Listen! (9780062213358) (13 page)

Figuring it is better to leave him alone to get used to it, Charley goes inside. Sarita is standing at the dining room window. They stand together, watching Sadie circle Coyote, begging him to play. Moments later, collar forgotten, Coyote is chasing Sadie around the yard.

D
r. Frazier, the mobile vet, doesn't have tranquilizer darts, he tells Charley when she calls, but he can send her a pill to give Coyote in a piece of liverwurst. If she gives it an hour before he's due to arrive, Coyote will get dopey enough that it will be easy to put a leash on him. “You won't even have to get him in the house. I'll do the checkup and take some blood and give him his shots right there in the yard. It should only take a few minutes. By the time he's feeling like himself again, I'll be gone and he won't even remember I was there.” Charley likes the sound of his voice, likes it that he wants to be sure Coyote isn't traumatized. “You're doing a good thing,” he tells her before he hangs up. “Difficult, but good.” Charley grins. Let him tell Mr. Heyward that!

It is early on Monday, the forty-ninth day, when Charley takes the pill to Coyote, embedded in a piece of liverwurst. The vet is due at nine, so she has been up since seven. They have already had their walk, and Coyote has eaten. “This has a pill in it that will make you sleepy,” she tells him. She doesn't want him to sense she is trying to trick him, or he might not come to get the liverwurst. She holds it out. “The vet is coming in a while to give you the shots I told you about. The pill will make it easier. He says you probably won't even remember after.”

Coyote gulps the liverwurst and backs away. For a moment Charley is afraid that he might go off into the woods before the pill works, and she won't be able to find him. But he goes to his usual place under the dogwood and lies down.

Forty minutes later he is sleeping when she takes the green nylon leash outside. She has called Mrs. Davis and asked her to keep Sadie on their side of the lake today. As she approaches him, Coyote opens his eyes and tries to get up, but his feet slide out from under him. She can see in his eyes that this frightens him. “I'm sorry,” she says as she clips the leash to his collar. “But it'll be okay. Really.” She sits on the ground next to him and stays beside him, stroking him occasionally, until the vet arrives. When the van turns into the drive, Coyote struggles to his feet and tries to run, but he can't control his legs and quickly sinks back to the ground.

Dr. Frazier, a pudgy, smiley man with a shock of unruly red hair, turns out to be as quick and efficient as he is kind. It is all over, as he promised, in a few minutes. “He's a healthy, handsome dog,” he tells her as he removes the cloth muzzle he has put on “just to be safe,” and pats Coyote on the head. “Chow and shepherd, probably—about two years old, I'd say. You can take the leash off now and let him sleep the tranquilizer off. He'll be fine in a few hours.”

At the door of his van, he turns back. “I'll give you a call when the lab work's done. Then we can talk about what else he might need.”

Coyote stays dopey and confused, wobbling when he tries to walk, till the middle of the afternoon, and Charley feels like a traitor. But she puts the rabies tag on his collar, feeling a sense of real triumph. Coyote is legal now, officially a member of the Morgan family, a connection that will be recorded by the county.

It is Day Fifty and Coyote is completely back to normal when Dr. Frazier calls. “Listen now, Charley,” he says when Sarita hands her the phone, “I don't want you to get upset.” A chill runs through her. He wouldn't warn her if the news was good. “Coyote has heartworms.” Heartworms, Charley thinks. She's heard of heartworms. They
kill
dogs! She wants to put down the phone, leave the room, stop this conversation.

“You're not to worry,” the vet says in his hearty, cheery voice. “We can treat him. It's not the pleasantest treatment in the world, and it takes a long time, but he's a survivor. He's proved that. And he's young and healthy. I'm sure he'll come through just fine. We can do the whole thing there at the house. The only problem with this dog will be keeping him quiet after the treatments.”

Keeping him quiet! “How'll we do that? He chases squirrels and deer, and he won't come in the house.”

