His parents, at least his ma, didn’t like me, though. One time, I happened to be walking past right as they pulled into the granny’s little dirt drive. Dixon’s ma and pa got out of the car, and Dixon come running over to me yelling, “Hey, Carol Ann!” and I’d yelled ‘hey’ back. I smiled over to his ma and pa because my ma had raised me to be polite to adults, but Dixon’s ma looked me up and down, kind of frowning, and then turned to her husband and said, “You see why we ought to not bring him here, don’t you? You want him mixing with trash?” I hadn’t known exactly what she meant, but I knew enough not to go near there again when I saw their car. From then on, I just let Dixon go ahead and find me, like he had today.
“Hey, Carol Ann,” he said, and I told him ‘hey’ back. He said, “Are those your puppies?” His eyes were just as wide as eyes could get. He hadn’t seen them before because they always had to stay pretty close to Belle.
“Yes, it’s Ann and Andy,” I said. I liked Dixon but felt shy of him. He had fancy clothes and fancy shoes. That summer I was barefoot the whole time because I’d grown out of my old shoes and wouldn’t be allowed to get my school ones until the last minute because Pa said that every second counted when it came to the ungodly growth rate of children’s feet.
“You named them after dolls?” Dixon’s voice was incredulous. He put his hands into fists on his hips and frowned like his ma had done at me that day.
I looked down at Ann and Andy as they tussled over a twig. I had named them after the only dolls I’d ever had, Raggedy Ann and Andy. They liked their names–what difference did it make if Dixon liked them or not. I rounded on him, feeling stung. “Go away, Dixon,” I said. “I’m taking these dogs out into the woods to play, and I don’t want you around.”
“Aw, don’t be like that!” Dixon said. The frown disappeared from his face in a flash, leaving behind his mild, kind smile. He bent to Andy and picked him up. Andy squirmed, trying to lick Dixon’s face. “It’s a good name you gave him, Carol Ann. I like it! Hey, Andy! Hey, boy! You’re a good boy, aren’t you, Andy?”
Ann put her little feet on Dixon’s shins and whined up at him, demanding her brother. When Dixon didn’t put Andy down right away, she threw her head back with a squealing little puppy ‘oooohwoooo’ sound. I laughed and Dixon did, too, and finally put Andy next to Ann. She jumped on her brother, and they rolled, kicking up dust.
“Let’s hurry and get into the woods where there’s more leaves and less a this dust,” I said. “They’re gonna be a mess!”
We took off running, and the puppies ran after us, yipping with excitement. What makes puppies so happy all the time? I wondered. Now I know what it is, but back then I was almost as ignorant as a pup, myself.
* * *
By the time school was back in, Belle wasn’t any better. Pa fretted over her, giving her chicken that Ma said we could scarcely afford. Pa told her it was an investment, and she said, “Yeah, an investment in futility,” and it was all just good money after bad. Pa told her she didn’t understand the first thing about it.
There wasn’t much laughing between them in the trailer that fall.
Ann and Andy were almost half grown and took up most of my bed at night. They still had their pink and blue plaited yarn collars, but I’d had to let them out to accommodate their growing necks. They were house-trained good and never had accidents in the trailer, and I pulled them away from Belle when it seemed she’d had enough of them. They were good dogs, and I was a good dog owner. No one had to tell me that, I reckon.
When Ma and Pa started fighting more, I’d pull those big puppies up so they was both laying on the pillow with me. Sometimes we’d all three start shaking, but I didn’t know if it was them shaking, too, or just me. Those dogs loved each other and they loved me, and I loved them like they were my own brother and sister. They were a comfort with their soft brown eyes, warm leathery feet, and gentle ways.
Especially after Belle died.
I woke one night, near the end of October, and Pa was yelling like I’d never heard him yell before. He was crying, too, and that scared me more than anything else could have done. I pulled Ann up into my arms, and she whimpered soft and looked at me in the dark with her eyes big and scared. Andy wriggled his way up until he was between me and the wall as if trying to hide.
Pa yelled, “Do you know how much I had invested in that dog? Do you? Everything! Everything we had went into her! Now what? You tell me, okay? You tell me! You’re so damn smart, right?”
