by Jon L. Breen
Instinctively, she drew back, tugging her reluctant pet with her. The barking of the Tobers’ dogs just next door grew in intensity. Wasn’t that in the same direction that the shadow had been moving? Silkie strained at her collar, growling deep in her throat, the fur on her shoulders and tail standing on end. After several minutes, the barking of the Tobers’ dogs began to taper off and Silkie visibly relaxed. Miriam remembered to breathe and exhaled loudly into the quiet room.
With a bound, Silkie leapt up onto the bed, circled several times, and then flopped herself down with a loud sigh. Flattening her huge, pointed ears back against her skull, she squeezed her eyes shut and composed herself for slumber, her previous concerns forgotten.
“Must be nice!” Miriam chided the small creature lovingly, and proceeded to burrow back into her covers, but not without a nervous glance at the window.
As the barking faded in her own neighborhood to be picked up distantly in others, Miriam closed her eyes for a second time that night, thinking harsh thoughts of careless dog owners who let their animals roam or, worse, simply turned them out when they grew tired of them or found them suddenly unfashionable. It had not escaped her notice that the young families of her neighborhood only chose breeds that were in vogue. The current fad favored Labradors on the one hand, of which there were no fewer than five on her block alone, and more ferocious-looking types on the other, such as pit bulls. She’d heard rumors of only one such creature on her street, and had not laid eyes on it, no one had, as its master, a part-time dog breeder, kept it locked away in a secure pen behind his house. In any case, she strongly suspected that one of these unworthy owners was responsible for the near-nightly cacophony that had plagued the neighborhood these two weeks past. With the passing of years she found sleep difficult enough without the unwanted canine serenade, and if it continued, she fully intended to investigate.
The following morning was fine and brisk and Miriam arose at her usual early hour, if somewhat crankily due to last night’s interruptions, in order to feed and walk Silkie. As was their custom, the woman and dog strolled to the end of their street, which terminated in a cul-de-sac. Beyond lay a small wood that separated Miriam’s neighborhood from another a quarter-mile to the south. The wood line provided a convenient place for Silkie to “conduct her business” without annoying any neighbors or forcing Miriam to use the awkward and embarrassing “scooper.”
It was on their return that Miriam spied her neighbor from across the street, Elizabeth, posting her mail. Miriam hurried to catch her before she returned indoors.
“’Lizbeth, oh, ’Lizbeth . . . good morning!” Miriam saluted, while Silkie strained at her leash in order to be the first to greet their neighbor. Miriam reined her in with an effort, not wishing to have the dog jump up on Elizabeth. Silkie, unlike Elizabeth’s dog, was not in the least obedient to commands, and Miriam had never had the heart to properly discipline her small companion.
Elizabeth appeared genuinely glad to see them, though her smile was a bit tremulous. She even took a moment to squat down and rub Silkie’s belly, as the corgi had flopped over onto its back in total submission upon reaching her feet.
The younger woman’s actions secretly pleased Miriam, as she tended to judge others somewhat by their conduct with her dog, though she knew this to be unfair.
“How are you, Miriam?” Elizabeth inquired, standing once more and folding her arms across her chest against the autumnal chill.
“Well, a little worn around the edges, I’m afraid. All that commotion again last night. Were you and Gary bothered?” Miriam asked, noticing dark smudges beneath Elizabeth’s eyes.
Elizabeth looked down at her elderly neighbor with concern. “It woke us up, but we got back to sleep pretty quickly. Gary thinks it’s the deer setting the dogs off. This time of year they tend to raid the flower beds and shrubs as food gets scarce in the woods.”
Miriam had not considered this possibility before. Had her husband still been alive, he would surely have thought of it. “Oh,” Miriam responded thoughtfully. “Did Gary go out to see last night, by any chance?”
“Oh, no.” Elizabeth laughed aloud at the suggestion. “You know Gary. When he’s in, there’s no moving him. I had to pull him by the arm to get him to leave the house that time our chimney caught fire! He would not go out in the middle of the night . . . period,” she finished convincingly. “Why?” she asked, catching up to Miriam’s question and becoming slightly alarmed. “Did you see someone around our house last night?”
