Huck

by Janet Elder

  I had a similar night, waking constantly, worrying about Michael, and wondering if it would not have been a better life’s lesson for Michael, albeit painful, to have come to terms already with the fact that Huck had run away and we would never see him again than to set him up for the heartbreak of false hope.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Rich quietly.

  “I’m going into Ramsey to start looking,” he said. “I’ll put up some signs and see if there is anyone outside. There just might be someone on their way to work or school who I can talk to. Maybe someone has even seen Huck.”

  “How am I going to meet you if you have the car?” I asked him, feeling very much like I wanted to get in the car and go with him if it were not for Michael sound asleep in the next bed.

  “When Michael gets up, call Dave and ask him to come and get you both. We have to let Michael sleep, and then he’s going to need to eat something.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “When are you going to eat?”

  “I’ll get something to eat along the way. I want to get going. You might as well try and get some more sleep, because there isn’t anything you can do right now. I’ll leave you two of the flyers. When Dave picks you up, ask him to take you somewhere where you can get copies made.”

  “Should we get color copies? They might be very expensive. If we’re really going to blanket the town, which I think we should do, we’ll probably need to start with five hundred flyers,” I said. I wasn’t so much asking him as just thinking it through.

  “We have to get color copies; otherwise the flyer won’t stand out,” Rich said. “If it is in black and white, people will just pass it by,” he continued. “The color makes it stand out. Oh yeah, see if you can get tape, too, and a box of plastic sleeves for the flyers we put up on trees and telephone poles. If we don’t somehow put the flyers inside plastic, when it rains, we’ll lose the flyer.”

  Rich was obviously way ahead of me. “Okay, that’s a good idea,” I said. It was so like Rich to think through what would happen to the flyers if it rained or if a good, stiff wind came along. He had an unusual ability to be so singularly focused, to think through many of the details of something, no matter what the distractions were.

  “We’re just going to have to do what we have to do right now and worry about the money later,” Rich said. “We have to be as aggressive about this as we can. I gotta go.” He was out the door before I had a chance to respond.

  I was too agitated to try to go back to sleep. I took a shower and got dressed, unplugged my cell phone from its charger, and, holding the phone in my hand, sunk into the beige easy chair next to the windows, waiting for Rich to call and Michael to wake up. I realized I had been abdicating much of the planning to Rich. That was unlike me. But I was so focused on Michael, his sense of loss, and how best to comfort him, I couldn’t think about much else.

  Outside, Rich pulled out of the hotel parking lot and headed toward Ramsey. The road into town was desolate. It was full of hairpin turns and not much else. Stopped at a light, glancing at the flyers on the seat next to him, Rich remembered he had to find some tape to put the flyers up. He thought about stopping at the Clarks’ house once he got to Ramsey, but it was just after 6:00, and they probably would not yet be awake. Just as he decided against stopping at the Clarks, he saw across the road a red-shingled building. There was a wooden sign out front, painted black. In the middle of the sign was a big red strawberry, surrounded by white letters: ELMER’S COUNTRY STORE. There were two gas pumps outside the store and several cars parked in the lot. It must be open. It was.

  Elmer’s had an old-fashioned lunch counter with chalkboards listing the daily specials. At 6:30 in the morning, the air was thick with the smell of bacon and coffee. The place was full of commuters, truck drivers, teachers, and students, grabbing a quick cup of joe or a couple of fried eggs. Local gossip was traded; newspapers, lottery tickets, cigarettes, and candy were being sold. And on that cold Friday morning in March, a man desperate for a roll of tape successfully talked the reluctant clerk at the register into selling him the only tape he had, the one used in the store, for $2.00.

  In no time, Rich was in Ramsey, driving down Wyckoff Avenue, past the Clarks’ house, making a left onto Pine Street, the area he thought Dave had pointed to on the map the night before. He parked at the corner, looking up and down the street as he got out of the car. He began walking down the middle of the block, carrying the flyers under his arm.

