A Boy and His Dog

A Call to Arms

His world swam as Henry felt the sharp light penetrate his tender eyes. His swollen lip tasted of fresh blood. On top of that, he felt pain on his wrists and ankles.

"Ooohh," he groaned as he tried to put a hand to his throbbing head, but his arm wouldn't move. Then the panic descended -- he remembered where he was, that he was tied to the chair. As his eyes began to focus, he saw the rain against the window, heard the sharp wind. The adrenalin coursing through his body killed these idle thoughts. A strong smell of shit filled his nostrils and panicked thoughts flooded his mind as he remembered where he was -- "Oh god no she's in here with me it wasn't a dream fuck fuck fuck won't somebody kill me my head hurts she won't go away."

A shrill creak sounded as she got up from behind him. The dull thud of mud covered boots as she crossed the room, the cold steel of a double-barreled shotgun on his neck and then. "So, the dickhead's finally awake," a deep, somewhat masculine voice said from behind him. Henry moaned a bit; then pressure on his neck from the gun spun him in the chair to face his captor. An enormous woman, about 6'2" and well over 200 pounds came into view. She brought the gun down on his right kneecap in a thunderclap to bring him to a stop and pressed her face into his.

"She's got a moustache," thought Henry in shock. He might have laughed at the thought at another time but the pressure on his bladder told him that he was scared shitless and in a hell of a predicament. "Hold it in, Henry, please, please, hold it in," he pleaded to himself. Biting his lip, he brought a fresh new stream of blood, and tears welled in his eyes.

"You little faggot! Are you crying again? What kind of a man are you?"

SMACK!

Across his face came a menacing backhand from his massive captor. His head swam again; on the brink of another blackout he managed to hold on. Groggily shaking his head he looked out the window again, for her blow spun him partly around.

WHAP!

Her boot connected with his left kneecap and sent he and the chair he was bound to skittering into the corner of the room. The thought of escape seemed ever distant now that Henry couldn't look out the window at the building across the alley. She put the shotgun down on the bed and began to pace the small room, which was furnished with nothing but a disheveled bed, bureau, and a small sink.

"Remember what we were talking about before, penis head?"

Henry didn't, couldn't respond. He was still trying to piece together whatever had happened. Even so, he wasn't much for communication.

She laughed, "I guess not. I did give you a pretty good shot to the back of the head." The throbbing pain in his eyes told him she was right. "Anyway," she continued as she pulled a big cigar out of the front pocket of her flannel shirt and lit it with the silver Zippo she returned to her left front jeans pocket. Now that he was coming to he took a bit of inventory. His mailbag was in the corner across from him. There was neither a phone nor TV in the room, just a small radio on top of the sink. He could feel his keys in his right front pants pocket, just where he always put them, as well as his wallet in his rear pocket. This thought always seemed to be among the first in his head. Living in New York, it was something of a defense mechanism.

Henry started as an empty can went whizzing by his right ear. She was upon him in a second. "Next time you phase me out, you little shit, I won't miss, you dig?" she said calmly as she held the arms of his chair. Henry looked into her expressionless eyes, which were an even uglier brown than the long, greasy hair she had pulled back in a ponytail. They weren't the eyes of a lunatic per se, but they also weren't the eyes of someone you'd put behind the wheel of a schoolbus. "Did you fucking hear me?!" she screamed as her eyes remained vacantly sedate.

Henry managed to whimper a small, "Yes. I'm... I'm sorry."

She took a pull on her cigar and exhaled the smoke deeply through her nostrils, making her look like some kind of thing from Greek mythology, "Minotaur. I think that's the name for it," thought Henry.

She stood up, turned, and said, again calmly, "Good. I don't think you should ignore me anymore. You wouldn't want Miss Erin to get mad and do something irrational, now would you?"

"No - no, I guess not." No, he definitely didn't want to see her mad, especially if she didn't consider herself to have been mad before. He decided to really pay attention.

"You fucking guess not," she snorted derisively, "Boy, you really are a total pussy, aren't you?"

Henry didn't respond, hoping that was a rhetorical question. The only thing he could think of was trying hard to pay attention. That was always a problem. He had an active imagination. Sometimes too active. Right now wasn't the time to slip away. God, how he didn't want to piss the Amazon off.

"Anyway," she continued, "we were discussing that little issue of the fucking 29 cent stamp."

"What's this maniac talking about?" he asked himself, but all he could manage to whimper was a soft, "What?"

"Don't try to play dumb with me, asshole. Erin called or stopped by hundreds of post offices in the past year and they've all given her the run around."

"This is the most bizarre thing that's ever happened to me," Henry thought to himself. "The woman's straight out of a Stephen King novel, and she's going to kill me over the fucking price of postage?"

