This Is Not Your City (12 page)

I work twenty hours a week at the Goodwill, mostly sorting donations. I'd work more if they had the hours for me. It's nasty work in lots of little ways, but since Leo's work is what it is, I can't complain to him. We have to keep the stuffed toys wrapped in plastic for two weeks in the back, to suffocate any lice that might be on them. We have to check the clothes for stains, like old blood the color of sweet potatoes on the insides of women's pants. If the clothes are stained too bad to sell, they're shipped out in big bundles to somewhere else, somewhere in Africa or South America or something.

Leo ate his potato last, scooping out the halves and then rolling the skins up into tubes with salt and pepper inside. He ate the tubes with his hands, like brown paper hot dogs. I got out ice cream bowls, a half gallon of vanilla and the kind of chocolate sauce that hardens on top of the ice cream. “I'm glad it wasn't the rottie,” I said, “who scratched you. She's a pretty one.”

“Pretty ugly. She's a dog.”

“All your pretty uglies.”

“You too, Miss Lyss. You can be my favorite. My prettiest ugly.”

I tapped my spoon against the hard chocolate. Underneath the shell my ice cream was already melting.

“I'm just kidding,” Leo said.

“Stop messing with the gangrene. You'll make it worse.” He was rubbing his knuckles up and down on the edge of the table. When he's itching bad he'll rub his fingers against stuff without even realizing and the skin breaks open right away. There are little smears of blood all over the house, on the prickly surfaces that feel best when he's itching—the rough carpet in the rec room, the weave of the couch, the furry cover on the toilet. I could track him through the house like that, like a hurt animal, something leaking and in pain.

“Maybe it
is
worse this time. Maybe I have leprosy. My nose'll fall off. Then I'll be
your
pretty ugly.”

“If your nose falls off you're not going to be my anything,” I said, which sounded kind of mean, and I thought about telling him the truth, which is that he'd be my lovely ugly even if his nose did fall off, and then that seemed pathetic, and I thought perhaps I shouldn't say anything at all, so I didn't.

“If you're not working tomorrow, can you come with me?” he asked.

“Carthage?”

“Webb City.”

“You got a paper?”

“We can pick one up there. Look through it over some breakfast. We'll go to the Denny's off 71.”

“Sure,” I said, and hoped he didn't think the Denny's was what swayed me. I don't do what I do for Leo so he'll buy me breakfast.

In bed that night I was careful of the gangrene. Leo fell asleep right after but it took me a while. It had been dark for hours, but the weather wasn't cooling. We had the ceiling fan going and the windows open. The crickets were chirping the way they did all summer, a long low buzz like power lines, and the dogs were suffering in the heat. I bet Leo'd never find anyone else who can listen to dogs cry the way I can. They call out and I can turn over and not hear them, not even a bit. I don't need the radio or the TV. I just need my own two ears and then I don't hear a thing. I dreamed good dreams but I don't remember what they were.

At Denny's, Leo got the Grand Slam and I got waffles. He took the classifieds from the
Webb City Gazette
and let me have everything else. I read about a meth lab bust and a church swap sale on the front page while Leo circled ads with a red pen. I grew up in Webb City, but with Mouse in St. Louis, there's not much to bring me back. I don't know where my mom's got to these days.

“Anything promising?”

“Loads. Some purebreds, too. Or so they're claiming. I thought we'd try and hit those first.”

“Sounds fine.” I went to check my hair and makeup in the bathroom while Leo settled up. I was wearing a flowered dress and sandals, my hair down, a little liner for my eyes and color for my lips, not too much. Like a Sunday School teacher, Leo said, and it was strange to hear something like that come out of him as a compliment. Leo was wearing khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt that covered his tattoo but was too hot for the weather. He already had sweat stains under his arms. We sat in the van with the air conditioning on while Leo started calling houses on his cell phone. Beagles are good finds. Hounds, labs, retrievers, too, either purebred or close enough so you can tell the breed without squinting. It's because they're mid-sized dogs with large chest cavities, the way Leo explains it. I don't quite know why that's important but I guess it makes them easy to work with.

