The rocks were treacherous like icebergs. Just a small, sharp comer might be sticking up, but if your foot hits it, you find out that most of it is buried. The rock stays put and you go down.
You don’t want to go down in Janks Field. (Forget the double-meaning.) If you go down, you’ll come up in much worse shape.
Even if you’re lucky enough to escape bites from spiders or snakes, you’ll probably land on jutting rocks and broken glass.
The field was carpeted with the smashed remains of bottles from countless solo drinking bouts, trysts, wild parties, orgies, satanic festivities and what have you. The pieces were hard to see on gray days like this, but whenever the sun was out, the sparkle and glare of the broken bottles was almost blinding.
Of course, you never walked barefoot on Janks Field. And you dreaded a fall.
But falls were almost impossible to avoid. If you didn’t trip on a jutting rock, you would probably stumble in a hole. There were snake holes, gopher holes, spider holes, shallow depressions from old graves, and even shovel holes. Though all the corpses had supposedly been removed back in 1954, fresh, open holes kept turning up. God knows why. But every time we explored Janks Field, we discovered a couple of new ones.
Those are some of the reasons we watched the ground ahead of our feet.
We also watched the more distant ground to make sure we weren’t about to get jumped. That sort of thing had happened to us a few times before in Janks Field. If it was going to happen again, we wanted to see it coming and haul ass.
Our heads swung from side to side as we made our way toward the stadium. Each of us, every so often, walked sideways and backward.
It was rough on the nerves.
And it suddenly got rougher when Slim, nodding her head to the left, said, “Here comes a dog.”
Rusty and I looked.
Rusty said, “Oh, shit.”
This was no Lassie, no Rin Tin Tin, no Lady or the Tramp. This was a knee-high bony yellow cur skulking toward us with an awkward sideways gait, its head low and its tail drooping.
“I don’t like the looks of this one,” I said.
Rusty said, “Shit” again.
“No collar,” I pointed out.
“Gosh,” Rusty said, full of sarcasm. “You think it might be a stray?”
“Up yours,” I told him.
“At least it isn’t foaming at the mouth,” said Slim, who always looked on the bright side.
“What’ll we do?” I asked.
“Ignore it and keep walking,” Slim said. “Maybe it’s just out here to enjoy a lovely stroll.”
“My ass,” Rusty said.
“That’s what it’s here to enjoy,” I pointed out.
“Shit.”
“That, too.”
“Ha ha,” Rusty said, unamused.
We picked up our pace slightly, knowing better than to run. Though we tried not to watch the dog, each of us glanced at it fairly often. It kept lurching closer.
“Oh, God, this ain’t good,” Rusty said.
We weren’t far from the stadium. In a race, we might beat the dog to it. But there was no fence, nothing to keep the dog out if we did get there first.
The bleachers wouldn’t be much help; the dog could probably climb them as well as we could.
We might escape by shinnying up one of the light poles, but the nearest of those was at least fifty feet away.
A lot closer than that was the snack stand. It used to sell “BEER—SNACKS—SOUVENIRS” as announced by the long wooden sign above the front edge of its roof. But it hadn’t been open, far as I knew, since the night of the parking disaster.
We couldn’t get into it, that was for sure (we’d tried on other occasions), but its roof must’ve been about eight feet off the ground. Up there, we’d be safe from the dog.
“Feel like climbing?” Slim asked. She must’ve been thinking the same as me.
“The snack stand?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“How?” asked Rusty.
Slim and I glanced at each other. We could scurry up a wall of the shack and make it to the roof easily enough. We were fairly quick and agile and strong.
But not Rusty.
“Any ideas?” I asked Slim.
She shook her head and shrugged.
Suddenly, the dog lurched ahead of us, swung around and planted its feet. It lowered its head. Growling, it bared its upper teeth and drooled. It had a bulging, crazed left eye. And a black, gooey hole where its right eye should’ve been.
“Oh, shit,” Rusty muttered. “We’re screwed.”
“Take it easy,” Slim said. Her voice sounded calm. I didn’t know whether she was talking to Rusty or the dog. Or maybe to both of them.
“We’re dead,” Rusty said.
Glancing at him, Slim asked, “Have you got anything to feed it?”
“Like what?”
“Food?”
He shook his head very slightly. A drop of sweat fell off the tip of his nose.
“Nothing?” Slim asked.
“You’ve always got food,” I told him.
“Do not.”
“Are you sure?” Slim asked.
“I ate it back in the woods.”
“Ate what?” I asked.
“My Ding-Dong.”
“You ate a Ding-Dong in the woods?”
“Yeah.”
“How come we didn’t see you?” I asked.
“I ate it when I was taking my piss.”
“Great,” Slim muttered.
“I didn’t have enough to share with you guys, so…”
“Could’ve saved some for the Hound of the goddamn Baskervilles,” Slim pointed out.
“Didn’t know…”
The hound let out a fierce, rattling growl that sounded like it had a throat full of loose phlegm.
“You got anything, Dwight?” Slim asked.
“Huh-uh.”
“Me neither.”
“What’re we gonna do?” Rusty asked, a whine in his voice. “Man, if he bites us we’re gonna have to get rabies shots. They stick like a foot-long needle right into your stomach and… ”
Slim eased herself down into a crouch and reached her open hands toward the dog. Its ears flattened against the sides of its skull. It snarled and drooled.
“You sure you wanta do that?” I asked her.
Ignoring me, she spoke to the dog in a soft, sing-song voice. “Hi there, boy. Hi, fella. You’re a good boy, aren’t you? You looking for some food? Huh? We’d give you some if we had any, wouldn’t we?”
“It’s gonna bite your hand off,” Rusty warned.
“No, he won’t. He’s a good doggie. Aren’t you a good doggie, boy? Huh?”
The dog, hunkered down, kept growling and showing its teeth.
On the ground around us, I saw small pieces of broken glass, little stones, some cigarette butts, leaves and twigs that must’ve blown over from the woods, a pack of Lucky Strikes that was filthy and mashed flat, a few beer cans smashed as flat as the cigarette pack, a headless snake acrawl with ants, someone’s old sock… a lot of stuff, but nothing much good for a weapon.
Slim, still squatting with her hands out and speaking in the same quiet sing-song, said “You’re a nice doggie, aren’t you? Why don’t you guys see if you can climb the nice snack stand, huh, doggie? Yeahhh. That’s a good doggie. Maybe Dwight can give Rusty a nice little boost, and they can wait for me on top of the nice little snack stand? Is that a good idea? Huh, doggie? Yeah, I think so.”
Rusty and I looked at each other.
We were probably both thinking the same things.
We can’t run off and leave Slim with the dog. But she TOLD us to. When she says stuff, she means it. And she’s smarter than both of us put together, so maybe she has some sort of fabulous plan for dealing with the thing.