In approaching a piece like Zebrun’s “Good Boy”, which traces the process of aftermath in a filicide case through protagonist and responding 911 operator Tommy, one may consider the ways in which grief, masculinity, and human-animal relationships function in the wake of acute violence. The root of Tommy’s fixation with said filicide case regards Sandy, the young victim’s beloved dog, who refuses to leave the boy’s side even in his death. Through utilization of our narrator’s interiority, memory, and sharp, resonant dialogue as he grapples with the aftermath of the case, Zebrun presents the reader with a number of questions for consideration, the chief of which seems to be: how do grief and love endure in equal measure?
Here are three questions to consider as you read:
- How do considerations of grief and masculinity intersect in this piece?
- As a story about aftermaths, we look here at the grieving process: what is explicit about it, and what underscores it?
- This piece considers the connection between the animal and the human. In what ways can we identify and interrogate mutual care between species?
—Julie Riedman, Fiction Editor
from Volume 14 of Ocean State Review
Good Boy
I call Bobby Cusumano who was the duty sergeant on the day that I took the 911 call from the bastard who killed his son. Bobby has seen my Tiffany Touchback drag show at Fugazi’s and even brought a contingent of friends. He’s one of the few brothers in blue who doesn’t give a shit if you’re gay, black, Latino or a three-legged apparition.
“You okay?” he asks. “That was some call you took on Sunday.”
“What can I say?”
He pauses. “I get it.”
“It’s the job.” I shrug, though he knows I’m not okay.
“Were you at the game last night?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Yeah, they had it in the bag and gave it away; like usual the Bills snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Billy is the prince of aphorisms. “Yeah, they choked,” I say.
I don’t want to talk football and tell him that there was a dog in the house when the kid was killed.
“Right. Fuckin’ shitshow. The dog didn’t want to leave the kid’s bed. I hear the mutt was covered in blood.”
“What happened to him?”
“Who?”
“The dog.”
“No one could get him down. They waited for Benjie, the dog whisperer. You just missed him; he was here filling out his report on what he saw at the scene.”
I ask Bobby if he could get me Benjie’s number. There’s something I need to know about the dog. He points out that he’s not used to a 911 operator following up. I tell him I’m having a hard time getting the dog out of my head, with more candor in my voice than I usually share when I’m struggling with a hard call. “I’d like to hear what he saw, if he’s willing to talk about it.”
I’ve sent Benji on so many animal rescue calls that I recognize his voice immediately, a comforting Garrison Keillor timbre. He loves dogs more than people. Once he told me that he can’t be in the room when a dog is put down. The executioner, that’s what he calls the staffer who does the killing, stopped asking for his assistance years ago.
“Benjie, it’s Tommy D, from 911.”
“Hey, you piloted the filicide.”
“Filicide?”
“Yeah, I can’t bear to put it into the actual concrete words, the father who killed his son,” he whispers, “not after the bloodbath I saw.”
“You okay?”
“No. Fuckin’ human beings. Can’t imagine a dog doing something like that to his progeny.”
“What happened to Sandy?”
“He’s curled up in a corner of a cage at the Oak Street shelter. He’s eating and drinking a little but not doing much else.” I get this crushing urge to go to the pound. “Gotta run, Benjie. If you want to talk . . .”
He cuts me off, and says, “Yeah, you too.”
I leave the Ducati in the backyard and drive there. On the radio the Buffalo Bills Day-after Show Breakfast with Sal is playing on WGR 550. Callers are talking about a naked fan after the game who covered himself in feces from a bunch of porta potties and was weaving in and out of cars and pick-ups trying to leave The Hammer; all the while he was singing the Bills Shout song, hey-ayyyyyyy-ayyyyyyy-ayy! The police think that he was on crack and LSD. One of the callers says, “No, the guy suffers from Bills Depression Syndrome.” A fan since the sixties manages to call it what is emblematic of the floundering team; he blurts it out before the censor can cut him off. “Shitshow, just like the Bills themselves.”
The entry to the animal shelter resembles a prison intake. No one is at the desk. Behind it there’s a track sign with missing letters, several of them on the floor. It’s inscrutable, like scrabble from the game show Wheel of Fortune: TO Y’S GO D DEE: BE OOD TO Y OU AN
MA S. What the fuck, I think, fixing on the letters until I finally see: TODAY’S GOOD DEED: BE GOOD TO YOUR ANIMALS. The room is murky, its only light a couple dim flickering fluorescents. There’s a machine pinging nearby, and the back of my throat bristles from the residue of bleach in the air. My eyes water. The kennel door is locked, the paint scratched off from dogs who resisted going in. There’s a speaker buzzer on the wall.
“Yeah,” someone says.
“I’m the 911 operator who took the call from the father who killed his kid. I want to see the dog.”
“What dog?”
“Just buzz me in.”
