Velociworld

REX

Here's a benighted tale of a puppy with bad joss.

When we'd been on the farm about a year the Senator brought home a white German Shepherd puppy, whom someone named Rex. A beautiful dog, and one we could be proud of, because our mutt Brutus was a pathetic looking thing, full of hookworms and sporting a stiffened back leg from a bad break setting by an alcoholic veterinarian. We called him the Running Corpse, because he was rather swift with the gimp leg, and all, but his skeletal form was off-putting to visitors. He had the look of a beaten, gunpowder fed junkyard dog, although he was actually very sweet of disposition. He was just, you know, tacky.

But Rex! Ah, Rex. A magnificent canine, who surely would grow into a sublime, respectable animal companion, fit for nouveau riche graspers lording it the fuck over the tarpaper-shack white trash neighbors from our fecund acreage.

But alas. After we'd had the whelp a couple of weeks, we piled into the Karmann Ghia one Sunday morn, my eldest sister driving, to attend services. And not just any church, but a fundamentalist woodframe of unrecollectable sect in Tusculum, Georgia, imbibers of grape juice, eschewers of alkeehol, hitchers of britches, thumbs under the armpits with fingers splayed, all righteous American Gothic preening under the guise of humility.

Because we were sleepy-headed children, who could not arise early enough most Sundays to drive nearly an hour for proper Anglican worship in Savannah. But to church we would go under penalty of the tiger-toothed belt, and at any rate this church was actually rather docile, not like the creepy place in Egypt, Georgia, where the elders looked quite decidedly like they absolutely craved, lusted to whip your naked buttocks so deeply you could see their turgid, anxious cocks bulging beneath their dungarees.

Okay, maybe I just sensed that, but that doesn't mean it wasn't true.

Back to Rex. Thankfully. Mercifully.

And so, as we five bumptious children piled into that VW, tardy as usual, my sister popped it in reverse and backed up, only to feel that bizarre wha-whump! as if we had driven over a croker sack of peanuts, or something. But that was no goobers. That was Rex, too young to understand the dangers of sleeping underneath the faux security of a wheel well.

And so we piled back out, like Keystone Kops, only nobody was laughing, because Rex had taken an enormous trauma to the abdomen. No longer the snow white pup, he looked like what I later in life saw to be clubbed baby seals, bloody, awful.

Instant hysteria amongst us younguns, of course, and we fetched the old man, who was inside with Shorty, our resident squatter and diesel mechanic (and what was Shorty doing at our abode that early of a Sunday? Obviously groveling for the only bonded whiskey extant in that dry county of a Sabbath. Which was probably why my sainted mother was not attending church with us, wisely deciding to play school marm to the naughty boys with the powerful thirsts).

The Senator, being a delegater, and decision maker, made us leave for church while he and Shorty would take Rex to the vet in Statesboro, about 25 miles as the buzzard pukes. We sniffled through services, anxious, only to find poor Rex buried by the time we returned. They said the vet couldn't save him, and it was a couple of years before we realized they'd never made it past the White Gate Fence at the end of the lane before Rex was either expired, or terminated with a .32 round in a gesture of humanity.

And so the issue before us today: how could a benevolent God permit such a tragedy to befall 5 little True Believers, who kilt their baby puppy in an effort to worship Him? I figure Jesus must have been sneaking a Kool outside the Pearly Gates (No Smoking in Heaven. They told you that, didn't they?). He never would have permitted such a travesty.

My mother said something about how He works in mysterious ways. Cruel ways, I would add. Never much of a fan of smokum and hokum after that. Felt a bit betrayed, I did.

Brutus seemed okay with the whole thing, though. Rookie, I'm thinking he muttered. All flash, no cash. Oh, but his days were numbered, too. But that is for another day.