A Thin Tether of Domesticity

My new wife adopted a rescue dog that came into my surgery for a simple vaccination. Typically, I try to keep a professional distance, but she fell in love with the shaggy mutt, and I was trying to be a good father to her son, little Nate. She called the dog “Ketch”. What fun it was to make Ketch fetch! Fetch Ketch! Fetch Ketch! It was a big tease, faking throw-ball, making that big dog lope about looking for the ball, and one day my stepson joined in the fun, “Fetch Ketch”, he cried, swinging his arm in that clunky toddler way. Ketch followed the arc of the make-believe ball through the air but suddenly something snapped in that canine mind and the thin tether of domesticity severed when the dog realized it had been fooled by a small boy. 

Every dog is a wolf. Nate, a naked ape, didn’t have a chance.

I am a vet, and normally I am unaffected by blood and suffering, but this was different, my new wife lost her mind, and in that moment, I operated on a primal level of panic.

I wrapped the gore in a plastic shopping bag and rushed Nate to the hospital where the ER doctors stitched up his torn face like a patchwork quilt, but they were unable to re-attach Nate’s mangled arm. If only I’d been a few minutes earlier, if only I’d packed the arm in ice.  I am a veterinarian for God’s sake! I am also a goddamned fool! 

I got back to the house that night, and first thing, I dragged the dog out behind the shed. The dog was innocent, I suppose. It was my new wife that brought the brute into our lives. Pitiful yellow eyes, whimpering remorse, the dog crouched low, and I blew its sorry brains out with my hunting rifle.

Grief swells until it shrouds the entire universe in gray, then it shrivels down to its hard black core and buries itself in your heart, where every other beat is a pulse of anguish. With grief comes anger, blame and remorse. My new wife was a mess.

The wounds healed but Nate’s face was puckered by scar tissue into a permanent rictus of surprise, and the shocking angularity of his right shoulder was a constant reminder of horror and loss. I spent a fortune on plastic surgery, which moderated the facial disfigurement so that Nate could move around in public without attracting too much attention, and when Nate was old enough his prosthetic limb – the training wheel arm - was upgraded to a sleek robotic carbon fiber contraption that he controlled by twitching the muscles in the shoulder.  He was a passable imitation of a teenager, but joy and hope seemed absent, sports and clubs and friendship too. He spent hours alone in his bedroom, the one-armed boy, her damaged son.

Nate’s mother was immobilized by grief, which soon turned to irreversible and ever deepening depression. She grew thin and weak, listless and atrophied, her face became an ashen mask. She became a passenger, a burden, useless to me, and she avoided the boy, she couldn’t bear the sight of his missing limb, she couldn’t bear the daily reminder of her terrible error. Finally, with her maternal and spousal duties fully abandoned, she one day went to collect the mail from the mailbox at the end of the driveway and never returned. Months later, her skeletal remains were found by a road-cleaning crew on a quiet stretch of I-95. In her pocket they found a picture of little Nate, pre-accident, still precious and whole, with his right arm draped over the neck of the dog. 

Madeline Marks, a comely Senior at the High School, invited Nate to the School Prom.  It was an improbable match, but I was desperate to see Nate achieve a modicum of happiness, independence at least, so I said a little prayer and hoped for the best. Perhaps she was one of those do-good angels, who tried to make everyone feel included, or who are blind to disablement? But something felt wrong, the children at Nate’s school were relentless bullies, tortured Nate with minor humiliations. My suspicions were substantiated later that night when Nate returned home early, alone, in tears; he was carrying his prosthetic arm like a piece of salvaged wood, it was covered in filth and looked badly damaged. His jacket sleeve was torn, someone had ripped the prosthetic limb from its exoskeletal shoulder-mount.   I intercepted Nate, got a slice of the tawdry story out of him before he stormed up to his bedroom and slammed the door. 

Evil sometimes wears a pretty face. Nasty Maddy. Bad girl Maddy.

I ask you, as a man, what would you have done?   From grief to anger, from anger to vengeance and retribution, we are talking of a short journey.

The next day, Maddy’s mother phoned, and screamed groundless accusations at me, where was Maddy? What did Nate do to her precious daughter? Nate was a schemer, a druggy, a weirdo, a monster. I was worse. I created the monster.

