Chapter 12: And that's how Derby Died

I pick up a pen. Crack open a Miller Highlife.  I take a sip, take a swig, then I tip the can up and pour the rest of its contents down my throat. My head fills up with bubbles. Happy, piss-yellow bubbles that fizz through my numb little brain, interceding on behalf of my thoughts.

Thus freed, I begin to write:

One day, I saw Derby pissing on the wall. He was always pissing on the walls. On everything. We’d gotten him neutered and still he pissed on the walls. We spanked him, and still he pissed on the walls. We took him to obedience school. He pissed on the walls.

At least once a day, he’d sniff out a spot, hike up his leg, and let the piss flow. Marking territory or something – some bad habit he picked up during his time on the lam, I suppose. His time in the wild. In the dump.

Anyway, this went on for months. And I’d have to clean it up. Every time.

My mother, she’d see the wet spot on the wall, smell that urine stench wafting off the carpet, and yell. “Freddy, that damned dog did it again.”

So I’d pull out the bucket. The sponge. The rubber gloves. Get to work.

It got so I hated the feel of warm water.

I sent him to obedience school. Twice, actually. Paying with my own money. Birthday money, Christmas money, I’d blow it trying to teach him to just pee outside.

After the second trip to obedience school, he went a week without letting go. Then, one day, I came home from school and there he was in my bedroom with his leg lifted and his ears tucked back, whimpering and shivering above that yellow arc, rolling his eyes back at me because he knew what was coming.

It looked so pathetic, I should have felt sorry for him. But I didn’t. Instead, I started getting angry. All those hours of scrubbing walls, scrubbing carpet ... smelling piss-yellow fumes and dipping my gloved hands into warm bubbles that smelled like piss and Ivory and something infinitely worse ... all the video games and movies and Zingers I could have bought with the checks from Grandma and Aunt Gwen ... all of those things tumbled into a pile in my head and flash-fried my brain. Everything went red, and my foot shot out as Derby was trying to slink away.

I felt my foot connect with the slats of his ribs. He yelped, and somehow, the yelping sounded good. Sounded satisfying. That soft mass of fur and bones and heartbeat felt so good squished around my toes that I shot my foot out again. I kicked him again. I don’t know how many times. I don’t remember. It was a lot of times.

The next thing I knew, I was kneeling in the bathroom, dunking his head in the toilet. Derby was whimpering and cycling his paws on the tile, trying to break free.

I had a bite mark on the back of my hand. A bleeding sponge mass of indented flesh where he’d sunk his teeth in and wouldn’t let go.

That was the only fight he put up.

Poor thing.

I was saying something like:

This is where you pee!

This is where you pee!

This is where you pee!

You stupid thing.

At some point I noticed that he wasn’t struggling anymore. Wasn’t whimpering or cycling his paws. I let him go and he thunked to the tiles. My dog. My poor, sweet Derby. Staring at the bathtub with glazed-donut eyes.

And suddenly all the rage washed out of me. My chest was cold and panic galloped up my spine as I crabwalked away from him. Going: No, Derby, no, Derby, no, no, no, no.

I hid him behind the tool shed and snuck out that night to bury his body in a vacant lot down the street. We used to build forts in that vacant lot when I was little. I never played there again.

And that’s how Derby died.