Caring Is Creepy (29 page)

The barking of the dogs got closer. The sound made Hayes’s hands shake. Even in the rain I could tell he was crying. He muttered “fuck” over and over again. His face crumpled up on itself. I knew by looking at him all he wanted to do was run. But he stayed. For that, I forgave him the rest. All of it.

“I seen them both—Butthole and the Army guy!” Burns shouted. “They’re going at it in the house!”

“We should get,” Travis said, closer now.

“Fuck no,” Marty said. “That little bitch stole my eye. I’m going to see her hurt.”

My legs jittered and shook. Hayes’s fingers skittered like crab legs across the tape. One of his ragged fingernails slipped and took a piece out of my arm. The dogs howled and screamed. Not being able to crane my neck far enough to see, I imagined them slavering at the smell of my blood, desperate for a taste of me.

“Hayes, get off that child. I’ll shoot you in the head if you don’t get out of my way.” Marty fired a round to show him this. A dollop of mud and grass splattered the two of us. “Let them loose, Travis,” he said. Then after a moment: “Sic her, Blitzen. Chew her fucking head off.”

The first dog ran so hard it slid past us. Its nails clattered on the cement apron below the steps. Buried beneath all the barking and Marty’s shouts to sic me and the openmouthed chewing sound of heavy rain, something keened like a fucked cat. A ghost whine. As the first dog jumped, Hayes covered me with his body. I thought maybe he made the sound, or even me. I wasn’t sure at first if he meant to protect me or if he’d been shot like Marty threatened. A second dog worried at his shirt, tearing the wet cotton. Hayes shouted for it to leave us be. A third went at my neck. I pushed its face away with my free hand. It bit through the webbing between my finger and thumb. I screamed. And screamed. Rain fell in my open mouth. Logan still didn’t come.

“Kill her, Donner! Goddamnit!” Marty shouted, hoarse now but louder than before.

All the dogs were on us. Hayes moaned and covered my face with his hands. I felt teeth tear my legs. My earring ripped through my earlobe. Hot breath in my face. More than anything I wanted to tear Marty’s throat out. I didn’t need a weapon. I’d use my teeth. Be my own dog. No more barking once the dogs really set to, only yips and growls. Hayes tried to hide my head in his chest.

“I can hear them coming, Flipper,” Hayes mumbled into my hair. “Hold on—”

Two flat cracks and the dog biting my ankle collapsed. Then Hayes let out a long, gurgling breath.

“The hell with this,” Travis said. “I ain’t facing a murder rap.”

“Get your ass back here!” Marty screamed.

That keening sound grew louder. It’d been floating in the rain above me all this time, but I couldn’t hear it for what it was. Now I understood what Hayes meant. I felt a couple of lifetimes away from the girl who’d made the 911 call. I slapped one of the dogs in the neck. It only growled and looked for a new angle. I tried to curl up under poor Hayes. The dogs kept on. They didn’t give a shit about police sirens. Teeth went into my shoulder, my arm. A hank of hair got torn off the back of my head.

A different gun went off. So loud I thought I might be hit and just not know it yet. Then another. This one farther away. My first thought was that Butthole had come back and he’d decided to end all this. The dog on my other leg quit biting. I couldn’t hardly breathe for the weight of Hayes on my chest. I squinted past his head at the pouring rain. Blue lights flashed in the grass, orange lights throbbed in the trees. Another shot went off somewhere behind me. A dog screamed. That’s exactly what it sounded like—a girl’s horror-movie scream. I listened for Logan. Where was he? How long had it been? Glass shattered over near the house. A gruff voice demanded someone stop or he’d shoot. Shoe soles slapped the pavement. Another man yelled, “Get that fucker!” Wheels squealed. Followed by the crunch and screech of tearing metal.

I don’t remember the exact moment the dogs stopped chewing on me. My right mind picked up and left me, and what went away didn’t come back for a while. I lay perfectly still. I was afraid to lift my head and let the dog get at my face again. I’d seen a dog catch a squirrel once down in Forsyth Park in Savannah when I was little. And this was the picture in my head. That dog whipping me around in its mouth and snapping my neck like a squirrel’s.
Someone touched me on the shoulder, asked if I was okay. I don’t know what I said. I don’t think I actually said anything. Just made a sound.

“You’ve got to get up, honey.” It was a man’s voice.

