Star in the Forest (8 page)

Crystal shouted, “YOU MUST BE MR. ED!”

“Indeed I am, child, indeed I am.” He coughed a few times without covering his mouth. Then he said, “What are you gals doing in my shed?”

I thought this would be a good time to run for it, because who knew if he’d start bashing us with his cane? But that would mean abandoning Star, which I just couldn’t do.

Crystal yelled, “YOU HAVE OUR DOG!”

Mr. Ed chuckled, and you could see his teeth,
which were stained all shades of yellow and brown, crooked, some missing, about one-fifth. “You gals been the ones feeding him down there in that old junkyard?”

I felt offended that he called our forest a junkyard. Especially considering what his own house looked like.

But Crystal just nodded.

“Well, then I owe you some thanks, gals.”

Crystal and I looked at each other.

“And good thing you came when you did. Say yer goodbyes. I’m just about to take him to the pound.”

“OVER OUR DEAD BODIES!” Crystal screamed, throwing her arms around Star.

“Now, calm yerself down, child.”

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM?” Crystal demanded.

He coughed a few more times and put down his cane and sat on a stump by the shed door. Then he laid the cane across his lap and told us the story of how he got Star, who he called Jim-Boy.

“This past winter, one nice, warm day, I’m fishing up the Poudre River, and I find a dirty, skinny dog on the roadside. He sits next to me real nice, and I say to myself, he’ll make a fine fishing companion. So I take him home and then he starts with this digging. Digging holes everywhere, and then the neighbors start their bellyaching. ‘Oh, he’s messing up my garden! Oh, I’m calling the dog cops!’ So I tie him up in that junkyard, thinking he’s just digging ’cause he’s bored, and come spring, when we go fishing every day, he’ll stop. Why is it that dogs are always digging? Like them squirrels. I put bird seeds out for the birds, but them squirrels gobble it right up, the rascals.”

I was wondering what birdseed and squirrels had to do with Star, when Mr. Ed looked at his cane, all muddled, and said, “Now, what was I saying?”

“You’re talking about Star,” Crystal said.

“What’s that?”

“STAR!” Crystal shouted. “WHY YOU TIED HIM UP AND LEFT HIM FOR DEAD.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, wouldn’t you know it, day after I tie him up, I fall and break my hip. In the hospital for weeks. I tell my nurses, I say, there’s a dog in the junkyard that’s wanting water and food pretty bad. And they think I’m crazy and tell me, ‘Now, sir, you just rest up and eat and watch TV and get yerself better.’ And I was happy there, with the good food, and all those channels. They got cable, you know. And you know what they say about hospital food tasting like cardboard? Not true! Every morning, oatmeal. Coffee. Juice. That fancy green fruit, what’s that called—honey something—”

Crystal stood up, like the fancy green fruit was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “STAR! STAR! WHAT HAPPENED WITH STAR?!”

“I’m just getting to that, missy. I come back from the hospital last week, and I’m thinking I got to go find that dog and bury him. But I’ll be doggoned, he’s alive. So I say, Jim-Boy, it’s a pretty day, and you and me are going fishing! I put him in the back of my old pickup and we head out. But
we’re on that Poudre Canyon road, going fast, when he gets it in his pea brain to jump out. I pull over, and I’m thinking he’s a goner, but he’s laying there whining.

“So I bring him home and put him in the shed. No money to take him to the dog doctor. But every day it’s worse, and that shoulder’s smelling bad now, so I got no choice but the pound. Make matters worse, my daughter says I’m moving in with her. Says I’m incompetent or some such thing. Says I got no business having a dog if I can’t hardly take care of myself. Won’t let me drive no more, neither. Look, here Jenny comes now.”

And at that moment, a little two-door car screeched to a stop next to Mr. Ed’s truck. Like a fast, mean dust storm, Jenny jumped out.

Jenny’s face was twisted into a frown. Maybe it got stuck that way and she didn’t know how to unstick it. Maybe her frown had something to do with her hair, which was frizzy, like it had gotten tangled up in Velcro. Her black jeans and gray T-shirt
matched the shadows under her eyes. Sharp elbows jutted out from her waist in angry little triangles.

