“For Christ’s sake, go ahead,” the man said, and I thought, Exley! and then pulled the trigger and shot the dog that had just finished eating. It was so loud at first and then wouldn’t stop being loud: it was like the noise was doing laps around my ears, and I wanted to put my hands over my ears, except they were holding the gun. The dog coughed out a weak, wet bark and flopped on his side in the dirt. The other dog yelped and sprinted off, away from the house and the chickens. The two live chickens squawked and ran into each other and made noises like they were about to get into a fight, but then didn’t. They started pecking the dirt again. I handed the man the gun, and the man broke it, and something that looked like red plastic but must have been a bullet fell out of it, and then the man put another bullet in and fixed it again. We didn’t talk. I don’t think I could have said anything if I wanted to. I was too busy listening to the sound of the gunshot in my ears. It was an echo somewhere deep down where you weren’t supposed to stick the Q-tip. I wondered what had hit the dog if the red plastic bullet was still in the gun after I’d fired it. I wondered what kind of guns my dad had fired in Iraq and whether it had hurt his ears the way me firing the gun had hurt mine. I wondered if my dad had been shot, and if that was why he was in the VA hospital in the first place, and if him being shot was more painful for him than me shooting the dog was for the dog. And then I wondered how my dad would feel about me shooting the dog if he’d been shot, too, and I almost started to cry. But I didn’t want Exley to think I was soft. So I made myself go hard inside and thought that there was no reason I should feel bad for the dog because I’d seen him eat the chicken.
“Poor King,” Exley finally said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you wanted me to shoot King, didn’t you?”
“That’s not King,” the guy said. “That’s Petey.” He rocked back and forth on his heels and held his stomach with both hands and looked at the dog, who seemed to be a German shepherd mixed with a smaller kind of dog. Petey was bleeding a little bit from the mouth, but his eyes were still open and he was still breathing.
“Why’d you say ‘Poor King,’ then?” I asked.
“Because King heard what happened to Petey and he knows it’s gonna happen to him, too.” Sure enough, I could hear a dog whimpering somewhere on the other side of the house. “V. thinks I don’t feed the dogs, but I do try,” Exley said. “I do try to feed them.”
“What do you feed them?”
“That depends on what I’m eating.”
“What are you eating?”
“I can’t eat nothing because of my stomach.” Exley looked sheepish when he said that. I had the feeling that Exley’s stomach was something he and V. had talked about. King yelped suddenly and loudly, and the man said, “It hurts my stomach to hear him cry like that.” Then he started coughing. It was a weird cough; it rose and broke, like a wave, and then started over again. I’d never heard a cough like it before. Exley was shaking, and his hands were covering his face, and that’s when I realized he was crying, not coughing. That made me mad because I tried so hard not to cry myself, and also because I was starting to figure out that V. was Exley’s son. Exley had twin sons in his book, and so V. could have been one of them. Except if V. were Exley’s son, he would know whether his father was Exley. Unless Exley had kept his identity secret from V., and I couldn’t come up with a reason why he’d do that. But I could come up with a reason why V. said he might be Exley: so he wouldn’t have to come out here and shoot his dad’s dogs for him. Any way you looked at it, it meant that this man wasn’t Exley and that I’d shot Petey for no good reason. I hadn’t done a very good job of that, either: Petey was still alive, lying in his own blood and making small whimpering noises. The whole thing just made me incredibly mad. So mad that I took the gun out of the man’s hands, walked over to where Petey was, and shot him again. Petey bounced about an inch off the ground, and when he’d landed he wasn’t breathing anymore. The chickens didn’t squawk this time; they just kept on pecking. Meanwhile, the noise from the second gunshot was chasing the noise of the first gunshot around and around in my ears. When I finally cleared my ears a little, I could hear King howling from behind the house. Meanwhile, the man was still crying, except louder, and this made me even madder than I was before. “‘Listen, you son of a bitch,’” I said. “‘Life isn’t all a goddamn football game! You won’t always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss.’”
“It hurts my stomach to hear you talk like that,” the man said. He sniffled a couple of times, hugged himself, and then looked at me with big eyes, like he’d just recognized me. “Jesus,” he said, “you sounded just like Exley.”
“You know Exley!” I said.
“I haven’t seen that crazy bastard in years,” he said. “I thought he was dead, for some reason.”
“No!” I said, and the man nodded.
“You’re right,” he said. “Guys like him who should die end up living forever. He’s probably out in Alex Bay. That’s where he was living last I heard.”
“Alex Bay,” I repeated. Alex Bay was Alexandria Bay. I’d been to a beach there with my parents once. It wasn’t far from Watertown, but it was too far for me to walk or ride my bike. I’d have to figure out how to get there. But now that the man had said this, it made perfect sense. After all, my dad had told me I wouldn’t find Exley in Watertown. At the time, I thought this was just one of those vague things adults say to remind you that you’re a kid who doesn’t know what adults know. But it seemed now it was one of those specific things adults say to remind you that you’re a kid who doesn’t know what adults know. “Thanks a lot,” I said to the man.
The man didn’t say, You’re welcome. He reached his hand out and I handed him the gun, except I handed it to him barrel first. “Jesus, not like that,” he said, and I apologized and turned it around and handed it to him that way. He flicked open the shotgun, dumped out a bullet, put another one in. “If you can’t find Exley in Alex Bay,” he said, “then you might want to ask this guy V. drinks with down at the Crystal. He’s a crazy bastard, just like Exley. And while you’re down at the Crystal, tell V. his father said he was a pussy.” Then he fixed his gun and went to find King, the other dog.
The Spanish Word for “Because”
You might want to know how I got to teach my dad’s Great American Writers class at the community college in the first place. I got the idea on the twentieth of March, 200–, the day my dad left to go to Iraq. I’d come home from school. It was the last day, like I told Dr. Pahnee. Like I told Dr. Pahnee, Mother was in the driveway, crying. But my dad wasn’t in his car yet. He was standing in the driveway with her. I guess I misremembered that part. And I wasn’t hiding behind the bushes. I must have gotten that wrong, too. I was just walking down the sidewalk. As I turned into the driveway, I could hear my dad say, “Poor K.” At first I thought my dad was saying the Spanish word for “because.” I’d just learned that word in my Spanish 1 class. Except my dad didn’t know any Spanish. That’s when I realized what he was saying, and I also realized, since I knew my dad liked to refer to some people by their first initial, because Exley did, that K. was probably the first letter of someone’s first name, and not the name itself. But I didn’t know who K. was, and I didn’t know why my dad said “Poor K.” like he did: like he wasn’t really sorry for K., whoever K. was.