My other hand came free of the chair, and once loose it carried a new and evil sort of pain. The man rolled Hayes off my chest. When I saw rain splashing Hayes’s open eyes, I knew, and something important tore itself loose from my chest and flew up into wet sky. The man with the gentle voice tried to pull me up by my armpits, but I kept my knees locked tight against my stomach, my eyes closed and my chin down. “This house is on fire.” He truly did have a gentle voice and I wanted to believe he meant well, but still I was afraid. “We got to get you out of here, darling. It ain’t safe.”

And that’s when I opened my eyes. It looked like the whole fucking world was on fire. Flames did pirouettes in the trees. Flames dripped down off the roof and spilled onto the grass. Fire chuckled and guffawed. Timbers popped and crackled. Glass cracked and crashed. Above it all, the clouds dropped gobs of hiss on everything. I looked around for Logan and my mom. I yelled for them.

“Come on, now,” the man said. I recognized him as the policeman who came and spoke to a school assembly about drugs last fall. A squat man with a short, black mustache. He seemed mean and no-nonsense at the assembly, yelling at us to not get mixed up with drugs and showing us slides of a woman insane from LSD, but now his voice was soft and kind. A TV show father voice. Somehow he’d managed to escape out of some terrible nineties sitcom and here he was to help me.

“Come on, now,” he said again. “Let’s go.”

The policeman took my hand and dragged me up. This time I let him. My legs felt numb and then they felt like what they really were: something that had gotten the shit bitten out of them. My arm screamed bloody murder, but only I could hear it. I made an
ahhh
sound, high-pitched, almost like a bird, and he apologized. My hands were bloody and my jaw felt cracked open and raw. When I stood up, it seemed as though I’d gotten my hearing back and I hadn’t even known it was gone. Everything became so loud. The heat licked at my face. A jumbo jet could have crashed into the house and it wouldn’t of looked any worse or sounded any louder. The fire hissed with the loudest static you’ve ever heard. A million TVs tuned to empty channels. How did the house go up so fast? I’d only really seen the smoke before. Now even the holly bushes were on fire. An explosion went off somewhere in the middle of the house. Loud enough to make my ears ring. Bits and chunks of the house came flying out. A piece hit me in the chest, but it just bounced off. What could hurt me now? I thought. Nothing can touch me now.

A man out front in the driveway yelled, “It’s got to be the furnace—must of been an oil burner!”

I found my mom leaned up against a police car in the street. She was wrapped in a blanket. Blood covered her face and the collar of her shirt. Her uncovered elbow dripped black onto the pavement. Absently, she daubed red squiggles on the white hood of the car with her fingers. Rain turned it pink. Sirens whooped several times and stopped, as though somebody had decided they needed to raise an alarm. Bright light flashed across my mom’s cheeks and neck—blue, then white, then blue. She stared at the house, her mouth open and blood smeared as if it’d been made with the slash of a steak knife. Her eyes looked black and empty. The policeman’s hand on her arm was the only thing keeping her standing.

When she saw me, she made a shrill sound and tried to pull away from him. “There she is,” she shouted. “Baby,” she shouted.

“Did you hear me, ma’am? It’s important you think about this clearly,” another policeman said to her. “I asked you, is everyone out of the house?”

I didn’t even think of it then, with the words being spoken a few
feet away from me. Instead, I thought, Where is Butthole? Where are the dogs? And then the man asked her again and I suddenly understood what the words meant.

“No, no, no,” I said. I ran over and grabbed him by the shirt with my less hurt hand.

The assembly policeman who’d been helping me said, “Whoa, now. You need to be looked at, little lady.”

“In the house. Someone. A boy in the house,” I said, the words tangling up in my throat.

“Where?” the policeman beside my mom said.

“In the living room maybe.”

My mom squeezed me. “Baby,” she said. “Oh, baby. Your face.” She sounded like she was crying, but there was so much blood on her face I couldn’t tell.

“My soldier. He’s still in the house!” For a flash, I know I saw him in the living room window, flailing his arms, calling me, then he was gone. I tried to blink it away, but I saw him burning even with my eyes wide open. Arms and legs in flames, fire spurting from his hair, his whole body going up in smoke. Logan projected on the burning trees. Logan flaring across the bright orange sky. “Please. Please. He’s going to burn up!”

“Hey!” the policeman shouted. “There’s another one in there.”

“No, there ain’t,” my mom said, shaking her head. “She’s just shook up.”

