Listen! (9780062213358)

by Tolan, Stephanie S.

  She feels like crying. She’ll have to rethink her whole plan. Plan! As if she’s really had one. All there was to it was the idea that walking him around the lake and feeding him every day would get him to trust her. The Taming was supposed to happen all by itself. Food good. Charley gives food. Charley good. Like that.

  Everyone at Eagle Lake knows, now, what Charley is trying to do. Mrs. Jensen, the retired librarian who used to babysit her when she was little, is the editor of Tail Feathers, the newsletter that went into everybody’s boxes over the weekend. She wrote a story about Charley and Coyote and asked anyone who might have been feeding him to stop so that Charley would be the only one he could go to for food.

  Yesterday when Charley got around to the Davises’ house, Mrs. Davis and Sadie were out on the road with Mr. and Mrs. Sutcliff and their Labrador retriever, Boone, and Mrs. Hobbes with her little white dog, Pandy. They’d all told her what a good thing she was doing.

  All the time they were standing in the road, talking, the dogs, including Coyote, had played in the Davises’ yard. But when the Sutcliffs and Mrs. Hobbes went on with their walk and Mrs. Davis went inside, Coyote disappeared into the woods.

  What, besides food, does she have to offer this dog? A place to live. But he has that. It isn’t very comfortable—just a bare spot under a tree. If he were really wild—a fox or a coyote—he wouldn’t have any more than that. A den, maybe. Coyote could probably dig himself a den if he wanted one, if he needed one.

  She can offer him companionship. But he has Sadie. And the other dogs. Why would he want companionship with a human? Mrs. Hobbes told her yesterday that Coyote used to follow anyone who walked a dog around the lake, staying mostly out of sight in the woods, but still following. “It wasn’t just the other dogs he was following. He wants a family. You can see it in his eyes.” Charley wonders if that could be true. She thinks of the connection she felt with him the first time she saw him. It wasn’t just from her to him, it was from him to her, too. He does want a family. He’s just too afraid to know how to make it happen!

  She looks out at him now, finishing the last of the food, backing away toward the woods. He needs me, she thinks. Coyotes and foxes and wolves know how to live in the wild. Dogs don’t. What about winter? Every year on really cold nights, they tell people on the evening news to bring their dogs inside or make sure they have a warm, insulated shelter to go to. Coyote won’t have that. He needs me. He does.

  She has to come up with a way to make herself more to him than the person who puts food out for him.

  “Stop that scratching!” Sarita has left her jigsaw puzzle and come into the dining room. “Don’t you know the hot water trick?”

  Charley hasn’t realized she is scratching her arm again. “What trick?”

  “Run water as hot as you can stand it on that rash until it doesn’t itch anymore. That’ll stop the itching all day. Eight hours, anyway. Do it again before you go to bed, and it won’t itch in the night, either.”

  Stupid old wives’ tale, Charley thinks. If that worked, why wouldn’t everybody know to do it? “How do you know?”

  Sarita’s eyes flash. “Because I know everything!”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You can do it or you can go on itching. It’s up to you.”

  Charley decides to try it. Sarita follows her into the kitchen. “So!” she says. “Not much change in that wild dog.”

  Charley tests the water to see how hot it is, then puts her arm under the faucet. “How long do I have to do this?”

  “Like I said, till it stops itching.”

  “People caught him with food before,” Charley says. She doesn’t mention how she knows this. “Feeding scares him. I need to do something that’ll give him a reason to like me. If you know everything, tell me what to do.”

  “What do other dogs like people for?”

  Charley realizes the poison ivy really has stopped itching. She turns off the water. “Playing, I guess. Fetch. Catch. But he isn’t a regular dog. He doesn’t do that stuff.”

  “Sadie does,” Sarita says.

  When Charley goes out to untie Sadie, Sadie frisks around her, front paws splayed, head down, her back end in the air, tail wagging. She is begging Charley to play. Sarita’s certainly right about Sadie. Charley leans down to get a dead branch that has fallen off one of the trees by the carport. As soon as she picks it up, Sadie leaps for it, trying to snatch it away. “Down!” Charley says, holding it as high in the air as she can. She throws the stick up the slope of the driveway toward where Coyote is watching from the safety of the trees. “Go get it, Sadie!”

