DOG BITE
by Jimy Valenti
Thanks for tuning in to PEDAL STEEL. A few months ago I got a story sent to me cold, by a man named Jimy Valenti, a writer based in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. I opened the document and started reading and then I couldn’t stop. This is the kind of story I’d hoped to place here, the kind of thing that makes PEDAL STEEL less of a Brett Writes Things project and more of a venue for discovery and collaboration.
“Dog Bite” is the inaugural piece of Guest Fiction for PEDAL STEEL. It’s about fatherhood, addiction, and a criminal temper. It’s about that animal that searches in darkness, that bites hold of you and won’t let go.
This is Real Deal Rural Noir on the Colorado plains by a writer who knows how to tell a story that feels true, and how to deliver that truth, sentence by sentence.
- Brett
I first noticed it about a week before school started. I took the girls to watch Alamosa High versus some school running the wishbone from north of the valley. We only went because Stevie’s kid made the roster as a freshman. And by made I mean the coaches had trouble filling out the 53 and they stuck him on the bench. Third string corner used only in the nickel. Still, Stevie’s kid is like a nephew to me, a cousin to the girls. That kind of thing is important.
Bella really didn’t want to go.
She’d been like this lately. I couldn’t remember if it started before or after Heather left, but losing your mom to the streets, pockmarks on her face, couldn’t have helped any. Her little sister and I sat in the truck while Bella pitched a fit just outside the front door. With the truck running, she forced me to pry her hands from the door handle and carry her like a deflated football into the pickup. We didn’t talk on the seven-minute drive to the high school, just watched the valley’s last slanted light spewing from Monte Vista over rows of rented alfalfa. She didn’t turn on the radio. Sophie in a car seat in the back plugged into a kid’s iPad, too young to feel the pain of feeling left out.
I noticed first how Bella sat on the bleachers. Slumped over. Knees into her chest. Hands clasped around her shins. Like she was burrowing into herself. Waiting for the sun to go down. Waiting for the game to be over. Waiting for high school to be over. It would be a while. She was only a freshman.
Stevie was Heather’s ex from twenty years ago who spent his college years outside of Boston. Black hair pulled tight into a little bun, two-day beard, and a jaw line that used to get him places he didn’t belong. Now he wore a Mean Moose hoody with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, jeans and work boots. We didn’t talk about Heather. Nobody did. But he was family just the same, and he was so excited for his boy to make the team. I never pointed out that anybody could have made the team this year. They didn’t have enough bodies. Stevie snuck two Styrofoam loaf-and-jug cups full of rodeo juice—lemonade and cheap vodka—into the stands. I sipped mine slowly. Out of habit. To be nice.
“There he is,” Stevie shouted from the top bleacher. The setting sun so bright off the aluminum bleachers I couldn’t see my nephew down there warming up. “Hit somebody, boy! Hit ‘em!”
Stevie sat down. Sophie wore a tutu every day since her mother left. The stains were starting to be obvious. She climbed on Stevie’s neck like a little happy monkey.
“They’re just warming up,” I said. “You’re not supposed to hit anybody during warmups.”
“Got to make the most out of your opportunity,” Stevie said to me and sucked the rodeo juice through his teeth. “He ain’t making the field anytime soon.” Then he stood and slugged his drink and yelled to the field, “That-a-boy, hit somebody, tonight!”
A few parents turned and stared. Nephew Billy looked like a kid trying on his dad’s suit there on the forty doing a runner’s lunge. Even through his helmet, we could see he was embarrassed, giving his dad a don’t-make-me-look dumb pleading gaze. Stevie sat down and waved his hand toward the field.
“He’s a good kid,” I said.
“Too small to get in the game,” he said. “Probably for the best, they’d kill him out there. But I grew four inches when I was a sophomore. Maybe next year will be his time, eh?”
“He’ll grow,” I said. And nephew Billy tripped on his untied cleats running to the sidelines.
I laughed and bumped a shoulder into Bella curled up beside me. She didn’t even look up from her shoelaces. Lost somewhere unseen.
