Adventure
The children did not ask for a dog, but one day this thing showed up and it was a dog. The parents had bought it. It was a puppy, a boxer with a pedigree. It was the family’s first dog, but not their first animal.
They already had certain rules in place regarding their animals. The dog was not allowed inside the house. The other animals were not allowed inside the house either. There was a room outside the house dedicated to the other animals, but there was not one for the dog. The dog was not allowed in the house because it was not potty trained, and it was not allowed inside the room with the other animals because it would eat them.
The other animals were rare birds. They were there before the dog showed up, so they took over the spare room. They were all of different colors and species, and I think they were collectibles. They never flew, but they knew how. Some shared cages, but no more than four birds were in one single cage. Some were alone and we assumed it was because they might be sick.
There were dozens of bird cages, and they were put on top of little shelves around the room. I could hear the birds all the time, but I only saw them twice. Children were not allowed inside that room either, and so the only times I saw the birds were illegal times.
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Vee and I broke into the spare room one day, which meant we just opened the door that was always unlocked and went in. Her parents told us not to do that, but we liked the risk. We noted which birds looked alike and hoped they would kiss. Birds kiss with tongue, you know. Their little beaks. The two white birds did kiss and we were satisfied. Afterward, we went to the backyard to play. We played on the patio sometimes, but not often since it was a flat cement square and there was nothing over there. Today the new boxer is there. Vee told me her parents are concerned because he does not lift his leg to piss. It squats instead, like a lady dog.
“See, it’s squatting again!” Vee said.
I could see it, but was focused on following the piss as it slid down the hot cement and dried quickly. The shiny line cutting through the dull cement. I wished he would not ever lift his leg to piss. It was better this way, better for me anyway.
We watched the dog for a little while. He peed again, then we got back to our activities inside Vee’s house. We did not know how to play with a dog, what he was for. Later I walked home and wanted a dog for myself, but not one just to look at.
Next thing you know, the boxer, whom they had named Doofus, was a big, mean dog. Give me that name and the neglect and I would be mad, too. Up until then, Doofus had barely been beyond the patio, and was never taken on a walk. I don’t think he had a leash or anything. His entire world was made of cement and everyone disliked him.
They had cut off his ears and his tail on purpose, and it took him weeks to recover. Now he had pointy ears and stub for a tail, and we thought it was normal for dogs to run in circles so many times like that with their tongue sticking out. We couldn’t go to the patio anymore because he was always there and there was no way you would get out alive.
One day the twins came home with us from school and we all went to Vee’s house instead of mine. Hers was the house with the dog and the more permissive parents, even though my backyard had grass and no animal was there spinning in a death circle.
The twins were Vee’s and my best friends in school. That was edgy because Vee and I were girls and the twins were boys. One of them was crazier than the other, and you could tell it from just looking at them. The crazy one had short, disheveled hair, and the more mellow twin had smoother, longer hair. The two of them had dark circles around their eyes and were named after angels. They had an older brother with a double name, which meant their family spent four names on just three boys. Their father was an alcoholic and their mother painted watercolors. Their mother was friends with my mother and Vee’s. The three of them often went fast-walking at the park, leaving us alone like the animals.
Vee’s mom worked in an office as a decorator of interiors. She had decorated my bedroom, and the first time I saw it all done, I was in a trance. She had spent days dabbing a little ball of cotton on gray paint and then on the white wall, making it look like a cloud when you saw it from a distance. My favorite wall. Evidently, Vee’s mom was good at her job and was right to spend her time doing it. She picked the four of us up from school and dropped us off in front of her house, but before leaving she whispered something to Vee. A threat. She said, behave yourselves or else, and she used her index finger to point at Vee’s heart. Then she went out again on what I think was a cotton ball-related errand.
Since the twins were there, Vee needed to show off as this was her house. We went down past the bird room and toward the gated back patio. Vee dared to go into Doofus’ territory while we watched.
“I bet I can last five seconds,” she said.
“There’s no way you can even make it two,” one twin said.
“I bet I can make it five seconds and scoop that poop over there too.”
