Listen! (9780062213358)

by Tolan, Stephanie S.

  Liver. She needs to get him some liver, reward him for staying. Slowly, carefully, looking away from him every minute, she eases herself out of the chair and starts up to the house. “Good dog!” she says as she goes, her voice as low and soothing as she can make it. “Just stay there. Good old boy!”

  “Sarita!” she yells when she gets inside. “You’ll never…” But Sarita must have been watching from the windows by her puzzle table. She is already coming from the kitchen with the sandwich bag full of liver pieces.

  Coyote is still under the camellia. Charley wants to run down the drive and throw herself at him, hug him and rub his ears as if he’s a regular dog. Her regular dog! It is all she can do to walk slowly down to the terrace, keeping her eyes focused on the table and chairs, and sit down. “Good dog!” she says again, amazed and relieved that he is still there. “Want some liver?”

  She has been talking to him about the liver she takes him every evening, saying the word over and over as he comes to get the pieces she puts out so that he’ll know that the word means something he really, really likes. And he’s been coming gradually closer and closer to get it. But still he hasn’t taken the pieces closest to her. She always sees him as she and Sarita drive away, sneaking back to get the last of them.

  She turns to look at him now, and their eyes meet. He doesn’t bolt. She feels the tremor of their connection. “Liver!” she says. “Every time you stay here when Sadie goes home, you get to have liver!” She takes the biggest piece she can find, holds it between her thumb and first finger so that it sticks out away from her hand, turns her head away, and holds the liver out to him as far as her arm will reach.

  Is he coming to get it? She can’t tell. She doesn’t dare turn to see. She holds her breath, makes herself as still as she can. Come on, she thinks at him, you can do it. Come get the liver!

  And suddenly the liver is gone from her fingers. He has taken it so gently she didn’t feel his muzzle near her hand. Just one moment the liver between her fingers and the next moment gone. Moving in slow motion, she pulls her hand back and gets another piece of liver. She extends her arm again, and again the liver disappears. Three more times she does it. Then she holds the last piece out in her cupped palm so that he’ll have to touch her to get it. It takes longer this time, but he gets it, his nose and whiskers grazing her hand.

  At his touch her eyes blur with tears. “Good dog,” she whispers. “Good, brave dog!” The sandwich bag is empty now, so she turns to look at him. He is no more than two feet away. He stands his ground, his ears and tail up, looking at her as if to ask if there is any more.

  “All gone,” she says, and shows him her empty hands. He stands for another moment, and then turns and goes back to the camellia. He doesn’t run, he doesn’t skulk. He just walks back and lies down.

  Charley looks up at the windows of the lake room above her. Sarita is there, watching. She smiles and nods, and Charley holds up both thumbs. “Wild forever,” Mr. Heyward said. Not this dog!

  Coyote stays in the yard the rest of the day. When Charley’s father comes home, he scuttles across the road into the woods for a little, but comes back to his place under the dogwood when Paul Morgan goes inside.

  Charley calls Mrs. Davis and tells her that Coyote stayed when Sadie went home. “That’s fabulous, Charley,” she says. “The kids said they hadn’t seen him, and I was a little worried. I thought something might have happened to him.”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Looks like your hard work is paying off.”

  “Anyway, if he stays over here you won’t have to keep Sadie inside tonight.”

  Mrs. Davis laughs. “And you won’t have to risk hearing Buddy Heyward tell you how impossible and dangerous this whole project is!”

  After dinner Charley’s father goes back to the office. At the time she would normally have gone around to Coyote’s territory with the liver, Charley splashes on insect repellent again and goes out to sit on the brick retaining wall. Coyote, under the dogwood, stays where he is, his eyes on her. “Brought your liver,” she says. His ears flick toward her. She holds a piece out toward him, but he doesn’t move. “Suit yourself,” she says.

  Half an hour later she goes inside, leaving three pieces of liver on the wall where she was sitting. Before she gets to the top of the ramp, he has snatched and gulped them down. Then he goes back to settle into his place again.

