Epitaphs
Everyone in Bloomfield listened to the radio. By the time Whiskey Jay and The Honker were done with the traffic report, people all up and down Main Street knew about the rabid dog.
Huge sucker, they said. Mouth foaming like he’s on a steady diet of Crest and Cool Whip. Brown coat, brown eyes, and dingy yellow teeth.
Greggy Bowens clutched the neck of his dog Chuck as the young mutt bled out on the parking spot in front of Ryerson’s Hardware. People cheered and clapped as Old Man Dodger lowered his hunting rifle and confirmed his kill from nearly a block away.
The fanfare died down as people heard Greggy’s wailing drown out their applause. It wasn’t until everyone had gone back into the shops on Main Street Northwest, that they heard the actual rabid dog was on Main Street Northeast. An update Whiskey Jay and The Honker didn’t make until after their prank call segment.
No one helped Greggy carry Chuck’s body back to the house. He pulled his Radio Flyer with both hands from Main Street, across the bridge by the marina, all the way to his house in the suburbs off Harbor Island.
Chuck was buried at sunset. His grave was a rock with a blue painted paw and a bundle of flowers pulled from Maggie Bowen’s garden.
A few sharp pats on the back were all Taylor Bowen could give his son Greggy. The words “sorry son, shit happens” transferred in two taps. A father-son Morse code.
Taylor and Maggie Bowens walked up the stairs of the back porch and left Greggy there with the rock. The sunset, turning the green blades of grass to a reflective orange until the moon hung overhead.
That’s when Greggy went to work.
It only took ten minutes with a flashlight and the phone book to find Old Man Dodger’s address. The light was dimmed enough by the Star Wars bedsheets to let Greggy plan out his whole trip from his bedroom window to the other side of town.
The wheels of his Radio Flyer clacked against the pavement, weighted down with old misprinted newspapers from Greggy’s paper route. He kept to the back streets, avoiding places third-shift workers or cops sipping on coffee might see him through windows or windshields.
After an hour, Greggy’s legs stung like his shins were packed with fire ants. He walked the bike the last ten minutes, trying to keep the tires quiet against the dirt road leading up to Old Man Dodger’s gated driveway.
The wind cut through the steel gates leading up to the two-story house. A single lamp threw a spotlight out onto the yard from the living room and plastic sheets on the upstairs windows shook and cracked with every shift of the night air.
Greggy only saw houses like this on the covers of Hardy Boys novels and his dad’s old pulp magazines. The closer he crept after slipping through the bars of the gate, the more he could smell the peeling paint and old wood. He imagined an old radio announcer introducing a creepy serial broadcast. A house where ghosts lingered, men went mad, or mobsters hid their loot.
His breath fogged the living room window as he craned his head to get a peek. The furniture was made of worn leather, like an old car had shed its seats around the television. The dining room table had been pulled closer to the couch, where war magazines and model planes cluttered around a single dish with a half-eaten roast beef sandwich.
And there was Old Man Dodger.
Greggy watched as Dodger furiously wrote on a legal pad. Every twenty to thirty seconds he bunched it up like kindling and tossed it into a model plane box of a B-52 that doubled as a wastebasket.
Greggy crept along the lawn. He didn’t know what the old man was doing, but seeing him struggle, even with a letter, made Greggy feel better as he pulled open the basement window. His hands got black with ink as he bunched up the stack of newspaper. Each misprinted Bloomfield Gazette tumbled from the open window down to the concrete floor with a sharp “pak” and rolled.
Greggy had only lit matches two other times in his life. The first was in boy scouts. He lasted a day before the troop leader told his father he wasn’t “scout material,” sending him home before the end of the camping trip. The second was when his mom had him relight the furnace with his little hands last Christmas Eve. His fingers trembled and shook that night as he reached inside the mouth of that metal monster that roared in their house.
He lit a match for the third time.
His hand was steady.
The match fell like a meteor. A burning ball of orange light that crashed into a small crater of newsprint. Greggy stayed to make sure the flames caught and then lowered the window. His feet padded across the lawn like a cat. He slipped between the bars of the fence and rode his bike all the way home, his empty Radio Flyer bouncing on the streets behind him.
Whiskey Jay and The Honker didn’t do the traffic report the next day. Instead, they apologized for giving the wrong street name for the rabid dog the day before. The local animal control guys snatched it up about an hour later. And aside from Leslie Thomas’s azalea bushes, nothing was harmed.
Then they read the news of the fire.
Wasn’t much to go on, the local sheriff said. Old Man Dodger was a hoarder and everyone in the county knew it. Most likely a stray cigar dropped from his hand or the old busted oven just burst into flames. People were careless that way, he insisted, but it was still a tragedy.
The fire was officially labeled an accident by the sheriff. The news reported that he had no next of kin, and the radio jockeys ended the segment with the usual “thoughts and prayers” they always did when something bad happened in Bloomfield.
Two weeks later, Greggy went back to Old Man Dodger’s after school. He had his new dog, Arrow, running alongside him on his bike. Arrow was a bit squatter than Chuck had been, but boy could that dog run. Ran faster than any dog Greggy ever saw. He had to ride his bike just to keep up with him that afternoon.
The rubble had mostly been cleared out around the house. The porch and a few walls were all that stood where the ode to old radio serials had stood. Even the window Greggy opened and dropped the match down was gone. The frame was shattered and dragged off to a scrap pile near the gates.
He walked around the frame of the house, getting a better angle of where the old dining room table had been. It was ashes now. All the magazines, clippings, and the letters Old Man Dodger had been writing were gray soot littering a useless lot.
That’s when Greggy saw the other side of the living room wall.
Not far from where his breath had fogged the window, Greggy saw a single handprint smeared on the burnt chunk of the wall. The black marking had the texture of dried oil and the fingers look smudged like they dragged and clawed their way along the wallpaper. Greggy held Arrow’s leash tight while he leaned in to look it over.
But Arrow pulled free from his leash, taking off like a shot through the wreckage.
Greggy followed Arrow to the porch. A weathered grocery bag sat on the last crooked step. Its creases and stiff body were crumpled and torn from abandonment. Inside, Greggy found a receipt and an order placed for a grocery delivery two weeks ago. The same day chuck was shot.
A rotted cut of beef, slimy carrots, coffee, beans, and juice stewed in that bag since the day after the fire. The grocery boy must have dropped it off and not bothered to go back and tell the store the house was gone.
But one thing in the bag caught Greggy’s eye. It shook him deep down as he fought to hold tight on Arrow’s leash. Out of the weathered brown paper sack, Arrow pulled a brand-new dog collar. The name for the dog on the tags was blank, but the address and name below it belonged to the Bowens.
Greggy walked his bike home. Arrow ran out in front of him. The sun was harsh that afternoon and Greggy could feel it searing his skin with every step as he passed houses and trees. He didn’t look for shade. He just kept walking in the sun, letting his skin burn.