  One clapboard house was nothing like the one next to it. Colonial houses stood alongside split-levels and ranch houses. More often than not, there were multiple cars in the driveways. Each house had a telltale sign about the people who lived inside. Flags, with sayings like “Welcome Friends,” or “Grandkids Spoiled Here,” hung next to front doors. On some porches, logs were piled high while on others empty rocking chairs sat waiting for spring. Some of the yards were hidden behind fences with a BEWARE OF DOG sign stuck in the ground. In other yards, there were trampolines.

  Rich wasted no time trying to get as many people as he could to befriend him and enlist them in the army of people we needed to find our puppy. He stopped the first person he saw, a man in a hurry, dressed in a business suit, who was heading out his front door and down his driveway toward his car that was parked at the end of it. Rich tried to smile. “Sir, do you have a second?” He then recited a quick synopsis of our story and asked the man if he’d take a flyer and tell his friends.

  “I’m looking for my son’s dog, a toy poodle named Huck. He ran away yesterday morning from my sister-in-law’s house on Wyckoff Avenue. My son is heartbroken. We’re desperate to find Huck. I wonder if you’d take a look at his picture and call us if you see him. We’re offering a $1,000 reward. And please, would you spread the word?”

  The man responded readily. “Sure. I’ll take a couple of your flyers. That’s too bad. How long has the dog been missing?” he asked.

  “About twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s not too long yet. I hope you find him,” the man said. He then got into his car and pulled away.

  The streets in this area off Wyckoff Avenue were labyrinthine. They were full of odd curves and turned in on one another. Rich would cover as much territory as he could on foot and then, before getting lost, go back to the car, drive to another of Wyckoff Avenue’s tributaries, park the car, and walk some more.

  As the clock passed 7:00 A.M, there were a lot of people leaving their houses, braced for the cold in winter coats and colorful scarves. They were all amiable enough, but all in a hurry. It took only one or two encounters for Rich to develop an ability to surmise how pressing each person’s hurry was, and he would adjust his retelling of the story accordingly.

  Rich talked to a man named Dan, a woman strapping a toddler into a car seat, and another piling four girls into an SUV. There was a man, whose bathrobe stuck out from under his tan trench coat, who was holding a cup of coffee in one hand while starting the car for his wife with the other. He lived next door to a man in sweat clothes, just back from his morning run. Rich shook hands with everyone he saw, beseeching strangers to deliver his message to their friends. He was starting to feel like a candidate running for political office.

  On Forest Avenue, he spotted a pretty teenage girl of about fifteen or sixteen, with dark eyes, dark hair, glasses, and a soft smile. She was about to get into a car driven by a woman who was more than likely her mother. Shy, but eager to help, Kim Romans took a handful of flyers. “I can give them out to some kids I know at school,” Kim said.

  Kim had a lot of friends at school. She played the flute and the oboe and was the music coordinator for the school’s marching band, which competed rigorously each year in the state’s competitions. As a freshman, Kim had been a cheerleader, but by her sophomore year she was spending more time with the band, hoping to become its drum majorette.

  When she got to school that morning, Kim taped a few of the flyers to the brick wall in the band room and handed others ou
t to friends in classes throughout the day. In cooking class, she gave one to Ray Leslie, a saxophonist and good friend, a boy who kept a fifteen-pound Flemish Giant rabbit named Dante in his bedroom and who volunteered a lot of his time for organizations like Save Darfur. “This looks like something you’d do,” she said as she handed him a flyer.

  After Kim and her mother had pulled away, Rich continued down the backstreets, thinking how grateful he was to Kim, how unspoiled and sweet-natured she seemed. She had been so approachable and had taken on the task of helping him in the most matter-of-fact way. He walked back to the car, eager to move on to the next neighborhood. Between Kim and the other people he had already met that morning, he was beginning to feel less alone, and it was still early.

  Rich drove farther into the maze of streets. Lost in thought, he wandered far from where he had spoken to Kim. The houses were starting to look different. They sat on bigger lots and looked as though they had been built into the woods. The bare trees towered over the houses.

