A Question of Manhood

by Robin Reardon

  “I suppose otherwise you would have avoided this kind of work.”

  He stopped what he was doing and looked down at me. “Why?”

  Shit. I tried to shrug it off. “Sorry; I know you asked me not to keep bringing it up.”

  “It? You mean, my being gay?” He shook his head and lifted the drill again. “Right. Everyone knows gay men hate power tools.” The drill whined into the tree, and when JJ was satisfied with the hole he got off the stool, and then he looked at me again. “Stereotyping saves you a lot of time, doesn’t it?”

  We walked Dante again, and the dog was too tired to react as strongly to other dogs as he had that morning, so I was able to do the whole walk myself. Which was a good thing, since JJ was pissed at me and I was pissed at him.

  When we got back JJ said, “Are you clear on what to feed him later? And how to get the muzzle off and back on again?”

  “Oh, I know how to do it. I just don’t know if he’ll let me.”

  “Try it. Right now. He’s tired, and he’ll be better prepared for it later.”

  I looked down at the dog, who had accepted the bed we’d set up for him and was all stretched out on it, even though his harness lead was tied to the metal shelves. I was just about to walk to him when JJ said, “No. Call him. He needs to come to you. The dogs in the pack are always expected to go toward the leader.”

  Damn him, anyway. What makes him always right? But I did it, and Dante came to me, exhausted or not. I scratched his ears again and then took the muzzle off.

  “Now give him one of those treats.”

  We’d selected about four different kinds to see which one he’d like the best, but he seemed to like all of them. I gave him two of the biscuits, muzzled him again, and rubbed his shoulders. He smiled at me and went back to his bed.

  “This is really good, Paul. He’s accepted you. He follows you. Now we just need to get him used to your father. Maybe tomorrow. Don’t forget to take the muzzle off again so he can drink water overnight. I’m heading out now. Listen”—and he went over to the worktable to find a scrap of paper and a pen—“if you have any problems this evening, call me here. It’s not the number in my file.”

  “Oh? Where is it?”

  He looked at me a second. “You don’t want to know.” And he left.

  I stood there, frozen, looking after him. You don’t want to know. It’s what Chris had said to me when the answer was…well, you know what the answer was. So whether I wanted to know or not, I knew; it would be JJ’s boyfriend.

  I left Dante dozing and went back into the store, to fish tank filters and dried cricket restocking and occasionally bagging at one of the registers, most of the time speculating on the boyfriend. He’d seemed a little older than JJ. And if JJ was at his house, it seemed unlikely the guy lived with his parents. College student? It was a possibility. But I really didn’t want to know.

  Right?

  I had a weird dream that night. Not about Chris, or JJ—not exactly, anyway. It was kind of like I was watching this training film or something, and the narrator kept talking me through this filmed scene where a small schooner, sails full open to the wind, is subjected to several different kinds of water disturbances. And no matter what the water is doing—head-on storm wave, rocking the boat sideways with the wake of a passing freighter, passed on one side and then the other by whale-watching ships—the schooner always reacts the same way. So each time the schooner gets tossed around in the water, it always recovers, and the narrator says, “This is the way a gay schooner will react in this situation.” Then it’s a different kind of turbulence, but again the narrator says, “This is the way a gay schooner will react in this situation.” He said the same thing, no matter what. And, no matter what, the gay schooner always recovered.

  After about the fifth time, I sat up in bed and shook myself awake. I thought of going into Chris’s room, but somehow I didn’t want to bring this weirdness in there. So I just took a leak and went back to bed.

  By Friday afternoon Dante had made significant progress. JJ had gotten him to tolerate Dad going in and out of the stockroom, and he’d even spent a little time on his run. He was back in the stockroom because of an on-and-off drizzle, and I was bagging at one of the registers, and JJ was outside under the overhang with a customer and her dog, when I heard Dante explode.

