The boy and his daddy had had other dogs. There was Duke the half-coyote who could climb a ladder at the lumber yard but was poisoned by a hateful neighbor. There was little yellow Susie, who had litter after litter and whose teats hung halfway to the ground when she was nursing. Susie was a source of astonishment to some beautiful high school girls who found the boy's explanation, "She has puppies," inadequate. There was the second Duke, whose left front leg was snapped when he ran in front of the big black Buick of some family friends in the driveway late one winter afternoon. They had his leg set and a cast put on, but he chewed it off and ended up having to be euthanized. A lot of things can happen to a dog, the boy had learned.

 

           There was another Jack a couple of years later, a trained Weimaraner who limped into Victory footsore and evidently lost from a hunting party. The city maintenance men knew the boy and his daddy were bird hunters and gave them the Weimaraner. He was a great dog, retrieving doves and ducks, swimming out with his webbed feet and pointing and retrieving quail. The boy started a game with the second Jack in which the dog carried dead birds by their heads as he ran up happily. The boy pulled the birds away and left the heads in the second Jack's mouth for him to chew them up, grinning his big doggy grin.

 

            Daddy liked to hunt because he was an ex-Marine who had fought on Bougainville and Guam. He was excellent with any type of gun. They had lived in the country when the boy was in the second grade, and that was when he saw his daddy could do extraordinary things with guns. They lived about a hundred yards from the dirt road, and there was an old mangy cur dog who lived wild and had been coming around looking for things to eat. The boy was playing by the road and saw the dog coming, moving pretty fast with his tongue hanging out. He knew it would come to him and he did not really want it to because it was dirty. Then he saw Daddy stepping quickly out of the house with his rifle, an eight-millimeter Mauser bolt-action, hurriedly wrap the sling around his left arm and take aim. The dog was fifteen or twenty yards in front of the boy when the rifle went "blooey!" and the dog collapsed on his jaw and the top of his skull went spinning up like a furry flying saucer -- some distance up, though not as high as the top of the adjacent telephone pole, as it had seemed then.

 

            The first Jack was a Boxer given to Daddy by a friend. Daddy was a blacksmith-welder who owned a large shop in town that his daddy, known to the family as Papa, had established in the early 1930's. The second Jack was always Daddy's dog, but the first Jack was the boy's. He was big for a Boxer with terrific vitality and alertness. They started keeping dog food at the shop, different kinds of meat because Jack was still growing and always hungry. When they weren't working on trailers or tractors or heating plowpoints red in the forge and sharpening them with the triphammer and beveling them on the big-belted grinder, the boy would open a can or two and knock the meat out with the heel of his hand and let Jack catch it, chomp it three or four times and swallow it.

 

            The boy got the bat game going like the bird heads game with the second Jack. They had a baseball, some gloves and a bat because Daddy had once been a pitcher -- a talent that helped him survive the war as a valued hand grenade-throwing specialist. Thirteen or fourteen, the boy would get the bat from behind the triphammer and start Jack to biting it. He had the idea of strengthening the dog's neck, but he never jerked it around too hard because Daddy said to be careful and not break his teeth. However, as Jack grew bigger and stronger and the boy more adept, the game got more violent. Jack loved the bat game. He never brought the bat, wanting to play as some dogs would, but came running every time the boy brandished it.

 

            The game took on an ineffable character as the boy learned his part and Jack became so powerful. He attacked as though killing a deer, barking and growling ferociously. He launched into it with complete ferocity, slobber flying as he assaulted it with his hind legs working like a fast-stepping prizefighter and his head snapping from side to side on his bulging neck. He crunched it so hard that the splinters would be falling onto the dirt floor between the forge room and the trailer room with the big sliding door that opened to the paved street outside. The first Jack bit and shook so hard that the boy's arms would be jerking around and he could barely hold on. They kept it up until the bat barrel was all chewed up and getting thinner and men started gathering around to watch. They began getting requests. Four or five men would be in the shop, one would say something to Daddy and he would say, "Go get the bat."

 

            The boy knew dogs because he fed them, Creosote-dipped them in a big hole in the backyard, bobbed and sutured their tails when they were puppies, forced raw eggs down their throats when they were sick and wept when they died. He understood that beneath their domesticity and love of people, they had wild hearts and could lose their heads if pushed far enough. That was why Jack would bite higher and higher on the handle and the boy would finally have to let go to avoid having his fingers bitten. As soon as the bat became inanimate, Jack lost interest and trotted away. They prized him a lot. So it was with long-lasting consternation that he disappeared and they realized he had been stolen. The boy remembered the semi-circles of men who had watched and knew it must have been one of them. He had never paid attention; they were just anonymous shadows in his memory.

 

            Without ever saying who had done it, Daddy said somebody saw a pickup stop beside the shop, pick Jack up and drive off with him. A little while later, he told the boy he had learned who it was and gone there. It was some sort of gangster farmer who lived south of another town. They had been stripping cotton when Daddy drove up and got out, saw Jack and said, "I believe that's my dog."

 

            "No, he ain't," the farmer said. "We've had him since he was a pup."

 

            Daddy did not back off easily, but the man had a hired hand jump down from a cotton trailer and drive him away with a pitchfork. The boy thought Daddy would have gone to the sheriff if the farmer had stolen something of more tangible value; but as much as he liked Jack, it was not important enough to make it a public issue.

 

            There no more dialogue about it for a few years, but the boy sometimes pictured Jack in the farmer's possession and felt hot resentment. They now had the second Jack, who was actually much more useful, and kept him in a pen or the fenced backyard to obviate a repetition. But the first Jack was never far from the boy's consciousness. One day when they were feeling cordial, he asked with false offhandedness, "So who stole Jack?"

 

            Daddy looked at him alarmedly and said, "No! I don't want you going out there."