Whippoorwill (4 page)

Cow Bell got shoved hard into the bus side by Larry Grieg as soon as we climbed down the stairs. Everyone laughed. Cow Bell laughed too, but I wasn't sure he thought it was as funny as the other people did. Larry Grieg was demented, and you had to laugh at whatever Larry Grieg did or risk making him go even crazier. His dad had died in a lumbering accident, and he told anyone who would listen that he was the man of the family now. No one believed it, of course, not even Larry himself, but you couldn't say anything without making him bull charge you if you were a boy, or flip an obscene gesture your way if you were a girl.

Anyway, the hard thing was watching Cow Bell. His camo was supposed to make him some sort of Marine tough guy, but it didn't give him the sawdust when it came right down to it. Larry Grieg unmasked him. When Cow Bell bounced off the bus, he laughed and kept his momentum going so he could drift away from Larry, and I knew without looking that he had a scared look on his face and a line of nervous sweat on his lip. I had known Cow Bell a long time, and now he knew himself.

Rumney High School. Home of the Catamounts, which is an old word for mountain lions. Purple and white are our colors. Our most famous graduate was a Civil War general who died from grapeshot—the guts inside a cannonball that fly out when it explodes—just as he mounted his horse. With his last breath he yelled, “Be true, boys!” then he fell off his horse and died before anyone charged in either direction.

His name was Captain Earl Piedmont Rumney, and his last words were etched into a marble lintel above the main entrance.

His last words, though, didn't say anything to girls.

He came from our town more than our school, but the school adopted him as our founding father. We celebrate his birthday every May by playing a school-wide Ultimate Frisbee game that the football players take over and turn into an ape carnival.

I went in to see Mrs. Cummings. It was better to have someplace to go than to wander the halls and wait for an attack. Mrs. Cummings was not the lunch lady but the assistant lunch lady, and she had a tiny office—the old furnace room, actually—at the back of the school, where she caught a breath before starting all the chopping and peeling she had to do each day. She was a nice lady, the nicest, really, and we had become friends because she had known my mom back in the day. Way back. Mrs. Cummings had mostly gray hair now, and her skin had gone soft like a spotted pear, but if you spent time with her, you could tell she had been pretty once. She was short and still trim, but you could hardly see her figure because she wore an elephant-gray cardigan every day. The cardigan had big, baggy pockets where she kept her Tic Tacs, and her memory pad. Her memory pad was just a small notepad, brown and rusty colored, with white pages and blue lines. Sometimes she wore the memory pad rubber-banded to her forearm, and sometimes it stayed in her pocket, but it was always with her. It was where she kept her reminders and her shopping lists, plus a garden design layout that she had been working on for more than a year. She wanted a garden of daylilies, just daylilies, but varieties of every color ever created. She lived in a doublewide with Mr. Cummings, who was a long-distance trucker, and her plot wasn't big enough to garden. Still, she had dreams about the garden, and I liked sitting with her in the early morning, her door open to whatever weather had arrived the night before.

“There you are,” she said when I arrived. “Just about gave up on you. You're running late this morning.”

She was drinking tea. She had her memory pad flattened on the table in front of her.

“The bus was late. We almost didn't make it.”

“Was Lenny hung?”

I shrugged and sat down on the turned-over five-gallon bucket she used as a footstool. I dropped my backpack between my feet and let myself settle. It always felt good to be in Mrs. Cummings's office.

“Well, he probably was. The town ought to fire him, and I don't say that lightly. Employment is hard enough to come by, don't I know.”

“He was okay,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Pink Charmer,” she said, lifting the memory book to show me the addition she had made to her garden design. “I just saw it in one of my catalogs. It's a beauty.”

“Pink, obviously, right?”

She nodded.

“Pink Charmer, then the blue one I like,” she said, and bent close to read her handwriting. “Blue Summer Daylily.”

“Pretty.”

She sighed and closed the book. She didn't say anything for a second.

