Drover's Secret Life

by John R. Erickson

  Gee, I’d never thought of that, and his words went through me like a wooden nickel and gave me hope and courage. With his help, I climbed back into the pickup bed and made another flight.

  By the time darkness fell that evening, we had erected a Monument to Dogs in Flight. Pete called it a “Backward Monument” because it didn’t stand up like a statue. It went down into the ground, like a hole.

  It was a hole, the hole my nose had punched into the ground, but like Pete said, by golly, it was OUR hole, and there it was for everyone to see, a living tribute to brave dogs and their flying machines.

  It sure made me proud, seeing that monument. I’d put a lot of myself into making that hole, but I couldn’t have done it without Pete’s help.

  But where was I? Oh, yeah, there’s something about Halloween that makes the weather turn cold. That’s when monsters come out, too—skeletons and witches and some guy in a helmet named Dark Vader. He wears a black cape and talks like he’s got a bad cold and he scares the bejeebers out of me. He comes to the ranch every Halloween.

  The first time he came to Loper and Sally May’s house, Hank made me go out and bark at him. I didn’t want to but I did, gave him one bark and ran like greased lightning to the machine shed.

  Hank got mad and called me a chicken liver but I didn’t care. Dark Vader came back the next year and I ran for the machine shed again, only this time I didn’t bark at him. He keeps coming back every year at Halloween, but we’ve kind of reached an understanding: I never bark at him and he never eats me. Whenever he comes to the ranch and gets out of the car, I go straight to the machine shed and stay there until he leaves. No muss, no fuss, no noise, no nothing.

  I don’t know why he keeps coming back on Halloween, but he never seems to do any harm. If he ever tried to hurt anyone or steal something, maybe I’d leave the machine shed and bark at him. Or maybe not. Probably not.

  I don’t remember what I was talking about when I started this chapter, but I think it’s time to start another one. You can’t stay in the same chapter forever. If you told your whole life’s story in one chapter, it might seem kind of boring.

  The next chapter is going to be exciting.

  Chapter Four: The Next Chapter

  I need to work on my concentration. It’s always been hard for me, thinking about one thing at a time. There’s always so much going on.

  This ranch sure is a busy place and it’s hard to keep my mind on My Secret Life. I haven’t gotten to the part yet about how I ended up living on Loper and Sally May’s ranch, but I’m heading in that direction.

  But you know what? I have an itch that won’t go away, and I’m going to have to scratch it. I don’t want to. I want to keep telling all the great adventures I found after leaving home, but I can’t stand this any longer.

  Will you wait? I’m sorry, but if I don’t scratch this thing right now, I won’t be able to think about anything else. Don’t leave.

  Scratch scratch scratch!

  There! Boy, that was a good one. I feel a lot better and I hope you do, too.

  What were we talking about? Oh yeah, leaving home, the sad day when my mom decided that it was time for me to go out into the world and find myself. Well, I did. Exactly thirty minutes after I left home and went out into the big wide world, I found myself.

  Everywhere I went, THERE I WAS! So with that out of the way, I decided to go back home.

  When they talk about “the big wide world,” they’re not kidding. The world outside our yard was bigger and wider than I ever dreamed. It was HUGE. Houses, streets, stores, cars, trees, shrubs, flowers, sidewalks, mailboxes, people.

  I saw a bunch of dogs out there, too. Most of them were bigger than me, and most of them looked like they wanted to fight. I did some fig­uring. If I fought every dog in Twitchell, I would be 127 years old and really messed up. Is that what Mom wanted me to do with my life? I didn’t think so.

  So I dug a tunnel under the fence and sneaked back into the yard. I saw Mom in the distance, lying in the shade and chewing on a soup bone. She wore a radiant smile and I heard her say, “At last, peace and quiet! All the kids grown and gone, and I have a bone all to myself. It’s a good life.”

  I tried to tiptoe across the yard and hide in a patch of flowers, but her ears shot up and the bone rolled out of her mouth. Then her voice ripped through the silence. “Drover! What are you doing back here? I sent you out into the world and here you are, back again!”

