Even watching him smoke or eat was a scary thing. He always seemed to have a cigar jutting out beneath his lemon lip, and when he struck a match to relight the cigar, an action he performed hundreds of times a day, all of the terrible contours of his face would be illuminated. His favorite meal, which he took daily in a little break room just off the wash bay, was pickled eggs and pigs’ feet with a side of saltine crackers. The eggs he covered in salt and pepper before consuming them in a single bite. When these were gone he moved on to the pigs’ feet, sucking the meat from bone and tendon before spitting the white knuckles onto the floor before him, a terrible sight to behold. Once, when I was sitting in the break room with him, Billy Dan attempted to share his lunch with me, his hand jutting out into the space between us to reveal a pig’s foot resting atop a clean paper towel.
“No thanks,” I said.
But this only caused him to shake the tidbit before me, his terrible green eyes urging me to try it.
“Okay,” I said, afraid to give any other answer. But when I put the pig’s foot in my mouth, and felt the cold, rubbery flesh on my tongue, I immediately gagged, spitting the unclean thing out at Billy Dan’s feet.
He squealed with delight, holding his head back to reveal a single upper tooth, just to the right of his nose. Seeing that lonely tooth shook me even more than seeing the white pigs’ knuckles arrayed on the floor.
As terrified as I was of Billy, his mere presence in the Yard often made me feel safer and less alone. One day, he even saved my life—or at least I believed he did. I was lying on my back beneath a junker Impala, pretending to change the oil, when suddenly I heard a rattling sound just to the left of my ear. Slowly I rolled my eyes in that direction, and coiled next to me, just inside the car’s front tire, was a rattlesnake. I froze, my mouth going dry, heart beating wildly within my chest. I knew it was the end. Any second and the snake would bite me in the face or neck, and I’d be filled with poison and die. But then, just when I was about to give up the ghost, I heard the roar of Billy Dan’s goose coming down the sand road at my feet. Eyes still closed, I focused on that sound as it grew louder and louder. Finally Billy Dan’s goose shot past in a cloud of diesel smoke, and as the sound of it died away, I opened my eyes to see that the snake was gone, as vanished from this earth as if St. Patrick himself had appeared to banish it.
* * *
More terrifying than snakes and ogres were the junkyard dogs my father kept on the place to guard the parts from thieves. He always had a soft spot in his heart, a special love, for these terrible brutes, and they returned this love twentyfold. My father was the only person at the salvage yard who could go into their kennel near the racks of hubcaps to feed them, just as he was the only person who could fit their mouths with the leather muzzles they wore during the day so they wouldn’t bite customers. Theirs was a jealous, protective love. Woe be unto the customer who argued with or raised his voice around my father, for he would soon find a growling, low-slung German shepherd poised next to him, as if awaiting the command to kill. My father never bought, bred, or went out of his way to acquire any of these dogs. People brought them to him. A station wagon or pickup would roll to a stop in front of the office, a harried-looking man would get out and ask for my father, and the two of them would stand talking and looking through the windows of the car at the beast jailed within.
“He’s been biting people,” the man would begin. “I promised the neighbors I’d have him put down. But then a guy told me you sometimes take on dogs like this.”
“Does he bite you?” my father would ask.
And the man would answer with a yes or no, and the dog would be brought out of the car on a chain or leash, and my father would look it over, and if the vibe was good and he liked the dog, soon he would be scratching behind its ears and talking to it in a low voice. “Been biting people, huh, Shep? That’s no good. No good at all . . .”
A little longer and the dog would be licking his hand or burying its head in his lap.
“What do you think?” the man would ask.
“I can’t promise you I’ll keep him,” my father would say with a shrug. “But we can certainly give him a try.”
In this way, my father acquired a half dozen or more junkyard dogs, all of them troubled in some way, unmanageable by anyone but him. Almost without exception, they were “one person” dogs, saving all of their affection and trust for my father. Everyone else—including women, children, the elderly and infirm—they looked upon with distrust and hatred.
I first came into contact with these dogs when I was four or five years old, and from the beginning I was deeply afraid of them. Although my father kept the dogs muzzled during the day, that didn’t stop them from chasing me and knocking me down. I’d be playing in some remote part of the Yard, and out of nowhere the dogs would appear, their presence announced by a low growl from somewhere deep inside their throats. Once, I was playing twenty yards or so from their kennel when two of the dogs cornered me. I stood up, terrified, careful not to look the dogs in the eye. I’m done for, I thought. They’re gonna kill me for sure.
But then my father appeared and called the dogs off. “What were you doing to annoy them?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Well, I wouldn’t let them see you playing with those,” he said, nodding at the hubcaps scattered across the concrete floor. “They eat their dinner in those. They probably thought you were going to steal their food.”
Although I was happy to be rescued, I still held a special grudge against the dogs—and, in a way, against my father—that did not abate until the day I happened to see them in action.
It was a Sunday morning. We had been at Mass in town and still wore our church clothes when my father and I drove out to the salvage yard to give the dogs their breakfast. My father unlocked the door to the Front and switched on lights one by one as we walked down the long corridor past the hubcaps to the closet where the dog food was kept. Having filled a couple of hubcaps with kibble, we carried them outside to the wash bay, where my father whistled for the dogs to come get their breakfast. Usually when he did this, the dogs came bounding from two or three different parts of the Yard at once. On that day, however, none of the dogs came. All we got was a bark or two from some distant part of the Yard.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” my father said. “You stay here and I’ll go and see.”
“No,” I answered, afraid. “I’m not staying here. What if they come back?”
He thought about this a moment, then said, “All right, you can come. But stay right by me, and if I tell you to stay back, you stay back. Got it?”
“Yes.” I took his hand in mine and held it tight. We began to zigzag across the Yard in the direction from which we had heard the barks.
The ground rose slightly in that direction, and wrecked cars were stacked high on either side of us. As a result, we couldn’t see more than a dozen yards ahead of us at any time. However, the closer we got, the louder the dogs barked. Finally we turned a corner, and there, high atop a wrecked van, sat a couple of long-haired men in dirty jeans and ripped T-shirts. Beneath