The Speckled Beauty by Rick Bragg

Author:Rick Bragg [Bragg, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

{ Nine }

Tumbling, Tumbling Down

A boy should have had this dog, a tireless, terrible, indestructible boy. Every bang of the screen door would have been the start of a great race. Think of the mud puddles, alone. Think of the adventures. The days would flash by, time would catch fire.

* * *

•

I ran with all the grace and speed of a potbelly stove. Over the years I had broken both legs twice and ruined one knee, and there I was, running in slow motion and leaping, sometimes, whole inches off the ground.

The dog didn’t care. The dog was thrilled. Finally, something to herd that did not try to kick his skull in. Every night, after supper, we played in the yard.

“That dog’ll trip you,” Sam warned.

“Nah,” I said.

It must have looked pitiful, from a distance. But it made me, for at least a little while, less of a miserable, crabby old grouch. All I had to do was clap my hands or talk to him in that goofy, enthusiastic way that people do, and he was bouncing, the way dogs do. I’m not saying it was anything that has not happened on this planet a billion or so times before; I am only saying it made me laugh out loud, again, a little bit, and the dog woofed and growled and hunkered down and then leapt like that asphalt driveway was a trampoline.

“Who’s a goooooooood boy? Who’s a good Speckle?”

He would whirl, around and around, answering the best he could.

I AM!

I AM!

I AM!

It made me think of one of my favorite dog books, My Dog Skip, by the great Mississippi writer Willie Morris. It was just a thin little book about a boy and his dog, but the thing that made it so good was that Willie, a lifetime later, had never lost the wonder of it. It had a boy’s joy, and a dog’s, too. It had to do with that look in his eye when he was around baseball…

It was worth all the trouble he caused, as his first summer here passed into his first fall, to see a living thing that happy. I would take off running in one direction, and he would cut me off in a flash, and try to herd me another way. I would rough him up, pulling at his fur and ears, and push him one way as I stumbled off in another. He was faster and more nimble, but I had two good eyes.

I would spin him around and come up on his blind side.

“Here I am,” and he would whirl.

But I’d cross over to the blind side, again.

“No, wait. Here I am.”

It was probably a little mean, but it was the only edge I had. But he had formed an idea in his head of where he wanted me to be, and he was going to push and nudge me there, cut me off when I tried to stray, and even nip at my heels, like he did the mule’s, if I wasn’t moving fast enough to suit him.

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