  The dog doesn’t need the words. Of course not, Charley thinks, watching her tear off after the stick. Golden retriever.

  Charley calls to Sadie to bring back the stick. She isn’t as good at letting go as she is at retrieving, but Charley manages to get it away from her and throw it again. Ears flying, Sadie runs after the stick, and Charley moves up the drive, keeping an eye on Coyote, who is sitting in a tangle of honeysuckle on the other side of the road. This is what dogs and people do together, she thinks at him.

  Sadie drops the stick and backs away from it, wagging. Charley picks it up and Sadie begins to bark, urging her to throw it. Coyote is standing now, ears and tail up, following every movement. His tail has begun to wag.

  When Charley throws the stick, Sadie gets it, and Coyote comes out of the woods to join the game, chasing Sadie. After a few minutes Sadie drops the stick, and the game becomes their usual chase and grab. So focused is Coyote that he doesn’t notice when Charley moves into the middle of the yard so that the dogs have to swerve around her as they run, the way they swerve around the azaleas.

  At last Sadie, tongue hanging out, flops onto the grass a few feet from where Charley is standing. Coyote circles, barking a high-pitched bark, snapping at Sadie’s ears, her feet, urging her up again. When she doesn’t respond, he gives up and sinks to the ground next to her. It’s the closest Charley has ever been to him.

  Over Sadie’s shoulder, Coyote looks directly at Charley, his tongue, too, hanging out as he pants. There are big splotches of blue on his long, pink tongue. Charley has never seen anything like it.

  “Blue spots on his tongue?” Sarita says later. “That’s Chow. Mama or daddy or grandma maybe—that dog’s got Chow in him somewhere.” She is leaning over her jigsaw puzzle, squinting at a piece in her hand.

  “So?” Charley says. “What does that mean?”

  “It means you don’t tell your father yet. Chows have a bad rep in the dog world. Blue tongue’s likely to scare Paul Morgan off, end you up with some little beagle pup. Some Chihuahua.”

  “What’s the bad rep?”

  Sarita makes a little satisfied “huh” as she puts the puzzle piece into place. “Aggressive. Protective. One-man dogs, they say. One family, anyway.”

  “Coyote’s not aggressive. Not even with dogs. And he doesn’t have a family.”

  Sarita shrugs and takes another piece from a cookie sheet full of bits of the sky. “Not now, anyway. You itching, by the way?”

  Charley looks at the rash on her arm, surprised. “No!”

  “Don’t mess with me, girl!”

  Charley sees a cloud piece and the place in the puzzle where it will fit, and puts it in.

  “You go rest that leg,” Sarita says, slapping at Charley’s hand. “You been outside too long today.”

  Sarita is right, Charley realizes when she settles into the recliner. Her leg, her whole body, has been getting stronger this week, the walk leaving her with more energy and less pain. But after nearly two hours with the dogs, throwing a stick for Sadie sometimes, or just sitting on the fender of Sarita’s car in the shade of the carport, watching them, she is worn out.

  When Sadie finally swam home, her tail wagging as she went, throwing drops of water that glittered in the sun, Coyote followed her to the waterline and stood with his front feet in the water, whining. “Come back!” he seemed to be calling to
her. It was as if a bungee cord stretched between the two dogs, pulling harder and harder as Sadie swam away. When she reached the other side and pulled herself out of the water next to the Davises’ dock, Coyote gave one last, exasperated whine and launched himself into the water, swimming with his ears back, his tail completely underwater. The contrast between the way Sadie swam, splashing and wagging, and Coyote’s grim determination made Charley laugh. This was clearly a dog who hated to swim. When he got to the other side, he dragged himself out of the water exactly where Sadie had, shook himself, and followed her up into the trees.

  Charley flips the lever on the recliner and leans back, her legs stretched out in front of her. She needs to break the bungee cord that links the dogs, she thinks as she picks up the remote and turns on the television. Better yet, she needs to find a way to transfer the bungee from Sadie to herself.

