How I Became A Writer
Our cheerleader girlfriends had cheered despite the scoreboard of our lousy school. Don’t think I’m bragging. They were pretty enough and had made the squad with their righteous jumps and rhythm but were maybe the least of cheerleaders. After the game, a lot of nothing had happened as was the usual course of things in our town unless you made something happen. That wasn’t our personality. Our motto: I’m thinking about not going. My best friend and I were small in stature, didn’t play baseball, and in general we didn’t want any trouble. Overall, we felt pretty lucky. After a football game in which we did not play or even watch but mostly stood around the backside of the bleachers talking about bands we would one day emulate even though we weren’t in a band, we drove back to somebody’s house and made out with the cheerleaders for a while. And then somebody’s parents said it was midnight, get lost.
We were coming around a curve at sixty miles per hour when a large dog walked in front of my friend’s Camaro. It sounded like someone dropping an armful of phone books. It was the worst kind of tumbling you could imagine, punctuated by whistling shrieks you could further imagine might come from a black lab humiliated by a car at that speed. My friend pulled to the side of the road, and we checked the tires and underneath to see if we had broken something loose or were leaking fluid. All was OK until we heard the moaning and whistling. Much to our surprise and disappointment, he was not dead. We had no flashlight, of course, being teenagers, but there was enough moonlight and dog whimpers to find where he lay looking at us like he had a question in mind. Because I didn’t think either one of us could take a tire iron to his skull, I suggested backing over him, but my friend couldn’t bring himself to do it. The whimpering did not subside. Wishing does not make anything die. We noticed a light pole down the hill illuminating a trailer, and we could tell someone down there was watching TV because we saw through the window the periodic flashing and changing of the interior. We figured this before us was that trailer’s dog, because no other house was on that road. We walked down the gravel driveway and knocked. An old man came to the door in his underwear. We said we hit a dog, and he said it wasn’t his. Did he have a gun, we asked, and he got it after he put on his pants.
The dog was still alive, and the old man put the gun in my friend’s hand and said, You hit it you shoot it. My friend pointed the shotgun at the dog’s gut. The man said, No, the head. I wanted to cover my ears and look away, but I didn’t. The man was looking at me because I was complicit. The dog still had not died and he was looking up at us like shoot me or take me to a vet, but we all knew a vet would have been no use even if we could find one, so my friend had to pull the trigger, and the shotgun exploded and kicked my skinny friend staggering a little across the road. The man took his gun back from my friend. He shook his head in a kind of disappointment at our lives or his own. When we went to leave, he told us we had to get the dog off the road. My friend looked at me as if to say, Well, I shot it. So it was up to me to drag the carcass by its back legs. I was careful because it seemed he would come back to life and bite me, even though he had no head any more. We drove away, the man and his gun in our tail lights. We drove by that trailer many times in our last year of high school, always slowing down to honor the curve a little bit. I’m convinced the dog belonged to the man, but to this day my friend says no.
I want to say something romantic like: When I was washing up at home that night before bed, I couldn’t get the death off my hands. No. It wasn’t that at all. These days I type as if trying to get that feeling back into my grip, that terror and wonder of being so helpless in the world.