I took another swig of the rodeo juice. This one for real, and I realized I needed to stop right there if I was going to drive the girls home. I set the cup between my feet. Bella’s laces were untied too.
Down the row of bleachers, a gaggle of teenage girls. None of them as pretty as Bella. They snickered and sneered and passed a vape pen around, trying to be sneaky, but it was obvious to anyone who cared to watch them. They caught me staring, and I flipped back to the field where nephew Billy now sat on the bench, unsure if he should join the team’s pregame huddle at the fifty. Stevie shooing him from up here, Billy never turning back.
The girls laughed, and one pointed this way. Bella shot up a shy hand, like a little salute almost. They laughed harder, and a few of them copied her gesture. Bella sunk more into herself.
“You know them?” I asked. Eyes to the coin toss.
“They’re nobody,” she said.
Bella didn’t say a thing on the ride home.
I got that first call at work. I’m a glazier. Been at Walker Glass thirteen years now. I was on my way to a house call, some rich couple with no kids wanted a dog door on the north side of town. I’d been out there three times already.
“Dad,” her voice so low through the phone, I took the call out the shop’s back door. The morning sun over Mount Blanca blinding.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve been bit. They say I need to go to the hospital.”
“Something bit you?” The noise of the shop through the open garage door. I pressed the cordless firm against my ear and plugged the other with my finger. “Did you say bit?”
“A dog bite.”
She sounded so embarrassed. Like it was her fault. Like somebody was judging her there in the room.
“At school?” I asked. “A dog at school bit you?”
“The Vegas’ dog,” she said. “Out at the bus stop.”
I have a temper. I know that. Heather knew that. I try to hide it from the girls the best I can, but when it comes, it comes. There is little I can do. I drove the company truck with two panels for the Boys and Girls Club project affixed to the rack in the back. You’re not supposed to do more than forty-five with panels that big. I hit seventy on the 5 North. Gravel spitting. A rooster tail of dust running from Walker’s place to the high school.
When I got there, Bella was all right, sitting in the nurse’s station with a bandage wrapped around her calf. That same sad-eyed stare from the bleachers sketched on her face. She looked so much like her mother.
“You okay, kid?” I said, crouched in a catcher’s stance. She wasn’t acting herself. I thought it was the nurse and the resource officer in the room, so I nodded for them to leave. They stepped out. “Bella, what happened?” I brushed her hair behind her ear.
“I had my headphones on,” she said, slumped on the exam table. That roll of paper crunched beneath her as she fussed with the bandage. “I didn’t hear it coming. When I got to the corner, it was already there. I thought it was just scared. Its head was down, and it was backing up. But it was growling. I tried to yell at it to leave, and then I saw the bus coming. I picked up some gravel off the road and threw it, but that just made the dog mean. It came at me, and I ran toward the bus. It bit me on the leg, then booked it the other way.”
“Are you hurt?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Can we go home?”
She was looking down at my boots. “Yeah, let me—” I stood and searched my pockets for the company phone. I’d forgotten it. The dog door people expected me an hour ago. “You gonna be all right? I have to make a stop first.”
I signed her out for the day at the school’s security office, two down from the principal’s. Bella stood awkward by the doorway, part in the hall as the period bell rang and part in the office. I noticed —I should have noticed earlier —that she was wearing the same outfit she slept in at school. Oversized gray sweats, one leg rolled to her knee where the dog got her, a tank, and one of my old flannels left unbuttoned. Oversized headphones draped around her neck. Bella was an artist. I figured it was her look. But seeing her, there at the school, I saw things weren’t right. I finished signing her out and walked down the hall full of passing students.
Bella paced behind me a good ways back. Fine, I thought. Teenagers. I hated high school too.
That’s when I saw them again. The girls from the bleachers. One—a blonde—leaned up against a locker, smacking gum. The others around her like parishioners drawn to an idol. They stared through me, to Bella. I took another few steps and tried to turn my head slightly to see if she was still behind me. Then I stopped in a river of passing kids. There was Bella sulking, head down through the halls. The girls snapped to her. The blonde one said something to the group, and they all laughed. A sick, pathetic laughter. And when Bella passed them, the blonde one said, “Dirty bitch. I see why your mom left.”
