A Girl Named Zippy (7 page)

Headless bodies really do hop around for a couple seconds; this was one of the indisputable lessons of Mooreland, Indiana. I saw probably four or five such bodies bleed their life out and fall down before my dad came out looking for me. By this time I was standing right out in plain sight, in roughly the same spot I had stood just a year before, watching Minnie Hodson take the head off a chicken for Sunday dinner. That patch of ground was a front-row seat for nature’s theater: years later I could stand right there and look at the grave of a much-loved and long-lost dog.

Dad didn’t stop to converse with me. He crossed our yard in just a few steps, and before the Scroggs men even knew he was there he had the hatchet out of Billy’s hand and John up against the bloody wall of the barn, Dad’s left forearm hard against his throat. Dad had on the face that no one in this world would choose to be faced with.

“Do you See that Little Child standing in the yard watching you, You Stupid Son-of-a-Bitch?!?” When pressed, Dad had a way of emphasizing certain words that was like Winnie-the-Pooh gone bad.

John was grinning in his shifty way, the way men smile at each other when one has a hatchet and the other doesn’t.

“I sure didn’t see her there, Bob,” he croaked out around Dad’s arm.

“You’ve got to Butcher your Rabbits on a summer afternoon when there are Children Outside Playing?!” Dad was spitting out every word.

“Now, I—” John started, but Dad stopped him.

“I’ve put up with enough out of you in the past two years, John, and now I’m going to draw the line: If you ever. Do anything like this again. I will tear off your arm. And shove it down your throat. Until you choke to death. Are we clear?”

John smiled stupidly. My dad was exactly the kind of man who made idle threats and then randomly acted on one. He had been known to raise a rifle, and to make peace over a bottle of whiskey. John knew better than to try to predict which he might do. He raised his hands in surrender.

“Sorry!” He called out to me. “Didn’t see ya there! Won’t happen again!” He looked like a clown.

Dad walked away quickly, and led me back into the house, roughly. “Go wash your hands,” he said, as we went through the front door.

“But, Daddy, I didn’t get—”

“Go wash them, I said.” His fist was clenched tight on the doorknob. I washed my hands.

IT TOOK US LONGER
than usual to get to Tall Trees, because twice I fell out of the top bunk with such a crash that Dad pulled over on the side of the road to make sure I wasn’t broken, and then before we could pull back onto the highway we had to test the lights.

By the time we arrived I already had on my bathing suit, my floppy shoes, and my Mickey Mouse sunglasses. My rubber nose-plug was hanging expectantly around my neck. We pulled into our favorite campsite and as soon as Dad shut off the engine I hopped out of the camper.

“Hey! Look! I’m all ready to go to the lake! Let’s just all head down to the lake!”

But I ended up sitting on the picnic bench for the next hour picking scabs, as Dad planted us firmly and safely in our temporary home. Before I got anywhere near that bacteria-filled water he had built a fire ring, hooked us up to electricity, strung up the fishlights, smoked sixteen unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and made friends with the family at the next site. When he and I finally left for the lake, he had Mom going through everything in the camper, looking for the toothache kit he’d gotten in the Navy, back in 1954: just in case.

THE KINDNESS
OF STRANGERS

O
ur neighbor, Reed Ball, who never ever left his front porch, was a big old man who stood crooked, like maybe one of his legs was longer than the other. One day he wobbled down to the fence that separated our two yards and called out to my dad, who was working in our garden, that he was going to poison our dogs if they kept barking at night.

“Is that right?” Dad said, looking at Reed in an interested way.

“Damn right that’s right!” Reed bellowed. He was another example of an old man who could barely contain his fury but also could never let it out.

“Keep you awake at night, do they?” Dad asked, leaning on his hoe.

“You know they do! They’re not fit to kill!” He was talking about Kai, who was so highly evolved he could have been a spiritual leader, and Tiger. Poor Tiger. Anyone with even a little bit of a functioning heart would have pitied her, the way her snoot was shaped in such a way that she always sounded congested, and the fact that she was pig-shaped, and thus had no dignity.

“Reed. Do you ever go
in
your house? Because maybe if you slept
inside
your house you wouldn’t be bothered by my dogs.”

Reed made a sound like a gunked-up combustion engine then lifted and lowered one of his legs, probably the longer one, a gesture surely meant to convey stomping. He raised one of his gnarly old hands and pointed a finger at my dad.

“You mark my words!” he said, then turned and strode back to his house, up down, up down, up the steps and back onto the padded chaise lounge where he spent his whole life. His sweet wife, Mary, was sitting on the padded glider. No one had ever seen her move more than her arms and her neck. Dad watched Reed’s slow progress, then waved at Mary in a neighborly way. She sweetly waved back.