  “Mom, I tried the world. It’s too big and . . .” Right then and there, something happened to my leg, honest. It just . . . terrible pain came shooting up from my toes and before I knew what was happening, I was limping around in circles. “Oh my leg! This thing’s killing me!”

  At first she seemed suspicious, but as my groans of pain grew louder and my limp got worse and worse, she said, “Well, maybe you should lie down.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Just one night, that’ll fix it. Boy, I don’t know what happened, but this thing is really . . . oh, the pain! Oh, my leg!”

  A month later, Mom’s attitude had gotten really bad. I mean, sour. She’d used all her home remedies and motherly cures but, drat the luck, my leg kept getting worse. I felt awful about it, but what’s a dog to do when he gets struck down in the prime of his rib?

  One morning she came to my bedside. “How’s the leg?”

  I tried to hide the pain, the terrible pain, but a groan just popped out of my mouth. “You know, Mom, I thought it was getting better . . . no, I’m sure it was getting better, but then it took a turn for the worse. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Which leg?”

  “Left front, down in the ankle. Ooooo! Awful pain.”

  “Yesterday it was the right rear, around the knee.”

  “It was? No fooling?”

  “No fooling.”

  “Gosh. How do you explain that?”

  “I’m wondering.”

  “Well, I guess the pain is moving around, huh? I’ve heard about Moving Pain. It’s the very worst kind.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes, you bet. Last year it took a terrible toll. Dogs all over Texas were dropping like flies.”

  “Mercy.”

  “And they say the only cure is lots of rest.”

  “How much rest are we talking about?”

  “Oh . . . months, sometimes years. It just depends.”

  “I see.” Mom walked a few steps away, whirled around all of a sudden, and screamed at the top of her lungs, “DROVER, THE YARD IS ON FIRE!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!”

  Well, I’d never been the kind of dog who wanted to mess around with fire. It took only one fire alarm to get me out of bed. I headed straight for the tunnel under the fence and dived in.

  Safe on the other side, I yelled, “Come on, Mom, I’ll help you through!” Silence. “Mom? Hurry!” I heard a clunking sound coming from inside the hole. “Mom?” I stuck my head back in the hole and saw that the opening had been plugged with a board. “Mom? Hey Mom, you’ll have to jump the fence. Somebody plugged the tunnel! Mom?”

  I held my breath, hoping the fire hadn’t . . .

  Finally, she spoke. “Drover?”

  “Mom? Thank goodness! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Your leg seems better.”

  My eyes drifted around. “Well, not really. I mean, it was okay there for a minute, but now the pain’s coming back. Maybe I’d better lie down.”

  “Not in my yard.”

  “What?”

  “I said, can you come for Christmas dinner?”

  “Christmas dinner? Mom, that’s six months from now. Mom? Hello?”

  What can you say when your own mother locks you out of the yard? It’s about the saddest story I ever heard. Even today it brings mist to my eyes.

  Chapter Five: I Never Got to Be Joe

  I wok
e up this morning on my gunnysack under the gas tanks, thinking about that Monument to Dogs in Flight, and I’m sure glad I woke up. Otherwise I’d still be asleep.

  I enjoy sleeping. I love to sleep. I’d rather sleep than do almost anything, but I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, day and night. I think I’d get tired of it after a while.

  If you get tired of running, you can always lie down and sleep, but if you get tired of lying down and sleeping, what do you do? I worry about things like that.

  I worry about a lot of stuff. What would happen if the sun didn’t come up in the morning? What if it came up in the evening? How would we know if it was evening or morning?

  It would mess up everything. Here at the ranch, Sally May brings out the breakfast scraps right after breakfast, which is in the morning. If the sun came up in the evening, would breakfast still be breakfast or would we have to call it something else? What would we call it?

  I’ve thought of a good name for it: Joe. It’s easy to spell and I’ve always liked the name Joe. When I was a pup, I wanted to be Joe but I couldn’t because I was Drover, and also there was already some dog named Joe. I never met him, but why couldn’t we have two Joes in the world?

