THE DOGS AND THE BITCH
On prison property, where prisoners from the
nearby Correctional Facility worked, starving dogs showed up like a sudden
outbreak of disease and started digging up everything in the well cultivated
vegetable patches. They must have been dogs still famished from the winter, who,
wandering from place to place, came upon the vegetable patches of this property.
There were ten or fifteen of them, lean, wild, constantly squabbling with each
other, growling and barking at each other, yet still united as a pack to defend
themselves against stronger attackers.
The warden picked up a gun and killed several dogs, and the
others ran off, only to return again, this time staying out of his sight. The
warden and the prisoners thought that the crazed dogs would disappear because
they left the carcasses of the slain ones right where they had been shot. But a
combination of hunger and madness brought the dogs back to the vegetable patches
of the property, where they sniffed and rooted around, but they fled into the
fields when the foreman would appear with his gun.
Then the warden was struck with a thought: perhaps these dogs
roamed together because of the bitch in the prison yard, a yard that extended
into the fields. She was a street dog, but well fed and covered in soft, shiny
black fur, with spots of white on her chest. The bitch had been kept there
several years already, frolicked with the prisoners who gave her a bite to eat
every now and then, and a prisoner serving a five-year term for rape took
special care of her. He seemed to be a gentle man, though often absentminded,
unable to concentrate on one thing for very long, as if he were a young child.
He often played with the bitch, petted her, fed her, and walked her around the
yard; and she was attached to him.
The warden summoned him and ordered him to bring the bitch
and tie her under the window of his office, which was on the ground floor of the
building, immediately next to the entrance. The prisoner, visibly upset, twisted
his cap between his hands, shifting his weight from one foot to the other,
waiting for further explanation, as if he had not understood. The warden had no
intention of explaining, yelling sharply instead that he should get the bitch
and do what he was told. The prisoner left and did what he had been ordered to
do—he tied her under the office window and waited.
"Get out of here and go back to work," the warden yelled. The
prisoner left, but he kept turning around. The bitch lay under the window in the
warm sun of the early spring morning. The warden thought that the dogs would be
attracted to the bitch, who was already pregnant, but whose scent probably still
lingered and attracted them. With this strategy, he planned to kill them one by
one.
Indeed, after a while several of the dogs approached the
bitch: two of them started fighting, and a third one tried to mount her, tied as
she was, frightened, defending herself only with yelps under the weight of the
dog. The warden fired at them, and the two who fought let out yelps and died,
while the third ran toward the fields. Good bait, thought the warden,
pleased—they'll be back. He called one of the prisoners walking by and ordered
him to remove the carcasses.
He was looking over some accounts in his office when he heard
wild barking and yelping, and he thought, here they are again. So he ran out
with his gun, but now the bitch lay there in a pool of blood, killed with a log
by the prisoner who had looked after her and was her friend; other prisoners
were gathered around him, staring at him speechlessly, waiting to see what the
warden would say and do.
"What have you done, man, what did she do to you?" he called
out, and the prisoner, the log in his hand, batted his eyelids and tried to
explain, but words would not come out of his mouth.
The warden approached the bitch and said in a softer voice,
"Why did you do it?"
The prisoner found his composure somewhat, and still
trembling and stuttering said, "She attracted the dogs here, but now they won't
come here, they’ll leave."
There was nothing to do in this situation except make the
onlookers get back to work on the property and punish the culprit with one of
the usual punishments for insubordination: one week of cleaning the latrines.
"And now take that carcass to the dump," said the warden.
Seeing the pools of blood from the bitch and the dogs, he turned once again in
disgust and added, "Clean the yard too, I don’t want to see a drop of blood.
Clean it up and put new sand on top of it."
He entered his office again, his thoughts wandering here and
there, something still seeming amiss in the incident. According to the calendar,
spring had not yet arrived, but the whole week had been warm, awakening new
fragrances, revealing green grass; warm vapors rose from the soil, heating the
bare branches of the trees, the masses of which shifted in the warmth, like an
old man’s body is heated in the gentle sun, awakening the blood in his heated
veins, bringing new power to his stiff muscles.
The warden felt all this in his office, the window open, the
sun shining from morning till afternoon. There was still a lot of work to do on
their tract of land. It had to speed up, he had to get these lazy bastards
moving.
