Trouble

by Gary D. Schmidt

  Her tail was still curled low between her legs.

  When she finished, Henry dumped in another can of beef stew, and she went to it, slobbering her jowls and throwing gobbets of the stew against the light maple cabinets.

  The kitchen was beginning to smell like cold beef stew and wet dog, so Henry was hardly surprised when his father came in—wearing an untied bathrobe, unshaved, uncombed!—and began to sniff. He looked over the kitchen island to see what the snuffling sounds were on the other side. He sniffed again.

  "It smells like you have a dog in here," he said. "A wet dog." His voice was tight.

  It did not seem useful to Henry to lie about this.

  Especially since the dog came around the corner of the island and sat down, her head cocked off to the side so that the ear with the large missing piece stuck out.

  Now Henry's father's face grew tight, too.

  "Get the dog out of here," he said.

  "I just saved her from drowning out in the cove."

  "That was a mistake. You don't go looking for Trouble, Henry. ... Get away."

  The last part was directed not at Henry but at the dog, who had come to sniff Henry's father to see if he might be at all interesting.

  "Get away," he said again. "Black dog, get away."

  The dog lifted up a paw.

  And Henry's father kicked her about as hard as a slippered foot can kick. Enough to skid her across the quarried-stone floor.

  She did not cry out. When she stopped skidding, she turned on her back, put her feet up in the air, and showed her belly.

  "Why did you ever bring that dog in here?" said Henry's father. "Look at her. Who would want a black dog like that? Lying there, all beat up. Bleeding. Pieces of her missing." He stopped. He leaned against the kitchen island and put his hands across his eyes. "Pieces of her missing," he said again. His body trembled, slowly, and then a little bit more, and a little more, like a building that is beginning to feel the earthquake starting under its foundations.

  Then his mouth opened, and though no sound came out, his silent howls filled the kitchen.

  Henry held his father. Tight. Very tight. He felt the black dog come back to them. He felt his father reach down to scratch her behind her chipped ear. He saw the dog roll her face with pleasure against his father's untied robe—and hoped that his father would not see the pus and blood that she left there.

  They stood, the three of them, together in the kitchen, and two things happened.

  First, Black Dog had a home and a name.

  Second, the telephone rang. It was the hospital.

  Henry changed while his parents dressed. They were already waiting for him in the BMW that his father had pulled around. "Leave the dog out in the carriage house," he said.

  "Dog?" said his mother.

  They raced through Blythbury-by-the-Sea, so fast that if it hadn't been a car they recognized, the town's policemen would have stopped the Smiths by the end of Main Street. They reached the hospital, bounced across the parking ramp, half-walked and half-ran through the hospital lobby, smacked at the elevator button until the doors opened, and ran through the corridor to Franklin's room, where three nurses—two of them big enough to be impressive rugby players—were holding Henry's brother down.

  "Another seizure," one of the nurses said. "He almost tore the straps off."

  Henry's mother sat down on the bed.

  "He's sedated now, but there were signs that another one was about to start."

  Henry's mother laid her hand over her son's heart.

  "Franklin," she said softly.

  He opened his eyes. They were bright and fierce. The nurses tightened their grip on him and spread their legs, ready for the next monumental struggle.

  But Franklin did not struggle. He looked around from face to face, wildly, quickly. It was as if he was in a room full of strangers and he was desperately trying to find the one face that he knew, the one face that meant something to him.

  And then he found it.

  He looked at Henry. His eyes fixed on him, so bright that Henry thought they were about to burst into flame.

  He spoke, his voice as urgent as a prophet's. One word to Henry. One word.

  He turned to the window and looked far out.

  And he said the word again, softly.

  Then the fire died, his bright eyes dulled and closed, and the strength of his body deflated into the bed. But the word echoed in the room and in Henry's brain.

  "Katahdin."

