Here’s a piece – perhaps not suitable for small children – from the unpublished Wild Dog #7. Lee, if you’re out there, sorry for the delay. – JDW
BY LEE TOMERLIN
It was like one of those things your dad warned you about that never happened, except this time it did.
I was splitting firewood and the axe head flew off and killed the dog.
I had sort of assumed such a thing was possible, of course, but I’d never seen it or heard of it actually happening before. The ax head had been loose for some time. To make sure it was on tight, I always banged the handle down on the chopping block first Once in awhile, I took a hammer and drove the steel wedge deeper. Such preliminaries had always worked before. Always. It had come loose, but never flown off. Until now.
I had been chopping and Daisy had been watching with a lively curiosity that was absolutely typical of her. The piece of maple on the block had a burl, hard as an ingot, buried in the wood. I had been sweating and cursing, whacking away at it again and again. The dust was boiling up — cedar and hemlock, maple and pine, mostly — making Daisy sneeze and my eyes feel gritty.
My wife, Jennifer — Daisy was Jennifer’s collie, actually, had been since before I met her — Jennifer once remarked my persistence was one of the first things she’d liked about me. “Strong-willed,” she called it then. That got to be “pig-headed” later. Finally she didn’t refer to it at all. Funny about how things change.
I walked over to where Daisy sprawled on the dirt floor of the woodshed. The blunt end of the ax had hit her, not the blade. Her head looked almost okay, just a little bloody and kind of lop-sided. She had let out a single yelp when she was hit. She hadn’t even ducked as far as I could see. Probably couldn’t imagine anyone would let anything bad happen to her.
I squatted down next to her, dropped the ax handle and lit a cigarette, cooling off. I stroked her flank for awhile. Her smell seemed less pungent, without a live dog inside. Sorry, old girl, I said…but there was a tickle of guilty gladness there, too. I’d always been a little jealous of Daisy. Except for that, I might have been more careful about the ax, maybe. But it always seemed to me Jennifer was nicer to Daisy than she was to me. ‘Course, I sure never would have hurt Daisy, not on purpose. I’d liked her, for Christ’s sake.
I picked up the ax head and wiped it in the dirt, stuck it back on the handle. Damn. Then I went and got the shovel from the enclosed part of the shed and began digging. I dug the hole under the shelter of the woodshed’s tin roof, because there wasn’t any grass there. Nothing but wood chips and dirt. A freshly dug hole would be easy to hide.
And, as my shovel took its first bite of dirt, the very act made me realize I had come to a decision without actually thinking about it. I was going to lie to Jennifer.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first lie I’d ever told her. When we started going together, I used to exaggerate my high school athletics, told her I had set some city records for pole vaulting and had been on the varsity football team — first string! — and then some stuff about driving a dragster in the funny car finals once that had just come out of whole cloth.
They were not significant lies, you see, no big deal. Who could have known I was going to marry her! After that, the lies became traps that had to be maintained with greater care and attention to detail than the truth ever did. Yet it was inevitable that gradually, from a thousand little missteps, such traps over time would be sprung.
And of course, as she came to realize the truth, I lost credit for my real accomplishments, too, such as they were. How was she to tell the difference?
After we got married and moved into our own place, one day I found her reading my high school yearbook, turning the pages over and then back, frowning. I asked her to come to the kitchen under the pretext of some excuse or other, and then later I got rid of the book. When she asked where it had disappeared to, I told her an old school chum had borrowed it. Another lie to cover up the lies that went before. One more thing to remember.
In some ways I began to feel like a totally different person than the one I was letting her see. He was the one who was married to her, who made love to her and afterward, lying in bed, ate potato chips and drank hot chocolate with her. I was somewhere behind the scenes, pulling strings, making sure he didn’t slip up.
But then, hadn’t Jennifer told some lies of her own? For a long time she’d gone out with John Buckholtz. He really was a football hero in her high school. She told me she had never gone to bed with Buckholtz. But one night he and this girl came over for dinner and we all got a little drunk and he told a different story. He wanted the four of us to swing, to swap partners, and he related knowledge regarding details of Jennifer’s anatomy he could hardly have come by without personal experience.
