damn good. We could have quit going to houses right then, as far as I was concerned.
At Michael’s house, the front door was open. Through the screen door, I could see Michael and his family eating in the kitchen. Before we could ring the doorbell, a short, thick-necked dog raced to the door and growled at us. Michael’s father came soon after. He squinted at us and frowned.
My father started talking through the screen door. Michael’s father lit a cigarette and drummed his fingers against the door frame, as if he was growing impatient with my father’s interruption of his dinner. I smiled nervously at the dog and he started growling again.
“And your son was one of the boys who called her a zebra,” my father said, ending his complaint.
“Who’s that?” Michael’s mother yelled from the kitchen.
“Nobody,” Michael’s father called back, without taking his eyes off my father. He then took a long puff from his cigarette, leaned past us, and flicked the smoldering butt into the street. Without a word, he shut the door in our faces. My father stared at the door and bit his lip as if contemplating something. After a moment, he turned down the steps to leave. As we hit the street, I smashed the smoldering cigarette with my shoe to make sure the fire was completely out.
We didn’t go to Teddy’s house. Instead, we headed home in silence.
Well, that last house sucked,
I wanted to say, but I wasn’t allowed to use the word
sucked.
My mother was waiting in the living room. “How’d it go?” she asked my father. He sped past her into the kitchen. I followed him.
“One man got really pissed at his son,” my father yelled back to her, removing a small Ex-Lax package from a cabinet. He slammed the cabinet shut and took out some cheese from the refrigerator. He wrapped a chunk of cheese around an Ex-Lax pill. “The last guy was a jerk. And he owns the dog that’s been pooping on our lawn,” my dad continued.
My mother ran into the kitchen and grabbed the cheese from my father’s hand. “Jack, it’s not the dog’s fault. Don’t hurt the dog.”
Dad’s hurting a dog? With cheese? Does he have a cheese pellet gun in the toolshed?
“Dad, what are you doing to his dog?” I cried, worried that my zebra fight was going to result in a doggie death.
“He’s putting something out for the dog to eat that will give him the poops,” my mother said, trying to get me on her side, since I’d brought the battle home in the first place.
“Gwen, the man slammed the door in our face, and his dog craps in our yard! He’s lucky this is all he’s getting.”
My parents were usually so straight and narrow, my mother especially, that I could have been a Brady kid. I couldn’t watch R-rated movies or wear nail polish like my classmates. Once, when I tried to steal a pack of gum from Rite Aid, my mother caught me and made me apologize to the store manager. He looked embarrassed for me. It got tiring. Whenever I got the rare chance to witness them doing something devious—like the time my brother picked up a toy in a store and my mother, not seeing a price tag on it, exclaimed, “It’s free!” and stuck it in her purse—I tried to make it last as long as I could.
“Will the poops hurt the dog?” I asked.
“No, just Michael’s father’s carpets,” my father replied.
“Mom, we have to do it,” I turned to her. I thought the plan was as full of holes as the cheese, like what if Michael’s father let the dog out before the diarrhea started and the dog got diarrhea in our yard? What if a squirrel ate the Ex-Lax? Is it really revenge if it’s done anonymously? Can we put a note on the dog’s collar saying “Who’s a zebra now?” It might not correlate exactly, but Michael’s family would get the point.
My mother sighed. “Well, I do want that dog to stop pooping in our yard,” she said, giving in. “Can you at least not use the good cheese? We do have some that’s about to expire, you