In the late spring of 1964, Dallas Winston owned a dog.
As much as anyone can own a dog who thrives in solitude on the streets that maim him.
But it was that fact alone that secured him as Dally's dog, and nobody else's. Maybe they just saw something of themselves in each other.
The nearly black, somehow barrel chested animal with skin that stuck like tape to defined, protruding ribs would hang around the open fields near the house that belonged to the father of Dallas. The dog would wait on those dilapidated steps each and every morning for the boy to rise and the day to start. It was on those same steps where not just a couple of months later in the fall, in a fit of rage and a stomach of Imperial, that the Savage .32 would find its way into the father's impaired hands, and in search of his only kid, would eventually settle to spend the bullet on the dog instead.
Dallas would wonder that same night, walking home from Buck's, where that old, scrappy mutt had gone, and would be the one to discover and would run away from that house and never look back. And it would change him, was a part of the long list of things that, in the end, doomed him.
All you have is your fire, his father would say then, too, as if it was an excuse or an apology. And as a sick man it didn't usually mean a whole lot to hear him say such cryptic things, but that particular frozen night, Dallas Winston would lose a piece of himself in the flames.
But that would be later. This was the spring and these were the days Dallas had company on those nights that could've been so lonely.
Dog would watch with nearly black endless eyes as Dallas would get home late at night. Would hear the brawls that would break out on the other side of that door when the father had reached past the point of mindless intoxication and into the depths of insanity and destruction, and would regret the damage each and every time, but it wouldn't stop him from doing it all over again the next night. The best apology is changed behavior, afterall, and the father of Dallas never understood that.
The dog would growl, deep within his chest on behalf of that almost seventeen-year-old kid who braved it each and every night, because could understand what it meant to be utterly terrified but not be able to show it without appearing weak. It helped to have hackles, teeth, claws.
Dallas liked that mutt, and the mutt would like him right back. He'd even crack open his window on the colder, more bitter nights and let that mangy dog stay in the house with him once the father would drift off into sleep with snores and Bonanza blasting from the living room.
Dog didn't even know that his name, Toto, had initially been given purely to patronize, and when he started answering to the name, Dallas might have felt a little guilty. He never liked how his instincts were to try and make things smaller than him, it's what his father did to him, and in a way, he hated the father.
"And they say people don't look like their pets." A blonde Soc would say, passing by one day when Johnny and Dallas were particularly outcast. And the Soc's words may have been a little true, though Toto still knew to growl at certain colognes like that kid with the mustang and expensive class rings. See, Toto and Johnny weren't so unlike one another either. The black hair, the scars, and though Johnny was pure of heart, he had a different kind of fight in him. More than he'd credit or be credited, more than he'd ever even get to know about himself.
See, kids are like dogs in that if they get kicked around enough, they think they might have actually done something to deserve it. Maybe that was exactly what had happened to Johnny, maybe that was why he was always trying to do the right thing, like he had all of these wrongs he was responsible to right. But Dallas knew only his father was responsible for letting his brilliant brain suffer under the crushing foot of toxic genes.
The worst was when Dallas would squint in his rusted over mirror, disheveled his hair a little more, he saw those similarities between the father and himself, they went much past the physical. The crack that ran down the middle of his reflection like a scar of separation of who Dallas was and who he wanted to be. Worried maybe it was impossible for the apple to fall much further than the roots of the tree, and like the crab apple orchard that decorated the empty fields Dallas roamed to kill time, he knew what rotted and unclaimed looked like. He decided he'd die before he'd allow himself to be like his father, a shriveled up 40-year-old in a consensual, sadistic relationship with such fleeting pleasures.
And the father, the charred pyromaniac, who would light matches just to watch the flame burn down to his fingertips, who was responsible for those accidental circles of black scorch marks that peppered the house, the furniture, who had burned down the old abandoned barn off of Maple St. once just to smell the smoke, to feel the heat, and because fire is cleansing, and had gotten away with it. Couldn't stop himself.
