The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski

  The two dogs that had crossed the clearing came to a halt in front of her, left and right. They didn’t look unfriendly but they didn’t look completely benevolent either. She took an instinctive step back, and from behind her came a disquieting rumble. She froze and turned her head. The third dog stood with its muzzle at the back of her knee. It nosed her leg and looked at her. When she put her foot back where it had been, the dogs in front of her stepped closer, and that made her sway a little, as if she were pinched in a slowly tightening vise. Yet as soon as she’d regained her balance and stood still, the dogs stepped back again.

  She looked across the clearing. The boy was gone.

  Now, from behind her she heard the older girl’s voice: “Jess? Let’s go. Jess?” The girl wanted to reply, but she couldn’t tell what the dogs would do if she starting hollering. Besides, there was something fascinating about the way they had lasered in on her. The way they stood just out of arm’s reach. She had the distinct sense that the dogs just wanted to keep her still. And they were beautiful, with furrowed, honey-colored brows over brown eyes that shone with an extraordinary sense of…what? Concern? Serene concern. She wondered what would happen if she talked to them. Would they step forward and touch her?

  She was about to test this idea when she heard a sharp double clap. Instantly, the dog to her right dropped away, oozing into motion and disappearing into the bushes. A moment later, the dog behind her wheeled and vanished as well. But the third dog didn’t move. It stood looking at her, then stepped forward and sniffed the hem of her shorts, quivering. She held out her hand. The dog stepped back with a look of something like guilt on its face. Then it, too, bolted. She craned her neck to watch it move, so graceful and surefooted. A dozen yards away the two other dogs waited beside the boy, who was kneeling and gesturing to draw the last dog toward him. When it arrived, the boy’s hands flashed expertly along its sides and down its legs, as if checking out of long habit for injuries. The little fishing rod she’d seen earlier lay on the ground near him, and the satchel was looped over his shoulder. He stood. The dogs looked at her across their flanks one last time and then they were gone and the underbrush had flicked back into place.

  She let out her breath.

  I should be scared but I’m not, she thought. And, strangely: Nothing like this will ever happen to me again.

  She waited another moment, then let out a whoop and raced toward the sound of the older girl’s voice.

  HE KEPT THEM MOVING until it had grown so dark he couldn’t see the way. Long ago, on their first night running, the sky had been clear and a full moon had shone directly overhead, but now the moon was a waxing crescent. He chose a spot near a stand of jack pines and scraped together needles, tossing away any resinous clumps. He downed the dogs. They knew it meant no water or food for the night and a chorus of grunts and complaints followed.

  Four and a half days at Scotia Lake. They should have been pushing west and north, but instead they’d lingered where the food was easy at the risk of being spotted. He’d known it was a mistake even as they’d done it. The howling had been bad enough the night of the fireworks, but now the little blond girl had gotten a good long look at him and an even better look at the dogs. He’d heard her shout as they were running from the clearing, “Hey, Diane! DIANE! Over here! Oh my God! You’re never going to believe this!”

  Whoever Diane was, she’d believe it, all right. She’d believe it, and her parents would believe it, and the county sheriff’s office would believe it, too. There was nothing to do but move as far and as fast as possible and always keep away from the roads—the old plan. The only plan he’d ever had. They’d covered maybe two miles as the light waned. If they pushed hard the next day they could cover another three or four straight through the forest.

  There was some good news, at least. The Zebco fishing rig, being a stubby affair, had survived their mad dash. Once they’d crossed the forest road, Edgar had cut off the hook and embedded it in the makeshift cardboard hook-book he kept in his back pocket. Afterward, he’d managed to thread the rod through the underbrush by tucking it under his arm. The other good news was how perfectly the dogs had translated the guarding game. It had been lovely to see them move through the sunlight toward the little girl. Part of Edgar had wanted to stand and watch them. Once they had surrounded her, whenever she moved, whenever she even shifted her weight, one of them pressured her back into place. And when it was time to run, they’d kept close and quiet.