  At the end of Stone Fence Road, a cul-de-sac, was a large house set deep in the woods. A barnlike garage sat at the end of a long driveway. Rich watched as a sparkling black Jaguar pulled into the driveway. A balding, sturdy-looking, middle-aged man in aviator glasses with a wide-open face and a compact build practically hopped out of the car.

  Harris Rakov had been an attorney in private practice before he decided he had had enough. He traded life behind a desk for life behind the wheel of expensive cars with high-paying clients in the backseat. In his second career, Harris chauffeured people around, listening to their tales and spinning some of his own. Many of his clients flew into Teterboro airport on private jets and wanted to arrive at their final destination in style. In fact, Harris called his new business “Ride in Style.”

  But mostly, Harris made the incongruous career change because his children were grown and he wanted to spend more time with their mother, whose own schedule as a real estate agent was flexible. Barbara Rakov—a tall, lithesome woman with bright green eyes and delicate features who in middle-age still looked as though she were taking the ballet classes she had enjoyed as a girl in Sheboygan, Wisconsin—was the love of his life.

  Harris and Barbara first met at a Christmas party in New York City. She was still living in the Midwest at the time, but had come east to the city for a visit. He wooed her for more than a year until she finally quit her job and moved.

  On a frigid January day, just after the calendar was turned to 1980, Harris took Barbara to the top of the World Trade Center for a romantic dinner. He ordered champagne. He picked up a glass of the bubbly to hand to her, discreetly dropping a diamond ring into it, and asked her to spend the rest of her life by his side. Twenty-three months later, their first child, a daughter, Sara, was born. They brought her home from the hospital on Christmas Eve and set her bassinet down under the Christmas tree.

  Harris adored his wife. He kept every note and every greeting card she ever gave him. He had an innate understanding of how tenuous life can be. His own father had died when Harris was only three years old. His mother had raised him in Manhattan, not far from where we live.

  Harris was the kind of man who drew people in, rather than turning them away. So when he saw Rich walking toward him, he stretched out his hand before Rich uttered a word.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Hi,” Rich responded. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure, sure,” Harris said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I hope you can help me.” Rich pulled out one of the flyers and somehow sensing Harris’s capacity for appreciating life, gave him the long account of our saga, the one that included cancer.

  As it turned out, Harris had had his own brush with children and pets and heartbreak. Some years earlier, his daughter Sara’s Russian Blue cat, Little Lely Bluesparkle Rakov, a completely domesticated feline with no claws, walked out of the house. Sara’s brother, Nicholas, then a newly minted driver, had backed his car into someone else’s, and in the ruckus the cat wandered away.

  “It was terrible,” Harris explained. “Sara was away at college. We did just what you are doing, we tried everything. Barbara went to the Humane Society, we posted pictures, we left food out for the cat, and Barbara even created a mailing list for every house in the area.”

  Rich asked the question he wasn’t sure he wanted the answer to. “Did you find the cat?”

  “You won’t believe it. After about six or eight weeks, the cat came home. It was pretty amazing. I came driving down the driveway and there she was, eating the food we had been leaving out for her. I’ll bet Barbara would be happy to create a set of labels for you, and you could mail these flyers you have here to homeowners all over the area.”

  Buoyed by the kindness of a complete stranger’s unusual offer of help, Rich thanked him profusely. The two men exchanged telephone numbers. Harris also gave Rich Barbara Rakov’s e-mail and work number, so he could be in touch about the mailing list. “I’ll tell my wife the story, and you call her a little later, once she’s had a chance to get to work and start her day.”

  Harris and Rich shook hands. Harris turned and headed toward his front door.

  As Rich started walking away, he turned back to look at Harris, hoping never to forget the face of this kind man. “Thanks again, thank you so much,” he shouted.

  “I’ll bet you find your dog,” Harris shouted back, advising: “Give it some time.”

  Back in the street and back in the car, Rich could not remember how to get out of the web of streets and back to Forest Avenue. He wondered if this wasn’t exactly what had happened to Huck—Huck started into the woods and, before he knew it, was so deep in he couldn’t find his way out.

