Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

by Diane DeSanders

  Cottonmouth—August 16, 1948

  I remember the August Babe Ruth died.

  We heard the news out back through radio static. The boys had a talk and made decisions. Some bigger boys brought a snake. They all came in from Texas sun to the shade of Bob Lynn’s back yard.

  They skinned a cottonmouth that day. We stood silent, watching the brightly colored organs spill out from the patterned skin, split open and nailed to a wooden table under the trees.

  We stood around some more, and we looked at it.

  Later, we walked home barefoot down the sun-hot gravel, past hedges, through clouds of gnats, and I was crying and crying.

  And I didn’t even know Babe Ruth.

  Dapper Dan

  Hazard is still suffering, Daddy is still gone, and it is almost time for school to start when a friend of Granny’s in New York gives us a new dog. Granny’s friend has to travel and can not keep the dog—a dog that my mama says belongs in whatever pantheon there may be of great dogs.

  Dapper Dan is a pedigreed boxer raised in a New York City apartment, his sire a National Kennel Club champion with a fancy-sounding name. He’s almost two years old when he comes to live with us, but he has never been outside off a leash, so he has to be kept in the house. Mama buys a book called The Boxer, which is full of things like correct tail docking, splayed feet, shoulder width, and set of head and ears. We all read it, and Mama and all of us fall in love with Dapper.

  He’s a dark brindle with a white chest, a blaze on the nose, and four white sock feet, perfectly well-trained, always thin, nervous, hypersensitive to everything in the house, and Dapper has eyes that understand all you are going through, and takes it all with a certain wit.

  He’s by Mama’s side as she goes here and there throughout the house. She loves training such a smart dog, and she shows him all that she wants a good watchdog to notice around the house—windows, doors. And Dapper loves to play.

  Sometimes when I am put to bed early at night, lying there awake with nothing to do, the two of them pass by my bedroom door and I whisper, “Dapper!”

  He veers instantly, always ready, and bounds into my room, jumps up on my bed, and we wrestle and play, him grabbing a pigtail in his mouth, the two of us rolling around in a little frenzy, and then he bounces out again with a doggy grin and a little dance, as if to say, We’re bad! We’re bad!

  Hazzy has stopped digging on Hap’s grave, but she still takes her naps right on top of it, and she’s never happy with being alone out there in the yard. Even though Mama does everything to make her warm and comfortable out there, she howls for a while every night, but she is still not allowed in the house.

  With Dapper suddenly here, and Hazzy knowing we have this other dog in the house, it is just about breaking her heart once again. She hangs around the doors whining, and Mama cries, but still will not let her in.

  One day, Mama starts talking to our plumber, Mr. Allball, about it. Mr. Allball has been around our house a lot, at first for the septic tank, and then later for the city-connected plumbing. He’s a large tousled man Mama and Daddy and all of us really like. He has several dogs and lives farther out in the country. He says Hazzy might settle down in a new place with other dogs where she can have a new life, and it might be worth a try if he takes her for a while.

  Mama’s worried about this, but she agrees, so we say good-bye to her. And later Mr. Allball says she has had more puppies, so everything does work out fine for Hazzy.

  DADDY COMES HOME RIGHT BEFORE school starts. Just one day all of a sudden, there he is, sitting out on the screened-in porch off the living room in his bathrobe, looking sad. No one tells me anything. He does not go to work, but sits on the glider every afternoon for a while, his cane propped against a wall, his face turned away.

  Dapper lies down on the floor next to him, watching him with sad eyes. If Daddy changes position, Dapper jumps to his feet, wary, knowing something is wrong. If Daddy gets upset or does anything too sudden, Dapper throws up on the rug, and next the whole house gets upset.

  I escape to next door, where I find Nathan with his visiting cousin. We talk about school starting, having to wear shoes every day again, having no time for adventures, and what the next grade will be like.

  But soon Nathan just wants to talk to his cousin about which would be worse—to be hanged or to be killed in the electric chair. I think the electric chair would be worse, but then they just want to argue about guns and knives and things, so I borrow an Alley-Oop comic book and leave.

  Daddy is still in the same spot. I hang around in the living room, looking at books, walking back and forth a few times, wondering if he knows I am there, but he never makes any indication. I never saw him so inward and low. He seems smaller.

  I wander casually out to the porch, hoping he’ll talk to me, but he stays quiet. Finally he glances over, looks at my eyes as if openly checking something, which is surprising. Then he looks out again, as if he needs to get back to something out the window, something he’s been watching.

