“Shut the up you stupid howling mutt.” Sam Crowley hugged his sweat- stained pillow tightly around his throbbing head and groaned from deep in his parched throat.
“If I could just lift my head, I would kill you, you miserable cur.”
Crowley’s six foot four inch frame weighed all of one hundred and forty pounds but his deep bass voice could send little children running home to mama. He had spent all yesterday afternoon and all last night till one thirty in the morning trying to drown his current sorrows. The too many cheap draft beers and four packs of generic cigarettes were doing a wicked number on his malnourished body.
“Why didn’t the stupid kid take the stupid dog when he left. Just what I wanted; to baby sit a flea bitten mongrel when he and his idiot mother are supposedly looking for a place to live.”
The marriage to Andrea Risen had been consummated nine years hence, but Crowley figured it was over as soon as the son was born. His wife’s deeply religious beliefs had eliminated any sex drive she might have previously had.
“Bear children so they may follow in thane footsteps,” her preacher had stressed repeatedly, the few times Crowley had accompanied her to church. The hard birth and unavoidable hysterectomy had closed her legs to Crowley forever.
Why he had let her continue living with him with her constant bitching and ultra spoiling of her rug rat, he had no idea.
“Buy him a bike. Buy him a new train set. Buy him this. Buy him that.” She had repeatedly whined. It seemed never ending and then he had to have the dog. Fine, I bought the dog and thought she would get off my case, but no.
“Randy is too busy with his schoolwork,” she had bleated. “You’ll have to feed and water the dog for him twice a day. Crowley’s memories of the past kept hammering at his constantly pounding skull.
“Well, I’ll fix them this time,” he thought aloud. “They have been gone ten days already and I’ll be damned if I’ll feed that stupid dog again. That mongrel is probably really hungry by now. When they finally get around to picking up the dog it will probably be belly up. Oh well. They deserve it.”
The persistent howling finally made Sam Crowley throw off the pillow and stagger out of the soiled sheets.
“I’m going to beat your head in. I’ll teach you to shut up,” Crowley cried through clenched teeth.
Crowley stumbled to the back door, head throbbing like a brass band playing inside of it, and threw open the screen. He grabbed the cut off pool cue that was standing by the back door for supposed intruders and started picking his way through the knee-high grass trying to avoid the many barely used but discarded toys that littered the unkempt yard.
A flicker out of the corner of his eye caught his attention and he turned full right, almost like a parade march, and glared at his neighbor’s house. That nosey Mrs. Carruchi, he thought. Spying from behind her curtains, as usual.
“I don’t give a damn”, he muttered under his breath. “She can’t see the dog pen from her window. I’ll beat the noise out of that dog and she won’t even know it.”
Crowley approached the makeshift dog pen and raised the pool stick menacingly over his head. He climbed up on a concrete block that stood on end and leaned far over the crooked pine boards so he could reach the dog huddling in the corner of the pen.
“I’ll teach you some manners you flea-bitten mixed breed,” Crowley yelled as he leaned way over to take a swat at the dog.
Frank Warren and Bill Stanton eased up to the masonry house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac and rechecked the address.
“This is it Bill, the dog abuse one.” Warren said as he read from the typed report on his clipboard. Bill Stanton put the white ASPCA van in park and shut off the engine.
“According to this report from a neighbor, a dog has been howling for days like it was starving to death. Don’t you just hate this kind? Why treat man’s best friend like an enemy. If you don’t like your pet, give it up for adoption, don’t starve the poor thing.”
The two men walked up the weed-covered sidewalk to the front door and pushed the doorbell. After several minutes and several pushes later Warren shrugged and said,
“Let’s look around back. There’s no fence to block our way so maybe we can find out if there is a problem or not. We haven’t heard a dog bark or howl since we got here.”
Bill Stanton reached the pen first and shrugged. “This is another one of those hysterical neighbor calls that waste our time. Look at that dog, you can tell he’s happy. Look at the bone he’s chewing on. Fresh from the butcher shop. Nobody would mistreat man’s best friend and feed him bloody fresh meat like that.”
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