As You Were Read online

  She sobs while he sings about the whiskey-drinking Indian, a Marine who went off to war, and how he died drunk in a ditch in two inches of water. He sings about the white men who stole their water rights and how the sparkling water stopped. Her grandson was born where the water stops—in Anishinaabemowin, that is: Nah-Gah-Chi- Wa-Nong. Not that she can speak a word of the language. Not that she lets on.

  ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN

  BRUTUS IS YOUR FIRST DOG, despite his not being a dog. He is a wolf. He’s not a wolf-dog or a wolf hybrid, but a timber wolf, also known as the gray wolf, also known as a western wolf. Your first dog, Brutus, is a no-shit wolf. But you don’t really remember him. There are a few flashes of his fur, flits of memories, and a handful of pictures faded from forty years. Brutus’s pups you do remember, but not him—at least, not while the two of you lived under the same roof. You do, however, remember him at the zoo, after Dad got rid of him. The rest of Brutus’s stories are told to you, not by you, so they’re not really your stories to tell.

  Then came Fifi, or so you’re told. He was a Pekinese that belonged to Grandpa Bullshit before he died. Fifi was a birthday present, in a roundabout way, seeing as how Grandpa Bullshit died the morning you turned two. To you, Fifi is a word for dog, so when Fifi dies, Mom takes you to the pound to pick out another Fifi.

  The way she tells it, you toddled from kennel to kennel until you called to get her attention, saying, “That my Cici.” You can’t pronounce, Fifi, but Mom knows what you mean.

  Cici is this matted mess of an Old English Sheepdog that delivers a litter of pups less than a week after you bring her home. Ten puppies, to be exact. There are plenty of pictures of Cici, her pups, and you sitting on the front porch of the single-wide trailer home and playing in the snow.

  Not that you remember any of it.

  But then comes Scrappy. Grandma Audrey breeds and raises and sells Boston terriers. She takes it so seriously she holds a wedding ceremony for her dame and sire. Mitzie wears a tutu, and she clips a bowtie to Buster’s collar.

  Grandma can’t sell Scrappy. He’s tiger-striped brindle, not black and white. He’s bigger than all his brothers and sisters, too. Too big, according to the breed standard. And he’s always fighting, so Grandma names him Scrappy, like Scooby-Doo’s nephew.

  When you go to live with Grandma, Scrappy sleeps in your bed. While picking strawberries down by the boathouse, Scrappy comes up over the hill when Grandma calls your name. From that, she knows where you are and that you’re all right. When he comes flying down the dirt road and up onto the cabin porch and scratches at the screen door enough to tear it open and crawl through to get to her, Grandma knows something is wrong. And she’s right. A black bear is chasing you and the buckets of berries you won’t put down. She saves the day by clanging some pots and pans together, without ever leaving the porch.

  When you sit with the soles of your feet kissing the rippling waves working their way toward shore, waiting for one of the sunfish to bite, a lone wolf walks out of the woods and stands between you and the cabin. Scrappy issues from the ether with hair raised and runs it off. When you start school, he howls the entire first day until you step back onto the stoop. Every day after, he sleeps on the mat in the mudroom waiting for four o’clock. The one time he isn’t waiting is the day he dies from a series of violent seizures on the way to the vet’s office. You don’t get to say goodbye, but you can always run your fingers along the passenger side of the dashboard in Grandpa’s Chevy Impala station wagon, where Debbie sat with him on his last car ride when he seized and then came to and then seized again and came to again until he didn’t come to anymore. He left bite marks in the pleather and foam of the dashboard, still trying to fight, not wanting to say goodbye until you came home from school.

  The class spent the day at the Duluth Depot on a field trip. You come home bursting with excitement about all the things you saw at the museum. But what you don’t see makes you forget all the things you did see. Scrappy isn’t sitting in the sun next to the mail slot waiting for you. Instead, you see Dad and Grandma standing in the kitchen. The closer you get to them, the more of the family you see waiting.

  “Where is Scrappy?” you say.

  No one answers.

