Monsters
What it is about is the job she’d wound up with for August. Through some golf and beer circumstances, her parents, who were old enough that at first I thought she was staying with her grandparents too, had met another couple, who lived in that resort town year round, and were on the way to the mountains for their vacation. Which, yeah, I mean, it seemed to me like they were going on vacation from living on vacation, but the way it worked out for Elaine was that she got paid twenty dollars a week, in advance, to water their flowers and walk their dog. To prove she could do it she had to walk him up and down the street one day before they (the ‘Wilkersons’) left, but the dog, as big as he was, had been trained, too, so Elaine had no problem with him.
And of course, because I had nothing else to do with my days but duck my grandmother’s loaded questions about my dad (my new granddad just watched me a lot, as if waiting for me to approach him, finally; I was his first grandkid, I think, so he thought I was made of glass), I’d stand with her while she drowned the flowers and then help her get Matey leashed up to make the rounds.
Which, those rounds, that is what this is about.
As we became more and more bold with Matey, sometimes we’d wrap his leash six or seven times around one of our fists and take him down to the boardwalk. The tourists usually gave us wide lanes to walk around. According to Elaine’s parents, Sid Wilkerson had been some kind of big brass with the police department. He’d joined right after high school and then stayed on until his retirement cottage. The reason we got told this, I think, was so we wouldn’t let the flowers die, and wouldn’t let anything happen to Matey. It wasn’t that Elaine’s parents cared about the plants or the dog, but that it would be awkward to have to explain it to the Wilkersons, who they thought were good people to know, as they might have an inside line on a cheap rental next summer. I don’t know. Like we had anything else going on, and were going to forget the flowers. Matey, though, he was the real fun.
Because Sid Wilkerson was ex-police, he was in some kind of retirement program for ‘canine units.’ When the bomb and drug and cadaver dogs all got too old to do their jobs anymore, Sid would take one, give it a good year or two as reward for catching so many bad guys.
And, though nobody’d left us any cheat sheet for Matey, we found out soon enough that he knew some kind of hand signals. We only ever figured out the obvious ones like ‘get’ and ’stay’ and ‘go right,’ but even that was a thrill, especially after all the brainless dogs we cycled through at home.
He was like our secret, our treasure, and of course we wanted to show him off down at the beach. We each even had — at least I know I did — dreams of him saving a drowning lady, or smelling a bomb in a trashcan and saving everybody’s lives, or stopping a carjacking, something like that. It was what happened in these ‘What I did that summer I met that girl or guy, and we found ourselves in a mystery’ stories. Though Elaine and me lived in different states, we’d still read all the same books from the library, had the same romantic-sleuth-adventure plotlines in our heads, and would never talk about something so stupid as being in a story with a ‘magic’ dog, of course. But that was partly just because talking about something’s the best way to mess it all up, right?
When you’re twelve, your superstitions are pure like they’ll never be again, I’m pretty sure.
And, yeah, I did finally tell her about my parents and how stupid they were, and she listened and digested it for a day or two then showed me her dad’s golf clubs in the storage closet behind their barbecue. Each of the clubs was bent perfectly in half, over the memory of a knee. I didn’t ask who’d done it. It was enough to know it was us against them, and that, if we could help it, we were going to wind up different people.
We should have been more specific about that last part, though, spelled it out letter by letter, that what we meant was we weren’t going to still be children when we grew up.
Instead, whoever answers these kinds of impulsive prayers just took the broad strokes into account.
We are different now, I mean. Definitely not our parents. But that’s just because our parents, unlike Elaine, didn’t have their throats chewed out the day before they were supposed to pack up and go back to their real lives.
This is why Matey is important here.
Sid Wilkerson should have told us all his commands before he left. The one we needed most was whatever one would make Matey forget all his training and just be a normal, average dog.
What happened, finally, as it had to I guess, was that we asked Elaine’s parents if we could go down to the boardwalk for sausage on a stick at dusk. There was a stand that faced the ocean and always had music rolling across the splintery counter. Elaine’s parents said yes, provided we took the Wilkersons’ dog, okay?
It kept us from having to ask.
As for my grandmother and ‘granddad,’ they were still on some schedule from 1950, where kids are supposed to stay outdoors until a half hour after dark, then sneak in, wash behind their ears, eat a cold dinner and — this was the update — watch game shows with them until bedtime. So I just went, didn’t have to ask.