It was true. This was as much my fault as anybody’s. As a father, I was a failure, not that I ever wanted the role.

The police arrived with a warrant, they confiscated Nate’s computer, and they asked him a lot of questions which caused the scars on his face and neck to flare up bright crimson with suppressed shame and rage. The police were persistent; this strange-looking boy with the disfigured face and the articulated claw-hand was their prime suspect.

But Nate knew nothing: Maddy left him and went off with an older boy; she was probably on the lam in Augusta or Portland. It was a lewd prank to impress a clique of friends, it was a High School hazing, a warped Stephen King dare.   Onlookers, teen boys and girls, laughed at Nate as he tried to pull the prosthetic from out of the toilet bowl, where Maddy’s boyfriend had jammed it into the trapway. Nobody helped.

The police detective, a pit-bull man, took notes. A prank would not account for Maddy’s absence. Something more sinister had happened to her, he was certain. They’d check Portland, they’d check Augusta, but I could tell, right from the get-go, they were focusing their biased and ignorant investigation exclusively on Nate. The detective even started on me! What was I doing on Prom night? Had I seen the girl, Maddy? Had I aided and abetted in a crime?

Newspaper reporters were sniffing around, rifling through the trash. A TV station sent a van over and parked outside looking for an interview with Nate or me. Someone threw a brick through the front window; someone fired a gun at the garage; Maddy’s mother hissed at me like a cat outside the supermarket; strangers spat at me in the street. My clients canceled appointments, and my staff at the surgery resigned. 

Maddy’s body parts were mostly found strewn about the woods near our house, along the riverbank, and wedged between rocks on the trail behind the nearby transfer station. Maddy’s head was impaled on a railing fence near the town pond. With her remains discovered so close to our house, it only intensified the scrutiny. I kept Nate inside, fearing a lynching. Not that he had any interest in going out. Where would he go? What would he do?

An itinerant was discovered living in a squalid camp in the woods on the south side of Bald Mountain. A creep, a hermit, his hovel was part-hidden by a cave and a clump of gnarled hemlock, and the nearby forest floor was surrounded by scraps of animal fur and bones, grisly rotting offal. He was a wild man, in his fifties, who’d been stealing from cabins and campsites, trapping animals in the woods. He’d been living in the woods for perhaps two years. A charred piece of Maddy was found in his campfire. Case closed.

But not completely. I waited a little while, until things had died down a bit, until Nate seemed capable of grasping my concept properly. He seemed slow to understand, then outright confrontational. Nate was repulsed by the idea. 

What kind of madness was this? His own stepfather? Did I not understand how truly fucking evil this idea was? What had possessed me? What kind of man would do that? It was wrong! It was sick! He wanted nothing to do with it, he would denounce me.

I confiscated his phone. He tried to leave the house, and I was forced to fight him to the living room floor, where I subdued him with sprayed triple drip that I used at the surgery to anesthetize livestock. 

When he came to, he was unyielding. There was no arguing with him. He would not see reason. I explained to him that it was too late anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound, there was no going back now, but eventually I gave up arguing. Better to seek forgiveness than permission. I dosed him up for surgery.

Once Maddy’s arm was properly unfrozen, it turned out to be a pretty good match, in terms of skin tone and musculature, though perhaps a bit smaller than I would have liked.  Her blood type was compatible with Nate's, and the nerve endings and blood vessels were clean and undamaged. It would be a micro-surgery marathon, but I was confident that I could perform the operation without any help. 

Perhaps I was never meant to be a parent? Nate seems to have adjusted reasonably well, though I don’t see much of him these days because it’s best to keep him locked in his bedroom. Such rage in one so young! It can’t be the arm because to the casual observer it looks quite passable (though a bit pale), and I know the operation was a brilliant success because he recently hurled a can of coke at me from the far side of his room and nearly knocked me unconscious, so vicious and accurate was the throw.

Perhaps the melancholy is hereditary, but perhaps it’s that twisted, scarred and scowling face? Who knows how that might affect a young person? He only has one expression, and I sense that it makes him unfit for an independent life. Nate has one friend, another loner-type, a gaming buddy called Jeremy, who'd came around once to help Nate fix his computer. He and Nate had some kind of falling out; it occurs to me that Jeremy has a very passable smile.