by Sally J. Pla
And about that mangy beast. Apparently, while I was in the Twa Corbies and Davis was breaking up with Jonathan Dylan Daniels, the twins found a little black and white pup tied to a rope in someone’s weedy, overgrown lot. There was a sign, written on a piece of scrap cardboard in thick black marker: Free to good owner. It looked like both the sign, and the dog, had been there a long time.
There was a metal bowl with an inch of warm water, and ants swimming in it.
A scruffy old guy came out of the house. He told the boys how it had been his nephew’s dog, and they could just untie and take him, “If it was okay with their mama.” The twins said it sure definitely was.
The old guy gave them a bag of stale kibble, and the leash, and the metal bowl. Joel and Jake washed the ants out with a hose, and gave the dog fresh water right then and there. “You should’ve seen him. He drank and drank and drank,” Jake said.
The dog is white, with cow-patches of wiry black and brown fur. He’s got a snub nose and warm brown eyes. He seems glad to be with us. His tail is wagging like mad as he leans against the twins’ knees. Also, he may be leaning against them for support, because he only has three legs. The back left one is missing from clear up by the hip bone. Whatever caused it must have happened long ago. It’s all healed up. Or maybe he was born that way. He doesn’t seem to mind having three legs, anyway. He seems totally used to it, like it’s no problem whatsoever.
The dog twitches an ear, then bares his teeth at me in this weird grimace, while wagging his tail. He wags so hard, he throws himself off balance and almost falls over.
“That’s a smile!” shouts Jake. “He’s smiling at Charlie!”
“No accounting for taste,” says Joel.
We have all wanted a puppy for years. But especially Joel and Jake. They spend hours watching dog videos all the time. Joel likes big dogs; Jake likes small dogs. They love to argue about what kind of dog they’d get, if they could get one. It’s one of their favorite twin-conversations.
They have some dog-care experience, too. The Blanco family, down the street, started asking them to dog-sit their two black poodles, Punch and Judy, this year. The Blancos skipped right over asking me to dog-sit. They went right from asking Davis, to asking the twins. I don’t know why they thought I couldn’t take care of Punch and Judy. I would have done a great job. I love dogs, too. I would have been a very careful dog-sitter.
“Hey, Davis,” the twins say. “He’s smiling at you now!”
“Uh-huh,” Davis mumbles, stares off into the distance. Her eyes have black-mask smears of mascara around them. I remember early this morning at the gas station, when she had that sparkly lip-gloss smile. Nothing’s very glossy about Davis anymore.
The dog shows his tiny little teeth and lolling pink tongue, waiting for Davis to get happy. Wag. Wag wag. But Davis keeps staring at nothing.
“The dog can be in the car with us; no problem, right?” says Joel.
“God, it smells,” says Davis, waving her hand back and forth.
“It’s not an it,” says Jake. “It’s a him.”
“What are we gonna name him? How about Dr. Who?” says Joel.
“That’s stupid,” says Jake.
“You’re stupid,” says Joel.
“Shut up,” says Jake, tightening his grip on the leash.
Davis slumps over on the bench and puts her head back in her hands for some more quiet sobbing.
I don’t say anything. I just hold on to Shaw’s green journal, tracing the gold feather on the cover with my finger, over and over and over.
A long time goes by before finally, down the road at the far traffic light, we see a small gray car appear. It looms up and lurches to a stop right in front of us. The door flings open, and a red-eyed, messy-haired Ludmila stumbles out.
“Well. So here are the runaways.”
She puts her hands on her hips and looks at Davis. “Very smart, young lady. You take your brothers for little trip?”
Davis just turns her head away.
Joel speaks up. “We were going to go see Dad. Jon said he’d take us,” he says in a higher, whinier voice than usual. Joel is sitting on the pile of our backpacks, the dirty three-legged dog snuggled in his lap. “Davis and Jon. They said they’d take us on an adventure, to go be with Dad. That everything would be fine. But then? Well, then . . .”
Ludmila stares at the dog like she’s not sure what it is. “I know what happened after that. You all okay? You? You? You?” She points at each of us in turn, and we nod, to answer her, one by one.
“Okay, then,” Ludmila says. “You’re safe and ready for your grandmother to KILL YOU!”