She looked at me and Crystal and her frown got deeper, but she didn’t say anything to us. She just waved her hand in front of her nose and said, “Pee-
yooo
, that dog smells bad.”

Right away I thought,
Now, she’s someone I would
not
want to be best friends with
. And I felt extra-appreciative of Crystal.

“Come on, Dad,” Jenny said. She grabbed his arm and pushed his cane into his hand. Then she frowned at Star. “How are we gonna get it into the truck, I’d like to know?”

Crystal clamped her arms around Star and said, like she was queen of the universe, “We’ll be taking Star.”

Jenny furrowed her eyebrows. “Star?”

“He’s not It,” Crystal said. “He’s Star.”

“Go on home, girls.” Jenny waved us away, while Mr. Ed stayed quiet at her side. “I got to do this,” she said. “Not exactly a fun thing, taking a dog to meet his end.”

“What?!” I heard myself scream.

“You think they got medicine to waste on a full-grown dog? No, they’ll put him right out of his misery.”

I threw myself on Star and hung on. He whimpered, but I’m sure that inside he was glad we were protecting him.

Jenny leaned against the wall, blew her bangs out of her eyes. “Your parents want a dog? You got the money for his vet bills?”

Crystal stuck out her chin. “Of course. My father’s a vet. We have a giant fenced-in yard and a state-of-the-art doghouse. It’s dog paradise. Actually, we were in the market for a dog, a big white one, as a matter of fact. Well trained and fit and handsome.”

Jenny narrowed her eyes. The black eyeliner around the edges made her look a little like a frizzly-haired vampire. I hugged Star tighter.

“Fine,” she said after a while. “Take him. But if this so-called vet father of yours says you can’t keep him, don’t bring him back here.”

Mr. Ed gave Star a pat on the head and then let Jenny drag him toward the trailer by the elbow. He called over his shoulder, “You gals take him on home in that there wheelbarrow. Keep it. Lord knows I won’t be wheeling nothing around myself anymore. Take care of old Jim-Boy. He’s a good dog.”

“THANKS, MR. ED!” we said, and started heaving Star into the wheelbarrow.

On the way home Crystal said, “I don’t hate Mr. Ed. Not exactly.”

“Yeah, he’s not an evil kidnapper after all.”

“He reminds me of my grandpa a little,” she said.

It was hard to hear her over the squeaky wheels, which sounded like a herd of dying elephants.

In Crystal’s trailer, we could hear yelling.

“The dictator’s back?” I said.

“He’s back,” she sighed.

So we wheeled Star to my trailer instead. Mamá didn’t like dogs, and I had a feeling she
wouldn’t be happy to have Star stay with us in the middle of a catastrophe.

But Mamá wasn’t home, just Dalia and Reina, watching TV. Mamá was probably still wiring the money.

I left Crystal and Star outside our door and stood in front of the TV so my sisters had to pay attention to me.
“Hermanas
, there’s something you need to see.”

They followed me outside, and I introduced them to Star. He was sitting in the wheelbarrow, and he offered them a handshake with the paw of his good leg. You could practically see their hearts melting, even though his shoulder was stinky. I explained to them how I found Star and how we fed him and trained him and then how he got hurt and was stuck in Mr. Ed’s dark shed with no windows for days.

“So you had a secret dog all this time?” Dalia said. “That’s where you always disappear to?”

I nodded.

Crystal said, “Star’s in trouble. We need to get him to a vet.”

“You got money for a vet?” Dalia asked Crystal.

She shook her head.

“Well, neither do we,” Dalia said. “Like not even five dollars for groceries.”

I was a little embarrassed she said this to Crystal. But it was true. Yesterday we had to go to the food bank, and even though the food wasn’t bad—the little plastic cups of frozen peaches were actually pretty tasty—still, it was the
food bank
. It was worse than getting your clothes at garage sales.

“Money doesn’t matter,” Crystal said. “We’ll bring Star to the vet and figure out how to pay later.”