Henry didn't see her face go red with rage or notice that she walked across the room and picked up the shotgun until she tried to cave his chest in with a baseball swing that would have sent Mark McGwire slinking away in shame. When he came to this time, his face was pressed to the floor. He was still tied to the chair, which was now on its side. He coughed to clear his throat and almost choked on the huge amount of blood that came up. That's when he felt the pain rip across his ribs. Henry gasped in an effort to hold back the scream of agony welling inside of him, and when he looked up the Erin creature was leaning down toward him, reaching for the arms of the chair. She heaved him up brutally. Henry passed out.

A splash of water in his face brought him around. She had gagged him and tied his feet and the base of the chair to the pipes under the sink.

"Erin's sick of trying to talk to you and she's thirsty. When I come back again we're going to talk, and this time you'd better give some answers, you fucking mute," she said calmly, putting on her coat. She walked out the door, locking it behind her. In the dusk light, Henry could see his reflection in the mirror. The left side of his face was swollen and red. He looked and felt like shit. The gun was nowhere to be seen, but it didn't really matter. He wasn't interested in moving, and he was terrified that if he tried to get out, she would know. She would know, she would be pissed, and she would make him pay dearly. He could see out the window now. It wasn't raining anymore, but the dreariness comforted him. On a rainy day in New York, plenty of people were suffering, but he doubted if many of them were as scared as he was. Henry didn't want to think anymore. He just wanted to escape back into his own little world.

...........

Henry was only three when the first tragedy of his life occurred. His mother died in a car crash on the Garden State Parkway. It would be years later before Henry saw the police report and found out the death of Francis O'Keefe was most likely not an accident.

Frannie, as she was known to her friends, grew up in Syracuse, New York. Her father was an alcoholic and associate professor in the physics department. Her mother died at the age of 38, a few months after her doctor discovered a tumor in her brain.

Thirteen year old Frannie was shattered. She became obsessed with death and was ignored by her father, who was too drunk most of the time to care. The task of raising her fell upon her mother's older sister, Mary. Aunt Mary had never married -- not due to any overwhelming homeliness or aversion to men, but because she had aspirations to become a nun. With Mary, thought never led to action.

The remainder of Frannie's teenage years were spent in rebellion. She went to high school and discovered parties, drugs, and alcohol. She began to attend frat parties at the University with regularity in her junior year. She was 19 by then, having only passed her freshman year on the first try. At a post-Valentine's party in February of 1961, one brother in particular took it upon himself to get her drunk in the hopes of gaining some companionship. That fateful Saturday night Frannie got loaded and extremely horny. She started out giving the boy who had been so kind to her a blowjob in the middle of a room full of pledges after the bash. All told, Frannie would have sex with seventeen members of Sigma Chi that night.

Frannie knew she wanted to keep her baby. She intended to throw her father into a binge and Aunt Mary into deep shock. She refused to reveal the name of the father (or possible names, as it were). Frannie wanted to raise her child alone, believing that since she was not far removed enough from her own childhood then she would be able to correct the mistakes she believed her parents made in raising her.

The baby was born on November 13, 1961. There were no complications, save for the fact that the child was born terribly underweight after a full nine month pregnancy. The doctors asked Frannie if she smoked or drank at all while she was with child. She told them no, thinking it mattered little that she smoked a pack of Camels and a couple joints each day.

When Henry Xavier O'Keefe was nearly a year old his grandfather committed suicide. Henry and his mother moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, where she got a job as an exotic dancer. She started to get into heavier drugs than marijuana at this time.

Henry tried to remember his mother often in his later years, but he was too young for any substantial memory. All he knew of her came from either her arrest sheet or Aunt Mary. The former told Henry all about his mother's life in Hoboken. Thirteen arrests in a year and a half, ranging from indecent exposure to possession of heroin. She was never given jail time due to the fact that she was a single mother supporting a child doctors diagnosed as nearly retarded and incapable of living apart from his mother. He also saw the police report which stated that Francis Mary O'Keefe had been travelling at nearly 110 miles per hour when her car skidded out of control and plowed into a gasoline truck. There were few remains of either driver that dry, sunny August day. There was also no indication that Frannie had lost control of her vehicle prior to the crash. Her death was ruled a suicide.

The majority of the things Aunt Mary told Henry about his mother centered on her moral character. She was the devil's child, Mary would say. God took her because she was evil.

"Out of all evil comes good, though, Henry, for that is the Lord's way. You are that good for which Frances came and went in the world," she would tell him. Mary raised Henry in a convent outside New Haven, Connecticut where she lived and worked as a cook until he was nine years old. In the six years before his Aunt's death from a stroke, Henry, who everyone labeled a slow learner, started to hate religion.

After his aunt's death, Henry was placed in an orphanage in New York City. It was 1971, he was smaller than all of the seven year olds, and everyone thought he was either mute or incredibly stupid. There was much more to Henry than he let on. His childhood was not a particularly enjoyable one. He was shunned by the other children, but he didn't mind, for he was enamored with solitude and rarely spoke. On those rare occasions when he did try to speak, Henry would get tongue-tied and bashful, then clam up.