“You’re so stupid,” the crazy twin said, “you just bet against yourself.”
“Vee, please don’t. We can do something else,” the nicer one said.
I go, “We can do something else, like the birds.” And I pointed to the bird room.
Vee disregarded our sensibility and breathed in deep, inhaling courage. She stepped down to the gate, Doofus growling and salivating by the entrance.
Turns out she did make it longer than five seconds, time which the dog used to scratch her entire back, hard, like a massage for pain, leaving marks and breaking the skin. She showed it to me later, when I helped her clean up in her mother’s bathroom with their nice toiletries. Some little soaps.
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She needed the excitement more than me, and you could tell from her ideas. One day she decided we would take little steps back to the classroom after recess, going the speed of ants. We had only made it a few yards when the teachers came for us. Vee argued that little steps are as good as any, that we were on our way the best we knew how. For me, I just didn’t want to go back to class.
/ / /
We had counted ten seconds. It was like Doofus was trying to climb over Vee to get out of that hell. She did not make it to the poop, and in fact she didn’t get anywhere but just past the gate. She barely made it out and now she was all messed up. You could see her chest shaking as she tried to breathe normally. The twins were not impressed because they were concerned.
That had been enough trickery for a day so we went back inside the house. Think of it, that was the only time the twins came over to Vee’s.
Years later when we were all eleven, we dared the twins to sneak out so we could meet at the corner after midnight, after our parents were in bed. We wanted to smoke cigarettes and do something wrong. Vee and I stayed up until two in the morning, taking turns to peek out of the kitchen window and wait for their signal but they never showed up.
After that day with Vee’s scratched up back, this dog got even bigger. He had still not been taken on a walk, much less seen the outside of that patio. By then, we learned that if we wanted to continue on, we would need some help. When Vee and I needed to get to the garage where we kept some supplies, we asked her older brother to restrain Doofus so we could zip past. At the time, we had been helping an ant colony and looking for the queen. Rob was never willing to help, and even when he was, he would only hold Doofus for a couple of seconds, so we had to run to not get bit. From the garage, we looked out the window toward the patio, and if he noticed us, Doofus would slam his body against the glass to try and get to us. This all sounds bad but it was good for us. We were learning about adventure.
This is how things went for a while. Then, they got worse. I was not around when it happened, but I know it was true because I saw the blood later on.
The story goes like, Rob had the twins’ older brother over one day after school, a day when Vee and I were at my house making clay turtles. We assume Rob and John Lucas were egging each other on like we had done with the twins, and we assume their games were riskier because they were older. That’s how we assumed it started, but not how we were told it happened.
The story they told us was that John Lucas was minding his own business in the kitchen, eating a sandwich or something like that, when Rob went down to feed Doofus. On his way out, Rob left the kitchen door ajar – the door that opened up to the stairs which led to the bird room and then to the patio. As Rob unlocked the gate to go into the arena and feed the dog, Doofus trampled him, food bowl and all, and raced over to the kitchen where John Lucas was eating his sandwich. The dog ran like a fugitive, his one chance at freedom. It was like all those months of running in circles had wound him up, like a pull-back toy. The inertia had him slamming into the walls, jumping fast and high and biting straight into the first thing he saw, which was John Lucas’ shoulder. He did not let go at first but when he did, he left the mark of every single tooth on both sides of the boy, with deeper holes where the canines were.
The next day Vee and I got a load of the story by overhearing our mothers while they fast-walked. It was not a good time for anyone, but there were no charges and no bad blood.
Later that week in school, I wanted to see the marks. During recess, everyone swarmed John Lucas as he pulled his collar over, stretched it to the very edge of his shoulder and took out the bandage. He was still in a state of raw meat and you could see some of the bone inside, wet from all the blood. Needless to say, that was the end of Doofus. We assume he was put down but that was not what we were told.
It was the end of the dog and all that fear. The family cleaned up the patio, even though we never played there anymore, and we did not sneak in to see birds again. Vee’s family got some rare fish later down the road, and they lived.