  The lights on the ramp are on a timer, set to go on before it gets completely dark. A little while after they come on, Charley goes out to check on Coyote. He isn’t by the fence where he was before. She checks under the camellia, behind the boxwoods, even goes out to look among the azaleas. He is not there.

  When she goes back inside, Sarita looks up from her jigsaw puzzle, a painting of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. The television is on. Other people watch television, Charley thinks. Sarita only listens while she does her puzzles.

  “He’s gone,” Charley says. She had hoped he would stay the night.

  Sarita nods. “A good day, though,” she says, and fits a piece into the stream of light cutting across a bank of storm clouds.

  The moment she says it, Charley knows that it’s more than good. It’s the best day she’s had all summer.

  14

  Watchdog

  When Charley goes out the next morning, dressed to walk around the lake as always, Coyote appears from the trees across the road and stands at the head of the driveway, looking at her.

  She can hardly believe her eyes. “Good morning, Coyote!” she calls, then spreads out both of her arms like a mother inviting a child to come running for a hug. He doesn’t come. But he doesn’t back off, either. His tail, a pale golden plume, stands straight up over his back, and she thinks she sees it move, the beginning of a wag. “Want your lunch?” she asks, thinking it is time to change the word to breakfast if he is going to eat it first thing in the morning like this.

  But he does know the word. As soon as she says it, he takes a few hesitant steps down the drive. Then he sits, watching her expectantly.

  “Okay. I’ll be right out with it!”

  When she takes his bowl outside, he scuttles off into the trees. She puts it down where she has been feeding him lately, on the driveway near his place by the dogwood. Then she goes to sit on the retaining wall. “Come and get it!” she calls.

  He emerges from the woods onto the road. His tail is down, now, and his ears back, his shoulders hunched forward. He is a wild thing again.

  “What’s the matter?” Charley asks. “You took liver from my hand last night!”

  At the word liver his ears twitch, but he doesn’t relax. He’s been eating with her sitting and watching for days. What is the problem?

  And then she knows. The problem is that Sadie isn’t here. It’s just him and Charley. “It’s okay,” she tells him. “Really it is! You took liver from my hand yesterday, remember? Sadie wasn’t with you then.”

  But that was yesterday. There was a night to get through since then. Wherever he was, like all his other nights, he was alone. Alone meant having to be on guard, watch out, survive, even while he slept.

  Besides, sleeping can wipe out memory so that you have to start over again in the morning. Charley knows how it is to wake up in your old self and all over again have to get used to what has changed in your life.

  “Okay, guy,” she says. She goes back into the house. Almost the instant the door slides shut, Coyote comes down the drive and eats. He still leans forward and snatches no more than a bite or two between glances over his shoulder. But he eats, and when he is finished, he flops down in his place under the dogwood.

  Later, when Charley is reading on the terrace, a fishing boat comes by, its electric trolling motor making a barely perceptible hum. Coyote goes down to the bushes at the edge of the lake and barks at it. “That’s some new watchdog you’ve got there,” Mr. Sutcliff shouts over the barking.

  Coyote barks until the boat has gone on down the lake and even the ripp
les have faded. Then he comes back to lie down under the camellia. Charley imagines him congratulating himself for having chased off a dangerous enemy. This barking is another step forward, she thinks. Their yard has become Coyote’s territory.

  That day a new pattern begins. The daily hikes are over. After dinner Charley takes Coyote his liver pieces, and little by little he begins to come up to her and take them from her hand, even when she’s looking at him. At dusk he disappears. But when she goes outside in the morning, he is there, lying up by the road or sitting at the end of the driveway, waiting for her. If her father leaves before Charley goes out, he never sees the dog, but Charley is sure Coyote isn’t going back around the lake anymore. He has found a place in the woods across the road to spend the night.

