The Tilting House (11 page)

“She grew!” said Aaron. He was right. Yesterday, Dinky had been the size of a cat. Now she came up to Aaron’s knees.

“That’s weird,” I said. “She didn’t seem nearly this big yesterday.”

“I bet it’s because she ate that paper envelope yesterday. The one that had the grow powder in it,” said Aaron.

“I hope she doesn’t get any bigger,” I said. What I really hoped was that the grown-ups wouldn’t notice.

Aaron pulled a Frisbee out of a bush and tossed it. “Go get it, Dinky!” Dinky ran after the Frisbee, caught it as it bounced off the sidewalk, and instantly chewed it to pieces.

“Dang it, Aaron, that’s mine!” I said. “Go get it back before she destroys it.”

“Too late,” Aaron said as Dinky tore a chunk out of the Frisbee.

“You owe me a new Frisbee,” I said.

“I didn’t do it!”

“Your dog did!”

“She’s not my dog. She’s Mrs. Natalie’s.”

I left Aaron with his furry friend and walked down to Lola’s house. While I quietly told Lola about the growing dog, Lola’s mom made us lunch—cucumber sandwiches on whole wheat bread, cut in perfect fourths and served with carrot sticks and apple slices. It wasn’t too bad, but Lola’s mom stood by the sink and watched us eat. She kept reminding Lola to eat over her plate so that she didn’t get crumbs on the floor. As far as I could tell, Lola was eating over her plate the whole time. I finally figured out that I was the one dropping crumbs but Lola’s mom was too polite to say anything to me.

We played with Lola’s rock collection for a while. For rocks, they were pretty interesting. When we got back to my house, Aaron was still outside with Dinky.

“She’s growing!” he yelled at us as we approached. “Look! Her back comes almost up to my waist!”

“Holy cow!” said Lola. “How big do you think she’ll get?”

We brought Dinky back to Mrs. Natalie’s, but the doggie door was far too small for her now. She’d grown up to
my
waist by then. Aaron opened Mrs. Natalie’s front door to let the dog in and we heard Mrs. Natalie scream. Aaron said, “It’s okay. She’s still Dinky. She just grew.”

I got a sick feeling in my stomach thinking back about the moss. What had we done to Dinky? I swallowed hard, grabbed Aaron, and we walked back home to tell Dad our theory. He
listened to us silently. He didn’t say a word during dinner, either. When we were done, Aaron and I went with him to talk to Mrs. Natalie.

“Thanks for coming over, Hal,” said Mrs. Natalie, opening the door. “Get down, Dinky. I wanted to ask your opinion about—stop it now! I said get down!—about this—now you let go of his arm!—about this dog. She’s grown so big so fast, I don’t quite know what—Dinky, you are being a naughty puppy—I don’t quite know what to—bad puppy!”

Dinky didn’t seem to realize that she was now a big dog: She still jumped on everyone. She still chewed on everything. Except now she probably weighed seventy-five pounds. When she was tiny, she was only annoying. Now she was scary.

Dad sat Mrs. Natalie in a chair and began making her a cup of tea. He told Aaron to try to play with Dinky quietly until Mrs. Natalie had a chance to calm down. The next day was a Saturday and Dad promised he’d take Dinky to the vet. We returned home. Dad never mentioned a thing about the grow powder to Mrs. Natalie.

“It’s all gone now, isn’t it?” he said to Aaron and me as we stood on the porch.

“Is what all gone?”

“That powder, Josh.”

“Yes. Even the envelope is gone.”

Dad nodded and entered the house.

We were only partway through breakfast the next morning when the phone rang. I could hear Mrs. Natalie’s frantic voice on the other end of the line. “Hal, I don’t know what to do with this dog—” Then the phone went dead. We all ran next door—even Grandpa—but when we got to the front steps, we saw a huge
wet nose and mouth poking through the doggie door. The mouth held the remains of Mrs. Natalie’s phone. Mrs. Natalie’s front door shook and strained against its hinges. We could hear Mrs. Natalie’s hysterical voice from inside as she tried to get Dinky under control. Then the door burst open and the biggest, fluffiest dog I’d ever seen jumped off the porch and onto Aaron, knocking him to the ground. Dinky stood on top of him, her huge front paws on his chest, chewing happily on Mrs. Natalie’s phone.

