Boys Life

the lights came on. I looked at my parents, my eyes and brain still drugged with sleep. “What was that noise?” Dad asked. Mom said, “Look at this, Tom.” On the wall opposite my bed there was a big scraped mark. Glass and gears lay on the floor, the clock face read two-nineteen. “I know time flies,” Mom said to me, “but alarm clocks cost money.”
    They chalked it up to the Mexican enchilada casserole Mom had made for dinner.
    For some time now, an event had been taking shape that was one of those destinies of place and circumstance. I was unaware of it. So were my folks. So, too, was the man in Birmingham who got into his truck at the soft-drink bottling company every morning and drove out to make his deliveries to a prearranged list of gas stations and grocery stores. Would it have made a difference, if that man had decided to spend an extra two minutes in the shower that morning? If he’d eaten bacon instead of sausage with his eggs for breakfast? If I had tossed the stick for Rebel to retrieve just one more time before I’d gone off to school, might that have changed the fabric of what was to be?
    Being a male, Rebel was wont to roam when the mood was right. Dr. Lezander had told my folks it would be best if Rebel and his equipment were removed from each other, to cure the wandering itch, but Dad winced every time he thought of it and I wasn’t too keen on it, either. So it just didn’t get done. Mom didn’t like to keep Rebel in his pen all day long, considering the facts that he stayed on the porch most of the day anyhow and our street never got much traffic.
    The stage was set. The die was cast.
    On the thirteenth of October, when I walked into the front door after school, I found Dad home from work early and waiting for me. “Son,” he began. That word instantly told me something terrible had happened.
    He took me in the pickup truck to Dr. Lezander’s house, which stood on three acres of cleared land between Merchants and Shantuck streets. A white picket fence enclosed the property, and two horses grazed in the sunshine on the rolling grass. A kennel and dog exercise area stood off to one side, a barn on the other. Dr. Lezander’s two-storied house was white and square, precise and clean as arithmetic. The driveway curved us around to the rear of the house, where a sign said PLEASE LEASH YOUR PETS. We left the pickup truck parked at the back door, and Dad pulled a chain that made a bell ring. In another minute the door opened, and Mrs. Lezander filled up the entrance.
    As I’ve said before, she had an equine face and a lumpish body that might’ve scared a grizzly. She was always somber and unsmiling, as if she walked under a thundercloud. But I had been crying and my eyes were swollen, and perhaps this caused the transformation that I now witnessed.
    “Oh, you poor dear child,” Mrs. Lezander said, and such an expression of care came over her face that I was half stunned by it. “I’m so, so sorry about your dog.” Dok, she pronounced it. “Please come in!” she told Dad, and she escorted us through a little reception area with portraits of children hugging dogs and cats on the pine-paneled walls. A door opened on stairs leading to Dr. Lezander’s basement office. Each step was a torture for me, because I knew what was down there.
    My dog was dying.
    The truck bringing soft drinks from Birmingham had hit him as he’d run across Merchants Street around one o’clock. Rebel had been with a pack of dogs, Mr. Dollar had told Mom when he’d called the house. It was Mr. Dollar who had heard the shriek of tires and Rebel’s crushed yelp as he’d been coming out of the Bright Star Cafe after lunch. Rebel had been lying there on Merchants Street, the rest of the dogpack barking for him to get up, and Mr. Dollar had gotten Chief Marchette to help him lift Rebel onto the back of Wynn Gillie’s pickup truck and bring him to Dr. Lezander. Mom was all torn up about it, too, because she’d meant to put Rebel in his pen that afternoon but had gotten wrapped up in “Search for Tomorrow.” Never in his entire life had Rebel roamed as far away as Merchants Street. It was clear to me that he’d been running with a bad bunch, and this was the price.
    Downstairs the air smelled of animals; not unpleasant, but musky. There was a warren of rooms lit up with fluorescent lights, a shine of scrubbed white tiles and stainless steel. Dr. Lezander was there, wearing a doctor’s white coat, his