Every Boy Needs a Dog

By Chris Griffy

Ronnie was always a disappointment; a small and bookish child so unlike the "man" his abusive father wants him to be. But when he rescues a beagle named Buck from euthanasia at a shelter, he finds the friend he always needed, and also finds that Buck is a very special dog who might just save him as well.

Trigger Warning: Child Abuse, Domestic Violence

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Griffy
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215871621

Chris Griffy

 Chris Griffy is a music journalist and fiction author with bylines in a number of major publications. You can join him on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/gryphonwrites, where he shares thoughts, essays, and fiction works in progress. When not writing Chris lives in Fayetteville, Tn with a wife, three cats and a dog and spends most of his time (and money) on concerts and gardening.

Book preview

Every Boy Needs a Dog

A Novella

Chris Griffy

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental. Copyright 2022 Chris Griffy

Table of Contents

I. Every Boy Needs a Dog............................................................4

II: The Secret Place..............................................................10

III. Missing Children...........................................................13

IV. A Different Kind of STRANGER...........................................14

V. Every Dog Needs a Boy.................................................17

VI. Secrets in Secret Places...............................................20

VII. Buck's Final Play ................................................21

VIII. Epilogue For a Dog............................................22

Acknowledgments...............................................23

Hell Is For Mailmen ..........................................24

For Benji, Snoopy, and Jill.

The Best Beagles a Boy, or a Man, Could Ever Wish For

For Jean Bethell, Whose 'Barney Beagle' Picture Books Kicked Off My Love of Hounds

And For Joan. My Secret Place

I. Every Boy Needs a Dog

E very boy needs a dog , my dad said as I jostled around the back of our 1979 Chevrolet Caprice wagon, sitting on the flat panel of the folded back seats. Southern rock music warbled an unsteady beat from the car's AM radio, the electrified guitars of .38 Special mixing with the low fuzz of static, at war with a distant radio transmitter and an unreliable hood-mounted antenna. And losing. The singer begged his girl to hold on loosely, don't let go! but the message was being hijacked by a preacher whose own signal would fade in at random intervals, promising salvation from the eternal fires of hell if only his listeners would let go of a few hundred dollars.

It was a rare moment of happiness from my dad. I could only see his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror from my vantage point but his smile reached them, full of the memory of all the dogs his own childhood held dear. For an instant I saw the man my mom married; charming, handsome, engaging. The early hour helped. While my dad had a very limited range of emotions, his anger was a bit like the Caprice, it took some time to warm up before it could get to speed. Besides, it was the first thing I could ever remember asking for that he didn't complain about or refuse outright. I'd wanted a dog since I was old enough to know what a dog was. And today I was finally going to get one.

Maybe it'll get you outside to play like a boy and not stuck in your room with your head in one of those books with the elves and shit. I'm not going to let you make a fag of yourself. The moment of happiness had been brief. It always was, his nostalgia retreating to a state I was much more familiar with; sullenness at a son of slight build, fondness for fantasy stories, complete ineptitude at sports, and lack of interest in the other things real men did. I was eight when we got the dog and my dad had only recently begun to add fag to his arsenal of insults. It wasn't effective. It was completely lost on a child with only a very basic understanding of sexuality. Mommies married Daddies because they loved each other, though I had already become doubtful. I didn't have the best loving Mommy and Daddy role models.

Fag mostly just made me confused. I'd watched shows from England on PBS when staying with my grandparents, enchanted by the exotic accents, and had concluded from them that a fag was a cigarette of some kind. But that couldn't be right. My dad loved cigarettes, as evidenced by the Pall Mall that hung between his lips, the acrid unfiltered smoke of it burning my eyes. It bobbed up and down as he spoke like that tiny wand Lawrence Welk, who my grandmother watched weekly with a religious devotion most preachers would envy, used to direct his Wunnerful Champagne Orchestra. Hearing Lawrence Welk now gives me a nostalgic feeling for Saturdays with my grandparents. At eight, it was an unbearably long one hour delay of Doctor Who and I hated it as only an eight year old can hate a bunch of brightly dressed and aggressively wholesome singing youngsters.

My mom sat in the passenger seat and beamed. As was typical for her, she chose the glass half-full approach, sheltering the small spark of kindness from the howling winds of my dad's inevitable mood swings. "I remember when I was