Dog House

“Dog House” -- A Peggy Scribble
By Michael Kroetch

The nails of our porch were exposed in places. They would trip you if you weren’t careful. It happened often at night. It did every time my father’s friend Barney came to visit. His green canvas duffle bag would fly out of his hand and fall behind him in a heap, but this didn’t stop Barney. He continued forward, propelled by his own girth; his hand shooting out ahead to try and save him, his lips curling back, his cheeks hollowing out, fingers stiffening, until --- clang! --- he’d clunk face first into the huge rusted steel door we’d gotten from the light house at an auction.
He slept on our couch whenever he visited. I was always first up so I made him breakfast. He said his eggs had to be as tough as the skin of a lizard or he wouldn’t eat them. He’d been in prison. I always wanted to ask him about it, but Peggy said I shouldn’t. She said if I did, she’d tell Dad and then I’d be in the dog house real bad. She thought Barney had killed someone. It made sense to her that someone big like Barney would be a killer. And, she said, hadn’t I noticed that killers always had too many nosehairs?
I looked at Barney while he and I sat eating our rubbery eggs and the wind pounded the trees outside. Dad had met him at the bar. He was one of the few men that Dad liked. They often sat on a pile of rocks up the hill behind our house and smoked cigarettes until it got so dark you couldn’t see anything of them except two orange glowing dots. Because I couldn’t ask him about being in prison, I didn’t ever know what to say while we ate our eggs. All I could do was sit and watch him out of the corner of my eye, ready to jump and run away if he started to hold his butter knife in any unusual way.