  Dad pulls out the step stool from behind the garbage can and tells you to sit down. It’s the same step stool he sat down on when he tried to teach you how to tie your shoe. Dad kept telling you something about a rabbit and a tree and the rabbit going down into the hole and slapping you each time you messed it up because you weren’t grasping what he was saying because his hand hung down at his side, hovering right over your head. So he had to keep slapping you off the stool and down onto the floor until you got it right. But you stopped getting up off the floor, and since you couldn’t seem to learn something so simple, he bought you a pair of Blue Light Special Velcro shoes instead. A simple enough solution. When you wore them, the other kids teased you and picked on you and pushed you around on the playground. But you got beat up enough at home and weren’t having it at school too. Remember the crowd of kids who gathered around? Remember their chant?

  Fight

  Fight

  Who is the nigger?

  Who is the white?

  Remember coming home and showing Grandma the white slip you got for fighting? While she read it aloud, Dad put his coffee cup down and looked at you, seeing the obvious signs of a struggle, and asked if you won. When you do win a fight, he leaves you alone, goes back to his coffee without laying a hand on you. Like today.

  So, once more, sitting on the step stool, you look up at them and ask, “Where is Scrappy?”

  Someone says, “He went to sleep,” and you glare at Dad with shiny eyes and ask, “Why?” and he says, “It’s okay to cry. It’s okay.”

  But it’s not okay. When it comes to Dad and anything with four legs and fur, it’s not okay.

  See, one night, he staggered after Debbie, chasing her from room to room with his leather belt in hand. This belt has dueling rows of steel grommets running the length of the entire thing, end to end, from the fold to the tip. Think seventies biker apparel.

  He loves that belt.

  He loves how it leaves perfect little rows of welts.

  He loves to fold it in half and snap it.

  He loves how the sound makes you jump and whimper in anticipation.

  He loves to feel the warmth of the leather in his hand once he’s done.

  It’s a point of pride for him to crack it hard enough to make flesh poke through the center of the grommets for a fraction of a second, like Grandma and the wooden spoon with a hole in it.

  Debbie darts into the back bedroom and hides beneath Mom and Dad’s oak-framed king-sized bed. By her side is her tiny teacup poodle, defending her, baring its teeth, growling, snapping at a hand twice its size lunging at the both of them under the bed.

  In the interest of turning minutes into seconds, the dog becomes too brazen and charges too close, and he snatches it up. And with dog in hand, yelping for someone to help, Dad belches out, “Get out from under that bed, little girl.”

  But Debbie silently protests.

  For him, there is no counting to ten, or even three. He doesn’t do all that. Instead, he flings the tiny teacup poodle against the far wall of the trailer’s back bedroom. It lets out one final yelp while falling to the floor, where the rest of its breath leaves its lungs. Or maybe it yelps while flying through the air, toward the wall. Or maybe it happens so fast that it happens all in the same second, and the sound simply hangs in the air while it’s still falling to the floor, like a gunshot that drops a deer instantly.

  Either way, he warned her.

  She makes sure to stay beneath the bed until his boots leave the room and their clomping stops shaking the single-wide, and all she can hear is his telltale snoring echoing back down the hallway. She doesn’t dare reach a hand out from beneath the bed to stroke her dog’s fur one last time. She doesn’t know what to do. Most children would
never think to hide beneath a bed to escape a monster. It’s not a typical childhood lesson, but neither is let sleeping dogs lie.

  There is this other dog, Midget. She’s the runt of her litter. Grandma can’t get rid of her either, so she has to keep her, too.

  One rainy day at the cabin, you want to play with the dogs, so you power slide on the carpet and pet Midget with your face almost touching hers and blurt out something meant to wake her, and it works. She lets out a warning, one you do not heed, which causes her to latch onto your lower lip, which causes you to jump to your feet with her still clamped on.

  Your bellowing summons Dad first, followed by Grandma. Before she can intervene, he hurls Midget up against the living room wall like someone is trying to steal second base. She doesn’t die, but she hits the wall so hard an eye burst out of her head. The sound she makes can’t be unheard. The things Grandma says to Dad while holding Midget in one hand and her eyeball in the other were of the sort that those within earshot let fall on deaf ears.

