The No-hoper and the Schnauzer (a short story by Phil)

Most of these smallish towns have some sort of home-grown mythology, usually including some yarn about a local hero. My home town is no exception, of course. The heroics in question were performed by a boy in my year at school called Benny Braille.

Benny Braille was long and athletic, possessed of a huge-striding wonky lope. He ran facing a few degrees left, to put his good side forward, although he was nearly as deaf in his right ear as his left, which was completely.

Benny banged around town, playing in the fields and woods and all that. He didn't get much attention from the locals, he was just another lad from down at the special school. I sometimes knocked about with him, but it was always annoying and discouraging how his lip reading and hearing were just slightly better than mine, so when we approached anyone else as a pair, they just spoke to him. I was just his cute mute little friend.

My mother told me not to bother about Benny. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said, ‘he’s a no-hoper.’ This was my mother’s favourite phrase for other children – pretty much all of them were no-hopers as far as she was concerned. Especially the other children in my class at school. There was Daniel Burn, blind as a blocked up flue; my mother called him a no-hoper because his mum and dad had divorced and there he was at St Francis’ School for Special Boys. There was Pierre Girard, whose cerebral palsy constantly made him spill juice on his trousers. My mother said he was a no-hoper because it ‘don’t matter how liberal you are, no one would love an adult pant-wetter.’ Benny Braille, for his part, was a no-hoper because he was just so damn scared of things. You name it: beetles, windscreen wipers on full speed, very large hats, rotting peaches, and most of all, dogs. This made the tale that made him a town legend all the more unlikely.

I saw the whole thing or most of it anyway. At least, I saw the payoff, if not the build-up. The dog in question belonged to Mrs Steeplechaser. Well, that’s what I’ll call her since I can’t quite remember her real name. I’ll call her Mrs Steeplechaser because she had a curious black and white striped picket fence at the front, with her pond just behind it. Mrs Steeplechaser was an opulent starling, perched and gossiping with all the rest but thinking of herself as the leader of the town busybodies. She was married to Mr Steeplechaser (probable real first name: Dorian), who, in spite of his flamboyant name, had the looks and personality of a parking meter. She always said it was him who left the back gate unlatched, allowing her precious Miriam (the Schnauzer, that is) to escape and fall in the well.

See, this was where Benny Braille was supposed to have found little Miriam while he was just out loping through the little wood over town. There was a well there in a clearing, usually covered but, fair enough, yanked off by youths periodically for them to sling down empty lager cans and the dead ends of their joints. Seems Miriam found it open, took a dicey walk along the edge and slipped into it. A good job really, that there was still water down there to break her fall. Another stroke of luck, apart from the water and Benny coming by and looking down the well, was the abandoned car. Only a few feet from the well was a beat-up rusty saloon with a tow bar for a caravan or trailer.

Benny saw Miriam down there; she could have been barking or whimpering too, for all he knew. Of course, he knew who it was. Mrs Steeplechaser walked Miriam around the neighbourhood all the time, and she liked introducing the dog to any of us St Francis boys as we walked home or were wheeled home from school. Benny Braille always hung back from meeting the friendly Schnauzer, naturally, but he put up with Mrs Steeplechaser like the rest of us. Mrs Steeplechaser seemed to love talking to us, grinning like a hornet’s nest and telling us just how sweet we all were. My mother called her a saint of good appearances and a patronising Christian, which I guess made her a no-hoper too. Anyhow, Miriam was in the well, swimming in tiny pathetic circles, washing the butts and tins up against the stone walls. Benny Braille took it all in and figured out what to do. I didn't witness this bit, but it’s been told enough times around town. First, he sprinted home, with giant strides and his listing head. Second, he went into the shed and grabbed a huge bit of rope, which was hanging from a masonry nail. Third, he looped it diagonally across his chest to look more like a cowboy or leading man or something. Fourth, he ran back to the well and tied one end of the rope to the tow bar of the corroded family car. Fifth, he hurled the rest of the rope down the well and started to climb down.

This was around the time I showed up on the scene. I could see the blue rope running taut from the tow bar to the lip of the well. I thought that someone was hanging themselves in the well; there was form for this in these woods after all – everyone in town knew that Dr Applecart had hung herself from a tree just over there. Her husband had been the one to find her, as it goes, and he wailed so loud that even Benny Braille heard it with his right ear from the other side of the copse, where he was with me trying to make a crossbow from fallen branches. We ran over and saw Mr Applecart with his arms around his wife’s bare ankles. She’d stupidly hung herself wearing a skirt, finishing up with her feet a yard and a half from the ground. Mr Applecart stared at Benny and me with eyes so blood-curdling we legged it. We went and told my mother, who smirked weirdly for a second before she called an ambulance.

As it happens, nobody was hanging themselves on that day when I saw the rope tied to the tow bar. I went up to the edge of the well and looked down to see Benny at the bottom. He was in the water up to his armpits, holding the vertical line with one hand and using the other to circle the free end of the rope around Miriam’s midriff. He got it under and let go with his supporting hand, treading water for a minute as he knotted the loop of rope just over Miriam’s spine. I tried to call down to Benny but can’t have been making enough noise because he didn't look up; he just concentrated on what he was doing. He hauled himself up first, pulling on the rope and scrambling with his feet on the walls as much as he could. At the top, he saw me, and artlessly I gave him a clumsy hand over the edge. Then, with a painfully manly expression, he signed, ‘I've got this.’ He stood just behind the ledge of the well and heaved on the rope, hand over hand. Miriam must have been scraping on the wall of the well, but she came out covered in green algae on her left flank, so I guess the slime must have smoothed her ride.

Benny Braille borrowed my penknife and cut a crude lead for Miriam from the rope. He asked me to put the lid back on the well and trotted off to return the dog, leaving me in the clearing. He was soaked but beaming like a conductor with an ovation. I guess he wasn't so scared of dogs after all.

He got Miriam back to the Steeplechasers. No doubt she thanked him at ten to the dozen while Mr Steeplechaser just nodded his head like a bucket of sand. That’s what he always did to me anyway: just swung his big head up and down, up and down. I expect he thought his bad harelip scar would make lip-reading too difficult for me, and indeed, for Benny Braille.

So, obviously, Mrs Steeplechaser tells the whole town, Benny Braille gets front page of the gazette and all the rest of it. There’s a special assembly on him at school, although it was cut slightly short by another fit from Humbert Heinbacher on the front row.

Not bad for an afternoon’s work, that, I said to Benny, many years later when we were both here back in town visiting our folks. Well, he was just visiting his father; his mother had died a couple of years before from a kidney infection. We had seen each other down the pub and had more than a few drinks together. Speaking in sign language means you can’t slur your words, so it has that going for it, but it sure makes it difficult to hold onto your chair. So, falling off our chairs midsentence every now and then, Benny Braille and I downed some scotches and gabbed about his local hero status. I told him what my mother had said: that the story morphed over time and now it involved him being trapped down the well with the dog for twelve hours before hatching a cunning plan to get them both out. One version had an adder down there too.

‘Mrs Steeplechaser (or whatever) is long gone now,’ Benny signed to me. He got back on his chair and continued. ‘So I can tell you the truth now. I was so sick of her thinking I was nice but dim, sweet but incompetent. I chucked Miriam down that well, tempting her up the woods with pork scratchings, just so as I could get her out again and teach that woman a lesson about who’s capable.’ He didn't know that it was my mother he really needed to convince in this town, but that’s another story.

Benny Braille fell out of his chair and swore me to secrecy from the floor, a promise I intend to keep, except from you, dear reader.