The red grease pencil on my workbench had rolled into the sawdust tray three different times that Tuesday morning before I finally picked it up and tossed it into the metal scrap bin. Leo was sitting out on the glider with his mother, my daughter Clara, while the mail carrier walked past our hedge without dropping a single circular. That kind of quiet doesn’t feel like peace when you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop; it feels like holding your breath underwater.
My grandson is seven years old, and last week a neighbor’s dog, the one everybody on our street in Wichita has been afraid of for years, got loose and bit him while he was riding his red Schwinn with the plastic handlebar streamers right in front of my house. He’s got stitches now, and nightmares, and he flinches every time a dog barks down the block or a car door slams too hard. The stitches run from just below his left knee down toward the shin, thirteen neat little black threads that look like railroad tracks across skin that ought to be smooth. Clara hasn’t slept in her own bed since Thursday night, preferring the lumpy pull-out sofa in the sunroom so she can reach out and touch his foot every time he starts thrashing against some bad dream about teeth and gray fur. I tried to go back to my lathe after the clinic visit, but the wood kept turning out uneven, the grain tearing out where the chisel hit it because my hands wouldn’t stop shaking with that cold, thin sort of anger that doesn’t make a sound.
You spend sixty years keeping your patch of earth squared away, painting the porch rails every other spring, keeping the privet hedge trimmed down to the concrete line so nobody has to step off the sidewalk, and then some yahoo three doors down decides that a fifty-pound pit mix with a rotting leather collar is a suitable lawn ornament.
When I went to that neighbor, my grandson’s blood barely dry on the porch mat, he didn’t show me one ounce of concern. Arthur Vance was standing right there on his stamped-concrete patio holding a long-handled grill brush like it was a scepter, wearing one of those gray cotton t-shirts that smells like stale cigarette smoke and cheap beer at two in the afternoon. He didn’t even put the brush down when I came up his driveway; he just shifted his weight from one worn-out sneaker to the other and waited for me to speak.
I told him what happened, every word of it, from the moment Leo dropped his bike to the way the dog tore through that rusted link fence like it was butter, and Arthur just let out this short, wet snort through his nose. He looked down at my shoes like he was checking the price tag and then looked back up at my eyes with that heavy, dead-eyed stare of a man who has never once had to pay for a mistake in his entire life. “My dog’s never done that before, so your kid must’ve provoked him,” he said, and he didn’t even blink when he lied. “Prove otherwise you can’t. And if you try to make trouble, you’ll be the one paying my lawyer’s fees. Keep your grandkid off my sidewalk and we’re done here.” Provoked him. A seven-year-old boy, hurt and terrified, on a bicycle with training wheels, and it was somehow his fault for breathing the wrong way near the public right-of-way.
I didn’t lose my temper on that man’s porch, didn’t raise my voice or swing an arm, because yelling at a man like Arthur is just giving him the weather report he’s looking for. I just looked at the way his left eye twitched behind his wire-rim glasses and stored every inch of it away in the back of my head where I keep the measurements for the old cedar fence. I said, “You’re probably right,” in a flat, even voice that didn’t rattle at all, and I turned around and went home to hold my grandson, calm as could be while everything inside me boiled like old lard in a skillet.
The rest of that week passed in a blur of small, miserable details that kept the wound fresh. Clara spent Tuesday morning on the phone with the city animal control office, only to be told that unless the dog had bitten someone twice within a twelve-month period or had an active rabies certificate missing, they couldn’t do more than issue a written warning that would take ten business days to clear the desk. Ten days. That meant Arthur could let that brute out again before the weekend if the mood struck him, and the law would be standing there with a clipboard while my grandson stayed behind a locked screen door with an ice pack on his leg. I sat on the front porch through the evenings while the sun went down behind the telephone wires, watching the shadows stretch across the asphalt where the blood had already been washed away by the garden hose.
Mr. Henderson from across the street didn’t wave when he walked his dachshund past our yard; he just kept his head down and hurried his steps, pretending he didn’t see the yellow police tape we’d pulled down from the bushes. Everybody on Maple Street knew about that dog, knew how it used to lunge against the chain whenever the paper boy came by, knew how Arthur liked to sit on his back steps with a tallboy and watch people cross the street to avoid his property line. They knew, and they stayed quiet, because Arthur worked down at the county road commission and had friends in places where permits get signed or ignored depending on who’s asking. That silence was worse than the bite itself, because it meant Arthur had trained the whole block to be his accomplices through sheer, ugly exhaustion. I didn’t say a word to Clara about what I was turning over in my mind, but every time I walked past the tool shed and saw the handle of the post-hole digger, my fingers closed a little tighter around nothing at all.
By Friday night, the neighborhood had settled into that heavy, humid stillness that comes right before an August storm breaks over the river flats. Leo was finally sleeping without his mother having to hold his hand, though every time a truck shifted gears down on the bypass, his little shoulders would jump under the quilt. I sat at the kitchen table with a ledger book and a stubby pencil, not writing anything down, just listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the way the floorboards creaked whenever Clara crossed the upstairs landing. Arthur had been putting up paper lanterns all afternoon in his backyard, stringing them from the eaves of his patio cover to the lower branches of the old mulberry tree that dropped purple berries all over his driveway. He was having one of his regular weekend setups, the kind where he invited three or four of the fellows from the road department and a couple of local contractors to drink lukewarm Busch Light out of a galvanized tub and talk about high school football games from twenty years ago.