Aaron burst into tears. Who could blame him? Dinky was huge. The top of her head came up to my chin. She must have weighed three hundred pounds—maybe not as big as a pony, but bigger than any Saint Bernard I’d ever seen.

Dad and Mom pulled Dinky off of Aaron. At Dad’s request, I ran to the garage for some rope. Dad and Grandpa did their best to hold on to the giant dog until I came back, and then Dad tied one end of the rope around her neck and the other end around the holly tree in Mrs. Natalie’s front yard. Dinky strained against it, and for a minute I thought she would rip the tree out of the ground, but it held.

“What am I supposed to do with this thing?” asked Mrs. Natalie to no one in particular.

Dinky dropped the phone from her mouth and barked—a huge, deep sound that rattled my rib cage. Her dark, shiny eyes looked longingly at Aaron.

“She’s not a thing,” said Aaron, wiping the tears from his face. “She’s still Dinky. She’s just big.”

“Mrs. Natalie didn’t mean anything by it, Aaron,” said Grandpa. “It’s just that Dinky is a mighty large dog for one little lady.”

“I suppose I should call the shelter,” said Mrs. Natalie.

“No!” shouted Aaron. “You can’t do that to Dinky!”

“I’m sorry, Aaron,” said Mrs. Natalie, “but honestly, I don’t know what else to do. I can’t keep a dog this big. Especially when she’s so naughty. Come and see what she did to my house.”

We followed Mrs. Natalie inside. She led us into her kitchen, where she pointed to the spot where her phone used to hang from the wall. Now there was a ragged hole and dangling wires. All the knobs had been chewed off the kitchen cabinets, even the ones above the counters. In the living room, the back of the sofa was torn open and the heavy wooden frame was scarred with teeth marks.

Grandpa took Mrs. Natalie by the arm and led her over to our house. We all sat around the kitchen table, discussing what could be done with Dinky and trying to comfort Mrs. Natalie. Aaron stayed outside with Dinky. Someone had to comfort her too, he said.

The adult conversation grew boring pretty fast, so I went outside to check on Aaron. Dinky and Aaron had disappeared. It looked like the rope had been untied from the tree.

I hurried back to tell Mom and Dad, and then we all started searching the neighborhood, calling for Aaron and Dinky as loudly as we could. Once Lola and a few of the other neighbors found out what all the commotion was about, they joined the search. The Talker had been sitting outside the whole time, of course, and Mom actually ran over to ask him if he’d seen anything. He didn’t even glance up at her. He just kept talking about dead bodies and Belgian winters.

Mom called the police, and then she and Mrs. Natalie went next door and searched every room in Mrs. Natalie’s apartment. Two officers came by, and after they took down all the information they said it shouldn’t be hard to spot a dog that big. Lola and I ran down to the schoolyard, but we failed to find so much as a paw
print. A few times during the day, I could swear I heard a deep, distant bark, but I could never tell where it was coming from. We crisscrossed the neighborhood all day long, calling and looking and fretting. Mrs. Natalie grew even more frantic, so Grandpa stayed with her at our kitchen table and made her more tea.

Mrs. Natalie was convinced Aaron had run away with Dinky to keep her from sending the dog to the pound. “It’s all my fault,” she said, again and again. I was convinced that Dinky had simply eaten Aaron and run off to look for more young children with sticky hands.

The two police officers stopped by after dark to check on us. They’d found nothing. Neither had we. Mom and Mrs. Natalie cried again. Dad frowned and tried not to curse. Grandpa cursed freely.

Then, just after a dinner that everyone only picked at, the front door swung open and there stood Aaron. We ran toward him, but he lifted up a hand to stop us. And we stopped. Even Mom stopped. Aaron stood looking at us silently, holding us back with his chubby upraised hand. He tilted his head a bit to one side, whispered something, and waved his hand. Silently and gracefully, Dinky stepped through the door. We could hear her soft panting as she took her place beside Aaron. Aaron tilted his head to the other side. He whispered again and Dinky sat down on her haunches. Another whisper and Dinky lay down. Then Aaron smiled, whispered, and tilted his head again. Dinky stood up, walked quietly to the kitchen—right past all of us and right past Mrs. Natalie. Dinky gently took the refrigerator handle in her mouth and pulled the door open. She stuck her huge head inside. She delicately picked up one of Mom’s Diet Pepsi cans, carried it back to Aaron, and lay it at his feet.

“Pretty good, huh?” said Aaron.