  I asked Mom about that when I was young, but she didn’t have a good answer. All she said was, “Drover, I worry about you.” Well, if she was so worried about me, how come she locked me out of the yard and told me to get a job?

  What did I know about a job? I was just a poor scared kid with a stub tail, a pup who’d always dreamed of being a Joe but couldn’t be.

  I never noticed this before, but if you take the word J-O-E, drop the E and add B, you get J-O-B. That seems pretty significant. B = bee, and we had some bees in our back yard. If a bee stung JOE, the E might fall off and you’d have J-O-Bee. Get it? J-O-B.

  No wonder I was afraid of getting a job. That explains it, ’cause I’ve always been scared of bees.

  I have to admit, I wasn’t exactly a kid when Mom locked me out of the yard. I was almost grown. All my brothers and sisters had moved out and found new homes, even Willie, the greedy pig. So maybe I was too old to be living at home, but just because you’re too old doesn’t mean you weren’t a kid at some point in your life.

  Everybody has to be something. Otherwise what would we do?

  It really hurt my feelings when Mom locked me out of the yard. There I was, a runt with a stub tail, a dog who’d always wanted to be named Joe but couldn’t be. That right there was enough to break anyone’s heart, but on top of that I had a seri­ous medical condition, Leggus Brokus with Moving Pain Syndrome.

  And she locked me out of the yard and wondered if I could come back for Christmas dinner!

  Christmas dinner! By Christmas, I would be skin and bones. I would look exactly like what’s left of a Christmas turkey after Christmas dinner. Who would offer a job to a turkey carcass with a stub tail?

  Real turkeys don’t have stub tails. They have feathers and they’re really pretty when they fan them out, but if you’re a dog, you can never be a turkey. No matter how many times you wish upon a star, you’ll be a dog until you wither away to skin and bones, and then you’re still a dog, only you’ll look like a turkey carcass the day after Christmas.

  Anyway, I woke up this morning thinking about the Monument to Dogs in Flight. You know what? All at once it doesn’t seem like much of a monument: a hole in the ground. I know, Pete said it was a Backward Monument and a tribute to my heroic efforts to fly, and I went to a lot of trouble to build it. But still . . .

  The hole is still there and somehow it just looks ridiculous. Just a hole in the ground. A monument should make somebody proud of something, but every time I look at that hole, it makes me remember all those times I flapped my ears and dove off the back of the pickup and landed nose-first on the ground.

  It doesn’t make me proud. It makes me wonder . . . how come, after I had the first wreck, I climbed back up there and did it a second time? And before I can answer that question, I find myself wondering, “Gosh, how come I did it the third time?” And it gets worse from there. I crashed twenty-five times. That’s why the hole is so deep.

  Something’s not right.

  Chapter Six: An Ugly Scene with Mom

  Here we are in Chapter Six. I kind of wish it was Chapter Seven, then I could call it “Chapter Crutch.” See, the shape of a 7 reminds me of a crutch.

  Back when I was living in the yard with Mom, my leg gave me so much misery that I might have used a crutch, if I’d had one. But I didn’t have a crutch and this isn’t Chapter Seven, so I can’t call it “Chapter Crutch.”

  Here at the ranch, we had a pretty wild time last night. Big storm, thunder, lightning, crash, boom, and little green Charlie Monsters running all over the place, trying to invade the ranch. Hank went out to bark at the Charlies.

  I tried to follow. I really wanted to go but, drat the luck, the old leg quit me just when Hank called for the attack. I went down like a rock, flat on my back, in terrible pain. Hank wasn’t very sympathetic, and I couldn’t blame him. It happens every time.

  Almost every time.

  Every time.

  Hank thinks I need surgery. Brain surgery, is what he said. I’m not sure what he meant, but I’m not keen on having an operation. Everything in a hospital is white and I don’t like white. It seems colorless. I guess it is colorless. That’s what makes it white.