Our dogs barked all night that night. They were highly perturbed about something. I finally got up and went outside with a flashlight to see what was bothering them; it turned out to be a bat circling a streetlight, eating dinner. I went inside their pen and sat down with them for a few minutes, trying to calm them down, but Tiger was so pleased to see me that she shimmied and yipped and snorted until I feared she would hyperventilate.

As I was closing the pen door to head back inside, I heard Reed call out from his porch, “You tell your dad I’ve had enough! This is the last time I’m going to tell him!”

“Okay, Reed,” I yelled back. “Hello, Mary.”

“Hello, sweetheart,” I heard from the darkness of their porch.

THE NEXT MORNING
I told my dad I was flat-out worried about what Reed might do to Kai and Tiger. Dad was casual, and said that he was working on it. He disappeared for a few hours, which was highly usual, and when he returned he was followed by a whole convoy of pickup trucks.

Dad came home at dusk, and parked in front of our house. All the other drivers just stopped wherever there was room and began unloading the cargo they were carrying in their truck beds. There were wooden crates and metal boxes and carriers obviously made at home. One kennel was large enough to house a healthy calf. I stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes watching them, then ran inside to get my mom.

“Mom! There’s about two hundred hunter-looking men in our yard with Dad!”

Mom looked up from her book, granting me the unadulterated attention she usually reserved for really good science fiction.

“What are they doing?”

“They’re . . . I don’t know. There’s a bunch of them and they’ve all got boxes full of dogs.”

Mom slowly lowered her book and began the process of removing herself from the deep indentation in the couch that she had been carving into it over the past twenty years.

I ran back outside. Lined up all along the fence separating our yard from Reed’s were crates filled with coon hounds, thirty-six by my count. They were nervous and jittery, pacing and circling. Some of them were already working themselves up into a howling lather. My dad walked back and forth in front of them, trying to calm the most disturbed. The dogs’ owners left one by one without a word.

Mom cleared her throat behind me, and Dad and I turned around at the same time.

“May I ask?” She addressed Dad as if he had just made an announcement she found interesting, but not unexpected.

“Ask away,” he said, shaking a Lucky Strike out of the pack.

“What, exactly, are you doing?”

“Dog-sitting.”

“Dog-sitting. Are all of your colleagues going out of town at the same time?” My mom was patient as a saint, but she said the word
colleague
as if it were coated with the oil drained off a can of tuna fish.

“Yep, that’s right,” Dad said, inhaling deeply on his cigarette. He had a habit of blowing all the smoke out through his nose, like a bull. “They’re going to a convention.”

“Oh, a convention. Would that be for the Society of Drunken Philanderers?”

“The SODP, we call it,” Dad said, nodding.

“I see.” She stood still for a few more seconds, probably counting the dogs, then turned around and headed back toward the house.

“Give me a hand here, Zip,” Dad said, uncoiling the hose, argument concluded. I helped him carry various buckets and pans out of his tool shed, which we filled with water and sat inside the kennels. The dogs were beautiful and stinky and hectic. From their pen, Kai and Tiger watched the proceedings without moving. Compared to these dogs, ours appeared medicated. I wasn’t sure Tiger was even of the same species.

We finished with the watering, then stood back and watched the hounds try, without success, to settle down until they were called upon to perform the task for which they had been created. One blue tick who was exceptionally irritated chewed ceaselessly on the metal door of his cage; another couldn’t stop scratching his ear.

“Daddy,” I said, reaching up to scratch my own ear, in sympathy. I would need a flea dip before the night was over. “Who
were
all those men?”

“Aw, I don’t know, honey,” he said, flipping his cigarette into the gooseberry bush.

“You mean they’re not your friends?”

“Nope. I’d never seen them before. They’re good people, though.”

“Well, how did we end up with their dogs?” I asked, completely mystified.

“Word gets around when a man needs help,” he said. He took my hand and we headed toward the house. At the time I thought he meant that he was helping a group of men he didn’t know, but I quickly realized that the opposite was true.

I GOT TO STAY UP
late that night. I didn’t make a peep about it, but just kept sitting on the couch next to my mom like I was used to the nightlife. It got completely dark outside, and then darker than that, and then the moon rose up and silvered the yard, and just when I was about to fall asleep against Mom and my own better judgment, another truck pulled up in front of the house, and Dad stood up as if he’d been waiting.

Mom didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. I just climbed down off the couch and pulled my red galoshes on over my pajamas and followed my dad outside. He shook hands with the driver, who was tall, shy, and looked like he might have a tapeworm.

“This ought to do it,” the man said, handing Dad a smaller crate. I couldn’t see what was inside it, but Dad held it away from his body.

“Tell Ron I sent my thanks,” Dad said, walking toward the backyard.

“Not a problem,” Lanky Man said, climbing in his truck like a marionette.

