Chapter 8
"Don’t pet him, Mike," Russell chided, grabbing hold of O’Brien’s upper arm and jerking him away from the approaching dog. "You don’t know where he’s been."
Russell, Pete, and O’Brien had been walking to Russell’s truck when the filthy mongrel rounded the back of Ursula’s Diner. Immediately, Mike had veered toward it, even though bald patches covered most of the dog’s body and dried feces caked its flanks and tail. The mutt could have been a Jack Russell-Corgi mix, but that was impossible to know for sure.
"Aww…he’s just hungry, that’s all."
"What did I just say? Don’t touch it." Russell pulled more firmly this time and O’Brien complied. "Come on, we’re going home. Huey’s waiting for you, remember?"
"But—"
"He’ll be fine." But Russell didn’t believe that one bit. He really believed the stray was on its last legs. And unstable ones at that. The bony thing shivered and trembled in the ninety-eight degree heat, and Russell’s heart went out to it. It truly did. If he were five years younger, he might have even cried for it (hell, he’d cry for it now, if he thought about it long enough), but that wasn’t the case. Besides, the dog didn’t need his pity. What it needed was a rifle round through the top of its mangy head. But Russell could never bring himself to shoot a dog. Even with all the pathetic, heart-breaking mewls escaping this one’s decaying throat, murdering a dying dog was way out of the question.
"But Rusty…" Mike pleaded.
"I said no. Get in the truck."
While O’Brien climbed into the back seat, Pete shot Russell a glance that said: You’re handling this one, chief, ‘cause I’m staying the hell out of it. Russell responded with a sarcastic smile and a nod: Thanks a lot, pardner.
Russell turned the engine, brought the truck onto Main Street, and aimed it toward town. Close to the interstate, Main Street took on the tawdry appearance of its namesake. On this part of the drag, the eateries served mainly hamburgers and french fries, and the other businesses sold mainly gasoline and lottery tickets. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Jack in the Box, Dairy Queen, Citgo, Exxon, Shell, and, of course, the lone remnant of Riley’s Rock Around the Clock era, Ursula’s Diner: a mini-oasis of fast food joints and convenience stores—like the Vegas Strip, but without the accompanying dream of leaving a winner.
Riley couldn’t help it. It was what it was: a rest stop for vacationers traveling from the big cities of the Midwest to the clover-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It was just too bad they never ventured further than a mile away from the freeway. They missed out on the charm of the place. Small town life in America. Someone get Ken Burns in here quick before it all blows away in a dust cloud of rural flight.
"Some town you got here," Pete said, breaking the silence, hoping for a mild laugh.
"It’s your town, too," Russell threw back. "You’ve been here four years now. Like it or not: you’re one of us." Then, speaking to Mike and Pete both, he said drearily, "Whose idea was it to eat at Ursie’s anyway?"
"Yours," O’Brien answered.
"No, Mike," Russell said, peeking in the rearview mirror, "it was yours." To Pete now: "It’s not a bad town. It just feels that way close to the freeway. I’m just glad there weren’t any travelers in that piece-of-shit diner. I don’t think I would’ve been able to stand it if there were."
"Yeah," O’Brien returned, interrupting Pete before he could speak. "But I’m still feelin’ sorry for that dog. Why wouldn’t you let me pet him?"
Pete turned to Russell but said nothing.
"I wouldn’t worry about that dog," Russell replied, dodging Mike’s question. "You know, I bet Ursula feeds it scraps. I’ve seen her do that with other strays."
"Really?"
"Of course. She really likes dogs."
"Yeah, for dinner," Pete mumbled.
"What’s that, Pete?" Russell asked.
"What’d you say, Pete?" O’Brien echoed.
"Nothing," Pete answered. "Nothing at all."
Mike leaned between the front seats and spoke way too loudly. "Hey, ya’ll think those guys are done at my house?"
