“Let’s go!” Max said. He began walking along the trail. King walked next to him, keeping pace so that his dark, cold nose was right next to Max’s fingers.
A squirrel ran down a tree and scurried across the trail. King just kept walking next to Max. He didn’t bark. He didn’t chase it. He didn’t even watch the squirrel go. A fox appeared on the trail ahead of them. King ignored it. A bear came shuffling out from behind a bush. King didn’t bark or even growl. Big as the bear was, King didn’t even seem to notice it. “Get the bear!” Max said. Snarling, King ran toward the bear, and the bear turned and lumbered off. As soon as it had disappeared into the forest, King came back, his tail wagging, and sat in front of Max.
Max changed the setting. Now he and King were walking along the sidewalk on 8th Avenue. King walked right next to him, ignoring the people coming and going around them. He didn’t bark at other dogs, didn’t chase squirrels, and didn’t even look toward the window of LaRosa’s. Max imagined a man walking out of the deli two doors down from LaRosa’s, biting into a huge ham sandwich. King’s nose didn’t so much as twitch.
Max decided he wanted knights and dragons in this adventure. He imagined himself on a horse now, wearing a suit of shiny silver armor. He was back in the forest, searching for the lair of a dragon that had been roasting and eating the cattle on the farms at the edge of the forest. “Sniff out the trail,” he told King. King put his nose to the ground and went ahead. When the trail branched, King sniffed to the left and then to the right. He looked back at Max and began trotting down the left-hand trail.
Soon Max saw whole, leafless branches burned black on some of the trees around him, so he knew that King had chosen correctly. After a little while, the trail curved upward and a cave entrance yawned in front of them. There were scorch marks all around its edges and bones scattered on the ground outside. Max’s horse danced sideways, neighing in fright. Max reined him in. King stood his ground in front of the cave, glancing back to Max for orders.
A tongue of flame flicked from the cave’s darkness. Then a dragon’s head appeared, covered with shiny red scales. Its eyes were bright and bulging and burning with a greenish-yellow light.
“Ready, King!” Max said, and freed a long silver lance from its place by his saddle, readying it for combat. King growled. The dragon stepped out into the light and unfurled its purple-and-red wings. King tensed himself to spring —
Max sighed and allowed the cave and the dragon to vanish. He knew exactly what would have happened next. King would leap at the dragon to bite its soft underbelly. The dragon would breathe fire. Ignoring the fire, King would sink his teeth into the dragon. Then Max would spur his horse, charge, and impale the dragon on his lance. He and King would have delivered the farmers of the kingdom from the scourge of the dreaded cattle-eating dragon. They would have won, just like always.
Max turned and started back down the trail. King came with him. Max stopped. “Sit!” he told King. King sat. “Roll over!” he told King. King flopped down on the ground and rolled over. “Fly!” Max said. King jumped up. Wings sprouted from his back, just above his front legs. He leaped into the air and flew around Max’s head in a big circle, in and out among the branches of the trees. There was nothing King wouldn’t do for Max — nothing he couldn’t do. But he never did anything surprising. He always did what Max wanted him to do, what Max expected or told him to do. Where was the adventure in that?
“Phooey!” Max said, and opened his eyes.
He heard Polly crying and Mother’s voice coming from Polly’s room. “Mrs. Chang put up lots of signs, honey,” Mother was saying. “Someone will surely find Goldie. Someone will call or someone will just bring her back to us.” But Mother’s voice didn’t sound very reassuring. Max could tell she was only hoping to be right.
“It’s all my fault!” Polly wailed.
“No, it isn’t,” Mother said. “You were just trying to help.”
They’ll get over it! Max told himself firmly again.
13
MORE THAN A WEEK PASSED with no sign of Ratty. No one called. No one brought a scruffy little yellow dog to their door. Every day, Max reminded himself of all the bad things Ratty had done to his life. He had taken his savings to LaRosa’s and offered to pay for the sausage Ratty had stolen. The man had taken his money and told him not ever to bring his dog back there. That was an easy promise to make, since Ratty was gone. The trouble was, Mother and Polly weren’t getting over Ratty’s disappearance the way he’d expected them to.