He looked through the window as the prisoner loaded the
carcass of the bitch onto a wheelbarrow. Suddenly he remembered something. He
pressed the bell, and the guard on duty entered.
"Send me one of the trustees, I have a job for him."
The guard left, and a bit later a man convicted as the result
of a traffic accident entered; he had been in pain every day of his prison term,
and his two years dragged by slowly, though he was sent home from time to time,
for good conduct. He stood before the warden, bareheaded in keeping with
regulations, and he waited with the anxiety every prisoner felt, because you
never knew what might happen—would he be punished because of some grievance,
something somebody noticed and reported, or would he be given some assignment?
The warden looked at this convict, who had visibly aged in
his one year in prison. Could he trust him? Would he do as he was told, or would
he remain in solidarity with the other prisoner?
"You see him," he said, indicating the prisoner who had
placed the bitch in the wheelbarrow and was now sweeping the yard with a large
broom made of twigs. "Follow him to the dump, but don’t let him see you. See
whether he takes the bitch there, notice what he does, remember it, and report
to me." He thought a moment. Here are these binoculars. He passed them over the
table to him, and, as if in afterthought, mentioned the reward for this job, "If
you do a good job, you go home this weekend."
He dismissed the convict. He continued looking through the
window, not able to return to his accounts. He contemplated how some resistance
had grown in him over the years of working here, seeing all kinds of people, as
well as some doubt concerning all of these convicts, who were, of course, both
good and evil, both feeble-minded and treacherous. But at times he felt that his
long stay here had relegated all these different characteristics to a common
moral sphere, to a kind of insanity that contorted the known notions of good and
evil, honesty and dishonesty, courage and betrayal. And, as doctors who treat
the insane become more or less insane themselves, had he too become infected
with the madness of these convicts and adopted their worldviews? Coarseness for
coarseness, mistrust for mistrust, violence for violence. Mistrust toward
everybody and everything—it seemed to him the first indication that he was
distancing himself from the most humane characteristics of people: belief in
others, belief in beauty.
He forced himself to go back to work. Much time passed before
the guard on duty delivered the convict who had been sent after the prisoner
with the bitch. Once they were alone, he addressed him, "So? How did it go?"
There was something odd about the way the convict stood
there. He fidgeted, thinking of how to say what would be needed, as needed. The
warden discerned what he was thinking, that he wasn't comfortable, so, in spite
of regulations, he indicated the chair in front of the desk.
"Sit down. How about some coffee? A cigarette?"
The convict sat but jumped up immediately, knowing that he
was doing something not permitted, that he could be falling into a trap.
"No, thank you. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink coffee."
"Sit down," said the warden impatiently. "Speak up."
"He didn’t notice me," the convict said.
"Good. So?"
"Here are your binoculars," he said, putting them on the
desk.
"Come on, how did it go?"
"He slit the bitch open… he ripped her apart," the convict
said.
"What the hell!" the warden yelled. What's this all about? he
thought.
The convict leapt up off the chair, frightened by the
outburst. He waited, cap in hand.
"What else did he do?"
"He was checking the insides. As if he was looking for
something."
"Did he take anything?"
"I don’t think so."
"You think so, or you’re sure?"
"I didn’t see him taking anything."
"You’re sure?"
The convict thought. "I think I’m sure," he said.
"Dismissed," the warden said. "And I don’t have to tell you
to be quiet about this."
The convict stood, as if he were expecting something else.
"Be here on Friday. You’ll get your pass."
"Thank you," the convict said, backing out.
It was all very strange, and he couldn’t think of a reason
for the prisoner to act this way. He looked through the window at the grounds.
The sunny day revealed a tidy and clean park, and there, between the trees, the
fields appeared, where the prisoners worked. It was truly an extraordinary piece
of ground, it paid off well, and it was all his doing. What could he be looking
for in the bitch’s insides? Again his thoughts wandered there. Did he hide
something inside the bitch? Did he give her something that, if discovered on
him, would result in punishment? What could be the reason for his behavior?
He noticed that the prisoner who had killed the bitch and
taken it to the dump had returned, left the wheelbarrow next to the green fence,
taken a shovel, and was getting ready to go back to work. He called to him
through the open window. The prisoner jumped in fright, because the call was
sudden. He started shaking, approaching the window.
