Bad Dog - Tex Gresham

I grew up in Texas. This happened when I was around eight years old.

My neighbor across the street was a boy named Lee who was more white trash than me. The kind of white trash that thinks the best way to get rid of an old couch is to put it out by the curb. The kind of white trash that had a frisbee on the roof of their house for about fourteen years. Poor. White. Trash.

Not that I’m pointing the finger. Notice I said more white trash than me. I was poor, a little trash, and am so white my skin often looks like frozen chicken skin. I don’t tan; I blister. When I was hungry, I sometimes watched fuzzy public access cooking shows to feel full.

Lee and I weren’t best friends. Not at all. He was the only kid who lived on my street so we did white trash stuff together. Built forts out of old boards and dead branches in the wood behind the burned down elementary school. Swam in the nearby creek that was mostly made of stagnant runoff. He and I caught two turtles once. He took one, I took the other. We’d take care of them as long as we were friends.

One time Lee and I were in his garage playing with real guns. His dad’s guns. Unloaded. Dry firing at each other, laughing because we didn’t know the power a bullet had to steal life. I was supposed to be watching my grandma, but that’s boring work for an eight year old. Mom said she was sick -- which I later learned meant she had dementia. But at the time, I didn’t really care. She was old and that’s what happened to old people — they got old. And old ain’t the business of eight year old little white trash boys. Plus she had Tourettes and always made this Woof woof sound, which annoyed that little version of me.

So I was in Lee’s garage, the two of us shooting each other in some variation of hunter and prey. But in the middle of us playing, Lee stopped, pulled out his penis, and started pissing on the floor. I couldn’t do anything except watch, confused. He kept panting like a dog. Like an animal not yet housebroken. His eyes drifted apart, loose and no longer obeying the laws of this world. I wanted to scream, but before I could, his panting turned to laughter.

He said, “Do it. It’s fun.” His voice sounded rough, like he’d just swallowed a handful of broken bones. And something in his voice convinced me. Cast a spell on me. I started to unbutton my pants, but stopped with a jolt when the door to the house burst open like a gunshot.

Lee’s dad rushed in and saw Lee pissing. I half-expected him to grab a newspaper, roll it up, and smack Lee in the nose and yell Bad boy! and then stick Lee in a crate.

But that’s not what happened.

His dad grabbed Lee by the hair and flung him like butchered meat across the garage. Lee slammed into his dad’s deep freezer. His dad started wailing on him with closed fists. Lee didn’t have the breath to scream. But he cried. And bled.

His dad grabbed Lee by the back of the neck and rubbed Lee’s face in the puddle of piss. Not the newspaper method. The rubbing-the-face-in-the-mess method. One of the most cruel and unusual ways to enforce housebreaking in a dog. I once saw a friend’s dad do this to their shar-pei when it pooped in their living room and it made me angry. What could be the benefit of shoving a dog’s face in its own mess?

His dad looked back at me and calmly said Go home like he wasn’t beating the shit out of his son. Like he wasn’t shoving his son’s face in piss. Like Lee, something about his dad’s face looked like dripping molasses. Nose and eyes drifting in different directions. A mouth stretched so wide that it’d be funny in a cartoon. But in real life, it made my stomach turn sour like a washing machine full of lawn clippings. It was like his skin was sliding off something underneath, maybe the real version of himself. But before it slid all the way off and showed me what that something was, I heard him say Go home again.

I stepped back until my lower spine hit the doorknob and sent a jolt of pain up into my teeth. I winced and reached back, opened the door. There was a fear that if I moved quick, I would disturb the attention he had on his son and bring his fury on me, so I kept it slow, easing out of the garage. And before I shut the door, he added with a smile: Your turn comes at night.

I showed myself out, shuffling past piles of dirty laundry, past engine parts on a dirty dining room table, past Lee’s half-naked mom who was high on mai tais and meth. She wore a t-shirt, underwear, and a top hat covered in cigarette burns. There were a dozen half-empty peanut butter jars in front of her. Her stare never left the TV, which played this house’s version of the Looney Tunes. She turned to me and said with slurred words, Want me to make you a pot pie or somethin, hun? and then sucked some peanut butter off her finger. On the TV: the Roadrunner bashed the Coyote’s head in and started to literally fuck its brains against the desert pavement. Lee’s mom laughed so hard she choked on the peanut butter, a wet plorp in the back of her throat.

I hurried out the door of a house I never went back to, across a lawn of overgrown grass filled with garter snakes. Back to my house.

Lee’s dad was known around the neighborhood as the crazy racist hunter guy. His truck had a big Confederate flag on the tailgate. He once pulled a dead deer out of the back of his truck and gutted it in his driveway as the elementary school bus drove past. He once knocked on our door and tried to give us a deer leg to eat and then fed some meat to our dog, drunkenly laughing. He once threatened to gut my grandma because he thought her constant and uncontrollable Woof woof was her making fun of him. He once called me over to his garage and pulled a severed deer head out of a garbage bag and slung blood in my face and then threw the head in his deep freezer.

That’s all I could think about that night as I was trying to fall asleep.

That’s not totally true.

I thought about it all day. Watching Jerry Springer in the safety of my living room, grandma behind me going Woof woof. Eating dinner with my family. Taking a bath. Brushing my teeth. Feeding my turtles. In bed with my feet protected under the safety of the covers.