  Sadie comes over later, sometimes swimming, sometimes on the road. Charley always has a book with her, but she doesn’t get much reading done. After a while she figures out what the dogs are telling each other with their ears and their tails and the expressions on their faces. If she kept a notebook like Jane Goodall did with the chimpanzees, she thinks, it would have more interesting information about dogs than the training books do.

  The only change in the new pattern happens on the Fourth of July. Fireworks aren’t legal in North Carolina, but they are in South Carolina, and Eagle Lake is only a few miles from the South Carolina border, so there are plenty of firecrackers and bottle rockets around the lake on the Fourth. The minute the firecrackers start going off in the early afternoon, Coyote disappears. Charley and her father and Sarita have been invited to the Sutcliffs’ for a picnic supper, along with most of the rest of the people from the north side of the lake. Coyote hasn’t shown up again when it’s time for them to leave, so he doesn’t get his evening liver. She leaves a few pieces on the retaining wall.

  When they get home after the picnic, there is no sign of Coyote. The liver is still on the wall. Deep booms fill the night from the official fireworks in downtown Charlotte. Charley worries all night about where Coyote is and whether he’ll come back. She’s heard of dogs so frightened by fireworks that they run off and get lost and are never seen again. But when she goes out the next morning, the liver is gone and he is there, lying out by the road.

  Just taking care of myself, he seems to say. You can’t be too careful.

  15

  Five Weeks

  “‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’—John Muir.”

  *

  Charley is sitting on her bed, looking at her mother’s book. The photo that goes with this quotation is a perfect circle of white mushrooms, some big, some small, against a background of brilliant green moss. A fairy ring. The mushrooms, she knows, are attached to one another—are really only a single fungus, its connections underground. It is called a fairy ring because it seems to appear by magic, overnight. One day it isn’t there; the next it is. In a few days it will be gone, as if the fairies came to dance there in the moonlight and then moved on, leaving their magic to fade.

  Charley remembers believing that. She remembers being in this place when a fairy ring was there, begging to be allowed to stay out at night to watch. “If humans are there, the fairies won’t come,” her mother told her.

  Later, of course, she gave up the idea of fairies dancing in the moonlight. But this place where the photo was taken remained a special place, different from the rest of the Eagle Lake woods of beech and hickory, oak and sweet gum, dogwood and sourwood. Her mother called it the Pine Grove—a small hillock covered entirely with evergreens—pines and cedars and holly. Charley doesn’t remember exactly where it is, but she knows it isn’t on the lake trail. In all the days of walking around the lake, she hasn’t passed it.

  Sitting with the book open on her lap, staring at the fairy ring, Charley has a strange sensation. It’s as if she is looking through her mother’s eyes. She can almost feel the camera in her hands, the pine needles and small stones under her as she kneels to get exactly this angle, this contrast of green and white, shadows of pine boughs on the moss.

  Goose bumps rise along her arms. She reaches to close the book and finds her mother’s face looking at her from a photo on the back jacket flap. Colleen Morgan, dark hair, blue eyes, splotches of pink on her cheeks against skin as pale as skim milk. Her mother called those splotches her “continents”—the shape of South America on one cheek, Africa on the other—proof of the Irish heritage that Charley shares. Charley touches her own cheek now, feeling the surge of heat, knowing that if she had a mirror she would see the pink that for her appears only when feelings rise like a tidal wave and threaten to wash her away. It doesn’t matter what the feelings are—anger, embarrassment, this rush of loss—her cheeks broadcast it to the world.

  She did not know there was a picture of her mother in this book. It has been hiding like a scorpion, waiting to sting. She pushes the book back under her pillow, pulls the sheet up over it, piles the other pillow on top. Her throat has closed so that she almost cannot swallow at all.

  The woods, Charley thinks. What she wants at this moment is to get out into the woods, away from the book, the house, the human world.

  She hasn’t walked the trail since Coyote began spending the night on this side of the lake. She realizes now how much she has missed the woods. How much she has missed the sounds of the birds, the pattern of sunlight through the leaves, the rustle of wind in the trees. She even misses spider sticks, and the way the silvery threads they catch glint in the sun.

