Cloverleaf Kennel Club in Loveland will not run live greyhound races in 2007, leaving Mile High Greyhound Park in Commerce City as the only dog track in the state.
The single POP! woke me up, but in my memory I’m already awake, listening to my friend’s mom and her boyfriend argue – lying there next to my best friend, Darla, in the sofa bed in the trailer’s living room.
“Here’s Scotty’s gun,” she said earlier, showing me a dark metal shape in the nightstand drawer. “We’re not supposed to touch it.”
That safety precaution out of the way, we went about unpacking our little suitcases. I had brought my new light-up mirror with the magnifying glass on one side, encircled in orange plastic.
Darla’s family raised greyhounds, and we were in Byers for the races over sixth-grade winter break, staying in a tiny trailer home near the track.
They also raised rabbits, but Darla never had the heart to tell me what they were for. An 11-year-old protecting her friend’s innocence.
Darla lived at the end of my block with her mom and her grandparents. We used to sneak Kools out of her grandpa’s cartons. He wore denim overalls, like he was going out to ride a tractor, except we lived in the “Appleblossom subdivision” in the (now) old part of Westminster.
We would play with the mystery bunnies and with the kittens her cat Ginger was constantly producing. Sometimes we’d swim. Theirs was one of the few pools in the neighborhood. We loved playing Barbies in the basement. We would sneak peeks at her uncle’s Playboys and then pose the Barbies like the girls in the magazine. The innocent naughtiness of girls practicing to be adults.
Had it been a different kind of argument, or if he’d been in a better mood, that POP! could have been for Darla’s mom, or even us.
But Scotty took aim at his own head, splattering his own blood all over the small bedroom. When I went in to get my stuff, it looked like someone had dipped a paintbrush in brick-red paint and flicked it across the room, speckling my round orange light-up mirror in rust.
At the real racetracks, they used fake rabbits, but at the practices – how do you think the dogs learned? The racing industry prohibits “live lures” now, but this was the ’70s. Trainers must not have understood that the sight of moving prey, not the scent of blood, triggers greyhounds’ urge to run.
Did Scotty feel like one of those rabbits? Stuck on a hook, going in circles as the dogs snapped from behind?
Darla told me afterward they were fighting about her – a child’s assumption.
I don’t remember much else about that night, just the crack of the gunshot, and sitting up in bed, knowing what had happened. I can still see his pale purplish foot sticking out from under the white sheet when I went in to pack my little suitcase.
We crunched down the snow-covered street in the bitter midnight to a neighbor’s house where the grown-ups were joking about whiskey. I wondered if they were going to offer me some.
After the suicide, Darla and her mom moved to Fort Lupton, closer to another dog track. We ran up the long-distance charges until our friendship finally began to fade when we entered junior high.
We never talked about what happened that night. I don’t know what happened to her, but I think about her when I pass Cloverleaf on the way to work, and I wonder how she feels when she drives by a dog track.
Does she still think it was her fault?
I wonder if she shares my fear of guns and disgust for dog racing. And I wonder if she still hears the screech of the rabbit racing ’round and ’round on a hook that created a Doppler effect of cruelty for both animals, and two little girls.
Kristen Browning-Blas is food editor of The Denver Post. She may be reached at kbrowning@denverpost.com or 303-954-1440.
