I Wish They Never Named Him Mad Dog

by Jordan Harper

(A different version of this story appeared in Demolition, Winter '08)

Some people will tell you that a person’s name has power and meaning. But it’s not so. A name’s just a name is all. It don’t have the power to affect your fate. Like, I know this gal down in the hills named Eustice Mae Winkles. Swear to God, ugliest name you ever heard, and she’s just about the hottest thing in the holler. So if names make you who you are, explain that to me.

Maybe you think it’s because I’m named Geat myself that I have this opinion. Here’s what being named Geat means: it means that my daddy was one hardcore Aryan son-of-a-bitch is what it means. But just because I’m named after a bunch of white barbarians don’t make me a natural born Super White Man. The way I see it here in the Ozarks, people here being mostly white as an albino’s scalp, you go around hating the niggers and Jews you might as well get a hate-on for the Martians. There’s plenty of pale-ass bastards around here to hate -- why ship it out? Of course, if you can’t keep yourself out of prison like old Perry Mashburn, you might run into a few more of the brothers. That’s why my name is Geat Mashburn and also why I always had two birthday parties when I was a kid – one in the Leavenworth visiting room. See, the things that happen, the choices folk make -- those are the things that shape you, not a name.

But nicknames are different. A nickname stuck to you at the right time can twist your life around forever. Most people who you’d ask about Mad Dog McClure, they’d tell you he was so cussed mean and crazy that God himself had that name written down for him in the Book of Life. But most of those people don’t know the full story. I do. See, I was there.

###
I was there at Jackie Blue’s the night he got the name Mad Dog. When the night started, he was just Joe McClure, a good old boy with a job sticking rebar in concrete. The guy was a metal head, with shaggy hair and usually wearing some black tee shirt on with a name like Morbid Angel or Cannibal Corpse on it, but that’s not that strange in these parts. He was good for shooting pool, matching you shots of Jack -- that was about it. He was a big fellow, almost as tall as me, but in a way you wouldn’t notice. No jailhouse tats, nothing in the world that would have made you think that this fellow was going to become one of the most feared men in the hills.

To tell the truth, the only guy with a rep that night at Jackie Blue’s -- except old Jackie himself -- was me. See, I’m a watchdog. We don’t have no mafia or big crime families to keep the peace between operators, or to police ‘em when they try to run games on each other. So if you want to make sure your deal goes down without a hitch, you call on me, and I’ll come along to watchdog the deal. People see my face coming their way and all their thoughts of double-crossing and dirty deals just dribble out their ears like creek water.

I was drinking double Crown and Cokes and talking to Jackie about what Mike Lewis had done last weekend in the back lot. See, the weekend before, old Mike Lewis walked from the bus stop down at the square, having just come from a seven-year bit for armed robbery, and walked straight to Jackie Blue’s to drink away his gate money. About six Wild Turkeys later, Lewis bumps into some square john who’d just walked into the wrong bar looking for a place to watch the Cards game. Now, understand, when a man walks out of a seven year stretch, he’s different than when he went in. In this case, Lewis done swoll up like a tick and covered his arms in dirty gray tats of the Grim Reaper, “FTW”, the number 13 and the like. So, the square john was real apologetic, tried to buy Lewis a replacement for his spilled drink.

Lewis just went sort of crazy, talking about how this fellow was talking out the side of his neck and whatnot. He starts hitting the bar a little, and Jackie tells him to take it outside. Even Lewis knew not to start shit inside Jackie Blue’s – Jackie’s retired but he likes to stay active -- so he drags this little square john outside and gives him an old-fashioned Ozarks ass-whipping. And when he’s done, he props the fellow up against the side of car, makes the guy open his mouth. And then he pulls out his pecker and takes a leak using that fellow’s mouth for a urinal.

So the next weekend, Jackie and I are hashing the story over and having a laugh. Maybe it seems a little cold to laugh at it, but you learn quick in the life that you either laugh at the fucked up shit around you or you start doing it yourself. Is the square world like that too?

Well, maybe twenty minutes later, who walks into Jackie Blue’s but old Mike Lewis himself, looking like a week out of stir hasn’t taken the edge off his crazy. He orders three double Wild Turkeys in three minutes and pays for each one with a twenty as fresh and clean as a new-snowed field. It doesn’t take Magnum PI to figure that Lewis ran out of the gate money they gave him when he got set free and that he’s robbing gas stations again.

“Cocksucker!” Joe yelled at the machine, slapped the glass top. But, since the music just dies, it comes out louder than Joe meant it to. You know how that is. For some reason no one will ever know, Lewis gets the idea that Joe went and called him a cocksucker. Like I said, prison can change a man, and sometimes things happen that you don’t ever tell no one about. So Lewis walks from the bar and shoves Joe right out of his chair, just like that.

