Jon Dog

I don’t recall a time before Jon Dog. My first friend, he looked just like a black Labrador Retriever but was actually a mutt. Jon had black spots on his tongue and his brother, Shep, who belonged to mom’s identical twin sister, was dark-spotted wooly and gray.

Why do I still get so resentful of people? Perhaps it goes all the way back, all the way back to Jon Dog- my hero, fearless and powerful. A Boy and His Dog- I painted that in undergrad. We were both naked in it. My first true friends really were animals. Jon Dog, thank you and I’m sorry. I still wish I had done more but I was just as scared and confused, still a kid. Maybe I’m glad you got out. I hope you ran free for miles and miles. I hope you drank from the stream and caught your meals in the tall grass and slept under the stars. I hope you found her.

The day of our big adventure, mom was at school or work and her boyfriend, Okie, was doing something to the lawnmower. I never wanted much to do with her boyfriends, so I followed Jon right into the wheat, which was golden yellow and over my head. I couldn’t see him but I could hear and, eventually, we spilled out the other side of the field and into the woods. We ran through those, too, and spilled out onto a dirt road. I saw a police car coming our way and yelled at Jon to get down and he did. We both hid until the coast was clear and then continued on our quest until the sun began to set. I didn’t know where we were but I knew that Jon did and sure enough, he took me home just in time. I don’t remember anything else about Okie. Mom showed up and I helped her pick the ticks off of my friend on the front porch. Then I sat on the living room floor, in front of her chair, and she picked them off of me and burned them in an ashtray while we watched The Ten Commandments on TV.

Another night, very late, we heard a pickup pull into the drive. Mom opened the door to let Jon assess the situation. He disappeared behind the headlights, the truck’s door slammed shut and it backed out and left very quickly. Jon returned with half of a pair of blue jeans in his mouth.

One time he jumped out the window of the Trans Am on the highway. It was white with white leather seats that burned the backs of my legs in the summer and there was a red-orange phoenix on the hood. Jon was fine. One time he got heart worms and stayed at the vet’s for days or weeks. He was fine after that, too.

Jon Dog was always good to mom and me and tolerated her boyfriends, but not their dogs. One afternoon we heard screaming from the back yard. Jon had managed to snag mom’s boyfriend’s dog by his lip through the chain-link fence and was trying to pull him through it.

4H leash training. Jon said: “Fuck off, kid. And another thing, soon as we get back I’m gonna eat one of the chickens and kill three more just for fun.”

After mom died, Jon Dog and I moved in with dad and my stepmom, in town. I was ten and dad put him in a small pen behind the shed. Jon, who had run through acres of wheat and woods and tall grass was now on about thirty-six square feet of plain red dirt. So he started digging and he got out once, twice, maybe three times. Another big black dog showed up, so Jon got out and tried to kill him. Dad was at work, so grandma came and tried to hit the other dog with her car but he and Jon were locked in combat. I sprayed the other dog’s eyes with AquaNet and he eventually gave up. Actually, I don’t remember how it ended. I remember spraying him and then nothing else other than that Jon was back in his cell. I didn’t like hurting that dog even though he tried to kill my friend.

Dad put an electric wire around the bottom of Jon’s pen but he still got out. Grandpa came over this time and we inspected the scene. There was a hole under the wire. Grandpa touched the back of his hand to it, to test whether or not it was on, and was thrown to the ground. The wire was definitely on and very, very hot. It was scary to see grandpa fall down like that but he got right up and said something about how powerful the current was in that wire. He also told me to always test a hot wire with the back of my hand because otherwise it might make me hold on.

Jon Dog didn’t come back that time. Dad drove a pickup and always wore blue jeans. I never got another dog.