No, no, no.
My legs tremble as I rise to my knees and watch the snake slither toward a clump of pine trees and disappear.
Hornets whirl.
I scream until no sound comes and then all is silent the way things are silent in those old movies Harry watches, silence before the storm.
—
Get a grip, I breathe in. Get a grip, I breathe out.
When I can finally stand long enough to count to fifty, I cradle my arm and pull my dented bike into the bushes.
And then—without a snake, without a plan, and slow as an old retriever who won’t run anymore—I begin the long walk to get my dog.
I’ve never broken into someone’s house before, but it can’t be that different from breaking into a barn.
I hear my papa in my head saying it’s a really bad idea.
I hesitate halfway up the driveway and this gives my toes time to gang up on me and refuse to go forward (they will dillydally until the cows come home, they tell me).
I snap at them: We have no choice. Swanson isn’t home and my dog is in the house, not the barn. Can’t you hear the barking?
—
Crows caw and soar into the sopping sky and I use Harry’s gruff Marines voice to force all the parts of me to march across the soaked lawn and up the porch steps. My sneakers squeak. My elbow throbs.
Swanson’s windows are closed and covered with thick curtains. Two are broken and patched with duct tape.
Inside, I hear my dog jumping and barking, and my heart swells and soars as again and again he howls, and the sweet sound of it is a warm blanket covering all the aching places inside me. I notice that my Gloaty Gus’s deep booming tone is missing and a high yelping has taken its place, but no matter, we can get things back to normal as soon as I wrap my arms around the true-blue friend of my soul.
The yelping continues, louder and louder, until it becomes that baying moan that wolves make at the moon.
“Stop barking!” I try to hide the tiniest trace of irritation creeping into my voice because my dog doesn’t have the sense to know it’s me, but the howling goes on and on and I realize we are going to have to learn to be with each other all over again. My papa told me that newly sheared sheep butt heads because they don’t recognize each other, sometimes for the rest of the day. This is a little reassuring, but not much.
The front door is bolted shut. I try all the windows on the porch, but each is locked. Every time I reach up to try and raise a sash, my elbow throbs and I stagger from the dizziness. My dog yelps so much I can’t hear myself think. I don’t even hear the oil truck rumbling up the driveway until it is almost too late, and I dive into the boxwood bushes on the far side of the porch, groaning from the pain.
From my hiding spot I notice another window on the far side of the house—more narrow, but slightly open—and I will need something to stand on to get up there, so when the oil truck finishes filling the tank, I waste another fifteen minutes finding a rusted folding chair pushed under the porch.
As I wedge the window up with my good arm, my dog breaks up his howling with that high yapping yelp, which hardly sounds like Augustus at all. Then he wails and this makes me wonder what Swanson has done to him. Cradling my arm, I crawl through the window and jump. This is no easy feat with my heart thundering, and I land in a bathroom, banging my elbow on the floor tiles. I moan louder than my dog, I can tell you that.
When I finally stop rolling and gasping, I notice a lacy shower curtain hanging not far from my nose and soft pink wallpaper with little roses. It is not the sort of bathroom I would pick for someone like Swanson, but my papa told me folks are complicated and have many sides to them, so don’t think you are so smart until you walk in their shoes for a while.
My dog barks as I stand dizzily and open the bathroom door. It leads into a kitchen with a stuffed sofa, an old black stove, and a metal pail catching water dripping from the ceiling.
Philippe and Cynthia whisper in my head, Don’t you remember she shoots squirrels? I push them and everything else away—including my mum, who is yelling, Good God, Rosalita, you’ll never amount to anything if you keep this up—because I’m in a movie now, hurrying toward the one I love.
The yapping is coming from a room at the front of the house and with each step my toes warn me that the barking doesn’t sound quite right.
Stop being such a worrywart, I snap, rushing breathlessly toward the door and flinging it open, just like they do in the movies.
The ears don’t perk up right.
That’s the first thing.
He doesn’t have that grin that only I can see.
That’s the second thing.
He has a white mask painted across his face from a long life, and his eyes don’t open.
Those are the third and fourth things.
No one could ever mistake this honey-colored dog for my scruffy Gloaty Gus.
The dog jumps and wails at the ceiling. My heart pounds frantically. Already my toes are screaming, We warned you, and my heart is whispering that if the true-blue friend of my soul was here, he would already be in my arms.
The blood roars in my ears. I have been wrong about everything.
—
The dog (that is not my dog) backs into the corner and raises the fur along his spine and howls. Blind, he sniffs at me, rushes forward and then backs up, over and over, like a bad movie that doesn’t end.
My legs get that shaky feeling you get when you swim too long at the beach. I take a few steps back, my heart hammering. The dog yaps and then edges closer, one paw at a time, sniffing at my shins, trying to figure out who I am, growling more fiercely the closer he gets, and finally lunging at me.
I sprint for the front door.
I’ve never broken into a house before and I’ve done it for a dog that isn’t mine.
Worse things have happened to me, but right now I can’t think what.
I freeze.
Swanson stops short. She is already halfway up the porch steps when I fly out the front door and I never even heard her jeep over all the howling.