  First I looked around for Dad, praying he hadn’t been the cause of the commotion. He was in his office, and he was at attention, too. I bolted toward the noise, throwing the door to the stockroom open. Dante was straining against his lead, barking and snarling viciously at a cowering Marty Kaufman, though he couldn’t reach Marty because of being tied to the shelves. From where I stood in the doorway from the store, it was obvious Marty had come in from the back and had been surprised nearly to death when Dante jumped up and probably lunged. In Marty’s haste to get back outside—or maybe he’d just fallen against them—he’d toppled a couple of stacks of bagged pine shavings for rabbit cages and was desperately trying to move them out of the way so he could open the door and escape.

  Dad appeared at my elbow. “Well, this is something,” he said.

  “Dad, would you get JJ? He’s out front. I’ll see if I can calm Dante down.”

  Dad stood there another second or two, enjoying the sight, and then headed out. Now I had to deal with this dog. I didn’t want to surprise him, so I moved around to get into his line of vision. He ignored me, focused on annihilating the intruder.

  “Dante!” I yelled at him. “No! Stop!” I clapped my hands and pointed to his bed, and he proceeded to ignore me. I tried everything I could think of to get his attention. Meanwhile, Marty managed to kick enough of the bags aside so that he could open the door. He stepped outside and pulled the door mostly shut, still watching but obviously terrified.

  Suddenly JJ was in the room. He marched right over and stood in front of Dante—blocking his view of Marty, which hadn’t really occurred to me—clapped his hands and pointed. Dante ignored him, too, which did my heart good. But JJ was not going to repeat an ignored command. He moved to Dante’s side, jerked the collar a couple of times without effect, and then put all his weight into forcing Dante down onto the concrete floor. Dante fought him for a minute, then just struggled a little.

  “Should I shut the door?” I asked, thinking it might be good to get Marty out of the picture.

  “No. Let him see that he has to submit even though his target is still in sight.”

  I looked over at Marty, whose eyes were bugged out watching this puny little gay kid manhandle a violent German shepherd. He was ready to run if necessary, but he was too fascinated to leave unless he had to. Eventually Dante stopped struggling and just lay there, panting and heaving like the bulldog, and like Gypsy, the Carters’ dog.

  JJ looked up at Marty for the first time. “Come back inside,” he said.

  “Fuck that shit!”

  “Young man!” My dad’s voice boomed from behind me. “We will have none of that language here. Now do as you’re told and come back inside.” I suspected Dad was secretly hoping Dante would take a chunk out of the terrified Mr. Kaufman. Truth be told, I would have found it amusing myself. Marty made a face and then shrugged, and gingerly he stepped back inside, leaving the door conspicuously open.

  JJ said, “Come this way. He won’t hurt you, I promise. Just approach casually. Don’t look at him.” JJ looked at Marty and chuckled. “And don’t look so terrified. It will only enrage him again.” I could hear ridicule hiding just behind his words; it seemed Marty was the only one in the room who didn’t think it would be fun to see him lose a little skin.

  So Marty moved slowly, cautiously toward the panting dog. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Just stand there so he sees you’re not afraid of him.” There was that humor again. Then, “Okay, now turn casually like you don’t care and walk back toward the door. I’m going to let him up.”

  I’m not sure Marty quite managed casual, but he made it to t
he door and turned around again, watching as Dante got to his feet. JJ, still holding the collar, jerked it once or twice toward Dante’s bed and pushed the dog’s side a little in that direction, using stiff fingers. Dante lay on his belly, head on his paws, and looked up from sad eyes.

  To no one in particular Dad said, “He’ll make a terrific guard dog, once we get him to obey a command to heel.” Then, to Marty, “As for you, what do you mean by sneaking in here through the back door?”

  Marty was trying to look cocky and wasn’t carrying it off up to his usual standard. “I just went around back to see if Paul was out there on a break or something. He wasn’t, so I came in. Didn’t think it would be such a big deal.”

  On a break? In the drizzle? Liar.

  “Next time, think again. You know I don’t really like you in here, anyway.”

  Marty straightened up a little. “As a matter of fact, I’m here to get a few things for Mrs. Denneghy. You remember her? The one with the Dalmatian that got attacked at your clinic?”

  Dad scowled. “What do you know about it?”

