The Golden Ghost (5 page)

he golden dog followed the man, but she kept turning her head to watch the girl. She watched and watched
.

She loved the man. She had loved him since they had found one another when she was barely more than a pup. That had been a cold night in a much larger city. She had been young and homeless and hungry. He was homeless and hungry, too, though not so young
.

They had kept one another warm that first night. And from then on, they had stayed together
.

They shared all that came to them. Often it wasn’t much. Food the old man found in Dumpsters behind restaurants and bakeries. An occasional rabbit the golden dog caught. Maybe a shed far enough away from a farmhouse to be safe for shelter. Or a large cardboard box behind some bushes in a park
.

Sometimes the man had work. When that happened, he brought food from a grocery store. But soon—the golden dog never knew why—they would be moving again. And then they would be hungry again. Both of them hungry
.

The day came when the dog began to grow sick. She didn’t know she was sick. She knew only that the rabbits seemed to run faster. She knew that even the food the man put down in front of her wasn’t appealing
.

The two of them stayed close still. Wherever they slept, they slept side by side. The man with his arm thrown across her deep chest. The man with his rough fingers tangled in her golden fur
.

The dog slept more and more, and the man stayed close. He stayed close until hunger and cold slipped away … for the dog, anyway
.

The golden dog barely noticed the slipping. She simply lay beneath the welcome weight of the man’s arm and breathed and breathed … until she breathed no more
.

When her breath was gone, she stayed on. The man was the only human who had ever needed her, so she stayed
.

He didn’t speak to her. He clearly no longer knew she was there. But the very rage with which he tackled the world told her how much he needed her still
.

And so she stayed close
.

Staying didn’t keep her from being lonely, though. If anything, being close to the unseeing man made her longing deeper
.

Until the girl. The girl had seen. The girl had seen, and she wanted her
.

But how could she leave the man?

The golden dog plodded down the street, following
.

Delsie sat down on the porch and put a hand on Bug’s round little head.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Bug leapt up and licked her chin.

“I guess he’s okay,” she said to Todd.

Todd nodded, but he kept stroking Bug from head to tail, checking for injury.

“Do you know what he was barking at?” Delsie asked.

“The old man,” he answered. “What else?”

Delsie took a deep breath. She knew it was useless to tell him. But because it was Todd and because they had always told one another everything, she kept going.

“He was barking at the old man’s dog,” she said. “It’s a ghost dog, really. More a collection of sparkles than anything.”

Todd didn’t reply.

Delsie put a hand beneath Bug’s chin and tipped his head up. She gazed into his solemn brown eyes. Bug had seen the golden
dog. She knew for certain that he had.

She waited to see what Todd would say.

“Do you know what?” Todd said finally.

“What?” she asked. She kept her gaze on Bug’s large, round eyes.

“Sometimes I think you’re nuts,” Todd said. “Positively nuts.”

Delsie winced. But if Todd had just told her he’d seen a ghost dog and she hadn’t seen the same thing, wasn’t that what she would have said?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

“I think I’ll go home,” she said. And she stood.

“What do you want to do tomorrow?” Todd called after her when she was halfway down the walk.

“I don’t know,” she answered, not looking
back. “Probably nothing. Nothing at all.”

Maybe they were getting too old to be best friends. Her mother had told her that might happen. She said that someday they might feel too old to be best friends, a boy and a girl. She’d said things would happen that would make everything different.

Delsie didn’t think her mom had been talking about ghosts, though.

Still, Delsie was angry. She hadn’t said it. She hadn’t even let her voice sound like it. But she was good and angry.

Why couldn’t Todd let himself see what was right in front of his eyes? Was it just because she was a girl? Because he was a boy and what he saw was always bigger, more important, than anything she might see?

She headed for her apartment above the store.

As the man approached the row of houses, he walked faster. He swung the two bags with their scant groceries
.

Blasted kids! What were they doing interfering? He wasn’t hurting anybody, staying in that little house. Why should a house be sitting there empty when there were people like him in the world who didn’t have a roof? Didn’t have anything
.

Not that it mattered. There wasn’t much that seemed to matter now that Dog was gone
.

It was time to move on. The cold would be coming soon, and there would be no way to get heat in that abandoned little house. He was running out of odd jobs in this hick town, anyway
.

Still … he hated being told. Always had. It was almost like having the police say it. “Move on! Move on!” That annoying kid and her “We’ll tell the police.”

That infernal little black dog, barking at his heels
.

He hadn’t been able to stand the sight of a dog, any dog, since Dog had died
.

His dog
.

No name. He’d never given her a name
.

He felt bad about that sometimes. She’d deserved a name
.

Sometimes he almost thought he saw her again … hanging around, right close by. Just a glimpse of that golden fur. Those eyes
.

But he wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t like those guys who got hauled away every now and then. Seeing stuff. Yelling about what they were seeing
.

He knew what was what
.

Dog was dead. That was all. Dead meant gone. He’d buried her himself behind the little house. Dug a hole deep so no wild animal would come out of the woods and dig her up
.

Dug a hole and that was the end of it
.

Except now he’d have to go off and leave her here. There was nothing to be done about that
.

As the man walked up the steps to the porch, though, the nothing he could do was suddenly too much. He kicked the face of a step. Kicked hard, meaning it to hurt. Hurt his foot. Hurt the step
.

He intended to make a solid thump
.

He’d spent years—he no longer knew how many—without a home, and he’d never made any noise. Sneaking around. Hiding in boxes, in sheds, in abandoned houses no one had bothered to tear down
.

If anyone had known he wanted to live in this one, they probably would have torn it down. They would have hauled it away before he got a chance
.

But the thump his foot made wasn’t solid. When he kicked, his foot passed right through the front of the half-rotten step. His foot passed through and his ankle caught
.

And then he was falling backward … falling
.

elsie was halfway home when a soft touch on her hand startled her. It was a damp, cool touch.

She looked down and, at first, saw nothing.

Then the golden dog gathered before her eyes. The dog trotted along beside Delsie, her cool nose grazing Delsie’s palm.

Come
, the cool nose said. And the liquid brown eyes said,
Come
.

Delsie stopped walking.

Again, a nudge from the nose.

“What’s wrong?” Delsie asked.

But the dog only turned away. Then she looked back over her shoulder to see if Delsie was following.

Delsie’s first thought was that something had happened to Todd.

But when she neared Todd’s house, she could see that he still sat on the front steps, Bug cradled in his arms.