My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) (19 page)

At first, my classmates tittered with laughter. Such formal phrasing sounded funny delivered in Principal Stodgill’s dull, wispy voice. But then the class became quiet; those same words and phrases would have sounded so eloquent, so
right
, delivered in Mr. Cahill’s voice. But he wasn’t here. He was gone.

Whatever his letter said, everyone, thanks to Hank, knew why.

Everyone turned and looked at me, suddenly angry and sad. The most interesting teacher most of us had ever had was gone, and it was my fault.

Principal Stodgill called out our seventh-period reassignments; I was relegated to home ec, where I’d have to make fussy little tea towels. At least school was a little better
than work at Miss Bettina’s Dress Shop, where women gave me disapproving stares, or at Dot’s Corner Café, where I kept dishwashing. At home, Will wouldn’t speak to me because of what I’d done to his diorama, but Monday afternoon, he came home from school with a black eye, explained when Mrs. Baker came to our house to complain that he had fought with her little Howard when Howard had called me a hussy. Daddy simply listened, nodded quietly, and shut the door (with Mrs. Baker still talking). I was so relieved that I nearly cried when Daddy didn’t whip Will but simply sent him to his room without supper. The next morning, when a box of Playtex rubber dishwashing gloves appeared at my place at the kitchen table—a gift from Daddy—I cried after all.

And then attention turned away from me. On Wednesday, the locals of United Paperworkers International Union at Groverton Pulp & Paper joined together to strike for better safety measures.

I found guilty relief in my sudden obscurity, even though I, too, was caught up in the tension the strike had suddenly spread over the town, as thick as the sulfur stink that spewed from the smokestacks. I’d never seen Groverton so divided, its social niceties cracked open, the underpinnings of fear and resentment laid bare.

Still, my personal drama hadn’t ended. Where I had been annoyed that Will called me into his room night after night, I now missed that. I missed talking with him and fussing over him.

I missed Jimmy. I missed talking and laughing with him. I missed his touch.

And I missed Mr. Cahill. I missed art class and cleaning
his messy kitchen and his lectures about my potential. I also yearned for what I knew I had missed out on, his guidance about my designing.

On Thursday afternoon, Miss Bettina looked at me sadly as I was leaving to go to Grandma’s diner and said if I ever needed to talk, she’d be glad to listen.

I nodded silently. I had said so little all week that I thought perhaps I’d go mute, like Trusty. I finally understood how the spirit could have been beaten out of the big dog to the point that he no longer bothered to make a sound.

Late Friday night, after getting home from the café, I slipped down to the basement, unable to resist the solace of working on my homecoming dress. In the basement, I turned on the bare bulb light. I opened one of the suitcases, which now just held the dress I was working on. I remembered that when I first counted them, years ago, there had been thirty-eight pieces.

Thirty-eight—it struck me for the first time that Mama would now be thirty-eight years old if she’d lived. She’d been so young, compared with Daddy, when they married….

That thought made me stop, go still, and in the complete silence, I thought I heard something behind me.

I pulled my scissors from the suitcase where I stored my sewing supplies, my hand closing around the handle like I was holding the hilt of a knife, and I tried to go still again, even holding my breath.

In that complete silence, I realized that I didn’t
hear
anything, but somehow I
felt
sound, like a low vibration, and my skin went cold, the hairs on my arms lifting, my scalp tingling, my throat tightening. Then I had to breathe again,
and with my next sharp inhale I smelled something fecal and foul. I held the scissors tight and high, like a dagger, my hand shaking, and turned slowly, preparing to face a hidden attacker. That week Daddy had filled the void of Mr. Cahill’s riles-town-but-sells-newspapers letters to the editor with crisply worded letters of his own, but his were in support of the union’s demands for better safety, even citing safety concerns from his management days and his regret over not taking Mr. Frederick McDonnell’s complaints more seriously. We’d received nastily threatening anonymous letters, and a man from Tangy Town—one of the perpetually unemployed who, Daddy said, management sometimes quietly hired as threatening thugs—even came into Ace Hardware and punched Daddy, cutting his face and bruising his eye. I couldn’t find a way to say it to Daddy directly, but for the first time I could recall, I was proud of him.

So I had reason to fear the possibility of some madman in our basement.

