Because You Love to Hate Me(79)

Crazy Hat Lady opened her front door, flailing her arms at me.

“Why do you have to run here? Look at what you do to my dogs! Leave us alone! How dare you do this to us!”

She wore a leopard-print pillbox hat with a black mesh net that looked like one of those sacks you buy tangerines in, and a black pheasant feather spearing out of its top.

I never answered her. I felt her line of interrogation was more rhetorical than inquisitive.

But that day, just as I cleared the field and came out onto Onondaga, two things happened: first, Crazy Hat Lady’s mutt scaled the short wooden fence around her front yard; and second, our local state trooper, Clayton Axelrod, rounded the corner in his patrol vehicle. So he saw everything.

The dog ran at me.

Crazy Hat Lady ran for her dog.

“Leave my dogs alone!”

I caught a glimpse—but only a glimpse—of her arms flailing as though she were attempting to extinguish invisible flames bursting from the top of her leopard-print pillbox hat.

The dog clamped his yellow teeth on my left wrist.

I realized something at just that moment: when a dog is biting you, shaking its head frantically as though attempting to remove a mouthful of flesh, it makes you really want to live. So I was kind of grateful—but only momentarily—to the dog for making me aware of just how much I loved my life.

“Leave my dog alone, you little prick!” Crazy Hat Lady yelled.

I slid my free hand inside the dog’s collar and twisted. The dog began choking.

I think at that moment, because of a lack of oxygen, Crazy Hat Lady’s dog realized how much he loved his life, too. In fact, there was so much love of life going on there on that morning beside the creek it was almost as though the dog and I had gone on a weekend retreat to one of those motivational seminars for depressed businessmen.

Trooper Axelrod got out of his vehicle.

Crazy Hat Lady, who ran very slowly, flailed and yelled, “Get the fuck away from my dog, you piece of shit!”

Trooper Axelrod, who wore very nice, shiny leather gloves, managed to grab the dog by the scruff of his ample neck fur. The dog unclamped from my bloody wrist, and Trooper Axelrod said, “Okay. You can let go of him.”

As soon as I untwisted my right hand from the dog’s collar, the fucker bit me again.

Thanks, Trooper Axelrod.

That was when Crazy Hat Lady finally caught up to us, yelling at Trooper Axelrod and me to get the fuck away from her dogs and her house.

I ended up with my mom and dad in the emergency room. I got four stitches and a tetanus shot in the left cheek of my pale, skinny butt, which everyone in the room, including the doctor, a nurse, Trooper Axelrod, my mother, and my father, looked at. I hated Crazy Hat Lady and her stupid dogs so much. And right when the needle was going in, that was when it happened for the first time. I thought, I wish Crazy Hat Lady would die. Wishes, like the thought of death, are almost always foreshadowing, and I wanted her dead. You might think that’s an intense overreaction to the situation. But not me. Death was called for, in my opinion.

My day was ruined, but probably not as much as Crazy Hat Lady’s would be, which is major foreshadowing.

In Ealing, a town where nothing ever happens and anyone who doesn’t live here is only passing through—either in one direction toward Waterloo or Cedar Falls, or in the other direction, toward Iowa City—there is a gas station/peanut-brittle-and-venison-jerky shop/petting zoo called Bill and Carol’s. The peanut brittle and deer jerky are not made there, even though the owners pretend that they are, and the petting zoo is the dumbest thing I have ever seen in my life. All the animals except three have died. The three animals in the Bill and Carol’s Peanut Brittle and Jerky Petting Zoo that are still alive are a desert tortoise, a Chihuahua with three legs, and a twenty-four-foot-long Malaysian reticulated python. The python would not eat the tortoise because of its shell, and the Chihuahua is very nimble, more so than the other animals that used to be part of the zoo’s collection.

So that day, at approximately the same time that my naked thirteen-year-old butt was being stared at by my mom and dad and a bunch of strangers in the emergency room of Ealing’s Angel of Mercy Lutheran Hospital, Bill and Carol’s twenty-four-foot-long Malaysian reticulated python, which was named Eddie, escaped from their woeful petting zoo and made its way down Onondaga Street, into Crazy Hat Lady’s front yard.

Naturally, Crazy Hat Lady’s long-haired wiener dog barked, yapped, and flung glistening strands of saliva. The other dog—the one that had bitten me—had been carted off to the dog pound to think about what he’d done for forty-eight hours. But Crazy Hat Lady, on hearing the commotion in her yard, assumed that the annoying runt who liked to torment her poor dogs had come back, running on the path beside her yard, which is what the little fucker liked to do.

She was wearing a lavender cloche with what looked like a bow tie pinned to its band. Her big mistake, besides choosing a green frock, was making an attempt to wrestle her long-haired wiener dog away from Eddie, who coiled his elm tree of a body around and around and around Crazy Hat Lady.

When I read about what had happened on Onondaga Street, I felt a little bit guilty, but only a little. Had I caused it by sheer will? Yeah, pretty sure I had.

Over the next two years, after what happened to the others—Camaro Douchebag, Unfriendly Bicycle Meth Head, Perverted Angry Substitute Teacher, and a few others—I came to recognize the fact that I was Ealing Iowa’s Little Angel of Death. It only took one little trespass on their part, and I would think, You should die, Camaro Douchebag, or Unfriendly Bicycle Meth Head, or whoever—and not just die, but die in the most strangely unpredictable manner imaginable, like death by space junk, for example, which is what hit Perverted Angry Substitute Teacher when he was driving in his convertible Fiat, which is a fleet vehicle for perverts.