The Puppy

“You have to help. Please,” spoke my neighbor in plaintive broken English. I remember his dark skin and his skinny awkward frame covered in clothes too big for him and that probably belonged to one of his older brothers. His accent was relatively heavy but I could understand it. We were best friends at the time based solely on the physical proximity of our duplexes. He was simpler and easier to get along with than the girls on my street. We once spent an entire afternoon breaking apart a discarded record player with hammers, barely speaking, and thus solidified our friendship. “Ok,” was all I really said. I yelled to my mom I was going out and followed him, dread filling up my heart as he sprinted next door with me trailing close behind. “Please. He’s very sick. Help.” I stepped into the garage and felt the tense atmosphere. Roughly five adults stood round watching the puppy. None of them spoke English. One of them looked warily at me as I crept my way closer to the thing and then went back to a staccato Spanish dialogue with another. They didn’t matter. Carlos wanted me here, I was here for him. He thought for some reason I could help and I would try. The dog panted and gagged and lay on the floor in a puddle of its own drool. Sympathies aroused, I knelt down and touched it to find it unresponsive, the eyes glazing and breathing even more labored. Fear bubbled up in me. The adults were looking at me. I looked at Carlos. “Let me ask my mom,” I said, deferring to the parental wisdom I had been taught to rely on. I ran back to find my mom in the kitchen. “Mom there’s something really wrong with the puppy next door. It can’t breathe or something. What should I do? Should I get a phone book? If we call a vet will they come out here?” My panic spilled over and lapped in waves on my mom’s steady front. She went over to see the dog. She came back and told me not to worry about it and was strangely adamant about me not going back over. She’d told them where to take it to save it.
I talked to Carlos the next day and asked him about the puppy. He shook his head. “It died.” He pointed to the giant green monstrosity of a dumpster and my horror intensified knowing what had been done. That they hadn’t had the money to pay for a vet to look at it. That my mother had known this. The flies swarming it added to the grotesqueness that my mind was creating and I had to look away. After a moment I glanced over again at the puppy’s resting place and felt a stab of pain to know how sad and pitiful his end was. I offered a quick apology as we took off on our bikes. I could never tell how he felt about the whole thing. But I could never tell much about how Carlos felt about things and that was just how it worked for us. He would move away in a couple months and I would start learning to interact with the girls again, but the reason I would remember Carlos for so long after would be because of the puppy.