This story is fiction only
because the names have been changed and all the facts can’t be verified. So,
this story is about as true as reporting is on the most important stuff. You
know, secret prisons, what’s behind the influence of the CIA, etc. Just like
that. True as hell; try and prove it ain’t.
A guy named Bill told me it
in a bar. If we hadn’t ended up in a booth with no one nearby he’d have never
told me, especially the part about one event that happened when he was a child
that he seemed to be over within less than a year, but which now he claimed
ruined his entire life. I mean, compared to, say, having a drone sneak up on
your uncle’s wedding and killing your entire family except for you and you’re
just eight years old - compared to that this is just whining, but I found it
compelling – I was spellbound for nine beers.
“ So, ok,” Bill begins, “This
is too complex if I try and separate all the parts that I saw happen, that I
was a part of, from the parts that I figured out later. And then there’s the
stuff that preceded this, ok, so it’s more like a snapshot of a moment. But in
that snapshot you can see lot’s more, you know? Like a Diane Arbus picture, you
know? Like, what we were just talking about JFK and Bobby and Martin, you know?
That moment when it hits you like a punch in the gut and you go, ‘Oh my God,
the government killed them all,’ you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got you. You
know I had a cousin who just died of some kind of heart disease. It’d been
diagnosed over a year before. The doctor told her she could die at any time,
right? Now, get this. Her husband is a Baptist preacher, right? And this is a
small Texas town. Everybody knows everybody. So I hear from my sister, ‘She
died in her sleep. And the autopsy showed it was her heart.’ And, in the
moment, you know, I just want to finish up the conversation, ok? I got the
news, sorry to hear it, well we all knew it was coming, thanks for calling,
would you mind putting my name on your card? You know. Then I hang up and it
hits me. Autopsy?! What the fuck they need an autopsy for? Did someone think
her preacher husband had killed her in her sleep?”
“Yeah, I hear you. What is
this shit with autopsies? Cutting up bodies. It only makes sense when you
suspect a crime has been committed, you know? You know what, talk about a punch
in the gut. You know how every time there’s a plane crash they conduct a
thorough investigation. Spend weeks, months if they have to. Finding the black
box, looking at this, looking at that, right? So, it hits me. 9/11. Bush ordered
the mess cleaned up as soon as possible, right? He fucking ORDERS that there
will be no real investigation, right? And barges haul all this debris, which is
the evidence, right? Barges haul it to secret locations and places that are off
limits, classified sites and shit, you remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” I answered, “I’m
with you. So, the most important plane crashes in American history occur. By
the end of the day, they say, ‘We know who did it. We know how it all went
down. Here’s pictures. It was Osama Bin Laden.’ And they’re flying his
relatives back to Saudi Arabia, right? But, this Baptist preacher has to have
his wife’s body invaded before the burial?”
“Yeah,” Bill says. “And Bush
says. It’s too distressing for Americans to see all this. We’re going to clean
it up pronto. Get it out of sight. You ready?”
“Yeah, I’ll stick with Bass.
I gotta go to the little boys room. I’ll get the next round.”
“Sure.” Bill gets this look.
“And when you come back you’ll be seeing a man about a dog?”
“Huh?”
“ You go. And if it doesn’t
bore the hell out of you I got a story to tell you about a dog.”
“Ha. Gotcha. Be right back.”
So I’m not a bar kind of guy
really. I always looked at it like hey, I can go to the store and buy six beers
for the price of two in a bar. But now, I’m gettin’ up there. I’ve most always
done my drinking alone while I was playing guitar. But now, fuck it, I’m
lonely. You know, I got no male drinking buddy. My wife won’t drink. Doesn’t
like me to drink. So, it’s worth it to go to a bar. I always talk to somebody
and once in a while I hit it off with some stranger and I end up getting stuff
off my chest that I wouldn’t, or couldn’t tell another living soul, you know?
So, Bill and I settle in. He
starts in, “I was just thinking. This story may bore you to tears. So just tell
me, ok, and I’ll stop. I mean, we’ve never seen each other before and I may
never see you again. And I want to tell somebody this thing that hit me in the
gut. Well, I’ll know if you think I’m a nut and I’ll stop the story. Or you
just …”
“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. I’m
into it. Tell me before I’m too drunk to listen, ok? I do this, too. Go. Tell
me about the dog.”
