Becky watched her father for the usual signs of anger as he ducked back into the still running 1976 Maverick. She’d know he knew if the vein above his right temple was jumping around like it wanted to come out.
It was still. Good.
He was whistling a little tune through his teeth, and he winked at her as he slid onto the fake leather seat.
She breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t seen her peeking over the door frame. He didn’t know she’d seen what he did.
She refused to smile for him when he lead-footed the accelerator and spun the car into her favorite doughnut move to point away from the river. He didn’t notice.
She didn’t speak as they turned off the dirt and gravel river road onto the paved highway. Her brain was a jumble of thoughts, none of them anything she could figure out how to say. He didn’t notice that either. He turned the radio up and sang loudly off-key with George Jones, “He stopped loving her today.”
“Ready to go home and watch Georgia whoop Ole Miss, Beck?” he asked when George shifted to talking about the old man’s funeral.
He was looking at her now, so she nodded once and turned toward the window to sort out her thoughts.
They usually spent fall Saturday afternoons together, watching SEC football, him guzzling Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and grousing about the officiating to her, her drinking Grape Nehi and reveling in the attention. Her mother herded Becky’s two sisters to trudge behind her at the Piggly Wiggly on Saturdays, but she had long since given up on trying to force Becky to act like a girl. She contented herself nowadays with making Becky shuck her usual overalls for a dress on Sundays. They had reached an uneasy truce, where Becky wore the dress to church without complaint, and her mother pretended not to notice the shorts underneath the dress. Becky had preferred her father’s company for as long as anyone could remember. She went fishing with him and insisted on baiting her own hook. She knew all the penalties and their corresponding yardages in college football. And this summer, she’d finally convinced him to teach her how to use the pop-rivet gun. When they went in the hardware store together, Curtis Milen, the WD-40 smelly old proprietor, winked and asked him if he’d brought his boy with him.
Her father pushed the bill of her Braves cap down and said, “Yep, I reckon she’ll have to carry on the family name.”
She would pretend she needed to look at the cap to straighten it while she waited for the blush of pleasure to fade from her cheeks.
But now, her head and her heart were struggling to reconcile all that with what she’d seen a few minutes ago. She didn’t understand why her father, who she’d always thought of as good and kind, killed those little pups. Confusion was about to drown her from inside. It built on itself until she couldn’t stand it anymore.
FM-95 took a commercial break and she blurted out, “Daddy, why’d you drown them dogs?”
He pounded the steering wheel with a leathery fist. “Dammit, Becky! I told you not to look! That’s five when we get home!”
The same hand extended toward her, stretching all five fingers to their full length like they were anger unfurling.
Becky was shocked. He’d never promised a whipping so quickly before. She must have done something really bad this time. The vein in his temple danced.
She shuddered and looked at the window to consider the coming punishment. She hated whippings, the sobbing indignity of them. She hated the anticipation of them more. They were infrequent, but they usually came when her curiosity got the better of her, and she disobeyed him. He always waited until they were home and out of the public eye, and she always wished he’d just get it over with.
For a few moments, she fidgeted and tried to decide whether her need to know outweighed the risk of more licks. He always went in increments of five, proportionate to the amount of aggravation she’d caused. She decided she could handle five more.
“But Daddy, why’d you kill the dogs?”
Her father sighed and eyed her out of the corner of his eye. He flipped the signal on and turned onto the rutted clay of Gopher Tortoise Road.
“You’re not gonna understand, child.”
She looked at him expectantly.
“I had to take care of the dogs...” he cleared his throat. “I had to take care of the dogs, ‘cause we can’t have a bunch of girl dogs runnin’ around the house,” he said.
She only hesitated a beat this time, her brow furrowing.
“Why, Daddy? What’s wrong with girl dogs?”
It looked like she was past the point of licks being added; the vein was quiet again, although his jaw was clenching and unclenching. She wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Her father shifted in his seat and looked straight ahead.
“’Cause they don’t do anything but make babies we can’t afford to feed.” He looked at her sideways again. “You wouldn’t want ‘em to take over the house and eat your food, would you?”
He changed the radio station and started in on Hank Williams’ “Family Tradition.”
“We could give ‘em away, couldn’t we?” the girl continued, raising her voice over his singing.
“Nobody takes girl dogs, Becky. They’re too much trouble.”
The girl fumbled with her overall strap and tried to do the math in her head. If Sally had eleven puppies every year, in five years, that would be… . She shook her head in frustration. Those dang multiplication tables. It would be a lot of puppies, anyway.
She fingered a fresh hole in her overall knee and imagined what her mama would say. She could see her now, scrunching up her face, and hollering, “We ain’t made of money, young’un!” It was what she always said when a question of new stuff came up.