Wet and trembling, frail, her hunting hat pulled low, her gray eyes large and stunned, she looks like a rabbit about to spring.
The dog (that is not my dog) yelps. The crows in the sopping pine shriek and shoot for the sky. I shiver under my wet clothes, my elbow burns, my heart races, my mouth is very dry. I back into the door. I take many deep breaths to get myself in line. It is the longest few minutes of my life.
The dog (that is not my dog) dashes around me to lean against Swanson and howls. Swanson makes that odd chicken-clucking noise and snaps her fingers and the dog sits and buries his muzzle in her knee. Her thin wrist trembles as she scratches the dog’s ears and I realize I’ve frightened her terribly, which makes me feel even worse about everything.
I hear my papa in my head: She doesn’t have anything and never did.
My chest tightens from the panic climbing inside me, and my voice is thin when I finally find it. “I came for my dog,” I whisper, cradling my elbow, trying to edge around her. “My mum gave him away when my papa went into the hospital and I thought you had him. I saw him here, or at least I thought I heard him. I’ve been looking for him for a very long time.” My voice catches.
Swanson darts around me and steps into the house. Her dog scurries behind her. She slams the door.
A wave of grief rises inside me. My toes clench and I grab the porch column because the earth tilts and I am unsteady on my feet. All this way, and it’s not even my Gloaty Gus. Harry is going to wring my neck.
—
I have just stepped into the rain when Swanson opens the door again. She has taken off her hat and her wet coat and put on a big bulky red sweater (way too hot for summer, but grown-ups are funny in some ways). The honey-colored dog is wedged close to her, panting.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I whisper. “I just miss my dog so much.” My voice knots and I brace myself for her to tell me she’s alrea
dy called the police. With my bike crumpled in the bushes and my twisted throbbing elbow, I will have a hard time making it home without help.
Instead, she stares at me so long I feel her searching the very bottom of my heart.
Then she makes that odd chicken-clucking noise and motions me inside.
The rain beats a steady thrum while we watch each other. The dog presses his muzzle deeper into Swanson’s leg. The house holds its breath.
No one knows where I am.
My papa loved reading Little Red Riding Hood (“How could anyone be so stupid to go in that cottage?”) and Hansel and Gretel (“Those idiotic children!”), and from the time I could toddle along behind him, he warned me not to talk to strangers. Yet here I am, considering following Swanson into her house because it is pouring outside, my bike is crumpled on the side of the road, the skin is hanging off my elbow, my dog isn’t here, and I need to call Harry.
Coyotes snarl in my head. Truly I am the biggest idiot in the universe.
Think, think, think, use your head, maybe you’ll amount to something.
God’s bones. I sound like my mum.
Finally, when each option looks bleaker than the last, I make a decision. I ask if I can use the phone.
Swanson stomps her rain boots a few times on the braided rug by the door and heads inside. Soaked and shivering, I tell myself that things can hardly get worse than they already are.
The holes in my sneakers sift thin trails of sand onto the rough floors as I follow Swanson and her dog into the kitchen, where everything smells like cinnamon.
The honey-colored dog pads past the table slowly, carefully, brushing against a chair, navigating with eyes closed until he finds a rug near the back door, sits, sniffs at me, and whines softly.
Swanson scratches her dog between the ears, fussing with that clucking noise. I figure out her dog is a she. I was wrong about even that.
“I just thought my dog was here,” I whisper, feeling any hope I ever had of finding my Gloaty Gus slide to the floor.
Swanson is so much smaller when you are up close, not much taller than me.
Her bone face is thin and creased, and when she pulls off her hunting hat, you see her hair is chopped in a floppy boy’s cut, like Philippe’s.
The dog (that is not my dog) pads over to her and whines and Swanson makes that clucking noise and softly strokes the dog’s face, then the dog circles and slowly lies down, dropping her muzzle to the floor. When Swanson pulls a can of cocoa from the cupboard and holds it up, I consider only for a second, then nod. Harry doesn’t believe in cocoa.
There’s a sign hanging above her stove—yellowed and crimped from heat—that reads COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS.
This seems an odd bit of wisdom for someone like Swanson, who lives all alone without any friends (that I know of) or family (that I know of) and doesn’t talk. How many blessings can she have?
My papa told me one day at the donut shop, “Just because she doesn’t talk doesn’t mean she’s stupid, so don’t harden your heart like some people in this town.”
I think about this as she hands me a quilt to wrap myself in and sets a steaming mug on the table beside me. She reaches for my elbow, but I pull it away and hold it under the quilt, close to my chest. The dog whines.
No one knows where I am.
The cocoa is very thick with chocolate. I begin planning how I’m going to gloss over what I’ve done when I talk to Harry.
Next Swanson puts on a pair of thick reading glasses, pulls an onion from her pantry, chops it, and fries it in butter. Surely she will tell Harry everything. I wince as much from the pain in my elbow as from what Harry is going to do to me.
She pulls a frayed tea towel from a drawer, lays it on the table, and pours the warm buttery onions on top. She wraps it up and reaches for my arm.
