Mercy

Mercy



         I was sitting Indian-style against the side of my house with the new Goosebumps open in my lap when Mr. Norris pulled his old, big car into his gravel driveway which is right next to ours.

         I looked up. Through the windows, even though the sun was bouncing off of them, I could see a blurry figure moving around in the backseat.

         Mr. Norris, wearing the same white T-shirt he’s always wearing, the kind you wear under another shirt, got out on the driver’s side and opened the back door.

         “Come on, out” he said to what was in there. 

         Not friendly, like Come on out, but Come on. Out.

         I’ve never heard Mr. Norris talk any other way.

         The blur in in the backseat didn’t move. Mr. Norris bent down, reached into the car and grabbed it and dragged it out, saying “Git outta there!”

         When what was in there was out and on the ground, he looked down at it and raised one arm and pointed to the porch behind him.

         “Go on. Up there.”

         What he was talking to didn’t move. The top half of Mr. Norris made a sudden jerk sideways where I could tell he’d kicked the thing, saying “Git!”

         By then, I had formed an idea of what he’d brought home with him and when I heard its startled yelp in response to being kicked, I knew for sure.

         The kick got it moving. Mr. Norris followed it around the L-shape of bushes you have to walk around to reach his porch steps. I guess the thing ventured too far because Mr. Norris halted at the base of the porch and yelled “Hey!” and pointed up the steps, directing it.

         The thing obeyed Mr. Norris and went up the steps.

         The bushes around the porch were short and don’t block the view at the top, so when the thing got all the way up the steps onto the porch, I saw it for the first time.

         It was a beautiful German shepherd that came up to just past Mr. Norris’s knees. It must have still been just a baby. Its fur was rough and matted down and it looked like it hadn’t been bathed or brushed in a long time, if ever.

         I wondered if the dog was a boy or a girl. I know you can’t tell either way unless you look underneath, but I used my imagination and decided by the gentle steps it took and the way it kept its head and eyes low and shy that it was a girl.

         Mr. Norris unlocked and opened his door and held the screen door open for her, saying “Come on.”

         She took a few steps back at the sound of his voice and looked into the house, afraid to go in.

         I’d have been, too.

         Mr. Norris said, “Girl, you’re gonna learn real quick you better mind me if you know what’s good for you. Now git yer ass in there!”  Snapping his fingers and pointing in.

         Girl. I’d been right.

         At the sound of his yelling she hunched down, startled. Mr. Norris pointed for a few seconds, giving her one last chance I suppose, then took a wide, fast step toward her and raised the hand he’d been pointing with up over his head and brought an open palm down between her ears.

         She let out a huge yelp, lost and regained her balance racing to get away from him. At the same time, a stream of urine rained out from between her hind legs.

         Mr. Norris looked down at the new mess on the porch and then back at the girl. He stared at her, mouth hanging open, for what felt like forever to me and must have felt even longer to her. I couldn’t see Mr. Norris’s eyes clearly, but you can always feel when somebody isn’t blinking.

         The girl had retreated to the corner of the porch and was crouched down low. Mr. Norris took slow steps toward her, reached down and grabbed her by the neck fur, saying something I couldn’t make out.

         He pulled her up into a standing position and yanked her toward the door.

         She gave in and walked with him. They disappeared inside and the door slammed shut.

         I sat there for a while just looking at the porch before I finally picked my book back up and found the page I’d left off on.

         I tried to concentrate and read, and found that I couldn’t.



#



         Over the next few days, every time I went outside I heard Mr. Norris yelling at Cindy.

         Cindy was what I’d named the girl-dog in my mind.

         I heard the yelling mostly through the walls of his house and sometimes out in his backyard where there was an old tree in the middle. Mr. Norris had padlocked a longish chain around the tree and would attach the end of it to Cindy’s collar, leaving her out there without any food or water whenever he went someplace.

         He had two kinds of yelling voices for Cindy—one that gave commands and a louder one for when they weren’t followed.

         Once in a while he’d yell something and a single quick yelp would follow. A few times a worse noise followed.

         I began spending less time outside.

         It got to where I didn’t even want to open my bedroom window to let the fresh air in while I played Nintendo on the small TV on my dresser.

         Toward the end of the week, I decided to talk to my dad.

         It was evening and he was in the living room, leaned back into his dark red recliner and watching a rerun of Magnum. His eyes were red and half open. On the small round table by the recliner was one of the two six-packs of Coors Light he’d picked up on the way home. Two of the bottles in it were already empty and one was sitting half-full in his lap.

         I went to the recliner and said “Dad?”

