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Macho by T.K. Kenyon It was the twilight of the year, when the children played with Christmas toys, and dinner was ham leftovers and madeovers, when no work got done at the office because New Year's vacation was in a few days and because someone always brought a TV into the office for the college bowl games, and everyone settled down to a good night's sleep during the cool, desert winter dark, someone cut Bandit's throat. Bandit was an Australian shepherd who had no sheep to tend because we lived on the west side of Phoenix. He herded everything else: toddlers, pigeons, guests. The cats hissed and bit when he tried to herd them. He didn't bark often, so it probably wasn't a neighbor enraged at being kept awake. I don't remember him barking that night. The kids, Juan, Miguel, and Lita, weren't even in junior high yet, so it probably wasn't some bizarre teenage revenge thing. Bandit lay in a puddle of his sticky, thick blood on the flagstone patio. I walked through the back yard that day because I'd parked the truck around the side when I'd loaded a telemetry unit into it the night before. Otherwise, the kids would probably have found him. His gray eye stared up at nothing, and his head was bent back at an impossible angle. Whoever had done it had severed most of the tendons in his neck, and the muscle and sinew gaped open. Pinpoint black ants, which don't die off in the desert winter, milled around the periphery of the blood. When I could breathe again, I went inside and woke Linda -- she said sleepily, "Juan, your keys are on top of the oven," -- and I told her not to wake the kids, but if they did wake up she should keep them in the front of the house, because someone had killed Bandit. I changed into running pants and a sweatshirt and buried him on the side of the house near Kibby, the Siamese cat hit by a car two years before, and the two hamsters. It's not strictly legal to bury animals -- the laws say that they have to be cremated -- but I didn't like the idea of burning Bandit up or the thought of the kids seeing him before that. He was a noble dog. He wouldn't want the kids to be even more upset. I wrapped Bandit in his brown-flowered blanket and carried him over to the side before I started to dig. His body was stiff and cool, like a stuffed statue. Linda came outside once while I was digging the hole in the sandy clay. I waved her away. Later, she said I sighed terribly with every shovel and it broke her heart because she knew how I loved that dog. I said I would be all right. When I was done at eight-thirty and I'd replaced the dull-bladed Saint Augustine grass on the small mound, I went inside, showered, and threw away those clothes because if I wore them again I'd never stop burying him. After a moment, I threw away the underwear, too. I didn't want it in with the sixteen other identical pairs of white briefs. I'd wonder all the time if I was wearing them. I arrived at work at ten, and the guys in the remediation division were in Jay's office drinking coffee and watching the Wildcats beat the Hawkeyes, and they yelled "Juan!" when they saw me. On the table in the back, the black coffeepot gurgled and brewed, and the white one was half empty. Those five guys already had drunk a pot and half. Wired. A mostly full bottle of Irish whisky and a can of whipped cream lay beside the coffee pot, and another fifth of whisky and two whip cans were in the trash. Wired and drunk. Elizabeth was in her office, listening to the radio and working harder. She waved. I smiled. The cup of coffee on her desk was topped with whipped cream. I poured myself a cup of coffee with a strong shot of whisky and added a head of cream, calories and fat grams and triglycerides and AA be damned, and I wheeled my chair into Jay's office to watch the game. I cheered at the right times, but mostly I watched the cream melt and run into the spiked coffee. At half-time, Carlos slapped my shoulder and asked, "Hey, Juan, what up?" Carlos had been born in East L.A. and considered himself more Hispanic than I was. I shrugged. "Some son of a bitch killed my dog." "No! How, man?" "Slit his throat." I poked a lump of cream down into the coffee and it disintegrated. Jay said, "My God. Why?" "Damned if I know." "You seen anyone?" Carlos asked. "No." "Do you think you know who did it?" Bill asked. "No." "Are the kids okay?" Jay asked. "They were asleep. I buried him in the yard. We just told them he died." "That's vicious, man. Someone kill your dog. Bandit a cool dog," Carlos said. The other guys nodded. "You very macho, though. Feo, fuerte, y formal." Ugly, strong, and serious. I tried not to imagine it. Bandit must have been frightened and in pain. He was certainly alone. When I had hosed the blood off the patio, there were paw scrapes where he had tried to crawl. Jay scooted his chair around in front of me, leaned over, and rested his arms on his knees. "Juan," he said, "Who did it?" "I don't know," I said. "Who was it?" "Who knows?" "Come on. You know." I swirled my coffee and drank down the rest. "There are some high school kids, bad seeds, in the neighborhood. Beckett and Remo. Both have been in Juvie for violent things. Beckett beat up a girl. Remo was in a gang fight. They go to that alternative high school over on Indian School Road because they've been kicked out of everywhere else. Beckett stole my golf clubs last year. If it was someone local, I'd put my money on those two." "Could it have been anyone else?" Jay asked. I shrugged. "Some wandering lunatic." "Kill your dog?" Carlos said. "That personal. Like a horsehead in your bed." Bill brought me a new