  “His owners live next door to me.” I knew this was true—or at least that Marty had said it before—but I had serious doubts about Marty’s intentions to do anything useful for his neighbors or their dog. Even so, I said nothing.

  All Dad could say was, “Paul, help him gather what he needs and see him out the door. The front door.”

  Marty gave Dante a wide margin as he moved toward the door that led into the main store area, and I followed him out.

  “So what is it you need for the Dalmatian?”

  “Not a fucking thing. What d’you take me for?”

  “Oh, let’s see…a thief, maybe? What did you think you were doing, coming in the back way like that?” I steered him toward dog supplies in case Dad was watching.

  “Maybe I wanted to see how you and the queer kid are getting along.”

  I picked up a bag of dog treats and shoved them at his chest. “Eat shit, Marty. You don’t scare me. Anybody questions me, I’ll just point out how I was able to ‘do the deed’ with our prostitute, and you failed to perform.”

  “Like hell you will. Hey, what are these things for?”

  “You’re buying them, or you can face the possibility that my dad’ll have you arrested for breaking and entering.”

  He held them up and stared at the bag. “Why these?”

  Unbelievably, it seemed as though he was backing down. As though once he knew I would throw shit back at him, he wasn’t heaving any more at me. All I said was, “They’re Dante’s favorites.” Didn’t matter that it wasn’t quite true.

  “Dante the monster in the back?”

  “Yup. And he’s my dog now. Got a problem with that?”

  Marty slapped my shoulder. “Simmer down, boy!” He held the bag up, saluted me with it, and headed toward the registers. “See ya around.”

  I watched him go, and in my mind’s eye I could see Dante the day his owner had brought him in. Pacing, threatening, snarling, until JJ had stood up to him. Until he realized that JJ had his number. I stood there just long enough to be sure Marty wasn’t going to avoid payment, and then I headed back to the stockroom.

  Another surprise awaited me. There was Dad, crouched down over Dante, stroking his ears and saying, “Good dog, Dante. Good boy.” JJ, standing a little away and watching, looked up at me as I came in.

  Dad saw me. “That troublemaker gone?”

  “Gone.”

  “What did he buy?”

  “Some dog treats.” See, Marty? I was right to make you get something.

  “You boys clean up in here”—he pointed toward the mess Marty had made—“and then carry on with your work. I’m going back to the office.” He started out the door but turned at the last minute. “Paul, maybe I’ll walk Dante with you later.”

  Well, well. JJ beamed at me. “This is going to work, you know?”

  JJ and I bent over our task. At one point we reached for the same packet; he backed off. I said, “Something about Marty reminded me of how Dante was pacing the day he showed up here.”

  A few seconds of silence, and then JJ said, “I can see why you’d say that. And maybe with retraining, Marty could be recovered, too. But right now he reminds me more of the guy who brought Dante in than he reminds me of Dante.”

  “The tattooed guy? Why d’you say that?”

  “They both want you to think they’re much tougher than they really are, and they’ll walk all over anyone they can in their efforts to prove it.”

  “So, what, you just stand up to them and they back off?”

  “Sometimes. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how cornered they feel and how much they think they might lose. On how scared they think you are. On how many buddies they have around them. Bullies don’t want to be beaten; they can’t afford it, because they’d lose too much status. So they won’t start a fight they aren’t sure they can win. They don’t fight for principles; they fight for self-image.”

  “You sound like you know a lot about bullies.”

  JJ snorted. “With a name like mine, with a face like mine, and as short as I’ve always been, you bet I do.”

  I almost brought up being gay, but I didn’t dare do that again. Guess I’m trainable. Instead, picking up a packet and throwing it onto the pile, I said, “You don’t back down from dogs like Dante. Do you back down from bullies?”

  He straightened up and brushed his hands off. “Did I back down from his owner?”

  No; I had to admit he didn’t. “I guess not. But you were scared of Marty the first time you saw him.”

  “I recognized him for what he is, just as he recognized me. And to be honest, I’m really, really tired of people like him, which is too bad because it seems like there are a lot of them. I just didn’t feel like dealing with him.”

  “How would you deal with him?”

