Issue Twenty-Seven - Winter 2016

Crazy Dog

By Maggie Fuller

He was a short, stocky middle-aged man with generic features and coloring. His once reddish hair had turned gray throughout. He could have been anyone but he was someone they called Crazy Dog.

The night was more interesting than the man. The air was heavy with all that an impending storm lends to the senses. No moon. Not an owl to screech or call. No stars to see. A slight warmth from the ground rose around the ankles but the upper air was cool and damp – shoulder-shivering damp. Angry, drunken, crying sounds from a party rang across the way to the river and its bridge where Crazy Dog had run alone to shriek his grief.

Crazy Dog was a violent man. He was anybody’s worst nightmare if he’d been drinking. He was no one’s friend. He was mean through and through. He was one of many like that – one of many young and old and aging Indians who ran in a circle that ran into the ground. He used to say that the Red Road was a hard road. He’d tried to walk in the traditional ways but he believed more in fear – fear of his white half, his father’s half, than in any Indian man or way.

All his life he had been told by elders that he would die by drowning. He was thinking only tonight of how he might die by hanging. He thought of Wakan Tanka – the Creator – and tried to pull the song, any song, even a Sun Dance song into the fore of his mind to save himself, but he could not. He knew he had done too much that was wrong. He knew he was wrong from the beginning. When he was eight years old, an elder called him a girl. He flinched at the memory of all the others laughing at that joke.

Crazy Dog tried to hang himself but slipped while climbing up on the wooden bridge rail, fell into the river and drowned. The river rushed on. An owl may have called. Maybe the midnight sky cleared and the stars reappeared. Maybe the air warmed and dried. Maybe the Creator paused for a moment to notice Crazy Dog pass along in the river to be caught and held by a sunken tree root.

He could have been anyone but he was Crazy Dog, who died by drowning, alone in the deep and quiet of night.

Copyright Fuller 2016

Maggie Fuller has been writing since she was a child. Her first poem, about a runaway squirrel, has yet to receive literary acclaim. Fuller learned the craft of writing screenplays when working as a production secretary for a small independent film company in the early 1980s. She has written numerous short stories and made two sad and sorry attempts at novel writing. In 2015 Fuller received an artist project grant through the Five Wings Arts Council with funds from the McKnight Foundation to complete her first real novel about generational fallout from ancestral secrets and tragedies. Fuller’s professional career of nearly 40 years included graphic design, art direction and copywriting. She maintained a satirical blog from 2009 to 2015 She also paints in watercolor, acrylic and mixed media and is currently creating a gallery presentation to be offered in 2016. Her recent work may be found at mefuller.com

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