Russell opened his mouth but the only thing that came out was a big goose egg of silence. He was glad O’Brien couldn’t see the shocked look on his face. In all honesty, he had nearly forgotten about the…incident—no, that wasn’t the right word. The…? There wasn’t a right word to describe it, since he really didn’t know what had happened in O’Brien’s backyard two nights ago.
Tread carefully, he told himself. Don’t let him see you worry, because then he’ll worry, and…shit, he’s probably already worried. I’d be worried, too, if I were him.
For Russell, the memory of O’Brien’s backyard was like an aching tooth: intermittently flaring inside his head and screaming to be dealt with that instant, but then quickly fading after promising to address its root cause at a later time. And with the pain in remission, it became a matter of out of sight, out of mind. Except Russell had actually done something about those throbs during the first hour of their inception, when the pain in his conscience had grown too insufferable to bear on his own. He had called the cops—anonymously, but at least he’d called them, which was more than Pete or Mike had the balls to do. Oh, and how his voice had quavered and jumped octaves as he spoke into the payphone outside the Citgo, while Pete, Michelle, O’Brien, and Huey had waited sheepishly and pale-faced in the truck. His conscience had gotten the better of him, and he had "done the right thing"—whatever that meant.
But now, with one question, O’Brien had brought that renegade tooth back to life. It discharged high-amp electrical current through his skull, reverberating there like a scream in a racquetball court, pressuring him to address the question, to be the one to answer the question (because Pete sure as hell wasn’t going to try) and to find an answer that would somehow mollify O’Brien’s innate fear of winding up homeless. If only Mike’s dad were in town to take him off his hands.
Hey, don’t kid yourself. You didn’t have to take him in.
But he did. Who else did Mike have to turn to? Pete? Hector? No way those two would ever reach out to a friend in need. Was it because Mike was poor? Because he was weird? Because they didn’t like him? Yes to all three. To them, O’Brien wasn’t a friend; he was a pet. Pete only deigned to talk to him when he wanted to show off his scientific jargon to an audience too polite to tell him to shut the fuck up, and the only reason Hector ever invited him over was to see what kind of crazy stunt he’d pull. As far as they were concerned, Mike O’Brien wasn’t one of them. He was an undomesticated human being, a man-dog, a creature too awkward and unsettling to acknowledge but for the briefest of moments, when his idiosyncrasies turned into commodities they could simultaneously laugh at and envy. As far as Russell was concerned, those two were in no position to thumb their noses at anyone. To Russell, they were the undomesticated ones: so full of themselves, vain, egotistical. When he thought about it, they were both a lot alike, Hector and Pete. Both talked a lot, but said very little. Both had zero imagination. And they both hate each other Russell added. I like Pete, but I think O’Brien is the only person I know who cares more about others than he does about himself. Especially when it comes to animals.
"I don’t know, Mike," was all he could think to say.
Russell could feel O’Brien’s eyes on the back of his neck, staring unabashedly at the scar there. Usually, Russell wore his hair in a ponytail, and today was no exception, but for some reason he felt exposed with Mike sitting behind him. He didn’t want him looking at his neck. Not today, when he was in his questioning mood.
"Do you think Huey and Apollo are gettin’ along okay?" O’Brien asked. He pronounced Apollo with a hard A, the way certain denizens of the region pronounce words beginning with that letter. Arabs becomes A-rabs, and apparently, in some mouths, Apollo turns into A-pollo. It wasn’t a big deal, though this was the first time Russell had heard his dog’s name butchered this way. Mike usually called Apollo "Pollo,"
dropping the A altogether.
"I’m sure they’re getting along fine," Russell said. "Dogs like ours have no reason to fight, if that’s what you’re worried about."
"But yesterday—"
"Yesterday," Russell interrupted. "It’s probably best you forget about yesterday. Yesterday was a fluke. Do you know what a fluke is?"
"Of course I know what a fluke is. I’m not dumb."