I was at them before I realized I was at them.
I heard Bella first. She was begging for me to stop. Apologizing. Over and over. To them. She’s apologizing to them.
I stumbled back. Blood on my shirt, my company shirt. And then I was hit from behind. Face pressed against the cold scuffed linoleum. It smelled like the glue we use on auto glass. A knee on my neck. I saw the blonde girl. She was crying. Her head in her hands. A bloody nose. I spat and grunted, and they took me away.
I once spent two nights in jail. It should have only been a few hours, but it took that long for Heather to sober up, pick up the phone, and bring one hundred in cash to the kiosk. I almost divorced her right there in the sally-port. I probably should have.
This time, they booked me on felony possession of a weapon on school grounds—I had a glazier’s knife in my back pocket—and felony assault of an at-risk youth. Through the fog of anger, I remembered catching her in the face with an elbow. I didn’t mean to. I meant to tell her what I thought of her. I never meant to do a lot of things. Bella begged me to stop, to keep moving. All the girls laughing. I turned to Bella, and I caught the blonde one with an elbow. Now, I waited for my phone call. Stevie has enough to bond me in cash from his settlement check. It would be a lot more than a hundred. The guard said twenty-five grand. But it could be more after they call the district attorney. At least you get it back when the case closes. I won’t miss a court date. I’m not that kind of person.
I am the type to drink too much. That’s why they booked me the last time. Heather was hammered, got into some blow in the bathroom. Weekends Tavern. A sad little place across from the emergency room. She’d bummed a smoke off the bouncer. Her hand brushing his as she pulled one from his pack. He lit it for her. Her skinny body canting toward his in the cold night. She likes getting attention when she’s hammered. I watched this from the bar through frosted glass painted with turkeys, for Thanksgiving, I guessed. I threw down another shot and left out the back patio, started the truck, and headed home. They got me on the 12 South. Red and blues flashing just a few houses down from our driveway. I guess they were out there because my neighbor had lit a burn pile, and somebody called it in. They handcuffed me and everything. Took me in. I refused all their bullshit tests. Now, I sat in the same room fifteen years later. I swore the same scratches were etched on the wall. The same crazy people holed up in the segregation units. The same young jail deputies. I mean they were different ones. But they all looked the same. At least Stevie would bond me out. At least I wouldn’t have to wait so long.
I bonded before shift change. Stevie was there when the sally-port rolled open. He stood outside his idling truck—a new GMC with a great flat grill almost as tall as he is. Stevie smiled. The sky roiling.
“Get in, champ,” he said.
I pulled my cell phone and wallet, eight bucks and change, from a clear plastic bag and tossed the bag in the parking lot. It blew in the wind and caught in some chain link. It smelled like mud out there, like it just rained. It never rains here.
“I hear that girl went four rounds with Tyson on Netflix,” Stevie smirked. “Surprised you made it out of there alive.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said and smacked him in the balls with the back of my hand and climbed in shotgun. He joined me and slammed his door shut. Willie’s Roadhouse on the radio so low you could hardly hear it.
When Stevie backed out of the lot, he said, “Dude, that hurt. You are a killer.”
We grabbed KFC for the girls on the way home. Nephew Billy at his mom’s house. Stevie went on and on about this probation officer he met on Tinder. He drove with a knee down the 12 South while trying to swipe through her profile. My mind was elsewhere. The sun went down a while ago. I needed a shower. My skin smelled like the jail. A smell that didn’t really ever come out. I took the bait and gawked at some of the probation officer’s photos.
The dog.
It had to be the dog. A mangy, big angry-looking thing whose eyes lit up green in the truck’s headlights. We were a few houses down from mine. Just past Vegas’ place. Almost to Bella’s bus stop.
“Stop here,” I said, and set the plastic bags of KFC onto the floor behind my seat.
Stevie gunned it faster. Reflexively. Maybe he was trying to protect me from my darker self. I whacked his arm. “Stevie, stop the fucking truck.”