  8

  Sadie

  The next day when Charley gets to the top of the hill by Crazy Sherman’s, Sadie doesn’t come to her whistle. Charley doesn’t see either dog, and she is all the way to the Davises’ driveway before she realizes why. The SUV is gone, and Sadie is chained to a tree down near the house. Straining at the end of her chain, she barks and jumps toward Charley, her front feet pawing the air.

  Coyote is lying under a rhododendron bush only a few feet from the tree Sadie is chained to. His ears are up, and he is watching Charley. Mrs. Davis has given her permission to unchain Sadie if she wants to. But Charley decides to leave Sadie chained and try to lure Coyote around the lake on his own. She throws Sadie a biscuit to make up for leaving her. “Come on,” she calls to Coyote. “Let’s walk!”

  At the word, Coyote comes out from under the rhododendron, his tail wagging. Charley drops a biscuit on the driveway. “That’s yours,” she tells him, and walks away from it toward the road. With her mirror, she checks to see if he is coming to get the biscuit. He does. “Let’s go get lunch!” she says, and keeps walking.

  But he doesn’t follow her. In the mirror she sees that he has stopped in the driveway, ears and tail down. He turns and looks back at Sadie, who is barking now and straining at the leash. Charley can almost feel the bungee cord pulling him back. The books would call this a training opportunity. She should just go on, whether he follows or not. If he doesn’t come around to get his lunch today, he’ll learn a lesson. He’ll know to walk with her tomorrow. “Lunch!” she calls again. She puts the mirror away and starts walking again.

  Every living thing is a spirit. This time Charley doesn’t try to push her mother’s voice out of her mind. That was what her mother believed. Charley does, too. The books are about training, controlling—human to dog. Charley wants to work with Coyote spirit to spirit. She doesn’t have a book for that.

  Coyote needs Sadie with him to feel safe, Charley thinks. She understands. It’s like the way she needed Amy with her on the first day of middle school. She goes back, takes Sadie off her chain, and watches the two dogs run a huge circle around the yard, bumping into each other, grabbing at each other’s ears. “Let’s walk!” she tells them, and they begin the walk in the way that has come to be their pattern, Sadie dashing ahead of her, Coyote following.

  Near the bottom of the hill, Coyote is far behind and Sadie comes bounding back, as she always does, as if to see what is taking Charley so long. But this time she makes a lunge for Charley’s walking stick and pulls it out of her hand. Charley has to grab a kudzu vine to keep from falling.

  Sadie drags the stick a few feet off the trail and drops it. Then she stands by it, looking up at Charley, her tongue hanging out, her tail wagging.

  “This isn’t a game,” Charley says. “I need that stick. Bring it back!”

  Sadie gives herself a shake and trots off down the hill and across the embankment. Charley lets go of the kudzu vine and goes to get the stick, moving carefully over uneven ground through the leaf cover. Throwing sticks was a mistake yesterday. Now Sadie thinks the walking stick is a toy. She picks it up and starts back toward the trail.

  Sadie comes flying back, grabs the stick, and tugs, nearly pulling Charley off her feet. Charley has to let go of it to keep from falling. Sadie trots off with the stick, carrying it back through the poison ivy, down to the edge of the pond. Then she wades out until the water is up to her chest and drops the stick into the water.

  To get the stick this time, Charley will have to plough through the poison ivy, maybe wade into the pond. She looks to see where Coyote is and sees that he has stopped at the base of the hill. When she turns toward him, he watches instead of skittering off into the trees. Sadie, still standing in the water, barks. Then she splashes along the edge of the pond, bounds across the spillway, shakes herself, and starts up the hill on the other side.

  Charley, furious, stands awhile longer, trying to figure out if she can get her stick back, and then gives up. She’ll just have to find a replacement in the woods as she goes. When she gets to the spillway, she realizes that walking without her stick doesn’t hurt much more than walking with it. At least on level ground.

  Charley steps carefully, gingerly, across the spillway, balancing with her arms out on both sides as she steps from one broken chunk of concrete to the next. When she has made it to the other side, she uses the dangling root to pull herself up to the fallen tree and climbs onto it. Coyote, a few feet back on the trail, stops, waits until she’s settled, then runs across the spillway and up the trail to catch up with Sadie. He passes no more than a foot from where Charley is sitting. She listens to the dogs, tussling with each other somewhere up the hill.

