A Box Full of Teeth

By Steve Stafford

In 1989, jaded Special Operations veteran Phillip Rhyader joins the Peace Corps in an attempt to escape his past and to restore a sense of balance to his life. Nine months later, 14 people are dead.

Was it something he said?

A Box Full Of Teeth is the story of one mans journey to shed a life of violence and darkness, and find his second chance in a remote corner of the world.

Although he arrives in Morocco with the best intentions, Phillips stay begins with a month-long, hashish-fueled patchwork of chaos and misadventure. As he spirals out of control, an unexpected violent encounter jolts him into correcting his course.

As he settles into his new role as a rural third world schoolteacher, he finds himself surrounded by an odd assortment of friends: The seductive and sophisticated daughter of his headmaster, a small group of young Muslim professors, and a tubercular prostitute, and an indigent, mentally unbalanced former political prisoner.

Much to his surprise, the pastoral existence Phillip had sought slowly takes shape. But when a police raid ends with the disappearance of one of his students, Phillip makes the miscalculation of getting involved. His refusal to remain complacent sets into motion a chain of events that ultimately force him to choose between keeping his new life, or fighting and perhaps killing to protect those around him.

A Box Full Of Teeth is an unforgettable story that intertwines two very different worlds US Special Forces and US Peace Corp into a story of despair, tragedy and forgiveness. Told in a stark, compelling voice, it vividly paints a picture of the Arab world that few have seen, and leaves the reader with a touching tale of love and loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496904195

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© 2014 Steve Stafford. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/20/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-0420-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-0419-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907249

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Chapter One: It Always Begins This Way

Chapter Two: The World Doesn’t Need To Know

Chapter Three: A Bus Full Of Holes

Chapter Four: Where The Water Ends

Chapter Five: Yes Or No

Chapter Six: Third World Gossip

Chapter Seven: Swaywall Days

Chapter Eight: My Name, It Means Moon Time

Chapter Nine: Chairs, And No Table

Chapter Ten: Long Lived The King

Chapter Eleven: Lesson One

Chapter Twelve: The Killing School

Chapter Thirteen: One Of Us Should Not Be Here

Chapter Fourteen: Apples And Oranges

Chapter Fifteen: It Doesn’t Matter

Chapter Sixteen: Not Like A Friend

Chapter Seventeen: Insh’allah

Chapter Eighteen: It’ll All Fade Away

Chapter Nineteen: Pencil Falderal

Chapter Twenty: One Short

Chapter Twenty-One: The Orphans

Chapter Twenty-Two: Clean And Easy.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Glue

Chapter Twenty-Four: Outliving The Young

Chapter Twenty-Five: Touché

Chapter Twenty-Six: Talking To Mars

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Over The Edge

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Dead Of Night

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Lemons For Oranges

Chapter Thirty: Angel Or Ghost

Chapter Thirty-One: Gathering Stones

Chapter Thirty-Two: A View From A Hill

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Lie

Chapter Thirty-Four: A Few Degrees Warmer

Chapter Thirty-Five: Plan B

Chapter Thirty-Six: Love Or Loved

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Consider It A Favor

Chapter Thirty-Eight: One Question

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Better One Than A Hundred

Chapter Forty: Make It Small

Chapter Forty-One: Between Four And Five

Chapter Forty-Two: The Honorable Thing

Chapter Forty-Three: Lost And Found

Chapter Forty-Four: It Never Ends

Chapter Forty-Five: Looking The Wrong Way

Chapter Forty-Six: My Life As A Dog

Chapter Forty-Seven: Catch

Chapter Forty-Eight: Loose Ends

Chapter Forty-Nine: If You Knew The Words

Chapter Fifty: The Missing Policeman

In remembrance of

M.T.

who was strong, but did not travel far.

"Oh what’s become of the world, Zaabalawi?

They’ve turned it upside down and taken away its taste."

—Maguib Mahfouz

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

—Aristotle

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.