There’s total silence. The dog whines, but Ludmila ignores it. She grabs her phone out of her jeans pocket and jabs a number in with her finger. Then she thrusts the phone out to Davis. We can hear Gram’s tiny, faraway voice already shouting through it. She sounds like an angry bee, buzzing and fussing. Davis fits in quicks uh-huhs, yesses, and sorry, Grams. The whole time, tears are sliding out of her eyes.
Meanwhile, Ludmila goes back around to her little car and opens her trunk. She crams as many of our bags in there as she can fit.
“How long will it take us to get home?” I ask. I can’t wait to be in my safe, clean room again. To fall asleep for a long, long time and forget about all this.
Ludmila turns, a backpack in each hand. “We are not going home, Charlie,” she says, and juts her chin toward Davis, crying on the phone to Gram.
“Then where are we going?” I say, panic starting to squeeze in my throat.
Ludmila doesn’t answer. Davis has come to hand back her phone. “I’m—I’m sorry, okay?” Davis hiccups, staring at the sidewalk. “I’m supposed to say I’m sorry for the trouble. And that we’ll be good. And thanks for taking us.” She sniffs at every other word.
“Wait. Taking us where?” I ask. My stomach is suddenly cold with doubt. I am shaking my hands. I realize I am jumping up and down, up and down.
“To Virginia.” Ludmila points to some huge duffel bags strapped to the little gray car’s roof. “See? Supplies. More clothes, camping gear. Your grandmother, such a nice lady, good person. She asked me to help, so I help. I bring you all to her. Even though I am not, what you say, a kids’ person.”
Wait. This is wrong. I’ve been waiting all this time to go home, to my safe, clean room, where I can finally breathe. This can’t be happening! This can’t be the plan!
My stomach goes into washing machine mode.
“In a few more days, you will be there with your dad. To face whatever comes next, good or bad, like a family together.” Ludmila’s eyes look like they are trying to lock a tractor beam onto my eyes from behind her smudgy glasses.
But I break that tractor beam. I burst out: “NO! I want to go home! I NEED to go home!”
Davis and the twins stare at me. The dog whines.
But Ludmila just opens the side door of the little gray car. “Sorry, kid. It’s all decided. No more protests. No more crying. Just driving. Everyone in. It’s a long trip and I want to get us somewhere special by midnight. Um . . . Do we have to take that dog? Really?”
And like it or not, off we go.
13
We have been driving forever in the smallest car in the world. I am next to Ludmila, and Davis is behind me. The twins are behind Ludmila, sharing one seat belt, and the dog is at the half-open window, half on Joel’s lap, filling the whole car up with his stinky fish breath. We’ve just passed Salt Lake City. All our stomachs are growling. We’re sleepy, but it’s so cramped, our knees in our chests and our bags everywhere—no one could possibly conk out in here.
Jake keeps poking my shoulder, over and over, just to be annoying. I jerk forward, cross my arms, and stare at the ceiling of Ludmila’s tiny car. It has beige fabric with this little pattern of three diagonal pinpricks, over and over, pingpingping, pingpingping, pingpingping. I stare at the pinpricks and think of the three stars in Orion’s Belt, in the nighttime sky. Be
sides the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt is the only thing I can ever pick out, because the pingpingping is really bright.
I stare at those beige pinpricks and try to drown out everything else, until my eyes go blurry, or maybe even a little teary.
I think of home. I want to go home.
My room at home has a knotty pinewood ceiling. It’s the color of warm honey, with swirls and lines in the grainy wood. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been staring up at that ceiling, and I can sort of make out things in it. I see silhouettes of people’s faces. Images. I know that sounds weird.
The main one I look for, the one I greet on my ceiling every morning, is of my mom. I don’t remember her personally, of course. But there’s this ceiling swirl that looks just like her profile in Dad’s favorite photo. It was taken in Mexico City, and she’s wearing a doctor’s white lab coat. She’s got her dark brown hair combed back from her face. Her dark eyes are set kind of wide apart, and her nose is long and straight. She has a wide smile. My dad’s in that photo, too, looking so different from her—tall and blond, with those smile-wrinkles around his eyes called crow’s-feet that look nothing like crow’s-feet.
