Dog Kicker
It was four-thirty in the morning and I was already late for my shift at work. Blame it on my odd desire for sleep.
The streets were empty as I took my usual route through my Just Okay neighborhood, into a part of town that was leaning closer to Pretty Bad. I turned off into a street where a dingy motel with a puke-yellow sign promised free HBO and hot showers.
As I drove past, I saw a man in the parking lot stomping at the skinny dog he kept on a leash.
That morning, I did two things.
First, I braked so hard that my car squealed to a halt in the middle of the road, which would have been dangerous and stupid if it had been any time but four-thirty in the morning. My purpose, I guess, was to get the guy’s attention.
But it’s not like he really noticed other than to pause for a second and then go into his room, his skinny dog following behind him with no hesitation whatsoever.
I think its tail was wagging.
Then I called 911. I don’t recall much about the response I got, other than being offended by its neutrality and calm.
The next day I had an early shift again.
Mr. Friendly was out there with his dog.
The dog he had kicked so mercilessly yesterday, whom I had called the authorities about, and who was evidently still with his owner.
A different kind of person would have taken action. Maybe she would have made some extra calls or, if she were particularly ballsy, just fucking pulled into that motel parking lot to confront this asshole. And while we’re at it, I don’t know, let’s say she rescued his dog and sent it to live with some nice people on a farm.
This hypothetical girl, you see, is a bad ass. And she is not me.
Instead, I just stopped taking that way to work so I wouldn’t have to look at that man or think about what life was like for his dog.
A few years of distance have given me enough clarity to acknowledge that the facts were these: I called the police. That’s all a reasonably sensible civilian can do.
Maybe.
I read something that said our bodies recycle themselves slowly until, eventually, every bit of you is entirely different from what you used to be. In seven years, we become totally different people.
Apparently, this doesn’t apply to our memories, because there are a couple of deep, dark moments that will not stop loitering inside my brain.
They’re not battlefield stories. They’re just awful things that, by rights, shouldn’t be part of my memory any more, and I resent the space they take up in my brain.
For one thing, I wish I could just forget about that dog.
And, while we’re making requests, I’d like to forget what it sounded like when a girl on my block got beaten so badly that we could hear her screams all the way down the street.
I’d also like to blot out that moment when she stumbled into my living room with a puffy face and torn earlobes, because someone awful had ripped the diamond studs right out of her ears.
I was maybe nine at the time, and not quite aware enough of the situation to be scared. My mother yelled at me to get back in the house, which wasn’t uncommon for her, but there was an electric snap in the air that made me pick up my pace.
Soon, I could hear the girl screaming, even through shut-tight windowpanes in our living room.
Did I wonder whether or not I should go and help? I like to think I had some plucky, childish desire to rescue her. An altruistic urge that would hint at my moral fortitude.
But I don’t remember.
I do know that nobody, not kid nor adult nor anyone in between, rushed out to break the two of them up.
The bully’s name was Lily, which still seems strange to me.
I don’t remember the other girl’s name, but I can still see how buggy her eyes looked behind her fogged-over glasses. She had glasses… how did she still have her glasses?
When the girl’s mother came to my house to collect her daughter, Lily was still wandering around the neighborhood like some kind of vicious dog.
The girl’s mother was Chinese or Korean or something that. And (like me and my family) she and her kind didn’t seem to have any proper right to be in some place as backward and white and insular as my tiny town in Oklahoma.
The girl’s mother saw Lily and yelled in her oddly punctuated voice, “I call police!”
And Lily yelled back, her voice bending into a high, mocking song, “Oh, you call poh-lease?”
The move didn’t sting me, nor did it surprise me. I was old enough to be used to people of questionable intelligence insulting my family (and others like us) with the only weapon they had: the obvious.
Some time later, a policeman came by. Did he take a statement? Did Lily get arrested? On both counts, I hope so.
Weeks later, my elementary school was doing a fundraiser. We were supposed to go door to door, hocking the same cheap, catalogue-crap that every other kid in the district was trying to unload.
My mom wouldn’t let me go out and sell.
One day, some kid whom I didn’t know came to the door with his mother, a pert blonde with big-ish hair and the kind of drawly accent that people welcomed, instead of frowned upon.
I don’t remember talking with the kid like, at all. But I do remember watching his mother sit and talk with my mother.
The white woman marveled at my mother’s creamy complexion and jet-black hair. She said she would never in a million years have guessed that my mother was over forty.
In this encounter, my mother was appropriately charmed and charming. It was a side of her that I liked to watch very carefully, because I so rarely saw it when we were alone. Most of the time, my mother just wandered around in her robe, listless, cleaning and cleaning and never looking directly at me.
At some point during the visit, the other kid’s mother brought up the unfortunate incident with Lily. And the woman said, her voice all syrup and her face so sweet, “Oh, honey. Everybody’s got a problem with Lily.”
I wish I knew Lily’s last name. I would try to find her now and see who she is, what she’s become. Part of me expects to find someone who’s done a string of years in some hard corner of the state pen.
Someone with a tattoo on her face and a deep, dead expression.
I dread that idea much less than the possibility of finding someone normal. A wife and mother with a house and a minivan. Hell, maybe even a couple of purebred dogs. She would smile at me from her Facebook profile, so warm yet polite.
Looking not at all like someone who would rip the earrings out of another girl’s flesh, or pound someone’s head into the sidewalk while their screams bounced through the air like a siren.
