Storm Dog

by L. M. Elliott

  With that I ran out of breath.

  Sergeant Josie listened all the way through. For a horrifying moment, she said nothing. Then she asked solemnly, “Marcus is a friend of yours?”

  I nodded.

  “You know what I’ve learned may be the most important thing in the world?”

  Shaking my head, my heart sinking, I figured she was going to tell me that it was following rules. The rules of law, as Daddy would say.

  “Sticking by your buddies.” Sergeant Josie looked around the circle of dogs. “And being kind to those who need help.”

  I gasped, too relieved to speak.

  She smiled reassuringly at me. “What are their names?”

  I realized I had no idea; Marcus and I had been so hurried. “That one’s Midnight. But I don’t know the others.”

  “Midnight?” She bent and kissed Midnight’s head. “The time the world shifts into a new day, with new possibilities and hope. Although it’s too dark to look very far into the future.” She smiled. “Seems appropriate.”

  I stared at the top of Sergeant Josie’s head as she hugged the Labrador. She must have gotten to a poetry collection or something on her reading syllabus. “Who said that?” I asked.

  “Just me,” she murmured. She stood and paced, finally stopping to lean against the barn door. She considered me for a long minute. I held my breath. When people stand right by a door, I always worry they might walk out on me if I give the wrong answer.

  Finally, Midnight broke the stare between us. She heaved herself up, waddled over, and cozied up right next to Sergeant Josie. Resting her muzzle on Sergeant Josie’s leg, Midnight gazed up earnestly at her. Thump, thump, thump went her tail.

  “Wow.” Sergeant Josie’s voice choked a little as she whispered to Midnight, “Your expression is just like my dog when . . .” She cleared her throat. She looked over at me. “You know, Ariel, one of the things about that cabin of mine—no one other than you and Duke have found their way to it.” She waited for me to get what that info implied.

  “Oh, Sergeant Josie!” At that I did burst into tears—grateful and touched and embarrassed and unsure all at the same time. “Do you think you could hide them for a while?”

  “For the time being. I like your idea about trying to find them new owners at the parade. Like one of those adopt-a-pet days at farmers’ markets and Petcos. We’ll have to check the people out, of course. But we can figure that out later.” She straightened up. “What should we call them?”

  Their names came easy to me, dog heroes from books I’d loved. I didn’t worry about gender: Duchess and Kep from Beatrix Potter’s picture books, Bodger from The Incredible Journey, Jump from Tamora Pierce’s series, and, of course, Lassie.

  Right then, lights snapped on in the kitchen across the lawn. One of the few things Mama did consistently (other than bragging on G-L-O-R-I-A) was go to church most Sundays. Sometimes she even went as early as the eight o’clock service if she had things she had to do later in the day like shopping. That would be her, making French Vanilla Cinnamon coffee, about the only thing she started from scratch.

  “Time to move out,” whispered Sergeant Josie. “Let’s get these ladies into my truck.”

  In single silent file, following right behind her, those dogs marched themselves straight to Sergeant Josie’s truck—no wandering off following their noses, no jockeying to get ahead of one another. Duke was sitting in the truck bed. When he spotted me, he dove out right into my arms.

  I love that dog.

  So did Midnight, Duchess, Kep, Bodger, Jump, and Lassie! They happily let him escort them to the truck. We had to lift Midnight into the pickup’s bed, which was no easy task, but the rest of the girls easily jumped in. They lay down quiet as could be so when Sergeant Josie and I closed the end gate, the dogs weren’t even visible. And when she drove off, not one poked her head up like most mutts do, snuffing the wind, their ears and tongues flapping. It was as if they knew they were on a mission!

  I watched the truck disappear round the bend before turning back for the house.

  When I darted into the kitchen, I discovered Mama staring into her coffee, trying to wake herself up. I held my breath, but all she said was that she was in the mood for all of us to go to church together to petition God for G-L-O-R-I-A’s success. She ordered me upstairs to wake everyone. No questions about what I had been doing outside that early—a non-reaction I should have expected and not been all worried about her noticing six dogs trooping into a bright red truck at the end of our lane. There didn’t seem to be enough coffee in the world to make her concerned about my whereabouts.

