I perked up on the word you.
“You don’t want him?” I whispered.
Sergeant Josie shook her head. “My dog died.” She hesitated. “That recon went all wrong. He . . . he was . . .” She shook her head again, harsher this time. “I don’t want another dog.” She looked out the window, clenching her hands as she did. But I could see the shake in them—that leftover stuff she said she suffered. Sergeant Josie took in a deep breath and turned back to me. “Besides, it was you he picked in that storm.”
In a torrent of hope—like sunlight spilling through a cloud hole—I jabbered out my idea about dog dancing and the parade. I left out the revenge finale of sticking it to G-L-O-R-I-A. I was smart enough to realize that as kick-butt as she obviously was, Sergeant Josie followed an honor code that probably wouldn’t be into that kind of thing. But the idea of that dog waltzing free and happy—she liked that a lot.
“First thing to do,” she said, “is to get him to come through that door again. Thought of a name yet?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe the music he likes will tell you a good one. Ready to begin?”
Between Sergeant Josie baking me cookies and the fact it took only two for the dog to ease himself back through the door, the afternoon started off promising. But that’s where easy ended. For an hour, no song got him dancing—no matter how much Sergeant Josie or I liked it.
I started with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and singer Bobby McFerrin performing a lively version of “Hush Little Baby” because Yo-Yo Ma is a hero of mine, being mutual cellists and all. I turned hopefully to the German Shepherd. But he just started barking out the window at a squirrel.
Changing to music Daddy and George loved, I picked Ella Fitzgerald singing “Cheek to Cheek.” That ballroom dance song had been good enough for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—probably the most famous dancing pair ever—to waltz to in one of their movies.
But the dog lay down and went to sleep.
I tried Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah” (Yeah, okay, I did first hear it in the movie Shrek—that movie where even a green ogre can find love and acceptance, which made it a favorite for me.) The dog actually snored! I guess that song does sound a little like a lullaby.
So I pumped up the beat and tried something thematic: “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men. That German Shepherd rolled over and sneezed like I’d insulted him.
I threw up my hands.
Sergeant Josie laughed. “Try Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy.’ It always makes me want to dance.”
That sure got me up, bebopping around the dog. He didn’t move, not a whisker. How is that possible? I decided to try an amazing pianist-singer I’d recently discovered, who had that soul-rattling outcry George talked about—Alicia Keys. Her “Wait Til You See My Smile” made the German Shepherd sit up and pant like he understood the lyrics and was trying to smile at me. But no dance.
“Hmmmm. May I try?” Sergeant Josie spun through her playlist. “Here’s my favorite singer, Alynda Segarra. She’s from the Bronx. She said what got her through a tough growing-up were the weirdos and the poets, the rebellious women and the activists—what people in power consider the riffraff, so she named her group Hurray for the Riff Raff. Isn’t that clever? These days she’s writing a lot about Puerto Rico—that’s where I’m from. I think you’ll like her.”
Sergeant Josie pushed “Living in the City.” During the refrain, “Well, it’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard,” that dog put his paw on Sergeant Josie’s knee, all empathetic and worried.
“Aww, it’s okay, fella.” She patted his head. “Maybe it’s too soon for political resistance music for him. What else you got?”
I switched to girl-power anthems: “Roar” by Katy Perry, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten, Carrie Underwood’s “Nobody Told You,” and “Defying Gravity” from Wicked. His ears twitched and I swear he nodded his head in rhythm, like he was thinking right hard on those lyrics. But he was too serious about it to get up and strut.
I flopped into a wicker armchair, feeling totally defeated. I’d run through dozens of songs. I swung my legs up over the chair arm and kicked them back and forth. Sergeant Josie didn’t reprimand me for it. She also didn’t start pushing a bunch of advice at me like most adults would have or complain that we’d just wasted a lot of time. She picked up an old frayed book to read.
Even though I would have resented her telling me what to do next, I was also annoyed that she wasn’t, because I was totally out of ideas. “What are you reading?” I admit my tone was pretty why-aren’t-you-saving-me cranky.
Sergeant Josie simply held the book up so I could see Homer’s The Odyssey—that ancient epic poem about Odysseus finding his way back home to Greece after the Trojan War.
“I have to read that next year when I’m a freshman. It sounds really boring.”
“Really?” She looked up and a bit of chill ran through me at her expression. “You think soldiers trying to find their way back home after a long war is boring?”
“N-n-no,” I stammered.
Sergeant Josie just stared at me.
I squirmed.
She waited.
I cleared my throat.
She sighed, relenting. “It’s actually a wonderful story, Ariel—dead accurate—about journeys . . . resilience . . . self-discovery. Piecing yourself back together after your world has been torn apart. Or when you’ve seen way too much death.” She looked back down to the pages.
The dog rolled over and put his paws over his face.
Okay, I may be slow to understand people sometimes, but I’m not stupid. I got why she liked it. I felt my stomach turn over with anxiety. When I said something that annoyed Mama, I paid for it with days of her barely speaking to me. When she did, her voice reeked with disdain. After your own mother has acted like she’s totally repulsed by you, it’s hard not to panic about the possibility of being rejected by a new friend when you goof up. I really liked Sergeant Josie. I didn’t want to lose her.
