Scrappy and Neck – Stephan Crown-Weber

October 24, 2025

It took the better part of twenty years for Carmichael and Barbara’s yard to look like itself. He trucked in the blue prefab bantam houses to a pen visible off to the side PDQ after buying the farm. Soon they had a crowd of roosters, and he had to explain he’d never be the sort to breed cocks for fighting in cheering barns in secret. What was the truth? Heh.

It wasn’t a coincidence Carmichael took up residence at a spot where trains whistled all through the night, as if anyone would be at the at-grade crossing at 2 AM or the next moments of the day he recalled, just before dawn when the segregated roosters set about crowing with contempt for rivals each believed should be destroyed. Carmichael never said he liked bustle, even if he got worked up on rare occasions when he drove across the big bridge from Kentucky into Ohio at Cincinnati and saw the railroad bridge parallel to it, the asphalt and trestles singing.

He added a chrome gazing globe on a pedestal, a pissing cherub who could’ve been connected to a fountain. A bird bath shaped like a scallop shell, four scarecrows with ornery faces that seemed slightly too kind, animatronic screech owls with red eyes who hooted all through the night and spun their heads around in full circles, scaring; a trampoline for little ones. And reclaimed pieces from the exterior of an old church left at the dump; those would be going up in value. Vending machines that could in theory be fit for sale to historical museums. As for strange types who came wandering off trains: in the daytime, they knew their place. And at night, they couldn’t see where they were going with all the shadows and shapes in their way. Heh.

The Carmichaels’ overabundance of cats was a known annoyance to the pound. A minor topic.

The dogs they acquired, though, were of the highest importance: male mixes with noble hound-like features.

Barbara did all the household shopping and most of the childcare while he tended to the tobacco crop, and when she got home she would throw a bone to each of the snapping brutes. Carmichael told her on occasion when those fangs came down around her finger just a tad too hard that she was rewarding bad behavior, but she just shook her head and said it was the only way.

In due time, he’d think on this proof of Barbara’s goodness, pure like God in his quiet moments, still the tiny quiet girl in high school who decided to talk back to him just enough times, who accepted the invitation in his passed note “2 cut tobacco w me on Saturday,” who smoked with him off to the side of a field party they had snuck off to, this woman who all that time said no to the temptation of liquor. She hardly bothered in all those years to say a cross word to him when she could just have a good afternoon smoke.

One day practically every farmer with flat fields had grown tobacco in those parts; folks respected the need to keep the world cool and collected, and the next day something elaborate and Chinese had tricked the companies into buying cheaper and inferior Chinese leaves; it was said that the Democrats had facilitated this for anti-smoking reasons or the companies were evil—or was he remembering right?

It was clear that he’d have to grow corn and let a neighbor contract out to keep cattle grazing down toward the creek. The dogs took this development dumb and panting. Barbara surely grasped the situation but it was mostly other farmers he once had seen at the local tobacco warehouses, practically all now closed, who knew the disaster intimately. They got together at McDonald’s or the Golden Horse depending on the morning and would have their sausage links and flapjacks and talk some truths and lies. The Democrats had betrayed them, they’d say. The Republicans didn’t care for any one man but themselves either, but you figured at least they knew the value of life and stood up for a lot of people who worked hard to pay their own bills. Some Republicans could take a joke. Much as “some” tried to point to the tobacco farmer buyout money from the government to help him “transition,” he was a bit beyond caring exactly who had arranged for this—like any money was enough to correct the problem. And these guys told a lot of those, like the one about the stewardess, the golfer, the priest, the feller who was always a friend of a friend.

You’d’ve thought there was some logic to it all on account of his draft number during the Vietnam times came up but he never deployed overseas with the Army and in fact would never go more than two or three states in any direction for non military reasons: Barbara got breast cancer and blamed bottles of water she’d kept in her car on hot days. There was a lady rock star she’d seen on TV with the same cancer who’d made this exact argument and as Barbara went around with a bob wig on, she recited something for all comers for once. “Ain’t nobody wanna admit what’s wrong with plastic. That’s all it took. And now the two of us are dyin’—or would be if she wasn’t a superstar.” Carmichael considered the riddle and refrained from placing blame, though nobody but the mean little grandkids had the nerve to ever bring up the cancer just-so story.

Carmichael had long ago objected to the price of a burial plot in the county seat. She was laid to rest in a grave in a tiny cemetery six miles south across county lines, surrounded by a chain-link fence and with younger trees and smaller graves than the other graveyards.