—George Bernanos

CHAPTER ONE:

IT ALWAYS BEGINS THIS WAY

I close my eyes, and after several seconds a picture begins to form: A dull, gray image of the dead boys.

I see them sitting in a row of folding metal chairs on a cold and barren hillside, their bodies held in place with duct tape and wire, their heads bound upright, their lifeless eyes focused on a pile of stones that rests at my feet. A bare arm juts from the side of the mound.

Then, as quickly as it came, the image fades.

Rubbing my eyes, I look out to sea.

I have to admit I’m happy with the room. The fourth floor balcony affords a clear view of the beach below, where my wife lies stretched out on a blanket. Morocco is nice this time of year. A little cool, but pleasant.

From time to time, I think back on my first trip here. The year I became a teacher. The year I killed for the last time. I was twenty-seven then.

When I think of that year, it always begins with a random, solitary image: A goat falling from the sky. The glow of a radio dial. Rope burns across the palm of my hand. A bus full of holes, a sack filled with oranges, a box full of teeth. Or, this time, the dead boys. I never know what it’s going to be.

An army doctor once told me that these random scenes are called hypnagogic hallucinations, which means I see things with my eyes closed. Most people only do this when they’re asleep; it’s called dreaming. For some reason, I get the same type of vivid, uninvited images when I’m awake. I close my eyes and something comes along. It doesn’t take long—a minute or two, sometimes less.

It’s been like this since I was five years old, or at least that’s when I first noticed it. Miss Underwood, our kindergarten teacher, used to make us put our heads down each day for a 15-minute nap. I closed my eyes, but never slept. Within a minute or so I’d start seeing things: Snowflakes. Toys. Dogs and cats. Geometric patterns. Trees.

The images are different now. They started becoming more frequent when I was in the army, and often they show things I’d rather not see. I can’t control what comes along. Sometimes it’s something from real life, the way it happened. Other times, not.

Like the boys, tied and bound into place. I never saw them that way. I never saw them dead at all. It’s just an image my mind concocted from the loose ends and fragments of that year.

I used to try to analyze what each hallucination meant, but after a while I stopped. Now I just accept them for what they are: Loose shards of my imagination, little diversions my brain conjures deep in its recesses and offers up to me. I let them come and go, without thinking. Like breathing.

For the most part I succeed in tuning them out, the way you tune out background music in a busy restaurant. But every now and then I can’t help but notice. I try to shrug off this latest one. It doesn’t mean anything. None of it’s real.

Except for the hillside. I was there eighteen years ago and I saw it with my own eyes. The hillside, and the lifeless arm. Those things I saw.

Those things, I remember.

CHAPTER TWO:

THE WORLD DOESN’T NEED TO KNOW

I want to tell you a story about that year. But first there are a few things you need to know.

When I was twenty-two, I thought I had a pretty firm grasp on the future. I had a plan. I’d just finished college and enlisted for a stint in the Army. The plan was this: Get through Officer Candidate School, see the world a little, and after a while head into the State Department. Foreign Service. Then teach—either literature or history—and maybe do some writing on the side. That was the plan.

The Army gave me two months to report for duty, so I opted to spend that time at my parents’ house outside Indianapolis. Having been away at school for four years, I decided to look up a few friends and relatives I hadn’t seen for a while. One of them was my cousin Daniel. Although we were cousins, he was twenty years older, and more like an uncle. He was an Episcopal priest—the white sheep of the family, we used to joke. Growing up I used to call him uncle cousin Daniel. Later, when he was ordained, it changed to father uncle cousin Daniel.

I’d served as one of his acolytes for a few years, but somewhere around high school we drifted apart. Three years had passed since I’d last seen him, and during that time he’d been transferred to a larger, more affluent church in the city. Rather than call him up, I thought I’d surprise him by dropping in on services.

That’s where it all started.