"I know you’re not, Mike. It’s just that yesterday…" Russell paused, searching for the right combination of words to quell the turmoil eddying in his, Pete’s, and O’Brien’s minds. On the way to Ursula’s, Pete had confided to Russell that he had slept poorly the previous night, and Russell had admitted the same. O’Brien, however, had slept like a baby in Russell’s old Cub Scouts sleeping bag, while the owner of that bag had lain awake with his hands laced behind his head, listening to the heavy exhalations of Mike’s snores. Staring at his moonlit posters, Russell had tried to avoid recalling what he had seen and done twelve hours earlier in the backyard of the kid who now slept with one arm on the floor and the other flung around an out-of-shape, sleeping English Bulldog, but that was exactly what he did. Sometimes, no matter how hard he tried, Russell couldn’t control his thoughts.
So now he revved himself up for the big speech, the one he had composed in his head somewhere between the hours of four and five that morning. The words themselves weren’t important; tone and cadence mattered most. It had to flow out of him, and he knew that if he could just start right, the rest would fall into place.
"Yesterday—Mike, Pete, are you listening?"
"Yeah," Pete said, gazing out the window.
"Yesterday was a Mulligan. A do-over. It happened and it didn’t happen."
Shit, I’m screwing it all up. A Mulligan? Start over.
"What I mean is, sometimes things look bad from a certain perspective, and there’s really no way of explaining the truth to people without them thinking you’re crazy. You see, a lot of people could take what we went through at your house yesterday, Mike, and twist it around—make us into the ones responsible and blame us for things we didn’t do. So before going forward with this, I need to be sure. Did you kill those animals, or did you find them somewhere else and throw them in your backyard so we’d pay attention to you?"
"No," O’Brien replied, sitting up and locking eyes with Russell in the rearview mirror. His forehead was a mountain range of ridges and valleys: his "mad" face. "Why would you say that about me and Huey?"
Damn it, he’s telling the truth.
He had been hoping for an admission, an "I’m sorry, Rusty. I found most of those poor critters in snares in the woods. The rest I shot and gutted myself to make it look like some wild animal had torn the heck out of them. I never knew there were so many rabbits back there. I hope I didn’t get you into too much trouble. I just wanted to hang out with you for a while and sleep over at your house."
But that’s not what he got. Those two squinched eyes and that artless, yet accusatory, question were all O’Brien offered in reply.
"Hey, I believe you—you can sit down now, Mike. But try looking at it through the eyes of the cops and the Centers for Disease Control. They think you’ve been snaring, and that’s illegal—you know that. It’s not going to take a genius to figure out who mutilated those animals."
Russell couldn’t believe the words being spoken were his. They sounded so disconnected, so far off. This wasn’t going the way he’d planned at all. He had planned for it to be a let’s-get-our-stories-straight-and-stick-together speech, but it was turning into an it’s-all-your-fault-Mike-you-crazy-bastard-speech instead. But he couldn’t turn back and start over. He had done that once already. So as the words issued forth from his betraying mouth, he rued each traitorous syllable.
"I hope you’re telling me the truth, O’Brien"
"I am!" Mike nearly screamed.
I wish I could believe that, Mike."
You do believe that, you asshole. He’s been telling you the truth since the start. Why don’t you just admit he isn’t lying and deal with the consequences? Do you even know what the consequences are? Or are you too chicken to face reality? Bee-yahk-bahck-bahck-bahck.
"I ain’t lyin’!" O’Brien was close to tears now. He fidgeted in his seat like a four-year-old needing to pee. "Why don’t you believe me?"
At that, Mike began to cry. With the dam breeched, the waterworks poured unchecked, and Pete sighed disinterestedly, having seen it all before.
"Really, Mike, stop it," Pete scolded half-heartedly, continuing to stare out the window. "No one’s buying it this time."
"IT’S THE TROOF!!!" Mike yelled. "I don’t kill animals!"
"Okay," Russell purred. "Let’s all relax. I’m sorry for not believing you before, Mike. I do now."
