Monsters
I pushed my knee hard into the back of the seat and closed my eyes and tried to hide in my arms, and only looked up when my new granddad made the sound he made when a game show answer was surprising him.
What he was seeing was the guy from the boardwalk.
He was walking our direction, away from Elaine’s house.
At his side was Matey. The way he was controlling him was he had the handle of the leash in his left hand, with his right hand cinched down to the back of Matey’s neck.
As we passed him I slammed myself up against the glass and he stopped, smiled, nodded something like thanks and then opened his hands, let Matey slip away.
I was out of the car before my new granddad could even stop it, and caught Matey ten minutes later in a cul-de-sac I’d never been down. He was crazy, even snapping at me. I calmed him down as much as I could, held his head to my chest, then looked back for the guy I knew had to have been running behind us.
There was just my new granddad in his house slippers, though.
“That’s Sid’s?” he said, about Matey.
I nodded, and then — because they were my grandparents, and not really that bad — they rode the brakes and lit the sidewalk ahead of me, all the way back to the Wilkersons’.
I ushered Matey into his pen then watched him check all the corners over and over, and that was the second-to-the-last time I ever saw him.
The next morning, then, along with the rest of the town, we got the news: Elaine had been killed in her own bed. Something had chewed her throat out, splashed her all over the walls.
It was like I was hearing all this through a long series of tubes. Like I could angle my head away and not any of it would be real anymore.
Over the next three days, with my grandparents’ help, the police pieced the events of the night together, and decided that Elaine had become too attached to Matey, so had smuggled him up to her room — her parents said she usually didn’t go to bed that early, no, especially not after a scene like I’d made — and then something had happened. Something terrible. Their proof was the blood and hair smeared on the gate of Matey’s pen. According to them, he’d probably licked it all off his muzzle and feet himself, hours ago. His water pan was empty too, I heard, which somehow made it not so much his fault: if we’d only not been kids; if we’d only taken better care of him.
As for my run across all the lawns to save her, everybody just shrugged, assumed I knew she had Matey up in her room, but, out of loyalty, wouldn’t say anything about it. And, after a prod or two, they didn’t push me to either. The story they had was neater, I mean. Made more sense: Elaine had accidentally made some bad hand signal to him, or stumbled onto an old kill command, or worn the same hair spray as some long-gone bad guy.
Whatever she’d done, or whatever had happened, the facts were that her throat had been torn out, and Matey, her responsibility, had been running the streets around her house that night, and had even snapped at me, whom he knew and loved, when I tried to pull him close.
The last time I saw him, an Animal Control officer was leading him away from the Wilkersons’ house, to be put down. He had that same grin on his face too, like this was just going to be another adventure — the boardwalk, with different smells.
Standing on the porch were Sid Wilkerson and a younger cop, who’d maybe worked with Matey before Matey started killing sixth grade girls. When Sid Wilkerson saw me he just thinned his lips, turned away. Shut the door.
My new granddad guided my away by the shoulder.
My mom and dad were already having a complicated road race to get to me, prove to each other who the real parent was.
My grandmother was making something complicated for all of us to eat, to prove how happy she was in her new marriage.
And Elaine.
All that was left of Elaine was a black stain on Matey’s fence, with stupid, hateful flies crawling over it (because I didn’t believe, I went and saw). And the shape my hand still remembered, from when she’d held it for three consecutive houses, and from when it had brushed hers in that dreamworld under the boardwalk where we’d walked together, not even afraid.
We should have been, though.
We should have run out into the surf as far as we could, until the parents packing up their bags became our parents and splashed out after us, shook us by the shoulders until we woke up.
Except they never would have caught us. We were twelve.
“He thinks I made him do it,” I said, not really to my new granddad but just out loud.
My new granddad licked his lips, said, “Sid, you mean?”
Across town, somebody in protective goggles was probably already pushing a needle into the back of Matey’s neck, then, if they were nice, petting the fur down over it.
I kept having to make my hands into fists.
“He thinks we made Matey do it,” I said, my lower lip trembling more than I wanted to let it, so that I couldn’t say there hadn’t been time for Matey to do it, that it had to have happened after I caught Matey, that there never had been any blood on him.