Huck

by Janet Elder

  We drove up the winding back roads. As we got farther away from Wyckoff Avenue, it became harder and harder for me to believe that Huck could have traveled such a long distance. Could Huck really have run all this way? I was already second-guessing, third-guessing, the decision for all of us to spend precious hours of daylight walking around an area that seemed too far away to yield any results. As we had been all along, we were operating on faith, and mine was shaky at best.

  From the car, I spotted one of our posters on a telephone pole, and then another on a tree, and another. Rich and his band had already been here. It was reassuring to see that the signs were clearly visible from a car.

  Dave and I drove on past that grouping of poles and trees to another, where we parked the car beside a thick, bare oak, and got out with our hammers and nails and signs encased in plastic. With one hand I used a nail to hold a flyer against a telephone pole; with the other I raised the hammer and began pounding the nail into the dry wood. By the time I drove in the second nail, I thought I was getting pretty good at it, having hit my thumb only twice, my other fingers not at all.

  We went on this way for a while. Sometimes Dave and I would both get out of the car, and other times, when there was only one pole or tree, Dave would stop in the middle of the deserted road and I’d jump out of the car and quickly hammer the nails into the sign. From the car, it was easy to pick out the spots that would be in a driver’s line of sight.

  About an hour or so later, we caught up with Rich, Michael, and Ray on Fawn Hill Drive. We parked and got out of the cars, once again to confer about the division of labor. I had not had much time alone with Rich, so I proposed dividing into two teams of poster hangers—Rich and I would go in one direction, and Dave, Michael, and Ray would go in the other. There was no resistance.

  As Rich and I started walking down the street together, now alone, I asked the unthinkable. “Don’t you think we should have an idea in mind of how long we want to keep this up? We’ve got Michael on an emotional high wire, and I’m really worried about what will happen if he falls, and it is looking more and more like that is what will happen. We’ve also got Darian there.”

  “I’m worried about it, too, but I can’t think about stopping this right now. I just don’t know,” was Rich’s response.

  We kept on walking, nailing signs to poles, letting the question hang in the air, knowing that sooner or later, we would have to answer it.

  The streets were unnaturally quiet for a Saturday afternoon. Rich and I were each wearing sneakers, which made no sound as we moved along. “I wonder if anyone up this way has seen Huckie,” Rich said to me. “I think we ought to try ringing a couple of doorbells and ask. Let’s just start going to houses where it looks like people are home.”

  “No one is home,” I said. “It feels like a ghost town.”

  “People must be home. There are a lot of cars in driveways,” Rich observed. “Let’s just pick a house.”

  I liked the idea. I was willing to drop my question about having an end point. I was desperate to hear someone, anyone, say something about Huck. I was not the least bit reluctant to stand on strangers’ doorsteps and ask if they had any clue at all about Huck.

  As we got to the end of Fawn Hill Drive, where it intersects with Deerfield Terrace, we saw a mustard yellow spilt-level house with brown trim. Wood was piled high in the side yard, covered by a black tarp. We were about to walk up the front steps when a middle-aged, somewhat large man, with an earnest look, came around from the back of the house. “Are you looking for a red dog?” he asked.

  My heart began to race. I could not believe what I was hearing. I nearly started to cry. Rich was cautiously hopeful.

  “Yes, yes, we are,” he said quickly. He showed the man the flyer.

  “You know, that’s the dog. He sat right out there by the logs all morning long. In fact, when I told my wife about it, she said she saw a sign about a lost dog in the supermarket. She just now went back to the store to take down the phone number.”

  Rich and I were both trying to process what the man was saying. “So you saw our dog this morning,” Rich said. “How long ago was that?”

  “Must be a couple of hours ago,” the man replied. “I tried to get him, ’cause he looked lost. He looked like he belonged to somebody, but looked lost,” the man continued. “I was out with my rottweiler, and when your dog saw me and saw my dog, he just took off. Darnedest thing, he took off like a jackrabbit. There was no getting him.”