He let the dogs die one by one without replacing them as if there were some need to be too worried about anything. Sure enough, once they were gone, over the course of a week, some creature, maybe a mink, got into those hen houses and went around biting them on the neck.

Carmichael went to the Baptist church down the road after Barbara died. There were forgettable sermons on “grace,” standing up for yourself to get right with the Lord, the immortality of the soul…Christian fellowship was as good as the Wednesday night potlucks: casseroles, au gratin potatoes, jalapeño cheese dip, Lee’s Famous Recipe brand fried chicken purchased from the local franchise by the congregation at large…and the company of concerned characters who sat down next to him: at first men who knew him from the farm supply stores and the tobacco warehouses along with their wives and then the ladies they knew who were single. Cherilynn came along, a secretary at the Caterpillar factory, and he knew he admired the way she spoke of buying up fabric for cheap from the closed Osh Kosh B’Gosh plant in Liberty to make outfits for herself and others, some even for children in poor places. There were the dishes she brought, and the fact she said she prayed for him constantly. They went on a date to see a James Bond movie with the smooth secret agent, who would never be found in a church unless it aided a mission, there was the way Cherilynn didn’t object to that English mug spouting obscenities and ending up in bed with sexy women, and he knew it was all over but the formalities when she went out for dinner with him afterward. She stayed the night; he didn’t want to respect her for it, but it was the right thing to do to be sure—you’ve got to figure there ain’t a line of ladies fightin’ for me; they got married two weeks later at the courthouse, and she proceeded to make meals he’d’ve never thought of. Bell peppers chopped fine and mixed with ground beef and Hamburger Helper. Eggplant Parmesan. She even had him going to plays at the outdoor theater and got grandchildren from the family over to jump on the trampoline.

It turned out there was something suspicious about her—not the fact she was taller than him. She’d say “And the whole of China is against you? That’s a whole ton of people. We should pray for them…” There was the way she slowwwwly came around to the idea that maybe he needed to come up with a new system for all his belongings displayed in the front yard. Mostly there was the way she began to talk and talk about feelings. It got to the point where it was clear she was trying to do something to him psychologically the way she wanted him to “reflect” on Barbara and regret. In her prayers at dinner, she would talk for a minute about how God needed to look after Carmichael. He tried to explain how belittling it was—he felt almost capable of speaking about the example of King David. She would’ve heard none of it anyway. Maybe there was something that stuck in her craw about him telling her he wanted to be buried next to Barbara and she would be welcome to be the second stone next to them. And then he thought he understood something about her first husband before she made up the story that Reggie was a bad man, a table banger with a lead foot heading in a bad direction. Carmichael divorced her after two years and that was one thing he didn’t regret.

What he really needed were more dogs. The last of the old lot to die hadn’t had the sense to bark when strange men hopped off the train and began to look around. There was a scorching September day when a burnt shirtless man wearing a black backpack came down the road and proceeded to poke and prod the equipment in the front yard. It was Carmichael who strode out in the front yard with a shotgun and asked if there was anything he could do to help. The guy looked up, shook his head, and kept walking.

Scrappy (like a Brittany spaniel, only thinner) and Neck (black like a lab but smaller like he had some beagle in him) were the solution. They were from his friends, not quite licensed breeders of fine canines, but people who had the sense to put together dogs with the finest qualities—no matter the breed. The fact that they were never advertised in the paper and the fact that these sorts of dogs went out to successful farming operations across the area gave him the feeling he needed.

One day he was out making a fine boozy inspection of his rented-out back forty with Scrappy and Neck, right where the creek drops into a ravine. A cow was on his corn side of the fence just chewing grass on the bank of the creek on a long expanse of grass. Beyond it the neighbor dad was big riding mower and just taking it all in shirtless, with breasts that strained towards a feminine floppiness.

“Well, I oughta wrangle this Bessie up,” Carmichael told the dogs.

“You oughta find that cow a treat,” Scrappy said, or seemed to say as Carmichael interpreted the flapping of that dog’s snout and fangs. “That’s what they’re all saying on TV but they wouldn’t want you to say that.”

“I really should.”

“That cow is such a lesbian,” Neck barked in Carmichael’s interpretation, a little bit gruffer: like an intermediate Rufus-sized dog instead of a tiny Barkley. “Dirty lesbian sex. Google dirty lesbian sex, lesbian sex, hairy pussy and udders.”

“How d’ya mean?”

“She wants to experiment with a different lifestyle like the jealous Jessica of your Uncle Sam.”

