“I should’ve got him in before I went to bed,” he mumbled. “It must’ve happened in the middle of the night. He was probably across the street digging through Mrs. Petrillo’s garbage like he used to.” Bernard chuckled. “Fucking dog always ate her garbage. He was probably on his way home when he got hit.”
“Still, the fucker should’ve stopped.”
“Maybe he did. It was late, and I found Curly in the backyard. He probably crawled back there and it was dark and shit and whoever hit him probably couldn’t find him, figured he was all right and ran off. I don’t know. Maybe it was just some prick who mowed him down and kept going, never gave it a fucking thought.” He pulled the piece of grass from his mouth, studied the small chewed section a moment then looked up at me. “Curly didn’t move as fast as he used to, he was old. Maybe he tried to make it but didn’t. He was bleeding out of his ears, and Mr. McIntyre said that was probably because he got hit in the head by the car.”
I stood there, unsure of what to say.
“I’m gonna miss that fucking dog, man.”
“Me too,” I said. “Curly was cool.”
Bernard turned back to the field. “Thanks for taking off school with me.”
“No prob.” I kicked a stone from the slope. It bounced, clicked along the tracks. “You going to that party over at Michele Brannon’s house tonight?”
“Nah.”
“Might get your mind off shit.”
The blade of grass was back between his lips, bouncing again with the breeze. “You ever seen anything dead, Al?”
I shrugged. “I guess so, yeah.”
“Have you?”
“My cat Doc died.”
“I remember. He got cancer.”
“Yeah. Doctor Halstrom said he couldn’t do anything to save him, he had this big tumor.”
“So he killed him for you.”
“He put him to sleep.”
“Yeah, he killed him.”
“I didn’t want Doc to suffer, man. He was real sick.”
“Did you see him do it or did you leave before?”
I walked around near the tracks, not wanting to think about such things. “We left the room before he actually did it. Doc was out of it though; he didn’t know what was happening. My mom let me take him when it was over, and we buried him in the yard.”
“I remember,” Bernard said. “It’s fucked up, seeing something that’s dead.”
“Yeah.”
“Especially something you knew when it was alive.” Bernard nodded, as if agreeing with himself. “Like, if you see something that’s dead on the side of the road or something—something you never knew or gave a shit about or even saw when it was alive and walking around—it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s gross and all and you might think it’s sad or whatever, maybe even kind of interesting in a way, but it’s just dead. This dead… thing. But when you knew it before, when you’re used to seeing it alive and then it’s dead it—it’s fucked up.”
“You ever seen a dead person?” I asked.
He nodded. “Been to a couple wakes.”
“I saw my grandmother after she was dead,” I told him. “She looked so weird in the casket, all powdery-faced and everything—shit, didn’t even look like her, not really.”
“Because it wasn’t her,” Bernard said. “Not anymore.”
“Everybody kept saying how good she looked—how peaceful she looked—and I was just a kid and even I knew it was a crock of shit. She looked awful, man. She looked fucking dead, that’s what she looked.”
“What do you think they look like out there?” Bernard motioned to the field with his chin. “What do you think it looks like under all that dirt and dead grass?”
“Probably mostly bones.”
Bernard plucked the blade of grass from his mouth and tossed it in the direction of the field below. The breeze caught it, and it spiraled and danced away, riding the wind. He pulled his glasses off, wiped the thick lenses with his shirttail then replaced them. “Worst thing is, we’re all gonna end up the same way. No matter what you do in your life—or what you don’t do—no matter where you go or who you are everybody croaks; everybody ends up dead and buried. Unless they torch you, spread your ashes all over. My mother had a cousin they did that to, sprinkled his ashes on the ocean.”
“Guess it won’t matter once you’re dead.”
“Guess not,” he agreed. “But still, it’s fucked up. We live our whole life knowing sooner or later, we’re going in the ground. One day’s gonna be the last.”
“Nobody, nothing lives forever, Bernard.”
He nodded absently. “We should though.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s cruel not to. It’s like, from the minute you’re born, you start getting older, right? So it’s like, you’re kind of dying right from the minute you’re born. What’s the point of life if it just ends and you’re gone and the world keeps going like you were never even there? Yesterday Curly was playing in the yard, chewing his tennis ball, having his dinner, drinking out of the toilet—being a dog. Then bang, gone. Just like that. Like he was never here at all.”
“That’s why we have memories,” I told him.
“Memories aren’t worth shit.”
I hopped off the tracks and sat down next to him. A cool breeze blew through the distant trees and across the field. The sky had turned ashen; a storm was brewing, rolling in off the ocean. We sat quietly, listened to our thoughts.
“You believe in God, Al?” Bernard asked.
“Sure, don’t you?”
“Yeah. You ever wonder about Him?”
“Like what He looks like and shit?”
“No, like why He does what He does.”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“I wonder why God hates me.”
“Bernard, God doesn’t hate anybody. He’s God.”
Bernard drew his knees up close, rested his chin on them and wrapped his arms around his legs. “You believe in the Devil?”
“I don’t know, man. I guess so.”
“If there’s a God there has to be a Devil too.”
“OK.”
“Well, it’s true. Everything has an opposite, right?”
“Sure.”
“Sometimes I get so fucking pissed, man, I just want to go crazy, you know?” Bernard looked at me and shook his head, as if the words bothered him more than they ever could me. “I want to say fuck it and just smash everything, smash everybody because none of it matters anyway. You do what you do and the world keeps going, nothing stops. If it mattered—if there was a point, it would—it would stop. It’d stop and take fucking notice. But it doesn’t.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, gave it a squeeze then shook him gently, playfully, and let him go. “Everybody feels like that sometimes, dude, don’t worry about it.”
Bernard’s eyes blinked slowly, slightly distorted behind thick glass. “I’m not worried,” he said. “One of these days I’m gonna snap, Al, and when that happens somebody’s gonna get hurt.”
Normally I would’ve teased him for making such a statement, but I let it pass and remained quiet, like I believed him.
“Hurt bad,” he muttered.
Just Bernard being Bernard. Couldn’t fight a lick, intimidated no one. Talking tough but never able to back it up. He was angry and frustrated and missed his dog, so I let him be. I let him be whatever he said he was.
“You ever think that maybe God’s just fucking with us?”
“He definitely has a twisted sense of humor.” I laughed dutifully.
“I’m serious.”
“Life sucks sometimes, that’s just how it is.”