making eye contact—the dog hated nothing more than eye contact. But I heard the deep growl, and I froze, hoping against hope that motionlessness would make me less contemptible in his sight. In this I was wrong. Gomer leapt to his feet and barked at me with anger and contempt. Again and again he lunged, only to be yanked back by his chain. I felt my heart pounding. I was certain I knew why the dog hated me—it was because he could see into my heart. I know who you are, he snarled. I know who you are!
There were times when I figured everybody knew who I was—that I was not Jimmy Fly-trap at all, that I was, in fact, Jenny Twin-set. I really believed this, right up until the day I finally came out, some thirty years later. It wasn’t that I held, and kept hidden, a nuclear secret that no one ever guessed. No, what I believed was the opposite: that everyone knew I was really a girl but was just too polite to say it.
All too polite, that is, except for creatures such as Gomer, creatures who measured their snarling self-worth in terms of truth telling. I’d recognize the shepherd’s bark in the words of bullies many years later when they said things like I’m sorry to hurt your feelings, but the most important thing is telling you the truth. Which is, if you ask me, often another way of saying The most important thing for me, in fact, is hurting your feelings, and doing so as deeply as I can.
Gomer’s chain snapped, and the dog unexpectedly found himself free.
No one was more surprised at this than Gomer, and the shepherd paused for a moment at the bottom of the wooden stairs, doubting his good fortune. The dog looked back at the house for a moment, as if he expected that the only possible consequence of finally getting free was someone coming along in that very same instant to chain him up again. In this, if only he’d known it, the dog and I turned out to have some common ground.
Instead, he turned toward me and lunged.
I was not fast on my feet, then or now, but I tried to outrun Gomer. I heard his furious snarling just behind me, along with what sounded like the chomp of the dog’s teeth as they snapped through empty space. Finally his front paws struck me in the middle of the back, and I fell into the wet mud that surrounded Joy’s farmhouse.
I lay on my stomach and closed my eyes, thinking the eleven-year-old equivalent of Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. The dog had his front paws on my spine. I felt his terrible breath on my neck. He barked triumphantly. I got you, Jenny Twin-set, he suggested. I got you.
And then, incredibly, I felt his tongue on my cheek.
Gomer sniffed me. Then he licked me again. The tongue was wet and rough.
A door slammed. Joy came out of the farmhouse. “What’s going on out here?” she said with irritation, as if somehow, whatever this situation was, it was something I had brought upon myself, and—who knows?—maybe in this suspicion she was not wrong.
I heard her boots sucking through the mud, and then, as I rolled over, I saw her towering above me, reaching down for the links of Gomer’s broken chain.
“Good boy,” she said in a voice that seemed to contain both affection, and pity. “You’re a good boy.” For a moment I thought, Wait, I am? Then the inevitable conclusion ensued: She means the dog.
In the long years since then, I have often wondered what exactly about that boy was good. Surely it was not the terrorization of an eleven-year-old nerd that Joy was singling out for special praise. True, Joy was no fan of mine; she knew full well what Jimmy Slingshot and I were up to when we were out of her sight. Still, it couldn’t have given her any pleasure—or not much, anyhow—to see me on the ground, literally afraid for my life.
No, what Joy must have felt for Gomer at that moment was gratitude for his protection. She was a woman who lived a hard life on a half-abandoned farm, and as difficult as it was for my young self to imagine, there were likely many moments when she felt vulnerable and scared. That frightening prison with its Victorian tower was less than a mile away, and now and again the