Anyhow, if you look closely at this one spot on my ceiling, you’ll see two pine knots like Mom’s wide dark eyes, and between them brown wavy lines in the wood that resemble her nose, and the exact curve of her smile. That’s what I look for, when I wake up in the morning.
Who knows when I’ll ever get to see that ceiling again.
Ludmila said Gram told her the experts at the new hospital in Virginia are running many high-tech tests. That Dad’s intracranial pressure is good. Things look good.
Davis is glad about things looking good. The twins are glad. The dog must be glad because his tail is always wagging; everyone seems glad.
How can they all just accept the word good? Good is a very vague word like fine. Basically meaningless.
Also, it seems like I’m the only one who wants to talk about Jonathan Dylan Daniels’s car accident. Davis says not to ever mention his name again. The twins, it’s like they’ve put it behind them. Not me. I can still feel the horrible, floating feeling of Jonathan Dylan Daniels’s car spinning. Still hear the BAM! The crunch. When I close my eyes, I can still feel it happening, over and over. Each time, I flinch. Each time, I gasp.
“Don’t you still hear it in your head?” I ask Davis. “The crunch? The BAM?”
“Shut up, Charlie,” Davis mutters.
I look over at Ludmila. “Are you a safe driver?” I ask for the fifth time.
“Yes, Charlie,” she says. “For the millionth time.”
I don’t like exaggerators.
We keep driving northeast, through most of Utah. I’ve never been to Utah. We pass the Great Salt Lake and Ludmila won’t let us out of the car, because she keeps saying we are too much in a hurry to get to this mysterious place we have to stop at tonight.
But now, finally, we are all starving. We see a bunch of lit-up fast-food logos by an exit ramp, and that does it.
“FOOD! YES!” shout Joel and Jake at the top of their lungs, making the dog bark. “FOOD! NOW!!”
We pull off at a burger place that’s super-bright, with overhead lights that chitter and flitter and hurt my eyes. Hideous pop music blares through the speakers. “I’m going to wash my hands,” I tell Davis. “Get me the usual.”
“Charlie,” Davis says, sighing. “Order your own.” She points to the order-taker people in their paper hats behind the counter. “They won’t bite.”
“Just order for me. Please?”
She shrugs her shoulders in defeat and goes to stand in line.
Yay!
I check out the window to make sure the dog is okay in the car. I can just see his nose sniffing at the inch of cranked-open window we gave him. “Sorry, dog,” I whisper to him. “We won’t be long. Promise. And I’ll bring you a chicken nugget.”
The restroom reeks of fake-flowery deodorizing spray. My eyes tear and my nostrils sting, but I get through twelve rounds of soap-rinse-one-soap-rinse-two-soap-rinse-three . . .
When I come back, the four of them are already munching, taking up a whole booth.
“I got your usual. Sit there, Charlie.” Davis points to the booth behind them.
No problem. From here, I can see out the window better, to check on the dog. Plus, I like my own personal space.
I think about pulling out Tiberius’s little green journal, but this is not a sacred enough place. I pull out my Bird Book instead, and start writing in it.
WHY WE SHOULD TURN AROUND AND GO HOME.
DAD WON’T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE.
LUDMILA’S CAR IS WAY TOO SMALL.
DOGS NEED YARDS TO PLAY IN.
IT’S GOING TO TAKE FOREVER.
GAS IS EXPENSIVE.
THE LUDMILA PROBLEM. (WHAT IF DAVIS IS RIGHT?
WHY DOES SHE CARE SO MUCH ABOUT DAD? WHY DOES SHE DRESS SO STRANGE?
This gives me an even worse thought, and my stomach churns. I nibble a nugget to calm myself, and write it down:
WHAT IF LUDMILA IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED? WHAT IF SHE’S FOOLED GRAM INTO BELIEVING SHE’S HARMLESS, BUT REALLY, DEEP INSIDE, SHE HAS SOME KIND OF SECRET, UNDERHANDED PLAN?)
I scare myself so much with this shocking thought, I can’t breathe for a minute. I slam my Bird Book shut and choke on my lemonade. We absolutely have to talk to Gram, so that we can ask her to explain why she thinks this total stranger’s trustworthy and okay. Just like something Dad talked about once: “Trust, but verify.”