I gave Star water and fried him bacon while Dalia looked in the phone book and found the closest vet. It was about a mile away. We wheel barrowed Star through Forest View, out to the highway, and followed the highway past the run-down hotels and Mexican grocery stores. We fed him bits of bacon along the way to keep up his spirits.

Even though Dalia didn’t like to walk, and didn’t like to be seen with kids, she only complained once,
after a big blue truck blasting
rancheras
drove by. She muttered, “None of my friends better see me pushing this dog around with you two.”

Reina was a trouper, too. She had to walk twice as fast as us on her chubby little legs to keep up, but she only made us carry her for a couple of minutes.

After a half hour or so, we reached a pink cement building that said
HAPPY PET VETERINARY CLINIC
with a picture of a cartoon dog on one side and a cartoon cat on the other and a small sign underneath that said
SE HABLA ESPAÑOL
.

Crystal whispered, “Zitlally, we have to convince them to help Star. Remember, whatever happens to Star happens to your dad.”

When Crystal said that, all the quiet, scared tears inside me turned into words, a whole giant ocean of words, wave after wave after wave of words. And I knew just what I had to do with them.

I marched straight to the counter and locked eyes with a lady with black-and-orange-striped hair. In Spanish, I said,
“Señora
, we found Star and took care of him, but then he fell out of a truck and hurt his leg. We don’t have papers or tags or anything, and we don’t even know if he got his shots. But we love him and we give him bacon and we trained him to sit in a truck and beep a horn and
we pushed him all the way here in a wheelbarrow. We don’t have money to pay you. But it’s very, very important that you save him. And Crystal and me will do anything. We’ll sell lemonade all summer and bring you all the money we make. We’ll work for you and clean up dog fur and cat poop or anything you want.
Por favor, señora, por favor.”

Crystal’s mouth was practically hanging open at my speech, even though she didn’t understand a word except
Star
.

The lady said in Spanish,
“Señorita
, this dog is lucky to have you. We’ll do everything we can for him.”

The vet was another nice lady who wore a light blue doctor’s coat and spoke Spanish, too. While she examined Star, she let us stay in the room and put our hands on his fur to calm him. She cleaned his wound and put an antiseptic on it and complimented us on how well-behaved he was when he shook her hand. She gave him the shots he needed, and he barely winced because we fed him
bits of bacon and petted him the whole time. Then she handed us a rabies tag and a collar and told us to come back after he was better to get him neutered, and they’d figure out a way to pay for it if we couldn’t.

She even gave us a little bottle of antibiotic pills to give him for ten days straight. And I knew that if he didn’t want to take them, we could just dissolve them with a little Coke and have him lap it up.

On the way home, Star seemed better already, although maybe it was just all that bacon sitting happy in his belly.

“Your speech worked miracles!” Crystal kept saying. “Zit, you’re something else!”

Back at home, Crystal went into her trailer, and Star came into mine. Mamá was home by then, and once Dalia and Reina and I explained everything about Star, she said he could stay inside the house just until he got better, but after that he’d have to stay outside. I hugged Mamá and she hugged me back and whispered, “Let’s hope
they let your father go, Zitlally. I don’t know what I’ll do if they don’t let him go.”

I looked at Star, all cozy on an old blanket beside the sofa. “I have a feeling he’ll be okay, Mamá.”

Sunday morning before church, Star was chomping on bacon from a bowl at my feet, and I was eating hotcakes with lots of syrup, when the phone rang. The phone didn’t usually ring so early, so I thought it must be either really good news or really bad news. I picked it up.

And heard Papá’s voice.

“Zitlally!” And then he spoke in star language, all
husssshhhhhes
and whispers, telling me how much he loved me.

“Are you free, Papá?”

“Yes,
m’hija
. I’m free.”

I wanted to shout as loud as I could “WOOOHOOO!!!” and tell Mamá, who was in the shower, and Reina, who was still asleep, and
Dalia, who was putting on makeup in the bedroom. But more than that, I wanted him all to myself for a minute. “What happened, Papá?”