Their father had finally called from Chicago, where he had moved for his new job. When Polly talked to him, she didn’t tell him about her nice teacher or her new friends. She talked about nothing but Ratty and how much she wanted her back.
Max was glad at first that Dad had called, but when Mother handed him the telephone, he didn’t know what to say except hello. He waited for Dad to start the conversation. “Are you all broken up about this dog too?” Dad asked.
“Not like Polly,” Max said. There was a long silence.
“So —” Dad said finally. “Have you made any friends at your new school?”
Max shook his head. Mother made talking signs with her fingers. “Not yet,” he said.
“This is your chance to start over,” Dad said. “Don’t mess up. Don’t just sit around daydreaming like you did before, or you’ll never have any friends. Get out on the playground and mix it up. Find the toughest kid and challenge him. Tough kids respect people who challenge them.”
Max didn’t believe that for a minute. “Okay,” he said.
“You get the tough kid on your side and everybody will want to be your friend.”
“Okay,” Max said again. There was another silence. “Bye,” Max said and handed the phone back to his mother.
After talking for a minute or two, she said good-bye and hung up. “He just wants the best for you,” she told him.
“I know.” Max said it, but he wasn’t sure he believed it.
Polly was crying again, and Max couldn’t tell if she was crying about Ratty or about something else. Phone calls were hard, he thought. Dads were supposed to call their kids. But now he sort of wished Dad hadn’t.
The next day, it rained really hard and the Lost Dog posters got all blurry. Finally somebody took them down. Polly stopped asking when the dog would come back, but after she went to bed, Max sometimes heard her crying herself to sleep. And she didn’t act like herself the rest of the time. Mom said she could invite her new friends over to play, the way she used to at their old school, but she didn’t. She just came home and moped around the house every afternoon. She was like a glass of soda after all the fizz is gone.
Mother sighed a lot, for no reason at all. And Max noticed how often she glanced out the window, as if she expected Ratty to show up on the stoop and bark to come in.
Ali Baba didn’t run anymore, of course. Sometimes he sat on the windowsill and looked out. Mostly he just slept and ate, the way he used to. But he didn’t go back to sleeping on Max’s bed at night. He stayed with Polly instead. Max had to get used to sleeping by himself. He didn’t sleep as much as he wanted, though. When he woke up in the morning at the time he used to walk Ratty, there was too much time before breakfast. He tried Adventure Time again, but he went alone, without King. It just wasn’t much fun.
At school, Nick tripped Max twice in the hall. Max imagined rats in Nick’s backpack. Rocco and Luis stole Max’s backpack and broke all of his pencils. Max imagined toadstools in their sandwiches. Nick snatched Max’s lunchtime banana and stomped it into a mushy mess on the playground. Max imagined a giant stomping Nick.
After that, he considered going back to Wishworks, Inc., and wishing Nick and his henchmen away the way he had wished Ratty away. It would work, he knew. And he wanted them to go away. But wishing something away was scary. So he just kept imagining rats and toadstools and giants. Imagining didn’t keep the bullies from bothering him, but at least it made Max feel a little better.
After dinner and homework, Max used the time before bed to finish unpacking the moving boxes. He arranged all his belongings in his room just the way he wanted them. Even when he was finally finished and his room really felt like his room, he wasn’t as happy as he’d hoped.
One night when Max had put on his pajamas, he sat on his bed and thought. His life was much, much better than it used to be. He had finally stopped waking up at Ratty-walking time. He had grown used to sleeping alone in bed. Mrs. Chang had started giving him and Polly graham crackers instead of broccoli after school sometimes. And in math, Mr. Malone had started weighing and measuring, which was sort of interesting.