Joe’s hammer spilled out his tool belt of its own accord. He didn’t fish it out like you’ve heard it told. Most of the people at Jackie Blue’s that night didn’t know that Joe had just spent twenty minutes listening to how Lewis turned a man into his private piss pot just the week before. So I guess to them, when they saw Joe come up from the floor and open up Lewis’s head with the claw end of the hammer, it might have looked unprovoked. And I can see how if you didn’t know the whole story, the way Joe turned the hammer around and gave Lewis a few more whacks on the way down could have looked like overkill.

Well, Jackie Blue’s cleared out pretty quick after that, and I left along with everyone else, not needing that kind of shit in my life, so I can’t tell you what Joe’s face looked like while he watched old Mike Lewis drip blood onto the scummed-up carpet. But I’ve often wondered on it.

And it wasn’t but a week later that I heard someone call Joe McClure Mad Dog for the first time.

###

"You hear about old Mad Dog, what he done last night?" Bill Houser wiped chaw spit off his flavor-saver. Houser is one of those good old boys always has a plastic cup with him half full of black sputum. Makes me sick. The cash he was paying me to sit in a holler and watch some fellows move bales of weed from one truck to another made it tolerable.

"Mad Dog?" I sliced a bite off an apple, ate it and wiped off my knife. Down at the bottom of the blade is carved a cross, followed by the word "white," the signature of the old boy who made it for me. Crosswhite's a good blade, and the old hardass who made 'em died a few years back, so I keep it sharp and clean. "Who the hell is Mad Dog?" I asked, pushing the knife back in my boot.

"That dude what put the hurt on Mike Lewis. Mad Dog McClure."

Houser shook his head incredulous -- Geat Mashburn out of the loop? "I ain't ever heard him called anything but. Anyhow, last night I guess he was over at the Pink Lady, shooting Jager down on pervert row. He'd gotten himself a favorite -- a slice by the name of Sunshine, and not a bad choice neither. The meth ain't reached her face yet like most of the scags down there. Anyhow, Mad Dog's throwing his money on the table and getting a face full of fish in return, and some dumb son of a bitch who'd drove down from Monet" -- Good Lord forgive us, we say it Mo-net around here -- "starts bitching about how Sunshine isn't giving him the old tuna special. Guess he got mad enough to go ahead and call that stripper a whore, which ain't exactly like calling the Virgin Mary one, but still I guess --"

A bang shook us both from the story. I had my sawed-off up off the bumper and raised before I could see that it was just a fellow who dropped the plastic-wrapped bale he was hauling. I sat back. Houser laughed.

"You alright?" he asked me. “Seem a might bit jumpy.”

"Just tell the story. McClure's stripper gets called a name, and ..."

"Well, what do you think happens? Mad Dog gets out that hammer of his he carries like he's just some dumb construction worker --"

"Well, that he is."

Houser waved this off, rolling his eyes like I'm the stupid one. "Sure he is. Guess that's why he took that hammer and turned that boy's front teeth to fairy dust floating in the air." He mimed a tomahawk chop. "Then he went after the dude's friends, all three of 'em at a time, and I heard he had two of them on the ground and the third one balls-out running by the time the bouncers got to him."

Houser shook his head and swirled his spit cup.

"Can't believe you ain't heard it yet -- a mean hombre like yourself ought to know about what the other hardcases are up to."

###
To tell the truth, I didn't give much credit to the story -- chaw juice isn't the only type of shit known to dribble out Houser's mouth. But over the next couple of months the hits kept coming. Stories about Mad Dog -- and it was always Mad Dog in the telling, never Joe -- trickled down and around. Mad Dog smashed the window out of a fellow's truck and dragged him out to stomp him in the parking lot at Remington's. Mad Dog and Sunshine -- who I guess got smitten when he pulverized that fellow's incisors -- smashing empties against the wall of the Dew Drop with no one there brave enough to say boo about it. Mad Dog cracking the arm of some rent-a-cop down at the Ozarks Empire fair -- he got pulled in on that one, but I never heard nothing coming of it.

All this time I didn't see the fellow, as Jackie banned him from the bar after that action with Lewis -- even fellows named Mad Dog listen to old Jackie Blue -- and I'm pretty loyal about where I do my boozing. But one night I ended up at a little roadhouse just outside of town on account of having just watchdogged a meth deal out on a farm. It wasn't the biggest deal I ever saw go down -- just a bunch of trembling suck-mouthed peckerwoods each scared of their own shadow -- but work had been slow as of late. I needed a drink when the deal was done.

I didn't recognize him at first, and might not have at all if he hadn't been sitting with some other fellows from the life that I knew. I shook a few hands before I turned to this fellow in the black tank top.

"Hello, Geat."