“Hey, wait,” a second policeman said, turning me toward the police car’s headlights and leaning down to look into my face. “Ain’t you the one who went riding around with the missing soldier from Hunter? Is that the one you mean?”

“Yes, yes!” I said, shouting right into his ear. “He’s still in there. I never saw him leave. Please—”

My mom pulled me away and pressed me up against her side. The second policeman, a younger man with blond hair and a
bristly mustache, kept looking at me, unsatisfied about something. My last “please” was muffled by Mom’s arm.

“There’s no one in the house,” my mom said finally. “She’s had a bad time. She don’t know what she’s saying. Believe me.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” I yelled at her. “You saw him.”

I still wonder about that. What had she and Logan said to one another? What sort of deal had they made?

The policemen looked at her, then at me, and lastly at each other. The older one made a gesture with his head, a sort of twitch that the younger one seemed to read because he nodded and moved off toward the house. An ambulance pulled up across the street and two men jumped out. There was a noise like someone puking behind the cop car. A person in the backseat yelled and banged on a window. I couldn’t make out who it was because the window was smeared and blurry. The dog truck had crashed into a telephone pole across the street and one of its doors hung open. A man’s leg stuck out. The foot was missing its shoe. I wondered in an absent way when this had happened, who it was. At the end of the driveway, a dog lay in a pool of black blood. There was a trail of blood from the backyard where it had dragged itself.

One of the ambulance men wrapped a blanket around me and I fought loose. My arm throbbed and my shoulder ached and my head pounded, but I made a break for the house. Like I would of been able to do anything if I’d gotten there, but I wasn’t thinking like that. I was just thinking,
Logan Loy, Logan Loy, Logan Loy
. A fireman grabbed me by the back of the shirt and swung me around and down into the wet grass.

The house burned. The fire was hungry and it ate the house. Another man tried to put me in the back of the ambulance and I bit him on the arm. His partner grabbed me from behind and the two of them dragged me away kicking and screaming for all I was worth. I wasn’t worth much by then. The house burned down.

I yelled his name once more. I screamed it. But I couldn’t make the words loud enough for them to hear what I meant. And then I was tied down on the stretcher and I couldn’t move my arms or legs anymore. My mom whispered something in my ear, something soft and stupid.

“He’s going to die,” I told them and her and everyone else who could hear me. “If you don’t do something, he’s going to die. Then it will be your fault.”

But I knew whose fault it really was. I knew and it scorched my brain as bad as any burning house. Try to keep just one thing as yours and only yours and the world burns down. You can’t own anything. You can’t own anything but your own faults. You can’t own anybody but your own self, and sometimes even that isn’t yours to keep.

And then the doors closed, and the ambulance pulled away from the curb, and then we were rushing somewhere very fast in the dark. I closed my eyes.

I
got fifty-seven stitches, a cast on my arm, and a week’s stay in hospital room 212.

Hayes died. Instantly, they said. Shot in the head in our backyard.

Marty died too. The newspaper said he had a heart attack and crashed his truck into a utility pole. No one was quite sure which came first, but it all amounted to the same thing. Him dead. I wondered if he’d get his eye back in hell.

Travis and Burns went to county lockup to await trial on manslaughter charges. No one listened to their “crazy” stories about what “really” happened. It was their word against my mom’s, a respected local nurse. Finally, they made a plea agreement with the district attorney and went off to the supermax upstate. As far as I know, they’re still there.

Carla the nurse, Marty’s second cousin, tested positive for pot and lost her job at the hospital, screaming bloody murder all the way out the door. “Sour grapes,” my mom said, and after saying it enough times with a reasonably straight face, she got the tag to stick.

Somehow, amazingly, my mom wasn’t hurt all that much. She had a slight concussion, a few stitches on her arms, and a bruise or two. Whenever the anger rose up in my throat like bile before puke, I tried to remember her raising her hand when Logan cut her free, unable to move, him bending over to whisper something to her. What deal did they make?

Logan died. Burned up in the living room of our house with an ashtray still in his hand. They found the glob of melted glass. Many are the nights I dream of him fighting off the fire with nothing but a glass ashtray. I can see him right now if I close my eyes. Head like a torch. Skin bubbled and black. I don’t care what anybody says. I killed him. I’ll have that lodged beneath the skin of my heart forever. My guilt smells like burning plastic.