“Just about. . now!” said Molly. I reached through the bars of the cage with my thick lacrosse hands and grabbed the dog by a foreleg. Immediately it started to pull away. “Don’t let it get away!” she said, scrambling in the bag for her knife. When it tried to escape — at first just a gentle tug — and it gave me a “What are you doing?” look, I very nearly let it go. If she had not remonstrated me, I think I might have.
It was an awkward kill, because the bars were in the way, and it was a strong-willed little dog that wanted to live. It bit hard but ineffectively at my hands. It bit at the knife and cut its gums, and its teeth made a ringing sound against the metal. It snarled and yelped and squealed, and all around us the other dogs were all screaming. Molly was saying, “There! There! There!” in a low voice, almost a whisper. When she finally delivered a killing blow to the neck, a gob of hot blood flew out between the bars and hit me in the eye. It burned like the harsh shampoos my parents bought for me, but I didn’t cry out.
On the way back I let her walk ahead of me. I watched the glint of her head under the moon as she ducked between bushes and hopped over rotting logs. I felt bad, not about the poodle, which I had hated instantly and absolutely as soon as I had laid eyes upon it, but about the owner, the fat lady who I thought must be named Mrs. Vanderbilt because that was the richest name I knew. I thought about her riding down to the kennels in her limousine with a china bowl full of steak tartare for her Precious, and the way her face would look when she saw the bloody cottonball on the floor of the cage and could not comprehend that this was the thing she loved. Molly got farther and farther ahead of me, calling back that I should stop being so slow and hurry up. As she got farther away all I could see was the moonlight on her head, and on the white bag, which she had taken, promising to clean my gloves.
When we had gone about a mile from the kennel I heard a train whistle sounding. It was still far away, but I knew the tracks were nearby. I went to them. In the far distance I could see the train light. I lay down in the middle of the tracks and waited. Molly Pitcher came looking for me — I could hear her calling out, calling me a stupid boy and saying it was late. She was tired. She wanted to go to bed. As the train got nearer, and I felt a deep, wonderful hum in the tracks that seemed to pass through my brain and stimulate whatever organ is responsible for generating happiness, I imagined my head flying from my body to land at her feet. Or maybe it would hit her and knock her down. She would, I imagined, give it a calm look, put it in the bag, and take it home, where she would keep it, along with my gloves, under her bed as a souvenir of our acquaintance. The train arrived and passed over me.
I suppose I was too small for it to take off my head. Or maybe it was a different sort of train that did that to Charlie Kelly, a fifteen-year-old who had died the previous summer after a reefer party in the woods when he lay down on the tracks to impress Sam Corkle’s sister. The conductor never saw me. The train never slowed. It rushed over me with such a noise — it got louder and louder until I couldn’t hear it anymore, until watching the flashes of moon between the boxcars, I heard my brother’s voice say, “Soon.”
All Severna Forest was horrified by the death of the dog, whose name turned out to be Arthur. A guard was posted at the kennel. For the first few days it was Sheriff Travis himself, but after a week he deputized a teenager he deemed trustworthy, but that boy snuck off with his girlfriend to get stoned and listen to loud music in her car. While they were thus occupied we struck again, after two nights of watching and waiting for just such an opportunity. This time it was a Jack Russell terrier named Dreamboat.
The kennel was closed after that and the dogs sent home to owners who kept them inside, especially at night. Sheriff Travis claimed to be within a hairsbreadth of catching the “pervert,” but in fact he never came near Molly or me. She never seemed nervous about getting caught. Neither did she gloat about her success. She was silent about it, just like she was silent about why she went around stabbing things in the first place.
But she talked about her parents all summer. When I was not playing lacrosse, I was with her, sailing on the river in the Sunfish her grandparents had bought her in June, or soft-shell crabbing in the muddy flats off Beach Road, or riding around on our bananaseated bicycles. I envied her hers because it had long, multicolored tassels that dangled from the handlebars, and a miniature license plate on the back that said, “Hot Stuff.” While we sat stuck on a calm day in the middle of the river I dangled my hand in the water and listened to her talk about her parents, about how her father was a professor of history at the same university where Sam Corkle would return to in a matter of weeks, and how he would tell her stories at night about ancient princesses, and tell her she herself was surely an ancient princess in a past life. Didn’t she remember? Didn’t she recognize this portrait of her antique prince? Didn’t she recognize the dagger with which she had slain the beastly suitor who had tried to take her away to live in a black kingdom under the earth? Her mother, a cautious pediatrician, had protested when he gave her the bodkin, though her daughter was grave and responsible, and not likely to hurt herself or others by accident. “A girl needs to defend herself,” her father said, but he was joking. The knife hung on her wall, along with an ancient tapestry and a number of museum prints of ancient princesses, and she was not supposed to touch it until she was older.
I listened and watched pale sea nettles drift by. Occasionally one would catch my hand with its tentacle and sting me. I wanted to tell her about my brother, about stories we had told each other, about our lighthouse game or our bridge game or our thunder-and-lightning game, or the fond wish we both had for a flying bed, of the sort featured in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, except that ours would be equipped with a matter transporter, à la Star Trek, so we could hover over our favorite restaurant and beam up many delicious pizzas. But I said nothing. Nothing could have made me talk, on that day, or any of the days that stretched back to Colm’s funeral. Back then I didn’t know why I would not speak. Different professionals had tried to get me to talk, with art therapy, play therapy, with pen and paper, and even, once, with anatomically correct puppets. I could not tell them what I did not know, and even if I had known, could not have said because the only communication I engaged in was my homework. I think now that the reason my throat closed up and my brain sealed up was because I knew, that day in the funeral parlor, that there was nothing I could ever say that would be equal to the occasion of my brother’s death. I should have spoken a word that would bring him back, and yet I could not, and so I must say nothing forever.
Molly’s birthday came in the first week of August. My mother took me shopping for a present. She spent much time in the Barbie section, agonizing over accessories, but I insisted silently on my own choice: a Bionic Woman combination beauty salon and diagnostic station, a deluxe playset where your Jaime Sommers doll (I had picked one of those out, also) could not just get her atomic battery recharged but her hair done, too. It was not the gift I really meant to give her, not the gift from my heart. I insisted on it because I knew Molly would show a complete lack of interest in it and I would be able to take it and play with it myself. Her real gift from me was a wide flat stone, taken from the Severn, with which she could sharpen her knife. I wrapped it in the Sunday funnies. When she opened it she smiled with genuine delight and said it was her favorite.