cup of coffee. "Assholes," he said sadly. "Do you think they did it?" Jay asked. I probably had two shots in me by that point. I was looking for some sense to it, I think, because any kind of terrible rationale, even two sadistic teenagers murdering a dog, wasn't as terrible as a wandering stranger or some other unknowable. Beckett and Remo made sense. "Yeah." "Bastards," Carlos said. "Someone should teach them a lesson." "Police won't do anything," Jay said. "And I buried the evidence," I said. "Police never do anything," Bill said. "Sons of bitches." "Bastards." "Chingasos." "They'd just get off." "Scot-free." "And then they'll do worse." "Someone should do something." More Irish coffee. "Bastards." "Really psycho killers start off killing animals." "Like that guy in Iowa that killed all those cats in the shelter with a bat and then murdered that little boy a year later." No coffee. Just whisky. "And Jeffrey Dahmer." "And Ted Bundy." "All those sickos." "Then they kill kids." Another whisky bottle from Bill's file cabinet. "Those bastards are evil." "Psycho." "Animals." "Vermin." "Let's go." Most of the guys in the remediation division are ex-construction workers. Jay and I are engineers. All of us go alone to remote sites in the desert and to industrial zones down near the Deuce in South Phoenix. So all of us carry guns. We didn't bother with our coats. Phoenix in December is a golf destination for rich Easterners. We did grab our remediation bags as we walked out, so we had long wrenches and extra pipe and our guns, and we went to go find Beckett and Remo. I was the least drunk. A few years ago, six shots was a warm up for the real drinking. I drove around the periphery of the neighborhood, past where the nice, retired folk kept their yards up, into the part that was going downhill that we clucked about at our block watch meeting, out by where we'd gotten a crack house condemned for plumbing code violations. Beckett and Remo were sitting in the alley behind the 7-11 eating white bread. When we got out of Jay's van, stepped down to the ground, and walked over to them, we could smell the Lysol sprayed on the bread. "You look sleepy," Bill said. "Late night?" "You better not be talking to me," Beckett said. "Kick your ass." "Shut up," I said. "Just answer." Beckett looked up at me. His eyes squinted though his pupils were pinpoints. "You don't look so good, asshole. Something wrong?" He dropped his bread and crouched to stand up. I ran two steps and soccer-kicked Beckett in the face. The blow shuddered through my work boots, steel toe and steel shank. Beckett's head snapped back, and his turned-around Bulls baseball cap flew off and hit the brick wall behind him, and Remo stood and slammed into Jay. Carlos kicked Beckett hard in the stomach again and again. I hit Remo hard in his temple, and I leaned my whole body into the punch like when I was fighting my way through high school, when the white boys said something to me. Remo stumbled to the side, and Jay hit him in the face. When I connected with Remo the second time, I felt his nose give, and blood poured out. Later, I figured that he must have had a brain hemorrhage, probably from cocaine-rotten sinuses. The remediation guys
came in kicking. We didn't need our guns, not five big, drunk
men beating up two stoned high school kids. On the way back to the office, Jay said, "They jumped us," and we all nodded. A few hours later,
after drinking more Irish coffee at the office and silently watching
the football games, we went home from work. If Linda smelled the
whisky, she didn't say anything. Their deaths did not make the local news, but such goings-on over on the West side usually don't. If two stoned teenagers had been murdered in hoity-toity Scotsdale, the cops would have logged a quarter of a million dollars in overtime. In hoi-polloi West Phoenix, the cops and the coroner bagged and tagged them, just another unsolved murder, and buried the evidence. At the neighborhood block watch a couple of weeks later, a cop mentioned their deaths and said it indicated that a new gang was moving into our area. We staged a rally because the police believed that a clique of adults holding signs would deter adolescent toughs, and I noticed that my sign was nailed to a stout piece of wood, one that I could have swung in a great arc above my head and smashed someone hard enough to knock him senseless. When we got home, I threw the sign into the alley trashcan. When it landed in the trashcan, everything inside shifted, collapsed, and settled. 
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