“That would be great,” she said, pushing herself out of the rocking chair with a grunt. “Y’all want to come inside?”
Toby looked at me with wide eyes. We weren’t supposed to go in anybody’s house unless we knew them real good. But Carmella seemed okay to me.
“Sure,” I said. “Come on, Toby.” I pulled on Toby’s T-shirt.
When we got inside, I looked around to see if Carmella’s house was really as bad as it had looked from out on the porch. It was. A big lumpy couch covered with a bedspread and piled with clothes and newspapers. A coffee table littered with soda cans and dirty dishes. A card table with a half-finished jigsaw puzzle. Shelves built into the wall were jammed with ratty-looking books, piles of papers, an empty fish tank, and a bowling trophy. Instead of the rose-covered carpet I had pictured, the wooden floors were bare and worn. And nearly everywhere I looked there was a dog toy, all chewed up and loved. That almost broke my heart and made me tell that lady Carmella everything. But, of course, I didn’t. My head was swimming with so many mixed-up thoughts I couldn’t get myself to say anything.
Carmella shuffled over to a cluttered desk and rummaged through a drawer, then pulled out some paper. She took a red marker out of a mason jar on the desk and stared down at the paper.
“What should I say?” she said.
“How about ‘Lost. Little black-and-white dog named Willy,’” I said.
“And then put ‘Reward,’” Toby said.
Dern. How come he had to go and say that? I was going to ease into that part, but it was too late now.
“Reward?” Carmella looked kind of confused.
I jumped in there before Toby could. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s a good idea. You know, just to make sure people notice and stuff.”
“You mean, like, money?” Carmella stared down at the paper on the desk.
“Yeah, money,” Toby said.
I shot him a look. I wished he’d hush up and let me do the talking.
“Yeah, money,” I said. “That would make folks try real hard to find Willy.”
“Gosh,” Carmella said, “I don’t know.” She pressed her lips together and kept staring down at the paper on the desk. Then she looked up at me and Toby. “How much money?” she said.
“Five hundred dollars,” Toby blurted out.
“Five hundred dollars!” Carmella kind of swayed a little bit like she was going to fall right over. “I haven’t got that kind of money.”
“You don’t?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Then how much reward could you pay?” I said.
“Well, I was thinking maybe, like, fifty dollars?”
Fifty dollars? That wasn’t nearly enough. I felt Toby watching me. My mind was racing. But before I could think of what to say, Carmella sank down onto the lumpy couch with a whoosh. Then she shook her head and said, “I guess that’s not very much, huh?”
“Well, um, maybe you could get some more,” I said.
Carmella looked down at her lap. Little beads of sweat formed on her upper lip.
“I could ask for some extra hours at work,” she said. “But that won’t help much.” Then she snapped her fingers. “I know what! I’ll see if I can borrow some money from Gertie.”
“Yeah,” Toby said. Then he added, “Who’s Gertie?”
“My sister.”
“Is she the one who owns this street?” I said.
Carmella chuckled. “Lord, no,” she said. “She teaches school over in Fayetteville.”
“Then who owns this street?” I said. “Your daddy or somebody?”
“What do you mean ‘owns this street’?” Carmella frowned at me.
“I just figured since your last name is Whitmore and …”
“Oh!” Carmella said. “You mean ’cause this is Whitmore Road?”
I nodded.
Carmella shook her head. “My great-granddaddy owned all this land one time.” She swept her arm out toward the window.
“He built this house with his very own hands. Brick by brick,” she said. “And had a big ole farm that went way on out there past the highway.”
I looked out the window toward the highway. A bad feeling was starting to fall over me. Maybe I’d gotten this whole thing wrong. Maybe Carmella wasn’t rich after all.
“What happened to the farm?” I said.
“My granddaddy tried to keep it up, but it just got away from him,” she said. “I guess he wasn’t much of a farmer.” She shook her head as she gazed out the window. “By the time my daddy got this house,” she went on, “the only thing left of the family farm was this little ole yard and our name on a street sign.”
“Maybe your daddy could give you some money,” I said.
“He died eight years ago,” Carmella said. “And my mama the year after that. Then Gertie moved away.” She looked down at the picture of Willy she was still holding. “All I got is Willy,” she said.
With that, she started crying again, and I was feeling so heavy it’s a wonder I didn’t sink right through the floor.
Suddenly Carmella sat up straight and snapped her fingers.
“You know what?” she said.
Me and Toby waited.
“I am gonna call Gertie and borrow some money,” she said. “Shoot, I’d pay a million dollars to get Willy back if I had it.”
“A million dollars!” Toby said.
She nodded. “Yep.” Then she added, “If I had it.”
So me and Toby watched her make the first sign:
LOST. LITTLE BLACK-AND-WHITE DOG NAMED WILLY. $500 REWARD.
I pressed my lips together hard to stop myself from smiling when she wrote that $500 on there.
This sure was working out good, I thought.
Then we all sat around the coffee table, making more signs. When we had a bunch, Carmella said, “There. That oughtta do it.”
“You want me and Toby to put some up now?” I said.