“I’m the only one back here. Everyone went to a funeral for a vet. I’m a volunteer. I don’t think I should let anyone in until they get back.”
I lie, “Listen, I’ve got a badge.”
There’s silence for longer than I’d expect until he buzzes me in.
“Show me the badge,” he says.
I fish out my 911 police ID and say I left the badge at home. He looks it over and nods.
“What’s the pinging noise I heard in the entry?”
“The anesthesia machine. A dog was put down about an hour ago. They forgot to shut it off and I don’t want to mess with it.”
Inside the kennel the caged dogs’ whining, barking, and wailing are deafening.
“Is it always this loud?”
“It’s worse when the door opens and someone new comes in. I don’t know what you want from him. It’s not like you can interrogate a dog. Just don’t upset him.” My presence in the corridor has ratcheted up the racket, now an ear-piercing cacophony triggering the dogs’ fears and who knows what other anxieties. Whimpers are drowned out. Baying crescendos and then collapses in exhaustion, only to begin all over again. I wince.
“I’m Joey,” he says.
“I do stuff for the animals. I don’t get paid. I just like dogs, cats, rabbits, birds. Don’t have much use for ferrets; an infected one bit me once and I needed to get the rabies booster, couldn’t move the shoulder they poked for days. At least the booster is in the arm muscle, not like the five you get in the butt. I don’t go near the reptiles. They spook me.”
Joey looks like he’s fifteen years old, but he tells me he decided to skip college this year and maybe go in 2014.
“That’s seven years from now, why wait so long.”
“I like to make life changes in brackets of seven.”
With all the noise, it’s hard to concentrate on what he’s saying. He starts telling me why seven is the perfect number. “It’s everywhere, 7-Eleven, Seven Days in May, Seven Deadly Sins, 7 Up, God rested on the seventh day, I could go on.” He says he loves math almost as much as dogs and cats, and while I don’t want to offend him, I can’t get Sandy out of my head the whole time he’s talking. I interrupt him and ask, “Where’s the dog?”
“Which one? We got a lot of dogs.” I’m starting to think that he’s either dimwitted or playing with me.
“Like I said when I came in, the dog who wouldn’t leave the kid after his father killed him.”
“That was wack.”
I raise my voice over the din.
“I took the 911 call. I want to see him.”
“You talked to the kid?”
“No, his father.”
“You didn’t talk the dude down?”
I cringe. “The kid was already dead.”
“You know that?”
The dogs’ racket is making my temples throb.
“Jesus, just take me to the dog.”
“Maybe he’s better left alone. The trauma, you know.” He can tell he’s making me angry.
“Where the fuck is Sandy?”
“Who?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Joey.”
“Didn’t know his name is Sandy. I guess it’s okay, you being in law enforcement and at the scene, so to speak.”
“Where is he?”
“About 10 cages on the left. He’s the only yellow lab we got. He’s curled up in the corner. Wait a second.” He leaves and returns with earmuffs. “Here, if you’re going to be here awhile, you need these.”
On each side of me are dogs in different states of abandonment. On the cages tags are pinned identifying their natures: CALM, NERVOUS, FIERCE. A silent pittie with scars on its coat and eyes so wide open you could fly right through them; three chihuahuas huddled together that at first glance look like dead bloated ants; a herding mix with her snout sticking out a hole in the metal mesh like she’s contrite and saying, see, I muzzled myself; a husky pogoing, then flailing itself against the cage door; and a shaggy mutt circling the concrete floor like he’s lost in his own head. I’m stopped in my tracks by a dog so massive that he almost fills the entire space. He’s standing, staring at me with brown melancholy eyes the color of singed bark.
“What kind of dog is he?”
“She’s a Japanese Tosa, 175 pounds, a fierce fighting dog banned in a shitload of countries—Norway, Denmark, England—but not here. Never seen one in Buffalo before. The mother of a gang member who was arrested a week ago surrendered her. Bora Bora seems chill despite the FIERCE tag on the cage. Unpredictable, I guess. Just by her looks, though, her days are numbered.” She plops down on the concrete and whines.
“That’s the dog,” Joey says, pointing to Sandy curled in the corner of the next cage, shivering. “Sorry about the shit and piss on the floor. I’ve got seventy cages to clean. It takes all day, then someone else starts all over again. Wait, don’t go in yet.”
He comes back with a footstool. “You can sit on this. Don’t worry about him biting you. Someone put the wrong tag on the cage. It should be NERVOUS, not FIERCE. I don’t have the authority to change it.”
