The old man’s radiator shop was at the corner of Silva and Central streets in Pawtucket. It was a well-known landmark because of a once witty slogan the old man thought up and stamped all over the place, which I sometimes found embarrassing, like an old joke, and anyway not nearly as clever as the Rhode Island State Lottery ad which from the window proclaimed PICK A WINNER. The shop was called Pop’s—the old man’s nickname; he bragged that he’d earned the title “because I popped so many niggers when I was a boy.” He’d grown up on Federal Hill in Providence, the only Irish kid in an Italian neighborhood. In the good old days he and his paisans would venture into South Providence on Saturday nights and beat the shit out of black guys. “Now,” he said, “it’s crazy, you could get yourself killed going into South Providence. They’ve let the place go to hell.” For a long time my brother and I pretended to hate blacks. Figured we’d be fools not to. At some point, though, I realized that a lot of what the old man told me was bullshit. Like the time in first grade I asked him what the I.N.R.I. on the top of the crucifix stood for. He told me it meant “In Rhode Island.”

When I was thirteen, my old man wasted the family dog, Clops. It was inevitable. Clops liked to terrorize the neighborhood cats and had been identified as the cold-blooded savage who’d beheaded a local kitten. Later, when he was charged with ripping the jugular out of Mrs. Hanley’s Siamese cat (in front of the Hanleys’ horrified six-year-old daughter), the old man decided it was time.

My brother, Jackie, had found Clops down by the power lines two years earlier. The mangiest mutt I’d ever laid eyes on, he was the size of an emaciated fox and almost entirely bald except for blotches of fur scattered haphazardly on his body. He had only one eye and in the two years we knew him he never once used his right hind leg in our presence. Just let it hang there like an old man’s limp pecker. But love is blind, and Jackie believed that Clops was some kind of runaway royal pedigree. He once woke me in the middle of the night worried that Clops might be dognapped and exploited as a show dog. “Look at him,” he said. “How many dogs you know who can run on three legs?”

Right from the start the old man hated Clops’s guts. Not just the “You can’t keep the mutt” kind of hatred but the “Let’s put the fleabag to sleep” variety. Fortunately, Caveech loved dogs and said, “It’ll teach the kids maturity.”

“I’ll get them a real mutt then,” the old man said. “One with two eyes and four legs.”