I’ll just take my dog and go.”
“He’ll kill her one day,” Leon said to his father.
Harold said, “Another word out of you and I’ll bust your goddamn nose.”
The fat man loaded the dog into the cab of his pickup and got in after her. A minute later he was gone, but Leon and Harold continued to stare one another down.
After a long, tense silence, Leon said, “I named her Ami.”
“You didn’t name her shit,” Harold said. “She wasn’t yours to name.”
With that, Harold limped back to his chair and cranked the volume on his court show. A grossly obese woman was explaining to the judge that her sister intentionally wrecked the car that they shared to keep her from driving it. The sister kept interrupting and shaking her arms in the air.
Harold chuckled.
“Stupid bitches,” he muttered.
Leon rushed to his bedroom, shut the door and wept. In the past couple of days he had gained a rare arachnid, a dog and a friend. Now, as far as he could tell, he’d lost all three. The spider was dead, the dog might as well have been, and Leon sharply doubted that Ami would consider him a friend when she found about the fat man.
He felt weak. Cowardly. Everything his father always said he was. And helped make him to be.
Harold erupted into a peal of uproarious laughter in the living room. Leon assumed he was already drunk, or well on his way. Since the sun was beginning to set, he was behind schedule. Most days he was in his cups before four.
Leon wiped his eyes and frowned. In his mind’s eye he could still see that redneck’s grinning, pockmarked face, the idiotic hat perched on his head. Southern Pride. He balled up his fist and threw a hard punch at a pillow on the bed. And another. And then several more. He’d heard it was a good way to vent anger and pent up aggression. He found it wholly unsatisfactory.
I can report you to the poe-leese.
Leon ground his molars together and sneered. They were ruining everything, his father and that awful man. How could he bear talking to Ami, confessing his loss of the dog? How could he even show his face at the office ever again, knowing how much she would resent him?
…have you arrested…
Leon’s right eyelid twitched. He could still smell the oily smoke from the burning terrarium. He could still hear his father’s phlegmy laughter. He could still see the fat man’s nasty grin. He clenched both fists until the fingernails dig into his palms. His forehead ached, his pain having moved away from the temples and concentrated there.
…bust your goddamn nose…
Leon put his shoes on and stomped out of the house.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Harold shouted after him.
But before he was finished, he was yelling at a closed door.
* * *
Dane Honeycutt jammed the tip of a hunting knife into the edge of the can and set to cutting the lid off. He then dumped the contents into a battered saucepan and lit the pilot with a match. Shortly the beans and franks began to bubble. Dane leaned over to sniff the steam that rose up from the pan; his mouth watered at the tangy aroma.
While he waited for his supper to heat to a sufficient temperature, Dane peered through the window over the sink at the backyard. The security light affixed to the back of the house shone brightly on the doghouse in the far corner of the yard, in the far corner of the chain link fence. He could not see Bess in the darkness of her hovel, but the chain that connected her collar to the post in the ground was visible. She was still in there.
“Damn dog,” he groused.
He cracked open a can of Pearl and dumped half of it down his throat before stirring the beans some more. His stomach rumbled. He figured Bess’s was, too, but she was just going to have to deal with it. There was no supper for her tonight.
Dane killed the beer, crushed the can in his large, meaty hand and tossed it at the black garbage bag on the floor. He missed, and the can ricocheted off the dirty linoleum, clanking across the kitchen and into the hall. Dane ignored it. It was time to eat.
He grabbed a bowl and dumped the beans and franks into it. He found a spoon in the sink and opened another beer. Outside, the security light winked out. Then came the knock at the door.
Dane dropped the spoon into the steaming bowl and grimaced. He was not expecting anyone. He never expected anyone. Yet the knocking persisted.
“What in hell,” he grumbled.
He crossed the kitchen to the hall and plodded up to the door. The light on the front of the house bathed the front yard with a harsh, yellow glow. Dane bent over the bureau beside the front door, piled high with unread junk mail and hunting magazines, and pulled open a creaky drawer. From the drawer he produced a snub-nosed .38, one of several weapons he had stashed throughout the house in strategically chosen locations, just in case. There were three rounds in the cylinder, and Dane made certain that he didn’t have an empty chamber at ready before opening the door.
He flipped the safety off with his thumb and unlocked the guard chain.
* * *
Leon could clearly hear someone knocking around just behind the door, but no one was answering. So he knocked again. Every time his knuckles struck the door, the growing pain in his forehead amped up a notch. But this was something he had to do. He did not fully comprehend what he was doing, only that it was necessary—for himself, his own self-worth. For the dog. For Ami. He knocked again.
His brow was dappled with dirt and sweat from the trek through the woods. He’d started at the far side of the lake, where he and Ami found the dog, and went into the trees until he couldn’t hear the interstate anymore. Eventually the trees thinned enough for the light from the redneck’s property to peek through, and Leon found his destination.
The house was dilapidated and decrepit, a crumbling jumble of chipped paint, rotting siding and a roof that looked as though it might cave in at any moment. The yard was overgrown where it wasn’t dead, and strewn with trash and rusty car parts. The place was little more than a shack, though Leon could not help but acknowledge that his father’s house was not much better.
He knocked once more. At last he heard the lock crunch open and the door cracked, groaning at the hinges. The fat man who took the dog away appeared in the dark doorway, his f
ace the picture of annoyance. In his hand, pointed down at the ground, was a small, silver gun. Leon swallowed hard.
“You,” the fat man grunted.
Leon looked him in the eye and remained silent.
“What the fuck are you doing at my house?” the man demanded to know. “This is private property. You see this?” He brandished the weapon. “I’m within my rights, you little bastard. I could plug you full of holes and I’m within my rights.”
Leon’s head throbbed. The fat man blurred, as if Leon’s eyes were getting bad reception.
“I’d like to come in,” he said softly.
“I don’t give a shit what you want. Get off my property.”
Blood pulsed in Leon’s ears. It was almost deafening.
Buh-thump. Buh-thump. Buh-thump.
He cradled the side of his head in the warmth of his palm and took a deep breath.
“Let me in,” Leon said.
“What’s wrong with you? I’m the one with the goddamn gun, here. I ain’t gonna warn you again. In sixty seconds I’m gonna start shooting, fuckstick…”
The world careened, turning sideways on its axis. Leon had to spread his feet apart to maintain his balance. His stomach flipped and his eyes felt hot. He soldiered through it and raised his head to gaze directly into the fat man’s eyes.
“Let me in,” he said again.
The man wrinkled his nose and squinted. His upper lip quivered and he lowered the gun. He looked terribly perplexed and, Leon thought, perhaps a bit afraid.
“I…you can’t…,” the fat man stammered.
“LET ME IN!” Leon howled.
The fat man dropped the gun. It struck the cement slab in front of the door and bounced off into the tall grass and weeds. The man’s eyelids slowly peeled back from his bulging, gleaming brown eyes. They welled up and spilled thin streams of tears down his pockmarked cheeks. He swayed for a moment as if highly intoxicated, then stumbled to one side to permit Leon ingress.
“Ah…ah, yeah,” the man rasped mindlessly. “Yeah, sure…ah, come on in.”