Looking back, I notice I have frightened eyes in most photographs taken in the backyard of our old house. They have the wide and vacant look of marbles worn smooth and glassy after years of neglectful misuse.
I remember, the swing would leer on rusty hinges as I slowly undulated back and forth, glassy eyes languidly rolling every few minutes to the fence on my left.
Screech.
Screech.
Screech.
The fence there was made of a grey and faded wood, rising out of the lawn. Running my hand along the surface of one or another, I once came away with a splinter lodged deep in my palm. After examining it, my dad informed me we’d have to use some tweezers. He turned on one of the stove’s burners low and put the instrument in the flames. I started to cry. I was never courageous, not then, not now. “Don’t worry, I’m just sterilizing them. It won’t hurt that badly.”
In the doorway I spy Matt, the scorn on his distorted to something biblically horrible through my tears. Dad tells to go upstairs and Matt scoffs, then turns around. Dad comes over, takes my hand and forcing it palm up, my fingers clenching. “Jesus Christ! I can’t see the damn thing with your fingers in the way. Just unclench them already.”
I sniveled, and did so, immediately regretting it. Pain shot through my hand. I screamed, snot and tears streaking my cheeks. My dad cursed. I think I heard Matt laughing upstairs. I might be making that up through. My hand throbbed where the burning metal had touched it.
After that, I was always nervous about touching the fence, even now.
Every afternoon, as I played outside, always on the swing, my glassy eyes rolled over the field of green metal squares stretched between each pillar of wooden posts. It was scouting out the enemy territory. It was the necessary result of the last few years, of all the memory I had of in that yard.
Screech
Screech
Scree….
RUFF!
A vicious guttural growl explodes from the other side of the fence. My swinging halts and I nearly leap down the small hill heading towards our house. The splash of gray and orange fur screams towards the chain of the fence. Jaws appeared in the melee of color, sharp and white, perforating the air around them with a clear sense of malice. I sit on the edge of the cracked leather swing, waiting, till the torrent subsides. Slowly, the jaws retracted, till Rusty, the Dragon of out neighborhood in the guise of a menacing sheepdog, retreated to prowl his domain. Uneasily, I begin to pump my legs again.
Screech.
Screech.
Screech.
Rusty’s owner was one of the black sheep of the neighborhood. A hard distinction to earn in place as strange as suburban Pennsylvania, where ran the gambit, from the meticulously groomed to the obscenely overgrown, and with houses that managed to, even in their cookie cutter nature of their design, be as distinct from one another as the people who lived in each. Ours was a restrained house, with average and unattractive plants that were pushed right up against the plain gray paneling of the house: Juniper bushes and creeping hollyhocks. An overall conservative feel, at odds the liberalism of my parents and family in general, but quite in keeping with the general nature of the col-du-sacs off Lamar Drive.
Our house was on a low hill, with second hillock rising about half-way into our back yard. On the crest of this hillock, my parents had built a jungle-gym, for us, a small slid and a jetting red rail where three swings, two old and leather, one bright blue and plastic. Around the play set, was a thicket of trees, that must have once been a small forest, before the developers had come. The west side of the house, shady on even the brightest of summer days, housed the compost pile and my dad’s tool shed. Separating the front yard from this side, was a red painted all wood fence, along, with a gap to accommodate a path leading up to the back yard of one of Matt’s friends.
But the next-door neighbor’s were a different matter. The woman who lived there had a son older than even Matt, and only about twenty years younger than her. She was single, a smoker in a world were that was fast becoming amazingly uncommon, whose yard was a tangled mess. I can never remember the plants in their front yard being anything other than unkempt.
Some days, I would see the woman on the back yard stoop, a couple of concrete steps that led into just about everyone’s backyard, with a water-pistol, smoking. When Rusty began to bark, she would spray him, between the eyes, ideally. I looked on amazed as the monster whimpered, and ceased, if only for a short time, its barking. She blew out a puff of smoke and in that moment she was beautiful to me. Anything that would have quieted him for even a moment seemed terrific right then.
Among the children of the neighborhood it was common gossip that the woman owned a snake, a python that Matt claimed to have actually held. He told me it was almost fifteen feet long, and could swallow any child whole.
Once, Matt had come home and gleefully told me and Same that the python had gotten out and had eaten a kid in the col-du-sac next to us. “He was gone in one gulp,” he said, opening his mouth wide and making a swallowing sound. I didn’t sleep that night. But lay awake, with Matt snoring in the top bunk, worrying away the hours until dawn.
I never knew much about the woman next door first hand, but I did know Rusty, and for that I always held a dark resentment towards her and her son. Inside, I hated them for that beast, who made each moment of play, one of anxious preoccupation, who darken even the brightest of days and the created storms of the most calm weather.
RUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFF!
In a furious gait, Rusty mounts the fence. His paws rest on the top, struggling to leap the fence, his jaws now clearing it and ripping the air. I scream, pulling the fear from inside me and expelled it one prolonged gasp of terror, as I throw myself from the swing, screeching as it swung, the seat twisting into a noose, the swing set itself becoming the gallows. I rolled and hit the ground running, looked back to see Rusty almost over the fence, scrabbling to follow me and slowly slipping as his claws scratched against the metal.
RUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFFRUFF!
I don’t stop running till I feel the rug burn on my hands as they rest on the cool surface of my bed, my head in the pillow, silencing my screams.
Not so long ago, I learnt that my family is partially responsible for the psychosis. After dinner, still gathered around the table, talking about this and that, we came to the topic of Rusty.
“Oh god,” my mom said, shaking her head. “I remember when they first got that dog. Carla had apparently ordered it from this trainer, and he came with these special instructions. She came over and told Mike to spray him between the eyes whenever he started barking.”
My dad was laughing. “Yeah. We used to keep a super soaker by the deck and Matt would spray him. I usually would use the hose. It drove him mad”
Later that night I went to my bookshelf and took out St. George and the Dragon, rereading it, wondering how to slay the dragon that lived next door. A few ideas occurred to me then, but none of them stood up to light of the next morning.
After that fear simply became the routine of my life of outside play, constantly checking to reassure myself that the dragon slumbered inside.
In the years since, looking occasionally at these vacant eyed pictures of my childhood, I wonder how such fear could be drudged up from the simply barking of a sheep dog. In retrospect it seems bizarre, as it was only his form and function that possessed him to behave in that manner of vicious assault. Indeed he might even inspire now a glimmer of compassion, his instincts of herding animals and of wide-open spaces so at odds with the clumped confines of suburbia.
I almost feel sorry for Rusty, copped up in the small yard, with nothing to herd but stubborn children. Intellectualizing Rusty makes him seem less the demon of fiery doom, but the Lucifer that Milton envisioned, something to stir not or ire or fear but the measure of sympathy they require. And yet…I still believe on that primeval level that Rusty was a beast.
No comments:
Post a Comment