“I see what you mean.”

Scrappy panted with the panic of a dog who shows a little more spunk in exchange for being small: “The lesbians serving on the front lines in Afghanistan and adopting kids who need homes. And then they appear in the filthiest, greasiest porn that nobody ever did see and the cutting out now, deep in the dirt.”

“Yeah, but are they any good at it?”

“They are,” both dogs told him. “A lot of dogs are lesbians too. You should respect them.”

“Now…A pair of canines talkin’ about how lesbians are good. I figure there’s an issue with them trickin’ others into bein’ lesbians.”

Scrappy shook his head and asked to be rubbed. “How do you know that? What if they want to be left alone? You collected us because we’re gay. We’re a queer soul tribe.” He said this third-to-last word as though he were involved in the teen culture—or anything but.

“Now you sound tickled with your fancies. I’m not much for arguments,” Carmichael said after contemplating the best next move. “I say we have it out and agree to disagree.”

Scrappy barked. “What I say is you’re holding food.”

Carmichael was already putting his hand in a baggy of kibble and put it in the palm of his hand and the cow came straight over. But really he couldn’t get over their conversational skills. “I’ll be darned, dogs who stick up for the gays.”

He got himself liquored up again and asked the two of them if they knew any good stories. Neck sidled up for a calm Rufus-sized scratch and rub and told him: “Google gay porn.”

“I ain’t googlin’ gay porn.”

“You want granny porn. Grannies with gays.”

Now I could have sworn I got you from Bobby.”

“Plans fell through.”

“You’re telling me a man who ain’t lied a day in his life had a secret plan to sell me to shady people with tattoos?”

“He’s watching the Bond movies. What do you think folks are learning from those? It’s all in there. You think a man has a license to kill.”

“Now is that why you’re such a mean cuss? ”

“Ladies love me. What can you do but respect?”

“That’s not very Christian.”

“Who ever heard of a Christian dog? You think they like dogs getting rowdy?” Scrappy interjected. “And you watch any James Bond movie when it comes on TV. You’ve clearly got a different code going. Look up google dot com, search for the googling feature, then search for gay granny porn.”

Carmichael shook his head, especially since he didn’t own a computer: “If you understand King David and taking down Jericho with trumpets, then you know a man in a suit has to take care of important business for Caesar. Caesar is already on the coins.”

“You wonder if you ought to become a bad dude,” Neck said sternly.

“Where do you come up with this stuff?” Carmichael asked.

Neck whimpered but it was a trick, Carmichael’s speech seemed to say. “You talk in your sleep. And then the ghosts come around and we’ve got a full house.”

Carmichael promised to buy better tick and flea medication when they turned this glum this time. It was a chore to inspect those bodies up and down. Those dogs deserved the best even if they all seemed to lose their train of thought together and drift into nonsense…the spout of the toad, the doubt of the road, they would say, him hanging on every word…

The thing was that their mouths moved when they talked.

Google gay porn.

Carmichael was a wallflower in the shade at family gatherings and kept his mouth shut so they wouldn’t think too much about the alcohol pluming from inside him. He recited the glum facts about agriculture in the area and on his land in particular, the city coming for them, one subdivision after another. “And we can thank the Chinese for the price of tobacco,” his granddaughter Kylie said, with a squeak to her voice that very nearly seemed to tell Carmichael that she would always be petite and feisty and overall a bit much for the men in the world.

“That’s right, little missy,” Carmichael said, unleashing protests about how old she was.

His two sons, both of them citified enough due to working in manufacturing at Toyota and spending years in the subdivisions of Georgetown, despite their attempts to hunt, fish, and drive trucks that were bigger than they needed, the good one hunting with him and the one who argued somehow avoiding the invitations—they’d ask him to watch a movie and he’d bear it and think about how his dogs were at home and willing to have a proper conversation with him while these other people seemed focused on entertaining the ripening children above all else: the Easter egg hunt, the stocking hanging, the Christmas parade that was just trucks and banners and politicians in sports cars.

