Here’s something that might interest you. There was this guy who’d race his old Firebird through my neighborhood. This is the way he walked his dogs. I shit you not. The dogs would run through the yards chasing the Firebird. He’d roll right through stop signs. My kids were young then and always riding their bikes around, so I’d yell at the guy from my porch. Other neighbors did too, but they were wary of him, you could tell. You could see him hunched behind the wheel in there. He stared straight ahead, paid no attention. The kids in the neighborhood made up stories about him like kids do. He’d poisoned his children but got off on a technicality. He tortured runaways in his basement and fed them to his dogs. Urban myth stuff. Anyway, after a couple of these incidents I decide to go visit his place, three or four blocks away from my house. I wasn’t sure what I’d say exactly but I was going to make an impression. So I get over there and he’s got all these antique carnival arcade games on his porch. He fixed them up, sold them on eBay, I suspect. Morgana the Fortune Teller was one, I remember—the upper torso of a woman in a red velvet-lined box. Anyway, I know the guy is home because I can hear the TV going. When I knock, dogs start barking inside. A whole pack, by the sound of it. He comes to the door. Hobbles a bit, like he’s got a bad knee. He’s disheveled. Dark circles under his eyes. Nervous. He has a long screwdriver in his hand. The dogs keep barking. It’s loud. He keeps turning back to them, talking in a language I can’t follow. I think about him running the stop sign, smashing my son’s bike, launching him in the air. And for some reason, I don’t know why, I introduce myself as someone I’m not. I tell him I’m from Austin Animal Control. I’m coming from work, in a jacket and tie, so I look semi-official. I tell him that there have been complaints about the number of dogs he keeps in his house, about the dogs being a danger to the community. I tell him the dogs may have to be removed. Euthanized. He looks at me like he’s examining a piece of food that might’ve gone bad. His eyes jitter around as if he’s mulling over his options. I’m watching the screwdriver out of the corner of my eye. Then he says, in English, without raising his voice, that he’d like to come to some agreement. There is no need for this, he says. He glances back inside the house, and his face stiffens, like he’s imagined suddenly what all this might mean. He seems spooked. I notice the close smell of the house now, the dog smell, but something behind that, something that made me think of dirt and roots. Or maybe that’s just in retrospect? Who knows? Anyway, the dogs are really going at it now. So I tell him I’ll be back in a week with a court order and the constable. I’m not even sure if there is a constable, but he doesn’t know either. He says something sharp in his language—I can’t tell if he’s saying it to me or the dogs—and disappears back into the house. I leave. I get busy at work, with the kids. So then I don’t see him for weeks. Don’t see the Firebird or the dogs. Which makes me feel okay. Like maybe something sank in. I drive by his house. Firebird is still in the driveway. No lights on in the house. I can hear the dogs, though. They are having at it. A real uproar.