  Essay lay with her head beside Edgar’s knee. He listened to her stomach growl and began the arithmetic again: on foot, breaking a trail and having to sidetrack for food and water, they might advance three solid miles a day. Ninety miles in a month. It was early July. He hoped it wasn’t more than one hundred miles to the Canadian border. That put them where he wanted to go by mid-August.

  He was going to need a map soon. They were still in the Chequamegon, but if they made steady progress, they wouldn’t be for long.

  THE NEXT MORNING A MIST began to fall so fine it coalesced in beads on the dogs’ fur. By noon the mist had turned to rain, and when a high-skirted pine presented itself, they scuttled beneath to wait out the weather. Half an hour later, the pelting rain was deafening. Sheets of water swept across their knee-high vista. Their adopted tree shed water erratically; without warning, a chilly gush would cascade through the core of the tree and onto their backs. When he was willing to take on more water, Edgar poked his head from beneath the tree’s hem to look for a break in the clouds. The dogs alternated between groaned complaints and half-sleep, trotting into the rain to urinate and returning, shaking out at the fringe of the tree, or sometimes—to everyone’s displeasure—beneath it. The air beneath the pine began to reek of wet dog. After a while Edgar could find no position that was both comfortable and dry. His bones began to ache. Only Baboo passed the time with equanimity, head on paws, hypnotized by the sight of falling water, sometimes even rolling on his back to watch the proceedings upside down.

  At first Edgar’s thoughts were practical: they needed to keep moving. He measured his own hunger to gauge how the dogs might feel. He’d gained a sense for how long they could go without. Skipping a day, he thought, would leave them distracted but not in danger. They were used to a little hunger now. In fact, except for the discomfort, there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with spending a day sitting under a tree. Hadn’t they done pretty much exactly that for the previous three days?

  But something in his mind made him fidget as the day passed, something he didn’t want to think about. For the first time since they’d crossed the creek at the back of their land he felt genuinely homesick, and once that began, the litany of memories quickly overwhelmed him. His bed. The sound of the creaky stairs. The smell of the kennel (which their time beneath the tree was reminding him of ever more powerfully). The truck. The apple trees, surely heavy with green fruit by now. His mother, despite the tumult of emotions surrounding her in his mind. And most ferociously, he missed Almondine. Her image appeared accompanied by a spasm of pure wretchedness. The dogs with him were fine dogs, astonishing dogs, but they weren’t Almondine, who bore his soul. Yet he kept making plans to go farther away from her and he didn’t know when he would ever be back. He couldn’t go back. His last image of her was that despondent posture, lying in the kitchen, tracking him with her eyes as he turned away. Her muzzle had grayed so in the last year. Once upon a time, she had bounded down the stairs ahead of him and waited at the bottom; lately, there had been mornings when she’d tried to stand but failed, and he’d lifted her hindquarters and walked alongside as she navigated the steps.

  But what she’d lost in agility she’d gained in perception—in her capacity to peer into him. How had he forgotten that? How had he forgotten that in the months after his father’s death, she alone could console him, nosing him at precisely the instant to break some spiral of despair? How had he forgotten that some days she’d saved him simply by leaning against him? She was the only other being
in the world who missed his father as much as he did, and he’d walked away from her.

  Why hadn’t he understood that? What had he been thinking?

  He needed only to close his eyes to feel all over again the sensation of his father’s hands reaching into him, the certainty that his heart was about to stop. The memory was too dazzling, like the memory of being born—something that, if recalled in full, would destroy a person. He couldn’t separate it from the image of his father lying on the kennel floor, mouth agape, and that final exhalation Edgar had pressed from his body. Then he thought of Claude and the look on his face when Essay had trotted up to him with the syringe in her mouth, and of the white dandelion and the patch of white grass that had surrounded it. And he thought of Doctor Papineau, eyes open and head turned at the bottom of the workshop stairs.

