by A. E. Kaplan
His eyebrows rose and he turned away from me, his face angling back up toward the sky. “I’m very proud of the work I do.”
It was a nonanswer, and the first sign of doubt I’d ever heard from him. I shouldn’t have pressed, but I was thirteen and scared and angry. “That’s not really what I asked.”
He sighed. “If you’re asking whether I wouldn’t rather stay here with you and your sister than spend the next year in the desert, then, yes, I’d rather stay with you. But there are more important things than what I want.”
It was a good-soldier answer and it infuriated me, because Zip and I needed our one living parent a hell of a lot more than the army needed one random major. And it infuriated me even more because I didn’t understand why he thought it was important to go, and maybe that meant that he was heroic in a way I never would be. I was selfish, and I wanted my dad, and I didn’t really care about the army or Iraq or any of it. The guilt ate at me, because he was going off to face guns and missiles and IEDs and all I could think about was myself.
I wondered, What will happen to me if he gets shot?
It did not occur to me to wonder, What will happen to him?
“After I get back,” he said, “let’s knock out that hiking badge you’ve got your eye on.”
I got that nauseous feeling I always got when he mentioned coming back, because of the implicit if in that statement. But I wanted to show my dad that I could be brave, too, so I tried not to let on. “I was thinking we could do the Appalachian Trail,” I said. “Maybe for a week.”
He nodded. “I get back in September. The trail should be real nice in October. All lit up with the leaves. It’s a date.”
“But I’ll have school,” I said.
He smiled. “You can miss a week to go camping with the old man.”
Dad never let me miss school, even when I had a cold. “Really?”
His teeth flashed a smile in the dark. “Really.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
Only he came back in January, not September. And we never did go.
I fell asleep thinking about that trip, and wondering if my father remembered it, too.
I woke to the sound of a barking dog.
Not just any dog, mind you, not a collie, or a Labrador, or a cocker spaniel, or any normal kind of dog. I woke up to the sound of a hound.
You hear them, occasionally, around here; some people keep them for hunting and guarding their livestock. But there isn’t one within a good mile of my house, so it took me a minute to figure out that I was hearing a real dog and not a TV show or a movie or something.
I rolled out of bed and scrubbed my hands through my hair. It was still pitch-dark, and I flipped my alarm clock around to see that it was only 2:01. I’d gotten exactly two hours and four minutes of sleep. It just wasn’t fair.
The dog was still going at it, and it really did sound close. I stumbled down the hall, stopping to glance out the windows, and then I realized that said dog was at my front door.
I was twelve when I saw Cujo. I have a healthy respect for canine-kind, and that respect does not extend to opening the door to strange hellhounds. But I looked out the window next to the door and saw a brown-and-white-spotted hound and no person. Then I realized why the dog was freaking out so hard: someone had tied its leash to my doorknob.
This was not a good sign.
I grabbed a leftover peanut butter sandwich from the kitchen and eased the door open, figuring nothing makes friends like PB&J on wheat. I threw the sandwich out once the dog’s snout, still barking, came through the crack in the door. While he fell on the sandwich, I opened the door the rest of the way.
“Good dog,” I said, untying him from the doorknob. “Gooood dog. Nice demon spawn.” The dog, meanwhile, had finished inhaling the sandwich and sat down, looking at me with a wagging tail. I scanned the driveway. No one.
“Where did you come from?”
The dog wiggled, then peed on the azalea next to my front door. When he came to me for a pat afterward, I saw that he had a piece of paper tucked into his collar. I plucked it out and unfolded it.
Darling,
You have prevented me from getting laid tonight, and that has rendered my mood sour indeed. My dim-witted cousin tells me this is not the first time you have spoiled one of his evening soirées. I think it will, however, be the last.
