Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [95]
“I did the best I could,” Jack kept saying to the doctor. “You can see what it was like. I just never knew what to do.”
Jo and I kept our distance. Neither of us said a word.
By the third morning, Arlene was gray-faced and repentant. When we went in to check on her, her eyes would not rise to meet ours.
“I’m all right,” she said in a thick hoarse whisper. “And I won’t ever let that happen again.”
“Damn pity,” Jo told me later. “That was just about the only time I’ve ever really liked her. Crazy out of her mind, she made sense. Sane, I don’t understand her at all.”
“What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked me.
She and I were sitting alone waiting for the doctor to come back. They were giving her IV fluids and oral medicines to help her with the nausea, but she was sick to her stomach all the time and trying hard not to show it. “Come on, tell me,” she said.
I looked at Mama’s temples where the skin had begun to sink in. A fine gray shadow was slowly widening and deepening. Her closed eyes were like marbles under a sheet. I rubbed my neck. I was too tired to lie to her.
“You close your eyes,” I said. “Then you open them, start over.”
“God!” Mama shuddered. “I hope not.”
Jo was a breeder, Ridgebacks and Rottweilers. A third of every litter had to be put down. Jo always had it done at the vet’s office, while she held them in her arms and sobbed. She kept their birth dates and names in lists under the glass top of her coffee table, christening them all for rock-and-rollers, even the ones she had to kill.
“Axl is getting kind of old,” she told me on the phone before I came last spring. “But you should see Bon Jovi the Third. We’re gonna get a dynasty out of her.”
After her daughter Beth was born, Jo had her own tubes tied. Still she hated to fix her bitches, and found homes for every dog born on her place. “Only humans should be stopped from breeding,” she told me once. “Dogs know when to eat their runts. Humans don’t know shit.”
Four years ago Jo was arrested for breaking into a greyhound puppy farm up near Apopka. Mama was healthy back then, but didn’t have a dime to spare. Jaybird called me to help them find a lawyer and get Jo out on bail. It was expensive. Jo had blown up the incinerator at the farm. The police insisted she had used stolen dynamite, but Jo refused to talk about that. What she wanted to talk about was what she had heard, that hundreds of dogs had been burned in that cinder-block firepit.
“Alive. Alive,” she told the judge. “Three different people told me. Those monsters get drunk, stoke up the fire, and throw in all the puppies they can’t sell. Alive, the sonsabitches! Don’t even care if anyone hears them scream.” From the back of the court-room, I could hear the hysteria in her voice.
“Imagine it. Little puppies, starved in cages and then caught up and tossed in the fire.” Jo shook her head. Gray streaks shone against the black. The judge grimaced. I wondered if she was getting to him.
“And then”—she glared across the courtroom—“they sell the ash and bone for fertilizer.” Beside me Jaybird wiggled uncomfortably.
Jo got a suspended sentence, but only after her lawyer proved the puppy farmers had a history of citations from Animal Protection. Jo had to pay the cost of the incinerator, which was made easier when people started writing her and sending checks. The newspaper had made her a Joan of Arc of dogs. It got so bad the farm closed up the dog business and shifted over to pigs.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about pigs,” Jo promised the man when she wrote him his check.
“Well, I can appreciate that.” He grinned at us. “Almost nobody does.”
“How’d you get that dynamite?” I asked Jo when we were driving away in Jay’s truck. It was the one thing she had dodged throughout the trial.
“Didn’t use no dynamite.” She nudged Jaybird’s shoulder. “Old Bird here gave me a grenade he’d brought back from the army. Didn’t think it would work. I just promised I’d get rid of it for him. But it was a fuck-up.” She frowned. “It just blew the back wall