“Smart enough to tell you not to put all our eggs in that one basket, wasn’t I?” Ma yelled, and there was no smile in her voice. “Who makes a business outta one dog? I told you you’d be crazy to try it! I told you go on and just get a job!”
“Get a job, get a job!” Pa said, and his tone was spiteful and nasty, and he stomped for emphasis every time he said job. The whole trailer shook. “Is that all what you think of me? Think I oughta be one of those poor Joe’s that trods outta here with his lunch bucket banging his thigh every day? Buttered bread and maybe a slice of spam if he got the overtime that week? Is that what you think of me?”
“I do it! Every day I do it…is that what you think of me?” Ma’s voice was higher than I’d ever heard it, screeching and wild. Something shifted inside me and broke open, and fear flooded my heart so it felt like it was struggling to beat. She went on, “I put on my goddamn smock and shag ass over to the store so I can say, ‘How you, miz snottybritches? How your kids; how’s that husband a yours? You find ever’thin’ you was after today, miz snottybritches?’” Her tone became simpering and weak. “‘Heyeah, lemme help y’all carry them bags fur ya, miz snottybritches!’” Her hand slammed down on the little formica tabletop. “I do that while you lay around this damn trailer singing or doing nothing or messing with a dog that you didn’t have the sense enough to get checked out before you bought it!”
There was a long silence, but I didn’t imagine that it would be broken by giggles as so many of their fights seemed to end. This fight was different. It was bigger, somehow; big enough to squeeze the air out of my little room, maybe outta the whole trailer. I’d never heard Ma talk like that, especially not to Pa. I found I couldn’t even picture him at that moment.
Then her voice started in again. “I am not but twenty-four years old, and my life is in ruins. I live in a dump, my husband is a no-account, and what do I have to show for all the work I do? Answer me that one, mister man, mister big business! Mister Captain of Indust–”
The crack was quick and flat, and had I heard it outside of the argument, I’d not have known what it was. Even knowing what it was, I still didn’t know what it meant. Pa had hit Ma. That’s why she’d cut off all at once.
I jumped outta my bed and opened the door. I was scared but starting to be mad, too. Pa’s job was to protect Ma and me; that’s what he’d always said.
Pa was sitting on the little couch, bent over with his face in his hands. Ma stood over him, her cheek bright red. But even still, the look she gave him was not one of someone afraid; it was one you’d give to a Florida cockroach. It was pure disgust.
Pa looked up when I came into the little living room, Ann and Andy to either side of me. At first as he looked at me, his face was flown apart, full of tears and grief and shame, but then something dawned like relief in his eyes. He wiped his hands across his cheeks, rough like a child would do. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes from my pups.
I looked past him to where Belle lay on the kitchen floor, still behind the makeshift puppy gate that had become such a part of the décor we seemed to have forgotten it was there. It took my shock to make me see just how thin the poor girl had got. She was nothing but bones and dusty fur.
“Belle!” I yelled out and stumbled over a rug edge trying to get to her. Ma caught me up by the arms.
“Don’t go in there, Carol Ann, and don’t let them pups neither,” she said, her hands on me were hot but not mean, not pinching. “If the poor girl had something catching,
we can’t let Ann and Andy get it. You understand me?”
I nodded, and tears sprang to my eyes, hot and stinging. Ma looked at me for a long time, and I was afraid the way she’d looked at Pa would dawn across her face, but it softened instead, and she pulled me into her breasts. She rocked me a little as we stood there. I couldn’t stop crying. “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s okay, Carol Ann,” she said, talking into the top of my head. “Belle was probably a lot older than we thought, that’s all. Labs don’t show their age but all a sudden, I guess.”
It was nice to have Ma hugging on me, but Pa’s eyes never left Ann and Andy sitting by the gate as they stared at their mamma, crying.
Ma put me and the pups back to bed. She sat down on the little bit of space that was left and pushed my hair back from my forehead. She said, “I think you should stay home from school tomorrow, get some extra sleep. This has been a bad night for all of us, hasn’t it?”
