Crum

Chapter 3

25 Chapter 3 The dog was the biggest sonofabitchin’ dog I had ever seen. Living in Crum, where the dogs were either mongrels or some sort of coon hound, you just never saw a really big dog that had long—or even medium-long—hair. The German shepherd that belonged to Ott Parsons’ brother sure as hell wasn’t any coon hound. As I said, it was the biggest sonofabitchin’ dog I had ever seen. Ott’s brother, Ralph, had picked up the dog in Germany, a few years after the Second World War. Ralph was a lot older than most of us and he had already been in and out of the Army. The dog, too. He had been in the German Army, according to Ralph. Ralph was a lot like Ott. He was big, mean, not too smart, and could lick anybody in town. I don’t know if he could lick Mean Rafe Hensley—especially if Rafe was drunk—or if he could lick Ott, but he thought he could. And that’s the way the dog was, too. The only difference between Ralph and the dog was I guess the dog was probably a little smarter. He was a rescue dog, trained by the Germans to pull objects out of the water. Any objects. Even people. One of Ralph’s favorite games was to sneak up on a bunch of us when we were down at the river swimming and turn the goddamn dog loose. He’d see all us objects floating around in the water, and he usually thought that he had found the meat store. He would ram his huge body into the water and make for the nearest kid, grab him by the arm, leg, or whatever he could get hold of and drag him bodily out on shore, usually halfdrowning him in the process. Whenever we saw Ralph and the dog coming we would swim over to the Kentucky side of the river and get out on the bank. We’d be stuck there, Ralph and the dog on the other side, until Ralph got bored and took the dog away. 26 We hated Ralph and we hated the dog, but there wasn’t much we could seem to do about it. Fighting with Ralph was a sure way to lose some teeth, and doing anything about the dog was practically impossible since he was always with Ralph. We had even thought of poison, but we probably would have had to poison Ralph first to get at the dog. It was a real pain in the ass, being run out of the river like that. Especially for Nip, the slowest swimmer. The goddamn dog was always getting to Nip first. Sometimes, his arm would bleed from where the dog had grabbed it and we’d have to take Nip back to my shed and rinse his cuts off in fresh water from the well and tie some rags around them. Nip never got rabies, so I guess the dog was healthy. But crazy. Once when the dog grabbed Nip by the arm and started pulling him toward shore, Nip fought back. He began to pound the dog on the head with his free arm, screaming and thrashing in the water. The dog shifted his hold and grabbed Nip up at the shoulder and it looked like he was going to bite Nip’s arm off. The other guys yelled and waved their arms, but the dog wasn’t paying any attention. I was closer to the shore than the dog so I scrambled to the edge of the river and ripped a heavy branch from a dead tree tangled in the brush at the edge of the water. Nip’s eyes were rolling back in his head and I knew he was in pain, but I didn’t want to get too close to the dog. I steadied myself in the slow current and took aim. The branch circled over my head and I brought it down with everything I had. It cracked the dog dead center between his shoulder blades. He opened his mouth in a shriek that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And he let go of Nip. The dog sank into the water and disappeared. Jesus, I felt like a hero. None of us had ever had the guts to hit the dog before, and now I had done it. Nip was crying...