He and Jerome Fisher sat together on the bus all the time now. One day, Jerome had asked if he could come over and walk King with him after school. Max told him he wasn’t allowed to have anybody over while his mother was at work. So Jerome invited Max to his house instead. Max got to meet Jerome’s mother and his baby brother, who cried all the time. He got to stay for dinner. While they ate, Jerome’s father told them more stories about his work. And before Max went home, Jerome let him feed Sam the goldfish.
But in spite of all these good things, Max wasn’t happy. He had had a real dog for a while and now he didn’t. An imaginary dog just wasn’t good enough anymore. He couldn’t have Jerome come to his house to play with King. In fact, unless he wanted to tell Jerome that King was only an imaginary dog, he couldn’t have Jerome come to his house at all.
Max thought about Wishworks, Inc. He knew he could imagine himself back there any time he wanted. He knew he would always have a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket to buy another wish. And he knew that once he made the wish, it would come true.
But now he understood how tricky wishes could be. He remembered what the old man had said before his first wish: “This is the hard part.” Max hadn’t believed him. He hadn’t thought hard enough before making that wish.
He hadn’t thought hard before wishing Ratty away either. He hadn’t thought how it would make Polly feel. Or Mother. Or Ali Baba. Max sighed. He hadn’t even known how it would make him feel.
If he were to go back and make another wish, how would he be able to imagine all the things that might go wrong with it and keep them from happening? How could he make a wish that he could be absolutely sure would work the way he wanted it to work? And how could he really know what would make him happy before it happened?
Max took out a pad of paper and a pencil. At the top he wrote Real Live Dog. Under that he listed what he thought would make him happy:
1. The dog should like me.
2. I should like the dog.
3. It shouldn’t be ugly.
4. Mother and Polly should like the dog.
5. Ali Baba should like the dog.
6 .Mrs. Chang should like the dog.
Max chewed on the end of his pencil for a moment. What else?
7. The dog should be able to catch a ball in the air.
8. The dog should have a mind of its own.
9. But not so much that I can’t keep it from doing awful things.
He read his list over twice. Would all those things really make him happy? Yes, he thought. Then he thought, I think so. Then he thought, Maybe. He was afraid something could still go wrong.
Max thought and thought and thought. And then he had an idea. He knew what he could say. It’s what he should have said when he made his very first wish.
He closed his eyes and imagined himself standing in front of the counter at Wishworks, Inc. The old man smiled at him. “I figured you’d be back,” he said. “It takes a while to get the hang of this.”
Max nodded. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the twenty-dollar bill he knew would be there. He handed it to the old man. He said the words of his wish in his head to be sure he wouldn’t make a mistake. Then he took a breath and said, “I want the exactly right real, live dog!”
“Done,” the old man said as the cash register clanged.
14
THE SOUND OF THE CASH register hadn’t even died away before Max heard the doorbell. “I’ll get it!” he yelled, leaping off his bed. He ran down the hall and reached the front door by the time his mother had gotten up from her chair. This would be his wish, he thought. It was a good wish, a perfect wish, and it had come true almost as soon as he made it! Outside the door already was his dog. The exactly right dog. This dog would be everything he wanted his dog to be, everything he’d put on his list. This dog would make him happy. He could feel his heart beating very fast. All he had to do was open the door and let it in.
Still, he was just a tiny bit nervous. He peered through the peephole in the door. The face of a man in a police uniform seemed to look in at him. It was Jerome Fisher’s father. Maybe the right dog would be a police dog, a big, handsome German shepherd.
The moment Max opened the door, a dirty yellow blur leaped from Officer Fisher’s arms and landed with a grunt and a yelp at Max’s feet. Yipping and whining, it jumped up on Max, scratching his legs through his pajama bottoms. No, Max thought. No, no, no, no, no! How could the man at Wishworks, Inc., get his perfect wish so completely wrong?
Polly came running from her room, Ali Baba right behind her. “Hurray, hurray, hurray!” she was yelling. “Goldie’s back!”
