I
Playboy, 1969
When I was young, Dad said,
people used to mess with me.
There we were, creeping around an abandoned racetrack, my friend Lloyd and me, looking for the grave. We didn’t know the exact location. The departed was a Saint Bernard, though, so how hard could it be to find? We imagined a big mound of dirt, a headstone bearing the name TOBY. I held a bouquet of dandelions. In his hands Lloyd held nothing.
My parents were suspicious of Lloyd, who, being diabetic, often arrived at our house with syringes and insulin. We were only eleven years old, but the idea of needles in the house put my mother on edge. It was 1969, and Lloyd had long hair, and if there were needles in the house, heroin could not be far away, or so thought my mother, whose name, unexpectedly, was Hildegarde.
From down the long dirt road we heard the approach of a slow-moving car—tires on gravel. It was not yet twilight, but the car’s headlights were on. They stabbed through the tall trees on either side of the access road, casting shadows.
“Hide,” said Lloyd. I’d been thinking the same thing. We ran into the First Baptist Cemetery, which was just through the trees to our left. It hadn’t occurred to us to look for Toby’s grave there, what with the dog not being human. We hunkered down behind the stone for Elizabeth Wayne, who’d died in 1793. She was a woman of distinguished piety and benevolence. We knew that she’d been the mother of Revolutionary War hero “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who was interred over in the cemetery at the St. David’s Friends meetinghouse, or most of him was, anyhow. We’d ridden our bikes there. After his death in 1796, the general had been buried up in Erie, but twelve years later Wayne’s son Isaac had ridden his carriage to the grave site and dug his father up so he could be reinterred in St. David’s. He dismembered the body by boiling it in a large kettle until he had only the bones. That being the fashion at the time.
These he drove back down to St. David’s. The rest he left in Erie.
The car came up the drive and then paused by the cemetery. We heard the door open and close, then the footsteps drawing near. A flashlight played off of the headstones.
“Okay, boys,” the voice said. “I think you can come out of there now.”
Lloyd and I stood up. Dr. Boyer shone the light in our faces. She was the veterinarian. Her practice was in the farmhouse at the end of the road, on the edge of the abandoned racetrack. There was a windmill by her farmhouse. Its sails were broken.
“Lloyd Goodyear,” she said in a voice that implied, I might have known. “And Jimmy Boylan.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Paying your respects?” she said, shining her light on the dandelions in my hand.
“We’re looking for Toby,” said Lloyd.
Dr. Boyer was a ruddy-faced woman with short hair and freckles. “Your dog,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. She knew all about Toby. It was to Dr. Boyer’s practice that Lloyd’s mother, Breda, had taken the dog’s body, after Lloyd had seen it on the median strip on his way to Marple Newtown Junior High that autumn. The dog had been missing for a week by then.
“We heard he was buried out here,” said Lloyd. “We wanted to see it.”
Dr. Boyer stood there, considering us.
“That’s the worst story I’ve ever heard,” she said.
Lloyd and I both opened our mouths to respond, because clearly a response was called for. But what could we say? We’d had plenty of experience lying to adults, and it was not uncommon to get caught. In those situations, the only thing you could do was tell the truth and take your licks. Sometimes you could try to explain why the circumstances had demanded mendacity—especially if the situation had called for protecting certain people from the world’s cruelties.
The truth had always been my last recourse. You knew that when you came out with the truth, no matter how humiliating its revelation might be, you couldn’t be punished for it. Or at least that had been my understanding. Now, for the first time in my life, I experienced what it was like to tell someone the truth and not to be believed.
As it turned out, there were times when the truth was no help at all.
“We heard—,” I started, but Lloyd was already looking down at the ground. He knew that it was pointless trying to explain. “We heard that he was buried here.”
“In the Baptist cemetery?” Dr. Boyer said. “The dog?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “On the farm.”
Now I was just pissing her off. “But who,” she asked incredulously, “who would bury a dog—here?”
The obvious answer, and the one we had believed to be true, of course, was, Why, you, Dr. Boyer. But this could not be spoken. Instead, I joined my friend in the universal pose of humiliation and stared down at the ground with him. There we stood, two shamefaced boys.
“You boys get off this property,” said Dr. Boyer. “I don’t ever want to see you here again. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Go on,” said the doctor. “Get.”
We turned and walked out of the cemetery, through the cluster of dead Waynes. From behind us came the sound of her car door opening and closing and the tires scraping on the dirt and the gravel.
“She didn’t believe us!” I said to Lloyd, furious.
But Lloyd didn’t answer back. I looked over at him to see fat tears rolling down his face. I didn’t say anything about it, because we were boys, and our code was clear: the only way to respond to some of the most important things in our world was with silence.
* * *
By the time I got home, Dr. Boyer had already called my parents. My mother told me to go into the den. “Your father wants to talk to you,” she said in a voice without pity.
Dick Boylan—a handsome man with a crisp white shirt, a thin tie, and slicked-back hair—sat in a black leather chair smoking an L&M King. Our dalmatian dog, Playboy, lay on the floor, his legs pointing into the air, displaying his pink belly and his not inconsiderable nether dog parts.
“Had a little run-in with Dr. Boyer?” said my father in a tone that was both sympathetic and disappointed.
“We were looking for Toby’s grave,” I explained, although why my father should believe this when it had failed with the woman we’d been told had actually buried the dog there I don’t know.
“Sit down,” he said, and I collapsed on the couch. The den was a small room off of the living room. There was a black-and-white TV in one corner and three walls of books. During the weekend, Lloyd and I sometimes glued together models of battleships here.
“We really were looking for it,” I said.
My father took a drag on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for a very long time. Then he blew it out. He took off his tortoiseshell glasses, wiped them with a pocket handkerchief.
“Lloyd’s a good guy,” my father said thoughtfully. He put his glasses back on. “You’re very loyal to him.”
“He’s my friend,” I said.
“He’s got some challenges that you don’t have,” said my father.
“The diabetes,” I said.
“No,” said my father. “I wasn’t thinking about that per se.”
Playboy’s tail thumped against the hooked rug. I noticed that, at this inopportune moment, the dog’s private regions were beginning to pulse. A pink suggestion began to poke at the outer boundaries of its sheath.
“You weren’t?”
My father took another long drag on his cigarette.
“You know,” he said, “my father died when I was just about your age. When I was twelve.”
There was an oil painting of my grandfather that hung in our living room. I had nightmares about it fairly regularly. In my dreams, the old man was trying to get out of the painting. He wanted to get me.
“It can upend a young man,” my father said, “if he doesn’t have … determination.”
Lloyd’s father had died of a heart attack the summer before. We’d been shooting off model rockets on the playground one afternoon. I remember the strange feeling of being on the school grounds in summer, when the place was as abandoned as Dr. Boyer’s farm. I had a two-stage rocket called the Black Widow. We watched as it took off in the sky and disappeared. The parachute had malfunctioned. That night, Lloyd called me on the phone and said, “My dad had a heart attack. They took him to the hospital, but they couldn’t help him. So he died.”
I did not know what to tell my friend.
“Is that what you think he needs?” I said to my father, uncertain. “Determination?”
“I think,” he said, “it is the thing you need.”
I sat there, taking this all in. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was we were talking about. It was not entirely impossible that my father suspected what lurked in my heart and was suggesting that it might be resisted, if only I approached the question of being alive with the necessary resolve and firmness.
On the floor, Playboy’s exuberance burst forth. A lack of determination wasn’t one of his problems, that much was certain.
Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Finney Boylan
Poem copyright © 1987 by Nancy Johnson
Copyright © 1982 by Mean Streak Music