Miriam suddenly felt foolish, and, worse, guilty of causing her young friend uneasiness. Had she really seen anything last night other than a movement in the shadows . . . maybe? In any case, Gary was probably right that it was a deer. “No . . . I guess it was the whistling that made me think that.”
“Whistling?” Elizabeth looked concerned in a different way now.
“You didn’t hear it?” Miriam asked shyly, noting the look on her neighbor’s face and blushing with the realization that she was mixing up her dreams with reality.
Elizabeth paused, as if she were seriously trying to recall the previous night. “No, but, honey, we do sleep with the windows closed this time of year.”
“Maybe I should, too,” Miriam offered weakly.
“It’ll help with the dogs,” Elizabeth assured her.
A thought suddenly occurred to Miriam. “Where’s Dakota, ’Lizbeth? I haven’t seen her in days.” It was their mutual distinction as the only two lap-dog owners on the street that had originally brought the women together despite their difference in years. They always inquired into the health and well-being of their respective pets and enjoyed many a curbside conversation recounting their little companions’ antics and eccentricities. Neither had been favored with children.
Elizabeth’s face crumpled, large tears welling up in her eyes and threatening to spill over.
“’Lizbeth,” Miriam cried out in shock at her friend’s distress, instinctively reaching out for her. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong, sweetie?”
Elizabeth had clapped both hands over her mouth as if to contain a torrent of emotion. “My puppy’s got lost,” she choked through her fingers. “Or run away . . . I don’t know!”
“No, no . . . she would never run away,” Miriam assured her neighbor, as sympathetic tears welled up in her own eyes. She glanced furtively at Silkie, who sat studying the two women in bewilderment, and was ashamed at her own sense of relief that it was Elizabeth who had suffered the loss and not she, though her sympathy was all the more real for it. “No, she must have got lost, honey . . . She’ll find her way back,” Miriam concluded, giving Elizabeth a reassuring pat on the arm.
“I hope so . . . I truly do . . . but it’s been almost two weeks now. We just let her out one night to pee, like we always did . . .” She trailed off, her lips trembling. After a moment of silence, she reached out and squeezed Miriam’s hand. “I’d best get in now.”
Miriam watched her neighbor until she disappeared within her home, and then turned heavily towards her own. “That dog would never run away,” she stated firmly to Silkie, whose fruit-bat ears pricked up at the tone of his mistress. “And she didn’t get lost, either. Dakota’s not like you . . . she behaves!”
Silkie, however, had lost interest and was busy investigating a spot of grass that had captured her attention. Straining her stocky, muscular frame against the pull of the leash, she was able to continue her delicate and infuriatingly thorough scenting. Miriam was forced to apply both hands in order to drag the dog away, and not for the first time questioned her own wisdom in not enrolling Silkie in obedience training.
Again it was the barking that awoke her, rolling from south to north, rising in intensity as it was taken up by the dogs in her own neighborhood, while falling off in more distant ones. This time, however, it did not disturb or color her dreams, but brought her to an instant, clear-headed wakefulness. She glanced over to the window and saw that Silkie was already manning her post
: head thrust forward and nose pressed to the screen, earnestly testing for the presence of whatever lay without, a deep, hesitant growl bubbling in her throat.
Miriam did not even bother to check the time, as she knew it was quite late. She had been unable to get to sleep until well after midnight, and even then it had taken several chapters of a particularly bad novel to do the trick. The news of Dakota’s disappearance, as well as her dream of the previous night, had left her restless and not a little apprehensive. She longed for the decisive, no-nonsense company of her husband, who would’ve marched into the darkness to confront or even do battle with whatever waited there. He had been a highly decorated marine in the Korean War, she reflected proudly.