  At the other window, I look out and see Mama in the front yard with Dapper on a short leash.

  Back and forth they walk, Mama and Dapper, with her calling for him to heel, to sit, to stand in show-dog stance, then praising with treats, as if Dapper didn’t already know all this. But he’s happy enough to go along with his humans.

  Daddy turns suddenly and asks if I am grateful for all I’ve been given. Then he and I just look at each other. I don’t know what to say.

  Then, still talking loud from outdoors, I say, “Daddy, what’s the worst way to die?” My words seem to leap across the screened porch, making too much noise.

  “Falling,” he says immediately, almost whispering. I didn’t expect that.

  “But why is that the worst way?”

  I notice his eyes are red. Daddy has been crying!

  I walk closer slowly, sit on an ottoman, careful not to touch or even look too closely at the scarred-ankle feet propped there.

  I can barely hear his voice when he answers.

  “But what if you didn’t land?”

  “What? But what about gravity? You have to land!” I laugh.

  “Yeah,” He says, “Gravity.”

  “What if you jumped in the dark, thinking it was just a ditch, but then you didn’t land, and you didn’t land, and you still didn’t land, until your heart was up in your mouth, until . . .”

  “Did that happen?”

  “In North Africa.”

  “But why did you jump?”

  “We were in the desert after dark in a semicircle. It was a blackout, German planes out there. I was told to run across and tell some idiot to put out his campfire.”

  “I felt the ground slip, rocks sliding. I thought it was a ditch I could jump, but when I didn’t land, and I didn’t land, I knew I was dead.”

  “But . . .”

  “I don’t know how long I was out. When I woke up, I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, just black. Then I really knew I was dead. After a while of that, I heard Doyle calling, rocks falling. Zoom, back to life! I was afraid he’d fall on me! My mouth yelled out without my even thinking about it.”

  “But how did you get out?”

  “They had to get me out. It took a while. I was in shock. I didn’t feel much at first. Everything was broken. It was a rock quarry. The hell was lying on that cot in the desert ’til they could ship me back. When I looked down and saw what was left of my feet, my legs. . . . Boy that morphine was good.”

  “But didn’t they know the rock thing was there?”

  “Someone must have known. I don’t know. It was my mistake.”

  “I remember seeing you in the hospital.”

  “The best guys I’d ever known were in that hospital. The jokes, the pranks. That was what we did. Nobody sat around whining like in the movies they make. You couldn’t feel sorry for yourself when you saw the guy next to you.”

  Then he turns his face away and doesn’t talk for a long
time.

  “There was this one guy at Valley Forge, both arms and both legs blown off. Well, you had to do what you had to do. Nobody understands that. Dad can’t understand that.”

  Then Daddy talks about his father, GranDad, tilting his head back on the glider pillow, his eyes flickering at something only he could see. His eyes are wet.

  “You didn’t see him when he was young.”

  Gradually, Daddy gets better. He starts puttering with cars and with clay and wood carvings and drawing cartoons. He smokes cigarettes. He shows me how he can blow smoke rings.

  School starts. We get central air conditioning in the whole house. Then we get one of the new television sets, but almost everything on it makes Daddy mad. He gets especially upset about Kraft cheese—the commercials on television, and the cheese itself. When Mama buys it he starts yelling, “Do not buy it! It is not cheese!”

  He gets mad at the telephone party line. He gets mad at the neighbors because their chickens wander over and eat our strawberries. Gradually, Daddy gets mad at more and more things, until he is almost his old self, and he starts getting dressed and going out in the car again.

  One Sunday, Daddy says Dapper has to be taken outside and let off the leash, so we all go out in the yard to watch. Mama has doubts about this, but Daddy says “Do it,” so she leads Dapper out. I see Nathan and his mom watching from the next yard. We all stand frozen as she unhooks the leash. Dapper stands frozen, too.

  Dapper looks at Mama, looks at Daddy, looks from one to the other of us again with his eyes, asking about this. It was as if he’d always known what unhooking that leash might mean but never allowed himself to think this might happen. He begins trembling, a tremor that starts in his shoulders and spreads, until it seems almost that more than one dog is standing there before us in a mighty shivery shaking.

  Mama hurries across the yard and calls to him, clapping her hands. He takes a few steps, shaking so hard he can barely walk. He looks back at us.

