Whippoorwill Read online

  “Hiya, boy,” I said softly.

  Even that little kindness was too much for him. He jumped up against his chain and tried to come to me. His front paws waved in front of him until the chain cut off his air, and he went back down onto his four feet, then jumped again, his chokes loud and insistent and the measure of his desire.

  Father Jasper says dogs are all about status and posture. Everything is hierarchy and dominance. They pee on trees to mark them and that sets a bar. The next dog tries to cover it and to pee higher on the tree. It’s the way dogs are. You have to understand that behavior if you hope to understand dogs.

  “Are you lonely?” I whispered. “You going to take it easy if I come over there?”

  He put his front paws down, danced, then went back to choking himself.

  “Easy,” I said, standing.

  I didn’t look down at the dog poop as I walked over to see him. His chain, I noticed, had swept a perfect circle in the mud and dead snow around his pole. The inside of his dog box had leaked and ice covered the bottom. He had lived on ice since he arrived.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I felt close to tears. “I’m so sorry.”

  I put my hand out carefully. Wally licked my fingers. He licked them like a crazy thing. I let him do what he wanted. At least, I figured, he wasn’t biting or growling. As I stood next to him, though, I wondered about letting him off his leash. His head came up to my waist; standing, he could put his paws on my shoulders. He looked ratty and undependable and more than a little nuts.

  “I should have brought you some food,” I said, slowly moving my hand to pet him a little.

  Wally raked at my hand with his paw. He did it softly, almost as if he couldn’t believe someone had decided to pay attention to him. It reminded me of the game I played with my mom when I was a kid. One of you puts your hand down, then the other slaps on top of it, then you slide your hand out and go on top of that, and so on.

  That’s what Wally did to me whenever I moved. He was so afraid I would take my hand away that he tried to keep it there.

  “I don’t know if even Father Jasper could straighten you out,” I whispered to him.

  The sound of my voice got him wiggling and crazy. He backed away and rose up against the chain and choked himself hard. Underneath his collar, his neck had red sores and scabs and fresh blood.

  “If I let you off your pole, will you behave?” I asked.

  Then he did something that killed me. At the sound of my voice he sat down and cocked his head to one side, and I saw the puppy in him. I don’t mean to say he was a puppy, because he wasn’t. He was old and gnarly and spazzy, but he had been a puppy once and I saw it in him. I saw what he could have been, maybe, if he had had a different life. I saw that he had once wanted to play, and to be friends with humans, and that he had suffered and taken it and he had slept on ice. Despite all that, he still hoped for kindness, and I couldn’t help it anymore. I started to cry and I moved closer and I put my arms around his neck.

  He let me. He stayed still. I asked him to forgive me for not getting him earlier, for not bringing some kindness to him. I told him the whole thing: that I had ignored him, that I had lied to myself about his condition, that I had been lazy and selfish and as cruel as the Stewarts when you came right down to it. I told him he should never forgive me, but that I would try to do better now and that he had one friend in the world. I told him people could be good, too, and that Father Jasper would help me teach him how to behave like a dog should. I told him to keep his heart open.

  Even as I said it, though, I felt my laziness, my inertia, try to creep in and undermine it. I wondered if I would really follow through. It was horrid to think about, because I knew it was true. Even as I swore it, I unswore it.

  I pulled a leash out of my pocket. It wasn’t a real leash, just a length of hemp rope with a carabiner tied to one end. I showed it to Wally.

  “You ever been on a leash?” I asked him.

  I knew what Father Jasper recommends: A dog should walk on the left and it should understand that being on the leash is not a time to play. If Wally knew anything about being on a leash, he didn’t show me. He jumped up and put his nose against the carabiner and tried to smell it. I squatted just out of reach.

  “I’m going to put you on here, but you have to promise to be calm,” I said. “You hear me?”

  Wally jumped up and choked himself some more.

