Useless Bay(2)

My brothers and I dealt with these remains mostly by toeing them over the bluff at the end of our back yard. Let the scavengers in the mud flats below sort them out. Most corpses washed up there anyway, so what was the big deal?

The worst came when Patience took on the Pellegrinis’ beloved Lhasa apso, Murphy.

I can’t really blame her. Murphy was small and black and white, like a walking Oreo. But even factoring in that aspect, Patience freaked the hell out of me.

I’ve seen dogs nip and bark at each other before. But they’ve never really meant it. It was just a warning, a back off.

What Patience did was something completely different. I’d never seen an animal transform so quickly from calmly sunbathing to berserker frenzy.

I had to hand it to Sammy. He may have been the romantic of us, but he never forgot that Patience was still technically his dog. He was the one who got between the two of them while Mrs. Pellegrini screamed at the top of her lungs, “Get her off! Get her off!” Sammy thrust his hand right into the scrum and pried apart their jaws. It took so much effort I could see the veins standing out on his forearms. His shirt may have even ripped down the back, Hulk-style. He was a strong kid. We were all strong kids.

When it was over, Patience went back to scratching her ear with her hind leg, but Murphy was in shreds, and Sammy needed seven stitches in his right palm. It looked so gross, we couldn’t wait to outdo him. We were a family of five. Competitive didn’t begin to cover it. Especially in terms of injuries.

Murphy, the yippy dog who looked like cookie dough bites, lost an eye and a leg. She spent the rest of her long, fart-filled existence being led around in a dog-size chariot that supported was what left of her hindquarters. The contraption made her look like a short-snouted Roman gladiator.

The worst was the day after the attack, when Mr. Pellegrini presented us with an order from Island County Animal Control to put Patience down.

None of us could argue with him. The Pellegrinis were not witches. They were retirees in their late seventies living on a fixed income. When we mowed their lawn, they tipped us in hard butterscotch candies and lemonade that still had yellow dust at the bottom of the pitcher. They were decent people.

Plus Patience had done something terrible. We’d all seen it; there was no defending her.

But we love whom we love, I suppose, no matter how vicious. So I brought up the idea of doggy boot camp.

I’d read about this guy, Hal Liston, who operated a kennel out of Deception Pass at the northern tip of Whidbey Island, where the current was so fast and deep, the water was the churning bright blue of toilet bowl cleaner. I’m serious. It should be called Ty-D-Bol Pass. Nobody had dumped anything toxic in it—it was nature all on its own, water churning through a narrow gorge.

My brother Dean, our de facto captain, liked the idea. “We’re very sorry, Mr. Pellegrini. Of course we’ll pay Murphy’s vet bill. But what if we give Patience another chance? This guy Liston has a rep for whipping dogs like her into shape. It’s your call, of course. We’ll do what you say.”

I could see the look in Mr. Pellegrini’s eye. It said he used to like us. And he wanted to like us now—he really did—but he was just too old and tired.

“All right, since that’s what Jesus would want,” he said as he crumpled up the order. “But if I hear of one more incident . . .” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. There were lots of Christians in the neighborhood, and most of them owned guns.

Enter Hal Liston, a man who seemed nice enough but didn’t understand that grunge had gone out with the nineties. In a way, he looked like we did—plaid shirt, Timberland work boots, wrinkled and muddy jeans. But he had this long brown stringy hair draped over his right eye, and a bulbous nose that made him look like some creature out of a fairy tale—and not a nice one, either. Someone who would eat you up like a billy goat if you didn’t answer his riddle correctly.

He whisked Patience off to his compound in Deception Pass before we had a chance to say goodbye. My brothers and I had a family conference about it later in their bunk room, and we realized none of us liked the guy—least of all Sammy—who’d endured the storm of the century from Mom to keep that dog.

We couldn’t explain why we didn’t like Hal Liston. He had a smoker’s voice, but so what? So did everybody in the Rod and Gun Club down the road.

“It was the hair,” I told my brothers. “It made him look like a troll.”

When the murdered man (still not yet murdered, of course) brought Patience back a month later, she had a medieval-looking pinch collar around her neck. Liston trained us all how to make “corrections.” His gravelly voice freaked me out. “As long as Patience is on this leash, she should be okay. Sit, Patience.” Quick yank on the leash, followed by a high-pitched yelp. Patience sat.

“What about when she’s off-leash?” Sammy asked.

Liston squinted at him. “Off-leash? You want to control her off-leash? That’s another solid month of boot camp. Two thousand bucks, kid.” And he looked at our roof, with the rotting cedar shingles and weeds growing from the gutters, and he smiled a gruesome smile. Without waiting for a response, he got back into his truck, which was loaded with other people’s overbred dogs that couldn’t be controlled.

At that moment, I was overcome by an urge to open the back of the truck and let them all out. All of them. No matter whose Lhasa apsos they took on. The urge was so strong, I couldn’t stand still.