I pull back quickly. Are you crazy?
She shakes her head, reaches again for my elbow.
No one knows where I am.
I jump up.
She makes that soft clucking noise and waits for me to make up my mind. The rain pelts at the window in cold hard little pecks.
“I need your phone.”
Swanson points past the bathroom and down the hall. Inside a room smaller than even mine, there’s a single wooden bed covered with another quilt, a nightstand topped with so many books there is hardly room enough for a lamp (my papa’s nightstand used to look like this), a dresser with a mirror on top, and a braided rug on the floor. The phone sits on a small table under the window.
I wonder why someone who doesn’t speak has a phone, but there is an answering machine, and when I lift the receiver, there’s a dial tone.
I pause. Harry’s going to wring my neck. I wait, listening as my breath follows a path to my toes. I picture my grandpa and what he’s going to do and I make another decision. I hang up.
I will find another way.
I lift the corner of the tea towel and consider the onions.
The World Book of Unbelievable and Spectacular Things has a whole chapter on healing herbs and it mentions the ancient power of onions. If I can get healed quickly enough, maybe I won’t need Harry.
When I let Swanson touch my elbow, she feels around the bones of my arm the way you would check the leg of a horse. Her fingers are callused like my grandpa’s. She wraps the onions around my elbow and I am reminded of the sharp peppery smell of hash browns sizzling on a grill.
Swanson’s dog gets up carefully and navigates to the window, where the rain is once again pounding against the glass. She whimpers and then pilots herself back across the rug to where we are sitting. Swanson watches her dog anxiously and her heavy glasses are too big for her face and she has to keep sliding them up. Her dog brushes against her over and over, then makes her way back to the window, whining. I wonder what’s wrong.
I sip my cocoa and think about what it’s like to be a blind dog. How do you do any of the things dogs like to do? How do you chase squirrels (or cats), dig bones, jump up on the bed to snuggle with the one you love?
My thoughts are interrupted as the dog jumps at the back door and bays like a wolf moaning at the moon. Swanson pushes her cocoa mug away and makes that odd clucking noise, but this time the dog doesn’t listen. It howls. Finally, Swanson goes over to an old hutch on the other side of the room, opens the top drawer, and pulls out a collar and a red leash (the one with gold stars all over).
My heart explodes.
“Where’s my dog?” My heart bellows like an old cow and I jump up, not caring about the onions or how they are spilling all over the floor.
Instead of answering, Swanson points to the milk bottles lined up by the back door.
She shakes her head, points to the leash and collar in her hand, then back to the milk bottles.
Her dog whines. I look from the door to the dog to Swanson. My heart is seriously wondering what we are doing still standing here.
Swanson points to the milk bottles again and my toes start their warning thing but I press them hard into the floor until they whimper. The dog noses the milk bottles so they clink against each other. Swanson waits for me to understand what she is trying to tell me.
When I look at her, my brows raised, she pulls a tattered notebook out of a drawer and in wavy birdlike handwriting spells out:
Milk truck
It takes several moments for the words to reach my heart. I feel like I did when my papa brought me to the ocean and I got tossed under the waves, one after the other, and salt water pushed up my nose and choked down my throat and I tumbled over and over and nothing made sense in the churning, crashing, upside-down, somersaulting world below the sea.
Now I fall into my chair, dazed, turning blue, because I can’t get enough air.
All of a sudden I know the terrible thing that’s happened to my dog.
“Never knew a bigger pain in the neck in my life,” the milkman told me. “That dog is going to get me killed.”
My Gloaty Gus had a thing about the mil
kman from the first day he saw the white uniform with the name TONY embroidered on the chest, and I’d have to hold on to my very bad dog until the truck drove off, but then a team of horses couldn’t stop Augustus from breaking free and biting at the tires like they were cats.
The milkman used to take bets on how long it would be before Augustus got himself run over, and my papa told him there’s something wrong in your head if you can even joke like that in front of a kid.
“Who says I’m joking?”
“Get out!” my papa yelled from behind the counter, and after that we got our milk from Shop Value.
—
I have that dizzy feeling I get when I am too high on the fire escape. The letters swim on the page of Swanson’s notebook and I slump on the table because my insides can’t hold me up anymore.
The old dog whines and hobbles over to me, sniffing at my knees. Swanson frets over my elbow and I let her unroll and reroll the towel with the onions. I have no strength and couldn’t push her away if I tried.
She clucks that odd noise as she tucks my arm back against my side. I try to make the pictures in my head stop—my Augustus chasing the milk truck, biting the wheels, the terrible surprise and crushing power of the rubber tires.
I hold the leash against my face with my good arm. It still smells of warm clumpy dog fur.
My heart beats a soft mourning song.
After all this time,
I’ve really lost him?
Swanson pulls her coat from a peg on the wall, takes her hunting hat off the shelf, and slides it onto her head. She holds a spare coat out for me, but I sit where I am.
My heart careens inside my chest, dashing against one rib and then another, unsure how to beat properly or even where it belongs.
After all this time,
Chasing Augustus Page 12