  The next summer, Debbie’s cat, Tippy, doesn’t come to the cabin. She got old. She stays at Grandma’s house instead, and Dad makes sure she has food and water. It’s your job to make sure she has a clean shitbox, Dad says. The summer before, you and the rest of the grandkids watched her kill a weasel while you dined on corn dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches, which you called girl cheese for far too long, which you eventually refused to eat, once you decided you didn’t want a snack meant for girls.

  Like Tippy, you didn’t go to the cabin that summer either. You’d moved in with Dad a few weeks before, the summer after you finished the sixth grade, right before you began the seventh.

  Dad guesses Tippy won’t see the end of summer and sends you to find where she’s taken to hiding.

  She’s warming herself beneath the television set. You only see the white of her fur, really, but you tell Dad, “Here she is. She’s under here.”

  He hoists up the TV to see for himself and grunts in affirmation. This TV of Grandma’s is one of those big wooden bastards that come up to your belly button and lets go a clunk, clunk, clunk when you change the channels from three to six to eight to ten.

  Dad plops the TV back down while you’re out in the kitchen, and Tippy lets out an exhausted meow. A day or so later, you ask when you should check on her again, and he explains, “She’s dead,” without offering anything more on the matter.

  That same summer, when the neighborhood sees a spike in skunks and raccoons ravaging trash cans and dumpsters as well as coyotes killing dogs left leashed to back porches, you see Dad come up with a cure. He takes a bottle of aspirin, crushes it up, mixes it into a pound of raw hamburger, and makes a batch of meatballs. But they don’t go into the oven. Oh, and he puts a treble hook in the center of each meatball before tossing them here and there along the alleyway. Problem solved. No more dumped over trash cans. No more bloody dog collars left dangling. None of this should surprise you.

  When a second cousin can’t afford to have the vet dock the tails of a litter of pups, you stand in the driveway with Sam and watch while Dad takes the box of them to the woods and does it himself. He uses a pistol to take off the tails. He tells the two of you the bullets sever and cauterize the wound all at once.

  He even brings along a tub of Vaseline for show.

  Little details like that make a lie seem more plausible. But the truth of it is the cousin couldn’t get rid of the pups or afford to feed all of them, and they were too smart to wander into the pigpen the way the last litter of kittens did. Dogs aren’t always so bright. Remember Porky, the Cocker Spaniel Dad took in from your cousin, Denise, after she found out her new landlord didn’t allow dogs? Porky got into an ice cream bucket full of used antifreeze Dad kept under the kitchen sink.

  “Dogs love it. It smells sweet to them.”

  Dad volunteers that last little bit of information to Grandma and whoever cares to listen before returning to his cup of coffee, while everyone else in the room looks at each other, wondering who the hell keeps a bucket of used antifreeze under their kitchen sink? It’s a safe bet he did the math and figured a jug of antifreeze is a lot cheaper than a bag of dog food. Even the bright yellow bag that says DOG FOOD in big black letters. He’s like a five-year-old who can’t quite grasp how outlandish the tales he tells sound. It doesn’t take long for you to notice how almost every time he opens his mouth, Grandma takes a drag off her cigarette and stares the way a defeated mother does while sitting behind her son on an episode of Court TV.

  There’s another time, a time before you got cable, a time when the phone is still tethered to the wall, a time long after Mom and Dad divorced, a time long after Debbie moved out on her own. There’s no one else there that day, a day that worms its way into your memories for two reasons. Both disturb you in their own special way. First, it’s the day Dad lets you, his son—a tender thirteen years of age—watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show while you sit in your respective recliners eating microwaved Banquet chicken and instant mashed potatoes and whole-kernel canned corn from faux wooden TV trays.

  The two of you hear a sound come from the kitchen, one that doesn’t raise a question as to what is happening, one that causes Dad to shove his TV tray to the side, accompanied by a melodramatic “Goddamn it!”

