My Dog Skip (2 page)

Our neighborhood was on one of the broad thoroughfares. In our side yard was a row of immense pecan trees shaped at the top like witches’ caps, and in the back a huge field, vined and bosky. On the front lawn was a full, towering oak, one of Skip's favorite trees in the entire town.

Every time I shouted
“Squirrell”
Skip would charge on the oak tree and try to climb it, sometimes getting as high as five or six feet with his spectacular leaps. This would stop traffic on the street in front of the house. People in cars would see him trying to shinny up the tree and would pull up to the curb and watch. They would signal to other passersby and point toward Skip, and these people would pull over too. They would gaze up into the tree to see what he was looking for, and, after a respectable pause, ask me, “What's he got up there?” and I would say, “Somethin’ small and mean.” They seldom recognized that Skip was just practicing.

This exercise was nothing to compare with football games, however. I cut the lace on a football and taught Old Skip how to carry it in his mouth, and how to hold it so he could avoid fumbles when he was tackled. I instructed him
how to move on a quarterback's signals, to take a snap from center on the first bounce, and to follow me down the field. Ten or twelve of my comrades and I would organize a game of tackle in my front yard. Our side would go into a huddle, Skip included, and we would put our arms around one another's shoulders the way they did in real huddles at Ole Miss or Tennessee, and the dog would stand up on his hind legs and, with me kneeling, drape a leg around
my
shoulder. Then I would say, “Skip, pattern thirty-nine, off on three;” we would break out of the huddle with Skip dropping into the tailback position as I had taught him. Mutton-head or Peewee or Henjie or Bubba or Big Boy or Ralph would be the center, and I would station myself at quarterback and say, “Ready, set, one … two …
three
”; then the center would snap the ball on a hop to Skip, who would get it by the lace and follow me downfield, dodging would-be tacklers with no effort at all, weaving behind his blockers, spinning loose when he was cornered, sometimes balancing just inside the sidelines until he made it into the end zone. We would slap him on the back and say, nonchalantly, “Good run, boy,” or when we had an audience: “Did you see my block back there?” Occasionally he would get tackled, but he seldom lost his grip on the ball, and he would always get up from the bottom of the pile and head straight for the huddle. He was an ideal safety man when the other side punted, and would get a grip on the second or third hop and gallop the length of the field for a touchdown. After considerable practice, I succeeded in teaching him the “Statue of
Liberty” play, always shouting
“Statue of Liberty”
to him and our teammates before the play unfolded. I would take the snap from center and fade back in a low crouch, less a crouch than a forty-five-degree list, holding the ball behind my shoulder as if I were about to pass, all the while making sure the loosened lace was at a convenient angle. Skip, stationed at the left-end position, would circle around behind me, taking the lace of the pigskin between his teeth, then moving with deft assurance toward the right side of the line of scrimmage, where I was leading interference, whereupon he would follow his usual phalanx of blockers to the enemy's end zone for another spectacular score.
“Look at that dog flayirifootball!”
someone passing by would shout, and before the game was over we would have an incredulous crowd watching from cars or sitting on the sidelines, just as they did when he was after squirrels. The older men especially enjoyed this stunning spectacle. Walking down the sidewalk in front of the house, they would stop and let go with great whoops of astonishment: “Man, that's
some
dog. Can he catch a pass?”

For simple gratification, however, I believe Skip enjoyed our most imaginative intrigue above any other, and there are people still living in the town who will testify to it.

In that place and time, we began driving our parents’ cars when we were thirteen years old; this was common practice then, and the town was so small that the policemen knew
who you were, and your family although they of course expected you to be careful. When I started driving our old four-door green DeSoto, I always took Skip on my trips around town. He rode with his snout extended far out the window, and if he caught the scent of one of the boys we knew, he would bark and point toward him, and we would stop and give that person a free ride. Skip would shake hands with our mutual friend, and lick him on the face and sit on the front seat between us. Cruising through the fringes of town, I would spot a group of old men standing around up the road. I would get Skip to prop himself against the steering wheel, his black head peering out of the windshield, while I crouched out of sight under the dashboard. Slowing the car to ten or fifteen, I would guide the steering wheel with my right hand while Skip, with his paws, kept it steady. As we drove by the Blue Front Café, I could hear one of the men shout:
“Look at that oVdog driviria carl”