There is a pause. Charley can feel her heart pounding. “We don't want to wait too long, but we can wait a month or so to start the treatment. You can keep working on taming him. One way or another, we'll manage.”

Charley takes a long, shaky breath. “So this treatment is all he needs?”

“Except for neutering. We won't be doing that until we're sure he's free and clear of worms—about a year from now. Remember, Charley, he's a survivor.”

Later, when Charley tells her father, he shakes his head. “I'm sorry, kiddo. That's rough. But if the vet says the dog's healthy enough to survive the treatment, you can probably take his word.”

She is afraid when she tells him how much the treatment will cost, he'll refuse. But he only sighs. “I told you there was no such thing as a free dog. We could take a week's vacation for that kind of money!”

As if Paul Morgan would ever take a vacation, Charley thinks. Sarita calls from the kitchen, “A week! That dog's given Charley the whole summer so far! Seems worth it to me!” It is the first time Sarita has ever offered an opinion on anything.

“All right, all right. I never said he wasn't worth it!” Her father reaches over to pat Charley's arm. “Don't worry. If this dog wasn't a survivor, he wouldn't have made it this long.”

Charley wakes up the next day with the image of Tree in her mind.
Survivor
, she thinks. What she wants to do today is visit Tree. She doesn't know how to find him from the trail, but he's easy enough to see from the water.

Instead of putting on her hiking clothes, she dresses in shorts and sandals and tells Sarita she is going out in the canoe. Then she clips on her waist pack with biscuits and liver pieces in it, and goes outside to call Coyote, who is lying at the end of the driveway. He comes down the drive all smiles and wags and prance, his collar and tag jingling, and stops just far enough away that she can't touch him. “We're having a boat walk today,” Charley says. At the word
walk
he starts frisking and bouncing, giving little yelp-barks as he heads back up toward the road. “No!” she calls. “
Boat
walk. Come this way!”

She walks around the house and down the gravel path toward the dock. Coyote follows, his tail only half-wagging, keeping his distance. This is not the pattern he's used to. “It's still a walk,” she tells him. “Except that I'm going in the boat, and you're going on land.” She isn't sure this will work, but it's worth a try.

Her mother's green canoe, the name
Dragonfly
painted on its bow, is upside-down on the bank, where it has lain untouched for two years. Remembering Mrs. Sutcliff's story about finding a snake under her canoe, Charley flips the boat gingerly, leaping back as it goes over. There is no snake under it, and nothing in it but spiders. From the dock box she gets a paddle and two swim noodles to take along as emergency flotation devices. Coyote is sitting at the top of the path to the dock, watching her warily.

Holding the bowline, Charley pushes the canoe down the slope of the hill into the lake, pulls it close, and steps in. Her leg gives a twinge as she pushes off, but the pain is so brief, it is easy to ignore. “Come on!” she calls to Coyote when she is settled. She paddles out into the water. “Follow me. Boat walk!” She angles to the right and heads around the bend to the shallow end of the lake. Coyote watches a while and then trots down to the edge of the lake and begins to follow, weaving through the trees and bushes along the shore.

When he reaches Mr. Garrison's yard, Coyote goes up for a visit with Jasmine and Bernie in their pen, all three of them running back and forth along the fence and barking. Then he runs back to see where Charley is, and follows her on past the last lot that has only a storage shed and a ramshackle dock.

Tree is directly across from this dock, but instead of paddling straight across the lake, Charley follows the shore so that Coyote can stay with her. He comes to the lake edge every so often to see where she is, but most of the time he is off on his own in the woods, just like on any other walk. At this end of the lake, it's easy to see where the original creek wound down into the gully that has become Eagle Lake. The water here is so shallow that Charley can see schools of minnows rushing back and forth over the bottom. Whirligig beetles circle and whirl on the surface of the water. The smell of rotted leaves and bottom muck rises with every sweep of the paddle. Low bushes grow out into the marshy shallows on either side of the original creek bed.