When I think back on it, that’s about the only place my first wife and I could’ve crossed paths. My dad was a welder who kept a small hobby farm, and hers was one of the richest lawyers in the state. We’d never met in twenty years of living in the same city, but there she was, sitting about twelve feet away. The instant I saw her I froze up, as if the air had tightened around me and held me in place. I literally couldn’t move for a moment, and could scarcely breathe. Something told me this was it; her eyes said that the same bolt of lightning had found her.

For the next two Sundays we exchanged glances but never spoke. On the fourth week she arrived without her mother, and after the service I waited outside to introduce myself.

It took my breath away, how quickly it happened. I asked her out for coffee, and that was all either of us were expecting. But a few hours later we were in her apartment, practically burying ourselves in each other. I wouldn’t describe it as romantic; it was more like instinctive. Primal. Frantic, in a way, as if neither of us had much time left.

We saw each other every day for the next month, and spent most of the nights together. I told her up front that I’d enlisted, and she took it in stride. She was headed to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt, her father’s alma mater. Basic training would be in Texas, but I promised to transfer someplace closer as soon as possible. I said I’d wait for her, and she said I’d better.

Over the next several months we saw each other as often as possible, which wasn’t as much as either of us wanted. I kept plugging away, doing anything and everything I could to get closer to Nashville, and after a while wangled a transfer. I ended up at Fort Campbell, a special operations base that straddled the Kentucky-Tennessee border. The duty was a lot tougher than what I originally signed on for, and nothing like what I really wanted. But geographically it was as close as I could hope for, and that’s all that mattered at the time. We took turns driving the sixty miles or so back and forth between Nashville and the base.

She got pregnant sooner than we’d planned. Or, rather, without us planning at all. To say her parents were none too happy would be an understatement, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. I didn’t bother trying to make amends with her father. He was about nine shades of pissed off when he found out and for a while wouldn’t stay in the same room as me for more than a handful of minutes. I spent my time angling for her mother’s good side, figuring the baby would eventually win over her dad.

That strategy was working, but only for about seven or eight months. One February, my wife decided to drive up with our son to surprise me for Valentine’s Day. A light snow had covered the hills the day before and sometime after sundown she hit a patch of black ice on a little two lane just south of Clarksville. The next morning a tobacco farmer found her car wedged between two trees.

After that, life became one big, dark hole. I started getting deployed to Central and South America, and occasionally to North Africa and Southeast Asia. Every time I left, it felt like I was flying farther and farther away from the life I had begun to build, and further away from the person I used to be. Which, truth be told, didn’t bother me at the time.

Life was aimless at that point, which was something I wasn’t used to. My wife and son had replaced my original plan with a shiny new one, one that felt so much better than what I’d dreamt up on my own. Once they were gone, all that remained was a void that I had no idea how to fill. Still, I continued to go through the motions. I took each day as it came.

After a few years I’d had enough of the Army. All I wanted was to get even further away—from Nashville, from the base, from everything. All I wanted was to disappear.

At twenty-seven, I felt like my life had capsized, with me trapped beneath it, struggling for air. The world had been rearranged to the point that I couldn’t recognize it or myself anymore. Part of me thought that if I turned my life upside down one more time, I might end up back where I started. Right-side up. I mean, I didn’t expect things to be exactly as they had been. I couldn’t bring back my wife and son. But maybe I could be at ease with myself again. Maybe I could go back to being more like the person I used to be. So I set out to overturn things as best I could. A shock to the system, I guess you could call it.

I signed up for the Peace Corps to try my hand at teaching.

Several weeks after sending in the application, I went through their crash course in Arabic and was sent off to teach in a little village in Morocco. Karia bah Itzak. The village of Isaac’s father. When I tried to find it on a map, my Arabic instructor told me not to bother. Turns out it was so small that it wasn’t on most of them.

It has no significance, he said in his broken English. It’s the type of place the world doesn’t need to know. Maybe it was just his accent, but I liked the way the words sounded.