The following spring, the movement of the dogs’ lips convinced him to shoot videos about a tobacco stick and make his best attempt to decry the Democrats’ opposition to the tobacco industry. And videos popped up from cable news that tried to tell him about China and what to think about global politics. Something about how the Chinese were creating “new apps” to help teens express themselves like nobody else had a bunch of dogs that told them what they were thinking and getting to the bottom of things. Heh. And he talked into the camera about every vending machine he had ever seen. There was something about the fact the old vending machines were on the honor system. And sadly you couldn’t buy cigarettes out of a vending machine either anymore. And that gave him a mind to stick it to some people by lighting up on camera until the dogs came bounding in. He turned off the video recording for secrecy’s sake, and Scrappy told him he wanted to be wild, and tobacco came from the ground and smoothed out the craziness of being a man until it didn’t, and he remembered as he thought about having another cigarette why he had given them up when the Chinese and the Democrats did their tricks. He thought to post the videos on the old-timers’ newfangled social media, and some said they missed him at church. Well, those dogs already asked: why didn’t they make a church that lived up to God’s green Earth?

Maybe he thought they had a truce about the matter but then Scrappy got onto the topic of how we all deal with loss. He had had a tumor removed at the vet’s. And then Scrappy said, at the far end of his constructive side, back at home and shaven into an even smaller Barkleyer form, “You know. Barbara didn’t suffer much in the scheme of things. Not at all. The end of Obama drama of your baby mama.”

Carmichael told him he was stupid. “I don’t think she found anything more insulting than getting cancer. How would you know anything else?”

“We talked to her,” Scrappy said with a wisdom he immediately recognized. “It was like the jog in the creek where it curves around the hills before the lake.”

“Why’s she talked you instead a’ me?”

“What’s the difference? She wants you to know what’s going on. She may as well tell someone reliable.”

“You’re unreliable. You’re worse than the most elaborate of the Chinese.”

“And you’re nutsy. You think the Chinese are out to getcha when they’re trapped in the same game as you.”

“Now you wanna play the liberal. But you ain’t ever gonna hear me deny that some Chinese folks got it in their minds to do some trickery with the tobacco market.”

Scrappy tutted, as though a comedian pretending to be a preacher or professor: “You know what you were saying on the deepest TV. Cone. Bone. Phone. You know what all those guys think about the Chinese. And you don’t ever contradict them.”

“A man’s gotta have his secrets. What’s the use of always telling it like it is? I’ve got my job to keep the peace and you’ve got the responsibility to protect us but you can hardly be bothered. You’d think it was gonna be raining gumdrops if I gave a sermon about how we could all be friends.”

“When have I done you wrong?”

“You barely raised a cry about that man coming up the lane from the train tracks the other day.”

Scrappy sighed. “It was hot out. And you’re going deaf. I’ll tell you that you want them smooth Christian buttholes for your old man peter.”

Carmichael shouted at him; he was an old patriarch who didn’t have a gay secret truth and the dogs just wanted to enrage him. Somehow it was like they were trying to make it the grossest talk he had ever heard.

“Carmichael, we do think you’re sexy,” Scrappy yelped from the kitchen.

“Shut up.”

Carmichael got a good deal on a Great Pyrenees who took to roaming the cattle pastures, and he tried to reward him as best he could for barking at strangers. As loud as he was, the Pyrenees didn’t speak English at all. Maybe because there was nothing to say, except a cartoon language in a bass of “Dum, dum, dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. Oh gosh…”

All this time, Carmichael had been regaling his friends at the Golden Horse or McDonald’s and Hardee’s with stories about the dogs. He called these two best dogs Sneaky Petes, said they had real attitude. Then he sometimes got to the point where he said the dogs knew him like the back of his hand, how to get a treat out of him, how to get him to stroke their manes. They were characters in their own right, the two fellers. Then he reached the point where he was willing to say: “Why sometimes I get the impression they’ve got a lot to say.”

“They say folks hear their dead spouses,” one feller smiled. “Complaint after complaint.”

Well, that shut up Carmichael real fast. He had never heard Barbara speak in death. It was maybe proof enough that she was with him. She was always tender and mild between the roar of trains.

Even then he brought up the topic of snow days with the dogs and they scoffed enough to remind him that his human friends could be interesting in some cases. “That’s a dumb thing to talk about,” Neck said. “Your friends are lame.”

