ESSENTIALLY, I HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON.
Just which specific aspects of the U.S. Bill of Rights were being covered by Mr. Johnson while this story of Ruth Simmons and her lost Cuffie filled in panel after panel of the window I cannot say, as by that point it is fair to say that I was absent in both mind and spirit. This tended to happen throughout this period. To be fair, this was the reason why Mrs. Roseman and the administration were determined to keep me away from distractions of all kinds — prohibiting Caldwell and I from sitting near each other, for instance. I do not remember even noticing just when it was that the exterior’s dogs broke off their initial attachment and began moving in circles of somewhat different size, sniffing at the ground and the mud of the ballfield’s infield. The temperature outside was an estimated 45 degrees; it was melting that winter’s second to last snow. I do remember that it snowed heavily the next day, March 15, and that, as school was closed on the day after the trauma, we were able to go sledding after several interviews with the Ohio State Police and a special Unit 4 psychologist named Dr. Biron-Maint, who had a strangely configured nose and smelled faintly of mildew, and that later on that day Chris DeMatteis’ sled had tipped to one side and struck a tree, and his forehead had had blood all over it while we all watched him keep touching his forehead and cry in fear at the reality of his own blood. I do not remember what anyone did to help him; we were all likely still in shock. Ruth Simmons’ mother, whose name was Marjorie and had grown up admiring herself in different dresses in the mirror and practicing saying, ‘How do you do?’ and ‘My, what a funny and amusing remark!’ and dreaming of marrying a wealthy doctor and hosting elaborate dinner parties of doctors and their wives in diamond tiaras and fox wraps at their mansion’s beautiful burled walnut dining room table in which she looked almost like a fairy princess under the chandelier’s lights, now, as an adult, looked puffy and dull-eyed and had a perpetually downturned mouth as she drove the battered car. She was smoking a Viceroy and had the windows rolled up and was not even rolling down the window to call, ‘Cuffie!’ as the kindly, long suffering father before her had done. There was backstory above, in which the blind infant Ruth Simmons was lying in her bassinet in her tiny dark glasses holding out her arms and crying for her mother while the mother would stand with a glass with an olive with a toothpick in it and a downturned mouth looking down at the blind baby and then turning and looking at herself in the room’s ancient, cracked mirror and practicing giving a bitter, sardonic little curtsy without spilling her glass. Usually the baby would give up and stop crying after a while and just make small whimpering noises (this occupied only two or three panels). Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, Ruth Simmons’ Playdoh figurine looked almost disfigured, less like a dog than a satyr or Great Ape which something heavy had run over. Her beautiful little snow white face with its dark glasses and hair ribbon is seen tilted upwards several degrees as she offers innocent, childlike prayers for Cuffie’s safe return, praying that her father has perhaps spotted Cuffie huddled inside a tire in one of their seedy neighbors’ unkempt yards, or has spotted Cuffie loping innocently along the side of Maryville Road and has stopped the car in the middle of traffic on the busy thoroughfare and knelt down with open arms by the side of the road for the dog to come running joyfully into his arms, her blind fantasies’ thought-bubbles occupying several of the panels that had previously been taken up by the actual scene of a frightened and limping Cuffie being harried by the two hardened, feral adult dogs along the seedy east bank of the Scioto River, which even in 1960 was already starting to smell bad above the Griggs Dam and had rusty tin cans and abandoned hubcaps scattered along its east bank by Maryville Road, and which my father said he could remember being able to fish right out of with a string and safety pin circa 1935, in knickers and a straw hat, with his parents in their own straw hats picnicking behind himself and his brother (who was later wounded in Salerno, Italy, in World War II, and had a wooden foot that he could unstrap and take right off with its special enclosing shoe provided by the GI Bill, so the shoe was never empty even when it was in his closet when he went to sleep, and worked for a manufacturer of cardboard dividers for different kinds of shipping containers in Kettering) in the shade of the many beech and buckeye trees that thrived along the Scioto before the University unduly influenced the city fathers into building the Maryville commuter road to more conveniently connect Upper Arlington to the West Side proper. With the faithful dog’s lustrous brown eyes now moist with regret at leaving the yard, and with fear, because Cuffie was now far, far away from home, further by far than the young little dog had ever been before. We have already seen that the puppy was only one year old; the father had brought him home from the A.S.P.C.A. as a surprise on the previous Good Friday, and had allowed Ruth to bring Cuffie along to Easter services at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church (they were Roman Catholics, as poor people in Columbus often were) in a small wicker basket covered with a checkered cloth from which only the dog’s wet, inquisitive little nose had shown, and he had been every bit as quiet as Ruth’s mother had said he better be or else they were all going to have to get up and leave even if it was right in the middle of the services, which for Roman Catholics would have been a terrible sin, even though one of Ruth’s elder sisters had surreptitiously kept poking at one of the puppy’s paws with a hatpin to try to get it to cry out, which it didn’t, none of which Ruth had had any idea about as she sat on the hard wooden pew in her dark glasses, holding the basket in her lap and swinging her little legs with gratitude and joy at having a puppy for a companion (as a rule, the blind have a natural affinity for dogs, whose eyesight is not very good either). And the two feral dogs (whose fur was matted, and their ribcages showed, and the piebald one had a large greenish sore near the base of its tail) were hard and cruel, and showed their teeth at Cuffie whenever he faltered, even when they went through the pools of half-frozen mud and sludge that plashed into the river out of the mouths of huge cement pipes with curse words written on them with spraypaint, and even though Cuffie was just a dog and didn’t have thought-bubbles as you or I do, the look in his soft brown eyes spoke volumes as the piebald dog suddenly leapt up into one of these huge pipes and its matted head and tail with the big sore disappeared, and the larger, black dog began growling at Cuffie to follow into the pipe, which was not gushing but had a trickle of something dark orange and terrible smelling (even to a dog) out of it, and in the next square Cuffie was forced to put his little forelegs up onto the lip of the cement pipe and try to pull his hindquarters up into it with the black dog growling and chewing at his rear tendons. The dog’s illustrated facial expression said it all. It conveyed that Cuffie was very frightened and unhappy and wishing only to be back in the fenced yard wagging its brindle tail and waiting for the
tap, tap sound of Ruth’s miniature white cane coming up the sidewalk to greet Cuffie and bring him in to rub his stomach and whisper to him over and over how beautiful he was and how wonderful his ears and little soft paws smelled, and how lucky they all were to have him, as the black dog leapt easily up onto the lip of the trickling culvert behind Cuffie and, with an ominous look to either side, disappeared into the round black mouth of the pipe, completing the horizontal row.