  The streets were more deserted now than they had been when Rich set out that morning. Talking with Harris had taken more time than he realized. It was now close to 8:30. For a while he saw no one. He wondered if everyone who was leaving for school or for work had already done so.

  That is when he noticed an attractive, petite woman in a brown suede jacket walking a black-and-white Tibetan terrier. Rich pulled the car up alongside the woman, who introduced herself as Lorraine Sassano and her dog as Baxter. Rich asked Lorraine if she had seen a small, red poodle and then told her the story.

  “Let me have some of those flyers,” she said. “You have to get the word out fast. I work in Allendale. I’ll put some up for you,” she volunteered. “I’ll also put some up in the office I work in. It’s a doctor’s office, so we get a lot of people in and out who live in the area.”

  “That would be great. Thank you so much,” Rich said, and he handed her some flyers.

  “Why don’t you try and go to the schools, get a posse of kids together,” Lorraine suggested. “Kids like a challenge. If the schools will put up some of the flyers, I’ll bet some of the kids will come out to help.”

  With Kim in mind, Rich thought Lorraine was on to something. Schoolkids probably knew all of the area’s hiding places; they probably knew the woods better than most adults. After all, kids went a lot more places on foot and by bike than adults did.

  “That’s a really good idea. I’ll try it,” Rich said.

  “There is one other thing you should tell your son to do. Tell him to pray to St. Anthony,” she said. “He’s found a lot of things for me.”

  “Thank you, I will,” Rich said.

  Lorraine pointed the way back to Forest Avenue.

  So many people had been so nice, Rich now felt emboldened, ready to take his campaign one step further. He had decided to start ringing doorbells at houses where it looked like people were home and awake.

  Back on Forest Avenue, Rich spotted a few workmen milling around a colonial house with an American flag hanging off the porch. There was a truck in the driveway, J.H. MYER GENERAL CONTRACTOR, in neat letters across the side. He headed for the front door and rang the bell. John Myer opened the door and stepped outside, his dog, Lily, a brown-and-white King Charles spanie
l, following behind him. “Wait, your dog just got out,” Rich said the minute he saw the dog come through the door untethered.

  “She’s okay, she won’t go anywhere,” John said nonchalantly as Lily lay at his feet.

  Rich was momentarily envious that John Myer’s dog just lay down on the lawn instead of running away or disappearing into the woods. Why can’t Huck do that? he thought to himself. He introduced himself to John and told our story while handing him a flyer, realizing as he did that he was running out of copies.

  John was a confident man, not just confident that his dog would stay at his feet, but confident in his own skin, a man with an easy manner, a ready laugh, and a firm handshake. A carpenter by trade, the father of three girls, he invited Rich inside, offering to photocopy the flyer.

  Rich followed John into the house, through the kitchen, where beautifully tooled cherrywood cabinets lined the walls and a cooking island stood in the center of the room. Off the kitchen was a den, where John’s handiwork was on display—thick crown moldings, a wooden mantle above the brick fireplace, a window seat. Off the opposite side of the kitchen was John’s home office. Without thinking, John made a fistful of color copies of the flyer and handed them to Rich.

  “I’ll keep some myself and put a few on the trees and telephone poles on the street. I’ll also post them in our trucks and ask my men to keep an eye out,” he said to Rich.

  “This is really helpful,” Rich said. “I didn’t realize I was starting to run out.”

  “Not a problem,” John said. “We’ll look around. Good luck.”

  While Rich was out walking the streets, and while Michael slept, I took the local phone book from the desk in our hotel room, grabbed my reporter’s notebook from my bag, and went into the bathroom where I could turn on a light without waking Michael. Doing nothing was torture. I had to start working the phones.

  I sat on the edge of the cold, white porcelain tub, balancing the phone book on my lap, and started looking for the names of local newspapers and animal shelters. I found at least three newspapers we could run ads in. I used my cell phone, which I had held on to since Rich had left, and started calling to find out how to go about placing the ad, and what it would cost. We had done such a good job on the flyer that it would be best if we could simply reproduce it in a quarter-page or half-page ad.