“Gosh, you look more and more like your mom every day,” she said. “I mean it. Spitting image and all that. You must see it yourself.”

“I guess,” I said. “We don't have that many pictures of her around.”

“Trust me,” she said.

First bell rang. It rang loud and hard.

“Up and at 'em,” she said when the bell died off.

She put her memory book under the rubber band against her forearm. She dug in her pocket and shook a few Tic Tacs into her palm, then she held them out to me, offering.

“I'm okay,” I said, “unless you're telling me I need them.”

She laughed and shook her head. Then she slapped the mints in her mouth, and her hand cupped against her lips made a small popping sound.

When I came home at four, the spring light made me step out on the porch as I peeled a clementine. If you've never spent a winter in northern New England, then you don't know what spring fever feels like. You spend all winter waiting for a little warmth, a little sunlight, and when it returns, it's overpowering. But the warmth also melts the ice and snow, and whatever you left outside in December is still there, waiting, like a snapshot of your life. Everything is dirty and cruddy. I slipped my hip up on the porch railing and looked around our yard. Seriously, it wasn't much better than the Stewarts' next door. We had a broken umbrella-shaped clothesline and a cement three-step staircase broken off and resting on its side and a coffin-shaped bathtub filled with beanpoles and garden junk. Weeds poked up everywhere, not growing, but giving the place a graveyard air. The whole thing looked ridiculous, looked like whippoorwills lived here, and I hated thinking how accurate that was. I put a tiny piece of the clemintine peel under my front lip. It tasted bitter and harsh, but I wanted that, wanted to taste the light in the fruit, and I leaned out a little and put my face back into the sun. Then I took a big bite out of a fruit section, and it tasted like spring, and like summer later on, and I had a warm, floaty moment until I heard Wally whining.

Ignore him,
I thought.

He kept whining, though, and I thought of him grabbing that Daily Growler, and thought of his paw swiping at my hand in a gentle way, and I tried to figure out what Father Jasper would do. He would call it a sin to ignore the dog, I guessed. So I shoved more of the clementine into my mouth and grabbed the lead from where I had left it on the porch the other day and I went around the stockade fence.

Wally went up on his chain, dangling his feet and trying to roll his paws like a horse rolls its hooves, and I looked at him for a ten count before I realized what had changed.

His yard had been raked. Not just raked, but really cleaned. He had a new water dish and he had kibbles in his bowl and even his house—a junky thing no matter how you sliced it—had been knocked together a little with extra pieces of board so that it appeared more solid. Someone had put a bag of grass clippings inside as a bed.

“What's going on over here?” I asked Wally, raising my voice a little like people do with dogs and children.

He put his front feet down, spun, and barked. I walked closer. To my astonishment, he also looked bathed. His fur glistened in the spring sunshine and his teeth looked better, his eyes brighter. The whole thing didn't feel so depressing.

My father,
I thought.

I walked over and knelt down just within reach, but not close enough so he could maul me. He spazzed and chucked his head against me. In the entire world, the only thing that dog cared about was keeping me right where I was.

His fur felt warm when I touched it.

“Oh, you good boy,” I said. “You good boy. Who was nice to you? Was it my dad? Did someone come over and clean you up?”

I was still petting Wally when Danny Stewart came out the back door.

“He looks better, right?” Danny asked.

No introduction, no hello, no how are you, no what's new? He simply walked out and started talking. He wore a sweatshirt with a picture of a black guy smoking a cigarette. The smoke trailed up over his shoulder. Underneath the picture a blue script said
ALL ABOUT THE BLUES
. For the first time I noticed Danny's sideburns had grown out. They were long and shaped like two snow shovels on either side of his head. I couldn't tell what look he was going for. It was half greaser, half rockabilly, but it made him more interesting.

“You did this?” I asked.

“I only go half days to the tech. I saw you out here before. It would have been funny if it hadn't been so sad.”

“It wouldn't have been funny if you had kept the dog decently to begin with.”

“It's not a perfect world.”

“It can be a better world.”