  He first saw her from high up, while standing on the scaffolding, the slate pieces stacked around him. It was late in the day, and she came out of the house with a bowl of cereal in her hand and walked toward the ledges over the sea. And just before she got there, she turned and waved to him. Just waved. Only for a moment.

  He waved back.

  And his father, tied carefully to the roof, told him to keep his eyes where they were supposed to be kept.

  But that was the beginning.

  3

  IN THE THREE CENTURIES that the Smith house had stood on the ledges over the sea, no dog had ever tramped through its rooms. Not a one. The stout oaken timbers had held all the forces of nature at bay. Earthquakes, hurricanes, solar eclipses, meteorite strikes (there had been two), lightning (four times)—none had shaken it. Powers, principalities, and dominions had sometimes warred against its frame: British regulars had almost burned it, General Stonewall Jackson had boasted that he would use it as his campaign headquarters someday, and a German U-boat commander off the coast during World War II had wondered whether a torpedo against the ledges would collapse the house into the sea.

  But nothing had shaken it—until Black Dog.

  When Henry and his parents got back from the hospital late in the afternoon, Black Dog was not in the carriage house, where Henry had left her. Somehow she had figured out how to pull down the latch and open the doors. But that wasn't the height of her miracles. After she escaped from the carriage house, she had gone back around to the service door—which was unlocked, because the house was so far from Trouble—and pulled down the latch on that door as well. It was still open, and the Smiths walked into the hallway and slowly followed her trail with impressed horror.

  Black Dog had gone into the kitchen first, probably since she was familiar with it. She had nosed open the cupboards until she found the pantry, and she had pulled all of the soup cans and sacks of onions and jars of canned vegetables and applesauce and bottles of New Hampshire maple syrup out into the kitchen before she found what she wanted: a jar of peanut butter with a loose lid. She had licked it clean, eating what she wanted and then smearing the rest all over the quarried stone floors and the light maple cupboards.

  Then Black Dog had gone into the library and climbed up onto Henry's father's desk—a desk older than the house and once used by Oliver Cromwell's secretary—and left peanut-butter paw prints there. Then she had jumped down onto the couch and sunk her toenails deep into the red leather—which apparently she enjoyed, since she had walked all over it until settling down to taste the left armrest.

  From there, Black Dog had gone to the south parlor and wiped what must have been the rest of the peanut butter from her snout onto the linen tapestry from Bayeux. Then she climbed up into the window seat to enjoy the view of the Atlantic. Finding the cushions a bit lumpy, she had torn most of their stuffing out. Afterward, she had jumped down and chased her tail—at least that's what Henry figured, since the scratch marks on the Italian tile went in circles.

  Then she had gone upstairs, and at the top—oh, there had been some peanut butter left, after all, and she had wiped it off on the Oriental runner—at the top, she had inspected the antique blue chinaware collection that had been settled on those shelves when Massachusetts Bay was still a colony, tottering the pieces on the lowest shelf toward the edge. The notion of a dog's snout in the Smith porcelain shivered Henry's parents.

  "Find that dog and put it out," said Henry's mother, turning to the shelves.
"Then start cleaning up. You're the one who brought her into the house, Henry. You're responsible."

  Henry had to acknowledge that this was fair, and he went to find Black Dog.

  This turned out not to be too difficult; all he had to do was to follow the peanut-butter smears along the hallway walls. He tried to imagine the cataclysm of peanut butter that must have engulfed the dog in the kitchen—a cataclysm still in evidence when he finally found her, wrapped up in the down quilt that covered his bed, her peanut-buttery nose tucked under her peanut-buttery tail, asleep, breathing quietly, absolutely and completely content.

  His room reeked of peanut butter.

  He cranked open the windows, and the moment he made a sound, Black Dog's head was up and her ears were forward and her eyes bright. She jumped down off the bed, dragging the quilt with her—"Now listen, Black Dog!"—and she circled around him, almost prancing—"You've got to"—until she finally flopped down at his feet and turned her belly up to him—"cut all this out." She pawed the air and waited for Henry to scratch her and tell her what a good dog she was.

