Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
The catalyst for a life-long friendship.
A few weeks later OJ and I were walking home from school when we spotted a black trash bag sitting in the dirt alongside the irrigation ditch. It was obvious that the bag was full of something because of the bulky shape it had taken. We kicked it and could feel the heft of something heavy inside. We didn’t dare open it in the fear that our fingerprints on the bag would incriminate us in some sort of crime yet unknown. Instead, we spent the rest of the walk home debating just what could have been inside. Was it drugs? Money? Dirty laundry?
During the next few days as we continued to walk home, the bag remained on the edge of the ditch. As we passed it day after day, our curiosity only grew. Eventually, on the third afternoon after we discovered the bag, OJ showed me a pocketknife he had brought to school with him with the direct purpose of slashing a hole in the bag on the way home.
We hovered over the heavy-duty sized trash bag and each gave one final guess about its contents. I was convinced we were on the verge of discovering a misplaced ransom — we would be rich on blood money. OJ, on the other hand, figured it was exactly what it looked like — a bag full of garbage that had blown from somebody’s trash can and rolled over to the ditch. Either way, our insatiable curiosity prevented us waiting any longer to find out what treasures were hidden in the bag. OJ pulled out his pocketknife, bent over and ripped a hole in the trash bag.
Instead of money, garbage or even clothes, inside the trash bag was the decaying corpse of a dog — bandanna wrapped around its neck. The horrible stench that escaped the bag as soon as OJ had cut a hole in it brought tears to my eyes and caused me to dry heave. Maggots and other assorted insects had made fast work of the fury fiend that had just weeks ago trapped us on the irrigation ditch.The dog was now a rotting, sickening shadow of its former terrifying self.
One look at OJ confirmed that he was just as freaked out by the sight a dead dog stuffed in a trash bag as I was. He dropped his pocketknife on the floor and began running full-sprint away from the ditch. I followed after him. Since my house was closer to the ditch then his was, I let him inside to wash his hands in the sink. We stood in the kitchen for half an hour, furiously struggling to sanitize our hands from the horror we had just witnessed.
Almost thirteen years after the incident, I can still vividly see the image of the dog stuffed in the trash bag; maggots crawling out from inside its mouth. For the rest of fifth grade and the summer following, OJ and I would bring up the incident the way survivors bonded over a shared catastrophe. I would pass him in the halls of school and with a grimace and a nod we shared the secret knowledge of man’s cruelty.
Eventually, this trash bag-sized bond gave way to the two of us beginning to hang out outside of school and away from the context of dead animal discussion. We met on the weekends to play video games or ride our bikes around the neighborhood. We built a clubhouse out of materials stolen from construction sites and shared frustration when we found the clubhouse bulldozed the next day by vengeful builders. We even went trick-or-treating together — I dressed up as Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis Venom and he dressed as a dog, bandanna wrapped around his neck.