Later we would ride out into the countryside, past the cotton fields and pecan groves and winding little creeks on the dark flat land toward some somnolent hamlet consisting of three or four unpainted stores, a minuscule wooden post office with its porch stacked with firewood in the wintertime, and a little graveyard nearby. Here the old men in overalls would be sitting on the gallery of the general store with patent-medicine posters on its sides, whittling wood or dipping snuff or swatting flies. When we slowly came past with Skip behind the steering wheel I heard one of them
yell, “A
dog¡ A dog drivin”!”
and when I glanced slightly above the dashboard I sighted him falling out of his chair over the side of the porch into a privet hedge. One afternoon not long after that Henjie and Skip and I were out and about in the same country vicinity when far up the gravel road we saw a substantial congregation of humanity emerging from a backwoods church after a revival meeting. A number of the people, in fact, were still shouting and wailing as they approached their dusty parked cars and pickup trucks. I stopped the car and placed Skip at his familiar spot behind the steering wheel; then we slowly continued up the road. As we passed the church, in the midst of the avid cacophony a woman exclaimed:
“Is that a dog drivin that car?”
The ensuing silence as we progressed on by was most hor-rendously swift and pervasive, and that sudden bucolic hush and quell remained unforgettable for me, as if the very spectacle of Old Skip driving that green DeSoto were inscrutable, celestial, and preordained.

T
HERE WAS
SOMETHING
in the very air of a small town in the Deep South then, something spooked-up and romantic, which did funny things to the imagination of its bright and resourceful boys. It had something to do with long and heavy afternoons with nothing doing, with rich slow evenings when the crickets scratched their legs and the frogs made murmuring music, with plain boredom, perhaps with an inherited tradition of making plots. We had to work our imaginations out on something, and the less austere, the better. To this day I have never doubted that Old Skip understood all this better than any dog in history.

As we grew older, he and I collaborated in other diverse ruses, one of them against a little boy named John Abner. My friends and I told him we would give him a quarter if he would walk alone, carrying a flashlight, at nine o'clock one
night, halfway through the spooky town cemetery to the “witch's grave”—the resting-place of the demon who had burned down the town in 1904, which was marked now with a heavy chain, with one link missing where she had escaped. John Abner consented. Two of our conspirators promised to accompany him to the gates at nine and send him alone up the road. At eight-thirty Ellis Alias, nicknamed Strawberry, and Skip and I went to the cemetery. It was a still, moonlit night in early June; the light of the sun was just going out on the horizon, giving the evening an eerie glow before the coming of the dark. Strawberry stationed himself ten yards from the witch's grave in a clump of bushes. He had a long stick, with a white pillowcase attached to the end; I had only my silver trumpet, which I was just then learning to play in the junior band, and I hid behind some trees on the opposite side; Skip crouched there next to me. As we waited for our victim, I noticed a man walking up the road about fifty yards away, taking a shortcut to Brickyard Hill. I signaled to Strawberry to wait and took out my trumpet. Pressing the valves halfway down, I played a long, ghastly, moaning wail, as loud as the horn would go. With that, Skip's ears fluttered and he let loose with a shrill, terrifying howl, as if he were baying at the moon. The man gave a little hop-skip-and-jump, listened again, and then took off at a steady gait up into the woods, while we doubled over and all but rolled on the ground with joy. Then we returned to our posts. I had brought with me a
pair of lengthy cotton strings and the cardboard replica of a skeleton I had bought at the nickel-and-dime store. I proceeded to tie this grotesque ghoul to Skip's back.

Soon we heard the faint sound of footsteps on the gravel, and there was John Abner, a frightened little boy walking stealthily through the trees, looking all around and flashing his light in every direction. When he got within a few steps of the witch's grave, Strawberry all of a sudden held the stick out from the bushes and waved the pillowcase. Then I blew a solemn high note on my trumpet, and descended to the same moan I had used on the man taking the shortcut. With that, I pushed Skip out from under the trees. Since he knew the poor victim and recognized him, he rushed impetuously toward him. When we looked out, all we could see was a wisp of dust on the road, and we heard the sound of small feet moving fast, Skip with his skeleton in torrid pursuit.