  Which, of course, he did.

  Then he took her back down to the carriage house and secured the latch with a chain so that she wouldn't get out again.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the peanut butter, while his mother washed the chinaware and called the furniture shop.

  Henry and his parents tried not to listen to Black Dog whine and beg and cry and bark pathetically during their otherwise very quiet and very still supper. But during their quiet and still dessert, they couldn't help but hear the latch opening on the back service door, and the click, click, click of toenails across the quarried-stone floor, and the great bark of joy and delight when Black Dog found Henry in the dining room.

  Beside his chair, she turned over and showed her belly. Am I not amazingly smart? she asked.

  Henry's mother sat back. "You're going to have to get rid of that dog," she said.

  "Maybe she'd quiet down if I took her for long walks," said Henry.

  "You'd have to take her for marathons. And besides, Henry, she's awful. She smells."

  "Just because of the peanut butter. I'll give her a bath."

  "And she's destructive."

  "I can keep her tied up."

  "And I don't think those scars will ..."

  Silence.

  Long silence.

  "No, they won't," said Henry's father, finally.

  They all watched Black Dog on her back, panting happily and waiting to be scratched.

  Then Henry stood, stepped over Black Dog, whistled, and together they headed down to Salvage Cove, where Black Dog sprinted up and down the beach in her floppy run, staying far away from the water, and coming back over and over again to show Henry her belly.

  That night, Henry tied Black Dog to a budding maple below his window, and after she had whined and begged and cried and barked pathetically for a couple of hours, Henry sneaked down through the house and brought her inside. He had to carry her across the floors so she wouldn't wake his parents—if they had gotten to sleep at all—and she squirmed as if she were being carried above the Abyss. But once he got her up to his room—which still smelled slightly of peanut butter—and put her down, she was up on her toes and prancing around him happily.

  "Cut it out," Henry whispered, maybe too fiercely, since Black Dog lowered her ears and dragged her tail beneath her belly.

  "Lie down, right there," said Henry.

  Black Dog followed the circle patterns on Henry's rug and lay down among them. She squirmed a bit into the warm and soft thickness, then put her head down. Her eyes—her lovely brown eyes—followed Henry's every move.

  "Stay," said Henry, and he turned off the light.

  The moon glowed. It was full and bright, so bright that everything in Henry's room turned silver. Beneath him far below, lazy waves sashayed onto the rocky ledges.

  "Good dog," said Henry.

  Which was enough of an invitation for Black Dog to raise her head and, in one fling of her body, jump onto Henry's bed.

  "Black Dog!" he said.

  But Black Dog was already digging at the down quilt and organizing it around herself. She looked at Henry, grinned, and collapsed. She was asleep in a moment. With soft hands, the moonlight buffed what fur she had and made it glow.

  Henry lay back.

  But he did not go to sleep.

  He listened to the loud and slow rhythm of Black Dog's breathing, and over it he could hear his brother's voice. "Katahdin." He could see his brother's open eyes, searching for the one face he wanted. Henry's.

  "Katahdin."

  In the dark, Henry could see the mountain. Its long peaks rising out of the flat green land. The circle of the mountain, as if it had risen to guard the blue lake in which it dangled its feet. The sheer stone of its sides. The way the heated, rough granite would smell. The sound of the wind streaking across the craggy trails along the peaks. He lay there, listening to Black Dog's snorting dreams, and listening, too, to his brother's urgent voice.

  "Katahdin."

  "Why Katahdin?" Henry had asked a month ago.

  "Because it's there, little brother," Franklin had said. "You scared?"

  "No."

  "You should be scared. You don't call a trail 'the Knife Edge' for nothing. People die there all the time."

  Henry had listened with round and wide eyes.

  "You do that climb, you have guts. You can handle anything."

  "Handle what?"