         It came out softer and less clear than I had meant it to.

         For a moment he didn’t say anything or look away from the TV. I figured he hadn’t heard me, or was ignoring me. Both happened a lot these days.

         I was about to repeat myself, even though I felt nervous about it, when he opened his mouth and said “What do you need?”

         I tried to ignore the swirling in my stomach. This was important.

         “Mr. Norris next door…”

         “Yeah? What about him?”

         “He got a new dog.”

         “Did he? Well…good for him.”

         He lifted the half-empty bottle to his lips and took a big gulp, still looking at the TV.

         “I think he’s been treating her bad.”

         “What do you mean, ‘treating her bad’?”

         I told him about the yelling and yelping.

         He said, “I haven’t heard any yelling. Besides, it’s Ed’s dog and he can do what he wants with it. None of our business how he treats her.”

         I said, “Yeah, but like, what if he hurts her really bad one day? Like, what if he breaks one of her legs and she has to hobble around the rest of her life?”

         “Christ, what the hell’s in all those books you read?”

         “It could happen, couldn’t it? And, like, wouldn’t it be kind of our fault, too, for not doing anything about it? Couldn’t we just call the police and tell them and they could come take him away?”

          Dad didn’t say anything for a few seconds and I thought he was going to just stop talking to me and pretend I’d gone away—he does that sometimes too. But then he lifted one corner of his mouth just a little, looked down at his beer and swirled it around in the bottle.

         “You’re just like your mother, you know that? Every time we saw a dog or cat just wandering around outside she’d be talking about it the rest of the day. ‘What if it starves or freezes to death out there?’ Finally, she’d have enough and call Animal Control and tell them where to find the things.”

         I nodded and said “Yeah. I remember.”

         “I asked her one time, what good would it do to have them picked up? They’d just be taken to the kennel and put down within the week. She said she supposed it was better they die quickly now than have to suffer and die anyway.”

         I didn’t say anything.

         “You know, back when you were just a baby there was this family that lived across the street where the Laymons live now. Had five dogs, all of them mutts. Never bothered to tie them up outside or train them to stay in the yard. They were free to just wander around the neighborhood, and there wasn’t a day that went by that one of them didn’t almost get run over. It drove your mother nuts. She called the police, just like you want to now. Called them over and over again. They’d come by and talk to those people and they’d round the dogs up and bring them in the house. Then the very next day those mutts would be back out on the street. That went on until the day the bank foreclosed on them and they had to move out.

         “So, Keith, you go ahead and sic the police on Ed if you want, but I can tell you it’ll just be a Band-Aid unless you can prove something definite. He’ll be back to beating on that dog before the cops pull out of the driveway.”

          I was looking down at my shoes by then, not letting Dad see my eyes.

         “Anything else?”

         I shook my head.

         “All right, then let me be.”

         So I did.          



#



         I was in bed wide awake, not feeling like reading or anything else really, just sort of staring at the ceiling. It was getting dark earlier than usual and I could hear the wind blowing hard outside my open window.

         And then I heard Mr. Norris’s back screen door swing open and slam back against the wall, making a sound like a pile of two-by-fours dropped on a cement floor. That was one of the sounds of Mr. Norris in a bad mood.

         “OUT, YOU LITTLE FUCKER!”

         I stood up on my mattress and looked out my horizontal window and saw Mr. Norris dragging Cindy out the back door by the collar. She was trying to get free from him, jumping and turning this way and that, breathing hard.

         Mr. Norris was gripping her collar with only one hand. I couldn’t see his other hand clearly, only that it was raised up like he was carrying something on his shoulder except that he wasn’t.

         He dragged Cindy down the steps of his back porch and across the backyard, toward the tree in the middle.

         Cindy saw she was about to be chained up and struggled against Mr. Norris even harder. I could hear growling and whining and barking coming out of her all at once.

         “QUIT SQUIRMING, YOU LITTLE BITCH!”

         Instead of using his other hand to put the chain on her, Mr. Norris threw one leg over her and dropped to his knees, trapping her under him. He let go of her collar and grabbed the

free end of the chain that had an open padlock hanging from it. He hooked the padlock around Cindy’s collar and shut it, then stood up.

         Cindy tried to get up, too, but before she was standing all the way Mr. Norris brought his leg back and forward, the toe of his shoe flying into Cindy’s side sending her rolling onto her back. She let out a cry that made me wonder if a rib had been broken.

         Mr. Norris said, “Eye for an eye, you little bastard.”

         He turned around and walked back toward the house, saying over his shoulder “And a lot more, too, when I get back!”

