Thursday, August 30, 1975, Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Get
Down” was at #8 on Billboard’s Top 100

Yorkshire’s asphalt dipped down to the new drain grate, before snaking dead end into Tecumseh Bluff. The kids knew the path, knew where to walk to avoid people and animals, and on rainy days to avoid puddles that would soak through their shoes and socks. Teachers would scold them for playing in puddles and classmates would make fun of them for being poor and for being from the westside and for having to walk to school. But the colossus that grew here was matchless in the eyes of west enders and few knew better how to navigate its bypass than the neighborhood kids.

After a half day’s heavy rain, debris would cover the grate, a mixture of maple leaves, pine needles, and sticks sealing it tightly and creating a swirling main of pollen, drowned insects, empty cigarette packs, candy wrappers, and band fliers pulled from windshields along the serpentine path. There were always fliers. This wasn’t campus but still close enough that fliers announcing bands at the Warehouse and at Fred’s Backdoor Lounge found their way along with odd fliers like the Theta Chi Annual Softball Tourney for MDA and The School of Dance’s an Evening with Terpsichore. All became the pulpy daubing and chinking for the lake’s grated basin.

The rheumy pool swelled outward from the northside of the street where houses of dull aluminum siding that had once been blindingly white or robin’s egg blue now bore lichen-covered roofs and pasty sun-stained exteriors. The water surged the northside curb where it reached back, pulling itself into the yards of college students and of second- and third-generation west end blue-collars.

Dirt yards dappled with crab grass and bulged with tortuous roots provided higher ground for cars trying to avoid the rising tide. The lake leveled off almost three-fourths across the other side of the asphalt. If the kids had walked in the street, they would be shouldered up to car after car parked on the southside avoiding the flood. There was enough room for the pair to walk single file, but they had to be quick-thinking. Regardless of the direction, any passing car would either drench them from head to toe or, with a slower driver, push a rolling wake of water halfway up their calves.

Walking in the southside yards had its own challenges. The yards were steep and grew upward from the street in a nine-foot wall of grass with sets of steps and an occasional driveway cut into the hill. Walking through these yards put the kids mere feet from front windows. They could see the warm glow of morning TV news and smell the bacon frying inside these hilltop houses. Trying to keep their distance from the houses’ windows, they once slid all the way down the hill and smacked into the passenger side of a brown custom van that, as far as they knew, had never moved but was washed and detailed every month by a stooped avuncular man who always waved at the kids and asked how they were. “He’s nice,” Liam had always thought, “You never know about strangers,” Sister had said, “Plus, he’s got a van. Stay away.”

Not all on the block were friendly. The old lady next door to their friend Randy was a witch (everyone knew that). A live oak hovered over her house and reached its branches toward the road and the swelling pond. And like all northside Yorkshire houses, any grass that grew in the witch’s yard was entirely by natural happenstance and had nothing to do with the owner’s efforts. Instead, a diseased mimosa and a wisteria of deep purple fought for as much ground as each could cover. The witch still protected her bit of ground and shooed away any pet or child that wandered in. And no one ever went to her house on Halloween. Ever.

Across from her was old man Hagburgh. Liam really liked him even though sister said he was to stay away from him always: “He’s a drunk and he wears a knife on his belt. What do you want to get killed for?”Liam shook his head. He liked Hagburgh because he was the only pirate he’d ever seen. The man’s gravelly voice, the red and yellow eye patch that pushed at his bushy eyebrow, his wily grey mustache that pulled the corners of his mouth to the bottom of his face. He couldn’t help but stare straight into the old man, studying the lines on his face and imagining the mapped routes of marauders on the high seas. Hagburgh was always in sleeveless shirts that displayed a hodgepodge of tattoos. He could be found on almost any day in his driveway working on an old car or motorcycle. He was impressive for an old pirate. Probably retired, Liam thought.

“The service ruined that one.” Liam’s parents were in the yard planting when he heard his dad say it and nod at Hagburgh passing by on a motorcycle. “Booze. Shellshock, no doubt.” He remembered the strange, angry look his mother had shot at his dad before turning and looking pitifully at Hagburgh pulling back into his driveway. “Well,” she paused, “at least he’s got a reason to drink.” She turned and stabbed again at the soil. His father let out a curse word. Liam never understood why his father was upset at her sympathy for the old pirate. 

He looked for Hagburgh all the time – every time he and the guys walked or biked by and every time the family drove by. Hagburgh never smiled but always waved back when Liam could catch the old man’s attention when he was tinkering with a motorcycle.

