Paws before dying

open the can and upended it over his open mouth. He looked like an albino black Angus bottle-feeding itself.
    “Hey, Dale, lay off that,” said Mitch, wiping sweat off his neck.
    “Screw you, Mitch,” Dale mumbled.
    “There are things you gotta do, little brother,” said Mitch. “Always things I gotta do, right? I always gotta do them. Ever since Buddy, right? I’m always the one’s gotta do everything, right, Mitch?” He lurched back across the room and stared at Mitch. “’Cause everything’s always my fault around here, right?”
    Buddy? Some kid they’d grown up with? A fourth brother? If so, wouldn’t he have appeared on Edna’s family tree? I of all people should have guessed.
    “Dale,” Mitch said soberly, pulling his neck up high and straight, “I hate to be the one to break you the news, but Buddy would’ve ended up just like Kaiser, anyways.”
    So far, Willie had kept himself pretty much out of the fight except to nod and grunt occasional support for Mitch. Mostly, he’d been keeping an eye on Leah, whose body looked frozen and whose gaze was fixed ahead of her. But now he changed sides.
    “Mitch, shut up,” he said. “It wasn’t Dale that was mean to Buddy. It was you.”
    “Yeah,” said Dale, staggering to Willie and thumping him on the back. “And Mom and Dad didn’t do a goddamned thing but lay it all on me like always.” He sounded about eight years old. Then, to my amazement, he backed up a step and began shouting at Willie. “Yeah and after Buddy, and after they scream and yell if Kaiser sticks his nose in the house, she lets goddamned Righteous eat in the kitchen and sleep right in your bed, and does she give you that shit about fleas? Hell, no! Oh, no, ’cause it’s real different. It’s precious little Willie’s dog, right?”
    “Right,” Mitch said. “Nothing’s ever your fault, is it, Dale?”
    “Goddamn well not my fault,” agreed Dale, who seemed genuinely to have missed the point. “For Christ’s sake, Mitch! I only a kid.”
    “Dale, this isn’t Buddy we’re talking about,” Mitch insisted. Buddy’s history.”
    “Come on, Dale,” Willie added. “He’s right. We been over that a million times.”
    “Well, screw you!” Dale shouted. “Screw both you! Buddy’d still be alive, you know! He’d be old, but he’d still be alive! Screw the both of you! He’d still be alive!”
    “Yeah, and so would the Jew next door,” said Mitch. “That was an accident, and you know it,” Dale yelled, as if Rose’s death had been a puddle left on the floor by a puppy he’d forgotten to walk. “And it was all her own goddamned fault. I mean, it’s my dog, right? it’s my dog. It was none of her goddamned business. You know what she was trying to do? She was trying to take my dog away. If she’d kept her big Jew nose out of it, none of it would’ve happened.”
    Why are so many gentiles timid about saying Jew ? Because we’ve heard slime like Dale Johnson cough it up and spit it out the way he did, and that’s the truth.
    But it didn’t bother Mitch. “Dale, when you do something that might or might not kill somebody, and it does, then it’s not an accident.”
    “And if you’d kept your nose out of my business,” Willie added coldly, “we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
    “Oh, yeah? Well, lemme tell you what this little bitch thought, baby brother,” said Dale, glaring at Leah. “She thought you weren’t good enough for her.” He huffed himself up and added, “Nobody treats my little brother like that, going out with a goddamned Jew and treating my little brother like shit.” He grabbed a can of beer, opened it, downed it, and reached for another.
    “Dale, that’s enough,” Mitch ordered him. “There are things we gotta do. You gotta get out of here.”
    “Well, screw you, you bastard! You get outta here!” Dale shouted. Finding himself near a wall, he leaned on it.
    Mitch and Willie seemed to study one another. I expected them to come up with some plan that they’d try to sell to Dale, but they didn’t. Instead, Mitch turned on Willie and began laying blame on him, and Willie tried to defend himself.
    “If you’d kept your goddamned mouth shut,” Mitch was yelling at Willie, but Willie interrupted him.
    “If I’d kept my so-called goddamned mouth shut,” said Willie, “her and her aunt would’ve gone and got him locked up, and not just about Kaiser, either, Mitch. I had to tell him, Mitch, honest to God, like I