Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,35

OR CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR OF ANY KIND, ACCORDING TO PRESS ACCOUNTS.

It had last snowed in early March. The classroom window’s eastward view, in other words, was now primarily mud and dirty snow. What sky there was was colorless and rode somewhat low, like something sodden or quite tired. The ballfield’s infield was all mud, with only a small hyphen of snow atop the pitcher’s rubber. Usually, throughout second period, the window’s only real movement was litter or a vehicle of some sort on Taft, with the day of the trauma’s exception being the appearance of the dogs. It had happened only once before, earlier in the Constitution unit, but not again until now. The two dogs entered the window’s upper right grid from a copse of trees to the northeast and proceeded diagonally down towards the northern goal area of the soccer fields. They then began moving in gradually diminishing circles around each other, apparently preparing to copulate. A similar scenario had unfolded once before, but then the dogs had not reappeared for some weeks. Their actions appeared to be consistent with those of mating. The larger of the two dogs mounted the other’s back from the rear and wrapped its forelegs around the brindle-colored dog’s body and began to thrust repeatedly, taking a series of tiny steps with its rear legs as the other dog attempted to escape. This occupied slightly more than one square of the window’s wire mesh. The visual impression was of one large, anatomically complex dog having a series of convulsions. It was not a pretty sight, but it was vivid and compelling. One of the animals was larger, and black with a dun chest element, possibly a rottweiler mix, though it lacked a purebred rottweiler’s breadth of head. The breed of the smaller dog beneath it was unidentifiable. According to my older brother, we had had a dog for a short period when I would have been too young to remember, which had chewed on the base of the piano and the legs of a spectacular 16th century antique Queen Elizabeth dining room table our mother had discovered at a rummage sale, which was worth over one million dollars when appraised and caused the family dog to have disappeared one day when my brother came home from nursery school and found both the dog and the table missing, adding that my parents had been very upset about the whole business and that if I ever brought the dog up or asked our mother about it and upset her he would put my fingers in the hinge of the foyer closet and lean with all his weight on the door until all my fingers were so mangled they would have to be amputated and I would be even more hopeless at the piano than I already was. Both my brother and I had been involved in intensive piano instruction and recitals at that juncture, though it was only he who had showed true promise, and had continued twice a week with Mrs. Doudna until his own difficulties began to emerge so dramatically in early adolescence. The conjoined dogs were too distant to ascertain whether they had collars or tags, yet close enough that I could make out the expression on the face of the dominant dog above. It was blank and at the same time fervid—the same type of expression as on a human being’s face when he is doing something that he feels compulsively driven to do and yet does not understand just why he wants to do it. Rather than mating, it could have been one dog merely asserting its dominance over another, as I later learned was common. It appeared to last a long time, during which the dog on the receiving end underneath took a number of small, unsteady steps which bore both animals across four different panels of the fourth row down, complicating the storyboard activity on either side. A collar and tags comprise a valid sign that the dog has a home and owner rather than being a stray animal, which a guest speaker from the Public Health Department in homeroom had explained could be a concern. This was especially true of the rabies vaccination tag required by Franklin County ordinance, for obvious reasons. The unhappy but stoic expression on the face of the brindle-colored dog beneath was harder to characterize. Perhaps it was less distinct, or obscured by the window’s protective mesh. Our mother had once described the expression