The dog was out there too, tied to a heavy steel eye-bolt screwed directly into the corner post of the deck with about six feet of galvanized chain that let him reach the edge of the lawn and four feet into the flower beds. It stood there with its head down, panting into the crabgrass, its shoulders broad and scarred from old fights through wire, looking every bit the part of a four-legged bouncer hired to keep the rest of the world off Arthur’s grass. I watched them through the kitchen window while I cleaned my fingernails with the small blade of my pocketknife, waiting for the dusk to settle down enough that the porch lights would start blinking on up and down the block.
The invitation to that cookout wasn’t written on paper, but it was hanging in the air just as plain as day when Arthur hollered something crude across the side fence to one of his buddies around five o’clock on Saturday. This weekend that man’s throwing a big backyard cookout, all his buddies over, that same dog chained by the deck like a piece of heavy machinery he didn’t want to put away in the shed. I watched the cars start pulling into his gravel drive, three pickups with toolboxes in the back and an old Dodge sedan that sounded like it dropped a lifter half a mile back. They were laughing loud enough to carry through our closed kitchen windows, the kind of heavy, unbothered noise people make when they think nobody else on the street has the right to quiet. Clara was upstairs helping Leo with a puzzle, her voice soft and patient through the ceiling vents, and she didn’t even notice when I reached behind the hall tree and took down my gray wool cap.
I put on a clean shirt, the light blue chambray one with the pearl snaps that I usually wear to the hardware store or down to the county clerk’s office when I have to pay the property assessment. I didn’t say goodbye to Clara because she would have asked where I was going at six in the evening with my jaw set like a pair of pliers, and I didn’t want to lie to my own daughter while the sun was still up. I walked down the street, my boots making a dry, steady crunch against the limestone gravel of the shoulder, keeping my eyes fixed on the gray paint of Arthur’s back fence where the wood was starting to rot near the bottom rail.
When I reached the side gate, the latch was hanging loose on a single screw, just the way it had been since the spring when Arthur backed his trailer into the post and didn’t bother to reset the concrete. I didn’t knock, and I didn’t wait for somebody to notice the shadow in the opening; I pushed it wide with the toe of my boot and came through his gate, right into the middle of it. The sound of their laughing dropped off like somebody had thrown a breaker in the basement, starting with the fellow nearest the cooler and working its way back toward the deck where Arthur was standing with a pair of long metal tongs in his right hand. There were six men sitting around the picnic table under the mulberry tree, paper plates piled high with potato salad and cheap links from the meat market, and every single one of them stopped chewing at the exact same second.
The dog didn’t bark right away; it just crouched down low against the cedar deck skirting, its ears flattening back against its skull as the chain went taut with a dull metallic clink that made the beer bottles rattle on the ice. Arthur dropped his tongs onto the grate with a loud clatter that sounded like a shovel hitting stone, his face going dark around the edges where the beer had already settled into his skin. He took two steps forward off the bottom step of the deck, his chest puffed out under that gray t-shirt like a bantam rooster trying to look bigger than a fence post. “I thought I told you to keep your old self off my property,” Arthur said, his voice loud enough for the people across the street to hear through their front screen doors. “You must be getting senile in your old age, old man, coming over here looking for another lesson in property law.”
I didn’t stop until I was standing right at the edge of the stamped concrete, about six feet from where that brute of a dog was straining against its iron ring with yellow foam dripping from its jowls. The smell of burning fat and stale cigarette ash was thick enough to gag on, but I kept my shoulders square and looked past Arthur’s shoulder to the men sitting at the table who were suddenly finding very interesting patterns in the grain of the yellow pine. “You told me my grandson provoked your dog,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake once, just stayed down in that low register I used to use when I was breaking horses over near the river forty years ago. “You told me he walked up to a chained animal on a public sidewalk and asked to be bitten to the bone, and you told me I’d be the one paying your lawyer if I made a sound about it.” Arthur let out a ugly little laugh that didn’t reach his eyes, looking back at his buddies to make sure they were still buying his ticket. “That’s right,” he said, and he pointed the end of the grill brush right at my chest like it was a pistol barrel. “And my boys here heard me say it, and they know how your kid was running his mouth up and down this block all summer long.
Now you turn around and walk back down that driveway before I let this chain out another three feet and see how fast you can move those old legs.” The dog gave a low, wet growl that vibrated right through the soles of my shoes, its back legs scrabbling for purchase on the dry dirt where the grass had died out under the shade of the deck.
