I had this mutt once. Medium-to-large. A gift from my father, a schmuck. I forget the mutt’s name. It had a few before it died and I can’t remember what we finally settled on. When we dropped its corpse into the ditch we’d dug, my schmuck father said a prayer to his schmuck higher power in which the mutt’s name was mentioned, and I remember feeling confused for a second because the name wasn’t the name I was expecting to hear. Whether my father’d used the mutt’s most recent name and I’d been expecting to hear an earlier name or it was the other way around I couldn’t say, but it sounded all wrong. It sounded wrong to my brother, too, now that I think about it, so that probably means Dad used an earlier name because my brother was not sentimental—he was a mental cripple—and he corrected my father’s prayer, and my father gave him a kind of schmuck-type look, though he let the correction stand, and Billy piped down.
Billy was also one of the names of the mutt, not just my brother, who was, understandably, confused by this fact, though it was my brother himself who named the mutt Billy. Billy, now that I recall it, was the mutt’s original name, and that, in fact, is part of how the mutt came to have so many different names.
I said the mutt was my mutt, but the mutt started out Billy’s mutt, who Dad brought the mutt home for and then told to name it. When Billy named it Billy, I said it was a bad idea and my dad said it wasn’t up to me. What he actually said was, “Not your dog,” which is how a schmuck talks, but what he meant was what I just said he said—wasn’t up to me—and then he left the room and ate some cold chicken.
A few days into having a mutt with the same name as him, which made Billy-my-brother more confused and scared than usual, Billy said he wanted to change the mutt’s name, and my dad said he could not change the mutt’s name. Said he had to stick with his choice, honor his commitments, the schmuck, though what he actually said to my brother when my brother, mentally crippled, said he’d like to change the mutt’s name was, “Can’t. Made your bed.” I made, in response, a kind of fuck-you face, and my father told me, “Not your dog,” so I offered my brother a dollar for the mutt and Billy sold me the mutt and ran off to buy candy and I gave the mutt its second name, which I don’t remember, and my schmuck father gave me a kind of schmuck-type defeated look, so I gave the mutt a third name, right then and there, and received another schmuck look, and I gave the mutt a fourth name, and so on, until the schmuck stopped looking at me, which didn’t take that long.
The thing about it was, though, I didn’t much want the mutt and had bought it only to help out Billy and get at the schmuck, and had, in fact, later offered to sell the mutt back to Billy, newly named, for just a penny, but Billy didn’t much want the mutt either, poor mutt. Poor schmuck. Poor Billy. Poor me.
A couple days later, the mutt got sick with something I can’t remember, something painful we couldn’t afford to treat, and the schmuck, who said it was my responsibility, would neither let me handle his gun nor would he shoot the mutt himself. I’d had enough of this schmuck ruling over me and Billy, and I did what I had to. I raised up a shovel and ended the mutt and raised up that shovel and turned to the schmuck and told him some things had to change around here and I told him he would help us bury the mutt.