Whippoorwill (2 page)

I found his book,
My Pack,
in our school library and took it out and read it while I watched Wally.

When I first thought about freeing Wally, I told myself I could bring him to Father Jasper at the Maine Academy for Dogs and he would know what to do. You have to imagine a thing to make it begin.

After seeing Danny chuck food at Wally, I still didn't do anything. That's the truth. I could pretend I had a big, important moment of insight, but I didn't. I was afraid, for one thing. And I was lazy. At night, when he whined, I consoled myself that it wasn't my problem and there wasn't anything I could do. Even more despicable, I pretended that Wally didn't have it so bad. I pretended he would be okay, that the Stewarts sometimes came out to pet him (they didn't) and that his life, when you considered it, didn't seem all that terrible. I needed to tell myself that story. We tell ourselves a lot of stories, it seems to me.

But Wally was like water seeping into me, dripping little by little into my consciousness. It took almost to April before I acted on it.

Also, I was bored. More things happen out of boredom than most people want to admit. I had colored my hair purple earlier that afternoon, and I had spent more time than I care to confess looking at the results. Purple hair didn't really change much, I decided. I looked like a lilac or a bruised eye. I didn't look punky or cool. I looked like a dork who made a half-lame effort to look cool. I took a shower and tried to wash most of the dye out of my hair, but that only made it worse. When I stepped out of the tub, I gazed in the mirror and couldn't believe how I looked. A lot of times I can blame it all on our lousy bathroom lighting and the crummy medicine cabinet mirror, but when I wiped off the mirror with the edge of my towel, I couldn't believe the girl who looked back at me.

Uninteresting,
I thought. I wasn't ugly and I wasn't pretty. I was plain. My nose had two dents where my glasses usually rested, and my chin, bony and too prominent, stuck out like a doorknob. I had an image of someone grabbing my chin and turning it like they wanted to open it, my whole head rolling on my shoulders at the pressure. My neck looked too thin to hold up my head, and my shoulders, where they stuck out over the towel, looked like someone should attach strings and turn me into a marionette. My features didn't do anything interesting. Whenever I was in a group photograph—which I hated—I disappeared. No one's eyes went to me. I wasn't even the last girl picked for dodge ball. I wasn't even
that
interesting. I was a human backdrop, a type of necessary neutral gauze against which other people might arrange themselves. Mousy. A girl Chevy. A boring four-door.

That was my state of mind the first time I met Wally. Wally changed that, though. Wally made me someone.

I
KNOCKED ON
the Stewarts' door at sunset. I did it before I had thought it through and had time to come up with a lot of objections, and suddenly I was there, my hand moving back and forth, the sound of a television blaring from inside. Right after I knocked, I turned away and started down their crummy front walk, figuring fate had decided not to answer me. I do that kind of mind game. I had almost started to loop over into our yard when the door opened and Mr. Stewart looked out.

“What?” was all he said.

Mr. Stewart was a big, ugly man, who always stripped out of his shirt at the first bit of warmth. As soon as the temperature climbed above fifty, you could see him around town in blue jeans, a thick cowboy belt, and no shirt. He seldom shaved or got a decent haircut, which left his chin white and stubbly and his hair and side-whiskers wild and translucent. He logged for the King Mill, and I could never be around him without thinking of wood chips and splinters.

“I wondered if I could walk your dog?” I asked, turning.

“You can take the effing dog,” he said, and shut the door.

That easy.

I'm not sure what I thought it would be like, but I didn't expect to be afraid of Wally. He looked so pitiful from my bedroom window, so eager and happy to see anyone who approached, that I figured he would be a big marshmallow. And maybe he was, but when I first walked into the Stewarts' backyard and stood a few feet away from him, he looked nasty. For one thing, he hadn't been bathed in forever, and he had pooped everywhere. The poop had frozen and thawed and looked like river-bottom mud, and it made me nauseated to think about walking across it to get to Wally. The chain had worn the fur away from his neck, and the skin underneath appeared red and sore. I didn't know for sure, but I would have bet money he had been on a chain wherever he had lived before coming to the Stewarts'. He had crusties in his eyes and one of his front teeth had broken off, so that his mouth appeared slightly lopsided. Flies or fleas had gotten to his right ear, and it was mashed down where he had clawed at it, its droopy edge tucking in like a boxer's. Also, he was big. He had a huge chest and enormous paws, and because he hadn't eaten a decent meal in a long time, his ribs looked like ladders running down to his tail.

I squatted. That's what Father Jasper says to do. Lower your posture when you meet a dog. It makes you less intimidating.

“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 of 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.