I rummaged through my trash bag of stuff. When I found my spiral notebook with the glittery purple cover, I opened it to a fresh page and wrote:
How to Steal a Dog
by
Georgina Hayes
I wrote the date in the margin: April 5. Then, next to that, I wrote:
Step 1: Find a Dog.
I chewed on the end of my pencil and looked out the window. Someone came out of the side door of the auto parts store and threw a cardboard box in the Dumpster. I slouched down real quick and waited till I heard the shop door slam shut. Then I wrote:
These are the rules for finding a dog:
1. The dog must not bark too much.
2. The dog must not bite.
3. The dog must be outside by itself sometimes.
4. The dog must be loved a lot and not just some old dog that nobody cares about.
5. The owner of the dog must look like somebody who will pay a lot of money to get their dog back, like maybe someone who has a big house and rides in a limo or something like that.
But then I scratched out that part about the limo ’cause who ever saw a limo in Darby, North Carolina?
I chewed my pencil some more and looked up at the top of the car. Dark brown stains formed patterns like clouds up there. Over the driver’s side, Mama had used safety pins to put up phone numbers for me and Toby in case we needed somebody. I guess she forgot we didn’t have a phone in that stinking car.
As I read my list of rules over again, I felt myself splitting right in two. Half of me was thinking, Georgina, don’t do this. Stealing a dog is just plain wrong.
The other half of me was thinking, Georgina, you’re in a bad fix and you got to do whatever it takes to get yourself out of it.
I sat there in that car feeling myself get yanked one way and then the other. So I just made myself stop thinking, and I read those rules one more time.
I was pretty sure I had covered everything. I stuffed my notebook way down in the bottom of my bag and said, “Come on, Toby. Let’s go find us a dog.”
3
“Okay,” I said to Toby. “You go that way and I’ll go this way.”
He squinted in the direction I had pointed.
“I don’t see no dogs down there,” he said.
I sighed. Maybe I should’ve asked Luanne to help me. I wanted to, but I just had this feeling she would mess things up worse than Toby was liable to. Not on purpose, but she just would. Mainly because of her mama, who finds out everything we do even if Luanne doesn’t tell. And Mrs. Godfrey doesn’t like me one little bit. She pinches her face up real hateful-like when I go over there. One time I saw her wiping off Luanne’s bedroom door with a sponge right where I had touched it. Like I had left my cooties there to infect her family. And when I used to invite Luanne over to my apartment, her mama would always find a reason to say no. She could pluck a reason out of the air like a magician plucks a rabbit out of his hat. A dentist appointment. A visiting relative. A sudden need to shop for new shoes.
So I knew asking Luanne to help me steal a dog would probably be a bad idea. But Toby? I could see he was gonna be more trouble than help. But what choice did I have?
“Listen, Toby,” I said real slow and calm. “You got to walk down there and look. Look in the yards. Look on the porches. Look in the backyards, even. Just look, okay?”
He nodded. “Okay.” He started off down the street, then stopped. “What do I do if I see one?”
“Come get me.”
“Okay.”
“And remember the rules for the dogs,” I said. “You know, about not barking and all that? Okay?”
“Okay.”
We went in opposite directions. The first dog I saw came trotting right up the street toward me. He was brown with tufts of fur that stuck together in clumps. Every few feet, he stopped to sniff the ground.
“Hey, boy,” I called to him.
He looked up and wagged his scrawny tail. His face had bald spots on it. One eye was closed up into a slit with gnats swarming all around it. Nope, that dog wouldn’t do. Nobody cared about him, that was for sure.
I gave him a little pat on the head ’cause I felt sorry for him, then continued on down the street. When I came to a house with a trailer beside it, a dog started barking. A shrill, yipping bark. When I got closer, I saw a dog tied to a clothesline on the side of the house.
A short-legged dog with a smooshed-in nose and a curlicue tail. When he saw me, he raced back and forth along the clothesline, his yippy bark getting shriller and shriller.
From inside the trailer, a man’s voice hollered, “Shut up, Sparky!”
Nope. That dog wouldn’t do, either. Too noisy.
A few houses farther on, a great big dog with bushy black fur sat by the side of the road watching me. When I tried to pet him, he slinked away with his tail between his legs. Then some woman came out with a rolled-up newspaper. She smacked him on the rear, hauled him off by the collar, and pushed him up under the porch.
“Get under there like I told you,” she said.
Then she stomped back up the steps and went inside. She didn’t seem like someone who would pay money for her dog.
Finally, at the end of the street, I saw a dog who had steal me written all over him. He was clean and fluffy with a red bandanna tied around his neck. He didn’t bark when I got closer. He even let me pet him, wagging his tail like he was the happiest dog on earth. I was about to think I’d found the perfect dog to steal, but then I took one look at his house and I changed my mind. The front steps were rotted right off the porch, lying in a heap of lumber in the red-dirt yard. Bricks and boards were stacked to make steps into the tiny house with its peeling paint and torn screens. A plastic window box had come loose on one side, spilling dirt and dried-up brown flowers into the bushes. A rusty old car sat on cinder blocks in the gravel driveway.
