crackling against my skin. Teddy started to laugh his idiotic chortling laugh, eee-eeeeeee into the air like some reed instrument being played by a lunatic.
‘Go, Gordie! Go!’ Vern screamed.
And Milo yelled: ‘Sic ‘im, Chopper! Go get ‘im, boy!’
I threw the bag over the fence and Vern elbowed Teddy out of the way to
catch it. Behind me I could hear Chopper coming, shaking the earth, blurting fire out
of one distended nostril and ice out of the other, dripping sulphur from his champing
jaws. I threw myself halfway up the fence with one leap, screaming. I made it to the
top in no more than three seconds and simply leaped. I never thought about it, never
even looked down to see what I might land on. What I almost landed on was Teddy,
who was doubled over and laughing like crazy. His glasses had fallen off and tears
were streaming out of his eyes. I missed him by inches and hit the clay-gravel
embankment just to his left. At the same instant, Chopper hit the chain-link fence
behind me and let out a howl of mingled pain and disappointment. I turned around,
holding one skinned knee, and got my first look at the famous Chopper–and my first lesson in the vast differences between myth and reality.
Instead of some huge hellhound with red, savage eyes and teeth jutting out of
his mouth like straight-pipes from a hotrod, I was looking at a medium-sized mongrel
dog that was a perfectly common black and white. He was yapping and jumping
fruitlessly, going up on his back legs to paw the fence.
Teddy was now strutting up and down in front of the fence, twiddling his
glasses in one hand, and inciting Chopper to even greater rage.
‘Kiss my ass, Choppie!’ Teddy invited, spittle flying from his lips. ‘Kiss my ass!
Bite shit!’
He bumped his fanny against the chain-link fence and Chopper did his level
best to take Teddy up on his invitation. He got nothing for his pains but a good
healthy nose-bump.
He began to bark crazily, foam flying from his snout. Teddy kept bumping his
rump against the fence and Chopper kept lunging at it, always missing, doing nothing
but racking out his nose, which was now bleeding. Teddy kept exhorting him, calling
him by the somehow grisly diminutive ‘Choppie’, and Chris and Vern were lying
weakly on the embankment, laughing so hard that they could now do little more than
wheeze.
And here came Milo Pressman, dressed in sweat-stained fatigues and a New
York Giants baseball cap, his mouth drawn down in distracted anger.
‘Here, here!’ He was yelling. ‘You boys stop a-teasing that dawg! You hear me?
Stop it right now!’
‘Bite it, Choppie!’ Teddy yelled, strutting up and down on our side of the fence
like a mad Prussian reviewing his troops. ‘Come on and sic me! Sic me!”
Chopper went nuts. I mean it sincerely. He ran around in a big circle, yelping
and barking and foaming, rear feet spewing up tough little dry clods. He went around
about three times, getting his courage up, I guess, and then he lauched himself straight at the security fence. He must have been going thirty miles an hour when he hit it, I
kid you not–his doggy lips were stretched back from his teeth and his ears were
flying in the slipstream.
The whole fence made a low, musical sound as the chain-link was not just
driven back against the posts but sort of stretched back. It was like a zither note –
yimmmmmmm. A strangled yawp came out of Chopper’s mouth, both eyes came up
blank, and he did a totally amazing reverse snap-roll, landing on his back with a solid thump that sent dust puffing up around him. He just lay there for a moment and then
he crawled off with his tongue hanging crookedly from the left side of his mouth.
At this, Milo himself went almost berserk with rage. His complexion darkened
to a scary plum colour–even his scalp was purple under the short hedgehog bristles of his flattop haircut. Sitting stunned in the dirt, both knees of my jeans torn out, my