I only nodded because it had been bad but also because I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask her how bad? What did it all mean? What happened to Belle now?
Did everything change since Pa hit you?
But I was only seven, and those words just didn’t fit in my mouth yet, I reckon.
That next morning, Pa opened my door and called the pups out to him. I sat up and pushed the covers away, but he said, “You stay right there, Carol Ann, and sleep more. Your ma will be mad at me if she finds out I woke you. I’ll let the pups out to do their business and then bring ’em right back in, all right? You sleep, Carol Ann.”
I laid back, and a hot nervousness sizzled into my brain. But I was also tired, and it seems when you are little, tired wins out every time. Hadn’t I seen it myself when Ann and Andy fell asleep mid-eat, mid-play, mid-ooohwooo? Yes. I’d seen it plenty of times by then. I fell asleep and slept straight through to mid-morning.
I wonder if you can guess that when I woke up, Andy was gone.
* * *
Pa said, “I’m sorry, Carol Ann, but that ol’ pup just ran off into the woods. It’s my fault, and I hold all the responsibility, and I’m apologizing to you.”
His face was solemn, and he looked me right in the eye, but there was a little wad of cash sticking out of his front pants pocket. I tried not to see it because I wanted to believe my pa more than I wanted anything else right then; more even than I wanted Andy back. It’s bad to lose a beloved pup, but it’s worse by the world to lose your pa, even if it’s just your idea of your pa. Maybe especially in that case.
Ann nosed all around the trailer. She’d lost both her mamma and her brother within two days. It made me remember Belle. “Where’s Belle? What did you do with her?” I had this idea that if Pa had buried her out in the woods, then maybe that’s where Andy had gotten to. I burned with a fever wanting it to be true; my skin itched with the wanting. I’d solve two problems with that one answer.
“I dropped her off up at the vet’s office in town. I want them to tell me how old she was because I might be able to go against that no-account who sold her to me,” Pa said, and my stomach knotted up as he stood with a wink. “Well, I guess that’s it, then, Carol Ann. I am sorry, but lookit, you still got the girl. And we can breed her next year, make us some money, and you can keep one of her litter.” He stared past me into the kitchenette, but he wasn’t seeing that, either. I don’t know what Pa was looking at, but it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t the life we really had, but it made him smile. He took a deep breath. “Yessir, I can see some light at the end of this old tunnel, Carol Ann. We’re going to be rolling in clover come next April. Ain’t that something?”
I felt the shift again, something inside me breaking open like a crack in a rock making it two; I was the little girl Carol Ann that belonged to my pa and ma, but I was also a new Carol Ann…one just for myself, a person with wider eyes but no smile. Someone who finally knew why pups were always so happy: it was because they didn’t know anything yet.
My heart hardened and seemed to stop beating as if denying its own softness, as if deciding all on its own that it would never be soft enough to beat ever again.
Three days later we left in the night because Ma had got caught stealing from her till. She got fired, but the store’s owner also told her he was gonna send the police out to the trailer.
I knew all of it this time, because this time, I listened.
Ann sat tucked next to me in the back seat of the POC, and we were packed in by blankets and a few boxes. I kept my arm around her, and she laid her head on my lap where I could pet her velvety ears. She’d not been the same since Andy went away, and I was wondering if she’d ever be the same again. Had her heart hardened, too? Would she ever get over missing her brother?
Then, for some reason, I thought about Dixon, and I wondered if he’d notice I was gone. Would he miss me? I pictured him running and that blond hair waving in the breeze, and that deep ache in me got a little deeper.
Ma and Pa sat as far away from each other as that front seat would allow, Ma staring out the passenger window and Pa keeping his eyes straight ahead. No one joked or sang or cried or laughed.
No one said anything, in fact.
* * *
I graduated high school at seventeen because they’d skipped me ahead in the fourth grade. They wanted to skip me again from freshman into sophomore, but I was too scared to do it. I wanted my friends. I’d been with them since I was eleven and Ma and I had gone to live with my gram–my ma’s mamma.
I never saw Pa again after Ma and I moved, but ’times I’d see politicians’ pictures in the paper, and I was always snagged by them–something about that blind, hopeful, cheerful, deceptive desperateness in the eye, I reckon.
