He was a white-looking, bullish-looking dog. I can’t honestly say he was a white bulldog. He was a muscled dog with a flat face and a worried look. He had a right, he had three legs and no home except the general vicinity of the Old Gym at Andalusia High School. He walked like he had six legs, which was odd, because he caterpillared along like he had forgotten that missing leg somewhere and just might go back when it was convenient and get it.
Tripod was officially the unofficial school mascot. The Andalusia Bulldogs took to the gym and sports fields on a regular schedule and the Andalusia bulldog, Tripod, took to every place else on an irregular schedule. Kids would feed him during lunch and breaks. He might go missing for days and show up like he’d been away on business and was happy to be back home. What business a three-legged dog could possibly have is a mystery to me, but Tripod was a mystic rover: a friend of many, a confidant of none.
Tripod carried secrets and Southern dog wisdom inside that smelly, anviled head, and he transported his baggage in silence as he loped from student to student. He cared not that one young man was a football star and the pretty blonde was the homecoming queen. He showed no more respect to the valedictorian than he did to the guy who was about to flunk out. The good and the bad and the ugly were all the same to him.
He liked popcorn and peanuts and Coca-Cola, which made Tripod just like every one of us. One day he’d be in the cafeteria, the next he’d be in the hallway. He came to the dances and the football games and sat out near the left field fence studying pitches and grounders. He sat in the library one day watching several students read books as if he might enjoy such a thing if he had any idea what they were doing.
He had the run of the place and, as such, was the most committed alumnus , the biggest athletic supporter, the most dedicated student. I never heard him bark, never saw him run, never heard him growl. He was a benevolent gimp of an angel who watched over an entire generation of kids until one day a group of drunken hooligans dognapped him and bagged him in a burlap sack and tossed him off Prestwood Bridge into the chocolate swirls of the Conecuh River. Tripod sunk into the murk and was never seen again.
This group of boys laughed and bragged about their vicious act as if what they had done to an innocent, crippled animal was something to be proud of. But soon the pride turned to anguish as one by one, strangely, their lives fell into disrepair. Death and loneliness and embarrassing malfunctions haunted them like a three-legged dog from beyond the bridge. Every time I heard about how their lives had taken a turn for the worse, I thought of Tripod.
It’s hard to lay blame for the unsystematic dismantling of those lives at the three paws of a dead dog. But in the South, stranger things have happened.