  “Depends. When I was little, I would have just made myself too much trouble. A kid like me? I was always a target. But bullies really don’t want to get caught. If they beat me up and I told on them, I’d be in even deeper trouble. But running away was a drag, and it didn’t always work. So I fought back. I still got pulverized, but when the teacher or whoever came thundering toward us, I wasn’t the only one with blood on him. And they knew better than to think I’d started anything. So the bully would get caught.”

  I just stared at him, wishing I could say I had that much guts, even to myself. I would have expected someone like JJ—especially if he was gay—to whimper and beg not to be hit anyplace it would show. But from what I knew about JJ by this point, how stupid was that assumption?

  I bent over to pick up the last fallen package. “I had this weird dream last night.” I didn’t know I was going to say that; it just came out. The image of the boat had stayed with me all day long.

  “Are you going to tell me what it was?”

  I shrugged. And I told him about the gay schooner, and about what the narrator said. “I feel like it means something. But I can’t think what.”

  “Are you asking what I think?”

  “I guess so.”

  “A couple of things occur to me. It’s like I said to you about stereotyping, when we were putting up Dante’s run. Remember? But even more, I think it’s like what my mom says when I have a dream that keeps repeating. Maybe you haven’t had the dream more than once, but it’s almost like you had it several times in one night. Anyway, she says it’s because there’s a lesson in it we haven’t learned yet.”

  He stopped, like that was it, so I said, “Okay, so what’s the lesson in this one for me?”

  “What do you think? What is it you need to learn about people who are gay?” I guess he figured I wasn’t about to answer that right here and now, so he said, “So, shall we get back to work, like your dad said?”

  When we got back into the store, Mrs. Carter was waiting for JJ. She didn’t have Gypsy with her, but she’d come for a consultati
on. As I was moving away, I heard Mrs. Carter saying something like how much better Gypsy was to walk, using JJ’s techniques.

  Walking Dante with Dad was interesting. JJ went with us, I guess just in case something happened, but he took the leash only once when Dante went a little insane seeing another dog. It wasn’t a long walk, with Dad’s leg, but other than the one crisis he held the leash the whole time. I’m a little ashamed to say I felt jealous.

  One thing that Dante did for me was to take my mind off of the fact that I was very much still in a harness myself. On a tight leash. Penned in. However you want to look at it. Dealing with him, learning the best ways to handle him and maintain my position as alpha, took a lot of focus. I’d still rant and rave a little at night as I jerked off, but my days were less of a burden with Dante in the picture.

  He got so that he loved spending time outside on the run, and we stopped needing the harness and the muzzle after a week or so. Sometimes I would look at him and think how happy he seemed, how I’d helped take away the awful life he’d been living, how his worries were gone. He seemed to think so, anyway. Oh, he was still difficult on the leash when he saw other dogs or bicycles, but not as bad as he had been. I could walk him alone with just a standard choke collar, no need for the prongs anymore. But I still had to fight pangs of jealousy when Dad took him for short walks, usually with JJ.

  Things would have been at least decent, considering my virtual incarceration, if it hadn’t been for Marty and Kevin. Marty must have decided I was okay or something after all, and the two of them started coming around when they knew I was likely to be on lunch break. Dante still hated Marty, and he stood staring at him the whole time Marty was around, but he didn’t lunge. It was kind of like he just wanted Marty to know he shouldn’t pull any funny stuff, whatever that would have meant to Dante. For his part, Marty tried to ignore the dog, but I noticed he always positioned himself as far away from Dante as he could before he fell into his studied casual pose.

  I guess if I’d had any other friends I could see that summer, I would have told Marty—and Kevin, who was less of a troublemaker but obviously under Marty’s influence to some extent—to get lost. As it was, though, they were it. They were all I had. And I was still pissed enough at Dad for so many things that hanging with Marty was almost like a slap in the face to my dad, and I wanted that. Take that, Dad, for telling me to be a man and then making it impossible for me to do that. Take that, for overreacting to my little romp in the hay with Lady Pink Vest. Take that, for not letting me have any of my own fucking money. Take that, for not letting me go on one stinking date all summer.