Before I moved in with Leo the biggest thing I'd ever stolen was a stick of butter. Not even a package, a single stick. Mouse and I had decided we wanted to make chocolate chip cookies. We found a recipe on an index card in the kitchen, but none of the ingredients. All we needed was a teaspoon of this, a half-teaspoon of that, and we didn't have anything. 1/8th of a teaspoon baking soda. We looked at the tiny bowl of the measuring spoon, the size of the nail on Mouse's pinky finger. We found a chain of little plastic snap-off paint tubs that had come with a paint-by-number set, and cleaned them out and put them in Mouse's pink vinyl purse. At the grocery store we took baking soda and baking powder off the shelf, looked both ways for clerks, opened the containers, and tapped out a few
spoonfuls into the tubs. We were doing the same thing with a tin of cinnamon in the spice aisle when a woman confronted us, a lady with a cart full of food like kids would eat, fruit snacks and Hi-C. “What do you girls think you're doing?” she asked.

“We want to make cookies,” Mouse said.

“Are you going to pay for that?”

“We can't. So we're only taking a little,” I said, and Mouse nodded solemnly, because Mouse was already an expert in solemn truths.

The woman looked at us in our old shorts and stained T-shirts and you could watch her feeling sorry for us, deciding to let us keep right on stealing. I let Mouse put two eggs and the stick of butter in her purse after she promised to be careful with them. At the checkout we paid for flour and sugar and chocolate chips and asked for two plastic bags. I put them on the handlebars of my bike, one on each side, because I figured Mouse had enough to worry about with the eggs in her purse.

The next morning, Mouse and I were eating some of our cookies for breakfast when Mom came home. “Where'd you get cookies?” she asked, and we told her, because we figured she either wouldn't care or would think we were resourceful. She put some bread in the toaster and opened the fridge. “Where's the butter?” she asked.

“There isn't any.”

“You don't put four sticks of butter in a batch of cookies.”

“That's why we only took one,” Mouse said.

“Lyssa and Mouse. You steal, you steal something worth taking. Then I'd at least have butter for the damn toast.”

That's one of the only pieces of advice Mouse and I can remember getting from her, and I didn't even take it. I still steal small. Not things other people want, or things that are worth a lot. I just take what I need.

The first house we went to in Webb City was in my old neighborhood, a street that had been kept up a little better than the one I grew up on. The house was a nice little ranch, painted white with geraniums in the window boxes. Leo rang the doorbell and then stepped back so we were standing side by side. The woman who came to the door had an armful of brown
cardboard boxes, so Leo kept it short. “Mrs. Sidore?” he said. “I called a few minutes ago. About the dog. Leo Tillet.”

We were shown to the couch in the living room, which was full of boxes labeled
Estate Sale,
and
Rubbish,
and
Keep,
and
Kids Might Want???
I could feel Leo smile. Death lingers on a dog. Families want rid of it. Leo's a quick appraiser, and I knew he was looking over Mrs. Sidore and the dog she brought in, which even I could tell was a poodle, purebred or pretty close, a little gray around the muzzle but spry enough. “You're quick off the mark. The first call we've had.”

“My wife and I wanted to get the jump on the Sunday ads. We've been looking for a dog and we were interested in poodles, so when we saw your ad—”

“She's purebred, from a breeder near Kansas City. I've got the American Kennel Association papers. She's been taken good care of. Shots, and spayed, although I think she's past puppies by now.”

“What's her name?” Leo asked, scratching around the dog's ears until she started to wag so hard her whole butt waggled. Leo's awfully good with dogs. Good with people, too; he asked all the right questions, about health conditions, about how much exercise old Muffy needed, whether she could be let off a leash. “We have a nice piece,” he said. “In the country outside of Neosho. She'd have room to run around.”

“It sounds lovely,” Mrs. Sidore said. “Honestly I was worried, with the dog being old, that she'd be hard to place. I don't suppose families with kids would want her, knowing she'll die and having to explain it.”

