Dog Eat Dog
Page 9
“Duran,” I said, scrambling over to them.
“Shut up,” Terry screamed. The dog’s fangs were sunk completely into one of Terry’s biceps. He was clamped on it, squeezing. He looked like he was going to do it until he bit through. Which wouldn’t take much longer.
“Fuck off, Mick,” Terry screamed through his screams. “I told you before, you don’t never break up a dogfight.” As he spoke, Terry kept trying to tug his arm out of the dog’s grip, making it worse, making Duran dig further in. “I don’t need you. Fuck off.” Then he screamed, not at me or Duran, but into the air.
I listened to him, stood up, and stopped trying to stop Duran. The dog’s eyes rolled backward, showing all white, as he twisted his head and the arm, making Terry scream and lamely punch at Duran’s snout. Terry couldn’t do anything with the dog, so he turned on me again.
“Fuck off, I told ya. I don’t want you helpin’ me. Don’t do it. I wouldn’t do it for you. I wouldn’t ever do it for you, ya fuckin’ loser.”
That was it. It came through like a rocket burning away my fog. It. Finally. What I’d been looking for. I found it, and goddamn Terry was the one who gave it to me.
“You’re right,” I said. “You wouldn’t ever do it for me. And that’s the difference.”
Against Terry’s fading protests, I scrambled over to get Duran off him. “No,” I said. “Duran, no. Stop. Stop now. Stop.”
Duran growled, didn’t look at me. “Stop it!” I said, slapping his back. “It’s me.” I angled down so that my face was looking right into his. Finally he turned his eyes up to me.
The flesh of his lip curled up, showing all of his long yellow teeth. For me this time. I’d actually thought, until then, that I had control of all this.
He looked at me for several seconds, considering me. Then he opened his great, wonderful, killer jaws, and let Terry’s arm fall out. I jumped back. Duran looked coiled to leap on me until Terry rolled over, his mangled arm flopping after him like a string of raw sausages. When he caught Terry trying to wriggle spastically away, Duran slammed down on the back of my brother’s neck. He toggled his head all around as he seized it. Like a dog does with a bone. Just like a dog does with a bone.
Terry stopped telling me not to help him. Terry stopped telling me anything.
As hard as I could, I punched Duran on top of the head. I punched him again. He paid me no mind, even though I heard the crack, felt the swelling between my knuckles already. I ran to the refrigerator and threw all the contents across the floor toward the dog. I opened the back door to let Bobo in, but Bobo had no intention of coming in. How many times had Bobo heard Terry say it?
The loser is supposed to lose.
Home
I WAS ALMOST AT Toy’s house before I even realized where I was walking. My left hand was throbbing, so I shifted the duffel bag to my right.
By the time Toy came down with his knapsack slung over his shoulder, I was sitting on the bike, my bag in my lap, pretending to ride. Like a kid. I had my bad hand curled and tucked up into my armpit, like I was lame.
“What happened to you?” he said, pointing at the hand.
I looked at it closely, as if there was an answer there, then looked back to Toy. “I fell down, in the forest.”
He nodded. “Ya,” he said, “I believe I heard it.”
“Is there still room on that train of yours?” I asked.
“Could be,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know if I’m going where you’re going, but I figure we can ride together for a while.”
Toy reached over to where his father’s motorcycle was parked right next to his own, pulled a helmet out of the sidecar, and stuck it in my hands.
“I suppose we could, for a while.”
A Biography of Chris Lynch
Chris Lynch (b. 1962) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the fifth of seven children. His father, Edward J. Lynch, was a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus and trolley driver, and his mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Lynch’s father passed away in 1967, when Lynch was just five years old. Along with her children, Dorothy was left with an old, black Rambler American car and no driver’s license. She eventually got her license, and raised her children as a single mother.
Lynch grew up in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, and recalls his childhood ambitions to become a hockey player (magically, without learning to ice skate properly), president of the United States, and/or a “rock and roll god.” He attended Catholic Memorial School in West Roxbury, before heading off to Boston University, neglecting to first earn his high school diploma. He later transferred to Suffolk University, where he majored in journalism, and eventually received an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. Before becoming a writer, Lynch worked as a furniture mover, truck driver, house painter, and proofreader. He began writing fiction around 1989, and his first book, Shadow Boxer, was published in 1993. “I could not have a more perfect job for me than writer,” he says. “Other than not managing to voluntarily read a work of fiction until I was at university, this gig and I were made for each other. One might say I was a reluctant reader, which surely informs my work still.”