“Ok. I’ll just start with the
whipping.”
“You whipped a dog?”
“Hell no. My momma was
whipping me.”
“Yeah?”
“Ok, I’m like eight years
old. We just moved into a nice brick house in the suburbs.”
“Where?”
“Amarillo, Texas. I grew up
there. It was nice for a kid, you know? Both my parents worked. It was, let’s
see, I was eight. It was 1958. We left our doors unlocked, you know? I could
walk to and from school. I’d get home, I could ride my bike. In five minutes
I’d be out of town, out in farmland, pasture land, you know? I was really into
riding that bike man.”
“Ok, got it. The dog?”
“Pudgy.”
“Ok, was he fat”
“No. I can’t remember why I
named her Pudgy. She was a cute little cocker spaniel. Not a pure-bred, but she
was a cocker spaniel. For the first time we had a nice fenced in back yard so I
got a dog. My first memories about her are me, like, tickling her chest. I was
sure I made her hair go curly there from all the tickling. She was … you like
dogs?”
“Oh yeah.”
“So you understand me when I
say I loved her more than anything? I mean more than ANYTHING. If you said,
‘Bill you can either ride your bike or stay home and play with Pudgy,’ there’d
of been no contest. I’m with the dog.”
“Gotcha.”
“You ever see “Old Yeller?”
“Oh yeah, cried like a baby
man.”
“Me, too. And I read dog
books. I remember “Big Red” and “Lassie Comes Home,” right? We had a World Book
Encyclopedia, man, and when I looked up dogs they had pages of dogs. Neat
pictures. Hunting dogs. Working dogs. You know.”
“Oh yeah. Don’t tell me the
internet is ever going to replace looking through a good encyclopedia.”
“No way. So, anyway, I loved
her. Thinking now I think I loved her more than I loved my family, but you’re a
kid, you’re only eight. You don’t think about that, you know? They’re your
family, right? You think you love ‘em. And you do, but it’s, what? It’s a …
it’s a conditional love, you know? We were Baptists. I believed I was bad, you
know? ‘For all have sinned …’ stuff.”
“Gotcha.”
“So, my parents would spank
me with a belt sometimes. And this one day, I don’t remember why, but my Mom
was wailing away at me on the back porch. I’d put my hands back there, but she kept
on, hurt my hands, so I moved them. And then, there’s Pudgy, man. And she was
barking and snarling, scratching at my Mom’s legs, you know? Protecting her
master, it’s just instinct, right?”
“Sure.”
“So my mom had just gotten in
from work. She worked in an office and she liked to dress snazzy, you know” She
wore nice, I guess silk, stockings, and Pudgy was tearing ‘em up. I remember
laughing, like right from crying and going, ‘No, mommy, no’ to laughing - kind
of hysterical I guess. So she takes the belt to my dog, but Pudgy stays in
there, man. I don’t remember her biting mom, just scratching up her legs and
snarling. Man, to me it was like a book or a movie. That’s what dogs do, right?
You don’t have to train ‘em. They love you to death. They’ll die for you, man.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“So, I don’t know. I’ve got a
vivid memory of her spanking me. My butt, my legs, my hands, whatever. And I
remember laughing and then everything changed. Her expression. I don’t even
remember if I had got down to protect Pudgy or if she just stopped. I think she
just stopped and went in the house, Pudgy still going for her legs.”
“Wow, that’s a dog, man.”
“Yeah, and I stayed outside.
Me and Pudgy hugging and her licking me, you know?”
“Sure.”
“So, I don’t remember how
things went down when my Dad came home. He probably whipped me some more for
good measure. Inside the house. Anyway, all I remember is the next day I get
home from school, the back gate is open and Pudgy is gone.”
“Shit.”
