Prince was a busy kid, an active fish in the school of offspring scattered up and down our country road. The day I saw him run down and kill a deer was when I knew my wife was correct: We were looking at “a diff’rent child.”
I’m not going to be polite and say he was a nice kid, or normal, lacking in any visible evidence of the traits that would lead him now to the public spotlight. It is, however, fair to say that the accomplishments for which he has become famous, and for which he apparently deserves full credit, were in no way suggested by my initial observation of the child born to our neighborhood.
I will say I’m shocked. I expected much different from Prince (his parents were fans of the rock musician). I expected a normal kid, for one thing. Out of courtesy, I shared that view discreetly. Only my wife knew what I thought. It was a comfort to me that she came to share my concerns.
We all saw Prince coming, month by month, year by year. We thought we knew his origins, but we knew nothing, really. Fawn and I lived on a small farm three miles outside Blissfield. I teach and Fawn cuts hair and we play in a country bar band. No children. None planned. None wanted, frankly. We have a few animals, so it was convenient to invite my mother to join us after Dad died. She occupied a small house just back from ours. I think the previous owner made it available to the Mexican man who managed his crops. That couple died and the government sent the Mexican man back to Guadalajara.
Mom was all excited to learn that the couple who lived across the gravel road from us were expecting. Bruce was a veterinarian. Lisa went to work for him as a tech and receptionist, and one thing led to another.
Mom had taken her chihuahua to Bruce. She grew fond of Lisa, who always gushed over Tootsie.
“T-u-t-s-i?” Lisa asked on their first visit, filling out paperwork.
“No, like Dustin Hoffman,” Mom said.
“Ohhh, right. Sorry.”
Mom always loved babies, but didn’t love children much, so her excitement grew in parallel with Lisa’s baby bump.
The arrival of another child, at least for our scattered community, was quite the event. Any excuse for a potluck buffet. Neighbors started showing up with bowls of slaw and potato salad, and the guys (why was it always the guys?) delivered platters of smoked ribs and sliced brisket. Lisa found herself in a swarm of well-wishers, wandering around with paper plates of food and cans of beer as she carried little Prince from one appreciative mother to another.
I sidled up to Roy Scarbrough, who farmed mint a half-mile east, and we sipped our beers and chewed the fat (literally), and finally he nodded toward the baby and said, “Looks a little off.”
“How you mean?”
“Like a factory second,” he said.
We chuckled. It was a view that became more widely shared, or held in smirking silence, by most of the males in our country colony. I wondered if any of the women had similar thoughts, but they’re generally too polite to say what they’re thinking about another woman’s child. At least in my experience. I would’ve been willing to bet money they opened up after they and their men gathered up their plates and bowls and headed home.
It’s hard for me to say what made me think Prince might become what some call “troubled.” I didn’t know for a fact that he would. It’s just that there were signs.
His eyes, for example. When we got our first look, I remember thinking he was actually pretty cute. I’m not much for babies, but I had to give him that. Then again, I tend to think that all babies are cute, until they aren’t. His head seemed less round than most. A bit flatter on top, wider between the ears. His eyes seemed distinctly larger than those of most babies. Some babies really look at you. Prince just looked through you. He never blinked.
His eyes as a baby had not yet begun to migrate toward the sides of his head. They did later, when his brow had begun to thicken and his eyebrows to lengthen. He was maybe three when I first noticed that his head looked more canid than hominid. I commented once on his eyebrows, and Lisa laughed as if she thought it the cutest thing. She said they had to trim them every week. “I should save it and stuff a pillow,” she said.
After he learned to walk, Prince started ranging outward from his yard. His parents seemed oblivious. When they weren’t at work and Prince at daycare, they were busy with their bicycles and ski gear and flower garden. I thought it healthy that they weren’t the helicopter type. One day, when I was returning a chainsaw I had borrowed from Bruce, I asked how he was enjoying being a dad. Just trying to be nice. No interest in bonding.
It was as if I had emptied a jug of water into a bucket of sand. My words just disappeared into a bottomless void. Bruce said nothing. Just stared over my shoulder, at something in outer space. Maybe a place he wanted to visit. He definitely had his bags packed.
It was as if they had a child because someone told them it was what you were supposed to do, and they did it, and that was that. No returns or refunds. You did what you were supposed to, like mowing the yard and not leaving car parts everywhere.
Bruce and Lisa were definitely hands off. Prince seemed to have the run of the neighborhood. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the value of a feral upbringing. My own mother turned me loose with Gila monsters and rattlesnakes in the Mojave Desert while she played bridge with her friends. No biggie. I don’t recall showing up unannounced on the front steps of people I didn’t know, ringing the bell, then mumbling incoherently when they answered the door and eventually asking for money. Like Prince. If I visited someone’s house, I had a reason. If Prince had reasons, they were well hidden.