In 1989, Lynch married, and later had two children, Sophia and Walker. The family moved to Roslindale, Massachusetts, where they lived for seven years. In 1996, Lynch moved his family to Ireland, his father’s birthplace, where Lynch has dual citizenship. After a few years in Ireland, he separated from his wife and met his current partner, Jules. In 1998, Jules and her son, Dylan, joined in the adventure when Lynch, Sophia, and Walker sailed to southwest Scotland, which remains the family’s base to this day. In 2010, Sophia had a son, Jackson, Lynch’s first grandchild.
When his children were very young, Lynch would work at home, catching odd bits of available time to write. Now that his children are grown, he leaves the house to work, often writing in local libraries and “acting more like I have a regular nine-to-five(ish) job.”
Lynch has written more than twenty-five books for young readers, including Inexcusable (2005), a National Book Award finalist; Freewill (2001), which won a Michael L. Printz Honor; and several novels cited as ALA Best Books for Young Adults, including Gold Dust (2000) and Slot Machine (1995).
Lynch’s books are known for capturing the reality of teen life and experiences, and often center on adolescent male protagonists. “In voice and outlook,” Lynch says, “Elvin Bishop [in the novels Slot Machine; Extreme Elvin; and Me, Dead Dad, and Alcatraz] is the closest I have come to representing myself in a character.” Many of Lynch’s stories deal with intense, coming-of-age subject matters. The Blue-Eyed Son trilogy was particularly hard for him to write, because it explores an urban world riddled with race, fear, hate, violence, and small-mindedness. He describes the series as “critical of humanity in a lot of ways that I’m still not terribly comfortable thinking about. But that’s what novelists are supposed to do: get uncomfortable and still be able to find hope. I think the books do that. I hope they do.”
Lynch’s He-Man Women Haters Club series takes a more lighthearted tone. These books were inspired by the club of the same name in the Little Rascals film and TV show. Just as in the Little Rascals’ club, says Lynch, “membership is really about classic male lunkheadedness, inadequacy in dealing with girls, and with many subjects almost always hiding behind the more macho word hate when we cannot admit that it’s fear.”
Today, Lynch splits his time between Scotland and the US, where he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His life motto continues to be “shut up and write.”
Lynch, age twenty, wearing a soccer shirt from a team he played with while living in Jamaica Plain, Boston.
Lynch with his daughter, Sophia, and son, Walker, in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains in 2002.
Lynch at the National Book Awards in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s brother Brian; his mother, Dot; Lynch; and his brother E.J.
Lynch with his famil
y at Edinburgh’s Salisbury Crags at Hollyrood Park in 2005. From left to right: Lynch’s daughter, Sophia; niece Kim; Lynch; his son, Walker; his partner, Jules, and her son, Dylan; and Lynch’s brother E.J.
In 2009, Lynch spoke at a Massachusetts grade school and told the story of Sister Elizabeth of Blessed Sacrament School in Jamaica Plain, the only teacher he had who would “encourage a proper, liberating, creative approach to writing.” A serious boy came up to Lynch after his talk, handed him this paper origami nun, and said, “I thought you should have a nun. Her name is Sister Elizabeth.” Sister Elizabeth hangs in Lynch’s car to this day.
Lynch and his “champion mystery multibreed knuckleheaded hound,” Dexter, at home in Scotland in 2011. Says Lynch, “Dexter and I often put our heads together to try and fathom an unfathomable world.” Though Dexter lives with him, Lynch is allergic to dogs, and survives by petting Dexter with his feet and washing his hands multiple times a day!
Lynch never makes a move without first consulting with his trusted advisor and grandson, Jackson. This photo was taken in 2012, when Jackson was two years old, in Lynch’s home in Coylton, South Ayrshire, Scotland. Lynch later discovered his house was locally known as “the Hangman’s Cottage” because of the occupation of one of its earliest residents. One of his novels, The Gravedigger’s Cottage, is loosely based on this house.
Lynch dressed up as Wolverine for Halloween in 2012.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from “Travel” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. From Collected Poems, HarperCollins. Copyright 1921, 1948 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.
Copyright © 1996 by Chris Lynch
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
978-1-4804-0453-3
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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