Then and only then was Aaron buried in a sea of hugs.

A few minutes later, Aaron pulled Lola and me out of Mrs. Natalie’s earshot. Dinky remained lying down, not moving an inch. “It wasn’t me who trained Dinky. Not really,” said Aaron, quietly. “It was Mr. Daga. When you guys all went inside earlier today, he came out. He was really mad. He said that he wasn’t going to let some loudmouthed dog keep him up all night. Either that dog had to learn some manners, or Mr. Daga was going to chase both Dinky and Mrs. Natalie out. Then he invited us inside.”

“You took Dinky into Mr. Daga’s house?”

“Yup. That’s where I’ve been all day.” Aaron explained to us how Mr. Daga had Dinky under control within seconds. Dinky was obeying the rat’s commands before they reached the top of the stairs. “Mr. Daga talks Dog.”

“He what?”

“He talks Dog. He talks Cat, Rat, and Dog. And English, of course. He learned it all from his dad, he said, who learned it from his dad, who learned it from his, all the way back to Mr. Daga’s great-great-great-grandfather. And guess who
he
learned it from?”

“Who?” I said.

“You’ve got to guess.”

“Aaron! Who?”

“Tilton. The guy who owned our house. He learned Rat and taught the rats to learn human English. He did it with something Mr. Daga called amp … umm … amplified bio …”

“Amplified bioacoustics?”

“Yeah.”

“Did Mr. Daga teach
you
how to talk Dog?” Lola asked.

“I wish. He said hardly any humans are smart enough to learn it. He called Tilton ‘a freak of nature.’ It took Mr. Daga all day just to teach me a few basic commands. You have to do them in a really high-pitched voice. So high that most grown-ups can’t even hear them.”

“Is that what you were doing when you first came in?” I asked.

“Yup. I’ll teach you. I can do ‘come’ and ‘sit’ and ‘lie down’ and ‘get me a pop from the fridge.’ That’s all I know. Oh, and Mr. Daga had a long talk with Dinky about bad manners and barking and chewing on things, so she’ll be a nice dog for Mrs. Natalie. I think Mr. Daga kind of freaked Dinky out. Mr. Daga’s got quite a temper. Now Dinky knows Mr. Daga’s the alpha rat.”

Mr. Daga’s talk worked. Dinky was a different dog from then on: quiet, obedient, and well mannered. Not that it mattered, really. Three days later, she started shrinking.

The shrinking didn’t happen the same way as the growing. One day Dinky woke up with her tail shrunk all the way to its original size. It was so much smaller than the rest of her that at first we thought her tail had fallen off. By the next morning her head had shrunk. Her body was still almost pony-sized, but her head was the size of a lapdog’s. Her bark was high and tiny again, not that she barked much that day. As a tiny-headed dog, nearly all she did was eat. It took a lot of eating for that tiny mouth to fill that huge belly.

The body shrank next. When Dinky woke up the following morning, she had a tiny dog’s body with big dog legs. She looked like a fluffy spider. She kept toppling over so she ended up spending most of the day with her legs sticking out of her doggie bed.
I laughed every time I looked at her. Even Lola laughed. Aaron sat next to Dinky, patting her head and telling her to ignore us.

The next day, Dinky’s legs had shrunk and she was back to normal, to the relief of Mrs. Natalie. Actually, she wasn’t completely normal. Her right legs had shrunk all the way down, but her left legs stayed just a little bit longer. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed but for the fact that Dinky tended to run in circles.

The one advantage? Whenever Dinky visited our house, she walked perfectly level on our tilting floors, as long as she moved around the house in a clockwise direction.

Mrs. Natalie seemed happy with her obedient little dog, but now that Dinky was so calm, Aaron didn’t show much interest in her. Dinky walked softly, almost never jumped, and rarely barked—and Aaron spent less and less time with her. By doing what everyone else wanted, Dinky lost the one thing she wanted the most. Dinky still grew excited when Aaron came around, but now she showed her joy with a quiet wag of her tail. Aaron hardly noticed. I did. So did Lola. “You can see her feelings in her eyes,” Lola said. “They look a little sadder than they used to, if you ask me.”

But every now and then the two of them—boy and dog—would connect in the old, wild way. It usually happened outside, down by the end of the block, far away from Mr. Daga. Aaron would shout. Dinky would jump. Aaron would tumble. The two of them would roll together in the green summer grass.