Somewhat emboldened by his memory, she made to rise and approach the window; the whistle froze her in mid step. Silkie’s growl grew louder and more angry, and a bark was not far away. The thought of this, of Silkie bringing attention to her darkened window, flooded Miriam with a sudden terror. The idea that out there, on the moonlit street, a head would turn and a face washed white by cold luminescence would lift its gaze to her window was more than she could bear. She rushed to the dog and snatched it up as it wriggled and struggled in protest. Hugging the corgi close, she tried to shush and comfort the surprised animal, to no avail.
It wasn’t just a dream, Miriam thought with little cheer. I was right. Someone’s whistling for a dog.
The whistling stopped and the neighborhood dogs’ barking grew less frenzied but did not cease. Several minutes passed and Silkie’s struggles weakened, though her attention never wavered from whatever was transpiring beyond Miriam’s walls. Outside, the barking ceased to be a communal effort and fell to individual voices—one dog answering another in challenging conversation. Silkie grew quiet in Miriam’s lap and accepted the strokes and murmured affirmations of “good girl” with evident pleasure. The neighborhood, at last, became silent. Miriam’s grip on her precious corgi loosened.
The whistle, though low and furtive, might have been an air-raid siren at a funeral for the great howl of protest it elicited. The dogs voiced their intolerance at being called to where they could not follow, and threw themselves against their chain-link pens in anguish.
Instantly, Silkie leaped from Miriam’s arms and onto the floor. In a blur of speed, she made not for the bedroom window but for the stairs and the freedom of the unguarded first floor. Miriam was up like a shot as well, guessing the small dog’s intent and determined to thwart it if humanly possible.
What Miriam referred to as Silkie’s “perch” was only an ordinary window in the dining room that faced the street. Its attraction to the dog lay in the design, which placed the sill a mere foot off the floor. This arrangement allowed the short-legged creature to clamber in, where she just fit, to enjoy a view of the outside world in relative comfort—much like a large house cat. The aluminum screen prevented her from sliding out and falling the short distance to the earth, though its retentive powers had grown rather strained over the years by her thirty pounds.
It was to this window that dog and woman raced through the darkened house. As she hurried down the stairs, gripping the bannister in the darkness, she could hear the dog’s unclipped nails clattering across the hardwood floors at high speed. “Stay!” Miriam cried out hopelessly. But Silkie, long on affection and amusing antics, was short on discipline, and hurtled, heedless of her mistress’s admonition, into the window at breakneck speed. Predictably, her momentum accomplished exactly what Miriam had feared, and with a small yelp of surprise Silkie and the frayed screen vanished into the night. The whistle, just as suddenly, ceased.
Forgetting her previous terror of the whistler, Miriam gained the first floor and made for the front of the house as quickly as her plump legs would take her. She threw open the door and rushed into the yard crying, “Silkie! Silkie!”
If the neighbors’ dogs had been in a frenzy before, they now were beside themselves and redoubled their efforts; some even began to howl a dismal counterpoint to Miriam’s pitiful cries. Somewhere down the street a roused neighbor yelled, “Shut up!” None of this penetrated Miriam’s frantic concern over Silkie’s whereabouts, and she continued to call and search the yard and shrubberies . . . but Silkie was nowhere to be seen.
With a small, muffled sob, Miriam wandered onto the twisting, tree-lined street and looked both north and south. Where the trees did not obscure the newly waning moon, the blacktop appeared as oily and black as the scales of the rat snake that haunted her flower beds. In those patches where the reflected illumination could not reach, the darkness was as impenetrable as blindness. Silkie was neither to be seen nor heard.
Little by little, the neighborhood grew quiet again, leaving the old woman crying softly in the street until exhaustion and grief combined to rob her of her will to continue. With heavy steps she recrossed her moonlit yard to the waiting open door, all the while convinced that she was watched from the safety of the mocking darkness.
She fell asleep shortly before dawn in a hard dining-room chair overlooking Silkie’s abandoned perch, tired and wretched, framed in the gaping hole of the screen that commemorated her little friend’s inexplicable departure.