You might think that I was running away. For as long as I can remember, people have been saying that you can’t run away from your problems. But at the same time, there’s this thing called fight or flight. It says that when life throws something unexpected your way, you have a choice: You can wrestle around with it, or you can see how many miles you can put between it and you.

Sometimes you choose fight. Other times, flight.

I picked flight. And, in doing so, I found out what I already knew: No matter how far you flee, you can’t escape the thing you’ve become, or what you’ve done, or the things you’re capable of doing still. Those things are yours. Those things, you have to carry with you. At least, until they become so unbearably heavy that you have no choice but to turn loose of them.

This is how the story begins:

I was riding on a bus, having a dream. And in the dream, I was riding on a bus.

CHAPTER THREE:

A BUS FULL OF HOLES

In the dream, the night was sweltering and clouds hid the stars. I sat silently as the bus whined and rattled through the night. An old man, a shepherd from the hills, had fallen asleep next to me, his bearded, turbaned head resting on my shoulder. His burlap robe smelled of goats and dust, and its coarse surface bristled against my arm as the bus jostled him beside me. It was annoying at first, but after a while I stopped noticing.

The bus felt eerie at night. Haunted. Or peaceful. Or some gray area in between. The robed and hooded figures that talked and moved throughout the day had drifted into silence. They’d wrapped their garments around themselves and sat motionless, like cocoons, like sarcophagi. I was the only person awake, aside from the driver.

As we reached the top of the hill, the bus groaned to a halt and the engine died. The sudden stillness didn’t seem to faze any of the other passengers. Grumbling beneath his breath, the driver dismounted and walked to the front of the bus, where he threw open the hood and leaned inside.

As I eased back into my seat, the silence was shattered by a sharp, loud knock, as if someone had struck the outside of the bus with a hammer. It was then that I noticed a small hole in the roof that hadn’t been there earlier, about the diameter of a pencil, maybe a little larger.

Again the sound rang out, this time striking closer to the driver’s seat. Then it hit two more times. It wasn’t until one of the passengers fell over that I realized someone was shooting at us. The shots were coming from so far away that I couldn’t hear the gun’s report; I only heard the impact of the bullets as they punched through the sides and roof of the bus.

One by one the sleeping passengers fell to the floor, oblivious to the sound and the sting of the bullets. For a moment I considered waking them up, but instead did nothing.

The second I made the decision to keep silent, the bullets began to strike in an unbelievably fast succession, too fast to count. The air exploded with rapid pounding, as if the bus was caught in a violent hailstorm. I covered my ears and huddled against the window as the other passengers slumped forward in their seats and dropped to the floor. As the old man fell away from my shoulder, I closed my eyes. For what seemed like several minutes, all that existed was the relentless hammering on the bus and the sound of my heart beating in my ears.

Then, suddenly, silence.

I opened my eyes. None of the other passengers were left upright. Sliding across the seat and toward the aisle, I stood. An overpowering silence filled the bus, so intense that it seemed more deafening than the barrage of bullets.

A vaguely familiar noise began to emerge slowly from the distance. A few seconds passed before I recognized it as the throbbing of helicopter rotors. The whirring of the blades grew steadily louder until they stopped and hovered directly overhead. A spotlight clicked on and its bright white beam seeped into the bus through thousands of tiny holes. The narrow streams of light were beautiful, in a way. Pristine and pure. Glancing around the floor of the bus, I looked down at the old man who had been propped against me. He’d landed on a woman and young child, both of whom were lifeless. For some reason, I raised my right hand and began to study a dot of light resting on my palm. It was white and crisp and perfect.

A voice came from the helicopter’s loudspeaker. Is anyone there? it asked.

I didn’t answer. Beneath the sounds of the rotor, I could hear a second voice murmur: Only one. Should we leave him?

No answer, no discussion. Just a short pause, followed by a final shot.