I remember how a red flush crept up the nape of Jennifer’s neck while Buckholtz laughed and tore her little white lie to shreds. How her features, the planes and angles of her face, never soft and round to begin with, seemed to grow even flatter and sharper. But she didn’t turn to me and tell me to throw the bastard out, and that was how I knew for sure.
I finished burying Daisy and put the shovel away. Then I went back to splitting wood until there was enough, the ax head didn’t fly off again, and before I went inside I unlatched the alley gate and left it ajar.
I was home during the day because on my last job I tried to punch out the shop manager. I told Jennifer I’d been laid off. Another lie. Worst of it was, the manager had decked me instead, and then fired me anyway. Prick.
I went in the kitchen, got out a glass and filled it with ice. There was a nearly full quart of bourbon in the cupboard over the refrigerator. I poured the glass halfway full and splashed in some water.
I couldn’t tell her I’d killed her dog. Just couldn’t. That would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. ‘Honey, I’m real damn sorry, but I killed your dog today, and I know you liked her a hell of a lot better than you like me, but shit, that’s life.’ Oh, sure, she’d love that. Probably cook me pork chops and a cherry pie. I took a deep swallow, the booze hit bottom and made me shudder.
I heard the car pull into the driveway. There was only the one car, and she needed it to get to the hospital. If we’d had two, I would have taken Daisy to the County Humane or the city dump or somewhere for disposal.
It would happen soon, now. Daisy usually barked when she heard Jennifer drive up.
“Home!” Jennifer called out as she always did when she came in through the front door. I called back from the kitchen, ‘Hi, Honey,’ and went to meet her halfway and hugged her. She was still dressed in her nurse’s uniform — white and white over white — and she stole a quick slug from my glass.
“Mur-der,” she said, slipping out of her coat.
“Huh?”
“Some kind of gang thing on the North side last night. We’ve been jumping all day, I’ll tell you! — trying to get bodies to breathe, hearts to beat,” she said, shaking her head, walking into the kitchen where she began to make her own drink. She sounded more tired than sad. She ran water at the sink to get it cold, looked out through the window, said, “Where’s Daisy?”
I started to answer, ‘How would I know?’ but that would sound wrong, too defensive. Suddenly, I couldn’t think what else to say, even something simple, so I didn’t say anything and she turned around at the sink and stared at me and didn’t say anything, either. And I felt like she was staring right into my head. Damn damn damn.
She spun and slammed her glass down on the Formica so hard the whisky splashed, ran to the back door and through it. I followed her, feeling like crap. I knew what would come now. I would point to the rear gate. She would say Daisy had never run away, would never, and I would shrug, and she would know. Know I had something I was not telling her. And she would agonize for days, and I would put up signs on telephone poles, put ads in the paper, drive up and down the streets, ring doorbells, and she would gradually lose hope that Daisy would come home, somehow. I would go with her, hating every minute, hating myself. Even now there was something in me that told me to go on out, take her in my arms, confess what happened, get down on my knees if I had to and tell her, ‘Sorry, I’m so sorry…’
But we didn’t have that kind of honesty between us, me and Jennifer didn’t.
I wondered if it weren’t for those original, self-serving, flattering, ego-boosting, niggling little crappy lies everybody told, if somehow all those stupid little lies could be taken back, would I be afraid to tell her the truth now?
I went out the door and watched her discover the unlatched gate for herself. She went through, looking up and down the service alley, calling Daisy’s name.
And I thought there should be a time-out during wedding ceremonies. The bride and groom should be taken to a special room. They should have to promise that no matter what is said in that special room, it won’t count. Then they should be made to go in and fix things up, all the lies. To sit down and not get up until they had told the total truth about everything, all the things they had said and hadn’t said, tell it all, and only then could they come out and finish the ceremony. Unconditional amnesty first, and then pledge each other their troths.
I walked to the gate, through it, and put my arm around Jennifer. I could do it right now. Tell her how it had happened, that it was an accident…maybe even tell her about all the rest of it, too. How I was only third string, and didn’t really pole vault twenty feet, and how I got fired not laid-off, and how sorry I was I killed her dog, how I was very, very sorry for all of it, sorry I wasn’t a better man.
I thought about it hard, and I almost, almost spoke up and did it. I almost told her. I really did. I opened my mouth to say the truth, and what came out was:
“Daisy! Daisy girl! C’mon home, Daisy!”