When I returned home at noon, Jackie wasn’t around. I kicked around the city all afternoon looking for things to do. But there was nothing. It was a doomed day. The air burnt my nostrils as it had the day I was chased by several boys through a tunnel at rush hour. The sun shone but the sky was a pale blue, almost gray. The chaos of car horns, children playing, and dogs barking made me sick to my stomach. My fingernails were caked with dirt.

Heard the news as the church bells were ringing at 6 P.M. Jackie’d been messing around and grabbed the wrong wire, that’s all. The fluttery electrical charge wasn’t enough to even burn his fingers, but it scared the shit out of him and he fell thirty feet off the power line. A paperboy found him lying beside one of the metal skeletons.

The doctors said it was a miracle that Jackie survived after the way he’d shattered the bones in his neck. I was grateful to whoever had the final say in whether or not to finish him off; there were conflicting reports. My grandmother cried, “It’s the devil’s work! It’s the devil’s work!” Twenty minutes later she said, “Why, God? Why did You do this?”

I was allowed to visit Jackie three days later. He was lying upside down in Rhode Island Hospital. Metal screws were drilled into his skull, but he said he felt great. When the old man left the room to speak with the doctors, Jackie asked me to make sure nobody was listening.

“You find any farms, Dunph?”

“’Course,” I said. I sat and turned my head so that I was looking up at him. “I saw this farm with about ten dogs out front so I asked the guy who lived there if he could use any more. You know, I explained the deal with the old man and all.”

“And?”

“And he took him. You know, at first he said he already had too many dogs and he had a bunch of sheeps and stuff, too, so he thought it might be a problem feeding him and all. But, you know, I told him all about Clops eating cats and how he hardly wouldn’t have to feed him at all. Then Clops comes running around the corner and, I’m telling you, the guy goes wild. Should’ve seen his eyes light up.”

Jackie smiled, and I got carried away.

“He loved Clops right away. Said he was either gonna use him as a show dog or he might just keep him around the farm for fox hunts.”

“Fox hunts?!”

“Yeah, he said Clops would be great as a fox-hunt dog. Looks so much like a fox he could probably blend right in and lead a whole family of dumbshit foxes right up to a bunch of hunters.”