  The scene when we arrived at church, on the other hand, was exactly what I expected. Gloria had slept in the past few Sundays, so her adoring fans were thrilled to see her. “Oh, Glooooori-aaaa!” the church ladies chorused as we approached the vestibule doorway. They crushed her in excited, fluttering hugs, wreathed in sweet perfumes, and chattered all at once. “I’m so proud of you.” “Isn’t it marvelous?” “You’ll be the belle of the parade.” “This is the beginning of great things.” “I’ll be able to tell reporters writing your life story that I knew you when you were just a little girl.”

  Then they swooped onto Mama, congratulating her for raising such a beauty. “Of course, she looks just like you.” “You two are the Gilmore Girls, I swear.” “Hollywood could cast you two in a mother-daughter movie.”

  They swarmed Daddy. “Your jacket must be bursting its buttons, mister.” “Aren’t you proud beyond anything?” “What a lucky man to be surrounded by two such beautiful women each and every day.”

  Me? “Good morning, Ariel.”

  The flock scattered into pews.

  During the service, the minister urged us to not let the vanities of this earth corrupt our God-given goodness. I’m sorry to report—since I was sitting there in church and should have been having peaceful, righteous thoughts—that I did hope G-L-O-R-I-A was feeling sick to her soul with guilt about how mean she’d been to Marcus. The only real prayer I squeezed out of myself, other than my usual plea about keeping George safe, was one asking for good winds for Marcus. Oh, and one other about not getting arrested as a dog-snatcher.

  I finally managed to tamp down my swirl of angst—so God wouldn’t feel the need to smite me right there for thinking such mean thoughts in His house—by contemplating how I was going to dress my princesses for the parade. As the preacher tried hard to save my sorry soul, I imagined Gloria’s closet and rummaged her drawers in my mind’s eye—smiling the whole time. Yup, there would be some fine outfits there for me to borrow for my dog court.

  Thirteen

  FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, GLORIA and Mama were consumed with beautifying everything about G-L-O-R-I-A, like polishing up an apple before handing it to a teacher. She had her hair highlighted, her nails buffed, painted, and sealed with gel, her legs waxed. She even went to a tanning salon—which I tried warning her off from, because even as mad as I was at her, I didn’t want her to get skin cancer. But Mama hushed me, saying Gloria needed to be bronzed and I needed to stop being such a killjoy.

  Normally, all that fuss and bother about G-L-O-R-I-A might have upset me. But I was focusing on my own preparations, climbing the blooming hills to heaven: music, dance, and a dog who came alive with happiness when he saw me.

  Every day Duke and I practiced, chiseling away clumsiness and hesitation. Since we no longer needed to count out rhythms, our dance routine was becoming second nature, poetry-in-motion. The song had seeped into our souls and become our heartbeat. We were in complete sync with the melody and each other.

  Duke seemed so much more relaxed. He even followed me in and out of the cabin door with only a flinch here and there. And truth be told, I was more at peace, too. When I was with Sergeant Josie, I didn’t feel quite so abandoned. Her being a veteran and all made me feel closer to George.

  I’d never been one for dress-up or playing with dolls, but I sure was having fun planning the costumes for
the parade. Up in the attic, I’d found an old top hat, the kind that folds down and then pops up like a little chimney stack when you snap it against your hand. It was way cool. On it, Sergeant Josie superglued a chin strap to secure it to Duke’s head during our dance. I’d also found a white vest and bowtie men wear with formal dinner jackets. Duke was going to look all Great Gatsby in it, Sergeant Josie said. I guess she’d just gotten to Fitzgerald on her reading list.