Nope. That dog wouldn’t do, either. The people in that house weren’t rich. I bet they’d never pay five hundred dollars for their dog, no matter how much they loved it.
It looked like it was going to be harder than I thought to find a dog that fit all the rules in my notebook.
I crossed over to the corner and waited for Toby. When I saw him skipping up the road toward me, I called out, “Any luck?”
“I only saw one, and he growled at me.”
“Only one? Are you sure?”
“I saw some cats.”
“No, cats won’t do.”
“How come?”
“They just won’t,” I said. “Let’s try one more street. Then we gotta get on back to the car before Mama gets off work.”
I hurried over to the next block. Toby kept stopping to pick stuff up along the side of the road. Rocks and acorns and wrappers and things. I had to go back and yank him a couple of times. When we got to the corner, I looked at the street sign. Whitmore Road.
“This one looks good,” I said. “Let’s go up one side and down the other. You stay with me.”
We walked along the street, peering over fences, sneaking into backyards. No luck.
Suddenly Toby pointed. “Look at that house,” he said.
Just ahead of us was a huge brick house set back off the street a ways. All the other houses on that street were small, one-story, wooden houses with tiny yards and no porches. But that brick house was two stories high. I bet it had a whole bunch of rooms inside.
“Come on,” I said to Toby, “let’s go check it out.”
We ran to the house. It towered over the little houses next to it. The front yard was the biggest one on the whole street, with a chain-link fence all the way around it. Along the fence was a thick hedge taller than me.
I peered over the gate. That house looked like a mansion. It had a front porch with rocking chairs and a swing painted the same color green as the shutters on the windows. In the yard, there were flowers everywhere, popping up between the bushes, curling around the lamppost, blooming in pots on the front steps.
And then
I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes. There in the bushes along the porch was a dog. A little black-and-white dog digging so hard that dirt was flying out behind him. His rear end was stuck up in the air and his scraggly tail was wagging away while his front legs worked faster and faster at the dirt.
Then a voice came through the screen door.
“Willy!” A big, fat woman came out onto the porch.
I ducked behind the hedge and pulled Toby down beside me. I put my finger to my lips and said, “Shhhh.”
I waited to hear her holler mean things at that dog for digging up the yard. Then I bet she was gonna come storming off the porch and smack him. But she didn’t holler. She laughed! Then she said, “What am I gonna do with you, you naughty little thing?”
I crawled on my hands and knees and peeked through the gate.
The woman was sitting on the porch steps, holding the little dog in her lap and letting him lick her all over her face. When she scratched him up and down his back, he stuck his face in the air, closed his eyes, and kicked one leg, leaving streaks of mud all over her shorts. She took his head in both her hands and rubbed her nose back and forth against his nose. Like the Eskimo kisses my daddy used to give me a long time ago when he loved me.
Then she picked the dog up and went inside.
My insides were getting all swirled around with excitement while I went over the dog-stealing rules in my head. I mentally checked them off one by one. That little dog didn’t look like he’d bite a flea. He didn’t bark one bit. And it was for sure that dog was loved.
I glanced at the house again. That was one big house. That lady must be rich. Then, as if I needed one more thing to convince me, something caught my attention. The mailbox next to the gate was kind of rusty and leaning over just a tad, but it had big black letters painted on the side of it that said: THE WHITMORES.
Whitmores? That lady was named Whitmore and this was Whitmore Road.
“Toby!” I said. “That lady owns this whole street! Can you believe that?”
His eyes grew big and he shook his head.
I grinned and gave him a thumbs-up.
“Toby,” I said, “I think we just found us a dog.”
4
I sat in the car behind the steering wheel and turned the envelope over and over. I read the messy handwriting scrawled across the front. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes.
I put it up to my nose and sniffed. I could actually smell my teacher, Mr. White. Sort of like soap and toothpaste and coffee all mixed together. I pressed the envelope against the window and tried to read the letter inside. I turned it every which way, but I couldn’t make out a single word.
I was pretty sure I knew what it said, though. Stuff about me. About the homework I hadn’t done and the math test I had failed. Probably even about how ugly I looked all the time now, with my wrinkled clothes and my dirty hair. And why was I so sleepy every day? And sometimes I didn’t have lunch money. I bet the letter said how Mr. White had tried to call Mama but our phone didn’t work. I bet the letter said all that stuff.
I rolled the window down and looked out at the weeds beside the road. It was only April, but it was already beginning to feel like summer. Lucky for us the nights were still cool, though, ’cause Mama made us keep the windows rolled up all night long. She said it was because she hated bugs and flies and things getting in the car, but I think it was because she thought some bad guy might reach his hand in.
I had been glad when Mama said Toby was going to go to work with her that afternoon. But now I was bored. I guess I should’ve gone on over to Luanne’s like I said I was.
I could hear kids over in the school playground. I wished Mama hadn’t parked the car so close to school. What if someone I knew saw me sitting there? What would I say? Besides, I didn’t see why we had to keep moving around so much. After two nights in the same place, off we went, to some new spot. Now we were parked too close to school and farther away from Whitmore Road. How was I supposed to keep an eye on that dog if we kept parking so far away?