Stevie pulled over, bouncing along the cracked shoulder and weeds. He threw on his flashers. It was getting pretty dark out there. Stevie told me not to get out of the truck, like he already knew what I was thinking. I didn’t care. When I stepped out of the cab, the wind picked up. The stars turning on for the night. Mount Blanca in the early evening was just another blob of space devoid of anything. But it was there. Somewhere.
Just like that dog. The Vegas’ dog.
“Gordon, get back in the truck,” Stevie told me, leaning toward the open passenger door. “Come on. No. Get back.”
I ignored him and made my way through knee-high weeds and prickers just off the highway. Nobody coming or going. Stevie got out of the truck and joined me there by the Vegas’ ranch fencing. Yellow lights flashing. He was trying to get me to go home. I put an index finger to my lips.
“Did you hear that?” I asked. Something growled out by the Vegas’ center pivot.
Bella’s bus stop up at the next intersection.
“Come on,” I said, pushing through the rough weeds. I removed my Carhartt jacket and laid it over the barbed wire’s top line, pushing it down so Stevie could climb over. He shook his head no.
“It’s out there,” I said. “Come on.”
Stevie looked to the idling truck, then back to me.
“I’m getting that dog whether you come or not,” I said.
“Fine, but you need something if it comes after you,” he said, and Stevie opened the tailgate. Illuminated by red brake lights and punctuated by the yellow flashers, Stevie pulled his kid’s thirty-two-inch aluminum bat. With the bat in his hand, Stevie finally looked to be enjoying himself and handed it to me as if he were a squire bestowing Excalibur. I laughed. Our Camelot the 12 South. Bella, our disgraced princess. And that dog. That fucking dog. It barked. Stevie noticed it too. I used the bat to lower the barbed wire to waist level. He stepped over, and I joined him.
The Vegas’ place was down a little ways from us. Its only light cast from the kitchen, the rest of the house dark and silent. We walked through the ruts made by the center pivot’s oversized rubber tires. Stevie fell in behind me. Bat in my hand. The wind bit cold. My ears ached out there. It barked louder as we made our way into the dark.
We reached the hanging sprinklers swaying in the night. Orion high on the horizon and hunting the dog star. Stevie asked if I heard anything. I shook my head no. I blinked, and the dog in the sky disappeared.
Flexing my grip around the bat, I spun and searched the field for the dog. What I’d do if I found it, I couldn’t say.
Then, a noise. Paws through dirt. Panting. Something coming this way.
I wasn’t sure.
I flipped around and called out, “Come on, mutt. You out there?”
We stood in the cold and waited. But I heard only wind.
Stevie spun back toward the Vegas’ house, his hands flayed off his sides. He was unarmed. Stevie stood in a stoop, fists like hammers, as if that might help. Like this dog wouldn’t rip him to pieces.
I cocked the bat and Stevie spooked.
I reared the bat, swinging blind at the night and catching wind.
It sounded like a bear, slobbering and grunting and moving at us. A dark flash in the night. Green eyes. I swung again, chopping and catching dirt. The dog was huge. Teeth. Eyes. Fur. Head down in a full sprint at Stevie. I lifted the bat and swung hard and lunged, catching my boots in the pivot rut. I fell forward, face to rock and sand and cut alfalfa. Stevie leapt to the hanging sprinkler head, lifting his feet off the ground, swinging back and forth and then settling to stillness.
The dog came skittering and chugging my way. I covered my head. It dove across the rut and kept going on and into the night towards the Vegas’ house.
Stevie lowered himself, swearing at my name. I used the bat to get back upright, tried to clean my face.
Stevie said, “You swing like a girl.”
We walked back to the truck.
I pick at that night from Weekends Tavern like a scab. Sometimes I try to push Heather from my mind, repeating, she’s gone, over and over. She’s gone. Other times, I can’t help myself. I let it crawl around my skull. Let it take over. I imagine all the ways she hurt me. Ways I never even knew at the time. Inventing her motivations. Inventing what she did with the bouncer. I know I shouldn’t. But I pick. I can’t help it.