  My heart sank. The pitch of emotion was overwhelming. I could not imagine how Huck was surviving, or what kind of physical shape he must be in by now. What sorts of harrowing experiences was he having, and how much longer could he possibly go on this way? On the morning he ran from the Clarks, he weighed barely nine pounds. How could he sustain himself?

  But Rich was not sinking at all. Quite the opposite—his spirits were boosted by the fact that Huck had been seen alive after yet another cold night roaming the wild. He also knew now that Dave had made the right call. We had moved the publicity in the right direction.

  Rich asked the man which way Huck had run, and the man pointed to Youngs Road, a narrow, winding, busy road where people drove their cars faster than they should. At that, Rich’s own emotions, so optimistic a moment ago, took a dive. Sensing Rich’s sudden change of mood, the man cautioned, “But, you know, I can’t be sure.”

  “Thanks very much for your help,” Rich said. “If you see him again, call any of those numbers.”

  “You bet I will,” the man said.

  We started walking toward the street. Rich called Dave on his cell phone to let him know what we had learned. Dave’s response was much like Rich’s, though without the noticeable mood swing.

  “Well, the good part is that he was alive as of a few hours ago, which all by itself is pretty amazing,” Dave said. “You know, in addition to everything else, it was cold last night.”

  “And what’s the bad part?” Rich asked.

  Without hesitating, Dave said, “That the guy wasn’t able to catch him and that Huck ran toward Youngs.”

  The hour was getting late, the day was growing darker.

  “I’ve got to head back to the house for a while to take care of a few things and to see about Darian,” Dave said. “Michael and Ray will meet you at your car. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “Okay,” Rich replied. “Thanks for everything this morning.”

  Rich and I continued putting up flyers. We must have posted Huck’s picture on every tree and telephone pole in the neighborhood. In the process, we feverishly searched yards for our dog, calling to him as we did.

  “HUCK, HUCK, HUCKIE. HUCK, COME ON, BOY.”

  But we heard no bark, saw no flash of red hair against the brown, dull terrain. Feeling miserable, we walked to our car. We had to regroup yet again, figure out our next steps, given that we now knew where Huck had been early that morning.

  Michael ran down the street toward me. “Mom, what happened?” he asked excitedly. “Uncle Dave said someone saw Huck this morning.”

  I put my hand on Michael’s cheek before telling him once again that Huck had been seen but had fled. “Someone did see Huck. He said Huck sat by a pile of wood next to his house all morning,” I explained. “The man tried to get Huck, but Huck ran.”

  “How are we ever going to catch him?” Michael asked plaintively, his emotions raw.

  Before I could answer, Rich did. He crouched down so he could look into Michael’s eyes. “Listen, lovee, we know Huck is still alive, which is the most important thing of all,” he said. “And we know we are on his trail, that we keep finding ourselves in places where he has been. Now if we had had food with us last night, we would have been able to get him,” Rich continued. “That was my fault. I won’t let that happen again. But let’s keep in mind, Huck is alive.”

  Michael was trying to work it all out in his own head, trying to assure himself that somehow fate would allow the moment when Huck would
be seen, we would be called, and we would all be reunited. He wanted to believe our story would have a happy ending.

  As painful as it would have been, I would have preferred that Rich at least touch on the idea that despite our seeming proximity to him, Huck might disappear from our lives forever. But it wasn’t in Rich’s DNA to do that.

  “But what about other people who see him and then he just runs away?” Michael continued. “How is that ever going to change?”

  Rich remained steadfast in his optimism. “That’s what the signs are for. If any one of the people who have seen Huck so far had seen our flyer beforehand and knew to offer Huck cream cheese, they probably would have been able to catch him.”

  He added: “And Michael, I know you have seen this for yourself, the people who live out here have been so generous to us, so open and kind. They want to help us. We have a lot of people looking for Huck, trying as hard as they can to help us.”