One thing I never did was help myself to the possessions of my neighbors.
I never caught Prince in the act, but logic suggested his hand. I habitually left my garage doors open, but after I found several garden tools and a pair of shoes scattered along the road, I grew wary. Other neighbors had dogs, as did we, but few let them roam. One might have come in and grabbed the shoes. But a shovel and a weed whacker? The only potential culprit was Prince. I gathered up my stuff and put it away and tried to close my garage doors after that. It felt as if something larger had been taken from me.
I was on my way home from the high school where I taught social studies and auto shop and coached basketball and track. I glanced out at the field of corn near the Jefferson place. Prince was out there. He was maybe four or five at the time. He was down on all fours, digging rapidly with his front legs. His hands, actually, but he looked like he was preparing to bury a bone. He was kicking up a real rooster tail of dirt. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to unearth something, or create a cavity into which he could deposit something. Perhaps the stick in his mouth?
“Weird kid,” I told Fawn when I walked into the kitchen. She had made us grilled cheese and cream of mushroom soup.
“He’s not a moron,” she drawled. “He’s just a diff’rent child.”
Ahhh, there it was. Everybody has their own way of doing things. It gets cold in the winter around here. So I was used to seeing Prince with gloves on. At first, I gave it no thought when I saw him wearing gloves in July. In the country, people wear gloves all the time. Fixing fence. Bucking hay. Hauling irrigation pipe. The only time I saw Prince without gloves was the day he climbed the trunk of a huge old oak tree in their yard, like a raccoon. He didn’t need to ladder up like other kids. He just grabbed the bark and ran up the side of the tree into the canopy. I couldn’t hear it, but the other kids he was playing with at the time all ran off, screaming about Prince snarling.
Lying in bed that night, I thought about what I had seen. Then I told Fawn. “Strangest thing,” I said.
“Maybe you were dehydrated,” she said.
“No, I wasn’t dehydrated.”
“Just ‘cuz you can’t climb a tree no more, don’t mean that kid is …”
I wanted to ask Lisa if they let Prince out at night to hunt deer, but refrained. Besides, he was still a pup. Bringing home the venison could wait.
Only a year, as it turned out. I was taking out the garbage toward midnight once, and I saw a fleeting shadow across the road. Coyote, I thought. Next day, before anyone was up over there, I looked out and saw Prince on the front porch, chewing on something. A bit later, Bruce came out and dragged a nasty old deer carcass around back.
In the years after Prince had graduated from kindergarten to the early grades, he began to lean more and more forward. His arms seemed longer. Kids, when playing, will sometimes get down on all fours, like their pets, and chase around. I heard Prince more than saw him, but when I did see him, he was always on all fours, ambling in the loose, easy way that wolves do. The other kids gave him a wide berth. He would turn and look at me, and in those moments, I felt a chill in my chest. To think, that I had once feared the thought of him shooting up his school.
Not long after, I was out mowing the lawn and heard a commotion. He was out front of their place, playing some sort of space exploration game with toys inspired by one of those movies. Laser Wands, I think they called the devices. They were weapons, and telescoped at the push of a button, for dueling with beams of light. His wand was fully extended, but he wasn’t dueling other kids. He was using it to beat the shit out of their tree.
“Hey, Prince,” I called. “Go easy on that poor tree, OK, buddy?”
He turned toward me with a grim scowl, as if I had interrupted a surgical procedure well before he could get to the evisceration. Then he lifted his leg on the tree.
Prince seemed to yell a lot. He got that from his mom. She yelled toward him, and he toward her. Sometimes she yelled at him, and he yelled at her. But that isn’t a criminal offense. With advancing age, his upper jaw seemed to grow longer. It began to extend farther out than the lower jaw. His nose now perched on the end of this snout. His lower jaw slumped down, his tongue lolling and dribbling saliva everywhere. Around this time, his yelling took on an animal quality. Something of a shriek. He could really crank it up.
I was out front, messing with the hoses, when I heard group yelling from the yard of the neighbors to the south of Prince’s house. Lisa, who had been sitting on the porch reading a paperback in the spring sun, yelled Prince’s name and jumped to her feet. She sprinted down the road a hundred feet, past the cars parked in the driveway, and out of sight.
Prince’s howls jumped in volume. I heard Lisa yelling at him, and Prince screaming at her. It was too far off to make any sense of it. After a second, Lisa dragged Prince back toward their yard by one of his floppy ears.