         With him turned around I could see his other hand. It was covered in blood and so was that side of his shirt. As far away as I was and through the bug screen of my window I couldn’t see any bites marks on him but I knew that’s what had happened, that Cindy had tried for once to fight back.

         I knew Mr. Norris had meant what he said, that he was going to make her pay for it when he returned.

         I waited at the window for a while, thinking I would see him come out the front door and get in his car to drive himself to the hospital.

         But he didn’t, and I figured he was fixing his hand up himself.

         My hands were holding onto the window frame tight and I was shaking all over, afraid of what I was going to see when Mr. Norris came back.

         I decided that, whatever it was, I had to stop it from happening.

         My first thought was to go and get my dad and tell him what was going on, but then I remembered everything he told me earlier. That it was none of my business what Mr. Norris did to Cindy. That even if I called the police they’d come and go and he’d do whatever he was going to do to her anyway.

         I thought, Mr. Norris is going to come back out and beat Cindy, beat her to death probably, and all you’ll be able to do is stand here and watch it happen.

         And I started crying the way I’d wanted to for a long time. The tears came hot and slick down my face and I had to wipe them away and wipe the snot away from my nose.

         Not because there was no way to stop Mr. Norris.

         Because I knew there was.



#



         It was dark in the living room except for the glow of the TV. The light that shone from it went from bright to dim and then bright again across Dad’s face. He was leaned back in the recliner, snoring.

         I walked past him, knowing I didn’t need to step carefully.

         In the kitchen, I opened the drawer between the sink and stove and took out the big knife that Dad used to use to slice lettuce and tomatoes on homemade taco nights when Mom was still here. The tip of it was broken off so that there were two jagged points instead of one fine point. I’ve never known how that happened.

         Holding the knife, I went back through the living room and out the front door. Outside, the wind was blowing harder and inky black clouds hovered low in the sky. I heard distant thunder and felt occasional raindrops on my neck and arms as I went down our wooden porch steps and cut across our front yard.

         Mr. Norris’s backyard came into view. Mr. Norris was back outside, still wearing his blood-spotted white T-shirt. His bitten hand was now wrapped in a white bandage.

         He’d added an extra padlock to Cindy’s chain that held her close to the tree so that she was trapped in one spot.

         He was bringing the buckle end of a wide belt down onto Cindy’s back, calling her all his usual names for her.

         I crossed the invisible line between our backyard and Mr. Norris’s. I wanted to stop and turn around, run back into the house and hide under my sheets, pretend the world wasn’t there.  But I made myself keep going toward the tree, toward Mr. Norris and Cindy. I wondered if this was what being brave felt like.

         If so, it didn’t feel good.

          When I was ten feet into the yard, halfway to the tree, Mr. Norris saw me and stopped hitting Cindy.

         “Hey! What the hell you doing on my property? Get back in your own yard!”

         He pointed toward my house with the hand that had the belt strap around it.

         I stopped where I was, breathing hard enough that it was making me dizzy.

         Mr. Norris looked down at the knife in my hand and then back at me.

         “What the hell’s that goddamn knife for, boy?”

         He wasn’t yelling anymore.

         I looked over at Cindy and saw her looking at me. Barking.

         Not the way a dog barks when a stranger comes in the yard. Cindy’s bark had a long begging moan to it.

         It said Help me.

         It said Do it.

         I walked the rest of the way across the yard toward them. Mr. Norris, looking at the knife, took a few steps backward, saying “Hey, now. Hey!”

         He was confused and afraid. I thought, Good.

         I raised the knife up past my shoulder and held it by my head the way you hold a baseball. I took a step forward and Mr. Norris took a step back and tripped backward over one of the tree roots and fell to the ground beside Cindy.

         I took one last step forward and held the knife out in front of me, pointed downward.

         I closed my eyes, lifted the knife and brought it down.

         I kept my eyes closed and yanked the knife out and felt a warm spray of blood on my arm. There was still movement and noise below the knife, so I brought it down again and then a third time. After that, the movement below stopped.

         I stood for a moment with my eyes closed, crying as hard as when I saw Mom in her casket, knowing I had to open my eyes now and see another body.

         I opened my eyes and looked. She was less bloody than I thought she would be, most of it having sprayed out of her neck onto my arm, and then poured from the wounds onto the ground when the pressure stopped.

         I looked over at Mr. Norris, saw him still on the ground but propped up by his elbows. That mean face he always wore was gone now and there was only shock and fear in its place as he stared at me.

         Sobbing, I said, “You’re done now.”

         I turned and walked back toward my house, out from beneath the branches of the tree and into the pouring rain.



End