  All that may have been true, but it was also true that Huck was still out there, facing death at every turn—a speeding car or truck, a wild animal like a coyote or a bear, an aggressive bird of prey, starvation, dehydration. The woods were even deeper here than they were in the Carriage Lane area, and they covered much of the terrain. The sky was now getting much darker, a storm was brewing. It would be another threat to Huck’s survival. It would also drive us indoors, forcing us to lose precious hours of daylight.

  We had plastered the area with signs. Luck had led us to a man who had seen Huck, but the very same man reported that Huck had taken off yet again. There was no point in ringing any more doorbells on Fawn Hill Drive.

  We got back in the car. Rich said he would drop Ray where he had locked his bike that morning so that he could get home now before it rained. About to pull the car away, Rich unwittingly put the car in reverse instead of drive, and backed into a lamppost, one with Huck’s picture on it.

  “Damn,” he yelled. He put the car in park and got out to see if there had been any damage done to either the car or the lamppost. He seemed to be taking a long time, which led me to believe there had been damage, a complication we surely did not need. I was about to get out of the car, when Rich got back in. “It’s okay. Sorry about that, guys,” he said. And we drove back down to Carriage Lane and Ray’s bike without saying very much.

  When we got there, Ray offered to come out again later, after the rain. Rich was starting to feel self-conscious about taking up so much of Ray’s free time. “You have been so nice and so helpful,” Rich said to Ray. “But I don’t want you to spend your entire day helping us.”

  “No, that’s okay. I want to help,” Ray said. “Really.”

  Ray’s desire to be a constant member of the search party was touching. Here was a teenage boy giving up hours and hours of precious weekend time to comb the woods looking for a dog that belonged to people he had never met before. In many ways, Ray was the embodiment of the good cheer and open hearts we had encountered all over town the past few days.

  “Why don’t we talk later and see where things are by then?” Rich said.

  “Great. I’ll talk to you later,” Ray responded. He got out of the car and we watched as he unlocked his bike, waved at us, and pedaled away.

  Rich, Michael, and I sat in the car for a moment and started to talk about what we should do next. Rich started retelling the conversations he had earlier in the morning. He told us about Dick Seelbach and how Dick had watched Huck all afternoon on Friday, and about the bologna and cream cheese he let Rich leave on the edge of his driveway. Rich went over the story of Brian O’Callahan and how Brian had heard Huck late at night in his yard.

  “I think we should give everyone on that street a flyer,” Michael proposed. “We could put them in their mailboxes or through the handles of their doors.”

  It was a good idea, given that two people on that street had seen or heard Huck. Still, the information was a day old, and Huck clearly was no longer around there. He had been seen that morning in a place at least a mile north.

  Rich was thinking about Michael’s suggestion but also thinking ahead to what made sense next. “Do you know if the Clarks have gotten any calls today?” Rich asked me.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I think Barbara would have called to let me know.”

  “Why don’t you call her, just in case?” he said.

  Before I had a chance to dial Barbara’s number, she called me. “Listen, Darian just got home from practice. I think you should bring Michael over here for a while to give him a little break and let him have some lunch,” she suggested.

  “I don’t know if he’ll go, but I’ll ask him,” I said. “We’re just trying to figure out what’s next. Have you gotten any calls so far today?” I asked.

  “Not a one. I’m really kind of surprised,” Barbara said. “Maybe it is just that people have been out. Maybe we’ll hear something later.”

  “Let me call you back once we plan our next move,” I said.

  Michael had overheard enough of the conversation to surmise that Barbara was urging he have some downtime. “I want to stay with Dad,” he said. “I don’t want to go back to the Clarks.”

  I told Rich and Michael the distressing news that there had not been a single call all day. Other than the man with the tarp-covered pile of wood, as far as we knew, no one else had seen Huck all morning or into the afternoon. There was only one more X to put on Dave’s tracking map.