  In the same cedar closet I discovered dresses from the 1940s, when Duke Ellington—the big-band musician Stevie Wonder celebrated in his song—was big. Rummaging through them, I pulled out a gorgeous velvet dress with beaded shoulders, made of a rich emerald, the color of a bower in the woods thick with summer-full leaves. When I held it against me in front of the mirror of an old vanity abandoned under the eaves, its beads glimmered. The color made my dull hazel eyes suddenly look interesting cat-eye-green. Astonished, right there and then in the attic’s dust I stripped to my underwear and winnowed into that evening gown’s soft folds. It fit!

  Whoever wore that dress before was as tall and lean, and maybe even as gangly, as I am. I wondered if it had been Daddy’s mother. I’d stared enough at her photo that I could definitely see some resemblance in our profiles—the same long face and nose. I decided to believe it was my grandmother’s dress. Her being such a big reader, and making such smart comments about books, made me think having some of my grandmother’s genes floating around in me might not be so bad. I could wear that dress with a sense of family tradition and pride I rarely felt.

  I twirled. It swirled—like a dancer. It was absolutely perfect.

  For my pooch escapees, I raided Gloria’s overflowing wardrobe and collected an armful of things in the traditional Blossom Festival colors of pink and green—crisp cotton boyfriend shirts with pop-up collars, sweaters embroidered with flowers. In the back of her closet was the Sugar Plum Fairy tutu Daddy had mistakenly remembered me wearing. That would be for Midnight. As I tiptoed out of her bedroom, I was tempted to make off with Gloria’s teen-queen tiara that rested on top of her bureau mirror. But even I wasn’t that reckless. There were plenty of hair bows and headbands. The girls were going to look sweet.

  Not that everything was perfect. According to the local newspaper, police were still asking questions about what reporters dubbed “the dog-pound prison break.” But beyond that, not much investigating was going on. Let’s face it, my escapees weren’t exactly prized pets, so no one was offering rewards or taping pictures on stop signs.

  No, my main problem was that my jailbird dogs were a straight-up disaster, dance-wise. Duke and I couldn’t do our routine over and over for the whole parade—it snaked through Winchester for twenty-plus blocks. We needed to alternate with the girls. Mostly they could just sit like princesses on Sergeant Josie’s truck while Duke and I walked ahead of them. But they had to do a little something now and then. Even a princess like Gloria waved and smiled at the street crowds.

  Sergeant Josie and I decorated her truck with plastic flowers and put crates in the bed for the girls to perch on during the parade. But getting them to sit still and stay was beginning to feel like Mission: Impossible. As grateful as those dogs were to be sprung from their cages and as hard as they tried to please, they got way too distracted, way too easily. Every chipmunk, every salamander, every bird, every deer—geez, even every pine cone that fell to the ground with a soft thump caused a conga-line commotion. One would start barking and leap off the porch, and the rest followed, racing off to nab whatever it was that caught the first dog’s attention.

  Seeing how they followed one another, I tried setting up a line dance for them, like the electric slide. Big mistake! All those wagging tails caused total havoc. The girls couldn’t stop friendly chewing on each other when the dog in front turned and accidentally swatted the one behind her in the face.

  I tried to get them to bob their heads from side to side in unison. But that just seemed to remind them they needed a good scratch. And when one did, they all did, in a growing crescendo of scritch . . . scritch . . . scritch . . . scr-scr-scr-scr-scri-scriiiiiiitch. BARK! It was like George’s marching band percussion section doing a slow-grow drumroll ending in a cymbal crash.

  I taught them to circle, but they thought it was so much fun, they couldn’t stop. They’d go round and round, bumping each other into piles of flailing, yapping dogs. When I finally calmed them down enough to sit, they were all too twitchy to really listen.

  If I paid attention to one, the others rushed to scratch at my knees in a doggie look-at-me free-for-all. Jump was the worst. She was living up to her name and must have had some border collie in her—you know, those fluffy dogs that can hurl themselves six feet into the air to catch a Frisbee—because she kept leaping over the others to slurp my face, all four paws suspended in the air. She knocked me to the ground every time.

  Honestly, only Sergeant Josie had any control over them. She would hold up her pointer finger, then two fingers, then three, the way kindergarten teachers count down seconds for children to settle into their seats and—shazam—all those dogs got quiet. It helped, of course, that she rewarded them with bacon. But when I took over, chaos reigned.