That’s a lie, Rusty. You believed him the moment you saw him kneeling on your front porch yesterday afternoon. Tell him you’re sorry again.
"I’m sorry."
"You better be." Mike said, trying to sound tough but coming nowhere close. Gradually he stopped crying; the sniffling soon followed.
"But they’re going to ask you questions…" Russell said, starting down the same path he had just abandoned. He really couldn’t help himself.
Do you want to him to start crying again? You’re scaring him. You do realize that?
Russell plowed on, ignoring his conscience, "In fact, they’re probably looking for you right now."
You’re killing him. He’s dying back there. He’s shriveling into a raisin and falling between the seat cushions. Why are you doing this to him?
[I don’t know.]
"You should talk to Sheriff Price when he gets back in town this evening."
He doesn’t know Price. He’ll be scared.
"And tell him what happened. He’ll understand."
Why are you so nervous all of a sudden? You’re about to cry, too. That tingling in your nose? You know that feeling all too well. Don’t you?
[Yes.]
"There’s nothing to worry about." Russell tried to sound cheerful, upbeat, as if nothing life-altering had happened to him, Pete, O’Brien, and Michelle only twenty-four hours ago. And he believed the timbre of his voice, even though his sinuses were cavities of carbonation and his peripheral vision was slowly smearing to gray. He wanted to cry like O’Brien had cried, but he couldn’t, not in front of Mike and Pete, who both looked to him to be the one who didn’t lose his cool when situations got hairy and people started acting like fools because they forgot they had brains that, when used correctly, could easily find solutions to their problems.
"I’ll take you over there this evening. I’m telling you, Price is a good guy. Civil."
You’re cracking under the pressure, Rusty. Get it together. Don’t let them down. They look up to you.
"I’m not going," Mike said defiantly. "I’m going back home."
"No, you’re not," Pete said, turning to look over his headrest. "That‘s where they expect you to go. They’re really looking for your dad, but since he’s out of town, I’m sure they’d settle for you. They just need somebody to pin this on, paperwork to fill out and reports and such. You know how these things are, Mike.
O’Brien whimpered.
"Dammit Pete!"
"What?"
"Listen to me, Mike. Don’t listen to Pete. Just stay over at my house again tonight. I’ll make up something to tell my parents, then I’ll talk to Sheriff Price in the morning. I don’t know—I’ll come up with something. I’ll tell him it was a bear, or some kids playing a prank on you. He’ll believe me."
"Uh, Rusty," Pete said.
"What?"
"You’re forgetting one thing."
"What’s that?"
"There’s a garden hoe covered in dried Bloodhound blood in the back of your truck."
"Yeah, you killed Lola," O’Brien chimed in.
"Shut up, Mike!" Russell shouted.
And the cycle started all over again. Mike bega
n to cry and, hearing his whimpers, Pete admonished him with a few curt words delivered in an icy, no-nonsense tone, which, as he knew it would, quickly stopped O’Brien’s mewling. Russell then scolded Pete for being cruel to the kid and for not showing some tact, for Christ’s sake, which prompted Pete to explain to Russell that beating around the bush never accomplished anything, that he had to be mean to O’Brien because he’d go right into one of his crazy shticks if he didn’t. Then as if on cue, O’Brien began belting out the classic Kinks song "Lola," singing it in giggly bursts and snorts. And when Russell said that that was enough, Mike, that it wasn’t funny at all, O’Brien turned sulky and morose, slid down, and pushed his knees into the back of Russell’s seat. Pete grabbing Mike’s ankles and pulling them so he’d stop distracting Russell, then saying, "Do you want to get us killed?" provided the impetus Mike needed to start mewling and whimpering again.
"He turn’s it on and off," Pete said to Russell in total exasperation. "I swear to God he does."
From the backseat: "Rusty killed Lola. L-O-L-A Lola, LOOOOOLAAAAA!"
"What did I just say, Mike?!" Russell shouted
O’Brien went back to kneeing the back of Russell’s seat.
It never ends.