It's 1978 or 79, and my grandmother takes me to her beauty shop for a haircut and absolution, my sins soon to be bled from me about the ears. The lady cuts me, and 30 years later I'm convinced she must have had cataracts. She visits me in my dreams, two gray, clouded eyes like an emaciated zombie with big, piss frosted hair.
The nip at my ears, however, is completely bearable when compared to the clippers. Old, diesel-operated shears that were surely retired from the local sheep farm, the vibration strong enough to shake the ice in her whiskey sour. They smoke and drank back then, they did, to keep their hands steady.
NO PUNISHMENT COMPARES TO THE ANTICIPATION RIGHT BEFORE THE CLIPPERS TOUCH THE NAPE OF YOUR NECK.
As soon as she turns on the juice, my eyes water and I will the shorthairs to fall from my neck. She pushes my head forward much as they did during medieval beheadings. Six inches from my neck she stops to talk with the lady next to her. Then she slowly extends the clippers again. An inch from my neck, I can feel the vibration running electronic interference through my nervous system. My leg is shaking like a dog who's surrendered its tickle spot. I pee on myself, I just know I do.
* * *
But the torment well worth the cost, for a week or two anyway. The sonofabitch knows how not to leave a mark when our hair is long, grabbing us by our mops and dragging us around the house. Goddamn, I'd prefer an honest beating to having my hair pulled. It hurts, but it's a humiliating kind of feeling, being so completely incapacitated, eyes watered in reaction. It's so easy to anger him in those days, and he doesn't say anything, just runs at you, quiet and eerie, like a pit bull. Goes straight for the hair.
* * *
He won't lay a finger on the dog, though, a golden retriever we adopt from a family who drove it insane. To this day he always talks about how this despicable, cowardly neighbor of his beats his dog, as though a dog were any different from a child. "Yep," he says, disgusted, "Th'other day I was talkin' to him and that dog of his was just barking like crazy. He simply stopped, picked up the nearest stick, and walked over to the dog and beat the ever living shit out of it. And 5 minutes later the dog was barking again."
You see, there's the moral.
And this: every time I hear the fool talk about how his neighbor beats his dog, all I can think about is our own damned dog, and how he never in 10 years laid a finger on it, but he had no such qualms with us. Once, the dog snapped at me, obviously aware of her rank in the pecking order. In swinging at the dog with a broom, I damn near had my head pulled off.
Thou shalt not harm the animals.
But stepkids just oughtta know better.
* * *
I certainly don't feel sorry for myself, though, because we're all square. Unknown to him, I learned to strike out on my own without leaving a mark. Whenever he was away, I shared every bit of punishment I could with that dog. I became that despicable creature across the street, the monster who held no compassion. For a dog that had already had its share of abuse.
The reason we got that dog was because it had snapped at the children of a previous family. It was being watched by a neighbor and the kids picked and pulled and poked for three days straight until the dog did what dogs do. And the father of that family, feeling the ire of a man whose children are threatened, threw the dog against a wall, breaking its hip. The dog lay like this for 2 more days.
The dog hated kids, having been betrayed, and drew my blood, which I mixed with hers, all of us sharing a house of abuse, wounds hidden from those who would hardly care to look, none of us understanding why rocks would hurt scissors, scissors cut paper.
I still don't understand the man's compassion for animals, any more than I understand my own cruelty. Or I do, but cannot be satisfied with the reason. God help me. I was grateful when the dog died, in the way the guilty must feel when their last anonymous victim fades from the collective memory.
* * *
The other day, our kids had been too rough with our dogs, and the bigger one snapped, drawing blood from Tristan's hand. I felt the ire in me, the threat against this ignorant boy of mine, upon whose head I could never imagine laying a finger, and there it was again, the cruelty in front of me, in what I intended to deliver. It was probably around 11. I was no doubt drunker than I should have been. But the anger passed more quickly than I was prepared for. I sat down next to the dog and reached out to pet her, and she released the contents of her bladder on the floor. I asked her not to bite the kids, no matter how mad they might drive her. I asked her to try to understand that things are different now, that those battles belong in the past. I'm not sure if I convinced her. Dogs have a kind of ability to pick up on the unseen, little vibrations along the nape of one's neck.