  Coyote has always stayed behind her, ready to leap off the trail if she turns toward him. He could have gone around her, could have caught up with Sadie anytime. Has it been her walking stick keeping him back? Has he been afraid to be out ahead, where he can’t keep an eye on the human with the stick? Charley laughs. It’s almost as if Sadie knew that.

  Charley wonders if she can manage the rest of the walk without the stick. “Till you don’t need it anymore” was all Tony said when she asked how long she had to use it. Maybe, just maybe, she is done with the stick. It isn’t only Coyote who’ll be glad if she is. Progress. Her father will be thrilled.

  9

  Two Weeks

  When Charley tells Mrs. Davis about how Sadie seems to have known that Coyote was afraid of her walking stick, Mrs. Davis laughs. “Don’t give her too much credit, Charley. Much as we love her, she’s not the brightest bulb in the pack. She’s always finding sticks to play with. Your walking stick was just another toy.”

  Except that she didn’t play with it, Charley thinks. She just took it away. What Mrs. Davis says makes sense, of course. But still—it feels as if Sadie knew what she was doing. Spirit to spirit. It’s possible. Just possible.

  The day Charley stopped using her stick, Sarita made a special dinner—with peach cobbler—to celebrate, and her father actually came home in time to eat it. “It’s the dogs,” she told them when her father said how pleased he was at her progress. “They didn’t want me using the stick anymore.”

  “Good for them,” her father said. Charley figures he doesn’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter. He is so glad to see her making progress, he’s willing to accept anything she says.

  Walking without the stick, Charley discovers that there are plenty of saplings or branches or roots to grab if she needs help over a rough bit of the trail. And without the stick, the walk with Coyote becomes very different. Sometimes he stays with Sadie, running ahead, doubling back. Though he’s careful never to come close to Charley, passing her only by going through the trees off the side of the trail, it no longer seems to matter whether she is ahead of him or behind him.

  Sometimes he disappears for long stretches, and she thinks they have lost him. Once in a while he vanishes almost as soon as they start the walk, and she doesn’t see him again the whole way around the lake. That’s when Charley worries. As many acres of woods as there are around Eagle Lake, beyond them are housing
developments. Streets. Cars. And county roads where the cars go very, very fast. The images of trees, squirrels, creek that she gets when she closes her eyes don’t help—she could be just imagining what she wants to believe. But always Coyote appears again by the time she and Sadie get as far as the chain across Eagle Lake Drive. It feels almost magical sometimes, the way he turns up, as if she and Sadie are wearing tracking collars that let him find them.

  Little by little, he is changing. Most of the time he is his dog self now, hardly ever the wild thing. She has discovered that he can smile. It isn’t just that his mouth turns up naturally—his smile, like a wagging tail, shows her how he is feeling. Even his color is changing. Some of the red in his coat turns out to have been Carolina red clay. Swimming back to Sadie’s every day, his fur has gotten lighter and lighter. His tail, the ruff around his neck, and what she calls his skirts—the long hair on the backs of his legs—are a pale beige now, a real contrast to the honey gold of the rest of his coat. The toes of his front feet turn out to be white. Charley longs to pull the mats and tangles out of his tail and his skirts, to brush him and make his coat shine. She thinks he is the most beautiful dog she has ever seen. His dark chocolate eyes are lined with black all the way around, a line that slants up in the corners like the eye makeup on an Egyptian princess. “Elegant,” Sarita has called him.

  It is deep into the sticky North Carolina summer now, the air so thick Charley feels sometimes as if she’s breathing underwater. She walks a little bit earlier every day, changing the routine gradually, in order to avoid the worst of the heat. She is still soaked with sweat by the time she gets to the Davises’ house, but the walk itself is better the earlier she does it.

  Now that she is sure Coyote won’t run off if she doesn’t bring his food to him the minute she gets home, she changes her clothes before feeding him, getting rid of the hiking boots and socks, the sweat-drenched jeans and T-shirt, putting on shorts, a tank top, and sandals. She still goes inside while he eats, and he still checks for danger every few bites, but she puts the bowl closer and closer to the house every day.