Carmella frowned down at the signs in her hand. “Well, I kind of feel like I ought to wait till I have the money, you know?”
“How long is that gonna be?”
“Not long, I hope,” she said. “I’ll call Gertie tonight.” She looked down at a dog toy on the floor. A chewed-up rubber slipper. She wheezed a little bit as she bent to pick it up.
“I think I’ll go drive around some more,” she said, turning the slipper over and over on her lap. “I can’t hardly stand to think about another night without Willy.”
“We’ll come back tomorrow, okay?” I said.
Carmella nodded. “Okay.”
Me and Toby watched Carmella drive away, then raced back to our car to get some food scraps for Willy. I put a biscuit and half a grilled cheese sandwich in a grocery bag, then rummaged through the stuff in the trunk till I found a towel for Willy’s bed.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Willy sure was glad to see us. He wagged and yipped and carried on. When we got up on the porch, he jumped all over us, licking our faces and all.
When I opened the grocery bag with the scraps, he like to went crazy. He gulped everything down, then licked that bag till there wasn’t one little crumb left.
I put my arm around him and laid my head on top of his.
“I promise I’m gonna take you home, okay?” I said. I pulled him onto my lap and stroked his back. He laid his head on my knee and sighed.
“He looks kind of sad,” Toby said.
I looked down at Willy. “Don’t be sad, little fella,” I said.
He lifted his doggie eyebrows, and I could see what he was thinking right there on his face. Then the tears that I’d been trying to hold back for so long came spilling out.
“What’s the matter, Georgina?” Toby said.
How could I answer that? Should I start with that big red F at the top of my science test today? Or should I just jump right on into how mean our daddy was to leave us in this mess? And then should I move on to how bad it felt to live in a car w
hile my best friend went to ballet school with somebody better than me? Then I could add the part about Willy. How here we were with this cute little dog who never hurt anybody and now he was all sad and probably scared, too? And then there was Carmella, crying and missing her dog so much? And right in the middle of this sorry mess was me, the sorriest person there ever was.
When Mama got off work that night, we drove over to Wal-Mart. I waited in the car while her and Toby went inside. I pulled out my notebook and read my notes on How to Steal a Dog.
It sure sounded easy when I read through it. I turned to a fresh page and wrote: April 20.
Step 6: When you find some signs about the lost dog, take him back to his owner, get the money, and you are done.
BUT
I drew a big circle around the word BUT.. Then I wrote:
If there are no signs, you will have to find the owner of the dog and help them make some signs.
While you are doing that, you will have to practice looking nice and not like a dog thief.
Remember to take real good care of the dog so he won’t be hungry or sad or anything.
THEN
I circled the word THEN and under that I wrote:
You will have to wait and see what happens next.
I stared down at my notes. I read the last sentence out loud.
After thinking and worrying half the night, I decided that’s what I’d do, just wait and see what happened next.
13
I don’t know what made me do it. I just couldn’t stop myself. I watched Toby walk down the hall and into his classroom, and then I turned and went right back out the front door. I hurried up the sidewalk and ducked around the side of the school building. When the buses pulled away from the curb and all the kids had gone inside, I started running and didn’t stop till I was way on up toward the highway. My backpack bounced against me as I hurried along the side of the road.
I had to see Willy. I just had to.
I turned down the gravel road that led to the old house. I kept my mind on what I had to do (see Willy) instead of what I had just done (hightailed it out of school).
When I got to the house, I took my backpack off and tossed it on the front porch. Then I pushed through the pricker bushes toward the back of the house. Just as I reached the corner, I heard something that made me stop in my tracks. Singing. Somebody was in back of the house, singing!
I jumped into the bushes and ducked down, my heart pounding like nobody’s business.
The singing stopped. I held my breath. A man’s voice called out, “Are you scared of me or should I be scared of you?”
I knelt in the damp earth and squeezed my eyes shut. My thoughts were jumping around between being scared and trying to figure out what to do. Maybe I could crawl through the thick brush and back out to the road. I pushed a branch aside and flinched when the sound of rustling leaves broke the silence. Willy let out a bark.
“I ain’t scared of a coward who won’t even show his face,” the man called out toward the bushes.
I lifted my head the tiniest little bit to peer through the leaves. A man was sitting on a log beside the back porch! I ducked down. I tried to crawl away from the house toward the path to the road, but a tangle of wild blackberry bushes blocked the way.
“This your dog?” the man called.
I scrambled to think what to do. Should I jump up and run? Should I call out something?
“Me and this dog are just sittin’ here sharing sardines,” the man said. “You want some?”
I pushed some branches down and peered out. Sure enough, there was Willy, sitting on the bottom step of the porch, licking a paper plate. The man stood up and walked a few steps in my direction. I ducked back down.
“I reckon you and me must think alike,” he called toward the bushes. “Never drop your gun to hug a grizzly bear, I always say.”
I crawled a few feet along the ground, trying to get a better view of the man.
“But you don’t have to worry, ’cause I ain’t no grizzly,” he said. “You think this little ole dog here would eat sardines with a grizzly?”