  Everything I did was stupid. I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. Father Jasper would have told me to use a prong collar. On a big dog like Wally, a prong collar was the only way to slow him down. When a dog acts crazy and strains against the lead, a prong collar makes him uncomfortable by pinching and lets you get his attention. That may sound cruel, and it is a little, but it’s one of the only ways to get through to a really nutty dog. The thing is, a dog that’s never been socialized doesn’t pay attention. It has no idea who you are or what you want from it. It’s just dog, and you are other, and the collar and leash and the squawking human saying commands has no more meaning than the chirping birds or rain clouds.

  Father Jasper says a trained dog is a free dog.

  What people think of as a free dog—a dog without manners or socialization—usually ends up in a shelter or dead from a car knocking its guts out. Untrained dogs are just waiting to do something to get themselves killed or locked up. A trained dog is free because he has enough sense to come back when he’s called, to stop when he’s asked to stop, to stay when he’s asked to stay. A trained dog can walk in the woods off leash and have a grand time, while an untrained dog has to yank and struggle against a leash until no one can stand it anymore.

  I clipped on the rope and unhooked him from his pole chain.

  I hate thinking about what happened next. He surprised me. In the instant he heard that chain drop away, he turned toward me, not away as I expected, and he tried to climb me. He shinnied right up my body, springing off his back legs, and I fell backwards and spun and rammed my spine into his pole. The pain killed. It hurt so bad, I couldn’t even focus on it, and before I had a chance to sort anything out, Wally took off. He took off. He went from zero to a hundred in the length of the rope I had, and if I hadn’t wrapped the end of the lead around my wrist, he would have been gone that second. Instead, the rope snapped taut and my shoulder nearly came out of its socket. The force of the snap made me jerk against the pole again, pinning my arm in such a way that Wally couldn’t move except by breaking my arm. He jumped back again, delighted to have me on the ground at his level, and while he tried to lick my face, I crawled away from the slack and got my arm away from the pole, and then he really took off.

  I slid through dog poo. I slid through mud and old food and more kinds of crud than I thought existed. At that point I didn’t care what happened to Wally. I wanted my wrist free of the rope. I clanged off one of the Farmall tractors, and the momentary slack helped me get back onto my knees. Wally shot off in a different direction, running at right angles to the tractor, and I screamed at him. I cursed him a blue streak. I couldn’t stand up, because each time I tried to get my weight under me, he yanked again, finding something new and ridiculous to sniff, and I attempted to get my legs out in front of me. That way, I figured, I might be able to pop up onto my feet if I had a chance to slide feet first, but thinking and doing were two different things. Wally dragged me again, this time toward the front of the house and the street, and I half hoped someone would look out of the Stewarts’ house, even Danny, and run out to rescue me.

  “Stop it, Wally,” I said half a dozen times. I let my voice get loud so someone inside might hear me.

  I remembered the blaring television, though, and I scrambled after Wally, trying to prevent him from jerking my arm out of its socket, trying not to slide into anything else. I finally wedged my knee against the base of a baby beech tree and I used the leverage to haul back on him.

  I wanted to kill him right then.

  That’s not merely a figure o
f speech. I wanted to kill that dog. If someone had handed me a gun, I would have shot him and walked away without a second thought.

  Even as I yanked at him, he managed to get his nose onto something new. He strained against me and I strained against him, and it wasn’t the last tug of war we would have, but it was the fiercest. And then with his right paw he dug at something just out of reach of his muzzle and he pulled it back to him. I thought at first he had killed a rabbit or a mouse, because something squeaked horribly, and I couldn’t believe he had managed to execute something so efficiently. He turned around to show me, and I used the moment to yank him closer and I almost didn’t see the gentle look blossom in his eyes. He had found a copy of the Daily Growler, the rubberized squeak-toy newspaper people give to dogs, and I knew he had spent weeks, maybe three or four, waiting for the moment to get to the Growler. It had waited like some tender moment of play suspended for days in ice and wind and rain, alive only in his memory and forgotten by every other creature in the world except Wally.

  Four

  “DON’T YOU LOOK ravishing this evening?” Jebby said.

  He had a Budweiser open in front of him, and he sat at the kitchen table beside my dad. Jebby did his rhino smile, smirky and dumb and grassy.

  “What happened?” my dad said, looking up from a motorcycle part. He had been heating it with a little flame from a welding wand, and he held the flame away from him while he examined me.

