George Higgins - Killing Them Softly

“Now the next thing I got to do,” Russell said, “I got to get that phenobarb into them dogs. ‘This’s kind of tricky,’ he tells me. ‘You got to take the water away from them by five o’clock, because them dogs, after the oil goes through them they’ll drink it all, and then we’ll fuckin’ drown in dogpiss. The trouble is, the last time I did this we give them the phenobarb about five, before we take the water away from them, and we really gave them a lot, because the time before that we didn’t give them enough and they got inna car and they all hadda nice nap and then it’s a fuckin’ madhouse. So the last time we give them too much and they’re all woozy, we get them to the guy, and we didn’t get nothing for them, the dogs’re sick and all the rest of it. I don’t want no more of that shit. I don’t want them dogs raising hell all the way down and I don’t want them bumping into things, we get down there, either. Give the little ones, half a grain. A grain if they’re lively. The big ones a couple grains, and if they’re, if there’s any of them that’re still jumping round, hit ’em again. With the water. Then take the water back. Take some bread and make it in little balls and stick another half a grain in that and give them it around eleven or so, and that oughta do it.’

“I said to him,” Russell said, “I said: ‘Kenny, I thought I was supposed to sleep all day. How’m I gonna sleep, I’m doing all them things?’ And he tells me. ‘Take a little dog dope.’ So I ask him, he’s gettin’ dough offa these dogs, how come I got to do all the work? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I got to do something.’

“He’s worse’n fuckin’ Squirrel for making out off guys,” Russell said. “He shows up, right around midnight, he’s got three more dogs. I’m busting my ass all day, getting dogs ready, Kenny’s out gettin’ more dogs. I said: ‘For Christ sake, Kenny, that’s’-we already sold some of the dogs to this guy down the North End? Poodles. We had three poodles and he give us a buck and a half apiece on them. Which isn’t bad-‘that’s sixteen dogs we got, mine and yours.’ He’s got this Caddy limo. Took the back seat out and he had a lot of old blankets all the way back in there, in the trunk. ‘Can’t put sixteen dogs in there. They’ll kill each other.’

“These dogs, he tells me, ‘These’re little ones.’ He’s got a couple spaniels and a wire-haired. Tit right in, no sweat.’ So, we load them up. My dogs’re all dopey. He takes the front legs, I take back legs. My mother’s looking out of the window. Finally get all them dogs in. Stack them right up. I’m getting in the car, she opens the window. ‘That all of them?’ Yeah. ‘Good. Remember what I said.’ Right, and now I understand the old man a lot better, too. She shuts the window, bang.”

“You’re still better off’n I was,” Frankie said. “My mother, she used to come every week. Every single fuckin’ week, I’d, I used to sit on Sunday, and the first thing I hadda do was, I hadda go to Mass. Fuckin’ guy, every single fuckin’ week he talks about Dismas. Oh for Christ sake. Well, no. Some weeks he talks about beating off. Funny, didn’t have nothing to say about blow jobs and like that. And then, the good meal, you know? The one that was just as shitty as the rest of them, except it was supposed to be good. Seen a turnip? I see another turnip, I throw the fuckin’ thing at somebody. And then my poor old gray-haired mother, her and her fuckin’ coat that’s all beat to shit, comes in looking like somebody that just got hit on the head. And I got to sit through that. ‘I pray for you, Frankie.’ ‘I made a novena for you, Frankie.’ ‘I hope you get parole, Frankie.’ ‘I know in my heart you’re a good boy, Frankie.’ ‘Frankie, you’ve got to change your ways.’ And she’s gonna stay, boy, she’s not comin’ all the way up there, she’s gonna leave in five minutes. No, sir. One week she’s sick. Sandy comes for a change. ‘Anything I can do for you, Frankie?’ You bet your ass there is. Chain Ma the bed, for Christ sake. ‘She don’t mean anything,’ Sandy says. ‘She feels guilty. She told me, she dunno what she didn’t do.’ I told her: ‘She didn’t tell me about assholes like the Doctor, that’s what it is,’ ” Frankie said. “ ‘Tell her, the next kid, teach him to plan a job right, he doesn’t get some fatmouth bastard in there, fuck things up.’ She looks at me. ‘You want me to tell her, you don’t want her coming no more?’ Of course I do. So she does, and the next week Ma comes up, you should’ve seen her. Looked like somebody took her out and kicked the shit out of her. ‘ Frankie ,’ she says, ‘Sandy said, you don’t want your mother coming up here no more.’ And then she starts crying, and there’s guys looking at me, and half of them’re bulls and they’re all gonna tell the parole, ‘He’s mean to his mother, she comes up to see him and he don’t appreciate it.’ Oh, Jesus, it was awful. So, what could I do? I told her, come back, Ma, I was just talking. And she did. Novenas, the stations, the rosary, she’s going down to Mission Church there and everything for me. Christ. ‘I ain’t crippled, Ma,’ I tell her. ‘In your soul you are,’ she says. Jesus. I’m lucky I didn’t get at her through the screen.”

