BTI Larsson
Saturday the dogs were set loose. The ones who chased anything unless they were chained up in Jan Olofsson’s yard. They clawed the dirt around their cage like they were trying to dig themselves out when Jan wasn’t looking. All teeth and paws. They looked no different from the wolves in the woods that howled when we walked to the lake, although we never saw them. We heard them making sounds from deep within their throats, one after the other. The dogs were a mess of black and white fur with black slits for eyes, some of them with a speck of yellow, which meant one had slipped into the woods and bred with something wild. On the way to school, we threw sticks just beyond the chain’s reach and the dogs forgot they were tied up and were snapped back by their necks. Maria watched while fixing her bra strap. Sara H and
Sara O sucked their hair.
When Dominik’s pajamas were brought out and held in front of the dogs, they smelled sleep and salt from where Dominik forgot to soap his wrists and oatmeal because he ate his breakfast still wearing those clothes. The dogs were eager to hunt him down. Boy , that’s what they smelled. We just had look at the way they salivated and showed their teeth to know it.
The dogs howled this way , here , there as they nosed through Stig Jansson’s field with the tall yellow grass. The ground was hard from frost. It crackled like electricity when they moved through it, bending the straws one way then another until they circled back. Jan said the frost confused the scent. He scratched their heads as they thumped their tails and stroked up against him. With him they were sweet. Too dumb to understand he was the one who chained them up all day and night.
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The dogs came to school next. Jan released them and said “Go, get,” and they slunk through the white hallways with their knotted coats and their tongues hanging out. He stood there in his checkered shirt, hands in his pockets. His beard and mustache covered his mouth and chin so we couldn’t tell what he was thinking, if he thought anything at all. None of us chased each other when the dogs came through. We walked slowly with our bags on our backs. We could tell the dogs wanted to rip us to shreds.
In the changing room next to the gym, they found a blue t-shirt with a hole underneath the collar the size of a thumb. We couldn’t remember seeing Dominik wear it but the dogs said he had. Underneath the shoe racks, they sniffed out
Dominik’s sticky slip-on socks. The scents make the dogs’ hair stand on end.
When no one looked, Maria threw her pink gum on the ground and said,
“Here, here.” Her voice was scratchy. I sucked in my breath when I heard her, but the dogs didn’t pay attention. They sniffed the schoolyard from top to bottom, ending at the woodshop.
They thirsted for the lake. The dogs pulled and strained on their leads like the devil was in them. The lake was a mouth that yawned open right after the river. Big and still and deep. There was no getting away from water or stones or bits of driftwood the lake spit up. They dogs splashed through the shallow bits until Jan called them back.
We saw Dominik plenty of times down at the lake when Maria tanned, and I tugged my cap down my ears and let my hair hide the rest of my face. I turned the color of the crabs I fished up for us with a clothespin and cracked-open snails, after they were cooked.
“Just another minute,” Maria said. The sun loved licking her. Dominik jumped from rock to rock down at the lake never stumbling and missing one. She watched him with one eye open and one eye closed.
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When we swam in the lake, Dominik shrieked when anything came close to his toes, no matter whether it was a fish or Maria who dove under and grabbed hold of his ankles. She came up spitting and laughing, her hair a mess, and Dominik stood on the shore, pouting with his big lips, his arms wrapped around his chest. He refused to look her in the face.
But we knew Domin ik wasn’t fishing like his mother, Britt-Marie, said. He didn’t wander away before Britt-Marie woke with his rod and hooks carefully wrapped in toilet tissue. “He’s good at that kind of thing,” Britt-Marie said, biting her lip. “He’s real patient.”
“Did you have a fight?” Teacher asked.
“No,” Britt-Marie said, but she lied. Dominik ran off plenty of times after the two of them danced in front of the windows pulling each other’s hair and shrieking.
After school, Teacher rode his bike over to BrittMarie’s. He cleaned out their refrigerator of leftover pizza and threw the boxes outside. He cooked Britt-Marie a cutlet of pork with prunes. The scent made our mouths water. The grass around the house was high and filled with buttercups. Dominik tore out the thistles. He wore winter gloves and pulled at the roots with his back so straight he almost landed on his bony behind. When the seeds fell out it was too late and thistles came up everywhere. The seeds wormed their way into the ground.
Maria squeezed up against the old bathtub where Dominik planted geraniums. They stank like piss. “Stay there,” I said. I leaned against a red Volvo with ripped seats that died years before and a couple TV sets that Dominik swore worked fine. “Then why are they out here?” Maria had asked. Dominik shrugged and said,
“We got a really big new one. Huge.”
As Britt-Marie ate, Teacher took out his notebook and settled down in front of the phone. With him there, Britt-Marie must have forgotten that Dom inik didn’t lie on
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the bed in his room, reading a magazine under the covers. She fell asleep sitting up.
Her skin through the window glare was the color of milk.
Filthy dogs, shaking with adrenaline and sweat. The dogs ran faster and faster, their bodies wheeling through the air, a snarl of fur and legs and tails, barely leaving footprints. The dogs ran through the fields surrounding the woods. A bit farther and the growth became tight clusters of pine and spruce where birds squeaked. The woods called t o the dogs. They pulled them there. Maria’s eyes were bright and her cheeks flushed whenever there was a ruckus in the woods. On the way to school, she thrashed a stick against the grass as we walked. “Do you think they can hear that?”