  Maybe I ought to go to a chiropractor. They have chiropractors for dogs, and I’ve heard that after a couple of adjustments, your backbone straightens out and gets longer. I’m not sure that would help my leg, but it might longerate my tail. I’m still self-conscious about my tail.

  It’s always something—my leg, my tail, allergies. By doze geds stobbed ub all the tibe. See what I bean? All I have to do is thig abou dit.

  Anyway, after Mom locked me out of the yard, I had to do something drastic—either suck up my courage and go look for a job, or sit there and moan about it for the rest of my life and feel sorry for myself. That didn’t leave me much of a choice, did it? Nope. And it didn’t take me long to swing into action.

  Right then and there, I made up my mind to moan and howl until Mom let me back in the yard. Boy, it was tough. I mean all day and half the night, hours of the saddest moaning and howling you ever heard. Mom didn’t respond, which surprised me. I thought she’d gone deaf or moved out, but finally, around three o’clock in the morning, she spoke through a crack in the fence.

  “Drover?”

  “Hi, Mom, how’s it going?”

  “Son, there are two words I’ve never wanted to use in your presence.”

  “I’ll be derned. Am I supposed to guess?”

  “No. Just listen. The words are ‘shut’ and ‘up.’”

  “‘Shut and up’?”

  “Say it fast.”

  “Shutandup?”

  “Drover, take out the ‘and’ and say it fast.”

  “Oh, okay. Shut up! Oops. Mom, I can’t believe I said that. It just slipped out, honest.”

  “Don’t apologize. It was meant for you.”

  “For me? You’re telling me to shut up?”

  “Yes. You’ve finally done it. You’ve pushed me into using harsh language and made me sound like a hag. Are you happy?”

  “I don’t think so. How about you?”

  “Who can be happy with you out there, moaning like a lost calf?”

  “Oh good, you noticed.”

  “Of course I noticed! Everyone in the neighborhood noticed. That’s why, for the past six hours, they’ve been yelling at you.”

  “Gosh, someone’s been yelling at me?”

  “Only the whole neighborhood.”

  “No fooling? Hey, here’s an idea. Let me back in the yard and we’ll talk about it.”

  “No! Get a job and we’ll talk about it . . . at Christmas.”
/>   “Mom, I can’t. Nobody would hire a little mutt who moans all night long.”

  “So stop moaning!”

  “Well . . . it’s kind of fun, to be honest. And I don’t have anything better to do.”

  “You think it’s fun? Listen, buster, keep it up and somebody’s going to call the dogcatcher.”

  “Dogcatcher? Who’d do a thing like that?”

  “Fifteen people who can’t sleep.”

  “Oh, surely not. That would be mean.”

  “I guess you can try it and find out.”

  “Maybe I will. It beats looking for a job. Hee hee.”

  “Some dogs never learn. Well, good night and good luck.”

  “Good night, Mom. If you change your mind, I’ll be right here.”

  I couldn’t believe she was being so unreasonable. And stubborn. All I wanted was to move back home for the rest of my life. Was that asking too much?

  Chapter Crutch: This Is Pretty Neat

  Well, we finally made it to Chapter Seven, and did you see what I called it? “Chapter Crutch.” Hee hee. It was fun.

  And you know what else? When we get to Chapter Eight, I might call it “Chapter Train Tracks,” and I’ll bet you can’t guess why. Go ahead and try. In a thousand years, you won’t guess.

  Give up?

  Here on the ranch, Little Alfred has a model train set with the track glued on a sheet of plywood and the track follows the pattern of a figure 8. Eight reminds me of his train tracks. Is that neat or what?

  Every now and then I get a kick out of doing something wild and rebellious. Sometimes it scares me. Two days ago when Hank said “Good morning,” I stuck out my tongue at him. No reason. I just felt a crazy urge to do it and I did it.

  He was shocked and so was I, and he made me stand in the corner for ten minutes. It was worth it, and one of these days I’ll do it again.