“They don’t know,” Russell said. “None of them know. They just think, you’re in there, you can’t get out. That’s all they know. They don’t know.”

“I wished they did,” Frankie said. “Putting up with them’s something awful. I wished I knew what it was, a guy goes in and they think it isn’t bad enough, they got to make it worse. I go in again, boy, I’m making sure nobody knows. I dunno if I can do time again, but I sure can’t take the visiting. Shit.”

“I’m not going in again,” Russell said. “That’s what I’m not gonna do.”

“You decided, huh?” Frankie said.

“I’m doing everything I can,” Russell said.

“And that’s what’s gonna put you in again,” Frankie said.

“Nah,” Russell said.

“Sure,” Frankie said, “you’re going back for stealing dogs.”

“Not so far,” Russell said, “and never again, either. You know something? The next dog I see, I’m gonna do a wheelie on him, is what I’m gonna do. Dogs, dogs’re stupid. You beat the living shit out of a dog, hit him with the pills and he goes to sleep, he wakes up the next day and he’s staggering around and all, but he’s hungry. All you got to do with a dog, you can do anything you want to a dog, then just wait till he gets hungry and feed him and he thinks you’re fuckin’ God or something. Except that black fucker.”

“Shepherd grab you?” Frankie said.

“That dog,” Russell said, “he’s the only dog I ever saw, remembers. First time he wakes up, sees me, rrrr, way down in his throat. So, I give him another day. Gets hungry enough, he’ll come around. I starved that fucker four days . His bones showed, for Christ sake. Know what I get when I go out? Rrrrr. I thought I was gonna have to give him some more of the stick. But he don’t come after me, see? Which proves it, that black bastard isn’t dumb. He remembers that stick. He’s not gonna tackle me. He’s just gonna make my life as hard’s he possibly can. So, I hadda feed him. I can’t sell hairy bones, for Christ sake.

“Now,” Russell said, “now he’s got me, and he knows it. I try and get him out, he holds back. I practically got to throw him out of the garage. Then he won’t, I can’t get him in. And he growls at me all the time, still. That bastard, all the way to Florida, we’re in this fuckin’ rainstorm in Maryland, they had a barge hit the bridge and we either hadda go around or we use the tunnel. Which everybody else is using. So Kenny say, ‘We’re going around.’ I thought I seen rain when I was with my Uncle. Christ. And them dogs’re all pissing and farting and shitting and everything in there and we can’t leave the windows down, we don’t wanna suffocate, and we also don’t want to drown. It was awful. I thought dogs was an easy way to make money. It’s not dangerous. I was right about that. I was half right. You know what I get for that black fucker, I thought I was probably gonna get twenty million dollars or something? Seventy-five bucks I got for that dog, and I was lucky to get that. The guy we’re selling them to, he just buys them, right? He just, he only takes care of them. One of those guys with no meat on him. He doesn’t talk. We’re there, he’s got this kind of beaten-to-shit old farm down outside Cocoa Beach. We’re there about half an hour, we’re finally breathing again, we been on the road about ten years with them dogs, all of a sudden I notice, his wife does all the talking. ‘This one here looks like he’s been run over,’ she says. She never stops talking and he never starts. ‘He sick or something? We don’t want no sick dogs here, Mister. I can’t let you have more’n twenty dollars for this one.’