Free My Dog Skip by Willie Morris

from the fifty-yard line and then began running in the opposite direction. The instant Peewee released him Henjie started the stopwatch. I ran as fast as I could, but in little time at all I could hear him approaching me from behind. I crossed the finish a mere three or four strides before he did. Then, with Peewee dashing alone down the field toward us in his keen curiosity, Big Boy and I approached Henjie, who had the stopwatch extended in his hand and was grinning with such wild felicity that I thought he might commence jumping up and down at any moment.
    We looked at the stopwatch:
y.8 seconds¡
Take into consideration if you will that the
human
world record in thehundred at that point in history was 9.4 seconds, held by a fellow named Mel Patton. I immediately surmised that the all-time world record for fox terriers was achieved on that day in this small-town high school football stadium of the American Southland. Who would have the audacity to question it? We did, after all, have four witnesses.
    You will have to take me at my word, however, that his favorite among all the sports was baseball. How did I know this? Because I knew my dog very well, and it had to do with the look in his eye when he was around baseball, and also with that particular time and place.
    Like Mark Twain and his comrades growing up a century before in another village on the other side of the Mississippi, my friends and I had but one sustaining ambition in the 1940s. Theirs in Hannibal was to be steamboat men; ours in our place was to be major-league baseball players. In the summers, we thought and talked of little else. We memorized batting averages, fielding averages, slugging averages; we knew the roster of the Cardinals and the Red Sox better than their own managers must have known them; and to hear the broadcasts from all the big-city ballparks with their memorable names—the Polo Grounds, Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium—was to set our imagination churning for the glory and riches those faraway places would one day bring us. Soon after the war was over Peewee went to St. Louis on his vacation to see the Cards, and when hereturned with the autographs of Stan Musial, Red Schoen-dienst, Country Slaughter, Marty Marion, Joe Garagiola, and a dozen others, we could hardly keep down our envy. I hated Peewee for a month and secretly wished him dead, not only because he took on new airs but because I wanted those scraps of paper with their magic characters.
    I had bought a baseball cap in Jackson, a real one from the Brooklyn Dodgers, and a Jackie Robinson Louisville Slugger, and one day when I could not locate any of the others for catch or for baseball talk, I sat on a curb with the most dreadful feelings of being caught forever by time— trapped there always in my scrawny and helpless condition.
I'm ready, I'm ready
, I kept thinking to myself, but that remote future when I would wear a cap like that and be a hero for a grandstand full of people seemed so far away I knew it would never come. I must have been the most dejected-looking boy you ever saw, sitting hunched up on the curb and dreaming of glory in the mythical cities of the North. And Skip, of course, would be right there on the street curb with me, dreaming his own dreams. Sometimes he would sit in my lap when I listened on the radio at home to the Cardinal games out of KMOX in St. Louis. When the boys and I played catch in my front yard, he would sit on the porch, watching us with interest, and often as not he would go inside and bring back his tennis ball and have us toss him his own grounders and high flies. Ever since he was two years old he could catch a tennis ball in his mouth as well as any center fielder. I had started him off on this gradually. Hewas about a year old when I began throwing the ball on a bounce from short distances, then moving a little farther back every day At first he muffed most of them, but soon he became all but unerring. After that I started