Instead, I faced a mad dog.

The no-name dog from Stedman’s Scrapyard.

Trusty.

The dog looked even mangier than before, with gashes in his paws and scrappy fur, his ribs prominently sticking out. He snapped and snarled mutely.

Strings of drool hung from his jaws. The dog’s coat looked like a matted old fur rug thrown over a rack of shaky bones, but his teeth and jaws still glinted and snapped with enough strength to rip into me. I put down the scissors. They’d be no defense against those teeth. But I wasn’t sure
what to do—grab the old dress form in the corner and throw it at him? Try to dash past him to the stairs?

Suddenly Trusty lunged at me, snapping and snarling, and I threw everything I could grab at him—the scissors, spools of thread, a pin cushion—which slowed him down but didn’t stop him, and I ran to the dress form, desperately using it as a shield, and then I heard Will screaming, “Trusty! Trusty!” and suddenly Will was there, throwing his body over Trusty’s, and I was no longer frightened for me, but instead terrified for Will, and I rushed to him with no real plan except to grab the dog by its loose, ratty fur and pull it away from him.

But in the few seconds it took for me to get to them, Trusty had calmed to panting. Will, who was hugging the dog, murmured, “Trusty, it’s OK, it’s OK.”

Then they both stared up at me.

“Will,” I said as calmly as I could, “get away from that dog. It’s wild and crazed and—”

“No,” he said. “Trusty would never hurt me. He’s just hurt himself, and scared. That’s why I had to bring him here.”

I studied the dog, how he pressed close against Will. I had to admit that while my safety might be in danger, Will was right. Trusty would never harm him, would only protect him.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“Mr. Stedman realized he could get away with beating Trusty after all.”

At first, this didn’t make any sense to me, but then I realized—of course. Jimmy had told Mr. Stedman to leave
the dog alone. But Jimmy and I had broken up. I…my family…my family’s interests, including this dog, were no longer under the protection of the son of the new president of Groverton Pulp & Paper, especially with Daddy writing pro-union letters.

I shook my head. I was sorry for Trusty. But I could not—would not—take that blame. Trusty’s condition was the fault of an angry, mean, small man. And I wouldn’t be making things better for us if we kept his dog.

“We can’t keep Trusty here,” I said. “Sooner or later Daddy will find out—”

“I’m not taking Trusty back to Mr. Stedman,” Will said, his voice thick, his eyes brimming with tears. “He’ll die from another beating like this one!”

I looked at the dog. I knew he couldn’t live much longer in that condition, even without another beating. “How, and when, did you get him here?”

“Just tonight.”

“You said you were going to Tony’s to watch your show and spend the night.”

Will stuck out his chin. “Yeah. That’s what I said. But I didn’t. I went and got Trusty and told him to stay down here. I figured you’d just go on to bed like you always do, and not stop by my room, after you got home.”

My heart clenched when he said the part about me not stopping by his room, and then, ridiculously, clenched further when I realized that he had missed
Sergeant Striker and the Alaskan Wild
to go rescue his own Trusty. After all we’d been through this past week,
that
realization made me tear up.

I blinked back my tears, though, as Will stared past me at the open suitcases and said, “Donna, what have you been doing?”

“Never mind that,” I snapped. “You’re in big trouble if Daddy finds out you stole Mr. Stedman’s dog. You got off lucky when Mrs. Baker came over.”

“I only punched Howard because of mean things he said about you,” Will said.

My heart cracked at the thought of my little brother, whom I’d always taken care of, having to defend me, but I gave Will a stern look. “We have time to get Trusty back over to Stedman’s. Maybe he hasn’t noticed the dog is gone—”

“No! I will run away with Trusty to Alaska, which is where he belongs!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, and started to move toward Will. Trusty immediately lunged and snarled at me. I jumped back. Clearly, I wasn’t going to be able to persuade Will to return the dog, and I wasn’t going to be able to take Trusty back myself.

I sighed. “Look, Trusty needs help or he’s going to die. I guess we could take him out to the country vet—” I stopped. How could we get that far without a car?

And then I thought of Mama’s old car, in the garage.

“I will drive us!” I said. “In Mama’s old car!”

“That’ll work?”