  Except with Midnight. She was always dignified and attentive. It would have been easy to set the entire choreography on her because she listened. But the truth was the old girl was too arthritic to get up and rhumba.

  One afternoon, when all the dogs went scattering, barking at each other, I flung myself down beside Sergeant Josie. She’d been watching from the porch, reading again. Duke flopped beside me, blowing out a huge snuffy sigh all over me. He’d had it with the girls, too. “This is not working.” I whined.

  Sergeant Josie simply turned a page.

  I repeated my complaint.

  “I heard you, Ariel.” She turned another page with crisp emphasis.

  I sat up. Why wasn’t she helping? I frowned. “What are you reading that’s so all-fired interesting?” I wasn’t afraid of her anymore, obviously.

  “It isn’t so much interesting”—Sergeant Josie looked up at me—“as . . . disturbing. Beautifully written. But its world is hitting me a little hard.”

  “What is it?”

  She held it up so I could read the cover: The Kite Runner. I noticed her hands were shaking. I hadn’t seen that for a while. “What’s it about?”

  “Two boys who fly kites in a tournament.” She sighed. “Cruelty. Love. Redemption. Racism.” She looked out the window. “It’s set in Afghanistan.”

  “Oh.” I hesitated. “Should I read it? So I know more about what George is seeing over there?”

  My question pulled Josie’s gaze back to me. She studied me for a moment. “Not yet. When he gets back.”

  I was grateful for her using the word when.

  A breeze picked up and backhanded the porch bells into little tinkles. Their jangles set off Lassie into a soulful barking. Jump, Duchess, Bodger, and Kep chimed in.

  Sergeant Josie laughed at them and shut her novel. “I can tell you’re looking for answers from me, Ariel. But the job of a good trainer, or friend for that matter, is not to tell you exactly what to do but to be more of a compass to help you get your bearings. That way you map your own journey. You find your own definition, not one put on you by other people’s opinions. Do you understand?”

  I just wanted some help with the dogs. How hard was that? But Sergeant Josie had hit on something I definitely felt—I was tired of being defined by others. So I muttered, “I suppose.”

  She smiled. “Okay, look. This is what I see. Each of those dogs has her own rhythm.” She pointed to the cascade of bells hanging from her porch roof. “Kind of like how each of my wind chimes has its own pitch. The wind brushes them to nudge each to sing out with its own note. Then each solitary tone harmonizes with the rest of the group, making chords of melody, a rich, collective, and cooperative song, a communion among individual souls.”

  Sergeant Josie waited for that to sink i
n. Dang, that woman sure could be all poetical when she put her mind to it. I got her metaphor. Or was it a simile? I get those two confused sometimes.

  Seeing me thinking, Sergeant Josie nodded toward the clearing where the girls had bolted. Jump was leaping and rolling around like an Olympic gymnast dancing a floor exercise. Lassie pirouetted as she chased her own tail. When she caught it, she backed away still clamped down on it, like she was exiting, stage left. Bodger was circling all of them in perfect serpentines. Duchess was looking up to the sky, cross-stepping as she tracked squirrels jumping across branches. Kep stood on her hind legs like a ballerina en pointe, gracefully rounding the tree that the squirrels had raced up to safety. And Midnight? Well, Midnight sat elegantly, just watching, even as a squirrel nearly darted over her feet in its panic to elude Duchess.

  I watched for a few minutes, trying to spot a choreography that could include all their individual moves. When Daddy compared me to Martha Graham, I hadn’t been sure if it was a compliment or not. So I’d looked her up. It actually may have been one of the nicest things Daddy’s ever said to me. Martha Graham is called the mother of modern dance. She rejected classical ballet’s rigid froufrou and fairy-princess stereotypes of prettiness and instead had the imagination and courage to let her dancers be more real, more athletic, more out there emotion-wise. Martha Graham would probably tell me Sergeant Josie was right. These girls weren’t suited to coordinated lock-step ballet.