Good Boy - Jennifer Finney Boylan Page 0,10

forbidding and beautiful expanse of Earle’s Woods, ten square miles of hardwood jungle originally owned by George Earle—who’d been governor back in the late 1930s and whose fancy country estate stood on the banks of a lake in the heart of the forest. A half dozen other houses had been built in those woods as well. But something had happened, I don’t know what. Earle’s mansion stood half burned and partially tumbled in upon itself. An overgrown cobblestone road led from the ruined house in the woods to the others, which were also fallen in, wrecked. Some of the abandoned houses looked almost inhabitable and still had curtains in the windows.

Years later, I would have a conversation with Governor Earle’s daughter. She said that the houses in the woods had once belonged to the people who worked in her father’s mansion. She’d been to the estate only once—in the mid-1960s, when she and a bunch of her teenage friends drank beer on the banks of Earle’s Lake. Mid-revel, some cops had scooped the young people up, and the police chief made a phone call to the ex-governor, asked him how his daughter and her friends might be treated.

Send them to jail, said he.

During the Revolutionary War, those woods had been haunted by a legendary figure named James Fitzpatrick, whom the locals called Sandy Flash. Once, in disguise, he’d attended a meeting in the one-room schoolhouse where plans were made to arrest him. After pulling the sergeant aside, he revealed his identity, tied him up, and robbed him. You wanted to see Captain Fitz, sir, and now you have seen him, he said. Sometimes he dressed himself up like a scarecrow and rode through the woods on his horse, cackling. He lingered in this place. I’d lain awake in my bed on summer nights and heard the sound of horses’ hooves softly clopping on the cobblestones in the forest.

We’d started keeping Playboy on a leash. Before that, we’d just open the door and let him roam. He’d head into Earle’s Woods, disappear for hours. Sometimes he’d come back with his belly engorged and a strangely smug expression on his face. It wasn’t clear what he’d been eating, but it wasn’t dog food.

Motorcycles drove the dog insane. We’d hear the Harleys coming down Sawmill long before we’d see them, and if Playboy was close enough, we’d grab him by the choke chain and try to restrain him. Sometimes he gave us the slip anyhow. Then he bounded toward the passing motorcyclist and attempted to bite the legs of the rider. No one ever fell off his hawg as a result of Playboy’s attack, but it was not unusual to see the cyclists wobbling back and forth in an attempt to escape our terrible dog. Over the roar of the Shovelheads we could hear the screaming and the swearing. One day Playboy got hold of someone’s pant leg and was dragged down the road for a hundred feet or so until at last the denim ripped. Playboy stood in the middle of Sawmill Road watching as the motorcycle receded, jeans cuff in his mouth. The driver raised high one hand, middle finger extended, as he soared around the far curve that led up toward the Biddles’ farmhouse and the old racetrack for sulkies and carriage drivers beyond that.

Over thirty years later, as I was riding toward home with my friend Tim, after the surgery I had been dreaming of for most of my life, he asked me for the name of my first dog and the name of the street where I had been a child. “This,” Tim said, “is how you generate your porn star name.”

I told him that, following this rule, my porn name would be Playboy Sawmill.

In response, Tim began to laugh so hard that for a long time he could not speak but could only clutch his abdomen as if afraid he might explode.

Back in the 1960s, though, the members of my family were humiliated by owning such a terrible dog. The exception being my father, who was incapable of finding fault with the dalmatian, no matter how heinous his behavior. My father liked to sit in a leather chair in our den, smoking his L&M Kings and watching the black-and-white television, the dog’s front paws in his lap. Dick Boylan had short hair oiled back with Vitalis, and tortoiseshell spectacles that made him look a little like the history professor he’d always wanted to become. (Instead of being