After Dallas' mother was taken too soon, so unexpectedly, the house began to reek of gasoline. It would follow Dallas around wherever he went, trap itself in his nostrils. Began to wonder if the scent actually was just his own, a warning of an impending future he had no control over. If it wasn't nature, nurture, any of that bullshit, if it was just him. Can such things be inherited? Or only created?
Like the father, Dallas had always looked mean, even back in those foggy memories of his mother's tender voice, smooth like Mrs. Curtis', when she'd run a finger through his hair to lay it flat with such persistent cowlicks, shake her head and tsk at him in the principal's office after striking Davison and breaking his nose.
And because his mother wasn't ever far from getting into trouble herself, who never stopped fighting back when the cards were unfairly dealt, who craved justice, Dallas always listened to her. His guiding star. Her slaps carried just as much weight as her embraces, and she was always operating with 100% dedication. Fiercely loyal. Unabashedly passionate. From her, he'd inherited selflessness, but most people never realized it in him, least of all himself.
"You're made of the choices you make, Dallas. Make the right ones. Timshel, my darling, timshel." He didn't like to remember that, it hurt too much.
Pops a cigarette on his lip to taste the bitter, and likes to have control over at least a small flame. He doesn't like to be jerked around, and that's all those memories seem to bring anyways. Sometimes it's best to forget.
Which was why he tended to keep away from the Curtis household, as much as it drew him in like a moth to a flame, Dallas made sure he wouldn't be one to sizzle. The softness in Darry's mom's voice was just too much of the same frequency, the same melody, or maybe it just rhymed. Unlike Johnny, it was easier for Dallas to stay planted in the dark than visit for too long at Soda's house where, sure sometimes it was warmer than outside, usually there was food to share, there were laughs and smokes, but inevitably, he would find himself back in the drafty house on the father's land with none of it but the fire that wasn't the right kind of warm, and that was just too harsh a contrast to weather on one's own day in and day out.
Some people are meant to be alone, anyways, or so he'd decided.
So on those days where Johnny just couldn't take another night roaming the streets with him, when he'd accept the open arms of Mr. and Mrs. Curtis, he'd beg Dal to join him, Dallas would wave at Mrs. Curtis who would always put one hand on her hip and beckon him in with a genuine plea, he'd shake his head with lies of better places to be and things to do, and wander off alone, and the delinquent and the dog would eventually meet up because solitude was one thing they had in common. There was something so truthful and fulfilling about being a renegade. Something so empty and tragic at the same time.
It was Toto who found that old oak tree with roots that sprung out out of the earth ever which way, with one a perfect perch for the two renegades. Though nearly seventy pounds, the dog would climb in his lap for warmth, and Dally welcomed it. Even scratched behind his ears.
And look on at that sunset. The fire in the sky. A different kind of fire than the father's. Had an endlessness, a beauty, a harmlessness he couldn't tear his eyes away from. And that gold that would fade to deep tangerine, or a blood orange glow that wound linger in the summertime, then to that wild pink like the roses the father used to bring his mother before life turned sour, then purple, to dark blue, and then eventually, black. It never lasted long enough.
Though brief, took his breath away each and every time.
But like Dallas, it wasn't enough to keep the father from falling off the deep end when the mother passed, those sunsets weren't enough for Dallas either, and he'd really looked at them. It wasn't enough.
He'd known that all along.
Author's Note:
Hm, not really sure why I wrote this one other than wanting to try Dallas out. He's a character I love deeply but have always been a little too intimidated to write, and I've been sitting on this piece for a while trying to make it work before just deciding to publish it. The narration is intentionally pathless and stream of conscious. If you made it to here, thank you so much for reading, it means so much.
'Arsonist's Lullaby' by Hozier sparked this song (pun intended ;) ), and I took "all you have is your fire" directly from the lyrics.
The 'kids are like dogs' line came from 'Lost' Season 1 Episode 23 called 'Exodus', said by their character Sawyer who, to me, is basically the same character as Dallas Winston.
And Bonanza was a western show that started in 1959.