The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [69]
Despite the evidence of my wound, the Haldemans refused to believe that their dog had gone for me. “Dewey?” they laughed. “Dewey wouldn’t harm anyone, honey. He wouldn’t leave the property after dark. Why, he’s afraid of his own shadow.” And then they laughed again. The dog that attacked me, they assured me, was some other dog.
Just over a week later, Dewey attacked Mrs. Haldeman’s mother, who was visiting from California. It had her down on the ground and was about to strip her face from her skull, which would have helped my case no end frankly. Fortunately for her, Mrs. Haldeman came out just in time to save her mother and realize the shocking truth about her beloved pet. Dewey was taken away in a van and never seen again. I don’t think anything has ever given me more satisfaction. I never did get an apology. However, I used to stick a secret booger in their paper every day.
At least rich people didn’t move without telling you. My friend Doug Willoughby had a newspaper route at the more déclassé end of Grand Avenue, made up mostly of funny-smelling apartment buildings filled with deadbeats, shut-ins, and people talking to each other through walls, not always pleasantly. All his buildings were gloomy and uncarpeted and all his corridors were so long and underlit that you couldn’t see to the end of them, and so didn’t know what was down there. It took resolution and nerve just to go in them. Routinely Willoughby would discover that a customer had moved away (or been led off in handcuffs) without paying him, and Willoughby would have to make up the difference, for that’s the way it worked. The Register never ended up out of pocket; only the paperboy did. Willoughby told me once that in his best week as a newspaper boy he made four dollars, and that included Christmas tips.
I, on the other hand, was steadily prospering, particularly when my bonus fines were factored in. Shortly before my twelfth birthday I was able to pay $102.12 in cash—a literally enormous sum; it took whole minutes to count it out at the cash register, as it was mostly in small change—for a portable black-and-white RCA television with foldaway antenna. It was a new slimline model in whitish gray plastic, with the control knobs on top—an exciting innovation—and so extremely stylish. I carried it up to my room, plugged it in, switched it on, and was seldom seen again around the house.
I took my dinner on a tray in my room each evening and scarcely ever saw my parents after that except on special occasions like birthdays and Thanksgiving. We bumped into one another in the hallway from time to time, of course, and occasionally on hot summer evenings I joined them on the screened porch for a glass of iced tea, but mostly we went our separate ways. So from that point our house was much more like a boardinghouse—a nice boardinghouse where the people got along well but respected and valued one another’s privacy—than a family home.
All this seemed perfectly normal to me. We were never a terribly close family when I think back on it. At least we weren’t terribly close in the conventional sense. My parents were always friendly, even affectionate, but in a slightly vague and distracted way. My mother was forever busy attacking collar stains or scraping potatoes off the oven walls—she was always attacking something—and my father was either away covering a sporting event for the paper or in his room reading. Very occasionally they went to a movie at the Varsity Theatre—it