This bullet, however, was different. Its path was methodical and surrealistically slow—much too slow to puncture the bus. I could sense it outside, hovering, looking for a suitable place to enter. Eventually it settled on burrowing through an existing hole just above me, the very first hole made by the shooting. It emerged slowly, like an earthworm, and continued to float toward me. I watched it drifting, and wasn’t afraid as it corrected its course and headed toward the center of my forehead. I turned away, but only slightly, offering it a spot on my left temple. It didn’t seem to matter to the bullet; it held its course. Forehead or temple. Either would do. I wondered if it would hurt, or if it would be quick and painless.

I took a deep breath, and as I exhaled the voice above spoke again.

Yes, it said. Leave him.

At that moment, the bullet stopped and fell into my hand. The odd part was how it fell; there was something very delicate and tender about the bullet, and when I examined it closely I discovered that it was made of snow. Outside, the helicopters began to pull back. As the rotors trailed off, the hundreds of tiny rays faded and the darkness returned. The old man lay lifeless at my feet, on top of the woman and child, and next to a dog that I hadn’t noticed before. I sat down and slumped into my seat.

The driver climbed aboard and settled into his seat as if nothing had happened. Where to? he asked.

I don’t know, I replied. Just let me off at the next stop.

He cranked the engine and shrugged. This is the only stop this bus ever makes, he said. Yanking the gearshift down, he stepped on the gas and the bus began to creep forward into the night.

Suddenly, I realized that the driver left something behind, but I couldn’t place what it was. Then, for the first time in the dream, I felt a sense of panic. Not a mild panic, but an overwhelming, debilitating fear. Looking around, I tried to decipher what was missing. Then, a piercing pain shot through my skull, so intense that my eyes welled with tears, and a bright, white light burst before me, blinding me.

I awoke with a jolt, startling the old man seated next to me. A sharp pain was pulsing through my left temple. From what I could tell, the bus had bounced over a pothole, dashing my head into the window latch. I’d left a small pencil propped behind my ear, and its point had gouged me. I ran my hand through my hair and across the side of my face; no blood.

The old man cast an inquiring look my way. Not knowing enough Arabic to explain what had happened, I pointed from the latch to my temple. He was able to decode my gestures and asked if I was okay.

Yes, I answered, staying within the awkward confines of my limited vocabulary. No problem.

Smiling a half-toothless smile, he closed his eyes and shifted in his seat.

My heart was still pounding from the dream. I took a few slow, deep breaths to relax, and as I did I could feel a wave of something resembling disappointment spread through me.

According to my watch, it was just after ten at night. I’d had a long day—or, rather, two days—riding and waiting on buses for thirty-eight hours straight. It was a mistake, trying to make the trip from the far south in one stretch; the journey should’ve been divided over a few days. It was a fair distance, and the buses were slow and infrequent.

I really had no business going that far south. I’d only gone because of a short story I’d read in college. It was about a professor—a linguist—who ventured far into the interior of Morocco, to the edge of the desert, to study the local dialects. In his quest to uncover new dialects he went too far, to a place where he didn’t belong. In the end, he fell in with some nomads who cut out his tongue and tortured him into a state of mindlessness. They kept him around for a while as a curiosity, decorating him with bells and bangles. After the novelty had worn off, they turned him out into the desert, leaving him to wander aimlessly until his death.

I went to see what it was like, to see the type of people who would do that. But it was nothing like what I’d imagined. It was nothing at all—just a small, sleepy town, indistinguishable from a half-dozen others I’d seen.

The first day in the south I realized that the story had been written nearly thirty years ago. It didn’t occur to me that things could change so much in that time. But after a little reflection, it seemed pretty obvious. Things can change pretty quickly. Within the space of a day, things can change.

The bus clamored on. After rounding and topping a few hills, we came to a valley dotted with scattered lights. As we descended, the bus rumbled over a small bridge, its tires drumming across the wide wooden planks. The noise caused the other passengers to stir; it served as their notice to wake up and prepare to dismount.

