Boys Life

away from him, and my selfishness had caused him to exist in this state of betwixt and between. I had rejected him, when all he’d wanted to do was lick my cheek. I got up in the dark, put on a sweater, and went to the back door. I was about to turn the back porch light on when I heard Rebel give a single bark that made my hand stop short of the switch.
    After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation. I knew this bark: it spoke of excited happiness, and I hadn’t heard it since before Rebel had died and come back to life.
    Slowly and carefully, I nudged the back door open. I stood in the dark and listened through the screen. I heard the wind. I heard the last of summer’s crickets, a hardy tribe. I heard Rebel bark again, happily.
    I heard the voice of a little boy say, “Would you like to be my dog?”
    My heart squeezed. Whoever he was, he was trying to be very quiet. “I sure would like for you to be my dog,” he said. “You sure are a pretty dog.”
    I couldn’t see Rebel or the little boy from where I stood. I heard the clatter of the fence, and I knew Rebel had jumped up and planted his paws in its mesh just as he used to do when I went out to be with him.
    The little boy began to whisper to Rebel. I couldn’t make out what was being said.
    But I knew now who he was, and why he was here.
    I opened the door. I tried to be careful, but a hinge chirped. It was no louder than one of the crickets. As I walked out onto the porch, I saw the little boy running for the forest and the moonlight shone silver on his curly, sandy-colored hair.
    He was eight years old. He would be eight years old forever.
    “Carl!” I shouted. “Carl Bellwood!”
    It was the little boy who had lived down the street, and who had come to play with Rebel because his mother would not let him have a dog of his own. It was the little boy who had burned up in his bed when a bad electrical connection had thrown a spark, and who now slept on Poulter Hill under a stone that read Our Loving Son.
    “Carl, don’t go!” I shouted.
    He glanced back. I caught the white blur of his face, his eyes scared and glittering with trapped moonlight. I don’t think he ever got to the edge of the woods. He was just not there anymore.
    Rebel began to whine and circle in his pen, the withered leg dragging. He looked toward the forest, and I could not help but see his longing. I stood at the pen’s gate. The latch was next to my hand.
    He was my dog. My dog.
    The back porch light came on. Dad, his eyes squinty from sleep, demanded, “What’s all this hollerin’ about, Cory?”
    I had to make up a story about hearing something rummaging around the garbage cans. I couldn’t use Lucifer as an excuse, as the second week of October Lucifer had been shotgunned to nasty pieces by Gabriel “Jazzman” Jackson, who’d caught the monkey ravaging his wife’s pumpkin patch. I said I thought it might have been a possum.
    At breakfast I didn’t feel like eating. The ham sandwich in my Clutch Cargo lunchbox remained untouched. At dinner I picked at my hamburger steak. Mom put her hand against my forehead. “You don’t have a fever,” she said, “but you do look kind of peaked.” This was pronounced peak-ed, and was Southern for “sick.” “How do you feel?”
    “All right.” I shrugged. “I guess.”
    “Everythin’ okay at school?” Dad inquired.
    “Yes sir.”
    “Those Branlins aren’t botherin’ you anymore, are they?”
    “No sir.”
    “But somethin’ else is?” Mom asked.
    I was silent. They could read me like a fifty-foot SEE ROCK CITY sign.
    “Want to talk about it, then?”
    “I…” I looked up at them in the comforting kitchen light. Beyond the windows, the land was dark. A wind sniffed around the eaves, and tonight clouds covered the moon. “I did wrong,” I said, and before I could stop them tears came into my eyes. I began to tell my parents how much I regretted praying Death away from Rebel. I had done wrong, because Rebel had been so badly hurt he should’ve been allowed to die. I wished I hadn’t prayed. I wished I could remember Rebel as he had been, bright-eyed and alert, before he had become a dead body living on the sheer power of my selfishness. I wished, I wished; but I had done wrong, and I was ashamed.
    Dad’s fingers turned his coffee cup around and around. It