CHAPTER 16

Dogs Howling in the Dark of Night

It’s springtime, and sixth grade is almost over. Soon I will leave the elementary school and enter junior high, where I’ll put my books in a locker and be forced to take showers after gym class. (The creepy female gym teachers will stand in the locker room and watch and they’ll justify it by saying they have to make sure all the girls practice good hygiene.) I’ll learn how to make a pillow with a sewing machine in home ec and shred the tip of my right thumb on the jigsaw in wood shop. I want to get away from Heather Grain and I’m pretty sure I will. She’ll be in the middle-track classes and I’ll be in top tier, but her house is just a few blocks from ours, so I’ll have to see her on the bus twice a day.

One morning, a boy on the bus will have a magazine page he’s ripped from his dad’s Hustler. It will show a woman on her knees, naked, a triangle of ash-blond pubic hair between her legs. She will be straddling a man’s face, his mouth and nose inside of her. He’s eating her out, the boy will say, and I will laugh a small nervous laugh because I’ll like looking at the picture and hearing the boy talk about it and I’ll want him to talk about it some more.

But my laugh will make Heather Grain notice me and that will be a mistake. She will turn to me, her green eyes drilling holes into mine. “No one will ever eat you out because your pussy is so hairy even you can’t find it.” She’ll say this as if I’m invisible, not even there. She’ll say this as if she’s able to read my mind.

The summer before junior high I begin to feel a sense of doom washing over me, a river of doom perceptible only to me. I count everything I can get my hands on, repeat silent mantras in my head, wish on every eyelash, every North Star, every puff of dandelion seed I explode with my breath. The seeds break and hover in the air, tiny clouds of plant-based smoke.

I work to keep myself barely visible around the house. I don’t like to get in my mother’s way. She appears to be far far away, as if I’m looking at her through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, as if she exists in a little glass globe up high on a shelf. Linda is going to be in high school in the fall, and my mother has turned most of her energy to editing and critiquing Linda’s social life.

Mother doesn’t like Linda’s friends. Jenny Marcus is an airhead, Krista Clay is rude, Mary Margaret Pearson is too skinny and her family is cheap (a bunch of skinflints). Heather Ohler’s little brother has diabetes, which isn’t contagious, but still, my mother doesn’t want Linda spending the night at their house just in case. Joelle Stockman is arrogant and wears too much eye makeup.

Rochelle’s family moved to California last year. My mother liked them because they were considered wealthy for Connellsville. They had white carpet all over their home and they had a maid, but Rochelle’s father got transferred at his job doing I don’t know what. Another family is living in their house now, and it seems strange to think of other girls hanging out in Rochelle’s basement, watching Dirty Dancing and talking about Patrick Swayze’s ass in those tight black pants.

In spite of Joelle Stockman’s fondness for electric blue mascara, my mother is letting her have her birthday party in our swimming pool. Joelle’s mother, Maggie, is divorced. She’s wears bright pink lipstick and has a boyfriend named Gallo who is rumored to be involved in shady business dealings around town. Joelle and Maggie live in the same apartment complex my grandfather died in. One would think this is a creepy connection, but my mother is thrilled with it, reminding me of the fact every time Joelle’s name is mentioned around our house.

Joelle and Maggie arrive at our back gate, their car filled with a cake and decorations and some presents. Linda opens the back gate for them so they can park in our driveway. Teenagers start arriving, and music plays from Linda’s yellow Memorex boom box, scratchy dispatches from B94 FM, our favorite radio station, broadcast from Pittsburgh. Boys are doing cannonballs from the diving board, staging biggest splash contests. Girls are milling around the pool, not wanting to get their hair wet just yet, adjusting their bathing suits around the areas on their bodies where stray pubic hairs might creep out. Even the girls who are naturally blonde have darker hair down there, and I feel like a pervert because that’s what I’m most interested in looking at, along with their hard nipples popping up under bikini tops. The pool water is cold.

I’m on the back porch, just watching the show, when I hear a whack, like the muffled sound of the teacher giving Jimmy Carter a crack in the hallway. Then I hear a dog squealing, so I look for Honey Louise, then see her running fast through the open gate, into the driveway. I run down the back porch steps to greet her somewhere in the middle of the driveway, leaning down to pet her tangled beige fur. It strikes me now that she is the color of honey herself, and she’s sweet, the right name for the dog.

I think about how much naming matters, even though most of us don’t choose our own names. The power of naming things hits me like a blunt object over my head. The power of naming things, the power of words, bludgeons me at this moment, as I run my hand along Honey Louise’s side, and it comes back smeared red with blood.

The squealing was the dog’s pain. My father runs down the alley to investigate, and I’m worried for him. What if someone wants to hurt him, too? After what feels like forever, but is probably only about five minutes, my father returns with the report. Three boys were hanging out on a corner two blocks down Washington Avenue. They had a pellet gun. Maybe they shot Honey Louise on purpose. Maybe it was an accident. We won’t find out because the boys ran when my father approached them. I try to imagine my father confronting them, but it’s difficult to see him putting himself on the line like that, even though I know he loves this dog enough to do it.