Old Skip was with us the Halloween night several of us went out to one of Peewee's fathers pastures not far from our school building to fetch a cow. We knew our schoolteachers would be rehearsing their faculty play shortly after dark on that evening, and we surreptitiously led the cow down one of the town s alleyways onto the school grounds, then through the back door of the auditorium. We tied the rope from the cow's neck to a seat on the aisle, leaving it a good amount of slack to roam around. As we were accomplishing this, I noticed Skip sitting on his haunches staring
inquisitively at the cow, and the cow staring right back at him. Skip glanced at me: What manner of creature is this? he seemed to be saying. I believe he perceived we were involved in something of immense consequence.

We retired to some hedges near the auditorium windows as darkness fell. From the street we saw the football coach emerge from his pickup truck and walk toward the auditorium, entering it through the front door; we knew it was the football coach's responsibility to turn on the lights before the other teachers arrived. We snuck up to one of the windows and looked inside, barely able to make out the silhouette of the coach groping his way down the aisle in the darkness. When he bumped into the cow's horns, he emitted a terrorized shriek of such acoustical dimensions that even Skip began to bark, and we got out of there fast.

When my comrades and I were thirteen years old (and Skip three) we ascertained the house where some of the women held their Wednesday-afternoon prayer meetings. One morning, following the cookbook, we baked two dozen oatmeal cookies in our kitchen, using every ingredient just as the book said, and then for good measure we added a mixture of castor oil, dill pickle juice, and milk of magnesia. “What else?” Henjie asked. I looked down at Skip, who had been following our activities with his usual intense attachment. Then I glanced across to the bottom shelf of the kitchen cabinet and saw his worm medicine for dogs, flea-and-tick
powder, and ear ointment. Using an eggbeater, we put these also into our mixture. When the cookies were cool we gift-wrapped them and pasted on a card that read, “To the ladies from all the people in town.” Then we crept through the bushes to Sister Craigs house and placed the gift inside the screen door. Later we peered through the window as Sister Craig served the cookies; I propped Skip's head near the ledge so he could watch too. The first guest who bit into an oatmeal cookie chewed on it for a moment, her jaws working politely but with purpose, then spit with such energy that the crumbs landed at a point six feet away, spraying three other guests with the awful stuff. Skip followed this with interest, and then we all slipped happily away. I never knew a dog who cared so passionately for nonsense, especially when he felt he was part of it.

At night when I lay in bed reading, Old Skip would crawl up to me and look at the book, sometimes touching it with his paw. He always wanted to know what I was doing. “You want to read some
Dickens?’
I might ask. When I turned out the light he would go to sleep curled up in the bend of my legs; when it was cold he would root around and scratch at me to get under the covers. First thing in the morning, after he had gone outside for a solitary run, he would bound back into my bed and try to roust me out with his cold nose. If this did not work, he would lightly bite my toes beneath the blanket.

After we both had a breakfast of raisin bran and milk, he would walk with me toward school. The school building was only six blocks down the boulevard from our house, and along the way Henjie would join us, then Bubba, then Rivers Applewhite. Every morning at the same spot, a few yards or so from Riversa front porch at the street corner near the bayou, he would stop and sit, watching us from afar as we crossed the bridge to the school grounds; then he would turn around and go home. Every afternoon after school he would be at that precise place waiting for me. We would retrace our journey home again, where I would make us both a mayonnaise-and-ketchup sandwich before we commenced our late-afternoon rituals.

Of these many exercises, one involved my throwing sticks for him. He was the best retriever I ever had. I would throw a stick as far as I could, far across the alley behind our house perhaps, or into the deepest recesses of the neighbors’ backyards, and then hide in the shrubs or under the house or in the green DeSoto parked in the driveway. Skip would come tearing around with the stick in his mouth and, not finding me where I had been when I threw the stick, would drop it and look everywhere. If he found me under the house, he would crawl in there and lick my nose, as if to suggest I was not as smart as I thought I was. Or he would jump onto the hood of the car or even go into the house to see if I was there.