At school, she picked the desk with her fingernails and looked out the window. Boredom came off her like sweat. She raised her hand and said, “I think he’s dead.”
She yawned. I could see the pink of her gums and her white teeth. No one said anything, and she went back to scratching her initials. Teacher came up to her desk and crouched down. I kept my head down so I don’t know what he said to her but she was quiet a fter that. For him she’d pretend to be writing in her notebook for an hour just like the rest of us.
“What are you writing?” she said.
“I’m not finished.”
That’s when the rector came to knock on our door and Teacher went out to the hallway. Maria squirmed in her seat. When Teacher came back inside, his hands were in his pockets and he looked at us. “They found him,” he said.
It was the cold before the first snow. It made our eyes dry and our tongues feel numb. When we came inside from recess we kept our coats on in our seats. Teacher told us, “Take them off,” but we didn’t. I stuck my hands underneath my armpits.
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Teacher said, “All right, get up” and one by one we went through the door. Someone said Teacher was going to drown us in the lake. We’d never seen his face so red. He marched us in twos away from school. Maria was up front with Greta. I was in the back alone and had to strain my neck to see.
We stopped in front of Dominik’s house. Teacher didn’t bother knocking. One by one Teacher pushed us thro ugh the mess of Dominik’s yard and into the house none of us had been inside. We squeezed through the narrow hall, over Dominik’s shoes that were flung here and there, until we were all in the living room where Britt-
Marie sat in a sweatshirt, her hair in a ponytail, without the black eyeliner and red mouth.
“Jesus would you look at that TV,” Maria said. Britt-Marie looked up. She sat alone, and even though the TV was on mute, she clicked between the channels.
Teacher sat down beside her and took the remote out of her hands. She placed her head into the crook of his neck and stayed like that all afternoon. The only time she got up was to fry some hotdogs when her boyfriend came. They heated and popped out of their skins but no one offered us any.
That’s when Maria called, “Dagmar.”
That’s me, so I looked and looked until I found her in Britt-Marie’s room, in front of the mirror and the tangled web of jewelry. Maria was biting her lower lip and wanting to steal it for sure. I said, “Follow me.”
I took her through the woods to see the dogs. We found them at Jan
Olofsson’s killing each other over a couple rabbits Jan flung in their midst. They were so wicked Jan had to calm them by hosing them down in the yard, spooling off their adrenaline and sweat. Then when they didn’t notice, he covered his hands in grease and reached into their coats to squeeze, twist, and pull the ticks out, fat with blood.
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Half sunk in the bog, face down. That’s how they found him. Boots slopping with mud instead of water. You w ouldn’t like to walk a few steps in those boots. The tag of his shirt collar stuck out. It had his initials written in permanent black marker because he was always taking it off when he was hot. He had a skinny chest. There wasn’t much too him. You could count every rib. He bruised. He whined. He was always slinking around, bending over to look at something, or climbing up to get a better view, nothing but his bony behind in your face.
He smiled and pouted whenever you came into the Pizza King or pulled your hand when you stood at the window. He led you to a table and tapped the plastic seat and said, “Sit here.” Then he brought Britt-Marie out from the back where she was poking at her hair in front of the mirror —you could see her whenever the doors slapped open —and he sat down in the corner with a drawing but really he was just staring at you. Every few seconds: look up, look down.
The bog was in the middle of swallowing him. It would have kept swallowing him a millimeter at a time if the dogs hadn’t found him. Everyone knew the bears and wolves and foxes, just a flash of red across the horizon, shy things, stayed away from all that wet. He would’ve turned into one of those bog bodies we read about if they hadn’t ruined it and dragged him out. He would’ve looked like he always did. A few scratches on his arms and one across his face underneath his left eye like an unraveled ribbon. He must’ve been looking for fish or flies. He must’ve drowned himself.
Someone brought him there, Britt-Marie said. Dominik d idn’t wander out by himself. The lake or the woods. That’s all he knew. The bog was too far. Too wet. It stank. But it was just meters away from the highway. He liked picnics and car trips.
He would’ve been patient as he sat in the front seat looking at the windshield wipers catching flies like they were sticky traps. All someone had to do was point out all the orchids growing low to the ground, brown ones and pink ones, ants, brown beetles, horseflies, crawly things that skated on the surface of the black bog water that looked
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like pools of motor oil. He wasn’t impressed. He whined. He sulked. He walked back to the car and when he found it locked, he flipped. We’d all heard him scream. The sound trilled from the back of his throat. It thrilled too. Enraged. Pushed. Pulled. And then, Dominik was laid down on the bog like a prince. “You see?” she said.
We didn’t tell them we’d seen Dominik and Teacher together gardening all summer. They were as pleased as they could be. He was stuffing strawberries in his f ace and he wasn’t being told off. Big red ones with the juice running down his face and chin. He eyed the blackberry bushes, too, even though those berries weren’t close to being ripe. We were like birds in the hedges, watching. But no one bothered asking us how Dominik died.
© BTI Larsson
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