I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have, so I said, “Why not? Jimmy taught me to drive. The keys are probably in the glove compartment or under the floor mat.”

“Not to the country vet, though,” Will said.

“What? Why not? Where else—”

“We can’t trust anyone not to call Mr. Stedman! Except MayJune. We could take Trusty to MayJune’s!”

I started to protest, but then I thought, why not? If we could get the dog there, then he would be off our hands. Mr. Stedman wouldn’t think to look there. Our house was the first place he’d come when he realized his mute dog was missing.

“Well, come on, then,” I said.

But when Trusty tried to stand, his front right leg buckled. I looked down. His paw was a bloody mess, like it had been mangled on some piece of junk at the scrapyard. I could just imagine the poor animal trying to run away from Mr. Stedman’s blows and cutting his paw.

Anger rose within me. That awful man. I looked at Will. “Can you keep Trusty calm enough for me to bandage his paw?”

He stared down at the paw, tears finally spilling over and running down his cheek. “I felt so bad, making him walk on that paw to get here.”

I kept an eye on the dog but put my hand on Will’s shoulder. Trusty looked at me warily. “It’s OK, Will. You did the best you could.” Another surge of anger rose within me at the injustice of Trusty’s fate. “You did the right thing.”

Will stroked Trusty and said, “See? She’s not that bad. Let her help us….”

He kept murmuring like that the whole time I tended to Trusty, my heart pounding while I swallowed back gags at the dog’s awful smell. I wrapped his paw in a scrap of bright yellow cloth left over from the dress I’d remade to meet Jimmy’s parents.

By the time I was done, Trusty was panting, his eyes closed.

If we didn’t hurry, the dog was going to die in Will’s arms. Still, a tiny sliver of hope broke through. Maybe MayJune really would know how to help Trusty.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s help Trusty up the stairs.”

O
f course, I couldn’t get Mama’s car to start.

In my rush to get Trusty over to MayJune’s, I didn’t think about all the reasons why a car that had sat idle for seven years under a stupidly cheerful red barn and yellow duck tablecloth would not start. While Will gently urged Trusty through the kitchen and breezeway, I rushed out to the garage, whipped off the tablecloth, and tossed it in the backseat, then pushed up the garage door. I checked the glove compartment and found, miraculously, the car key. For the few seconds before I put the key in the ignition, I felt a giddy relief that this would all work out easily, simply.

But the car only made a clicking sound when I turned the key. Still, I turned it, over and over. Maybe, I thought desperately, the car just needed new oil. I got out of the car to see if there was a spare can in the trunk or on a shelf. Then I remembered, from all the times I’d put mousetraps under the car, that the tires were flat.

I popped the trunk anyway. If I could just get the car started, get it to Sterry Oil, surely someone like the cheery Sterry Oil man from the cover of Jimmy’s atlas—or at least
grumpy old Mr. Phibbs—would put air in the tires, put in oil and gas.

There was no oil in the trunk.

I slammed it shut, got back in the car, and tried starting it again. Click, click. Maybe, I thought, I could put the car in neutral, push it out of the garage and onto the street, and then roll most of the way to Sterry Oil.

I kept turning the key, but there was, of course, no starting the car. (Later, I’d know enough about cars to realize that the battery was dead.) Finally, I gave up, put my head on my hands on the steering wheel, fought back tears, tried to convince myself that we could make a sling out of the tablecloth, somehow get Trusty in it, and between the two of us manage to walk, with Trusty in the sling between us, over to MayJune’s house.

“Donna.”

Jimmy’s warm voice, wrapping around and through me. I thought I was dreaming.

“Donna, Will called me. I’m taking him and Trusty to MayJune’s.”

I didn’t move, suddenly angry and shamed that Will had realized I couldn’t help him after all, that he had called Jimmy, of all people.

Who else should he have called?

My anger and shame gave way to fear—how had Will phrased things on the telephone? Who might have heard him on our party line?

“Donna, you can just sit there or get up and come with us.”

“I’m not letting you take Will anywhere,” I said.

“And I’m not letting Will down just because you’re stubborn.”

He turned and walked out to our driveway. I jumped out of the car, ready to shout at him that he had no right to call me stubborn, that he hadn’t really listened or been forgiving.