Then for the second time that day, I just up and did something without thinking. I stood up, pulled the branches aside, and said, “His name is Willy.”
The man looked in my direction. “Well now, I do declare,” he said. “I sure am glad you ain’t a grizzly, neither.”
I stepped out of the bushes and Willy started wagging his tail and kind of prancing with his front legs. The man chuckled.
“Now that’s some tail waggin’ if I ever saw it,” he said.
Part of me was saying, Georgina, stop what you’re doing and get on out of here. But I never was too good at listening to my own self, so I just stood there and checked things out.
The man had nailed one end of a blue tarp to the side of the house and tied the other end to a tree to make a shelter. A ratty sleeping bag was stretched out on the ground beneath it. Leaning against the porch was a rusty old bicycle with a wooden crate strapped on the back. An American flag dangled from the end of a long, skinny pole duct-taped to the crate.
The man gestured toward the bike.
“Easy to park and don’t need gas,” he said.
He grinned and I caught a glimpse of a shiny gold tooth right in the front. When he gave Willy a pat on the head, I noticed he had two fingers missing. I’d never seen anybody with two fingers missing before.
He must have seen me staring at his hand, ’cause he said, “Got in a tussle with a tractor engine one time.” He wiggled his three fingers at me. “Tractor won,” he said.
I blushed and looked away.
“My name’s Mookie,” the man said, tipping his greasy baseball hat.
“Mookie?”
He grinned again. “Real name’s Malcolm Greenbush, but my mama called me Mookie when I was just a little thing and I been Mookie ever since.”
“Oh.”
“You got a name?”
“Georgina,” I said. “Georgina Hayes.”
He stuck out that three-fingered hand of his for me to shake. I confess I didn’t feel too good about shaking a three-fingered hand, but I did it anyways.
“I don’t mean to go prying into your business, Miss Georgina,” Mookie said. “But how come you got your little dog all holed up here in this old house?”
Uh-oh. I hadn’t been ready for that question. I had to think fast.
“’Cause we got a new landlord and he says we can’t have a dog anymore, so my mama is looking for a new place where we can keep a dog, so I’m keeping him here till she finds one,” I said. There. That sounded pretty good.
Mookie’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “That so?” he said.
“Yessir.”
“Well, I can tell you that dog was hungry enough to eat the south end of a northbound skunk.”
I looked at Willy. He sat on the step and pawed the air with one of his little paws. Then he yawned, curling up his little pink tongue. I sat beside him and pulled him onto my lap.
“I bring him stuff to eat every day,” I said.
“That so?”
Something about the way he said “That so?” made me squirm.
“Except today,” I said. “Today I forgot.”
“Well then, it’s a good thing I had them sardines.” Mookie gathered up the paper plate and empty cans and put them in a plastic grocery bag. Then he turned to me and said, “Ain’t it?”
I felt squirmy again. “Yessir.”
“Seems kind of a shame to keep a little dog like that tied up all the time.”
I looked down at Willy and ran my hand along his back. “You wanna run a little bit, fella?” I said.
His head shot up off my lap and he whined.
Mookie chuckled. “I think that’s a ‘yes,’” he said.
I untied the string leash from the back porch, and Willy leaped off the steps, jumping up on me and yipping like crazy. I took him around to the gravel road, and off we went. Willy looked like he was
ready to bust wide open with the pure joy of running. We raced up and down the road a few times till I finally collapsed right there in the dirt, gasping for breath. Willy sat beside me, panting.
“I don’t know which he needed more,” Mookie called from the side of the house. “Them sardines or that run.”
I pulled Willy onto my lap and put my arm around him. He licked my face and then nudged me with his nose.
Mookie strolled out to the road where me and Willy were sitting. “He sure is a smart little fella,” he said. “You had him long?”
“Uh, kind of.”
“Guess it’s pretty easy to love a dog like that.” Mookie picked up a piece of gravel and hurled it into the trees. A loud thwack echoed through the woods.
“I bet you miss him a lot,” he said. “I mean, you know, not having him in that apartment of yours.”
I nodded, stroking Willy’s head and trying to keep my face from looking as squirmy as my insides were feeling.
Mookie hurled another rock into the woods. “I had me a dog when I was a boy,” he said.
“What kind?”
“Oh, just a little ole half-breed,” he said. “Uglier than homemade soap, that dog was. And dumb? My daddy used to say he didn’t have both oars in the water.” He chuckled. “But, lawd, me and him was closer than white on rice.” He shook his head. “I sure did love that dog.”
He reached down and scratched the top of Willy’s head. Willy gave Mookie one of those doggie smiles of his.
“Dogs are just like family, ain’t they?” Mookie said.
I looked at Willy, and no matter how hard I tried not to, I kept seeing Carmella’s sad face and hearing Carmella’s heartbroken voice.
I stood up and brushed the dirt off my jeans.
“Where do you live?” I said.
“Yesterday, today, or next Thursday?” Mookie grinned, making his gold tooth glitter in the sunlight.
“Well, um, yesterday, I guess.”
How to Steal a Dog Page 7