Surviving My Family, Part Four

I don’t think my mother was truly aware of how much I hated Joe until our final confrontation. As fate would have it, she was right there in the room with us when it happened. It was a day when coastal Texas was having one of those chilly fall howlers where the lightning blinds you for a minute, the thunder rattles the whole house like an earthquake and you don’t dare go outside because it’s just this side of being a hurricane out there.  At the time, I had a dog named Pechudo (after a horse in a movie I saw when I was little). He was my first all-to-myself pet. He was a big, goofy, dumb mutt dog but he was MY big, goofy, dumb mutt dog and I loved him with all my heart. Sometimes when I didn’t feel like having to fight with Joe, I’d vanish before he could get into his rip-roaring and just go curl up in Pechudo’s big dog house at the back of the yard. The dog hated him, too, and Joe was afraid of him because he’d bare his teeth at him if he hung around too long. Pechudo would lie across the opening so he couldn’t see me in there and growl at him if he came poking around his run. Well, being big and goofy, that poor dog was terrified of thunder and lightning. A lot of the time, if I was home and saw a storm coming, I’d grab my little flashlight and a book and go crawl into his house to keep him company until it was over, even if it was in the middle of the night. Joe bitched about that. Mom never did. That particular day, with a big nasty howler going on, Joe was doing everything he could think of to make me stay in the house. 

He knew I was going buggy worrying about my dumb dog out there all alone. Pechudo panicked. He busted his chain and popped the gate to his run. I was just hustling out the door when he came tearing up the back yard, throwing mud everywhere. Before I could get him, he barreled past and into the den… right as Joe was heading for the bathroom. He grinned… that horrible, mean, shit-eating grin and he stepped in the den as the dog came charging in. Before I could move from the door, he hauled back a leg and he kicked that poor dog so hard that he let out the most horrible yelp I’ve ever heard a dog make. He flew back the ten feet to the storm door. It had closed and latched as I’d turned. He hit so hard that he popped the latch, broke it and went flying about another 5 or six feet into the mud beyond. And he just… lay there. I couldn’t tell if he was even alive.

I then had the first instance of what I call red screen rage that I can recall. It was beyond any anger I’d had before. All of my vision was colored this ugly throbbing red color.  I also did something that friends who saw me do it later on in life called “blinking” because one moment I was in one place, you blinked and I was somewhere else, incredibly fast for a little short, fat girl. It generally only happens when I’m in red screen rage.  I went from the door to the big ottoman I typically flopped on to watch cartoons and was on it so fast that he tried to step back in surprise. But I was sober and much, much faster.

Up on that ottoman I could reach his throat and I grabbed him by it. It was weird. Not even a teenager and somewhere deep inside a little voice whispered, “Windpipe. Grab the windpipe. One good twist and it’ll all be over. You’ll be free.” And that other part said, “No! No, you won’t. They’ll lock you away in the loony bin and throw away the key.” But my fingers held on and I pulled him until he was nose to nose with me and I growled at him. “Motherfucker, if you EVER touch anything I love ever again I will fucking KILL you!”

I shoved him staggering backward, coughing and looking like he might puke. He beat feet toward the front of the house to go upstairs. As I spun and hopped off the ottoman I saw Mom’s face. Her jaw was hanging open and her eyes were so wide they looked like they might fall out of her head. When I looked at her, her mouth snapped shut and she just stared at me like she didn’t know who I was. “I’m going out to take care of my dog.”

That was all I said as I went out into the rumbling, chilly night like a thunderhead joining the rest of them. It took days for me to nurse that dog. Mom and I quietly took him to the vet while Joe slept off his hangover the next morning. We told the rather suspicious looking vet that he’d been winged by a car. He told me what to watch for and what to bring him back for. I slept in that doghouse for a week. I wouldn’t even go to school for fear Joe would try and finish what he’d started.  Eventually he did. A few months later he teased him with a burger so he could get hold of him and clipped his collar high up on the cyclone fence so he’d strangle. He claimed the neighbor boy had been teasing the dog and he must have gotten stuck. He thought I didn’t know, but I saw him grinning out the kitchen window when I found him like that. Bastard. I knew he had me in a stalemate. I couldn’t kill him. If I did, I would get locked up. If I ratted him out to Mom, SHE would get locked up for killing him. So all I cold do was pray to whatever powers that be there might be. I wasn’t Catholic anymore by then, I’d quit being Catholic when I was seven and I hadn’t figured out if I even wanted a religion anymore. But I had a notion there must be something bigger than the stupid hairless apes who think they run the place, so I prayed to whoever might be listening to please take him away so Mom and I could be at peace.

(TO BE CONTINUED)