I climbed into the backseat and stuffed the envelope from Mr. White way down inside my trash bag of stuff. Then I pulled out my notebook and turned to the page that said:
How to Steal a Dog
by
Georgina Hayes
I wrote April 6 in the margin. Then, after Step 1, I skipped two lines and wrote:
Step 2: When you find the dog you want to steal, keep an eye on it for a while. Here are the rules to remember:
1. Make sure the dog really doesn’t bark or bite.
2. If there is a fence, see if the gate is locked.
3. Decide whether or not you can pick the dog up or maybe you have to have a leash or a rope.
4. Check to see if there are any nosy people living next door or across the street or something.
I closed my notebook, climbed out of the car, and locked the door with the key I wore around my neck. Then I set off for Whitmore Road.
When I got there, I stopped for a minute to check things out. The street was quiet. There was nobody outside except for some guy working on the engine of his car. Inside one of the houses a baby was crying. A sprinkler sputtered in circles in one of the yards.
I walked up the road toward the house. I hummed a little so my face wouldn’t look as nervous as I felt.
When I walked by the man working on his car engine, he didn’t even look up. I strolled along beside the hedge that surrounded the big brick house. I quit humming so I could listen. It was quiet in the yard. I glanced back to make sure no one was watching me, then poked my head over the gate to look into the yard.
Birds flew away from a bird feeder that hung from a hickory nut tree. The front door of the house was closed, and I noticed something I hadn’t seen the other day—one of those little doggie doors, so the dog could go in and out of the house all by hisself. I figured that was a good sign. It probably meant that the people who lived there were gone a lot, but they still cared about their dog.
Then I remembered my rule about checking to see if the gate was locked. I reached over and lifted the latch. Nope. Not locked.
Suddenly a squirrel came scampering around the corner of the house and scrambled up the hickory nut tree. Not far behind it was the black-and-white dog. He dashed to the tree and peered up into the branches with his tail wagging about a million times a minute.
“Hey there,” I called to him.
He sat in the leaves under the tree and cocked his head at me. His face was white with little black spots, like freckles, and black fur around one eye, like a patch. His ears were floppy, but when he looked at me, they perked up. But the best thing about him was that he looked like he was smiling at me. The sides of his mouth curled up and his pink tongue hung out.
“Hey there,” I said again.
His doggie smile got bigger and his tail wagged harder, swishing leaves back and forth.
“Come here, fella.” I reached over the gate and snapped my fingers at him. He came trotting right over. I stooped down and stuck my fingers through the chain-link fence. He sniffed and then he licked me a couple of times.
“How you doing, little fella?” I said.
He cocked his head again and looked so cute.
I looked at the house. The front door was still closed and it seemed like nobody was home. I scratched the dog behind his ears, and he leaned his head against my hand with his eyes closed. He was wearing two collars. One was a dirty plastic flea collar. The other one was green with shiny rhinestones and a little silver tag shaped like a dog bone.
“What does this say?” I pulled the dog a little closer and squinted at the words engraved on the tag.
Willy, it said.
I turned it over. On the other side it said:
Carmella Whitmore
27 Whitmore Road
Darby, NC
Under that was a phone number.
“Willy,” I whispered to the dog.
His floppy ears perked up, and he did that dog smile thing again.<
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“My name is Georgina,” I said to Willy.
Just then that squirrel made its way down the trunk of the hickory nut tree, and Willy dashed off to chase it again.
I stood up and looked around. Way at the end of the street, two kids were riding bikes. The man who had been working on his car was sitting in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette.
Uh-oh, I thought. What if he saw me?
I headed back up the street, trying to look like a normal person instead of a person who was thinking about stealing a dog. I kept my head down and concentrated on keeping my feet from running. I didn’t look at the man when I passed him, but I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke.
When I got to the corner, I finally let my feet run like they’d been wanting to, all the way back to the car. When I got there, I unlocked the door and climbed in behind the steering wheel.
I put my hand on my racing heart and laid my head against the seat. I was starting to wonder if I really could steal a dog. I’d never stolen anything in my whole life. Luanne did one time. Slipped a pack of M&M’s right into her coat pocket. But not me. How in the world was I going to steal that dog?
But then I looked around me at all the stuff inside our car. The Styrofoam cooler full of icy water and plastic containers of tuna salad. The trash bags stuffed with clothes and shoes. The milk crate on the floor with paper towels, shampoo, a flashlight, a can opener.
I looked into the backseat on Toby’s side of the car. His blanket all smooshed up in a ball. His pillow. His Scooby-Doo pajamas.
And then there was my side, with all my special things jammed into a plastic bag instead of sitting out on my dresser like they used to. My horse statue. My swimming medals. That little stuffed bear that I got in the Smoky Mountains.
I hated every inch of that car. I put both hands on the steering wheel and pretended like I was driving. I drove and I drove and I drove, the whole time sending bad thoughts to my daddy for getting tired of it all and making us live in a car.
How to Steal a Dog Page 2