  “Go, Dapper, go!” We all start shouting to him, “Yes! Go!” He takes a few more steps. We keep yelling and clapping. He walks. He trots haltingly. He keeps looking and we keep yelling. I see Nathan at the fence over there yelling, too.

  Then suddenly, Dapper seems to realize he can run, he needs to run, is made to run, and the running starts jolting through him, taking hold of him, as he bounds from a trot to a canter into a full-out gallop, going faster and stronger as we are cheering and cheering for him. You can almost see the gears shifting up and up in him, his muscular boxer body stretching and pounding, twisting and cavorting across our yard, jumping the fence, turning in air, leaping hedges. He is looking over at us, sharing it with us, tongue flying out of his happy boxer big mouth of joy. I am jumping up and down, wanting to run like that, too. He pounds up to each of us in turn, wagging, jumping, licking, and we are jumping and clapping all together, seeing his doggy sense of humor, and we are a running and laughing family for once as well with this dog who is in every molecule a dog set free.

  Then Daddy turns to me, puts a hand on my shoulder, and says, “Now then.”

  This is our dog: Dapper Dan.

  Kid Show

  Nathan’s cousin Phil visits again, and the two of them come to my bathroom window as I’m about to undress to take a bath. They try to talk me into letting them watch, but I say no. I start considering it, but Mama knows what’s going on, because after my bath she comes in as usual to paint calamine lotion on my poison ivy and chigger bites and Mercurochrome on my scratches and skinned knees, and I have to dance around naked, painted red and white all over, until it dries. It’s tingly and cold as I jump and twirl under the attic fan, and just as Daddy comes around the corner and up the hall, I run toward him, shouting, “Daddy, Daddy, Look! I’m an Indian!” thinking this is a great joke.

  Mama runs down the hall and slaps me hard.

  “Don’t you ever let a boy see you naked!” she hisses. Daddy disappears. So I know all this must be bad.

  This is about the same time my little sister starts stripping the sheets off her bed, the slipcovers off the sofa pillows, and all the clothes off of her dolls, my dolls, and herself out in the front yard. It kept Mama busy for a while, last summer. Now she’s doing it again.

  Nathan is always asking me to take off my underpants and show him what my girl’s thing looks like. He wants to see what I have down there, since he knows I don’t have a thing like his thing. He wants to talk about this all the time, and he starts acting like maybe we won’t be friends anymore if I won’t do it. I don’t know why, because I am curious, too, but I always say no, even though Nathan gets mad and says I am just like any other girl. And I know what the boys think of girls. Girls are tattletales and teacher’s pets. They don’t want to play fair or fight fair—they wimp out and blame somebody, or they cry and go home. I know what they think.

  When we talk about the movies, Nathan says that maybe the kissing scenes have to be done with people who are already married, and what do I think about that?

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t like the way he’s acting. Then he asks why he and I don’t ever kiss like that. I say I don’t know why. Then I say that the boy is supposed to make it happen. But then Nathan says no, it’s the girl who’s supposed to make it happen. I don’t think so, but I secretly know I do not really want to kiss Nathan like that. Why can’t we just keep being pals the way we are? But Nathan starts being very quiet.

  The boys all talk about their “weenies,” and things like that, with an enormous amount of giggling. Sometimes they say, “No girls allowed!” and Nathan goes along with the others together in his clubhouse.

  One day I wait outside and call them “Dumb eggs!” when they come out—one of those half-accidental utterances—and they laugh at me, but then later all the boys say it, too, “Dumb egg! You’re just a Dumb egg! Dumb egg” becomes the insult of choice and goes around our neighborhood for a couple of years.

  One day, I go next door and find Nathan out by his clubhouse, and Bob Lynn is there, all the way across the yard, purple-faced with deep and righteous rage, and with his brother’s BB gun pointed at Nathan. He starts firing it over and over, hitting the ground in front of Nathan’s feet, and with a look on his face such that you know before anybody yelled at you that you had better get away!

  We are all well trained in the safety rules of BB guns, yet Nathan does not seem to be shocked or outraged at this behavior. He seems aware of danger, yelling at Bob to stop, but also seems unsurprised and not fighting back.

  You can tell by the furious crying face and behavior of the normally responsible and sober Bob Lynn, that something serious has happened, and the two of them will no longer be the friends they have been. The shock is that Bob is so willing to be what we all know well is “in the wrong.”