I changed the subject—fast—hoping that would save me. “That’s quite a lot of books you have there,” I said awkwardly. Exactly the kind of statement that made kids my age walk away from me. You’d think I’d learn.
“Mmm-hmmm.”
Well, at least she didn’t sound like she’d just seen a cockroach or something. I got up and looked at the titles—The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, The Outsiders, The Grapes of Wrath, The Sun Also Rises, Jane Eyre, Lord of the Flies, and 1984. Stuff I was going to read in high school.
Some of them I’d already read and loved: The Secret Garden, The Giver, the Harry Potter and Narnia series, The Book Thief, Anne of Green Gables, and even Charlotte’s Web. “Hey, I know these. Why are you reading these as an adult?”
Sergeant Josie looked up. “They’re on those PBS and BBC lists of books everyone should read.”
Really? PBS thought kids’ books were just as good as adult ones? All right! I’d be sure to throw that at some of my peers who called me a nerd for reading so much.
“How many have you read?” I pushed.
“About half.”
“Like them so far?”
“Most, yes.”
Clearly, she was still smoldering or trying to ease down from being annoyed with me, so I let it alone. I knew better than to worry a wasp nest. I also had no idea what would be the right thing to say, so I stared out the window, absentmindedly thumbing through songs on my phone. Without really thinking about it, or I guess subconsciously wishing George was there to help, I pressed “Sir Duke,” Stevie Wonder’s tribute to big-band legends and the “king of them all,” Duke Ellington. George had arranged it for his marching band, weaving in a wicked cool drumline interlude.
Well, that song wasn’t more than a measure or two into its opening trumpet and saxophone fanfare when the German Shepherd woke up, sat up, and lit up. The tip of his tail started slapping the floor, in that hint of happiness dogs give right before they rea
lly start wagging and squiggling all over with joy.
Rushing so the magic of the moment didn’t break, I cranked the volume right where Stevie sings:
Music is a world within itself
With a language we all understand . . .
I jumped up and swayed with the music, waving my arms in time to the beat. “Yeah, boy, good boy,” I cheered.
The shepherd started circling me, prancing, barking, his tail going round like a propeller. Sergeant Josie clapped her hands to the cymbal beat. I was so excited, I did a victory lap, skipping around the cabin. The dog followed, yip-yapping, his feet catching at my heels.
We were feeling it “all o-o-o-ver” just like Stevie Wonder was singing, just like I had when George let me honk on his saxophone and introduced me to the soul-filling rapture of music.
Moving with those exuberant lyrics, barking along with those trumpets, the dog didn’t even notice that we passed right by that scary door three times.
We had found our music. And his name: Duke.
Eight
I’M GLAD I DIDN’T KNOW HOW hard teaching Duke to dance a complete routine to music was going to be or I might have given up before we even started.
Achieving an effortless-looking performance takes a heck of a lot of effort! Getting Duke to heel—following right by my side, matching his steps to mine—was easy. As long as I didn’t try going through that threatening door, of course. He also sat and stayed on cue. So right from the beginning, we had a couple of decent dance moves. He’d sit and let me skip around him. He’d trot along beside me as I walked in serpentines. But beyond that? We had an awful lot of learning to do and boring, frustrating, oh-my-God-make-it-stop repetition.
Each day after school, I biked and climbed the hills to Sergeant Josie’s cabin. I’d show Duke a move and then practice it over and over and over.
It was like learning to play the cello. Before I had been able to even attempt an easy piece, I’d had to learn how to finger the notes, how to string them together without stumbling, how to stay in tune as I played. It’d taken me two months to eke out “Twinkle, Twinkle”—a baby song that only had six notes in it. Two months!
We had only four weeks till the parade.
I started with simple things like a spin. Honestly, if you clutch a piece of bacon, any dog is going to follow your hand, nose to your fingers. So I would circle my hand in a big O, Duke pirouetting to keep that enticing bacon aroma in his nostrils. “Good boy!” I’d cry after each circle. Then I’d switch the direction. “Good boy!”
Eventually I could get Duke to do four tight spins in a row without holding anything in my hand, just pointing and rotating my wrist. Then a treat and “Good boy!” I did the same to get him to weave in and out through my legs as I walked.
Sergeant Josie must have fried up ten pans’ worth of bacon for those two tricks alone.
At night, I worked on creating the actual dance routine. Suspecting Gloria would make fun of me if she saw, I worked in our old dirt-floor basement, where I could dance out of sight. George had sometimes played hide-and-seek with me there. But mostly the basement had been my private stage. I don’t know how many times I’d acted out fairy tales or Nancy Drew mysteries down there with my stuffed animals when I was a kid. Just me and my Winnie-the-Pooh under the spotlight of a bare bulb hanging next to the jelly cellar.
The cellar shelves were stacked with damson plum preserves my grandmother had jarred—the only thing in the house I ever found that I knew for sure she had made. Those and the scribbled responses to literature. The jars sat, their sweet contents probably poisonous by now, relics of the time our place had been a working estate with cows and fields of vegetables. We still have a thick grapevine in the back arbor that bears fistfuls of ink-dark grapes. The bees and birds enjoy them since Mama keeps us supplied in grocery store jelly. Which explains why nobody ever came down looking for jam. Only George had ever thought to search me out in the cellar, wondering where I was when I disappeared for an entire day.
