This Dog for Hire

happy anymore, when I was looking down.”
    Looking down now. Looking like a child. Pauses thick with emotion.
    “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said, looking so young, so scared.
    “What did you do?”
    “I tore them.”
    “Which ones did you tear?”
    “Mine. Me. But then Peter got torn, too. By accident. I tried to separate him out, so I wouldn’t tear him, too. But he got torn. In halt.”
    Now Clifford Cole was sobbing.
    “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he said. “I didn’t.”
    And a hand appeared on-screen, offering a box of tissues.
    Clifford wiped his eyes and blew his nose, and I Watched as the: sad face of a little boy was transformed and, like the sudden recognition of knowledge I’d never tire of seeing in the eyes of the dogs I Used to train, Clifford Cole got the knowledge he’d been looking for, the full brunt of it, ail at once, recorded on tape for posterity.
    “I did ,” he said. “I did mean to hurt him. i t was Peter. Peter was why I hate myself.”
    “Why is that?”
    “Because he hurt me,” Clifford shouted. “He fucked me. He abused me. I pushed it all away, but now it’s back, now I remember what he did, that 's why I began to rip him up!”
    Triumph in his eyes, his eyes so old, so sad now.
    “Tell me about it.”
    “All week it was coming back to me, weird, horrible feelings, and I’d be thinking about Peter or mad he hadn’t called me, something stupid like that, only that wasn’t it, wasn’t the real thing, and I’d just feel like I was too ugly to go outside, I even hired this kid, Michael Neary, who walks dogs in the neighborhood to walk Magritte, and I stayed in bed, and then it came to me, like in pieces and I couldn’t grasp hold of it, only see parts of it, but I knew it had to do with Peter, I don’t know how to explain it, but I just did, and now all of a sudden I remember it all, what he did to me, when it was, everything.
    “It started when I was seven and he was twelve, when my parents would go out and they’d leave Peter in charge of me, and he said he had things to teach me, because I’d be a man one day, and there were things I’d have to do, things I had to know, things he knew because he was older than me, and I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew he was going to help me because he was my brother and I loved him. I trusted him. My parents, they always made this big thing about brothers, how you’re loyal to each other, how it’s forever, being a brother, that when they’d be gone, we’d have each other.”
    “And what did Peter want to teach you?”
    “About girls. He said I had to know what to do with girls. That he’d show me. So he took me into our parents’ room and he dressed me in my mother’s clothes and he showed me.”
    “What did he do, Clifford? Tell me what he did.”
    “He hurt me.” Sobbing now. “And when I cried, he said, Be a man, Cliffie, you have to know this, and Mommy and Daddy will never teach you, it’s up to me, he said, because you’re my brother and I love you, and I was so mixed up, because he said that, but he was hurting me, and after that time, he did it again and again, in his bed or in my bed or in my parents’ bed, he’d put me in a dress and put lipstick on my mouth, all over my mouth and around it, big, grotesque, red lips, and he’d kiss me and he’d fuck me and he’d say, This is what you’ll do when you get the chance.”
    He covered his face and cried, but when he took his hands away, his face had changed. He wasn’t sad now, he wasn’t frightened, he was angry, his face whole, open, strong, his eyes round and clear, sane, his demeanor adult, powerful.
    “Then it changed,” he said, strong in his knowledge, “and now he put my mother’s dress on, and makeup, powder and rouge and lipstick, he looked so weird to me, but he said he was doing it so I’d know what to do, so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself when the time came, so I could be a man. That’s what he told me, so I could be a man.”
    “How awful for you.”
    “Gotta practice, he’d say. Gotta get ready. Gotta do it. That’s what he’d say when I cried—Gotta do I was a child. I couldn’t protect myself. I didn’t know how. And there was no one there to do it for me. No one there to rescue me.”
    “That's what we’re doing here, rescuing that child.”
    Clifford nodded, his gaze far away. Bertram Kleinman and I waited silently, watching Cliff see something from a long time ago, something