One of the men at the table, a fellow named Gary who runs the parts counter down at the county garage and usually has enough sense to look away when Arthur starts leaning on people, shifted in his seat and cleared his throat like something was stuck in his windpipe. “Hold on a minute, Art,” Gary muttered, not looking up from his paper plate. “The kid was on a bike. I seen him ride past my house five minutes before it happened. He wasn’t doing nothing to nobody.” Arthur spun around so fast his glasses slipped down the bridge of his sweaty nose, his face turning that dark, liverish purple that usually meant he was about to start swinging or screaming about his rights. “Shut your trap, Gary, you weren’t even home,” Arthur snarled, his voice cracking just a little bit at the edge where the panic was starting to curdle the beer. “This old man is trespassing, and I got every right to remove him from my land by whatever means I see fit.” He took another step toward me, his hand reaching out to grab the collar of my chambray shirt, right where the pearl snap was fastened tight against my throat.
That was the moment I had been waiting for since the Tuesday morning when I looked at Leo’s stitches in the clinic washbasin, the moment where the bully stops talking about lawyers and remembers he has fists. I didn’t swing at him; I didn’t have to, because a man who relies on an eight-foot chain to look tall doesn’t know what to do when you simply step inside his reach and let him look at his own reflection in your eyes.
“You’re welcome to try,” I said softly, my face so close to his I could smell the stale whiskey on his breath from the night before. “You’re welcome to put your hands on me right here in front of Gary and the boys from the road crew, and then we’ll see whose lawyer has a easier time explaining why a fifty-pound pit mix with a history of three unrecorded bites was tied to a deck post without a muzzle.” Arthur’s hand froze about two inches from my collar, his fingers twitching like they wanted to close into a fist but didn’t quite have the backbone to finish the job. The silence in that backyard got so deep you could hear the traffic down on the bypass a quarter-mile away, steady and distant like water running over gravel. One of the other fellows at the table, an older contractor with gray hair and a grease stain on his knee, slowly stood up from the bench and reached for his car keys where they were sitting next to the potato salad bowl. “I didn’t know nothing about no prior bites, Art,” the man said, his voice flat and dry as a cedar shingle. “You told us the dog was just high-strung around strangers, not that the wardens had been out here twice last year.” Arthur turned back toward his friends with a look of pure, sputtering disbelief on his face, his mouth opening and closing like a landed bass on the bottom of a flat-bottom boat. “You guys are full of it,” Arthur yelled, his voice rising up into a ugly screech that carried all the way over to the Henderson place. “This old man is lying through his teeth, and you’re just sitting there letting him walk all over my property!”
Nobody moved to help him, and nobody stood up to back his play, because men who drink Arthur’s beer on a Saturday afternoon are only his friends as long as he’s winning the argument. Gary stood up too, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin and shaking his head like he had just realized he was sitting at the wrong table in a diner. “My wife told me three weeks ago that dog got loose and chased her mail carrier into the ditch, Art,” Gary said, his voice dropping down low as he walked past us toward the side gate without looking back. “I figured you took care of it. Seems like I figured wrong.” One by one, the rest of them got up, leaving their paper plates and their half-empty cans of Busch Light sitting right there on the red-painted picnic table under the mulberry tree. Arthur stood there on his deck with his arms half-raised, looking like a man who had just spent his last dollar on a lottery ticket that didn’t even have the numbers printed on the front.
The dog gave another sharp, frantic tug against the chain, and this time the rusted eye-bolt pulled clean out of the rotted cedar post with a sharp *pop* like a pistol shot. The animal didn’t go for me; it didn’t even look my way, because even a half-wild dog knows the difference between a man who is standing his ground and a man who has just lost every friend he ever bought with warm beer. It bolted past Arthur’s legs, knocking over a folding chair and sending a cloud of paper cups flying across the lawn as it headed straight for the open gate and the safety of the weeds down by the drainage ditch.
Arthur didn’t chase the dog, and he didn’t look at me either; he just stood there on his empty deck with his hands hanging down by his sides, his shoulders slumped like a punctured sack of feed. I didn’t say another word to him, because any word I added would have just cheapened the quiet that was settling down over the yard like gray dust. I turned around on my heel, pushed the loose gate back into place without bothering about the latch, and started walking back up Maple Street toward my own house where Clara was probably wondering where I’d gotten to. The sun was down below the telephone poles now, leaving just a long, thin streak of orange light right along the top of the western ridge, and the air smelled like dry grass and woodsmoke from somebody’s fire pit two blocks over. When I reached our driveway, I didn’t go straight inside; I stopped by the bottom of the front steps and looked down at the red Schwinn leaning against the porch rail with its training wheels sitting square on the concrete.
Leo was standing behind the screen door, his little face pressed against the wire mesh, watching me come up the walk with his hands tucked into the pockets of his denim shorts. He didn’t look scared, and he didn’t flinch even when a car went by on the blacktop with its radio turned up too loud. I went up the steps, opened the screen door, and put my hand on his shoulder, feeling the solid, steady weight of a boy who was finally going to be able to ride his bike past the middle of the block without having to look over his shoulder every ten feet. We went inside together into the warm smell of pot roast and boiled potatoes, and for the first time in seven days, the house didn’t feel like we were holding our breath anymore.