This fine animal is a hunting dog belonging to Mr. Jeremiah Stevens. He has, I believe, five such dogs. Or is it six? It’s so hard to keep track when they’re running around. I’m sure you understand. Do you know Mr. Stevens? Perhaps you’ve introduced yourself to this upstanding pillar of humanity on some prior occasion? I do hope so. At any rate, in one hour Mr. Stevens will wake up to do a perimeter check of his property, as he does at 3 a.m. every night. At this point, he will find his treasured hunting companions are missing. Fortunately, I have left a note just inside his main gate letting him know that you are keeping an eye on them. Isn’t that kind of you?
Say hello when you see him.
Much love,
Wolf
I ran my hand down the length of my face. Jeremiah Stevens. “Holy shit,” I said.
Then, from somewhere behind my house, I heard a barking dog. Then another. Then another. I grabbed the end of the leash and ran back inside, snatching my phone off the kitchen table. I hit the button to call Ed. “Pick up, pick up, pick up,” I muttered, shoving my feet into my shoes.
“Dude,” he finally said. “You are getting alarmingly needy.”
“Shut up,” I said. “Just listen. I flipped the power at the Rothgars’, and Wolf stole all of Jeremiah Stevens’s dogs and told him I did it.”
I heard the sound of Ed sitting up in his bed and turning on a lamp. “Say that again.”
I repeated myself. “I have one of them here, but I think the rest of them are in the woods or something.”
“Oh, man. That’s…He’s going to blow your freaking brains out.”
I was fully aware of this. Jeremiah Stevens was our town’s answer to the anarchist militia movement; a survivalist, he lived on the edge of town in a bunker he rarely left. You didn’t go onto his property without expecting death: the man supposedly kept a full arsenal in a shed in his yard, and the whole property was surrounded by barbed wire. I couldn’t imagine how Wolf had gotten the dogs out to begin with.
“How long do you have?” Ed asked.
“An hour, maybe less. Ed, if you don’t help me find these dogs, I am seriously going to die.”
“All right,” he said. “I’m already in my car.”
I felt a lump of affection in my chest for Ed. “You are?”
“Calm down, tiger.”
There was a gentle knock at my door. “What fresh hell is this?” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just hurry.” I hung up the phone and answered the door.
It was Willow Rothgar. Holding another dog by the collar.
I gaped at her. “What are you doing with that?”
“He was barking under my window,” she explained.
“And what made you think to bring him here?”
She made an annoyed grunt. “Just help me, would you? I can’t hold him.”
I pulled him inside with the other dog, and the two of them wiggled around each other in glee. For all of Jeremiah Stevens’s reputation, these had to be the most ineffectual guard dogs in the history of the survivalist movement.
I finally got a good look at Willow. She was wearing blue pajama pants and a tank top, and she had I-just-woke-up hair. “Tell me again why you brought this animal here,” I said, jerking my head in the direction of the dogs, who were eating leftover cookies off the kitchen counter.
She blinked slowly. “I heard the other dog over here,” she said. “I thought…I don’t know. That you were taking care of them. Or something.”
I explained about Wolf and Jeremiah Stevens. “Your cousin,” I said, “is trying to get me killed.”
“I think you’re being kind of dramatic.”
“I’m really not.”
“Then why are you standing around doing nothing?”
“I’m waiting for Ed,” I said.
She scrunched her face at me. “Why?”
I sputtered, “Because I don’t want to chase down half a dozen dogs in the dark by myself? What do you think, Willow? Does it look like I’m having fun?”
She shrugged, and I heard a car door slam. Ed came jogging up the driveway and side-eyed Willow. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m helping,” she said.
“Let’s just go,” I said. I could hear the bay of the hounds in the woods. “We don’t have much time. We still have to drive them back to the farm, and that’s like fifteen minutes from here.” I grabbed the leash of the first dog and nodded toward the other. “We have to take them with us. I’m not leaving them alone in my house.”
Ed said, “We’ll need more leashes for the other dogs.”
“Right,” I said. “Only I don’t actually have any of those.”
“Rope?” Willow suggested. “Belts?”