“Put it down,” she yelled. “Now.”
Their neighbors raised chickens. Prince had one in his mouth, and was shaking it back and forth. Its head flapped loosely. Drops of blood sprayed in a semicircle. They stopped, and as Lisa held Prince by the neck, he let go of the chicken, and they resumed their march to “time out.”
I could barely make out her insistence to him that he always — “ALWAYS” — wear his shoes and gloves when he was outside, “because you don’t want your friends to make fun.”
When you hear something like that, you are likely, as I did, to pay a lot more attention to the paws of your 8-year-old neighbor boy than most would consider appropriate.
Lisa bought another chicken for the two girls who had lost theirs to Prince’s appetite. Their mother must have put an end to his visits, because I noticed Prince spending a lot more time around his own home. He had stopped standing by then, settling into a quadrupedal gait. He wore long sleeves and pants most of the time, but when it got hot, he would rip the clothing off with his jaws. Technically, he was still a kid, but if you figured it in dog years, he was middle-aged. Either way, he was a solid critter. As far as we knew, he hadn’t started shaving, but he had his work cut out for him. His entire body now featured a thick coat of hair.
Bruce and Lisa had taken to chaining him to a stake in the middle of their yard. He had attacked the back tire of the garbage truck and punctured it. On his lead, he would pace safely in circles as Bruce and Lisa puttered around the yard as if there were not a thing unusual about the scene.
Fawn and I would stand in our front room, staring out at Prince.
“What is he?” I asked once. Fawn had no answer.
I found myself thinking it might be good for us to consider moving away. Put some distance between the future child, the adolescent turning into a young and more intentional adult something-or-other, and the headlines he might write.
“I ain’t movin’,” Fawn said. “I got clients. They need me. I’m the only stylist in these parts.”
Not long after that chat, on a Saturday, I told Mom that I would take her into town so Fawn could give her a perm, and I could swing Tootsie by Bruce’s office for his shots. I dropped Mom off, and drove to the vet’s. I was standing there with Tootsie on a leash, waiting for Lisa to finish some paperwork, when the door tinkled open and Jeff Budrey came in. His kid played guard on our basketball team, and ran sprints in the spring.
Jeff had his dog on a leash. Big mix of a thing, long hair, pastiche of dark and golden brown and white coloration. Longish snout. Floppy ears.
“Who we got here?” I asked.
I felt as if I had met him before.
“This is Wilbur,” he said. “Flo and I are going to Calgary, and he’s spending a little R&R here with his girlfriend.”
Lisa came around the counter. She walked right past me and Tootsie and squatted in front of Wilbur. She grabbed his ears, put her face up to his muzzle, rubbed his head and down his sides.
“Who’s a good boy, Wilbur? Who’s the best boy EV-er? Everybody loves Wilbur. Lisa loves Wilbur. Lisa really does.”
She went on and on. I was a bit embarrassed for her.
“A little over the top with the PDA, Lisa,” I said.
She looked up and grinned. “We go way back,” she said.
Jeff seemed totally fine with it. It was probably how Lisa greeted every lodger, to make the owners feel less guilty about dropping them off at a kennel. Hard to have sex at the Super 8 in Calgary when you’re feeling sorry for your dog.
Lisa walked Wilbur into the back. Jeff waved as he departed.
I looked up and saw, for the first time, the Wall of Fame. As I waited for someone to come get Tootsie, I casually browsed the gallery. It featured many of the clinic’s patients. Cats. Dogs. Even snakes.
And Wilbur. A 10-years-younger Lisa squatted next to Wilbur, grinning widely, her arms around his head.
She was visibly pregnant.
I’ll just say it. That dog was the spitting image of Prince.
Or Prince of Wilbur.
I glanced after Lisa. In the back, Wilbur was standing on his hind legs, front legs over her shoulders. Tongue out. Like hers.
Without a word, Bruce emerged from an exam room, took Tootsie’s leash and led her back inside. I glanced again into the back. I could no longer see Lisa and Wilbur.
I sat and opened a yachting magazine. It didn’t do a bit of good.
About the Author
Stuart Watson has been honored for his work at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland, and has placed literary work in Bull, Yolk, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), The Writing Disorder, The Rush, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Muleskinner Journal and others, all published work accessible from chiselchips.com. He lives in Oregon.
About the Artist
Viggo Krejberg is a 21 Year Old Chicago based Artist and Animator. He attributes his work to being heavily inspired by artists such as Junji Ito, Bryan Lee O'Malley, and Ian Worthington. Updates on his art & current projects can be found on his Twitter @VKrejberg.
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