“It's just my wife and I right now,” Leo said. “And we don't have time to train a puppy.”

“Well, Mr. Tillet, the ad was Free to a Good Home and you seem a good home and she's still free. I'll grab her papers, if you're decided, and a box of her things.”

Our house is full of dog bowls, and Muffy wouldn't need toys, but Leo let Mrs. Sidore get them. I held the dog on my lap as we drove away. On the next block we stopped and Leo unlocked the back of the van. He has kennel space for six dogs back there. We locked Muffy into a cage with a dish of water and
one of the toys from her box, and Leo checked the next house on his list against his map.

Leo's lucky we've got a good neighbor, by which I mean we never see each other, and never give each other any trouble. His house is on the far end of his property, and even on a clear night the sound from our yard doesn't travel. If we actually wanted to let Muffy roam free, he wouldn't say boo about it. Mouse and I, our neighbor growing up was Mr. Martin, who had a house just like ours except that ours was yellow and his was green. One summer he decided to have a big yard sale, and got all his buddies to bring over every piece of old furniture they could find, either on consignment or just to save them a trip to the dump. Offer the customers a wide selection, he kept saying, lining couches up along his driveway and across his front yard until his entire property was covered over like a furniture store, chairs in one corner, desks in another, big appliances, like an old fridge with a bright chrome handle, back by his garage. He seemed to do okay. People came and hauled some stuff away, or shook on something and promised to be back later for it. The next weekend, though, he still had half a Goodwill store spread out over his lawn. That weekend it rained, and in the morning all the furniture was soaking. Mouse and I balanced on the backs of the couches, knocking each other off onto the cushions and listening to the squelch. Pools of water rose up in perfect footprints where we stepped, and the beginnings of a smell, damp and lush, curled from the upholstery. Mr. Martin chased us off that morning, and stood for a while on his lawn, reaching his right arm over his head to scratch at the back of his neck. Mouse and I stared at the hair growing in his armpit and wondered what he'd do.

Of course, the easiest thing to do with a yard full of soaking furniture is nothing at all, and for years that's what Mr. Martin seemed settled on doing. He gave up trying to run us off, and in winter we made snow forts out of the sofas, pelted each other with secret stores of snowballs hidden under chairs and in desk drawers. After the first winter's snow melted, the smell had taken hold. The furniture was wet and moldering, the wood splitting with rot, the cushions mildewing. A pair of raccoons
had started a den underneath a loveseat, and a skunk had a nest of babies under a recliner. Mouse and I would jump onto the loveseat, both together, on the count of three. When our feet pounded the springs the raccoons would shriek and shoot out. We played hide and seek and once Mouse accidentally locked herself in the old fridge, but I found her and let her out.

One family Leo and I visited that Sunday had already placed their dog. A few more were playing coy, taking our information and giving us the third degree. The fat guy with the Akita had a long list of names on a yellow legal pad, but the lady with the Bichon Frisé just wrote Leo's name and number at the top of a blank page. “I've had a few people show some interest. I'll let you know,” she said, and you could tell she hadn't, but she was mighty suspicious of why a guy like Leo would want a dog like a Bichon. We picked up a chocolate Labrador from a couple who was moving to a one bedroom apartment in Kansas City in a week. An English terrier from an old woman whose family was putting her in a nursing home. She tried to serve us tea and tiny little shortbread cookies, but she dropped the cookies into the tea and didn't seem to notice. The tea was in these white china cups, and you could look down inside and see the cookie dissolving, settling in a thick layer across the bottom. The dog was skinny, with long nails, like the woman couldn't remember how to take care of it. She kissed Leo on the cheek when he took the terrier into his arms.

The summer Mouse locked herself in the fridge was the summer Mr. Martin started locking himself out of his garage. The first time it happened, Mouse was alone, playing at Boat, trying to hop as far across his yard as she could without touching the ground, which was really water and full of sharks. She'd asked me to play and I'd refused, just because I was five years older and I could, even though when we stood on chairs and rocked back and forth we moved in rhythm, without even trying, because we could feel the same waves.