  Thinking that we may have left the area where Huck had been seen that morning prematurely, I suggested we go back up the streets around Fawn Hill Drive, or else that we put up signs on trees and poles in Ramsey. It was impossible to know what to do and I was easily pulled away from my own ideas, something completely out of character for me.

  Michael was not so easily swayed. At that moment he was insistent about staying on Carriage Lane, in the neighborhood where the night before he had come so close to holding Huck in his arms again. He thought Huck would return there. He wanted to go to the Seelbach house to see if the bologna and cream cheese had magically lured Huck back to the area.

  I don’t think either Rich or I wanted to tell Michael that we thought his notion was the least likely of scenarios. “How about this?” Rich proposed. “Michael, you and I will drop Mom back on Main Street, and she can start nailing up the posters to trees and poles there. Then we’ll come back here and look some more. We’ll do what you said and make sure everyone on the block has a copy of the flyer. Then we’ll meet Mom back at the Clarks’ house and have something to eat before going back up to Fawn Hill Drive.”

  Michael was satisfied. He had been heard. “That sounds like a good idea,” he said.

  I knew it was more than likely a waste of time, though I did think both Michael and I were being guided by wanting to return to where Huck had been. For Michael, it was a matter of returning to where he had seen Huck with his own eyes. For me, it was a matter of returning to the place where anyone had last laid eyes on Huck.

  As I called Barbara back and told her our plan, Rich started driving back toward Main Street. Just as they had done the day before, Rich and Michael dropped me at the top, past the high school, only this time I was carrying a hammer and nails, along with posters covered in plastic. I suddenly realized that I did not even know if what I was doing, or, for that matter, what we had all been doing all morning, was legal. I hadn’t given it a thought before now. I imagined myself standing in front of a judge explaining to him why I had defaced every telephone pole in Ramsey and Mahwah. In my fantasy, he was lenient, since he had his own dog and son.

  Rich and Michael headed once more to Pine Tree Road. Michael was heartened now that the adults or at least one of them was following his lead. “I want to go back into the woods where we saw Huck run last night,” Michael said. “I just think he might be there.”

  Michael had a desperate need to search those woods for himself. Ever since he had watched Huck run into the thicket of trees and brush, Michael could not understand why his belove
d dog would run from him and not to him. Wasn’t the sound of his voice enough to bring Huck home? Didn’t Huck ache for Michael as much as Michael ached for Huck?

  When Michael and Rich got out of the car on Pine Tree Road, Michael got down on his hands and knees in front of the car to try and understand what the car must have looked like from Huck’s perspective, to try and gain some understanding of why Huck had run.

  “If you are a little puppy, the car looks pretty scary from down here,” Michael said to Rich. “All you can really see are these blinding lights and this big machine that looks like it could squash you in a second. You can’t even see the windshield from down here to see people’s faces,” Michael described while still on his knees in front of the parked car.

  “I’ll bet with the car running, he didn’t even hear me call to him. He just ran because he was afraid of the car.”

  “I’ll bet you are right,” Rich said, reaching down to give Michael a hand up.

  Rich and Michael first walked up one side of the street and then down the other, leaving a flyer in every curbside mailbox or stuffed between the storm door and front door of every house. Then they did the same on nearby Carriage Lane, before going into the woods for one more look. They saw the bologna and the cream cheese untouched in front of the Seelbach house. Unbeknownst to Michael, Rich was determined to make quick work of this latest search of the woods. He was doing it only to satisfy his son. Just as I was, Rich was eager to get back up to Fawn Hill Drive.

  Rich and Michael traipsed through the grove of bare trees. As they moved toward the edge, near Carriage Lane, they spotted a father and his two young sons, out with a spirited dog, a Shiba Inu, about four times the size of Huck. “Let’s talk to them,” Rich said to Michael.

  When they were closer to the family, the man called out. “Are you looking for something?” the father asked Rich. He walked toward Rich, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Ben Mamola. And these are my sons, Ben and Peter, and that’s our dog, Scooter. We live right here,” he added and pointed to a sprawling house up against the edge of the woods.