  "Handle Trouble. Like, suppose you hear at school that someone who doesn't deserve to be at Longfellow Prep is talking with Louisa. And maybe he wants to do more than talk. You have to handle that. You have to find this guy so it's just the two of you, and you put your finger in the middle of his chest and you tell him to stay away from her, and to show him you mean it, you shove him up on the wall and hold your forearm across his neck—like this." Franklin had shoved Henry against the wall and pressed his forearm against his throat. "You let him know that you're ready for Trouble. You let him know that you're not going to let other people think you'll put up with someone like him touching your sister. ... See what I mean?"

  "Yes," said Henry. He didn't.

  Franklin took his arm away from Henry's neck. "That's what climbing Katahdin means," Franklin said. "It shows you've got guts, and that you're ready to stand by yourself and handle Trouble. Except there's one problem, Henry."

  Henry had stared at him.

  "I saw you play Kenilworth, and you don't have any guts." Franklin punched his arm. Too hard. Then he laughed and walked away.

  Henry lay in the darkness. Black Dog dreamed dreams.

  The next morning, Henry got up for Whittier for the first time since Trouble had come to find him. He got up early so he could secretly carry the squirming Black Dog out of his room and out of the house. And he almost succeeded—until Louisa appeared in the kitchen at the last second, ready for Longfellow Prep. She didn't say anything. So Henry let Black Dog down and she ran over to Louisa, showed her belly, and panted happily. Louisa crouched and patted her lightly. "She smells like peanut butter," she said.

  "I still have to give her a bath," said Henry.

  "That's not all she needs," she said quietly.

  Then their mother came in. Louisa stood. Black Dog grinned up at her and whined. Louisa looked down at the scarred and battered dog. Then, suddenly, as if the moment had broken in two and let everything fall out of it, she ran across the kitchen and into her mother's arms and began to sob, but with no sound, and with no words. Her mother stroked her dark hair. But it all lasted only for a few seconds. The moment jarred back together, and Louisa pulled away. She ran out of the kitchen. The sound of her footsteps on the stairs came back to them.

  Henry's mother put out a hand to the kitchen island to prop herself up. "Take the dog outside," she said.

  Henry led Black Dog out of the house and down to Salvage Cove. The tide was high, and the waves came in, and c
ame in, and came in, battering on the shore, sounding like Katahdin, Katahdin, Katahdin. Henry's heart beat wildly within him, thinking of how Louisa would love to run with Black Dog. How Franklin might have loved to run with Black Dog, and now he might never. ... And then he squashed down the traitorous thought.

  Of course Franklin would run again. He was Franklin Smith, O Franklin Smith, the great lord of us all, Franklin Smith.

  But Henry had to admit, deep down, that he hoped that Black Dog would rather run with him than with his brother or sister.

  Then his mother called him back from above the black boulders.

  Mr. Smith, who had planned to drive Henry into school, had decided to stay home that day—he hadn't been to his Boston office since the accident. So Henry's mother drove him instead. Black Dog rode in the back seat, because she jumped in before they could do a thing about it. Except for Black Dog's panting, they drove in silence. Silence, Henry figured, was Trouble's good friend.

  Henry was surprised that Whittier was so unchanged, since he had been gone for something like half a lifetime and the whole world had changed for him. But Whittier—and maybe even the whole world, too—had gone on as if what had happened to Franklin Smith didn't much matter. The clipped grass was sotted with the morning dew, as it had been every spring morning. The ivy that ran up the burnt brick walls had not faltered but was greening up in the spring sun. The paths across the quadrangle were perfectly swept—as they always were. The bright flags of country, state, and academy flew briskly—as they always would. The cars were arriving one by one to let off students, their books shiny with red-and-white Whittier Academy book covers. Inside, the slightly sweaty smell of the halls mixed with the wax of Bates Gymnasium and the meat loaf aroma of Thwaite Cafeteria. It was all the same.