“Right.” I ran for the bathroom, where I pulled the belt out of my dad’s bathrobe, and grabbed my black and brown belts from my closet, plus an old tie I’d gotten for my bar mitzvah and always hated.
“Dude,” Ed said. “You move slow for a man whose life is at stake.”
“I know, I know!” I grabbed a loaf of bread from the pantry, a flashlight, and Dogs One and Two, and we ran out the front door.
The barking was coming from the woods, so we ran that way.
“Go on, boy,” I said, patting Dog One and pulling on his leash. “Find your buddies.”
Thankfully, he did, but holy crap did he run fast. The barking was so loud, and there was so much of it, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
“I hear it!” Ed shouted. “It’s close—it’s— Crap.” I followed him with the beam of my flashlight, long enough to see him grabbing something out of the hollow at the base of a tree, which turned out to be an MP3 recorder. He pulled a yellow Post-it off the front and handed it to me after he jogged back to us.
Ooops. That was too easy. How much do you want to live, Grendel?
“I don’t think I like this guy,” Ed said.
“Come on,” I said. “We need to keep looking. Let’s just hope we don’t find any more recordings.”
We ran through the woods, scraping our legs on briars and tripping over roots. We followed Dog One to the edge of the lake, where he suddenly sat down.
I turned a circle, but there was no mistaking it. The barking—some of it, at least—was coming from the middle of the lake.
“Is it on the pier?” Willow asked. I shined my flashlight in that direction, but there was nothing, so I dragged the beam of light along the edge of the lake.
The shore was deserted except for us, but Ed looked out toward the water and said, “What’s that orangish thing?” I moved the light in the direction he indicated.
There, right in the middle of the lake, was a yellow inflatable dinghy with a howling dog on board.
“Oh no,” I said. “No, no, no.” I held up a piece of bread, which caused Dogs One and Two to jump all over me. “Doggy! Food!” I shouted.
He bayed despondently. I looked at Willow. “Do you guys have a boat?” She shook her head. I wondered where the yellow one had come from. It didn’t belong to anyone in the neighborhood.
I kicked off my shoes and pulled my shirt over my head. “What time is it?” I asked Ed.
“Two-twenty-five.”
I handed Willow my shirt and the leash of Dog One and ran into the lake. I swam through the cold water to the boat, where the dog was baying and panting at intervals.
He growled at me.
“Good dog,” I said.
He bared his teeth and snarled.
I flopped backward, dunking myself under the surface. I tried to swim to the other side of the boat, but he followed, growling from that side.
“Your cousin,” I shouted, “has put the mean dog on the boat.”
“Is there anything you can pull it with?” Ed called.
“It’s an inflatable boat! What should I pull, the valve?”
“Is there an oar?”
“Yeah,” I called. “I could use a diversion!”
Ed and Willow started to jump up and down and shout, waving the loaf of bread in the air, and Dog Three (or the Hound of the Baskervilles) stopped growling at me to watch. I grabbed the oar and used it to push the boat back toward shore.
“Throw me the bread!” I shouted, once it was shallow enough for me to stand. Ed tossed the loaf to me, and I made a few high-pitched good-dog noises and threw two pieces to the dog in the boat. He fell on them, and I pushed the boat up onto the sand.
He ran over to Willow and lay down with his head on her shoe.
“Well,” I said. “That’s interesting.” He turned back to me and growled again. “Okay, Will,” I said, throwing her my brown belt. “You hold on to Cerberus.”
Holding one dog each, we ran toward the sound of the nearest barking. It was hard to tell how many dogs were making the noise; there was so much of it, and they all sounded kind of alike. “How many do you think there are left?”
“Two, I think,” said Ed.
“Maybe we should split up?” Willow asked.
“We’ve only got one flashlight.”
“Good point. Go left, I think.”
I got whipped in the face with a pine branch. “It’s here,” I said. “But…” I started scanning with the flashlight. The sound was definitely coming from up.