Back at the house, Bella and Sophie sat on the floor in front of the TV. They were watching Love Is Blind Denver. Bella was teaching Sophie who to root for, who to hate on. How to be a girl. Bella braided Sophie’s hair. They didn’t even turn to us as we set the KFC on the kitchen counter. They both looked happy. They both seemed fine.
Stevie and I ate standing up. The girls didn’t ask about the mud on my face or Stevie’s ripped jacket. They ate in front of the TV. I told you I pick at that night from Weekends but that’s not entirely true. A scab comes off eventually. This thing’s more like an abscessed tooth. Something rotting inside. Something I have no control over. Stevie went on about the probation officer—Jenny was her name. Sophie caught on.
“Uncle Stevie, who’s Jenny?” she said, her eyes trained on the TV girls.
I picture Heather leaving the bar in split screen as I hurtle down the 12 South, too drunk to drive. She’s flirting and laughing and getting into his truck, leaning over as he drives through town. A hand on his leg. She turns the radio on. He says she’s crazy. She says he has no idea. I get arrested at Bella’s bus stop. I can see our driveway. Our floodlight sputters like it did back then. They get to his place. Dom. I see him around town. Now he works at the recycling plant. Stacks the cardboard with a forklift. He smiles when he sees me. I don’t think he knows Heather and I were together. I keep seeing it. Heather stumbling out of Dom’s truck, a hand in his back pocket, and then they disappear inside. This was sometime before Bella was born. I kept seeing it, although I didn’t want to, as Stevie went on and on.
The next morning. I was late for work. I was always late. Bella lounged languid on the couch. I prodded her to get dressed.
“I am dressed,” she said.
I made them both sack lunches. Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat. I used the peanut butter smeared knife to make my point. “Don’t you want to wear something you didn’t sleep in?” I said.
Bella turned on the Bluetooth speaker. Too loud. I was going into overload. Slapping the sandwiches in a little plastic bag, then into that brown paper everybody remembers, and then some single-serve Lays. Sophie wandered out in her tutu again.
“Sophia, do you want to wear something different today?”
She plopped on the living room floor.
“No.”
I looked out the kitchen window, towards the Vegas’ place. The sky was a wispy pastel blue, amber light rising. There was no dog. Stevie left the bat by the front door. Bella wandered into the kitchen barefoot. Happy. Black hair in a messy bun. She was in my flannel again, opened the fridge, drank orange juice from the carton, put it back, and started telling me all about some concept album she was listening to. I guess that’s what was playing. Crowding out my thoughts. Making us all late. I looked to the center pivot out there in the rutted field of dirt, then back to Bella, who seemed to care more about this band than I had about anything in my entire life, and I thought about how much I loved her.
“You’re going to be late,” I said. “Take this bat with you to the bus stop.”
“I’m never going back,” she told me.
Sophie, on the floor with Legos, “Yeah, me neither.”
I called the Gingerbread House and said Sophie would stay home, called the school to ask about Bella transferring to online for a while. The lady who answered the phone said I had a protection order against the school and they’d only speak to Heather. I forgot to call the dog door couple. The shop called and chewed me out. “I’m sorry,” I said, and told them the kids were sick. That worked, and I made the girls help pack the truck with our recycling.
We made the plant just before ten. It’s on the Southside of town, surrounded by places Heather might be. If she’s still here at all. Unsorted cardboard and cans of Diet Coke and milk jugs and everything else stuffed in the back of the pickup. We lost some to the wind as we shot down the 12 South. Bella, Sophie, and me. All was good. Out beyond the farms, little bands of cottonwoods in the middle distance. As we rode by Vegas’ place, I searched for the dog. It wasn’t there.
Sophie liked to carry the plastic milk jugs over her head like they weighed one thousand pounds, and she was the strongest girl on earth. Who’s to say? But when she got to the dumpster, she whined until Bella gave her a boost, and then she tossed it in. They repeated this process one by one as if once they finished, I’d make them go back to school. This would take a while. I stood in the back of the truck bed, throwing cardboard into the shed when I saw him. Dom. He was in his city vest and hopped on a forklift, and it beeped as he backed up and then grabbed garbled stacks of recycling and disappeared into the packing plant. I tossed two and three boxes at a time. It was warm and I started to sweat. A dog barked from the neighborhood. Somewhere on Alamosa’s Southside. The girls had only moved three milk jugs. Maybe forty more to go. I sat on the tailgate and watched them. Bella laughing.