"Get inside!" the warden ordered the prisoner, whose anxiety
had not diminished. He tried to shut the door behind him and just barely
succeeded. He stood near it, as if ready to flee. The warden, in a quieter but
still frightening voice, asked him directly, "Why did you slice open the bitch?
What were you looking for inside her?"
The prisoner opened his eyes, most likely surprised and
scared that even at the dump somebody’s eyes had followed him and seen what he
was doing. He spoke as if his tongue were in a vise, as if he had suddenly been
struck dumb, only a kind of gurgle came from his throat, and he realized that he
should have wanted only to finish off that damn bitch who lured the dogs, caused
them to wreck the grounds, made them wild.
There was a smooth rod on the warden’s desk, there more for
defense than for punishment, and he almost never took it in his hands; actually
it mostly served as a paperweight, a defense against sudden drafts, not so much
to intimidate inmates. But suddenly, out of impulse, like lightning, he picked
up the stick and, seemingly in anger, lifted it above the prisoner and screamed,
"Answer, you dog, or I’ll kill you, just like you killed that bitch!"
"No!" the prisoner shrieked in fear, falling to his knees and
guarding his head from a blow, though he was at a distance from the warden and
the stick, since he was still by the door.
"I’ll kill you like that bitch! Speak up!" the warden yelled
again, coming forward from the desk, holding the rod high.
The prisoner answered in fear, "I’ll talk! No! Please, I’ll
tell everything!"
"Stand up!" yelled the warden, still holding the stick above
him, realizing that the prisoner was afraid of it. He stood up, trembling, crazy
with a fear came from who knows where, from what memory of a beating similar to
this, sometime, somewhere.
"Don’t hit me, don’t punish me! I’ll tell you anything you
want to know!"
"Why did you kill the bitch?"
"She was mine… she loved me, and I loved her… And then the
dogs came and she gave herself to them! She was a bitch, she cheated on me, the
unfaithful bitch…"
He became thoroughly excited, his whole body shook, he
started to cry. "She cheated on me, the bitch," he repeated.
The warden looked at him, still not grasping what this
obsessed man was talking about, what he was feeling—feeble-minded, obviously.
"Why did you slice her open? Tell me," the warden said again.
"She was pregnant…"
"So?"
"Those were my puppies…"
"What do you mean, yours?"
"I…I… with her… we…" He groped for words to explain it all,
but also to soften things so the rod wouldn't rise above his head. "I… lived
with her. She was my lover," the prisoner said, and as if relieved that he had
uttered the most difficult thing, looked at him with an open, hopeful
expression.
"And?"
"Everybody said to me, 'you’ll see, when she gives birth—the
puppies will look like you, and everybody will know who their father is, that
she was your lover.' I just wanted to see if they looked like me…"
The warden sat down. Everything became dreadfully clear to
him: the strange behavior of the prisoner, his passion in killing the bitch, the
slitting of her belly, the removal of the puppies. Perhaps in some other place
and in other circumstances this would be unbelievable, but here it seemed just
another feasible truth.
"And did they look like you, the puppies?"
The convict smiled broadly, already relieved of fear.
"No. They were just making fun of me."
The warden remained silent. The story was complete, but now a
question arose: what should I do with this man now? What punishment would be
appropriate? And he has to be punished, even if only mildly, because of
insubordination, because of indecent behavior. Another week of cleaning the
latrines? How many people like this are in prison instead of in a hospital? Can
any punishment help other than this stick? And a beating, how would it help him
regain his senses, normal behavior, normal understanding? For that matter, what
is normal for him, or for me?
"Go. Get out," he said to the prisoner, who returned a glance
as though upset, as though he didn't understand that he wouldn't be punished.
"I told you already. For insubordination, seven days of
cleaning the latrines. And for this, keep your mouth shut. Only you and I know
about it, all right?"
The prisoner smiled, already feeling the bond, and he put his
finger to his lips: Shhh! Nobody!
The warden was left alone again. His bowels churned with
nausea. Even his insides, used to all sorts of things, would not stay calm after
everything he had heard. He sat down to resume his paper work, but he couldn’t
deal with it. He looked at his watch, two more hours until the end of the
working day. He collected everything from his desk and locked it in his drawers.
It’ll be better if I take a walk around the grounds, he thought. My head needs
air, he decided, but his momentary pleasure at this thought was nudged aside in
his memory by the story of the dogs and the prisoner.