By mid-morning, only a little less tired and somewhat fragilely composed, Miriam embarked upon a door-to-door search for her corgi. Though she was not close to the families that inhabited her street, she felt certain that no one was unfamiliar with the sight of her and Silkie on their daily walks, and therefore they could be relied on to take the errant dog in and return her to her mistress at the first opportunity. It was simply a matter of alerting them to be on the lookout. She also carried a large shopping bag filled with Silkie’s favorite “chewies,” which she intended to distribute to each household to be used as enticements if the dog were spotted. After all, she reasoned, Silkie could hardly be expected to run to strangers just because they called.
The first thing Miriam discovered was that almost all of her young neighbors, both husband and wife, worked, and therefore no one was to be found at home. Nonetheless, fear for Silkie drove her ever forward to try each and every door.
On her fifth attempt, she met with limited success. Having pulled a rather harried young mother from her screaming toddler, Miriam set about to enlist the woman’s aid, only to find herself crying as well, describing her dog and its predicament between barely suppressed sobs. With thinly disguised distaste at Miriam’s performance, the young woman reluctantly accepted the baggie of dog treats and promised to keep an eye out for the missing dog. Miriam thanked her effusively and began to turn away, but not before the wailing brat snatched the bag of goodies from his mother’s hand and dashed for the interior of the house. Before Miriam could protest, the door was closed in her face.
Stupid, mean-hearted girl, Miriam thought as she made her unsteady way down the drive. Not even to invite me in . . . or offer a tissue! She ranted inwardly as she rummaged through her purse for a handkerchief. A wadded one lay at the very bottom and she snatched it out to dab angrily at her running eyes, a hot resolve replacing her sense of humiliation and dependency on the kindness of neighbors.
Within minutes she discovered a man pushing some kind of contraption that spread a white powder across his meticulous lawn. Miriam recognized him as a teacher at the local high school and thought his name to be Ward. She had often noticed that he would be home on days when school was in session and suspected he abused his sick-time privileges. If he did, he did so without care, for he was always to be found manicuring and grooming his yard and flower beds for all to see.
Miriam strode across the carpet of lush green until she caught up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, visibly startling him. Simultaneously, his two Labrador retrievers, one black, the other white, came bounding around the corner of the house to confront the intruder they had scented from the backyard. They came at a silent lope and had almost reached her when Ward gave the shouted command, “Stay . . . sit!” Both animals came to an instant halt and sat down on th
eir haunches, teeth bared for Miriam’s benefit.
Miriam took an involuntary step backwards. “No.” Ward spoke to her in a lower tone. “It’s all right.”
The dogs appeared as obedient as the environment that Ward had created of his property, and Miriam was a little reassured, though somewhat ashamed at the story she was there to relate of her own undisciplined dog and the trouble it had led to.
When she had sufficiently caught her breath again, and the beating of her heart had slowed enough to allow it, she explained what she wanted of him.
“That’s that little dog I’ve seen you with, isn’t it?” he inquired rather stupidly. “That’s too bad . . . a damn shame. Though I don’t think he’ll be coming round here,” Ward stated flatly, hooking a thumb in the direction of his Labs. “They wouldn’t have it.”
“She,” Miriam corrected.
“How’s that?” Ward looked perplexed. “Oh . . . your dog, right . . . she. In any case, I’ll know if she shows up, that’s for sure!” And he smiled proudly at his canine guardians as if he could already envision their running the corgi to ground and tearing it apart.
“Thank you,” Miriam murmured and turned to go with no intention of sharing any of Silkie’s treats with these brutes. A thought struck her and she turned back to find Ward smiling condescendingly at her. He quickly wiped the smile away.
“Did you hear anyone whistling last night when all that barking was going on?” Miriam asked. Ward seemed to think it over carefully, as if somewhat embarrassed at his previous cavalier attitude. “I thought I did at one point. You know these two were puttin’ up quite a racket at the time.” A perplexed look crossed his face. “That wasn’t you?”