It was the neighbor. He was on his knees with his hands behind his back. There was a shotgun on the ground before him, broken over. That’s how I knew it was a shotgun.
When I could see around my mom better, there was a sheriff’s deputy there. He was tall. His hat was on the ground. I kept looking from his hat to his head, like I didn’t understand they could separate.
The sirens in the air were the ambulance, coming for the way my head was bleeding.
When the paramedics reached down for me, I shrunk away from their monstrous silhouettes, my breath going deep again, so my mom went with me. It was sixteen stitches. I didn’t even feel them. The reason I didn’t, it was that I think I finally went into shock, being led past our porch, where the dogs had been digging. Where the tetherball pole and wheel still were, the pole standing up now.
The whole front of our house was splashed with blood that had dried while I was knocked out.
And—this was the theory—evidently I’d sleepwalked again, once my conscious mind lost its grip.
Laid over the eyes of each destroyed dog were pieces of black fabric. Even the yellowy-white dog-head that had been left behind under the skirt, it had been pulled out, got the blinder treatment. On that dog the blindfold was more like a mask. Its tongue lolled out, was swelling.
The whole time I was getting stitched, the neighbor was yelling that I was a menace, that I wasn’t natural, that I wasn’t right. That a human couldn’t do this to four dogs, and any human that did needed to be put down, and that it was his God-given duty to do just that, he didn’t care how many deputies the county sent.
Even when the sheriff’s deputy guided him into the back of the cop car, the guy was still going off.
He’d come over with a gun, after his dogs. He wasn’t coming home for a few days at least, my mom told me. And when he did, he’d be under strict orders from the sheriff himself, probably. She smoothed my hair down on the uncut side of my head and told me that if I even stubbed my toe in the future, that neighbor would probably go to jail.
Dino was just standing by Mom’s leg, watching me.
I was now the brother who had taken on the dogs next door, and won.
Except it hadn’t been me.
The sheriff’s deputy kind of knew it too, I think. In his job, you see what a human body can and can’t do, I imagine. You assess a scene right when you walk onto it, so you can apportion blame out appropriately. And some of it comes down to simple laws of nature.
Can a slight twelve-year-old tear into a pack of dogs like that, when each one of those dogs outweighs him?
Never mind that they said I was groggy when Mom got there, called in by Dino, who couldn’t count to twelve but was able to read her number off the wall well enough, dial it into the phone.
That was the real miracle of the day, as far as I was concerned.
Mom just pulled me to her again, when the ambulance and the sheriff’s deputy were pulling away. When it was quiet at last.
Where I’d been when she found me, she said, it was halfway crawled through the house skirt over at the corner, under her bedroom. It wasn’t a question, exactly. But I could have answered it, I think.
I didn’t.
She didn’t ask after her last black dish towel. The one I would have had to get inside the house to unfold from its drawer. I had a key, but why would I have relocked the door behind me? Why would I have come outside at all, with the dogs there? Why was I even home at all?
The way I would have torn the dish towel into even strips, though, I imagined I would have done that with my teeth, starting the tear at the edge, then pulling steady down in a straight line, three times. My hands bloody from not holding my own head, and not from hammering them into the ground with the wheel-base of the tetherball pole, but from grabbing the four dogs at both ends and, one by one, tearing them in two.
About dusk, the sheriff’s deputy came back in his personal truck and shone his lights onto the front of our house, the light coming through our window bright enough, it threw Dino and my shadow onto the back wall by the television. We were standing in the window, watching him shovel up what was left of the dogs.
He lifted the remains into the back of the truck, and then the deputy stepped onto the porch and we shrunk back.
Mom talked to him at the door in muttery tones we couldn’t get any words from, and they didn’t hug at the end of it or anything. But I think they could have.
For Dad, I pretended not to see.
After stew from the can—mine and Dino’s favorite, because stew came with unlimited club crackers we could lick the salt off first—Mom screwed a different lightbulb into the porch and dragged a rake back and forth across the dirt in front of the porch.
The reason she got a different lightbulb, it was that when she’d turned it on for the sheriff’s deputy, it had shone red, had been misted or splashed or clumped with gore—I never saw the actual bulb, just the bloody light it smeared onto the porch. The sheriff’s deputy had unscrewed it, tossed it into the back of his truck like nothing. Just more trash to be dumped at some dead-end pit out in the pasture.
He had taken the big parts, and now Mom was working the smaller bits into the dirt.
I guessed about anything might grow up from there, now.
When Mom came back in, I could tell she wanted to ask me a thousand-and-one questions, but instead we just watched a detective show where the detective had a cool car, and then she made sure to tuck us each into our beds tight, and kiss us into place like she used to.
I woke hours later, thought I was finally dreaming at last, because I couldn’t feel myself standing. That meant I was floating, right? Wrong. It meant my feet were asleep again. I’d deadfooted it out of bed. And I had the distinct feeling in my throat that I’d just been saying something.
That left me two questions at once: what had I been saying, and who had I been saying it to?
I was alone in the kitchen, the refrigerator open behind me, cold on the back of my thighs.
“Thank you,” I said to the darkness, to the night. Because it seemed like what I should be saying, for that afternoon. For the dogs.
Instead of going back to bed like usual, like makes sense if you don’t have a blanket, I dodged the creaky parts of the floor across to the couch, and laid there with my head cocked up on the arm. There was a line of glare in the dead television screen from the lamp and I watched it, blinking as little possible, because as soon as that line of light broke, that was going to mean something had passed between me and it. And, if it came from the right, that meant Dad was done with fixing Dino. And if it came from the left, that meant he was just getting started.
What I wanted was to see him again, for real. Not just thinking about how he must have been at my age. Not just building him up in my mind from the stories Mom told. Not just seeing him through his sisters’ words, where they only remembered the best parts. I wanted to see him as the dogs had, in full regalia and facepaint.
Hell yes, they’d squealed. Not that it mattered.
Death hadn’t even been able to stop him. Four big dogs didn’t stand much of a chance, had they?
When the interstate lights finally blotted out, it wasn’t because I was drifting off, it was because a body was there.
Dino.
He was saying my name, looking for me.
All over his back and stomach were cusswords and pictures that Mom hadn’t seen, because he’d fallen asleep in his school clothes, watching the detective-and-his-car show. He’d got hot in the night, though, peeled out of his shirt.
“Deener,” I said without sitting up.
He looked over to the sound of my voice, his face blank, not expecting anything. I led him back to our bathroom and used a washcloth with warm water to rub off all the words that had got written on him on the bus. All the pictures that had been drawn onto him because I wasn’t there to stop it from happening.