“Do hounds climb trees?” I asked. “Like, is that a thing?”
Ed scanned the treetops with the flashlight. “There,” he said. Then: “Oh God.”
There was one of the hounds. About ten feet up, nestled in the curve between a branch and the trunk. He was smaller than the others, probably a puppy. I hoped that meant he was less likely to try to rip my throat out.
“How the hell did Wolf get him up there?”
“Damned if I know. Maybe he had a ladder? Is there a ladder?” There was not.
“I can get up there,” Willow said. “If you give me a leg up.”
“What are you going to do with him once you get up there? You can’t climb down while you’re holding him.”
She waved my shirt, which she was still carrying. “I’ll make a sling or something.”
“He’s too big for that.”
“Well then, you better get in a good place to catch him in case I drop him.”
I tried to protest, but Ed was already hoisting her into the tree. She scrambled up to where the dog was, then tied my shirt around his middle.
Then she stopped.
“Okay, I don’t think I can actually carry him down.”
“I did tell you this was going to be a problem,” I said.
“Okay. Just, okay. Let me think. Okay.” She wedged her body between the trunk and the branch. “I’m just going to lower him down. She slid to a sitting position, then hooked her legs under the branch and took hold of my shirt. She flipped herself upside down, revealing several inches of her waist, and slowly lowered the wiggling dog until Ed was able to reach him with the tips of his fingers. Willow let go, and Ed caught the dog and set him down.
Just in time to piss in my shirt.
I didn’t have time to worry about the fate of my clothes, though, because right then everything went quiet.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “What happened to the other one?”
“I think it was coming from back by your house before,” Ed said.
“Are you sure about that?”
“No.”
“And here’s the other thing,” I said. “What if that wasn’t the last one? I have no idea how many dogs Stevens has. Wolf said five or six. And we don’t know if he was telling the truth.”
“I don’t think Wolf actually wants you to get shot,”
Willow said. “It’s a prank, that’s all.”
“A prank! Christ, Willow, he gave my name and number to the town loony, then told him I stole his prized hunting dogs. I think this goes a little beyond a prank, don’t you?”
She shrugged. “Come on, Tom. You’ve been pulling them, too.”
I rounded on her, because she was acting like Wolf and I were somehow engaged in the same activity and that activity was nothing but adolescent high jinks. “Do you think I’m doing this for shits and giggles? I’m trying to fix things for my dad! You know, so your psycho relatives don’t give him a nervous breakdown? I don’t want to be the freaking Hatfields and McCoys. I just want him to knock it off with the parties!” The hounds were staring at me with their ears pinned back, and I lowered my voice. I hadn’t realized I was yelling. Willow was pointedly looking at a tree. “Exactly whose side are you on?” I asked.
There was just enough of a pause to make me start to wonder. “Yours,” she said quickly. “Of course, yours. I’m just saying I don’t think there are any more dogs.”
“Besides the last one that just went to sleep or whatever.”
“Well, yeah, besides that one.”
Just then, I heard the baying again, coming from the direction of my house. But it was so quiet, it was hard to hear.
We grabbed the dogs and started back through the woods.
“It’s coming from the front of the house,” Ed said. We ran toward the driveway, where we found the last dog locked in my car, barking furiously.
“How did he get the dog in my car?”
“Was it locked?”
“Yes, it was locked!”
“What about the house?”
I swallowed. “I forgot.” As we got closer, I saw that Wolf had scrawled a message on the side of the car in what appeared to be motor oil. It said A GIFT FOR YOU. My keys, helpfully, if somewhat alarmingly, were in the ignition. I tried the door; it was locked. I shot a desperate glance at Ed.
“Do you have a spare key?”
“It’s on my dad’s key ring. In Florida.” I kicked the tire. “I’m going to die. That’s it. I’m going to die tonight.”
“A valet key,” Willow said hopefully. “Did your car come with a valet key?”