I will acknowledge this. I will also acknowledge that I asked the very earth below his dragon claws to open up and swallow him on that calm afternoon (strung now, forever, somewhere between a stolen country pond and a rented town hospital bed) when he called me on the telephone to acknowledge (not to praise, mind you, but merely to acknowledge) something I had written, whereupon he claimed, with too much pride in a failing voice, that he had “manipulated” me into becoming a writer, and I swore I could forgive him anything but that.
A note on the people
I feel obligated, all the same, to provide a note on the people:
The people these persons put me in mind of I love a great deal. Those people, though, are not these persons. These persons are my personal inventions. Those people, if you ask them, invented me.
A note on the dogs
I promised a note on the dogs. (See the second paragraph of the fifth part of my fourth attempt to end all this.)
BLACKIE O’REILLY (1974–?). Our original town puppy, got from a sex accident on my paternal grandparents’ southern Illinois farm, after a cat we had from there, Hazel, named after a hideous television character my parents said she resembled, had become so suddenly and inexplicably feral that she was returned to the farm, which outpost itself proved too civilized for her, and we last caught sight of this beast, scraggled and enormous, splayed along a dirt-road ditch as we sped away from the countryside with the new puppy alert in our laps, though I may be compressing events there. (Is that what this is still called, compressing? I was so very young then.)
Adjusted well, this pup, and was an avid snuggler, as we all should be. Was availed of two littermates, that I am aware of: one called, unimaginatively, Snoopy, and given into the care of idiot cousins in whose company he would soon succumb to worms; the other called Tavish, for some reason, by our younger aunts, who encouraged him to run all around, as they themselves did, until he was caught in the woods one night and eaten by coyotes. Said to be part Chihuahua, of all things, on his mother’s side; God knows what he was on his father’s. Weighed a little more than ten pounds, eventually. Was for the most part black but sported a white chest and four white paws, which pattern he would later see repeated in our menagerie to his absolute horror. Had ears like a startled fruit bat.
Taken by my brother to a pet show being staged at a local town park. Sparked a small controversy when it was explained that pets needed to be registered beforehand to participate, whereupon the boy held his puppy up and asked what kind of pet show was this. Returned home, hard boy and triumphant dog, with jury-rigged award for “cutest pet.” slept always with his little head on a third of my brother’s pillow. Knew his mealtimes, and became enraged when these were not strictly adhered to. Made the most religious effort I ever saw in a nonhuman to acquire language, so that all attempts at cleverness around the subject of food failed, as we sent one another the code f-e-e-d t-h-e d-o-g, or m-e-a-l, or a-n-i-m-a-l m-o-u-t-h, and then had to dodge the little fur missile, whose speed and vertical leap were by then legendary, as he hurled himself directly at our hands and our faces.
Was allowed after mealtimes to roam free, as we all were, which my town-caught father insisted was the natural order of things, his town-raised wife disagreeing, and while we formed our little packs and explored the town sewer pipes, never knowing what backyard we would pop up into next, our dog followed a different sort of scent, and soon half the town was abloom with his babies. If asked about this, we were instructed to blame the poorer family around the corner, whose numerous mutts were also black, with white on their chests and their paws, and to lie and say that these were born before we ever moved into the neighborhood.
Situated himself on the corner, when there was no heat on the air, and waited for challengers to come up the hill on Harrison, or to top the sad crest on Tenth, and gun their motors against him, after which he set off like a mechanical rabbit, holding to the sidewalk while the muscle cars and the motorcycles ran him down, the perpetual complaint being that just when they finally caught him he would leave off, self-satisfied, so as to remain, if but technically, undefeated. This brought, understandably, a certain reckless (one might even say a stupid) element to the street, and there began to be horrific crashes in front of our home. A car (it looked to me to be a Pontiac, though I might be mistaken there) collided with a large tree in the yard opposite, and I (and probably the dog) first learned the word “hematoma.” Not long after, a motorcycle spilled into that same yard, and the stupefied driver said that a little black mutt, “the fast one,” had come directly “at” him. He stayed locked away in our basement for the next two weeks (the mutt, I mean) while we more than once denied knowing him. Shortly thereafter we agreed, as a family, to move to Virginia.
Chased cows in Goochland, and was spanked by our father for doing so, which we thought was the funniest thing we had ever seen. Ran away from us then, and stayed away until my brother took out an ad in the local paper depicting what looked to be the head of a black devil-bat, with ears twice as long and pointy as the real ones were, above the caption Have You Seen This Dog? whereupon a local farmer returned him to us, gladly, within a few days. Stayed with us for a stretch after that, and bullied the puppies we had begun by then to accumulate, as country people will tend to do, with the obvious aim of teaching these mutts to respect him even after they had grown to two or three times his size. Must have known, on some level, that this project would fail, having been teased, and kicked at, and spanked, and picked up like a football and thrown out into the middle of a pond by a man who demanded respect from those all around him but would not receive it even from his tiniest dog.
Eventually made trips, on a daily basis, to a gas station roughly a mile off, behind which we had quartered when we arrived in that awful place. At first we assumed this was so that he might hassle the Holsteins along the way. They were black, as was he, with patches of white, and once, when spotted from the road by my parents, and fearing another spanking, he stopped suddenly and began to graze as if he were one of the cows: to this day I am not sure whether this demonstrated a mastery of perspective or a total misunderstanding of it. Soon became clear that he was not headed to the gas station on account of the cows, nor because he expected from the small commerce there a substitute for town, but because he wanted to huff the fumes, as the lower denizens of the station embarrassingly explained it to us, and we began to make regular stops to fetch him, goggle-eyed, home.