Max got down on his knees so Ratty couldn’t scratch his legs anymore, and pushed the dog away. She thought he was playing. She jumped at him, put her paws on his shoulders, and licked his face. Then she bounded over to Polly and flopped on her back, whining for Polly to rub her tummy.
Officer Fisher was shaking his head. “Jerome just said you knew who the dog belonged to. He didn’t realize she was yours.”
Ali Baba stepped out from behind Polly. The dog saw him and chased him down the hall and back again. They ran twice around the living room, and then Ali Baba went under the couch. Ratty got stuck halfway under, snarling and growling and wagging her tail furiously.
Officer Fisher introduced himself to Max’s mother. She thanked him for bringing Goldie back. “Where did you find her?”
“Well, that’s an odd story,” he said. “I stepped out on our front stoop a little while ago and this little dog came tearing down the sidewalk. A big, reddish-brown dog was chasing her. Before I could close the door behind me, she barreled right between my legs and into the house.”
Max looked up. “Did the dog that was chasing her have a big plume of a tail?”
“He sure did. Handsome dog, he was.”
King! Max thought. It was the first thing King had ever done without being asked.
With a sigh, Max sat down on the floor. Ratty came over and climbed onto his lap. She was as dirty as she’d been when she first came to them. That meant he would have to give her a bath again. He groaned.
He could feel her ribs through her scruffy fur. It was a good thing they still had her food. The exactly right real, live dog, he had told the man at Wishworks, Inc. Real and live as she was, there was no way she was the right dog. No way at all.
Ratty turned around and around and lay down in his lap. Max looked at her. Something about her had changed while she was gone. Dirty as she was, she wasn’t quite as ugly as she used to be. The tufts of hair around her ears didn’t look so odd. Even her tail wasn’t as ratty as it used to be. He touched her head. She looked up at him and blinked her eyes. He hadn’t noticed before how gold her eyes were. He hadn’t noticed her dark brown eyelashes. He patted her head and she reached up and licked his face again. Whatever the change was, it sure hadn’t helped her breath! He wondered if there was such a thing as a doggie breath mint.
Officer Fisher was going on with his story. “As soon as the dog ran inside, I went to close the door so the big dog wouldn’t follow this one in. My wife is allergic to dogs, and she was already h
ollering like crazy. But the big dog had just — vanished! I can’t imagine where he got to. All the fuss woke the baby, of course, and he started crying. It was chaos.”
Of course the big dog vanished, Max thought. He was surprised that Officer Fisher had been able to see King in the first place. No one else ever had.
“Meantime, this little dog had found Jerome and was barking and jumping all over him. Jerome said he’d seen his friend Max walking her one time.”
Friend? Max thought. Jerome had called him his friend?
“He said she belonged to a family Max knew. I had to get the dog out of our house, so I thought I’d just bring her over and find out if you could tell me where she belongs.”
“She belongs here,” Mother said.
“I can see that!”
What, Max wondered, would he tell Jerome about King? If Jerome thought he was a friend, would he be mad that Max had lied to him?
“I didn’t want Jerome to think she was my dog,” Max told Officer Fisher. “So I told him about my imaginary dog instead. His name is King.”
To Max’s relief, Jerome’s father smiled and nodded. “Jerome used to have an imaginary dog too — name of Valiant. No allergy worries with Valiant.”
Mother thanked Officer Fisher and asked if he would accept a reward for bringing Goldie back.
“No, no. I was just doing my job,” he said with a grin, “taking a menace off the streets. What Jerome would call a scourge! He’s heavy into fantasy. Knights and dragons and so on.”
“Well, you’re definitely our knight in shining armor,” Mother said.
“Tell Jerome thanks too,” Max said. “Tell him I’ll see him at the bus stop in the morning.” I have a friend, Max thought. One who will understand about King. The next time Dad called, Max would tell him about Jerome.
Wishworks, Inc. Page 5