  “I tried to take Wally for a walk.”

  “The dog?” my dad asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “That dog’s crazy,” my dad said. “You’re lucky he didn’t attack you.”

  “By the look of her, maybe he did,” Jebby said. “You smell something horrible.”

  “His yard is disgusting,” I said. “There’s poo everywhere.”

  “You okay?” my dad asked, and clicked off the burner. “Honey, what’s going on here?”

  I couldn’t say. I felt like crying, but I didn’t want to give Jebby the satisfaction. He used any sign of weakness by a girl as a tool against women all over the world. Mom had always called him a pig, but not a full-grown one. Piglet, she’d said. Meanwhile, my back felt as though it had a long scrape down near my belt line, and my shoulder clicked whenever I moved it. I knew I smelled bad. I wanted a shower, but I was afraid to touch anything on my way upstairs. I stood by the back door like a little kid in a snowsuit, hands out at my sides, paralyzed.

  “Did the dog bite you, Clair?” Dad asked.

  “No, it just got excited and wanted to play.”

  “That dog has some Dane in it too. Great Dane,” Jebby said, turning his beer up to his rhino lips. “He’s a horse.”

  “It’s a decent dog,” I said.

  “Elwood Stewart is not a man to trifle with,” Jebby said, referring to Wally’s owner. “I remember one time down at the Homegrown Lounge he beat up two men in a bar fight. I mean, he was some fierce . . . There was another time—”

  “You need help?” my dad asked, cutting him off because Jebby liked to talk about the past more than the present, and he would go on and on and my dad knew it.

  I shook my head and went upstairs. My eyes got full once I went away from Jebby. In the bathroom I slowly peeled off my clothes in the tub. When I was down to my panties and bra, I stepped back out and filled the tub with water so it would take some of the filth off the clothes. I let the water slosh around on them for a long time. The steam from the hot water felt good on my face and pretty soon the bathroom warmed up. I felt drowsy and strange, almost as if I had come back from a long hike miles and miles away from my house. I couldn’t let myself think too much about Wally. He had freaked me out. He was like a statue that had come to life and suddenly turned crazy alive. I never got to handle him or to know the first thing about him because he had gone so spazzy. I didn’t really want to see him again.

  Finally I took my clothes out and put them in a laundry basket by the hamper, and then I wedged the whole mess angled into the sink so it wouldn’t drip all over the floor. I stripped down and stepped into the shower. I felt sorry for myself. I felt annoyed that my act of kindness had gone unrewarded and even unnoticed. I knew I was being small-minded, but I couldn’t help it. That dog was genuinely ridiculous.

  I showered a long time. I let the water run all over me. Nothing could have felt better.

  Dad was in the hallway when I came out in a towel.

  “You okay?” he asked. “I told Jebby to take off.”

  “You didn’t have to do that. I’m okay.”

  “What do you say we go out for pizza, maybe? Just you and me. A little dad and daughter date?”

  “You don’t have to do all that. I’m fine.”

  “When’s the last time we went to Ronnie’s? Come on, I need to take the bike for a little spin anyway. Wake it up for the spring. It will give me an excuse.”

  “Do we have to go on the bike?”

  “Sure we do. You’re a Harley chick, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not a Harley chick, Dad.”

  “Come on. Humor me. I feel like I hardly see you.”

  “I’m here all the time.”

  He raised his eyebrows to ask again. I shrugged. I guess we agreed to go.

  “Dress warm,” he said. “It’s still mud season.”

  “Then why don’t we take the truck?” I asked as I closed the door to my room.

  “Brrrruuuummmmm,” he called back, making a motorcycle sound with his lips. Then he shifted into second. “Brummmmppppp, brummmmmmmmp.”

  Father Jasper says good and bad is a human construction placed on a dog’s behavior. For instance, if you put a steak near the edge of a table and the dog slides it off and eats it in about three bites, that is good, or smart, behavior from the dog’s point of view. It’s natural behavior, actually. If we come in and say, Bad dog, bad dog, the words are meaningless to the dog, although he will decipher the tone of voice you use. A dog still thinks what he did was pretty smart, but he gradually learns that the alpha dog—you—doesn’t permit that kind of thievery. So, if you’re lucky, the dog will stop stealing meat off the table. Good and bad, though, have little to do with it. Dogs act on positive or negative reaction, that’s all. Morality has nothing to do with it. There are a lot of humans like that, actually.

