Nor had he learned to choose more wisely, as Filomena had recommended; perhaps he’d purposely decided against choosing to be with anyone who so much as hinted at the promise of permanence. And the writer knew he was too old to still hold his aunt accountable for introducing him to sex when he was too young. Whatever reluctance Danny felt for involving himself in a permanent relationship couldn’t be blamed on Filomena-certainly not anymore.
IT WAS THE BAD-DOG PART of Danny’s run; if there was going to be trouble, it would happen here. Danny was looking for the different-eyed dog in the narrow, flat driveway lined with abandoned vehicles-dead cars, some minus tires, trucks without engines, a motorcycle on its side and missing its handlebars-when the big male dog emerged from a Volkswagen bus without any doors. A husky-shepherd mix, he came into the road on a dead run-no bark, not a growl, all business. The patter of the pads of his paws on the dirt road was the only sound the dog made; he hadn’t yet begun to breathe hard.
Danny had had to beat him off with the squash-racquet handles before, and he’d had words with the animal’s no-less-aggressive owner-a young man in his twenties, possibly one of those former Windham College students who wouldn’t move away. The guy had a hippie appearance but was no pacifist; he might have been one of the countless young men living in the Putney area who called themselves “carpenters.” (If so, he was a carpenter who either didn’t work or was always at home.)
“Mind your dog!” Danny had called up the driveway to him, that previous time.
“Fuck you! Run somewhere else!” the hippie carpenter had yelled back.
Now here was the unchained dog again, snapping at the runner. Danny moved to the far-right side of the road and tried to outrun the dog, but the husky-shepherd quickly gained on him. Danny stopped diagonally across the road from the hippie carpenter’s driveway, and the dog stopped, too-circling him, his head low to the ground, his teeth bared. When the dog lunged at his thigh, Danny jabbed him in the ear with one of the sawed-off squash racquets; when the husky-shepherd seized the racquet handle in his teeth, Danny hit the animal as hard as he could with the other handle, both on the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. (One of his eyes was the light-blue color of a Siberian husky’s eyes, and the other was the dark-brown, more penetrating eye of a German shepherd.) The dog yelped and let go of the first racquet handle. Danny hit him on one ear, then the other, as the animal momentarily retreated.
“Leave my dog alone, you son of a bitch!” the hippie carpenter yelled. He was walking down his driveway between the rows of wrecked vehicles.
“Mind your dog,” was all Danny told him. He had started to run again before he saw the second dog-so similar-looking to the first that Danny thought, for a moment, it was the same dog. Then, suddenly, he had two dogs snapping at him; the second one was always at his back. “Call your dogs!” Danny shouted to the hippie carpenter.
“Fuck you. Run somewhere else,” the guy said. He was walking back up his driveway; he didn’t care if his dogs bit Danny, or not. The dogs tried hard to bite him, but Danny managed to jam one of the racquet handles deep down the throat of the first dog, and a lucky backhand swing caught the second dog in the face-lashing one of its eyes, as it was about to bite Danny in the calf. He kicked the dog choking on the squash-racquet handle in the throat. As the dog turned to run, Danny struck him behind one ear; the dog fell but quickly got up again. The second dog was slinking away. The hippie carpenter was nowhere to be seen, now that his dogs drew back to their territory in the driveway.
When Danny had first moved to Windham County, there’d been a bad dog on the back road between Dummerston and the Putney School. Danny had called the state police; it was a similar hostile-dog-owner situation. A state trooper had driven out there, just to talk to the dog owner, and when the dog attacked the trooper, he’d shot it dead-right in the driveway. “What did you say to the dog owner?” Danny had asked the trooper. (His name was Jimmy; they’d since become friends.)
“I told him to mind his dog,” Jimmy had answered.
Danny had been saying that ever since, but with less authority than a state trooper-clearly. Now, without further incident, he ran to the DeSimones’ house, but Danny didn’t like it when he’d had to break the pace he’d picked up in his last couple of miles. He told Armando about the two dogs and the hippie carpenter. “Call your friend Jimmy,” Armando said, but Danny explained that the state trooper would probably be forced to shoot both dogs.
“Why don’t we kill just one of them?” Armando suggested. “Then maybe the hippie carpenter will get the idea.”
“That seems harsh,” Danny said. He’d understood what Armando’s proposed method of killing one of the husky-shepherds would entail. The DeSimones’ dog was a purebred German shepherd male named Rooster. Even as a puppy, Rooster had stuck out his chest and strutted, stiff-legged and threatening, in the presence of other male dogs-hence his name. But Rooster hadn’t been bluffing. Full-grown, he was a dog-killer-Rooster hated other male dogs. At least one of the dogs who’d attacked Danny was a male; the writer couldn’t be sure about the second dog, because it had come at him from behind.
Armando DeSimone was more than what amounted to Danny Angel’s only “literary” friend in Putney; Armando was a real reader, and he and Danny argued about what they read in a reasonably constructive way. But there was something innately confrontational in Armando, who reminded Danny of a more civilized version of Ketchum.
Danny had a tendency to avoid confrontation, which he often regretted. People who picked an argument or a fight with the writer got the idea that he would never fight back; they were surprised, or their feelings were hurt, when Danny did come back at them-though not until the third or fourth provocation. What Danny had learned was that these people who’d grown used to baiting or goading him were always indignant to discover that the writer had been keeping score.
Armando didn’t keep score. When attacked, he attacked back-the first time. Danny believed this was healthier-for a writer, especially-but it was not in his nature to be like Armando. In the disturbing case of the undisciplined dogs, it was only because he believed Armando’s way was better that Danny Angel allowed himself to be persuaded. (“Then maybe the hippie carpenter will get the idea,” Armando had reasoned.)
The only way that would happen, the writer should have known, was if Rooster bit the hippie carpenter. Yet Rooster wasn’t wired that way; Rooster never bit people.
“Just one dog, Armando-you promise,” his wife, Mary, said, when they were all in the car with Rooster, driving back to Danny’s house.
“Tell Rooster-make him promise,” Armando said; he’d been a boxer, back when colleges and universities had boxing teams. Armando drove, with Danny up front in the passenger seat of the VW Beetle. Seemingly long-suffering Mary sat in the back with the panting German shepherd. Mary often seemed at odds with, or put out by, her husband’s combativeness, but Danny knew that Armando and Mary were a formidable couple-at heart, they were unassailably supportive of each other. Maybe Mary was more like Armando than Armando. Danny remembered her remark when a fellow teacher had been fired-a former colleague of Mary’s at the Grammar School, and later of Armando’s at the Putney School.
“Because justice is so rare, it’s such a delight,” Mary had remarked. (Now, Danny wondered, did Mary only seem to disapprove of her husband appointing Rooster as executioner?)
In the end, Danny Angel could only have said (in his own defense) that he did not acquiesce to the assassination of the dog-even a dog who’d attacked him-lightly. Yet, somehow, whenever Armando was involved-on matters of moral authority, especially-Danny did acquiesce.