  Dad hates Slater, your Japanese Bobtail cat, who gets his name from you watching Pump up the Volume and Gleaming the Cube and Heathers too many times. Slater doesn’t make much of a dent in the breaded chicken breast he’s helped himself to atop the kitchen table, but the whole box is covered in his hair, so Dad bashes his head against the tabletop, cursing him in cadence with each successive smack until he goes limp in Dad’s hands and lets go a low, haunting yowl.

  Dad’s back fills the entire doorway, and you stand behind him with fists clenched until he stomps up the stairs and tosses Slater into the cage, where he lands in the litter box.

  You’re still standing there, fixated on the baseball bat balanced against the wall between the refrigerator and the back door, when he comes down the stairs and tells you not to let Slater out of his cage for a week. “Maybe then he’ll learn some table manners,” he says, and pushes play on the remote and stuffs his face with what’s left on his plate.

  Sometime during the night, Slater’s tongue slides out of his mouth and turns white. He feels cold to the touch. Stiff too. When you tell Dad how you found him, you watch him throw what was once your cat into a plastic bag, which he tells you to toss into the dumpster out back of the building on the way to school.

  That would have been the fall of 1990, the year the Jim Belushi movie K-9 came out on VHS. That year, Dad became obsessed with the idea of owning a German Shepherd, and as luck would have it, one of his drinking buddies, Bob-the-Dog-Catcher, says he has one locked up down at the pound. A runner. A repeat customer. He can have it.

  The next day, the two of you climb into Dad’s two-tone, brown and beige, four-door Reliant and head down to the pound to pick him up. On the way, Dad’s voice booms between songs, saying he has the perfect name for him: Jerry Lee. Of course you knew that, you saw it coming, you mouthed it when he said it. What else would he call a German Shepherd after wearing out two different copies of that damn movie?

  Rin Tin Tin doesn’t have quite the same ring to Dad as it once did.

  Bob-the-Dog-Catcher hands you a leash and collar from a box filled with leashes and collars that once belonged to dogs he never found homes for and put to sleep.

  “The dog’s in the back,” he says. “Death row,” he mumbles to your father before they go back to bullshitting.

  You walk by little scraggly, yappy things, a couple of lab mixes, a few different dogs obviously crossed with huskies and malamutes or whatever those sled dogs are, something that looks like the Hound of the Baskervilles, but no German Shepherds. Then you head toward the cages at the opposite end of the building, where the lights are off.

  He’s not a German Shepherd. He’s not brown with a black mask and saddle. He
doesn’t have the sloped back and those hindquarters that always look like they are crouched, ready to pounce, like you see on all the cop shows. He’s a blonde Brutus. His back comes up to your hip, and when he lifts his head, he can stare you right in the face.

  “He’s a—fucking—wolf,” you tell Dad and Bob-the-Dog-Catcher, whispering when you say “fucking,” not wanting to get hit, but wanting them to take you seriously.

  “Nah, he’s a gold color,” Bob-the-Dog-Catcher says. “Don’t know what all he is. He’s Shepherd, though. Go see, Dick. Take him for a walk, David.”

  “Walk?” you say. “Like, open the cage?”

  Dad doesn’t walk him any farther than the back door of the car. Maybe it’s because the dog pound sits across the street from the shit plant, or it could have to do with his mind being made up sight unseen. Jerry Lee takes a dump in the side yard as soon as he jumps out of the back seat of the sedan. Dad tells you to pick it up and takes Jerry Lee inside to show him the house.

  The spade shovel isn’t big enough to do the job, so you take two trips across the street into the woods of the abandoned block and fling the shit into the overgrown brush.

  Meanwhile, Jerry Lee makes your home his home. He climbs into your recliner. It’s too small for him, so he spends the next hour sniffing every inch of the downstairs: the bags of trash, the pile of laundry yet to make it into the washing machine, the two recliners, Dad’s boots, the black shiny sheen on the kitchen carpet leading from the back door to the sink before it forms a Y and heads past the stove and into the next room, giving way to the brown, beige, and gold shag on the living room floor and walls. He smells the things that shouldn’t have a smell but do because they still smell of Slater.