The bus sputtered to a stop at the center of town, filling the air with smoke and diesel fumes. As the passengers dismounted, the driver climbed onto the top of the bus and started handing down crates, suitcases and boxes. Eventually he got to my bags and eased them down one by one. After gathering all four, I pulled them from the street and waited by the side of the road for the crowd to clear.

A teenage boy nodded and smiled as he walked by.

Excuse me, I said. Where’s the hotel?

There’s no hotel here, he replied. But you can stay at my house if you like.

He seemed earnest enough, but I didn’t want company.

Oh, I said. No. Thanks. He walked off into the night, apparently unoffended.

Before arriving, I’d made a backup plan; if there were no hotels, I would sleep at the bus station and find lodgings the next day. But this town had no depot, just a wide stretch of road where the bus eased to a halt. I shifted the weight of the bags around and headed up the main road.

The street was lined with battered, whitewashed buildings. A café two blocks up appeared to be the only place left open. It was small and dirty, and inside two shepherds huddled over a pot of mint tea.

The buildings went on for about eight blocks, at which point they abruptly stopped. The paved road continued into the night, where the glowing lights of the bus were growing steadily smaller.

While the main road had been full of shops, the unpaved side streets seemed to be lined with homes made from concrete and cinder blocks. Although the houses weren’t exactly identical, nothing made one more memorable than the next. The most notable difference was the doors, whose colors covered the spectrum: a light blue one first, followed by forest green, then orange.

As I approached the house with the orange door, I had the unmistakable feeling of being watched. Passing by the house’s darkened window, I glanced inside and saw a woman staring out. For a moment we both remained motionless and silent. We were only two or three feet away from one another, but the darkness muted the closeness and made it feel surreal. She was attractive, perhaps in her mid-thirties, but something felt wrong. Most women here would move or avert their eyes from the gaze of a man, but she remained as still as a fortune-telling mannequin behind her glass case. I was about to excuse myself when a man’s voice boomed through the house. She bolted at the first sound of him. Barging into the room, he yelled and swatted at her twice as she ran into the courtyard. They started screaming back and forth, but I didn’t try to decipher their words; instead, I wondered if she had been waiting for someone, or simply staring into the night for no reason at all.

The bags seemed heavier with each step, and the road grew more rough and uneven.

At the edge of the village lay a vacant lot bordered by a low stone fence. Setting my bags in the dirt, I climbed over the fence, walking stick in hand. The lot covered an acre, maybe two, and as I squinted I could make out a ghostlike form in the distance. As it drew nearer I could see that it was a large white mare. She was tall and muscular, her mane shiny and straight. She stopped a few yards away and snorted at the air. Taking a small step forward, I gently raised my hand but she turned and bolted, sinking back into the darkness.

I gathered my bags and continued to walk. Twenty minutes later I still hadn’t found a decent option for spending the night. I began to wonder if it would be possible to spend the night wandering the streets, but a few minutes later I tripped over a stone that jutted up from the road, scattering my bags and ripping through the leg of my pants. The scrape wasn’t too bad, but I thought it wise to head back to the main road and try to clean it.

Inside the café, a radio filled the air with static-laced music. The two shepherds stopped talking as I entered. The café consisted of six beat-up folding card tables and a dozen or so mismatched chairs. As I sat, one of the shepherds called for the owner, who was stretched out on the floor behind the counter.

He shuffled over to my table, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He stared numbly as I asked for a coffee.

I nodded a thanks to the shepherds. They nodded back and one of them pointed to my leg, which was bleeding. I rolled up my pant leg to reveal a small, curved gash just below the knee. I couldn’t recall which bag contained the first aid kit. Rather than searching for it, I took a long white gym sock from the nearest bag and tied it around my leg, covering the cut. The shepherds stared at the wound. I looked back at them, thinking that might cause them to look away, but it didn’t. Instead, they stared even more intently, anxiously waiting to see what would happen next.