We drove to Sonic after winding through the neighborhood where I thought Heather might be. I imagined her crawling out of a trap house, feet dragging behind her, like a zombie. I feared she’d come for the girls. I blew through a stop sign and sped up toward State Street. Bella looked up from her phone and questioned my driving with an annoyed flick of her eyebrow. Her mother could do that too. I slowed down and made our way down State. We parked by the Rio Grande and ate burgers and drank milkshakes, and Bella tried explaining the band she’d been listening to to Sophie. She didn’t get it either.
I had a meeting with a public defender just after lunch. I gave Bella a twenty and asked if she’d take her sister to the Boys and Girls arcade on State. I watched them walk down the sidewalk, Bella holding her sister’s hand as they passed the bookstore’s plate glass window. She stopped and stared at something in the store and then kept on. Once they crossed the intersection, I met the lawyer. She was younger than I imagined. Sixteen years prison. That’s all I could remember. Sixteen years. I’m not going away for sixteen years. Do whatever you need to do, but that’s not possible. I’ll do anything else. But I’m not going to prison. The young lawyer seemed to understand, and that was that. Not much else to do. None of the police reports were ready. I’d see her again next month.
You ever see Orion’s Belt in the winter sky? I’m terrible at constellations, but that one’s obvious. When it climbs high, winter is coming. But when it falls just above the horizon, spring will be here soon. No matter how dark and cold the Valley feels, it’s coming. We learn about it at the Sand Dunes—Heather and me—when she’s pregnant with Bella. Some ranger crammed in a light brown uniform walks us out on the dunes at night. We normally don’t do things like this. But for some reason, we’re here. I can’t remember why. “The father’s fire,” the ranger says, pointing to Orion’s Belt slung low against the southern sky, “is always burning. Back when people traveled the Valley through cold nights and deep snow, and their fires burned low, embers scattered to the wind, Orion still burned. Even when their own fires died, pushed through darkness across the Valley floor, the Father’s Fire still burned.”
I like that. I could be that. I always remember that story.
Bella refused to go to school that whole week. I left her at home alone. I didn’t know what else to do. The guys at the shop and I were putting in a new windshield, special-ordered for an F-250 with all the bells and whistles. One of the new ones with all the sensors. It was a pain in the ass, you ask me, but I drove an ’03 Chevy, so what do I know. We got the glass on the lift, the shop’s back garage door open in the October sun, Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels” on the radio.
“Nope, we don’t want to be you,” the guy who makes everyone call him Chief said after every verse. He says he’s part Ute. Could be.
Chief moved the glass into place.
The other men sang along out of tune. Their voices breaking.
Chief said, “He’s quite the panocha, huh?”
I was laying a bead of urethane when Walker came out of his office. I didn’t look back, concentrating on lining up the adhesive, but I heard him shuffling into the shop despite the guys’ Petty rendition.
“Gordon, phone,” he said.
I was on a step stool, leaned over the truck’s open cab. The owner had candy wrappers and fast-food trash shoved in the door wells and the cup holders, farm dirt on the floorboards. Somebody was in there a lot. I finished the top line of adhesive and wiped an excessive dollop clean.
“Take a message,” I said, and started in on the driver’s side.
“It’s your kid,” Walker said. “She’s crying.”
I came off the step stool fast, leaving a run of urethane dripping onto the white truck frame. The guys groaned and watched me leave. Walker instructed Chief to finish the adhesive, and I’m in the office.
“Bella, what’s wrong?”
“Mom’s here.”
I punched the Chevy faster and cut the turn onto the 12 South through the Abbey’s dormant rose bushes and flew towards home, gaining speed, all the while terrified. But if I’m honest, there was a part of me that hoped she was okay. Maybe she was better. Maybe she came home. Maybe she’d be Mom again. Then I drove mad. Fuck her. I pulled into our gravel lot and skidded a cloud, threw it in Park and got out of the truck. I called for Bella.