  He was stumbling through the rain before he knew what he was doing. He didn’t care what direction he traveled, only that he moved. When he looked down, the dogs were bounding alongside. His wet clothes had warmed to the temperature of his body, but the rain flushed away the heat. He flung himself through the brush, bursting through thickets, stumbling and standing and running again. For the first time since they’d left home, true meadows appeared. Twice they crossed gravel roads—strange, unbroken lines of rusty mud. All of it washed through him, washed the thoughts away. The rain became a senseless tapping on his skin, neither warm nor cold, and he welcomed it. A July rain should never have stopped them. The danger had been in staying still so long. They encountered many fences now, some downed and rusty and more dangerous because they were difficult to see. He stripped blueberries from their stems wherever he found them and held them out to the dogs, who rolled them in their mouths and reluctantly swallowed. The cardboard holding the fishhooks dissolved in his pocket and the hooks began to poke his skin. He spent an hour standing naked from the waist down, extracting the hooks and wrapping them in layers of birch bark, and when he finished, his fingertips were puckered and raw.

  Near twilight the clouds fractured and the rain let up. Tracts of deep blue appeared in the sky. They were within sight of a small hayfield of perhaps fifty acres at the far end of which stood a lone old barn. He stripped off his sodden clothes and bedded them down inside the edge of the woods. Before any but the brightest stars shone, the four of them lay overlapped and sleeping at the rim of the Chequamegon.

  When he woke in the morning he didn’t understand that the dogs were gone, or even how late it was, only that a thousand pounds of sand covered each of his limbs. He lay on his back, arm draped over his face, letting the radiant sun warm his chest and arms. The absence of the dogs’ soft weight against his body meant nothing—there was only the dreamer’s logic, wishing a return to the seadreams from which he’d run aground. When his eyes finally came open, he stared at the flattened weeds where Tinder should have been sleeping and pushed himself upright and looked around. Before him lay a field gone to wild grass and milkweed. It rolled in a long upsweep to the barn he’d seen the evening before. Two hawks glided over the field, hunting and diving.

  One of the dogs—Essay?—porpoised out of the weeds in the middle of the field and the others followed, arcing and disappearing into the deep grass. He stood and clapped and they worked their way across the field, zigzagging and leaping, until at last Essay burst into the clear. She carried in her jaws an enormous brown-and-black garter snake, thick in the belly and almost as long as she. She stopped near Edgar and shook it until its lifeless body writhed in the air. Baboo and Tinder whisked past, trying to snatch her prize. She trotted one way then another, until finally Tinder got hold of the snake’s tail. After a struggle, the snake separated into two parts with a string of entrails quivering between. Baboo and Tinder repeated the process with the rear half of the snake until each dog retreated with their portion.

  Ugh, God, Edgar thought, turning away, not so much disgusted by the idea of their eating a snake (though garter snakes smelled foul) as their eating it raw. He wondered if the matches in his pocket were still dry; he could cook the snake for them. But by the time he dressed, nothing was going to be left. The dogs had to be ravenous, if his own stomach was any indication. Nothing else felt half as important as finding food.

  He dressed in his damp clothes and gathered the dogs and they waded up through quack grass and milkweed and mullein, the dogs skating around him in wild, hooped orbits improvised on the theme of his path. The old barn stood beside a weed-shot blacktop road with no house in sight. It was the first barn they’d seen in their travels and Edgar took it as a sign they’d finally crossed the Chequamegon and were in farmland again. He pressed his eye to one of the thumb-width spaces in the barn’s siding boards. Inside sat a disk harrow and a moldboard plow, each with its spooned metal seat, and a dilapidated hay wagon whose framework back sagged like a frowning thespian mask. At the far end, an antique sower made of rusty knives and funnels. Irregular planes of light striped the machinery and the hay-strewn dirt floor as if he were looking through the ribs of a great bird-picked carcass at whatever had eaten it from within and been trapped.

  The dogs ignored the barn and poked along the dilapidated barbed-wire fence bordering the road, nosing the fireweed and morning glory twisting up the fence posts. Edgar walked to the pavement. Not even the shadow of a centerline. The dogs were acting downright gay, he thought, watching them run toward him, as if relieved to have returned to the itinerant life after being pinned down in the rain. They crossed a shallow ditch together and passed through a line of trees, where an orderly two-stranded barbed-wire fence stood. The dogs slipped beneath, hardly breaking stride.

