Kathryn Ganfield: PEOPLE SAY PIT BULLS ARE SWEETHEARTS

Flash Nonfiction by Kathryn Ganfield
PEOPLE SAY PIT BULLS ARE SWEETHEARTS

A woman screams without stopping. Two men in penny loafers leap out of a sedan. Three dogs circle in the street.

All pit bulls, two on one. Those infamous jaws doing what hundreds of years of human selection have successfully wrought. Two clamping down on one, the littlest one, down on her neck and they don’t let go. There, muscles. Their muscles are magnificent. They’re muscled beyond belief.

The woman screaming without stopping is older than me. Brittlely skinny, palest white, a turquoise satin scarf tied on her scalp. She has no muscles at all but she tries nonetheless to insert herself in the fight. Her hands bleed bright red.

Blood puddles on the street, blood and dog foam flying as the three spin and spin on the blacktop. Soon I know the smallest gray pit bull would be pinned beneath the others. Soon she’d have no breath left, but still her woman would scream.

I’m surprised I ran to the woman, because you don’t know until you know, you know? But I ran to her screams without thinking and then I thought her dog would die unless the penny-loafered men could pry them apart.

“Get a hose,” I say. “Spray them with a hose.”

No one replies to the tactic I’d read somewhere about how to break up a dogfight. No time for book learning now.

I take the woman by the shoulders and steer her away from the animals, who circle death as they were bred by men to do. She is so frail beneath my fingers. Shaking, like a white-skinned aspen in fall and just as thin. I hold her back and it takes no effort at all.

A gate swings open, a man strides out. He reaches into the dogpile, grabs the two attackers by their scruffs. Their jaws spring open like jacks-in-the-box. He hoists them up on their back legs—what must they weigh?—and they dance in his hands on their tippy toes back into the yard. Without a word or reprimand, he kicks shut the gate.

The penny-loafered men—without a word or condolence—drive away in their sedan.

The bloody dog crouches low, tail wagging like a metronome. She trots to me and her owner, wet with spittle, her ears in ragged red strips. She feels like velvet. I cradle them both, and it takes no effort at all.

“Who can I call?”

She has cancer. She’s in chemo. She wasn’t supposed to be walking that dog at all. Even if she’d been full strength, in that moment, at that square spot on the sidewalk on Third Street, two pit bulls were destined to meet hers, to employ their jaws pre-destined not only to bite but to never let go.

Ragged red strips hang from her fingers. I pull Kleenex from my bag and hold them against her paper skin. Yes, I think of bloodborne pathogens, of course I do.

Should I call an ambulance? I don’t know, I don’t know, we both agree. We wait for her husband. I nudge us up the street, away from the windows of the man who was responsible for making his dogs do this. I don’t know what that man would do if I called the cops. I don’t know if the cops would even come.

Her husband pulls up in his pickup. He holds his wife. He opens the passenger door and the soft gray girl leaps into the truck, and he doesn’t care about the blood the dog drips liberally on the upholstered seats.

I think he must be a good guy, that I won’t need to wait with them for the cops we together decided to call. I say my goodbyes, my good lucks. I think he must be a good guy, to keep a pitbull purely as a pet. He calls her sweetheart. I think he never fights her, that all he does is hold her tight. He’s calm now, perhaps knowing his wife and dog can be stitched up today, and maybe, someday, cancer can be cured.

Kathryn Ganfield is a nature writer, essayist, and teaching artist in the river town of St. Paul, Minnesota. Her work focuses on family, animals, and the climate in crisis. She is a past Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Fellow, Paul Gruchow Essay Contest winner, and two-time Pushcart nominee. Her prose appears in Hippocampus, Water~Stone Review, Creative Nonfiction, and River Teeth, among other literary journals. Find her online at kathrynganfield.com.