Mama's Dogs

FICTION Mama's Dogs Jane B. Wilson MAMA HAD TWO DOBERMANS, a stud and a bitch. She just loved to say that because, as a full-fledged dog breeder, she had permission to use vile language, language that had nothing to do with dogs in my seventh-grade world. A stud was what all of us wanted, some tenth grader with hard muscles, and a bitch was what we hoped never to be. I thought she must know the real meaning of the words, and that she was just pretending to be neutral, purposely ignoring the shock on my face. She completed her plan to raise fierce, noble animals, top quality, show-potential criminal killers by naming them Duke and Vixen. I eyed her name choice with suspicion and embarrassment. She had just left Daddy and taken us with her, so she bought those dogs for protection and to make a little extra money. Back in the 70s, people believed in the power of the Doberman Pinscher. They were scary; Mama's parrot was even scared. When the dogs came near the cage, he would squawk at them as if to frighten them, but I recognized his fear as he retreated to his small wooden perch in the farthest corner. At first, she kept them down in the basement, a solid concrete slab in which my Uncle E.C. had set enormous steel poles to set the house on. There were light bulbs placed every six feet, so it was never too dark, no cobwebs or dirt in his basement. He made us a foundation and a basement that could not ever be destroyed by an insidious insect. To be sure, though, he soaked the ground with chlordane. The house itself was what they called a pre-fab. It seemed like a whole lot of basement for such a lightweight top, but he was in his late sixties and talked a lot about the underneath part of things. When Mama put the stud and the bitch down there, it lost its cool wet rock smell. The concrete became urine-soaked, warm and cold at the same time, like a deep hole where death has been but disappeared, a smell that began to seep underneath the space between the basement door and the kitchen floor. The parrot lived at the top of the basement stairs in a long, golden rectangular cage. It wasn't in the least bit charming or affectionate or human-like. It didn't talk or repeat words it had heard around the house like "Shit!" or "You need four horses like you need four noses!" or "Kiss me right in the crack of my ass!" all the things mybrother Jack 66 and I said to the bird in imitation of dinner conversations between Mama and Nannie. Uncle E.C. said Nannie always stayed with Mama because Mama was "her only chicken," so I watched Nannie for evidence of her endless devotion to her only child. Nannie mowed the huge lawn with a self-propelled push mower, which had lost its selfpropulsion some time after Mama left Daddy and took the mower with her, too. Uncle E.C. said that made the mower twice as hard to push. Nannie pushed it and pulled it over the same row so that the grass was cropped and thick. Mama let the dogs out to relieve themselves in it, though, so whenever I thought of going outside to brush my long, silky black hair in the hot sun, in the frame of glossy green grass, close enough to the road to be seen by some tenth grader in his daddy's pick-up truck who might think that I was a Cherokee princess, I considered the risk. From a distance, I might have been pretty, but up close the source of the lush scene was just plain shit, a smell of rich death suggesting astonishing ideas about real life. I stayed behind my window, hoping a boy might drive by and honk for me. Jack and I thought it would be a masterfuljoke on the whole family if we could teach the bird to talk back to Mama and Nannie during...