The café owner returned with a coffee. You’re a tourist?

No, I replied. A professor. I’ll be teaching English here this year.

Ah, welcome, he smiled. Do you have a house yet?

Not yet, I replied. I was about to ask if he had anything to eat when he interrupted.

Then we’ll get you one. He disappeared behind the counter, calling someone’s name. A few seconds later a young boy emerged, squinting beneath the bright lights. His father snapped a few words at him and he shuffled out the door.

The coffee was hot and strong. Taking a pack of cigarettes from my overcoat, I offered some to the owner and the shepherds, all of who accepted. One of the shepherds slid his cigarette carefully into the pocket of his dusty burlap jacket, while the other lit up. After a couple of drags, the smoking shepherd nodded approvingly and passed the cigarette to his friend.

As they shared the cigarette, the shepherds looked at my walking stick. They seemed to want an explanation, but I didn’t offer one. My knee bothered me from time to time, but the stick wasn’t necessary. It had belonged to my grandfather, and I brought it to Morocco to keep stray dogs at bay. Upon arriving, I found it carried an additional benefit: It tended to keep beggars away. Many of them, except the sickest of the sick, felt awkward begging from a man with a cane, thinking it a sign of illness. But primarily it was for the dogs. Strays roamed the cities and countryside, and rabies was not uncommon. I figured it was worth a little precaution, having been bitten by a rabid dog once before.

That happened when I was four years old, on the farm. I had a dog for a while, a mid-sized beagle mix. I used to call him mine, but in reality he didn’t belong to anybody. He came and went as he pleased. He’d run with some pack dogs for a few days, then come back and stay at the house for a while. I always had food for him. He wasn’t the brightest dog, and in fact was a bit on the dim side. He wouldn’t fetch, but enjoyed playing tug of war.

One day he came back with another dog in tow, a big black mutt. I was playing tug of war with my dog. I had my fists buried in one end of a blanket, while he latched onto the other end like it was made of beef jerky. My grandfather came through the gate, tap-tap-tapping his way up the walkway with his stick. He was joking around and telling me to pull harder and reel him in, but the instant he saw the second dog his tone changed and he told me to go upstairs to my room. I asked why, and he told me again to get upstairs.

I was dragging toys out from under the bed when I heard the first shot. I ran to the window. The black dog lay dead on the sidewalk, a small puddle of blood pooling around his head. My grandfather had his .22 aimed at my dog. I yelled out to him, but I couldn’t be heard through the window. So I grabbed my rocking chair—the small kind made for children—and heaved it through the glass. But it was too late. Just as the chair crashed through the glass the second shot rang out.

I ran crying to the bed and buried my face in a pillow. My grandfather open the front door, then clomped up the stairs to my room. He scooped me up from the bed and held me in his arms.

Sorry I had to do that, boy, he said. Those dogs were sick. Sorry you had to see it. Then he unbuttoned my sleeves and began to examine me. There were scratches on my right arm—several on the forearm and a couple more up above the elbow. He asked how I had gotten them, and I couldn’t remember. Then he just shook his head and held me, rocking me back and forth until I went to sleep.

When I woke up, both dogs were gone. That day my parents took me to a hospital in town, where the doctors started a series of shots in the stomach with big needles.

The shots must have been painful, but I couldn’t honestly say. I couldn’t remember them. In fact, I didn’t remember any of the story. The dogs, the inoculations, the sound of the gun—none of it. I could scarcely remember my grandfather, who died two years later. The only reason I knew about it was because my parents told me. As far as I was concerned, it might as well have happened to someone else.

However, one image of the incident stayed with me: that of a small child’s white rocking chair, arcing through the air, falling through the trees, bouncing out across the front lawn. Otherwise, the story was a blur. But for some reason, when I turned eighteen and left home, the only thing I asked my parents for was my grandfather’s walking stick. I couldn’t say why; I had no use for it.

Setting my