Well, what a few months and a new name can do. He'd grown a tangled billy-goat beard, for one. For two there was a tattoo -- still wet-looking -- of a slavering pit-bull on his bicep. And that bicep, and all his muscles in fact, had grown. But they weren't the kind of muscles you got hauling around rebar. No, they were gym-and-juice muscles, big puffy things -- they always remind me of a flower grown in a hothouse that looks big and strong but would die if you replanted it out in the real world. But you could see, by the way he was sitting and the way everyone else was sitting that he was the fellow in charge. Maybe helping that out was the woman at his side, who I guessed was Sunshine. She was a pretty little thing all right, but she looked at me with that half-lidded kind of look that I’ve learned to stay away from. Both of them looked pretty tricked out with diamonds and clean clothes. Mad Dog McClure wasn’t hauling rebar for his scratch no more, that much was clear.

"Hello, Joe," I say back.

"It's Mad Dog these days," he says back, twisting his truck so that the tattoo faced me.

"Course it is," I say, and take out my wallet and turn to face the bartender. "How about a round for everyone here -- and let's get some shots with that." I turned back to the table. "How's Wild Turkey sound to a Mad Dog?"

He smiled and leaned back in his seat like he'd won something. "Sounds right, Geat. It sounds right."

So we did our shots and drank our beers while people played pool and stuck quarters in the jukebox and played those songs that I guess it's required by law that you hear every time you step into a bar out here: "Gimme Three Steps," "Thunderstruck," "If You Want to Get to Heaven," shit like that. I mostly sat back and watched the rest of the table slobber all over Mad Dog's ass. He tried to play it cool, but I could see it plain there behind his mask – he was stone hooked on being Mad Dog. After a while he got up to piss. A minute later I went over to the jukebox like I was thinking of playing a song. When he came out the pisser I waved him over.

"What can I do you for, Geat? If you're looking for good music on that juke, forget it. Just that same old redneck shit in there."

I didn't have no idea how to do this. None at all. But it had to be done -- somebody had to try to save this boy's life.

"Look, Joe --"

"Call me Mad Dog."

Shit. I'd blown it already.

"Mad Dog, look man, I just -- shit. You need to cut this shit out, amigo."

He laughed like he didn't know what I was talking about, but I could see it in his eyes. "Cut what shit, Geat? What shit exactly should I cut out?"

"You need to get back to your crew and haul some motherfucking rebar and cut out this 'Mad Dog' shit. You are not … this isn’t you, man. This is not going to end well."

He laughed – that’s all it took, but he went on.

"Aw, fuck all that. You think I'm going to sit back and let y'all have all the fun? Think I want to keep getting to the job site at five in the goddam a.m.? Come on, Geat I'm not Joe McClure anymore. My name's Mad Dog, see?" He tapped his fingers on that hammer head on his tool belt.

I looked back and saw that the table -- his boys all -- were staring at us. I turned back palms up -- chill out, the hands said.

"All right there, Mad Dig. Look, I understand, I do. But I always thought you were a good fellow back at Jackie Blue's, and I don't really want to see no harm come to you. You keep pumping yourself up like this and some shark is going to come by and take you down just so they can have people say 'he's the one what killed Mad Dog.' You just think about it, okay?"

I turned to get going, and one of his boys stood up to meet me on the way out, a rat-faced fellow by the name of Webby. He kind of sneered at me, and my first instinct was to rear back and bitch-slap him. Instead, I turned back to Mad Dog.

"Care to put a leash on your boy?"

Mad Dog laughed and waved Jackson back in his seat. "No hard feelings, Geat. But when you next see old Jackie, you tell him that I don't take to kindly to being banned, hear?"

"Now that's a message that you can deliver yourself, if that's what you want," I told him heading out the door. I was talking to a dead man who wasn't smart enough to know it yet – a man who’d try to send a message like that to old Jackie Blue. I wish they never named that boy Mad Dog.

###
A few weeks later I got a call from Ricky Beal, a fellow who cooks up Nazi dope down around Stockton. He told me that him and Bill Houser were planning up "a big ole swap." I knew what he meant -- they'd trade a couple of ounces of meth for a bale of Houser's weed, simple as can be. They did it every once in a while, and they'd done business enough that they mostly didn't even bother with me riding along.

"Well, I don't mind it," I told him, "just so long as you know that I do all of Houser's watchdogging and that's not a problem for you. Either way, no one's going to rip no one off on my watch."

"Yeah, well, that's the thing here, Geat. I guess you ain't heard yet, but Houser done found himself a new watchdog, much as I hate to tell you. And seeing as how I don't know his new guy, I thought I better bring you along."

Now that I thought about it, I hadn't heard from Houser in a few months. I hated to hear he'd found someone new, though -- he was good for quite a bit of my green. It happened every once in a while, though, when someone thought they could save a little money by going outside of my circle. Never bothered me none, as those folks usually ended up getting ripped off on the other guy's watch -- one way or another.

