This morning, the house where they never keep their dogs restrained in an appropriate manner was surrounded by three cop cars. Two cops stood on the front stoop talking.
My first thought was that the teenage boy had come back.
And then I thought about how he described that house and, shoot, even if his stories were only half true, I can imagine someone called the cops on someone else for good reason.
Still, three cars?
There wasn’t an ambulance, but maybe it’d already gone.
As do most poor people, I grew up incredibly distrustful of the police as a whole. But there’ve been a few times when I’m out walking my dog where I see them and my heart goes out to them.
One morning, there was a wrecked car in the middle of Murphy Road, just sitting there, and Mrs. Wigglebottom and I came up just as the cop was getting to the window. When he flashed his light in there and saw that whoever had crashed the car was gone, you could see him visibly relax.
He seemed like a man with a shitty job right then.
Not some power-tripping asshole out to ruin anyone’s life, just a man with a shitty job.
I think about the guy who lives in that house, how he’s always walking his German Shepard puppy around, how he’s either working as some kind of maintenance guy or has a side job as such, based on the equipment out front of his house, though, and I wonder about him.
Is he just a man with a shitty life or some power-tripping asshole?
Any given day, Mrs. Wigglebottom and I see six to twelve men on our walks. We see between zero and three women.
I don’t know if that matters to this discussion or not, but it sticks with me, too.