But the words Your turn comes at night kept me from ever falling asleep. My mind raced with all the ways in which my turn would come. The pit of my stomach turned painfully at the thought of my turn becoming my parents’ turn, grandma’s turn. Lee’s dad coming in through the kitchen window, crawling down over the sink like a lizard, his biggest rifle in his hand. Oozing like mud from shadow to shadow until he reached grandma’s room first. Her little Woof woof right before the first shot rips through the house. Dad rushing out to see what the noise had been and catching the second free bullet. And on and on until Lee’s dad stands over my bed, smiling, and shows me what the end of his barrel looks like. And all I’d be able to do is stare back like one of his trophies he’s got stuffed and mounted in the room where he keeps all his secrets and demons.

Maybe he wouldn’t use a gun. Maybe he’d use the same knife he used to gut his animals. He could move from room to room and slit an entire family’s worth of throats before anyone noticed they were dead.

Hours went by like this and every little noise prepared me for the worst.

But then the sky turned that shade of deep-ocean blue that shares whispers of the sun on its way to the horizon. That had always been a time when I felt safe to close my eyes and dream. Night was over and day was on its way again. After a nightmare, there was no better remedy than knowing another day would burn away the bad things that happen in bad dreams. And I was starting to forget the words Lee’s dad said and feel that safety again when I heard the familiar rusty creak of the front door.

Not the kitchen window, but the front door.

I wanted to get out of bed, to run to my parents’ room and scream and shake dad awake, but all I could do was pull the covers over my head and listen.

A thump, like a booted footstep. Somewhere in the living room.

A scrape, claws lightly touching glass.

A barely audible unghf, like someone out of shape trying to get up off the floor.

A hum that I thought I recognized. Was it the microwave? Did Lee’s dad turn on the microwave?

If he was in the kitchen then he’d be at my door any second. I eased the covers down, just enough so I could see my doorway, the darkness beyond it. I watched, waited for his figure to appear from the darkness, fade in like a ghost returning from the void. Could I hear his breath out there in the hallway or was that just the microwave turning and humming? And for the first time I asked myself: if what he did to his son was what he does to people he’s supposed to love, what the hell is he going to do to me?

The sun eventually came up and put some brightness on everything. But I wasn’t convinced it was over. And I was further unconvinced when there was a loud bang from the kitchen. A muffled sound like a gunshot through a pillow.

“What the hell?“ That was Dad, still in the bedroom. He ran out, and I could hear him run down the hallway and into the kitchen. I wanted to scream for him to stop, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was a high-pitched wheeze that crawled out my shaking mouth.

I heard the microwave door open and Dad screamed, “Oh Jesus God. Jesus God. What the fuck? What the absolute fuck?”

The pop I’d heard in the kitchen was the sound of a turtle exploding in the microwave. Its shell was still intact, but all its insides had sneezed out, like someone’s idea of bad art. It was all still steaming.

Dad tried to blame me, like I was young enough and irrational enough to put my own turtle in the microwave. But I went into my bedroom and got my turtle out of its little tank and showed him. He still wasn’t convinced. Still thought I had something to do with it.

But when they found grandma later that day, he started to change his tune a little bit.

One of the old men who walked around our little rural neighborhood like a lawman of the Old West found grandma floating in the creek Lee and I always swam in. She was face down, floating like a bloated shopping bag. Had been that way for hours. Probably since around that time of the morning when the sky begins to lighten and brings whispers of the sun on the horizon.

While my mom spent the morning in tears, because it was her mother after all, the old lawman guy and my dad put it together like this:

Grandma woke up early in the morning and having reached the final frayed strand of her mental rope, wandered outside, found a turtle and brought it back inside thinking it was something that would be good in the microwave or thinking the microwave was something that would be good for the turtle. And then she wandered out and waded into the creek, where she probably thought she was back in bed and fell asleep.

But I knew where she got the turtle. It wasn’t something grandma found outside. It was Lee’s.

I heard Lee’s dad’s voice say your turn comes at night and I could see him easing through the front door, putting Lee’s turtle in our microwave, slipping into grandma’s room, helping her out of bed with a hand over her mouth so we wouldn’t hear her little woof woofs. And I wonder if she realized anything as Lee’s dad helped her into the creek, if she knew that it was her turn.

I didn’t leave the house that day. I watched Jerry Springer and ate cereal. I tried to distract myself with comic books and cartoons. Tried to be a kid. But the events of the morning told me otherwise. The time to be blissfully unaware was behind me. And in a way, I guess my turn had come that night. A death of a different kind.

The next morning, on a Saturday that was exceptionally bright and somewhat burned away the nightmare of the day before, I felt comfortable enough to go outside and do outside things.

Lee’s house was empty.

No trucks. No confederate flag. No sign that anyone has ever lived there. The front door was open like a mouth, giving me a glimpse at its endless throat. The lawn seemed to be more overgrown than it was the day I left and never returned. The house seemed to sag, as if there was a sinkhole slowly pulling at the center of the foundation. And it was empty.

I didn’t understand. I wondered if they’d even been there to begin with, if there was ever a boy named Lee who was a little more white trash than me. And if there was never a boy named Lee, then there was never a man named Lee’s dad. But if that were true, why couldn’t I forget the words he said?

I was too afraid to ask my family if there was ever a boy named Lee. I didn’t want them to think their son was crazy. So I pretended that the empty house across the street had always been that way. And eventually, their absence was never noticed and never felt.

Except for the times, even to this day, when the sun is about to dip towards the horizon and night starts flooding in like a high tide, and I remember those words said to me in that garage, like a premonition I’ll never forget until I to find my own version of becoming a bloated shopping bag floating in a creek:

Your turn comes at night.

***

Tex Gresham — n., 1) wrote Violent Candy. 2) takes photos. 3) made movie. 4) writes screenplays 5) is nobody. 6) has website: www.squeakypig.com