Dirty Dick

My parents hated Dirty Dick, but they were bred of that sort of liberal pedigree that eschews correction. They believed that things like this must run their course and resolve naturally, that intervention risks harming a child. Decades after her own schooling, my mother blamed many of her anxieties on how teachers had wrested pencils from her left hand, insisting she write with her right. She didn’t want to damage me in the same way by forcing consensus reality into my developing mind. My father, likely due to his lack of imagination, seemed both afraid of and impressed by Dick, whose presence haunted our house for two years or so.

It was a tumultuous time for the family, but I was too young to be aware of the way finances can strain a marriage. Hot dogs or Sloppy Joes for dinner seemed more of a boon than an austerity measure for me, even with a strict limit of two imposed. In my presence, my parents pretended things were fine, but I could tell that there was some sort of cold war going on in the house with the way my father had taken to sleeping on the couch. In retrospect, Dick appeared around the same time that I stopped having friends over.

At first I struggled when pressed to describe Dick, as he wasn’t exactly perceptible to the naked eye, existing in more of a place in my mind, or sometimes hovering just above my right ear. Having mentioned this to my mother and observing the way she blanched, I took to saying that he looked like Dennis the Menace. I’d explain that he was a blonde boy about my age with a cowlick, but he was dirty, caked with grime as if he’d been crawling around under abandoned shacks in the woods. This wasn’t far from the truth, or became some form of the truth, as when I did start seeing him, this was what he appeared to be. I’d leave out how his eyes glowed with a red tint in the darkness, like nighttime predators on nature shows, as that aspect of him frightened me and made me wish I couldn’t see him.

One time I heard my dad say he was going to “blow his brains out in the living room so there’s no fucking insurance money.” I knew enough of the words and had seen enough on-screen violence to suddenly be afraid. Dick thought this was hysterical and made explosion sounds as he laughed. By dinner, my parents were acting as if everything was fine, or at least nothing was so wrong that some hot dogs couldn’t fix it. I was beginning to have my doubts.

Back then, a thin tree line separated our property from the Hanna’s farm. The ancient couple hadn’t tended to the property in years, and I was forbidden from going there, as it was the sort of place where overgrown grass can hide deep wells to fall down and rusty nails to impale yourself on. Furthermore, Mr. Hanna had bad eyesight and an itchy trigger-finger, sometimes discharging his shotgun off the porch at perceived coyotes and foxes, though it had a been a long time since they’d kept chickens or livestock. Their formerly bright red barn had faded to a pale rose over decades, but was still visible through the trees a few hundred yards away like a beacon. The fact that I was strictly prohibited from going there enticed me, but not in a meaningful enough way to do anything about it until Dick came.

Before Dick, Andy from across the street had come over a lot, but that stopped when my father said we couldn’t afford to feed him anymore. Andy had Almond Parents and he’d sometimes go overboard with the handful of sweet snacks we’d keep in the house as a last nod to some sort of luxury. Finally, my father had caught him, uninvited, eating ice cream out of the freezer in our garage. At the time I was just beginning to understand how being told you couldn’t have something made you want it more. I don’t know what my father said or did to Andy the day of the ice cream incident, but afterwards he was too scared to come back over, so I never had to explain why I’d stopped inviting him.

Unlike Andy, who always wanted to play video games inside, Dick encouraged me to go outside. After we’d thoroughly explored the property, including the garage and the shed where my dad kept the lawnmower, his preferred form of recreation became Stick Wars, which involved hitting sticks against trees until they broke in search of “One that can do some real damage,” as Dick would put it. In my defense, I imagined that we were looking for a stick stout enough to knock a hole in the barn door, as I could tell that Dick’s future designs included accessing the structure.

One day, after we’d found a nearly perfect club, knotted up at one end and tapered like a Little League Louisville Slugger, Dick suggested that we go bash a cat or a dog. When I balked at the mere mention of the idea he told me to lighten up, that it wasn’t like he’d suggested that we go bash Andy, though we could do that too. I frowned and he backed off, but within a few weeks I realized that one of his grand schemes was getting rid of my parents so we could live off the insurance money.

I didn’t understand at the time how any of that worked, how the absence of a person could result in money, or what that even meant. All I knew about money is that you could never have enough and Dick made it sound like a pretty good trade off. I loved my parents, or at least I thought I did. Dick said that without them I could have as many hot dogs as I wanted and a quad bike, but when I weighed that against having them around it sounded like, at best, a break-even deal.