Here Coyote cuts across from one side to the other, splashing through the water, weaving in and out among the bushes and then swimming the narrow stretch of deep water. It's the first time Charley has seen him swim willingly, and she suspects he didn't expect to step suddenly off into water too deep to touch bottom. On the other side, he shakes himself and runs up the hill under the trees, his legs caked with black bottom mud.

When Charley reaches Tree, Coyote is nowhere to be seen. She stops the canoe where her mother must have stopped to take the picture for the book jacket and lets the canoe drift. There is a light breeze stirring up the water so that the reflection of Tree's leaves, green now instead of red, is not like in the photograph. The breeze keeps the canoe moving and Charley wonders how, even on a day with no wind, her mother managed to hold the canoe still enough to take the picture.

She paddles toward Tree, and the canoe hangs up on a limb that has fallen into the water. It takes her a while to figure out how to maneuver around it. There is a tall, arch-shaped hole in the trunk where Tree stands in the water and she leans to take hold of the edge of the hole to pull the canoe in close. Poison ivy grows up one side of the trunk, and spiders have spun thick webs inside the hole. She can see layers of rotting wood and dark, still water inside, but all around the hole is the solid, living trunk, far too big for Charley to get her arms around.

When Charley was about eight years old, she remembers, her mother had her hold a dead stick in one hand and a long twig of a living tree in the other. “Feel the difference?” she asked. “Feel the life?”

Charley wasn't sure she felt it then, but she can feel it now, her hand on Tree's rough bark.
Hi!
Her mother talked to Tree, but she only thinks the greeting. She sits for a moment, aware of the sensation of life under her hand, the slight movement of the canoe, the breeze on her skin. And then it is as if Tree has answered. There are no words. It is more as if something old and completely friendly has welcomed her. Ants are running up and down the ridges in the bark. Charley wonders how many living things make their home in Tree. She wonders whether Tree likes having them there.

Almost immediately she realizes it is not about liking or not liking.
It's how it is
. That is her own thought, of course. But still, it feels like an answer.

From up the hill and farther around the lake, Coyote begins to bark—the high, light bark that means he's treed a squirrel and is hoping he can bark it back down. She wishes she could take some bit of this tree's spirit, whatever it is that keeps it alive in spite of the water, in spite of the hole and the spiders and the ants. Tree has what Coyote needs.

So does Coyote
.

“I'll be back sometime,” she says, aloud this time.

I'll be here
.

I
t is nine-thirty in the evening, the first of August, and a light rain is falling. Brief, blustery storms have alternated with this steady rain most of the long, boring day. Thunder rumbles occasionally in the distance. Sarita has gone to her room, Charley's father is watching a car chase movie on television, and Charley is stretched out in the recliner chair, her eyes closed, ignoring the movie and letting her mind drift. Coyote spent most of the day behind the boxwood hedge at the front of the house, lying against the bricks under the roof overhang out of the rain. It is the closest he has ever come to the house, and Charley considers it a huge step forward. He isn't there now, hasn't been since it got dark, but still, he purposely took shelter against the house.

She quiets her mind and lets images come to her of Coyote in the woods across the road. She can hear rain on the leaves overhead, smell the damp ground. She senses more than sees Coyote in the darkness, feeling the nest he has dug himself in the leaves beneath a shrub that leans over a tree stump. His back is against the stump, his nose under his tail. His fur is damp, but the dampness doesn't reach all the way down to his skin. He has not eaten, she knows, since breakfast this morning.

Charley opens her eyes and sits up. Coyote ought to have a bedtime snack, something more than a few pieces of liver in the afternoon to carry him through the night. Sarita has bought a box of big biscuits—for large dogs. One of those would be good. “I'm going out,” she tells her father as she pushes herself out of the chair. “I'll be back in a few minutes.”

“Where are you going? It's nearly ten o'clock!”