So I about jumped out of my skin the night Daddy called, “Hey, Ariel. I was in the hall and saw the light under the door. What are you doing, sweetheart?” He was sitting halfway down the open-rail stairs, like he’d been there for some time watching me walk, spin, lean over to shake Duke’s imaginary paw, repeat.
I yanked off my earphones. Stevie Wonder sang into the room.
“‘Sir Duke!’” Daddy brightened. “Great song!”
“Yeah.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It’s stupid, but I felt as weird as if Daddy had caught me smoking a cigarette. I turned the music off.
“I was worried you were listening to something god-awful like rap.”
“Actually, Daddy, a lot of rap and hip-hop songs are really good. You should listen to Hamilton; everyone else in the country has! The composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, won that prize for it—you know, the one you think is so important—the Pulitzer.”
“Pshaw,” Daddy answered. We went silent, starring across a several-generations gap in music. He tried again: “Were you dancing?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you choreographing something for school?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
I could have kicked myself. Here was a rare chance to actually talk to Daddy without Gloria interrupting. But I was just too embarrassed. Or maybe Daddy and I had chatted so little lately that I had no idea how to have a real conversation with him.
“Our own little Martha Graham!” He smiled at me.
“Who?”
“The lady choreographer who pioneered American modern dance. Mother took me to see her company when the Kennedy Center first opened. We used to have season tickets to all sorts of theater performances in DC when I was your age. I loved doing that with her.” He stopped and frowned. “Didn’t your mama and I take you to see Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring when you were little? I remember our splurging and spending the night at the old Willard Hotel next to the White House. You were all excited about getting room service—a club sandwich and a chocolate sundae. Remember?”
“No, sir. That must have been Gloria.”
“What?” Daddy rubbed his nose, the quirky thing he did when he was getting uncomfortable with a situation. “Are you sure?”
I certainly was! That kind of attention had always been spent on G-L-O-R-I-A, the anointed family flower worth tending and coaxing into bloom. I kept hoping she would just go away—like George had to college—so in the void I might capture some of Daddy’s interest. But the laser focus on G-L-O-R-I-A had only flamed into full-scale floodlights when she stayed home and went to our local community college so she could take private acting classes with drama professors from Shenandoah University. Come to think of it, part of the real iciness between Gloria and me started when I asked, if she had actually done her homework during high school, could she have gotten into the university itself and acted in their drama conservatory’s really wonderful plays.
“Well,” Daddy tried again, “I know your ballet class went into DC to see The Nutcracker because you dashed around in a tutu pretending to be a sugarplum for weeks afterward. Remember doing that?” He laughed fondly, taking off his glasses and polishing them with his handkerchief. When he put them back on, he saw that I wasn’t smiling in response.
“That was Gloria, too.”
Daddy seemed genuinely startled. He stared through me, and I knew he was rifling through a mental file cabinet of memories, trying to find some envelope that applied to me. He looked pretty distressed.
I decided to help him out. “We went to the National Zoo a bunch of times with George.”
“That’s right!” He perked up. “We saw Ling-Ling.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that particular panda had died before I was born, that he must be remembering a trip from when George was a baby. For a few moments, Daddy’s face clouded. I knew he was thinking of George.
But Daddy kept trying. I’ll give him that. He switched topics again. “You’l
l be going to high school in the fall.”
“Right.”
“Bet boys will call all the time to ask you to dances.”
I was seriously beginning to wonder if someone had slipped something funky into his coffee at work. “I don’t think so, Daddy.”
“Sure they will, honey.” He thought a moment. “Do you know how to do the pretzel? You know, when you go under your partner’s arm, turn around and end up on his other side, all while keeping your eyes locked.” He smiled. “It’s very romantic.”
“Eeeew. No. No one dances holding hands anymore, Daddy.”
“That’s sad, don’t you think?”
Actually, I agreed with that. The slow swing dance that he and Mama did looked like a lot of fun.
“Well, let me show you the box step, then. I want you to be able to slow dance without getting too close to a boy. Not my little girl.”
“Daddy!” I was totally mortified. My face broiled again at the image of the boy with the big smile and the gleaming braces holding me in his arms.
Daddy came down the stairs. I was so stunned by the attention, I let him put my left hand on his shoulder and take my right hand in his left. He sidestepped us to the right (pause), back (pause), left (pause), back, in a neat little square, then again. He hummed as he moved us.
Somewhere from way back in my past, my memory called up Daddy’s deep baritone voice singing: “Oh my dar-ling, oh my dar-ling, oh my daaaaarling A-ri-el.” Suddenly I remembered standing barefoot on his shiny loafers as Daddy danced me around and around, substituting my name for the song’s Clementine. I could hear our long-ago laughter. I remembered the feel of his swinging me, my being almost parallel to the ground, and then the big bear hug he’d give me before putting me back down, dizzy and hiccupping with happiness.
Storm Dog Page 6