Ma brought Ann to my graduation. She’d tied a big pink ribbon to her neck and stood just outside the seating area, and that made me happy. I cried a little to see the one dog where I still to that day felt two should have been. Ann’s belly was just a little droopy from the litters she’d had when I was nine and then ten. Each time, Pa offered to me to keep one of the pups, but I didn’t. I didn’t love them like I loved my good dog, Raggedy Ann. My heart was hard against them. I was happy each time the pups had been given away because there was no miracle to them anymore, no joy in the warm little potatoes that wriggled and squirmed and cried out for Ann’s attention. Each little brown pup was my missing Andy. Sometimes I fancied that Ann felt the same way.
I knelt down after the ceremony and held my face to Ann’s, rubbing her warm jowls and kissing the wide place between her eyes. Her tail whipped dangerously close to Ma’s legs–that tail coulda ripped her stockings.
“Did you decide yet?” Ma asked, and I looked up and smiled.
“I’m going to go wherever they’ll let me bring Raggedy Ann with me,” I said.
I looked at Ma for a good long while, and her smile dimmed off her face. “Carol Ann,” she said, “we never talked about that night, that day, I reckon, when your Pa sold off poor Andy.” She swallowed and knelt down, her arm across Ann’s sturdy golden back as if she needed the support. “I didn’t know, you know. That he was gonna do that.” She ran her hand across my cheek, and her thumb caught one of my tears, and she brushed it like a painter making a brand-new color. My cheek cooled. “I wouldn’t have let him. I had a lot of faults back then, still have a lot, and I was too young and too dumb. But I’d never have let him sell off your dog. You believe me, honey?”
I pictured her as she’d been back then, in her smock, going off each day like it was a new adventure. Never letting on how much it diminished her. What courage it had taken for her to keep going, to keep trying even as her marriage unraveled and her life fell apart. She was so strong.
“I believe you, Ma,” I said. And I did, but I didn’t, too. I knew too much, I reckon, for any judgment on my part to feel so iron clad as all that.
The college in the next town over said they’d take me and that I could get off-campus housing if I wanted to bring a dog; there was nothing they could do to stop m
e, the counselor said, but they advised against it. There was enough to distract a freshman–sororities, parties, boys–I didn’t need one more thing that would hamper me from getting the best grades possible. The counselor was a stern lady, but straightforward, and I appreciated that. I preferred it, actually.
I told her that I’d be bringing Raggedy Ann and that I wasn’t worried about being distracted. Having my good dog with me would actually make all those other distractions impossible because my responsibility lay with her. Which was fine by me.
The counselor sighed and riffled some cards on her desk. “Well, in that case, there is a building off of Arch Street that takes students with pets. It is unusual, especially for a freshman and a girl, at that, but I can set you up with a nice roommate. She’s a junior and can help show you the ropes. How would that be?” She handed me a card, and I couldn’t help but smile when I saw the name written there. I felt it was the best of omens.
I retrieved Ann from the tree I’d tied her to outside. She’d already drawn a crowd. A ten-year-old yellow lab is an animal people are just naturally drawn to, aren’t they? And I know why. It’s because they are soft and sturdy, gentle and kind, steady and predictable. They are, in other words, a relief to a distraught mind.
Annabelle Lee answered the door at the apartment and invited me in without hesitation. She had golden hair and a solid build, and her face was slightly heavy through the jaw. Her eyes were deep brown and kind. I felt at home with her right away.
She offered me an iced tea and put me in a chair in her living room. She bent to Raggedy Ann and kissed her between the eyes as though she and Ann had known each other in some previous life. She fingered the old yarn collar at Ann’s neck.
She looked up at me with a sweet but puzzled smile. “What is this, some new fashion trend for dogs around here?”
I said I wasn’t sure what she meant, and just then, Raggedy Ann went to the low window and whined. Across the common and heading our way, a blond young man walked a brown lab. The breeze tugged at his hair until it fairly danced on his head.
More Good Dogs: More Stories About Good Dogs and the People Who Love Them Page 2