Becky knew her mama was right. She’d worn enough of her sisters’ faded hand-me-down church dresses to know money was tight. Still, it didn’t seem right to let Sally keep having babies if they were just going to take them to the river and drown them. She chewed on the inside of her lip and thought about what they could do.
“But Daddy, Tommy Johnson said they could be fixed where they wouldn’t keep having babies.” She leaned toward him and tugged on his sleeve, excited that she might have hit on the solution.
Her daddy took his cap off and rubbed his head.
“What’s fixed, Daddy? Can we get Sally fixed?”
He snapped the radio off and jerked the window down in a series of little cranks, jamming the cap back on his head. “Somethin’ we can’t afford and somethin’ good little girls don’t talk about.” He pushed his side vent window out, and she knew from his tone he was close to shifting back to lick-adding mode.
Becky rolled her window down too and reached up to play with the vent. It was still hot in southern Georgia, and the clay dust rose up from the road as they passed, dragging a red scrim over the pines. Normally, she’d watch it billow and whirl in the car’s wake, but today she was preoccupied. It wasn’t fair. Those dogs didn’t do anything to anybody, they were just born. She felt a familiar heaviness well up in that spot between her chest and stomach and quickly shifted her thoughts to school, their pond, football, anything to head off the tears. But it was too late. They came like the first drops of a summer thunderstorm, big and full and heavy, plopping down on the dusty seat to leave clear spots on the vinyl.
“Well, Jesus Christ, Becky,” her father said. “Aw, honey, it’s okay.”
He reached across the seat to pet her head. She slid over to make herself smaller against the door.
He tried again. “Sally’s still got two puppies at home, you know, and you can play with them. Besides, she’ll make more puppies soon, and you’ll forget all about these.”
But she didn’t hear him. She was remembering her favorite puppy, the spunky little polka-dotted runt, how the crown of her round black head fit perfectly into Becky’s hand. How the sharp little nubs of teeth were just now able to gnaw through the jibbled up pieces of wiener she snuck out of the refrigerator to take to the dogs in the washroom across the yard. She buried her face in her arm on the window sill and cried harder.
Her father flipped the radio back on and waved at her back helplessly.
“Oh for Chrissake, Becky, they’re just dogs.”
When they got home, Becky knew she had to wait for her whipping before she went anywhere. It would be worse it she tried to put it off. She hung around the house a few minutes, droop-faced and tense, scuffing her ragged sneaker toes in the dirt, waiting for her Dad to pull out the paint stir stick he used to dole out punishment for minor offenses.
But her father had apparently forgotten the whipping. She kept an eye peeled through the open living room window until she saw him pop open a beer and plop heavily onto the couch in front of the television. She could just hear Verne Lundquist announcing the starting offense for the Bulldogs, but she didn’t stop to say their names the way she usually did.
Her shoulders dropped, the tension relieved, and she skipped across the yard to the washroom. She wanted to see Sally and watch her wolf down the wiener she’d taken from the fridge that morning. When she creaked open the wooden door, Sally got up from the washroom floor where she lay with her two remaining puppies and waddled toward Becky, wagging her tail.
Becky knelt to hug her, whispering fiercely. “I’m sorry ‘bout your babies, girl. When I get big, I’ll get us both fixed.”
The dog licked Becky’s face, her tongue rough-smoothing the salty remains of earlier tears. The puppies toddled over to Sally and latched onto her overflowing teats.
Becky pulled out the wiener from her pocket and unwrapped it from its paper towel. She squatted on the washroom floor, watching Sally swallow the wiener almost whole, marveling that the whole time she was eating, the puppies’ tiny mouths pulled on her teats.
“I don’t know how you stand that girl,” Becky told her. “It looks like they’re gonna suck you up.”
She watched in silence for a few more minutes. The only sound she could hear was the puppies sucking and smacking. When they were round-bellied full, they burrowed into their mother’s stomach, yawned and stretched, and slept.
Watching them made Becky tired, too. The morning’s events tugged her eyelids downward, as she rubbed Sally’s black and white side, slowly and more slowly. Finally, her hand stopped, and she sank down to lie on Sally’s haunch.
She woke to the sound of her father’s voice.
“Becky, where you at, girl?” he called. “It’s halftime already. Don’t you want to know who’s winnin’?”
Disoriented, Becky raised up and looked around. She realized where she was when she spotted the shiny surface of the washer knob. She lay back down, her face pressed against Sally, one arm flung around the dog’s neck, and pretended to sleep.
She didn’t move when the door opened wide, or when her father picked her up and carried her in the house, or when his beer-streaked breath brushed her cheek in a kiss.