When the weather was nasty we’d play Treasure Hunt inside, which meant either sneaking down to the basement, up to the attic, or simply rooting through my parents' things. I always thought we were looking for gold or an old book that had been hollowed out and filled with money that my family had somehow forgotten, or maybe naughty stuff like the magazines full of naked women in the attic or the drawer full of incomprehensible paraphernalia that I knew had to do with “sex.” What that meant was unclear, but I knew it related to the magazines as well.

Dick was never interested in that sort of stuff. He’d giggle when we found it, but wouldn’t want to pause in his constant searching. It certainly piqued my curiosity, but Dick would begin nagging if I spent too much time poring over the magazines or lingering in the drawer. He did, at one point, convince me to take a few of the issues to school. One of my classmates left them in the bathroom, where they were discovered. There was an investigation, which led back to me, but Dick told me to say that I’d found them by the bus stop. It was explained to me that, in the future, I should leave such things alone or turn them into an adult, and I got off easily. If my father recognized the magazines, he never let on. Sometimes you can choose to not see things you don’t want to, or at least you can convince yourself that you don’t see them. At least, that’s what I did when I realized Dick was looking for guns.

It was a long weekend and Mom was away for work when we finally went into the barn. We took a stick to smash planks with, but it was unnecessary, as the door just slid open on runners. I cannot describe the excitement I felt as we dashed through the tall grass towards the big, red building. Angled just so, to keep out of sight of the farmhouse I felt like a soldier or a thief or both as I ran. Dick made me crouch at the corner of the barn to get a good look at the Hanna place. He made note of an open window with curtains blowing in the breeze and made me jump a few times before I realized what he was doing and insisted that the barn be our priority. This rankled Dick, but he agreed that it was better to go slow.

The got the feeling that Dick had hatched some sort of Scooby Doo scheme to scare the old couple out of the house so we could ransack the place. However, he hadn’t put much thought into it, and so was willing to settle for exploring the barn, which turned out to be very dark and full of hay, hardly the prepper’s armory Dick had been hoping for. I was emboldened by the fact that I wasn’t alone, but still scared to go in. I was afraid of rats or things with tentacles or that my dad or Mr. Hanna would suddenly appear at the door, but Dick pointed out an old hurricane lantern hanging on a low hook with a box of strike anywhere matches balanced on top of it.

I tried to light the lantern, but the antique device was unfamiliar and may have been out of fuel. Dick encouraged me to ignite some hay as kindling and try again, and I did, but embers scattered as I tried to manipulate the dry grass. The fire spread quickly, and I ran back home despite Dick’s insistence that we stay and watch it burn. I hid in my room until the commotion next door was too much to ignore. We went out to the edge of our tree line to stand with with my father, watching firefighters spray the conflagration. The Hannas were on the far side of the chaotic scene, crying, and Dick was encouraging me to use the confusion as an opportunity to sneak into their house.

The fire burned hot enough and long enough to destroy any evidence of my crime. The subsequent investigation was “inconclusive,” and once again I got off scot-free. Whether or not my father suspected my involvement in the arson, I do not know, but I was never confronted or questioned about the issue. What no one knew at the time was that Mr. Hanna had a 1930 Rolls Royce Phantom in the barn. It’s impossible to say what sort of grief or nostalgia fermented in his head over the next month, but the note he wrote after shotgunning his wife in bed, but before turning the gun on himself, he made it clear that the loss of the car, which he saw as his childrens’ inheritance, was too much to bear.

After the thing with the Hannas, my parents split up, and I wound up moving several towns away to live with my mother in a condominium complex. I’d become afraid of Dick after the fire, and I’m happy to report that he mostly faded into the background of my life. His voice, which had once boomed in my head like a megaphone had been reduced to a tinny whisper, as if coming over a broken walkie-talkie. I believe this had something to do with the presence of other kids with whom I was able to make friends.

In college, I hooked up with a friend of mine, and after the act we smoked weed in bed. I tried to convince myself that the red glow I noticed briefly in the closet was merely the reflection of the joint’s glowing ember reflecting off of something, or it was from the headiness of the smoke, but in my heart I knew it was Dick. That was the last I saw of him for many years, but now we are expecting a baby and he is back.

We’re using a surrogate, for several reasons, and trying to carrying on normally in the meantime, as couples do. The day the crib was delivered I began to hear Dick’s voice again, and I could see him, if that’s the right word, in the corner of the room as I assembled it that afternoon. He's as dirty as he ever was and he has a lot to say.