“I thought you'd be happy,” he said, and came over and let Wally jump up on him.

Wally stood with his paws over Danny's shoulders. Wally was a really big dog.

“You shouldn't let him do that,” I said. “It teaches him that it's okay.”

“It is okay.”

Danny rubbed Wally's ribs.

“It makes him impossible for other people to be around. He'll jump all over them. You have to train a dog.”

“You train him if you want him to behave so much. He's okay with me.”

“He's your dog.”

“Look, my dad took him in payment for a job. The dog crapped everywhere in the house and ate everything he looked at. Dad was going to take him to the pound, but I talked him out of it.”

“He'd have a better chance at the pound.”

“Man, you know just about everything, don't you? You get nosebleeds sitting up there in judgment?”

“Just simple facts.”

“Anyway,” Danny said, pushing Wally down, “I admit he needed cleaning up. So I did that. I thought you might like it.”

“I do. I do like it. I'm glad you did it.”

“He's a nice dog. He doesn't mean any harm. He's just big and stupid.”

“He's not stupid. Every dog is as smart as the people who own him,” I said, quoting what I thought Father Jasper would say.

“Sit, Wally,” Danny said.

Wally sat. He trembled as he sat, ready to go. I moved closer and ran my hand over his chest and shoulders and finally his head.

“They say you should pet a dog's body as much as its head. Everyone just wants to pet a dog's head,” I said. “You wouldn't like it if that's all anyone petted on you.”

“I might,” Danny said.

He squatted down next to me. We both petted Wally.

“Who's ‘they'?” Danny asked.

“A guy named Father Jasper and his staff. They raise dogs. He's a retired priest and he founded the Maine Academy for Dogs.”

“Seriously?”

“Can we put him on the lead for a second?”

Danny shrugged, then took the rope from me. I stepped back. Danny put two hands on the rope as soon as he dropped the chain connector. Wally began pulling him around like a man on skis. But Danny kept his feet and let Wally move around. Wally marked half a dozen places with urine. His nose made a snuffling sound everywhere he went. Watching him, I thought Jebby was wrong about the Great Dane part. Wally had some bloodhound in him. His nose and muzzle flubbered when he sniffed at the ground.

“Can you make him sit on command?” I asked.

“Not really,” Danny said. “Sometimes.”

“Try.”

Danny jerked the line tight and said, “Sit.”

Wally paid no attention. Danny did it again, and this time Wally genuflected, and then kept going.

“He needs a lot of work,” I said.

“I'm going to put him back now. You want to hook him while I hold him?”

I did. Wally jumped up on me and I shoved him off.

“Off,” I said.

Wally slid off, then jumped again. I shoved him away again.

“You should knee him when he jumps,” I said. “Not too hard, but you have to make it uncomfortable for him. You can squeeze his paws too. Dogs are protective about their paws, because if a dog injures his feet in the wild, he's a goner.”

“Is this the priest guy telling you this stuff?”

I nodded.

Danny stood still until Wally jumped up on him.

“Off,” Danny said, and kneed Wally in the ribs.

Wally went back to all fours.

“You want to go get a burger?” Danny asked, his hands running around on Wally. “I'm going out for a burger if you want to come.”

“Where?”

“Smitty's. It's up in North Haverhill.”

It was such a bizarre question, I didn't know what to say. I squatted next to Wally and petted him.

“Sure,” I said. “I guess.”

My stomach turned and vibrated and I thought I would throw up as soon as I said yes. I didn't know why I said yes, but I did. It would have seemed weird to say no, because we had just finished with Wally. Luckily, we both continued petting the dog, giving more attention to the task than it deserved. I asked myself a series of stupid questions, but the main thing that kept going through my head was
Danny Stewart?

Not in a million years did I think of Danny Stewart as someone to date.

And was it a date? I couldn't even be sure of that.

“You're saying right now?” I asked, because I wasn't clear on what he was proposing.

“Yeah. You should probably grab a sweater or something.”