When I open the cage, Sandy lets out a feeble growl more like a plaintive plea than the fear contained in it. He’s curled in the corner, his lower half on a blanket, his head and chest pinned to the bare concrete. One side of his face is turned toward me. I stand at the entry for a while and in the softest voice I can find, even though I know nothing is okay for him, I go, “It’s okay, guy. It’s okay.” He doesn’t raise his head, no response except for trembling that hasn’t ceased. “I’m going to sit with you, if that’s okay.” The footstool is plastic, neon green with a wide,
piggybank slit down the middle of the seat, its four legs poking in his direction. Sandy has suddenly fixated on it, giving it the frightened whale eye, the outer white sclera slipping into a half-moon. He’s licking his lips. “It’s okay, Sandy.” I leave the stool behind and slowly approach him. I believe the sound of his name elicited a slight rise of his head, though it could have been just a nervous twitch. There are feces and a puddle of piss in the corner across from us. About four feet away, I say, “I’m going to sit right here, if that’s okay, Sandy.” He raises his head slightly, the whale eye gone. He watches warily as I shift my weight onto the front of my leg and inch my knee to the floor. I’m careful not to make a sudden movement. I brace my other side with my hand on the cold concrete and sit cross-legged. He’s still trembling but doesn’t seem anymore freaked than when I came in. I look around the cage, only occasionally meeting his eyes. I tell him “when I was a kid I used to go to the zoo and talk to Eddie the chimpanzee. He had a spiky white beard, long arms, and sunken eyes, a little like yours. But he was ugly, not like you, and he knew it. As he got older, he used to throw feces at visitors, but never at me. I’d only go when no one else was around and sit outside the fence. Early in the morning after the zoo just opened and after he had eaten a banana and grapes, peanuts, and sometimes hard-boiled eggs; or I’d visit the last half-hour before his keeper took him back to his cage in an ornate building with murals and terrazzo floors in the long dark hallway he looked out on. He never seemed happy, and I think he could see I didn’t either. Sometimes he’d get bored and climb a tree about 10 feet away, but he’d always return and sit and listen to me talk about my father who didn’t give a shit about anyone except himself, or about the cute boy in biology who gave me a hard on when he placed tasting sticks on my tongue in a taste perception experiment—sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savory; or how I sometimes wanted to break out of the house, flee to California and learn to surf. Eddie never howled at me. He never spit at me through his rubbery-looking lips. He never pounded his chest like he wanted to deck me. When I knew him, Eddie was retired. He used to be a showman. The zoo sometimes dressed him up like a woman (I felt a kindred drag spirit, hearing this); he’d dance what his trainer called the Zoological Conga and twirl and do loops from a tree branch. There was a popular skit he did long before I knew him. His trainer would sit in a barber chair, covered in a barber shop sheet, while Eddie lathered the guy’s cheeks and shaved him. I used to wonder, Sandy, if Eddie, old and tired, no longer the reluctant performer, ever imagined slitting his keeper’s throat. I know all about his past because there’s a video of Eddie doing his acts in the Buffalo Museum of Science, in a room where his taxidermy is on display. I went once, but couldn’t bear to see him again like that, so lifelike and motionless.”
Sandy’s stopped trembling. He shifts his body so that most of it is on the blanket. He’s angled himself so that his face is looking at me, both eyes fixed, still wary but with less trepidation now. I had grabbed a handful of training bits that were in a bowl behind the desk in the intake and fish one out of my pocket and show it to him. There’s no discernible response, so I inch forward still crossed legged until I’m an arm’s length from him and place the treat between my fingers close to his snout. He looks at me. I feel his breath on my hand as he sniffs it and turns away. “It’s good,” I say. “You’ll like it.” He sniffs it again and gives himself enough space so that he can take it gently from me. “Good boy,” I say, “good boy.” He gives me a look like he wants me to know he’s heard that before. I open my hand and bring it to the space where his chest meets his neck and he lets me give him a few slow scratches with the tips of two fingers before he turns his head away, but not before I can feel matted fur. I lower my head and can see it’s a spot of congealed blood that somehow escaped the bath he got when he came in. “Jesus,” I say, “that’s Jamie’s blood.”
The name startles Sandy, and he jumps up, whimpers, looks around the cage before he bolts to the other end. “I’m sorry,” I say, as if I believe he understands. “Sandy, I’m sorry.” He just stands there awhile until I fish out another treat and hold it up. Warily, he creeps back and takes it. “Good boy,” I say, “good boy,” and he surprises me, sits beside my leg, resting his head on my thigh. We’re silent for a long time while I stroke the top of his head, gently massage the side of his neck, avoiding the spot of caked blood, until I rest my open palm on his flank. I’m careful not to mention Jamie again as I talk to Sandy about so many things I haven’t told anyone.
Gary Zebrun is the author of three novels, Someone You Know, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, Only The Lonely, and Hart Island, finalist for the 2024 Ferro-Grumley Award for Best LGBTQ fiction and the 2024 Publishing Triangle Joseph Hansen Award in LGBTQ Crime Writing. His prose and poetry have appeared in The Common, The New Republic, The New York Times, Iowa Review, Sewanee, and other places.