I galoshed as fast as I could after Dad, and the dogs and I realized at the same moment that what Dad was holding was a raccoon. If I’d been any less a child I would have wet my pants from the sound the dogs made, collectively; one of them barked so hard and furiously that he tipped his kennel over, and he never stopped barking as he somersaulted inside it. Twice Dad lost control of the crate holding the raccoon and nearly dropped it, which would have resulted, of course, in the raccoon running right up my pajama leg to bite me in some tender place and make me rabid. I was so overcome by the commotion and the potential for disaster that I had to just sit right down on the sidewalk and put my head between my knees.

I looked up and saw Dad gently setting the raccoon down in the middle of the yard, about twenty feet from the row of kennels. By this time the dogs were hysterical, throwing themselves against cage doors and leaping up and smacking their bony heads, repeatedly. When I was sure that none of them would actually escape, I walked out and joined my dad at the epicenter.

“That raccoon is gonna have a heart attack,” I shouted. Lights were coming on all over Mooreland, everywhere except Reed and Mary’s house. “It must be scared out of its wits.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Dad said, glancing at the dogs and then at the raccoon, as if he were watching a tennis match.

“What’s the other way?”

“Well, this is the luckiest night of this particular raccoon’s life. There’s no chance it’ll ever come across thirty-six caged coon hounds again.”

I nodded. After a few minutes Deputy Jim drove up next to our house slowly, with his lights off. He stepped out of his cruiser and stretched, then moved his head from side to side to pop his neck. He was wearing his pajamas and his deputy hat.

Dad walked over to the car and talked to Jim for a few minutes. The dogs never slowed down. They would have barked and howled and heaved as long as they had oxygen. Jim took off his hat to scratch his head, and Dad said something that caused him to guffaw and bounce his forehead up and down on the roof of the car. Next to me the raccoon seemed to be having a seizure. I tried to make out its features in the moonlight, but it was just one big panicky fur ball. By this time Johnny Scroggs was standing in his yard watching the proceedings, and Edythe, who never slept at night anyway, had decided it was a good time to play the piano. She was banging away at “When the Roll Is Called up Yonder,” and whistling. My sister came over with a lawn chair, then sat down and started brushing her hair. My mom was conspicuous by her absence.

Before the night was over half the town had gathered in our yard, as if we were hosting a fourth of July picnic. Sometime before dawn Dad carried the raccoon, who was clearly permanently damaged, over to the bed of his truck and drove it out to the woods at the edge of town. The dogs continued howling for about ten seconds after he left, then collapsed into dog heaps and fell asleep. Throughout the conflagration there had been no sign of Kai and Tiger, neither hide nor hair, as my Mom Mary would say. They had stayed safely tucked in their dog houses, silent.

By the time Mom and Melinda and I got up for church the next morning, all the dogs were gone. Dad was already out in the garden, watering his fruit trees. I slipped on an old dress that had lost its hem; my gym socks and saddle shoes; grabbed my little pink New Testament from where Dad kept it on his end table, and told Mom I’d meet her at the corner.

I reached Dad at the same moment Reed reached the fence. Dad said hey to me, then looked up at the sky as if he’d just realized it was morning.

Reed cleared his throat so long and ferociously I feared one of his lungs had worked its way loose. “Pretty funny,” he finally said, without laughing.

“What’s funny?” Dad said, turning off the hose.

“You know what I’m talking about.” Reed bit off the end of every word, like a drill sergeant.

“Nothing funny happening over here, that I can see,” Dad said, wrapping the hose in a loop between his elbow and his hand. “It’s just another Sunday morning with me, Not Fit To Kill and Not Fit To Kill, Jr.”

In the yard Kai was lying on his back looking up at a cloud that was shaped like a daisy and Tiger had just tipped over sideways after chasing her own butt for ten straight minutes.

“Hmmph.” Reed snorted. It sounded like a thunderstorm that lost the nerve to strike.

Dad looked down at me. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Sunday School?”

I nodded. “I’m on my way. I’m meeting Mom at the corner.”

“Go on, then,” Dad said, carrying the hose back to the shed. “But don’t you cross that street.”

“Dad,” I moaned, collapsing in the middle like an old balloon. “There aren’t even any cars to watch for.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” he called back over his shoulder. “There’s danger everywhere.”

Reed closed his eyes for a moment, leaning against the fence, then sighed and began to clomp back toward his porch. He wore the same thick, heavy shoes my dad had to wear at Delco Remy, the factory where they had both worked, and the seat of his brown pants was shiny. I hated the feeling old people aroused in me, especially when they were eating so carefully and patiently, or when they were waiting for someone, or at times like this, when they were working so hard to get from point A to point B. I wanted to just quick take the situation in hand and make it better—
here, give me that spoon
, or
climb on my back, I’ll just carry you home
—but it also made me want to kick something and bite myself.

I swallowed, rubbed the nubbly outside of my Bible, then skipped out of the garden and began to hopscotch past Reed and Mary’s house. Reed was just stepping up onto the porch, slowly making his way back to his chair. As I passed them I called out, “Hey, Reed! Hey, Mary!”