Hagburgh’s was one of two houses that flew a flag. The other was at the other end of Cheshire, the Gainouses. Theirs mounted to the left of the front door. Mr. Gainous brought it in every night and whenever it rained. Hagburgh’s was on a rusty pole that was slightly taller than his house and was much too tall for the small, tattered flag. Its end was finely worn, and the last red stripe was separated almost completely from the rest of the flag. He had never taken it down. Below it flew a brand-new black flag with a white outline of man’s head and a lookout tower. Liam didn’t understand the abbreviation or the image, but the motto he understood: Soldiers were dead and Hagburgh remembered them. He liked looking at Hagburgh’s flags, and when no one was watching, he would stop and salute them when passing by. The soldiers deserve it, he thought. He was fascinated by the threadbare flag and wondered if the colors all felt the same Was it slicky like Gran’s Sunday dress? Was it cool and crisp like clean bed sheets? The flag’s frayed edges reminded him of well-worn cutoffs.

*

Brad seldom came outside and when he did, he could only play in his own yard. Still, Liam liked the boy because his backyard had the best climbing trees ever. He was a year older but that was okay, too. His yard also had honeysuckles. The sweet-smelling creepers pulled heavy at twelve feet of chain-link fencing along Yorkshire and engulfed one corner of the  backyard. Ever since Sister had shown him how to pull the style through the bottom of the flower, pinching ever just so to draw the nectar to the tip of the stigma, Liam could easily lose an hour or more working the honeysuckle alongside hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies.

In July, when the Gainouses moved away, Liam lost a friend and access to the honeysuckles and the climbing trees – giant loblollies. Making it worse, the new owners went to work on the fence, spraying the heavy vines and chopping at their roots with shovels. By August, the wall of white nectar had been reduced to a curbside heap of limp amber clinging to withered vines and crisp leaves waiting for the city haul-off truck. Liam felt stripped of his rights. It was his neighborhood first, and nobody had even met them yet or even knew their names, except their dog.

All heard the dog’s bark every time a car passed and then someone hollering Molly. The St. Bernard-shepherd mix ran the length of the fence, back and forth, yapping at anyone who dared to walk or bike alongside her yard on their way up or down Yorkshire. She was guarding the giant soft pines that only the Gainouses’ old yard had. But he’d been there first. He knew the value of those trees and that yard, knew that he could see his over the rooftops and into foreign backyards, hidden by thick maples and oversized dogwoods. She was just a dog – a bad dog. From the tallest loblolly, he could see his mother hanging laundry, Hagburgh working on cars, a small stretch of Tecumseh blocks away with traffic rushing to and from campus, and he could even see Mrs. Landry who wasn’t really a Mrs. sunbathing in her backyard. He and Brad had spent hours up in those trees seeing things. Dogs know nothing about seeing things.

The loblollies covered the backyard with their limbs extended, a few even reaching past

Their chainlink barrier and into the neighboring yards. They reached above stunted maples and Japanese cherries and together rivaled the moss-draped oak that was the centerpiece of the neighboring backyard. Molly’s doghouse was jammed plumb against the back fence. It was a simple plywood box raised off the ground by cinderblocks three high and was topped with a cattywampus roof of mismatched shingles and. He’d never seen one like it.

“I miss Brad.” Liam sat on the bottom step. Sister sat cross-legged leaning against the house. She lowered her book and looked at him, acknowledging his expression before going back to her reading. “He was fun to play with.”

She put the book down again and followed his stare. “You just miss playing there.”

“Do not. He was my best friend.”

“Everybody’s your bestfriend.” She raised the book again.

He knew she meant to hurt him but said nothing. So what’s wrong with that, he thought.

A car turned onto Yorkshire, heading for Cheshire and cuing Molly’s fence run and volley of barks.

“Go climb a tree if you want to.” Her head never moved from her book. You’re not afraid of a puppy, are you?”

“No, I ain’t, and she ain’t a puppy.”

A light laugh stuck smugly in her throat. “Yeah you are, wuss.”

Liam lay in bed that night picturing the doghouse she had pointed out. It’s because of the flooding, she had said. She was right, Molly’s head came to the bottom of the opening. She had to pull herself up to get into the house. She couldn’t have gotten on its roof if she wanted to. Yeah, he thought, that dog would of escaped long ago if she ever could of but the roof was just too high.

*

By the end of August, Molly had worn a dirt path into the ground along the fence, and and she was Liam’s newest obsession. For weeks he’d studied over how to get by the dog and climb the trees. He knew he had other things to be doing, to be thinking on, especially today. Today he was eight years old. A big number. Gran was coming and they were going to have hamburgers and potato salad and chocolate cake. And afterwards, Mom was taking him and Lewis and Bert and Stan to see the new John Wayne movie Cahill. But the wind pulled a strong draft through the scant honeysuckles, and the loblolly branches beckoned anyone who’d see their calling. The movie was hours away. The day would be his.

