Dog Bite - Page 3

I have a temper. I know that. Heather knew that. I try to hide it from the girls the best I can, but when it comes, it comes. There is little I can do. I drove the company truck with two panels for the Boys and Girls Club project affixed to the rack in the back. You’re not supposed to do more than forty-five with panels that big. I hit seventy on the 5 North. Gravel spitting. A rooster tail of dust running from Walker’s place to the high school.

When I got there, Bella is all right. She was sitting in the nurse’s station with a bandage wrapped around her calf. That same sad-eyed stare from the bleachers sketched on her face. She looked so much like her mother.

“You okay, kid?” I asked, crouched in a catcher’s stance before her. She wasn’t acting herself. I thought it was the nurse and the resource officer in the room, so I nodded for them to leave. They step out. “Bella, what happened?” I brushed her hair behind her ear.

“I had my headphones on,” she said, head down, slumped on the exam table. That roll of paper crunched beneath her as she fussed with the bandage. “I didn’t hear it coming. When I got to the corner, it was already there. I thought it was just scared. Its head was down, and it was backing up. But it was growling. I tried to yell at it to leave, and then I saw the bus coming, and I picked up some gravel from the road and threw it, but that just made the dog mean. It came at me, and I ran toward the bus. It bit me on the leg, then booked it the other way.”

“Are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Can we go home?”

She was looking down toward my boots. “Yeah, let me —” I stood and searched my pockets for the company phone. I had forgotten it. The dog door people expected me an hour ago. “—you gonna be all right? I have to make a stop first.”

I signed her out for the day at the school’s security office, two down from the principal’s. Bella stood awkward by the doorway, part in the hall as the period bell rang and part in the office. I noticed —I should have noticed earlier —that she was wearing the same outfit she slept in at school. Oversized gray sweats, one leg rolled to her knee where the dog got her, a tank, and one of my old flannels left unbuttoned. Oversized headphones draped around her neck. Bella was an artist. I figured it was her look. But seeing her, there at the school, I saw things weren’t right. I finished signing her out and walked down the hall full of passing students.

She didn’t join me exactly, pacing me several feet behind. Fine, I thought. Teenagers. I hated high school too.

That’s when I saw them again. The girls from the bleachers. One —a blonde —leaned up against a locker, smacking gum. The others around her like parishioners drawn to an idol. They stared through me, to Bella. I took another few steps and tried to turn my head slightly to see if she was still behind me. Then I stopped in a river of passing kids. There was Bella sulking, head down through the halls. The girls snapped to her. The blonde one said something to the group, and they all laughed. A sick, pathetic laughter. And when Bella passed them, the blonde one said, “Dirty bitch. I see why your mom left.”

I was at them before I realized I was at them.

I heard Bella first. She was begging for me to stop, to leave, to go. Apologizing. Over and over. To them. She’s apologizing to them.

I stumbled back. Blood on my shirt, my company shirt. And then I was hit from behind. Face pressed against the cold scuffed linoleum. It smelled like the glue we use on auto glass. A knee on my neck. I saw the blonde girl. She was crying. Her head in her hands. A bloody nose. I spit and grunted, and they took me away.