“Pudgy is gone. But you know,
Lassie comes home, man. She could have gone out, but she would have would have
come back in, too. She knows where home is. But she’s not in the alley. I spend the whole afternoon
walking up and down the alley, calling, ‘Pudgy, Pudgy, reet, reet, reet (he was
whistling), here Girl, Pudgy.’ But she’s gone, man. My parents get home about
the same time and say, “Well, did you leave the gate open when you threw out
the trash?” Man, all my life all you had to do to get me was lay a guilt trip
on me. So that turned my mind to blaming myself, then there was some
speculation. She looks like a pure bred. I bet someone took her. Maybe someone
opened the gate from the alley and left it open when they left. Anyway, I was
just a stupid kid. It didn’t hit me until I was middle-aged with two out of
three kids grown up. All these thoughts like, if someone came into our yard
they could have come on into the house and stolen SOMETHING. You know, and a
lot of other things it’d take too long and whiny to get into, but one of them
was remembering so vividly that look on my mother’s face when she went
from being mad as hell, whipping
my ass, to just stopping. Oh yeah, she said, “That dog ruined my hose,” and
just went inside.” So one day it hit me like a punch in the gut, “My mom had my
dad take Pudgy away. I wonder if he shot her or just took her so far away she
couldn’t find her way home.”
“But Lassie comes home.”
“Yeah. Every day after school
I came home and looked for Pudgy. On foot, on my bike. With binoculars even,
ha. I remember going out in a snow storm looking for her. Man, I just knew I’d
find her. I just knew she’d come back. I didn’t give up for months, man.”
“Pudgy was dead.”
“Yep, I think so. If my Dad
didn’t do it then I’ll bet she got her daddy to.”
“ So before we both start
crying here let’s get set up.” So Bill got the beer and I took another leak,
thinking. Feeling bad for that little boy looking for his dog. Then it hit me
like a punch in the gut.
We settled down again and,
what the fuck, if this had been a friend I might not have had the guts to
handle it this way. I said, “Bill?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me quick without
thinking one good thing about your mother.”
“Huh?”
“Quick.”
“Well … That woman worked her
ass off. Her good job is the reason we got by. My Dad was a salesman all his
life and he either got a good commission, a bad commission, or nothing at all
when things were bad. Oh, and she was in the union, man.”
“Which one?”
“Communications Workers of
America.”
“Telephone company, huh?”
“Oh yeah. That’s pretty good,
huh, for Texas? A union woman from the 1940s when she was a telephone operator.
You know, plugging in those wires.”
“Did she cook?”
“ Damn good meat and potatoes.
Not much on vegetables. From a can. Oh, except for fried okra. And you know
what? Every Saturday morning for a long time she got up on Saturday morning and
made cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Hey, I see where you’re going with this.”
“You remember, about two
hours ago when we first met we were talking about that damn Keystone Pipeline?”
“Yeah?”
“We talked about Rick Perry
and how he wanted a mile-wide line all the way through the United States? And
how the damn Democrats would probably open the door to that by okaying the
pipeline? And how that’d be the thin wedge that, after that, why not lay down
some train tracks along side, and a highway, and electrical lines, and the damn
Democrats would end up making Governor
Rick Perry’s wet dream come true?”
“Well, yeah. Now, I don’t see
where you’re going.”
“Well, excuse me, but you
know I told you I was a songwriter? And I’m drunk and I’m going to go poetical
on you.”
“Ha ha. Go man.”
“Well, that Pudgy thing? I
understand it broke your heart. I bet your Mom did it, too, but you know what?
That thing is your own personal Keystone Pipeline and …”
“Oh, brother, you are drunk.”
“I know. Fuck it. But man,
that thing is like the Keystone Pipeline in your heart, man. It’s the thin
wedge that took you down the road into forgetting all the good stuff and the
more you dwell on it, the wider that pipeline gets.”
“Fuckin’ corny man.”
“ So are some of my songs.
But they make a point.”
Bill looked at me, kinda
opened his mouth, then shut it. I think his eyes got a little moist.”
“If you’ll shut up, I’ll buy
a last round.”
“Done.”
We got our beers and Bill
held his up. I reached mine over and we clinked glasses.
Bill said, “Burl, to my Momma
…” I could tell he had more but couldn’t get it out.
“To your Momma. One hard-ass, workin’ Texas gal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hey Bill.”
“Huh?”
“ How can we convince those
damn Democrats not to open the door to Rick Perry’s wet dream?”
“I think we’ll have to meet
tomorrow and figure that out.”
Damn, it was good to have a
drinkin’ buddy again.
Aillen Gilliland Dunn, 1923-2012
My kids would be appalled that I called her "hard ass." They remember a sweetie. Sure, she was that, too. The story is fiction, however.
