The Shack Across The Street
My parents got a divorce when I was two years old. My older brother by almost three years and I lived with our dad until I was seven and he was ten. We lived in a house that was somewhere near Lake Lavon east of Dallas.
The back of the house touched the ground. The front of the house was on cinder blocks. This left a crawl space where we would crawl under the house on occasion and I remember seeing snakes though we were too young and uninformed to know what kind of snakes they were.
Our dad worked in construction in some fashion, maybe painting and fixing houses akin to that kind of work. Later in life he would come to own a construction business, which I suppose gave me the entrepreneurial spirit.
At this time, he was once paid on a job he did by trolling motors. There had to be about 25 trolling motors that he had leaned against the side of the house and covered with a tarp. I remember playing under the tarp and house and weaving around the trolling motors.
We were pretty unsupervised in those days. Across the street was a shack that a guy in a car would visit fairly regularly. I don’t think it was his main home, he wasn’t there that often. We had a big white dog named Rippy (which, in hindsight, may have been a Great Pyrenees, and one day a female dog that looked like a wolf came out of the woods and started hanging around the house. Shortly after the female dog became pregnant and my brother and I were very excited when the puppies were born.
The road ran beside our house, and then curved at a right angle 90° and passed in front of our house; we had a corner lot. The shack was directly across the street from the front of our house.
For reasons that are unknown to my brother and me, on multiple occasions we would find one of the puppies dead in the street, ran over by a car. This happened often enough that my brother and I figured that there’s no way that these deaths are accidental. Once I started driving, this confirmed our conclusion even more, given that you can clearly see a dog in the road ahead of you.
I don’t remember how exactly we came to know that it was the guy that owned the shack across the street that was running over our puppies. But in my recollection we knew it was him. It’s possible that we saw him do it but I honestly don’t remember. The trauma of seeing these puppies I suspect has possibly blocked it out of my mind.
My brother was about 8 or 9 years old, and I was around 5 or 6. We decided to get revenge.
We got construction hammers and sledge hammers, and we went to work on this guy’s shack. We broke into it, I can’t remember exactly how we got in (I think we broke down the back door), but we got in. We knocked holes in the walls, punched holes in the ceilings, busted out windows, I have a vague recollection of tumping over his refrigerator, and did as much damage to this shack as we could in retaliation for our dead puppies.
He pulled into the driveway mid swings of our hammers, and my brother and I took off like lightning through the back door in a strait run so that the shack obscured his vision and kept us hidden until we were deep in the woods. The woods got dense enough pretty quickly to give us cover. We had spent a lot of time in these woods and knew how to hide.
A few days later, while sitting in our classes at our elementary school (I was in 1st grade and my brother was in 4th), my brother and I were called to the principal’s office. We had never been to the principal’s office, and had never seen the principal before. As soon as we walk in, we both realize that the principal of our school was the owner of the shack! We were in a kind of paralyzed fear and frozen panic, thinking we had surely been caught.
He asks us to sit down, and starts asking us questions about whether we had seen anyone around his house. My brother and I said no. He asked the same question in a few different ways, like “You haven’t seen anyone new, or anyone that looks like they shouldn’t be there, around the house?” To which we’d reply “No”. It became obvious to us pretty quickly that we weren’t suspects, given his demeanor and given that he was asking questions about us seeing any grown men.
Looking back, I think the damage was so extensive that he couldn’t have imagined that it would have come from two little boys. Maybe he had suspicions about us, but he let us go and we never got in trouble for it.
Is there a moral? Maybe don’t mess with little boy’s puppies.