Later in life, Henry would look back and attribute his shyness to the nuns. They made him fear his own failures. He had been constantly reprimanded for his poor study skills and inability to remember simple prayers. It wasn't that he couldn't -- it was that he didn't want to. He would much rather sit off by himself and let his vivid imagination run wild, creating worlds in which the puny O'Keefe kid said and did all the right things, because he certainly couldn't deal with the real world in the same way.

Now that he had some time to think, Henry started to remember all the times he had been the object of ridicule in his life before, all the bullies he had been the whipping boy for. David Cohen, the Jewish kid who hassled him for a couple of years in the orphanage until he was found dead in a puddle of his own vomit. The medical examiners found a large quantity of strychnine in his stomach.

Gloria Henrickson, a blond seventh-grade knockout who Henry had a crush on. She publicly humiliated him on a number of occasions. A smile crept across his face as he remembered the time Gloria spit on him in the middle of math class. That day after school Henry walked to the pet store and bought two soft, furry, white mice. The next day Gloria Henrickson cracked her skull open when she fainted after opening her locker.

Becky Marsalis, Gloria's best friend, started screaming when she looked in the locker and saw two mice hanging there. One had been gutted from head to toe. The other was covered in tar. It had no head and was wrapped in yellow yarn.

The pattern continued as the torturers of little Henry would suddenly be found dead, apparent victims of suicide by overdose. Some were found in their apartments with the gas on, the victims of an unfortunate explosion. Henry always worked the same way -- accidentally.

Nobody ever wound up with their throats cut or full of bullets. Those were too direct physical means of retribution. Their pets might be gutted or their homes destroyed, but that was the most Henry could manage. Being little had become an affliction for him. Direct violence frightened him.

Henry's bladder released when he heard the sound of Erin's heavy boots in the hallway. She fumbled with the lock for a while before she finally came in - he could smell the alcohol on her as soon as she came in the room. Purposefully, she untied him and pulled his 5'3" frame from the chair. Pain shot through his ribs, legs, and still throbbing head. He screamed in agony as she threw him on the small bed and bound his arms and legs to the posts. Henry could think of nothing but the pungent fresh bar smell coming from her and the physical revulsion he felt for the mammoth bitch. He was scared. She had total control and she was so -- fucking -- big.

He saw her vacant eyes in the reflection from the mirror as she tuned the radio to a top 40 station and undressed. A wave of panic overcame him as he began to realize what was about to happen.

Erin reached under the bed, pulled out the shotgun and pointed it at him. "We're gonna have some fun now. Take off your pants." A panicked convulsion overcame Henry.

"H-h-how?"

A look of confusion came over her face as she realized he was tied to the bed. "Goddamn you, do I have to do everything?"

Sticking the barrel of the gun in his mouth, she climbed on top of him. Pain ripped through him as the full effect of Erin's weight hit his battered body. To keep from screaming he bit hard onto the gun. The cold of the metal on his lips frightened him even more. Guns made him want to puke. He feared their cold, impersonal power. Even the little moments of power he felt on the few times he used a knife, either to kill an animal or slash tires, frightened him.

Henry looked down and saw Erin was sucking on his balls. His penis was still limp. Try as she might, she couldn't change that. Finally she got off him in obvious frustration. She walked to the sink and smashed the mirror with one huge fist. Tears flowed from Henry's eyes in volumes. The gun was still in his mouth and he started to gag.

Erin turned. For a moment Henry saw what appeared to be a look of compassion in her eyes. She pulled the gun from his mouth and untied both his arms and his right leg, then sat on the sink.

Henry didn't move. His wrists hurt, but so did the rest of his body. His concentration was focused on the Amazon.

"I think I hate you. I think I hate me more. I can't even get a pathetic prick like you hard," she said. She didn't know what hate was, Henry thought to himself.

She began to pace back and forth between the window and the bed. Henry started to dread the explosion he felt brewing. Her whispering grew to a scream, "fuck you. fuck fuck you. fuck you. fuck. FUCK YOU!"

On the last one she brought the gun over her head, bringing it down like a lumberjack on his left shin. Howling, Henry rolled on to the floor. As he fell, his hand caught the cord from the radio, pulling it onto the floor next to him. Erin stood, a look of total rage on her face. The alcohol had obviously slowed her down mentally. She stood contemplating her next move as she looked about the room. Henry could feel the radio at his fingertips. He slowly stretched his hand out and pulled it toward him.

"Well, what do you think I should do? You must be impotent or something," she said slowly raising the gun and pointing it at his dick, "Maybe I should just blow that useless thing the hell off."

A glaze went over her eyes. It could have been the last boilermaker she'd downed, but it was obvious to Henry that she fazed out for a second. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Henry grabbed the radio and hurled it toward her. It connected with her face, breaking her nose and dropping her to the floor in a heap. Henry desperately reached for the shotgun at his feet as Erin started to rise. In a last ditch effort he grabbed it, pointed and fired. The blast sent Erin back through the window without her insides. As his vision started to blur and the room began to spin, he softly but assertively said, "Fuck you. Things are gonna be a lot different now."