All night the primary dogs were bustling through arguments like the wind. They were saying they were better than his friends. He ought to stop meeting up with them. His dog friends would mumble and look the other way and as he muttered to keep up with their slang, the two of them would always have a kind word about how his wife hated him for never talking about God. Neither would say why they were training him. Something about how it was the only way, “the only way.” They were better than his friends. Even his wife hadn’t understood him. They didn’t act like they believed for a second he wanted them to shut up. And Carmichael made himself smoke a cigarette to calm down. Then another. Then they jumped around at his feet, showed their bellies; they were singing his favorite songs he played for them and he couldn’t figure out a way not to join in. “Barbara would have loved us—but not as much as we love you. We’re gay for you like you’re gay for God and his farmer-tan Son.” No way could he live it down. They were training him to be gay for the movies except they wouldn’t say if that was what they really meant or if it was symbolical of secrets. He said he reckoned they were a hurricane. The two said Barbara had found the role of her life taking care of grandbabies, used to be making those pretty dresses and sailor suits and kittycat costumes all the time and having them pose in them pictures, and Barbara was crygrannily aware from afar in the mean frozen corner of his heart that those babies had turned him crueler than ever, made him spin like a hurricane in his parched grampsolescence. All they did was ruff at him that the circle was the circle and that’s what a man does in the midst of good dogs. His friends didn’t understand him. He was in bed with the opposite of the tobacco Chinese. That was either what he was thinking or they were thinking or he had tricked them into thinking it or they had tricked him into thinking as much. Barbara hated him, spun the hurricanes.

“Now I don’t want to be bothered,” he shouted. “Bad things happen to dogs who won’t shut up.”

They gulped like cartoon puppies just once and kept chattering. Neck said he needed to take it easy and call up his friend from elementary school who lived out in California so that he’d buy Carmichael marijuana if he said the special word on the telephone. And he smoked his last cigarette, drove into town without them, and got himself a couple cartons that he worked on in his truck down at the county park as the sun rose. He drove up and down the highway toward the next county seat and arrived to a full parking lot at the Golden Horse…nobody looked up at him aside to wave…he didn’t much like visiting…That waitress who served him had either her baby or her grandbaby crawling around the barstools behind her. And he looked at that baby and said, No. He had himself a good breakfast of flapjacks and eggs, as tobaccoed as he could stand—was nice to the waitress and the regulars he knew—he was reeling off how there was work to do—and “I can sleep when I’m dead”—

When he got home with fine levels of nicotine; the two pups said the circle was closed so he better not have any family down at the regular time. And Carmichael lowered the phone and shouted at them to stop, which got no reaction from the son, and got the whole crew together anyway.

One day he was out in the pasture by the pike with a cigarette in his mouth, with the buzzing field of full liquored oblivion upon him, ready for the next smoke after that, cool as a cuke, tending to a bucket he was using to attract field mice who proceeded to drown in the rainwater and he felt his arms go limp. He couldn’t think more than the corn was lowing. And the dogs just panted over Carmichael, talking as always, kind of a pitter patter for him, vegetable talk.

“Are you corn?”

“Are you corn?”

And he knew less and less and corn was gonna in his mouth he had to become the worst of the truth corn was gonna in his mouth of his own way of being a bone but things were gonna to be…

Barbara stood mum-mouthed over him. She would take him to the next place corn that he understood to be beyond the highest water corn.

And he was more than a little funny to wake up in a ——— with his children and grandchildren asking him about him, what he ————, what he ————, how a little brown boy had spotted ——— in the grass in the backseat of a ————going down the pike. Little Hovveair had cried out, insisted there was no way a man would lie down in the grass with so many ticks around and the corn of course, always the corn. And now Carmichael had to face being ———— for a little bit longer. The grandchildren played around at the ———— of his ———, asking if they could see him press the ———— that made the ——— rise up. And for once, he didn’t find them annoying but thought they were deeply ———— in what he was doing. And there was no easy way to tell them that he wanted to know where Barbara was or what was going on with those ——— of his.

He knew it all wasn’t corn really…it was a matter of regaining the control of his “corn” arms. Something chilled his arms about how he got home to the dogs with the certainty that they were gonna send somebody out to check in on him—all those tobacco buddies would make a throne of old sticks but more importantly the insurance kicking in—and it was just as well to try to converse with those folks as best he could because the dogs’ voices had gotten slow and scrambled and they didn’t try to trick him into doing…what was thing they were tricky about? They barely managed “Hey now…” They told him he was slow. Some of these folks had him at that health center in town where he walked on the machine in his nicest pair of jeans and they had him move his body around like they had a plan and he had a plan. And what do you say to that but keep doing that? And they didn’t bother feeding him lines when his sons sat him down and said that he needed to be where he didn’t have to manage cows and feed corn and the tobacco severance money from the state had something to do with it all. Scrappy and Neck didn’t quite make their goodbyes the day after the auction; they were wild and bucking that day until they were restrained. And their voices failing to reach him as he waited for something he couldn’t unscramble, he knew they were leaving when their cages were hoisted in the back of a truck. What was also different about their front yard was that a lot of the mass of whatever that was called was missing.