My heart pounds. I lean over the seat and tap Davis on the shoulder.
“What is it, Charlie?” Davis has a little blob of white sauce stuck to her lip.
“We need to talk to Gram again, soon,” I tell her. “Also, you need a napkin.”
“We’ll call her,” says Davis. “Put away that book and eat.”
The twins inspect my food arrangement. I always lay my chicken nuggets out in a neat horizontal row on my napkin. I like to see them displayed properly, waiting to be slowly consumed or rejected in order from largest to smallest.
I usually do quality control first. Flick off any overly brown or unacceptable bits. Then, if there’s an even number of nuggets, I’ll start eating left to right. If there’s an odd number, I start in the middle, then work my way through, middle-left-right-left-right.
The twins tell Ludmila, “Look at what Charlie does.”
Davis says, “And he’s always writing in that notebook of his. I guess now, it’s like his travel journal. He should probably call it ‘Chicken Nuggets Across America.’ Because that’s all he ever eats.” Everyone laughs. It’s like they are trying to impress Ludmila by making fun of me.
Joel chimes in, trying hard to do a fake British accent. “The chicken nuggets of Las Vegas vary from the chicken nuggets of San Diego in a slight saltiness of breading,” and Davis adds in, “There’s a certain je ne sais quoi of crisp in the Nevada desert variety.”
Ludmila’s visual cue is unreadable.
“When can we talk to Gram?” I ask.
“In the morning, Charlie,” Ludmila says.
“What’s this burning desire to call Gram all of a sudden?” Davis asks.
(Because this lady could be taking us anywhere! Maybe you were right about her to begin with, Davis!) I can’t say that out loud, but I try to beam it to Davis telepathically.
I inspect a nugget. There are too many little black flecks in this one, so I put it in the reject pile.
Ludmila is still staring at me with no facial expression. “Everything okay?”
I take a long slow sip of lemonade to try and un-lump my closed-up throat.
“The car’s too small. The drive is too long. We should turn back.” I am starting to feel like I can’t breathe. Brain pressure. Maybe intracranial. My heart is pounding like a rabbit thumping in my chest, bursting to get out. My hands itch.
Davis scrambles out of her red plastic seat and comes over to sit next to me. “Charl
ie, come on,” she says in her kindergarten-teacher, “let’s calm Charlie” voice. “We’ve all been bending over backward for you, so come on now. Think of Dad. He’s waiting for us there, in Virginia!”
“Yeah, Charlie,” says Joel, his eyes wide.
I can tell the twins really want to believe everything is going to be okay. But when did Davis change from doubting everything about Ludmila, Intruder Gorilla, to trusting her?
I want to go home.
Ludmila is quietly collecting up all our paper garbage. “Well, Charlie’s right about my car. It is too small for five people and a dog, for a cross-country drive. But don’t worry—that’s why we need to get to Wyoming.”
Maybe she is going to kill us off, or sell us into slavery. We’re pretty much at her mercy. Anything could happen. We are not safe anymore. And all I can do is keep my fears to myself, and wait and see.
14
Supposedly, in England, they have this expression: “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” It’s just a weird way of saying, don’t get upset. Knickers is a British word for underwear.
Well, right now, my actual underwear is actually twisted, and I’m upset. Both of those things. “It’s almost midnight!” I moan. “And my butt hurts! When are we going to stop?”
The twins are sleeping in back, curled up with Dog. He started out smelling like rotting fish. Now he smells like rotting fish someone left in a public porta potty overnight. I am gagging so bad, I’m riding with my head out the window.
“For crying out loud, the dog smells fine, Charlie,” explodes Davis. “Shut the window!”
We keep on. My knees ache and the seat belt’s dug a permanent rut into my neck and my back is screaming to be stretched. We’ve gone from sunny palm-tree San Diego, to flat, beige Nevada, to rocky red Utah, and now, in the growing dark, we’re heading through low, rolling hills in Wyoming. Big herds of cattle graze just off the road. We come on a whole ton of them in a huge fenced enclosure that stretches at least half a mile. I didn’t think this was humanly possible, but they maybe stink worse than the dog. I roll up the window fast.
