The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

The Theory of Dog Shit

O ld man Krause was one of those neighbors we thought we hated. Because he came outside to curse at us when a foul ball rolled into his yard. Because he’d hidden behind his shrubbery once and leapt out to pounce on a rolling softball, refusing to return it. Oneafternoon,whilewesataroundcomplainingaboutadults, Charlie Schneider explained the theory of dog shit, how a burning bagful would draw the people we targeted to their front porches, wherethemen,especially,wouldstampoutthefirewhilewewatched happilyfromasafelydistantshadow.Itseemedlikesuchagreatidea that the next weekend, Dave Tolley and I watched Charlie scoop a week’s worth of his golden retriever’s dog turds into a paper sack and followed him across the vacant lot where we played to stand beside him in the summer darkness while he lit the bag and rang old man Krause’s bell. We hid on the street side of the same shrubbery Krause had usedearlierintheweek.Butwhen Krause flung open the door, he didn’t stomp on the fire. He just yelledatus.“Iknowwhoyouare. Young Tolley and Schneider. I know your fathers.” IwasgladtobeexcludedbecauseIdidn’tliveonthesamestreet, but we didn’t bother Krause anymore that summer. Instead, we tried the theory of dog shit on a dozen enemy houses—the fathers of effeminate classmates and girls who ignored us, but mostly men who trimmed their lawns so perfectly and so often we thought we hated them as much as we did a softball stealer. We moved out of their neighborhood and mine to give our victims more would-be vandals from whom to choose, and though there were men who cursedintothedarkness,launchingthegreatobscenitiesofanger,not once did the person who answered the door step on the bag of shit. It was the summer of 1959, we’d just finished eighth grade, and a whole new set of neighbors had moved in during the past two The Theory of Dog Shit 52 ■ b e g i n n i n g s years because the farm between my house and the housing plan where Dave Tolley, Charlie Schneider, and old man Krause lived had been sold and divided into lots. Three years earlier, when there were huge drainage pipes set in place to accommodate the changes in landscape and the demands of sixty new families, we’d used those pipes to entertain ourselves. Each one of the pipes eventually led downhill to The Flats, where the township ’s poorest families lived. Pine Creek, which flowed among those houses, flooded them each spring. There was an abandoned strip mine at one end of that neighborhood, and a busy highway bordered another side. All three of us could see that drainage from the housing plan would empty itself onto the hillside above The Flats, one more reason to be happy to live on high ground, although never once did we burn dog shit on the front porches of those who lived there. What we did that earlier summer was crab-walk through those enormous stormdrains,pretendingwewerefollowingalead-linedtunneltoabombshelter, liketheonespeoplewerebeginningtobuildbecausetheRussianswerethreatening to nuke us. Overhead, the model home that had been built before any of the lots were sold was unlocked for the wives of steelworkers and mechanics and truck drivers, men who worked with their hands like our fathers did. Once, we’d watched those women brush their fingertips over the slick Braille of appliances before they parted the gold and green patterned drapes to appreciate the view, but quickly, in the darkness of those pipes, we forgot the simple geography of their corridors, and all three of us raised our voices as if volume was a vaccine for the sudden amnesia of being underground. We couldn’t get ourselves properly turned around. For ten minutes we sweated and swore our mild fifth-grade oaths like “damn” and “hell” and “shit,” and finally we skidded out of a pipe fifty feet above a backyard full of old tires and two abandoned cars. One neighbor we didn’t harass was Jack Hall, who was building a bomb shelter in his backyard because he was a veteran of nuclear testing and said he knew exactlywhatwascomingforthefamilieswhosefathersthoughttheonlypossible use for the A-bomb after Hiroshima and Nagasaki was stock footage in movies and television shows. He’d done a hitch at Camp Desert Rock, where he’d witnessed a bomb test called Shot Smoky by standing in the open with a group of other soldiers four miles from the tower where the A-bomb ignited. He’d watched two other earlier tests and been discharged shortly after Shot Smoky with sores and loose...