  My dad drove easy on the way to Ronnie’s. A couple times he slowed way down and looked forward, near the front wheel, and he bent and tried to figure out the meaning of a sound. It made me nervous when he leaned forward, because I had to lean with him, my butt perched on the back, my arms on my dad’s shoulders. He didn’t like what he was hearing, I could tell. It was a splatting sound inside the regular chunk of the Harley engine, and my dad had been fighting it for years. The sound was his White Whale, and wherever he went he asked different guys if they had a clue. He checked online, called Harley dealers all over the country, but he couldn’t solve it. The sound didn’t really do anything to the engine except make it a little less perfect than my dad would have liked, but it was the fleck of dust on an otherwise clear pair of sunglasses.

  It was too bad he couldn’t let the sound go, because the ride, I had to admit, was spectacular. We took Puddle Road, a backcountry route with fresh tar and a brilliant yellow line, and the bike held on like it was happy to be running. The stars had just started coming out and you could smell snow back up under the pines but the air tried to be warm and it stirred you up. Halfway to Ronnie’s we stopped at the Pumpkin Span, a dinky bridge that went over two swampy areas, and the peepers called like mad. As soon as Dad turned off the bike, the clouds peeled back to let the moon filter down and it hit the water and you knew winter had passed again for another year and all the good, warm weather lay ahead. It was like the first day of vacation, and I crossed my arms across my chest and listened to the peepers and looked up at the half-moon.

  “Some night,” my dad said.

  He had bent down to look at the front wheel but then had clicked his t
ongue against his teeth and stood.

  “I’m glad we brought the bike,” I said.

  “Be cold on the way back.”

  “It will be worth it.”

  “Do you want a dog, Clair?” my dad asked, the confusion in his voice plain to hear.

  “No, Dad, that’s not it.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I don’t like that dog being left abandoned over there day in and day out.”

  “I know what you’re saying. It’s tricky, though, with neighbors. We have to live beside them.”

  “I know.”

  “Anything else we should talk about? I know I’m not always tuned in like I should be.”

  “No, Dad, everything’s fine.”

  “You’ve never done anything like that before. Go over, I mean.”

  I didn’t answer right away. I had to think about what I wanted to say, and even after I came up with it, I wasn’t sure I should say it aloud.

  “He was invisible,” I said. “No one should be invisible.”

  What I meant to say was I felt invisible sometimes. That was the truth, but I couldn’t put it into words right at that moment.

  “Maybe I could talk to Elwood,” Dad said after he weighed what I’d said.

  “Don’t do anything. After today, I don’t even know if I want to walk him anymore. He’s seriously strong and seriously nuts.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You getting hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “One thing, though, okay? Don’t you ever tell me you’re not a Harley chick. You’re my Harley chick.”

  He put his arm around me and squeezed. A blue heron neither one of us had seen suddenly spread its wings and flew halfway across the second pond. It settled down without a splash and began wading, watching for frogs.

  “Some night,” Dad said again.

  Stars. The sound of the bike and my dad leaning, leaning, the night flashing by. The taste of tomato sauce on my lips. Salt. My dad driving seriously now, cruising, taking pleasure in it. When we buzz past the Pumpkin Span, the peepers’ calling explodes like a wave of sound, then falls behind us. A Doppler effect, I remember from science class. Then on a straightaway my dad reaches back and touches my knee. I bend forward and we rocket down the smooth blade of road. White birches pass like ladder rungs, and my dad does his yell, this crazy yodeling sound he does when he has the bike just right, the road just right, the everything just right. I yodel with him, and I feel self-conscious and dorky, but it’s fun, too. It’s going like nothing, and my dad throttles down to a normal speed in little hunks, the sound of the world returning in vibrations and tingles, and we might have been in space or under the sea for all the world coming back as it does.