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 them on all sides of the van were five or six drooling, howling yard dogs.
“What’s going on?” my father asked the men in an even voice.
“Not much,” one of the men offered sheepishly.
“Where did you come in?”
“Around back,” the other man said, pointing his chin in that direction.
“Did you cut the fence?”
“No. Climbed over.”
“What happened to your arm?” my father asked. Only then did I notice that one of the men was holding his arm a little funny, as if he had injured it.
“Dog bit it.”
“I see,” my father said, nodding his head. “Tell me this. If I let you boys down, are you coming over that fence again?”
“No, boss,” the first man said. “You can count on that.”
After the men were gone back over the fence and the dogs were greedily choking down their kibble, I asked my father who these men were, expecting him to answer with some generic term like “burglars” or “parts thieves.” Instead, he shrugged and rattled off their first and last names. “They’re brothers,” he added. “Their father and uncles used to come over that same fence twenty years ago. It’s kind of a family tradition, I guess you’d say.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. In my mind, he should have had the men thrown into jail. What was the point of catching them if you were only going to let them go? As for the dogs, although I had gained a newfound respect for the work they did at the salvage yard, I still didn’t trust or like them. I just knew that if they ever caught me in the Yard when my father wasn’t around, they’d tear me to pieces with the same jealous ferocity they used on thieves.
* * *
Of the dozen or so men who worked at the salvage yard at any one time, among them Yard Men, body men, engine specialists, and front office help, one of the most fascinating was a half-crippled mechanic named Speck. Of course, Speck wasn’t his real name, but it was the name sewn on the pocket of his light blue mechanic’s uniform. Speck talked with a slight lisp and walked with a limp, the result of a motorcycle accident that should have earned him a handsome settlement, had he not been cheated out of it by insurance company lawyers—so he claimed, at any rate, heaping terrible insults upon the heads of lawyers everywhere. In addition to his uniform, he wore ugly boots with thick, oil-resistant soles. His glasses were black and held together in the middle with electrical tape, the lenses thick and pitted with debris from the grinder and sandblaster.
Speck was an opinionated slanderer of everyone of a different race, color, or creed than himself, as well as anyone deemed by him to be “stupid.” His natural mode