Molly slept midday in the cool dirt beneath the kitchen porch. Liam rode around to the east end of Yorkshire to Bellevue and dropped his bike in the rental yard two houses down from the Gainouses’ old fence. He missed his honeysuckles. He crouched like a pirate sneaking out of his cell past the sleeping guards, knowing that if he could see her, then she could see him. For protection, he wished he had a knife in his mouth or a bully club in his belt. He moved from one overgrown bush to another, to a fat pine to the abandoned beater on blocks until he was directly behind Molly’s house. She lay still, head flat on the ground below the back of the house. She wouldn’t get him. The doghouse roof was too tall for Molly, and it was really too hot for her to move. He could do it. He knew he could stand on top of her house. He would easily climb into the trees and the dog would never even come close to him. If his buccaneer stealth continued to hold, he would be fifty feet up in a few seconds looking down at the sleeping mutt. He pulled himself onto the doghouse roof.

The monster had pushed him down, grabbing his shoulders with her front paws. Her tympanic bark caught in his head and her breath burned his scalp when he rolled onto his back. She blasted incessantly and he pushed at her hot oily fur with all he had. Each handful of her seemed to slip from his fists and he kept grabbing and re-grabbing, holding her face away from his. The more he screamed, the more she barked.

Her teeth, he thought. Got to keep them away. Keep her from biting me.

He opened his squinted eyes to see where the breath was coming from, to see what was breathing in his face. In her mouth, he saw the brownstreaked yellow teeth and the pink gums, and he smelled the whole of the dog’s world – stale Purina chow, the cool earth, and the chewed-up volleyballs and rawhides that littered the yard.

He took hold of her collar with both hands and wrenched the dog’s head to one side. He felt something snap, and his right hand fell from Molly’s collar. He pulled back his fist and struck her left eye. With one hand holding her collar, Liam’s other hand struck the dog’s eye repeatedly. After the sixth or seventh blow, Molly let out a high-pitched bark that Liam couldn’t hear for his own screaming. He couldn’t hear the traffic speeding along Jackson Bluff; he couldn’t hear the overhauled Honda Scrambler in Hagburgh’s driveway; he couldn’t hear the Osceola Ice Cream truck or its mono-recording of “The Entertainer” turning off Kettlewell or the neighbor children calling after; he couldn’t even hear Morrison belting out “Love me Two Times” from the front bedroom window of the college renters just two houses down and across the way; and none seemed to hear him.

Blood began to appear. After several more blind punches, she gave another yelp, more acute than she had ever had cause to let. And still, Liam’s left hand was wound tightly in the oily leather collar, clenching a fistful of fur and holding her in place. He squalled and punched and rolled his frame intuitively giving all his weight to his tiny fist. And when his grip on her collar loosened the slightest bit, the dog finally pulled free, stumbling sideways before finding her footing and skulking off about fifteen feet away.

She crouched head down with her hind end in the dirt, front legs nervously lifting and lowering her torso slightly from the ground as she moved forward ever so slowly. She shook her head to one side, coming toward Liam as he clambered over the fence. His face was flushed. Blood and dirt and dog slobber swirled the copper-colored dirt stains on his white tee. Molly’s blood. He turned to run home but stopped short when he finally heard her whining. Opening his bloodied fist, he saw the vaccination tag and its sharp wire between his index and pointer fingers. He turned to see her slumped against the fence and pushing its slack outward toward him. She was still trying to shake the blood from her vision. There was something pathetic in her doggy voice, something suppliant and sad. She raised her nose in the air looking at him shamefully or apologetically or simply in deference to the beating the boy had just given her. Liam glanced around. No one was in sight. He figured after all his screaming that someone would come. But there was no one. No neighbors, no college renters, no Kowlaskis, or Bryants, or pirates. No one.

“Molly,” he panted. He realized he had stopped crying. “You’re a bad dog.”

She whimpered back at him, moving her gaze again to the ground. He tugged his tee shirt out and inspected the dog’s blood and slobber, trying to fathom how it was that she never bit him. He had not only survived but maybe Sister was wrong. Maybe she didn’t know anything about dogs or wusses. Maybe the dog wasn’t an enemy.

She had slowly moved to the fence and now leaned into it. He stuck his fingers through the fence and touched her ear. It was soft like the frayed end of an old pirate’s flag. Liam stood for a few minutes petting the soft edge of the dog’s ear. She leaned more of her weight into the fence and now into him. She was not his enemy after all, he thought, and he wasn’t no wuss. He had fought a dog, he had stood his ground, and maybe, he thought, he had made a friend.

– Bill Gary