"Geat? Geat, you there?"

"What? Oh, sure. Sure, I don't mind coming along. Say, what's the name of that new fellow Houser got?"

"Shit, man, it's Mad Dog McClure. See why I want a little muscle on my side?"

###

Bill Houser's place sat on a couple of acres just outside Busiek state park. Houser didn't grow his weed on his land -- he grew it on the government's. More than that, the weed he grew he didn't sell here. He bought Mexican shit weed off the I-44 pipeline and sold that around here, and moved his bud north up the pipe where he could get real money for manicured smoke. The trade was some of his homegrown for some of Ricky Beal's Nazi dope -- so called because some smart fellow back in the 70s went to the Missouri State University up in Springfield and found himself the formula that the Nazis used back in the day to keep the storm troopers goose-stepping through the war. That little bit of book-learning is what's made a generation of Ozark folks some of the biggest meth kings in America -- and it's one of my pleasures in life to hear two-tooth fellows who can't hardly tell you if the Earth circles the sun or vise-versa use words like "anhydrous ammonia and lithium." Ricky Beal's got more than two teeth, seeing as how he don't touch his own product, but I still wouldn't make him one of my lifelines on that game show.

Mad Dog arrived late -- I knew he would -- and me and Ricky and Houser leaned against the house, playing with the dogs. They'd each brought two men with them for doing the heavy lifting and for just a little more comfort. I turned down the beer Houser offered but those boys had several.

"Now Geat," Houser said as he drew back the beer I'd waved off, "I hope that there's not any bad blood between us, what with me giving Mad Dog a day in court."

I shook my head.

"Variety is the spice of life, right? No hard feelings at all."

You could hear Mad Dog coming before you could see him -- that kind of frog-throat heavy metal that he liked came roaring up the driveway, like he had some kind of devil choir announcing him. The car was one of those little Japanese things with a spoiler on it, red with black flames crawling up the hood. He parked it next to my old truck and got out with a pump shotgun in his hands and that hammer still hanging from his belt. He nodded and swung the shotgun up on his shoulders as he walked our way. I bet the others saw what he wanted them to see, the bad guy making his entrance to the movie. I saw the joy kid-like behind his eyes. It was his finest moment.

"Evening, boys."

"I told you eight-thirty," Houser said.

"And I ain't but ten minutes late, so what?" Mad Dog gave Houser a glare. Houser might have asked what the point of a watchdog was if he wasn't there before the merchandise, or he might have said how I had been there almost an hour already. But all he did was look down and give that cup of his a little more spit. I pushed one of the dogs away from me and stood up.

"Hey there, Mad Dog. Good to see you."

"Same, Geat." He just tossed a little nod my way.

"Boys," I said to the rest, "before this goes down, me and Mad Dog are going to step inside the house and go over a couple of ground rules.

"Ground rules?" Ricky asked. "What all is that? I don't recall nothing about there needing to be ground rules."

"And I don't remember you ever being around when a swap's had two watchdogs. It ain't the normal way, and I know an old hand like Mad Dog can see it clear enough.

I took the pistol out of my waistband and tossed it in the gravel. Mad Dog took the hint and laid his shotgun up against the house as he followed he inside. I turned around once we were inside so that Mad Dog had to shut the door and lean against it to face me. Once we were inside, he gave me a smile.

"Man, this is a fucking rush. You've got the life, Geat, for real."

"That I do."

"You ain't really got any ground rules, right? I mean, look Geat, if this is about that night in the bar, my buddy was being a jerk. I told him off. I'm awful sorry about the whole thing. Friends?" And he held his hand out to me.

"I'm awful sorry too." And then I kicked him in the chest. My boot hit him flush; he went back and took the door outside with him.

"Holy shit!" someone yelled as I came through the empty doorway. The dogs started up howling. Mad Dog looked up at the stars struggling for breath. He fumbled his hammer out of his belt. I mashed his hand against the gravel. He screamed. I went down on his chest and pulled out my Crosswhite blade. I looked down at his face and there wasn't a Mad Dog there. Just Joe McClure. I put the blade in behind his collarbone and pushed down until you couldn't see the cross on the blade. I locked eyes with him. First there was fear and then there was pain and then there was knowing and then there was nothing.

I wiped the blade on his shirt as I stood.

"Boys, we've got a deal to do, then I got a piece of trash to dump out in the forest."

Houser dropped his spit cup so the brown gunk splashed out. In the moonlight it looked a lot like Joe's blood.

"He killed Mad Dog. Geat killed Mad Dog McClure."

That's what he said. And I knew that pretty soon that's what everyone would be saying. I am sorry that they named that boy Mad Dog. But I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me now.