The party guests are beginning to realize that something is happening. They can hear some commotion over their music and splashing. I run to get my mother from inside the house. She is making herself scarce on purpose, in silent protest of this party for a girl of which she doesn’t entirely approve. She is making herself invisible, something I realize now that she’s taught me to do, too. Maybe we are built the same. Maybe there was something different about me, the child born on the Sabbath. The little friend from the womb arriving to rescue her mother. Maybe I am some kind of Jesus.

Linda is upset. Most of the girls are in tears with her. Joelle feels worst of all, for it was she and her mother who forgot to close the back gate after they arrived. It was she and her mother who supplied the opening through which Honey Louise escaped.

I find my mother in her bedroom, lying sideways across the neatly made bed. She has all the blinds drawn, blocking out the sunlight. She’s wearing jeans and a thin cotton blouse. She never wears shorts or skirts, even in the heat of summer. She’s ashamed of her varicose veins, which are severe and bulging from years of standing on concrete at the factory, measuring the openings of baby food jars, making marks on them with a red grease pencil. Her work is called SQC, which stands for Selector Quality Control. The other workers on the line are simply called selectors, their job to watch the glass as it moves along lines. My mother is the one who inspects the vessels as they come off the line.

She looks for defects, abnormalities in the quality of the product. She communicates the measurements to the men working at the furnaces, tells them if they need to adjust their glass making. It’s not glassblowing, it’s not creative like that, although I’ve often pictured my father rolling a long metal rod between his thumbs, firing something liquid and beautiful into shape, something that resembles a cat’s eye marble.

It’s a Sunday, so my mother can’t do any housework today. That is bad luck, and it’s against God’s wishes, which she abides even though we are not particularly religious. She does take Linda and me to Albright United Methodist church from time to time, but it’s more of a social visit, not for worship. My mother likes that church because it’s a block from the peeling yellow house on Atlas Avenue where she grew up, and many of the churchgoers remember her dead parents and dead brothers. They pat her arm and tell her how young she looks. They tell her they can’t believe she works in a factory, she looks too glamorous for that. They tell her I look just like Pearl, my dead grandmother.

I’m shaking, but not crying. My eyes see things in slow motion, like one of our home movie reels when I place my hand on the film to slow to down. The images look choppy, blurred. My mother sits up. A puppy excited by the smell of bad news in the air. “Someone shot Honey Louise,” I tell her. I feel like I’m in a soap opera, remembering watching Dallas years ago, all the headlines that summer asking, “Who shot J.R.?”

“Where is she?” my mother asks, still not standing, still not wanting to attend the party that’s happening in our backyard, the thin boys with their mostly hairless chests and knobby knees, the chunky boys with their floppy breasts that look like mine.

My father has brought Honey Louise into my bedroom. She’s resting on my bed on her good side, the side that doesn’t have a metal diabolo pellet in it. Her breathing is shallow, but steady. Her black eyes are moist and dim. Since it’s Sunday, the vet, Dr. Meerhoff, is out of town. My father talked to him on the phone, via his emergency number. Dr. Meerhoff instructed my father on how to stop the bleeding. He said the pellet will actually keep things in place for now. He says to let Honey Louise rest in a quiet room until he can make it back to Mt. Pleasant Animal Hospital, around 6:00 p.m. We can drive Honey Louise in then, my dad’s Chevy Blazer becoming a dog ambulance.

We turn off all the lights in my bedroom and draw the blinds. I decide I’ll stay with Honey Louise until it’s time to go. I’ll lay behind her, curving my body against hers. I have a dishtowel nearby in case of more bleeding, which the doctor says shouldn’t come. I don’t want to watch TV. I don’t want to make any noises to disturb Honey Louise, so I grab a copy of Judy Blume’s Just as Long as We’re Together, begin to reread it silently. My mother, after inspecting my makeshift dog hospital, goes back to her room, closes the door this time. She won’t emerge until after anything is over—the party, the trip to Dr. Meerhoff’s, the cleaning up around the pool deck. She won’t emerge even late into the night, when Honey Louise is back home again, stitched and wrapped in sterile gauze, eating ground deer meat from my father’s palm.

On Dallas, it turned out to be Kristen who shot J. R. Ewing. She was his mistress, a word people only seem to use on TV. She shot J. R. in a fit of anger, but he eventually forgave her. I can’t imagine forgiving the boys who did this to Honey Louise. I want something bad to happen to them in return. Every time Honey Louise sighs, I imagine something being taken from the boys. I start at the ends, first a finger, then another, then the toes. The sighs keep rolling from Honey Louise’s fat black nose, so I move farther up the boys’ bodies, cutting arms off at the elbows, legs at the knee, until eventually there’s nothing left of them to take away.