Heather’s there. She’s there in the kitchen.
I gripped the front door frame. Her hair first, from behind. She’s home. I see Bella eating pancakes at three years old, bluelillies she cries, bluelillies, and I see when we first bring Sophie home in that tiny little car seat and the time we finish the downstairs bathroom ourselves and the toilet leaks onto the floorboards and I see Dom in his yellow vest down at the recycling plant, those cold steel bars closing in, and I see the dog at the bus stop, and tubes for tying off a vein and burnt foil and little bags stamped with stars and missing money and missing nights and I could, I could. I couldn’t. I don’t do anything. But I stare.
Heather’s rifling through kitchen drawers as if she’s a bear up by Cat Creek in late fall and some hunter had left food in his fifth wheel. She clangs forks and knives and tosses the one drawer full of receipts and old batteries and whatever else, and then she’s down below the sink pulling out reusable grocery bags. She mutters to herself. I almost ask her what she’s doing, but nothing comes out when I notice Bella standing there. She’s in front of the TV. It’s still playing some reality dating show with the volume muted. Bella isn’t crying exactly. No, she’s alert and concerned. Eyes to her mother.
“Heather,” I say and step to her. “What are you doing here? Heather, stop.”
I come up behind her, and she spooks. She turns from a drawer where we keep the pots and pans and tops that never seem to fit any of them. She’s making a racket, clanging and banging, then freezes. An immediate silence screams. She looks up at me. I’m not even there.
She goes right back to it.
“Heather, please,” I say. “What do you need? You’re scaring Bella.”
“Mommy, stop,” Bella says. She’s crying now.
I drop to one knee, get hold of Heather’s wrist, and she pulls away. I wrench harder and stand. She comes with me, and her feet give out. She slips, but I hold her up. I start dragging her to the front door and she looks back at Bella, who’s stopped crying and takes a few steps our way.
I tell Heather she has to go. She straightens up and moves for the open door but she turns back. Her eyes a deep black. The starless void Mt. Blanca gathers from the sky at dawn. She looks at Bella.
“It’s here,” Heather says. “It’s here somewhere.”
It’s quiet again. I tell Bella how sorry I am, like it’s my fault. It is my fault. It’s our fault, her mother and me. It’s nobody’s fault. It doesn’t matter now, and I hold her and repeat I’m sorry. And Bella says it’s okay.
We hear a dog bark.
I move to the front door. It’s got three-quarter tempered glass.
Heather is running through the field. The dog closing in.
That next morning, I don’t even wake up the girls. I text Walker and say I need the day, something about not feeling well. He’d understand. When I come out of my room, Bella and Sophie are eating cereal and watching Love is Blind. I join them on a kitchen stool and pour myself a bowl. I watch for a while. Bella is wearing the same gray sweats, my old flannel, big headphones around her neck. I ask her where she’s going. Mouth full, milk spilling from my lips.
“School,” she says. She rolls her eyes like her mother. Sophie jumps from the couch to a pile of pillows on the floor.
Bella takes the bat by the front door and leaves. I set the bowl on the counter and watch.
The bat dragging behind her as she makes her way to the bus stop.
Jimy Valenti is a writer based in Colorado's San Luis Valley. For the past ten years, he's also represented the Valley's indigent criminal defendants as a public defender. Jimy graduated from both CU-Boulder's journalism and law schools, while completing the Denver-based Lighthouse Writers Workshop's Book Project in 2022 under the mentorship of crime writer Benjamin Whitmer. As a defense attorney in the San Luis Valley, Jimy has stood witness to every horrific act one human being can inflict on another, but he's seen beauty there, too. His work is a dispatch from the Valley floor, celebrating its people and its wide, empty skies.
Writing fiction is hard work. If you enjoyed “Dog Bite,” let Jimy know by hitting the heart button. Leave a comment. If you’re not already a subscriber to PEDAL STEEL, come on in. The water’s fine.
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Well done, Jimy! You're a hell of a writer.
"Rodeo juice" Oh how I wish I'd written that. Huge kudos, great story.