By Randy Reynolds
Rusty didn’t know anything about tragedy, self-pity or how it felt to be punished unfairly. As I lurked in the woods near the home that I was leaving forever, the big old German Shepherd mix bounded around like it was just another romp in the swamp with his best friend, me. He licked my face when I settled down behind a log to write my farewell manifesto.
I brushed him aside. “Get out of here, Rusty! Go! Git!”
He settled down beside me, panting and wagging his tail while I wrote the note that would be my final communication with my family. Rusty didn’t care that I was pouring out my mistreated soul in the little notebook I always kept in my pocket. He didn’t care that I planned to sneak up to the house after dark and tie the note to Daddy’s car handle so he would know the reason I had run away and was never coming back. Rusty didn’t care that someday this note would probably be published in the St. Tammany Farmer—maybe even LOOK magazine—so I had to get it just right. My words had to make my dad sorry for what he had done and they had to make the whole world understand what it was like to be me.
Not every 14-year-old carries a notebook and pen on his person at all times; fortunately, for the tragedy at hand, I did. Until my farewell note, I had used it only to record jokes I heard in barber shops and cafes, from other kids at school or on TV—whenever I heard a good one, I wrote it in my tiny notebook.
“One Englishman to another: heard you buried your wife last week. The other one says, ‘Had to, old chap. Dead, you know.”
“A pilot comes on the intercom and announces, ‘Folks this plane is overloaded. Unless we can lighten the load we’re going to crash into the ocean.' They threw out all the luggage and the pilot says ‘We’re still overloaded.’ So a Frenchman gets up and says, ‘Viva la France Alamo ’ and throws two Mexicans out!”
I kept a record of these jokes so I could be the life of the party. True, I didn’t go to parties, but if I ever did these jokes in my little notebook would help me be the center of attention. I would never be at a loss for words in front of a girl again, because I could always whip out my joke book and read some jokes and make her like me. Heck, I even memorized the Raven, all 14 pages of it, so I could keep the conversation going next time I was in the presence of a pretty girl who always left me tongue-tied.
But that was all in the past. Wasted effort. I no longer needed to impress the girls. My future would be dark and lonely. And it would begin as soon as I finished my farewell note to Dad, which I could have concentrated on a lot better if Rusty hadn’t been thumping the ground with his tail and looking me in the eyes as if to say, ‘Hurry up, Ran. Let’s go play.’
Darkness fell at last and I sneaked back to the house, crawling the last few yards, commando-style. With a piece of string that I’d found in my pocket—who knows what a boy will find there, or why he put it there—I tied my note to the driver-side door handle of my Dad’s tan 1964 Chevy station wagon--or so I thought--and crawled back into the woods.
In my confused state, mentally exhausted by the events of the day and my urgent need to stay tragic in the face of Rusty’s happiness, I didn’t notice that I had tied my note to the wrong make, model and color car. Mr. Bill, our church Youth Director, Scoutmaster and family friend, had stopped by the parsonage where no one knew yet that I was missing. When he departed he was able to grasp his door handle and open the door without noticing the piece of paper tied to the handle with a string. Only when he stopped at Atwood’s Store, a couple of miles away, did he finally see it, read it and call my dad.
By that time Rusty and I had broken into the church, just down the road from Atwood’s. Well, not exactly “broken in” –the church was kept unlocked in those days; we just opened the door and walked in. We scrounged for food in the church kitchen, but there was none to be found. I heard a car pull up outside, so I hustled out through the back door and climbed a tung-oil tree beside the spot where the old parsonage had burned down. I got as high up in the tree as I could while Rusty sat on the ground and looked up at me.
Mr. Bill walked right under the tree. “Hey, Rusty! Where’s Randy? Where’s Randy, boy?”
I expected Rusty to look straight at me and bark, but he bounded away and Mr. Bill followed, possibly thinking they were having a Lassie moment and that Rusty was going to show him which well I had fallen into.
At long last, Mr. Bill drove away and Rusty came back and waited for me to get out of the tree and continue our adventure.
Being tragic takes a lot of energy out of a boy, and I needed something to eat. Being broke, I'd have to steal our supper...and I knew just the place.
The State Overseer’s cabin on the Campground was empty this time of year. He only stayed there one week every summer, the week of Camp Meeting, and that event was long past. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, he’d left some food—a can of peaches, a bottle of ketchup, anything. I broke in through a window and let Rusty in through the door.
We shared the jar of dill pickles I found in the fridge and I drank the last of Brother Beaube’s orange juice and we settled down for a sleepless night. Rusty kept licking me in the face and interfering with my grieving process, so I let him out and told him to go home.
My dad drove past the Campg round
Epilogue: I never eat a pickle without thinking of the time that Rusty ate pickles with me and kept me company till Daddy found me and took me home.