  Two whole years. How could she have stayed away from the woods she grew up in, the woods that had been the background, the setting, for her whole life? Two years ago she made herself a new life, with a new setting, just the way her father did. His life became work, hers became school, Amy and her brother, and their friends. Two summers at Amy’s house, swimming in their pool—a pool surrounded by concrete and grass and a tall wooden fence—two summers of malls and movies.

  Coyote must be missing the woods, too, she thinks. For the dogs the walk through the woods is never just a way to get from one place to another. It is always an adventure.

  She changes into her hiking clothes, calls to Sarita to tell her she’s going out. Coyote is under the dogwood. “Walk!” Charley says to him. “Let’s go for a walk.” He gets up and stretches, first his front legs, his rear in the air, then—one at a time—his back legs. Then he shakes himself and starts up the driveway after her, prancing and smiling. After a moment he passes her. Tail waving, he trots ahead down the road toward the woods trail, pausing now and again to look back over his shoulder to be sure she is coming.

  The next day, before she gives him his breakfast, Charley takes him for a walk. And there is a new pattern.

  They go every day, no matter what the weather is like. Because there is no particular destination on these walks, Charley lets Coyote choose where they will go. It is quickly clear that he knows the woods better than she does. He takes her on old logging roads, ATV trails, side branches of the sewer line access. Though he doesn’t need to follow trails, he seems to understand that she does. Or maybe he, too, likes the way cleared of brambles and honeysuckle. After they’ve walked for a while, he goes off cross-country on his own, but no matter how far she walks, whether she turns back on the same trail or off on another one, he always manages to find her again.

  If she doesn’t see him for such a long time that she starts worrying about roads again, and cars, she whistles for him. Sometimes he actually comes. Once in a while Sadie comes to the whistle instead, and finishes the walk with her. With or without Sadie, by the time Charley gets home again, Coyote is always with her. Once, when she thinks he is behind her, she waits and waits by the chain across the end of the road for him to catch up. When she finally gives up and goes home, she finds Coyote sitting at the head of the driveway, waiting for her. “What took you so long?” his expression says. “Where’s my breakfast?”

  With no place special to go, Charley isn’t in
a hurry. She walks slowly and finds herself noticing things she hasn’t noticed before. Once she spends fifteen minutes trying to follow a line of ants carrying things, looking like bearers on safari. Moving their colony, she thinks. It’s easy enough to discover where they are coming from, a hole beneath a tree, but try as she might she never finds where they are going. The line just seems to peter out in the leaf litter. She sees a woodpecker disappear into a hole in a dead tree and wonders if it is feeding young ones. Hearing a hawk scream overhead one day, she looks up and sees an enormous chunk of broken tree hanging above her, one end caught among the branches of another tree, the other moving slightly in the light wind. She scuttles out from under it and then realizes it is very old, is rotting slowly away in the air. It has probably been hanging there that way since Hurricane Hugo.

  There’s so much death in these woods, she thinks, noticing how many blowdowns she can see standing where she is. And so much life, a voice sounds in her head. Yes, she answers, listening to a woodpecker’s laughing call.

  Coyote likes going up the sewer line access toward where Dixie Trace, the new housing development, is going in. Even though ATVs have beaten a path, blackberry brambles grow thickly on both sides, up the hill from where the lake trail angles off. They are half-choked with honeysuckle vines, but there are plenty of berries. And plenty of thorns. The thorns are so wicked that Charley can’t pick berries without getting scratched and bloody, but the berries are worth it, shiny and fat and sweet.

  Along this trail, wide enough to be sunny most of the day, there are huge, circular spiderwebs with gigantic green and yellow and black spiders sitting in the middle, their legs spread out to feel vibrations in the strands. On a foggy morning Charley finds a web lined with drops of water like pearls and wishes she had a camera, wishes she knew how to do what her mother did. She stands for a long time, trying to burn the image into her brain so it will stay with her, even though she can’t bring it back, capture it on paper, and frame it.