  Before them stood an up-sloping field of sunflowers taller than Edgar—row upon row of sage trunks topped by hairy, fluted plates, all pointed off angle to the risen sun. They walked the edge of the sunflowers for easy traveling until a car appeared distantly on the blacktop. Edgar turned for one last look at the desiccated barn, then clapped his leg and they ducked into the gap between two infinitely receding rows of sunflower stalks.

  Outside Lute

  THEY WERE HALFWAY DOWN THE FAR SIDE OF THE FIELD BEFORE the sunflowers dwindled into an open patch and Edgar stopped to look around. At the bottom of the slope the field ended at a tree-filled farmyard. The house was simple and square, with attic dormers and plain brown asphalt shingling. A long driveway hooked around behind the house to stop at a freestanding building that looked like a carriage house or shed. In front of the shed sat a battered old car. No one was walking around, no dogs lay on the back porch, no sound emanated from the small barn at the back of the yard. All he could hear was the collective hum of thousands of bees harvesting the sticky nectar glinting on the sunflower heads. The field itself was long and narrow, an alley bounded on one side by a barbed-wire fence and on the other by a solid stretch of woods. Over the treetops rose a water tower, aquamarine and round-bellied. Wide-spaced cumulus clouds languished above it all in shades of white and blue, their shadows tracing the contoured land. The name of a town was painted on the water tower’s barrel in tall white letters: Lute.

  He clapped the dogs over and held their muzzles in his hand and ran his fingertips around their gums to see how thirsty they were. It gave him a chance to gauge whether Essay was in the mood to bolt or to stick, whether Tinder or Baboo were fretful. When he was satisfied that they would stay nearby—when the four of them agreed on that—they made their way to the edge of field.

  During his thief’s apprenticeship, Edgar had learned not to waste much time speculating on whether a place was unoccupied or just looked that way—it was easiest to just walk up and knock. If someone stirred inside, he could always run off. And, too, his hunger made him reckless. He down-stayed the dogs (Essay walked it down inch by inch—they were going to have to practice that) and strode his most innocent walk to the back door. He heard no voices inside, no television, no radio. The sash on the small, square window beside the door was down and latched.

  He knocked. When a minute passed (lo
ng enough for someone to get out of bed and start walking across the room; long enough for someone to shout, “Who is it?”; long enough for a dog to bark) he opened the screen door and tested the inside knob. To his surprise, the door swung inward and he stood looking into a neat, linoleumed kitchen with a Christmas floor mat just inside. He leaned in and knocked again, louder this time. The only reply was the click of the refrigerator compressor shutting off.

  He took one more look around and then it was a mad dash. He threw open the refrigerator. Cans of beer and bottles of Coca-Cola. He grabbed a Coke and rummaged through the cabinet drawers until he found a bottle opener and upended the cold bottle against his lips. From the counter near the door he grabbed a loaf of bread and a bag of potato chips and stepped outside and tried to stroll along, though he knew, in his excitement, he was heel-walking like a dope. A patch of weeds near the edge of the field began to shake. He dove in, awkwardly signing a release before the dogs broke anyway. They weren’t idiots; they knew food when they saw it coming.

  He ripped open the plastic wrapper on the bread and handed out slices all around; he gobbled one down himself, then another, following it with big washes of Coke. In a minute, half the bread was gone. He tore open the bag of chips and shoveled them in, chip after salty, crunchy chip. The dogs tried to jam their snouts into the bag. He clamped it shut, then parceled out the delights, with the dogs following his hand each time it disappeared. He smiled, bits of potato chip and bread showing in his teeth. The true depth of his hunger had only then become evident. The sight of all that food almost panicked him—he’d needed to take something modest or he’d have fainted right there in the kitchen.

  He sat watching the house again, half-expecting someone to barge out of the door at last, shouting and shaking a fist. The dogs panted in his face as if to say, what are you waiting for? Then they broke into a sprint. There was no holding back. Whoever lived there might come back at any moment and the opportunity would be lost.