Betty
It was sometime during the first Clinton administration, I and a few fellow friends of the earth were living on ten forested acres, thirty miles southwest of Eugene, Oregon. I was a somewhat recent transplant from Long Island, New York. Compared to the malls, traffic, and the general bad attitudes that prevail in the sprawling suburbs of the Island, the Oregon Coast Range with all its big trees, misty mornings and meandering rivers was a utopia I thought available only in a good game of Dungeons and Dragons.
A few of us had jobs, like myself, working at a local nursery, some twenty miles away, the others lived off the fat of the land, or off the others’ meager paychecks. There was beer, a lot of beer, there was pot, a lot of pot, which helped make “The Now” the only thing that really mattered. “The Now” is the only thing that matters, right?
Words like 401K, health care, and Monday morning commute were not part of our conversations. We talked about turning the land into a vineyard, or a nursery of strange mind-altering plants, or producing some good-for-you, but not-that-tasty, food product. Still, despite these big dreams and our four figure salaries, the mortgage was always past due, and we often settled for a bag of barbequed potato chips smothered in blue cheese dressing for dinner. I didn’t have many pairs of socks.
Somewhere along this smoky timeline, the land inherited a black, very dumb, almost seal-like pit bull–lab mix. Betty she was named, not sure why. Betty was a major hassle to care for: she ran as soon as you opened the door to the trailer that sat atop the land and would not come back. Really, she would not come back for a whole day, and when she did she smelled like a mix of tuna, human crap, and peppermint. Always the wagging tail and dripping pink tongue, crashing through the ferns like a retarded deer. “Did I miss something?” her look would say. “I was just out, rolling around in mud, mixed with a dead bird, for eight hours.” She would soon be forgiven as night fell and she curled up near the woodstove like a focal point in some sort of mushroom-induced Rockwell painting.
The number of inhabitants on the land fluctuated from two to maybe eight or nine. Often someone would get a girlfriend and move into their house in town, fully equipped with heat, television, and food. During the winter there seemed to be fewer people around, this was after all, the wilds of Oregon, where rivers tended to swell and flood roads. Fog was dense and driving at night could be treacherous. Woodstoves worked best with dry wood, and if dry wood was not around, it might be an early night. Strange forest vermin, brought to the Coast Range on ships carrying lumber to Japan, were rumored to be living in the southernmost wall of the trailer. In fact, one morning I woke up to a polecat, a hybrid of skunk and weasel, at the foot of my bed poised for a fight. I think I fainted, because I don’t remember how the confrontation was resolved. Needles to say, if you were lucky enough to acquire a girlfriend in January, you stayed at her house.
The summer was a different story. The land came alive, the trailer, equipped with a very nice stereo, was jammed and blasting music constantly. Cold beer on ice flowed day and night. The population would swell to ten, and people from town would seek mini-vacations out to the land. Huge bonfires blazed nightly. We went from freaks in the woods to people with a great place to party. “Let’s go out there and party,” people would say. Some of the parties were planned. I remember a school bus, equipped with stage and a band, making it out one night. I don’t know how they got that thing up the muddy, rutty, Burmese path we called a driveway, but they did. On the land, nothing was really off-limits, we lived in a twenty-something version of Lord of the Flies. We had little regard for the few neighbors we did have. That’s why we lived out here, so we would not have to worry about neighbors, and so we could urinate wherever we wanted.
We assumed that everyone lived like this, come on, the Oregon Country Fair was held, as the crow flies, only ten miles away. We were just like every one else around these parts, or so, in our naivete, we thought. The neighbors were dropping subtle hints that we were too loud and crazy. By subtle hint, I mean firing off rounds from a shotgun during the middle of a most excellent drum circle.
All the while, amidst the beer, pot, and huge fires, Betty was there, sort of. If she wasn‘t there she was no more then a ridge away, slathered in mud and deer carcass, eating a rock, maybe. The fires burned bright, the joints the same, the drums loud, and who the hell brought the Marshall stack out here? Van Halen concert in the woods. Why not?
I realize now, that what people rely on to feel normal: a wife, career, a mortgage, were instead substituted with friends, crazy dogs, cool plants from South America, misty mornings and a full moon that rose large and bright over the hills. On the land, we considered ourselves one percenters, not the one percent that makes over $150,000 gross a year, but the one percent that lives how they want to live, who answers to no one.
This idealism has since faded. I am now a slave to Monday morning traffic, and quarterly reviews, and after-work cocktails. My friends who shared this time of independence lead varying lives of underachievement: one is a parent and drug addict; another a parent with a drinking problem teetering on moral and fiscal bankruptcy; another a parent living at his mom’s house in the Midwest at the ripe age of forty-two; oh and another, not a parent, is in prison serving a twelve-year sentence for a nonviolent crime. It pains me to write this. Our intentions were so good. We had so much heart. I am saddened to think how things turned out.
The mornings on the land were often the best time of day for me. The sun was bright, and nowhere near sinking behind the hills that surrounded us. I would often smoke some pot, if I had any, and make a cup of strong free-trade coffee, walk down to the garden and greenhouse and take a look around. Water the dry plants, pick some dead leaves off. Maybe flick the radio in the greenhouse on, listen to some NPR, Car Talk maybe. Betty, man’s best friend, was by my side, kind of.
As I was drifting between Click and Clack, the Tappett Brothers, and the purple sage that looked a little dry, I heard a gun go off. Well, that’s normal, guns in the country, like peanut butter and jelly. But this shot sounded personal, not like shot in air or at an empty beer can. Where’s Betty?
I walked down to the paved road, not far from the garden, and there was Betty. Her intestine lay on the road, dripping from where the bullet hit. Why would you kill such a stupid creature? If you have a problem with us, take it out on us, not this stupid dog. She lay in the middle of this county road, dead, but still smiling, like she found a new type of shit to bathe in. I ran to the body, it looked heavy, I began to weep, and was overcome with a toxic mixture of anger and sadness.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a neighbor collecting his mail. I ran over to him, “you killed my fucking dog?” I said in a tone that said “what kind of sick fuck are you?” He looked at me, scared almost, “I didn’t do it,” with his palms facing me, don’t hurt me. I shook my head and walked back to the body. It didn’t matter now. Betty was dead. That’s the way scores were settled around these parts, no lawyers, no police, no ombudsman. This is the wild west, gunpowder, vengeance, an eye for an eye.
I walked past Betty, back to the greenhouse, like the country kid I never was, grabbed the wheelbarrow, and marched back to the body, as if it was a pile of mulch I was hired to spread. I can’t remember if I used a shovel, I doubt I did. There I was climbing back up the Burmese path, with a dead dog in a cart, like Monty Python’s “bring out your dead.” When I reached the trailer, I went inside and made some calls, not to the police or to the ASPCA, but to friends. Come out to the land, bring beer, we have to bury Betty in the patch of old growth behind the trailer.
