Solomon's Oak

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  “Because I want to talk to you.”

  “So talk,” he said.

  “Let’s go outside and let Dodge out for a run. That way we can have privacy. Back soon,” she called out to Juniper, who didn’t answer.

  Glory opened the kennel door to let Dodge out, then returned to the back steps and sat down. Joseph walked down the steps and past the barn-red chicken coop, Dodge pushing to get in front of him. The hens were inside for the night. He wondered how she’d trained the dogs to let the chickens alone. Dodge raced toward the corral and disappeared in the dark. Joseph waited for Glory to say whatever it was she needed to tell him.

  “I appreciate you letting her know up front, like you did about her sister’s case, where things stand. She’s battling demons you can’t imagine, or maybe you can.”

  Joseph nodded.

  “And thanks for keeping the details of that case you were on to yourself.”

  “Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me.”

  Glory got up, walked to the barn, and pulled the sliding door shut. One of the horses whinnied. “It’s difficult sometimes. Juniper’s so defensive. She won’t talk about things. She lies, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “I hope you don’t think that’s your fault. Hormones do make them a little bit nuts. I’ve witnessed kids stab each other and at the end of the day they’re best friends.”

  “Do you have kids?”

  “I haven’t been too lucky in that department.”

  “Then how do you know all this?”

  “I tutored kids like her back in Albuquerque, smart kids who dropped out of school because what else could be more fun than breaking and entering? At that age, their circuitry is all fouled up. Juniper told me you had foster sons before her.”

  “We did.”

  “Then you know that things’ll get better. All I did was listen and try to help them pass their GEDs. What you’re doing is so much harder, but ultimately it’s the kid’s choice. At the end of the day you have to go home to yourself.” As Dodge completed a lap of the yard, Joseph could just make out his shape in the darkness.

  Glory leaned against the fence. “After she goes to bed I lie there and think, what am I doing? Either I’m making decisions for her, or she makes bad decisions by herself.” Glory turned to face him. “Juniper really likes you.”

  “I like her, too. She’s a smart kid.”

  “Then I’m just going to come right out and say this. Men have only let her down. The police, her dad abandoning her, boys in her last placement, it’s all been negative.”

  “Okay, but what’s that got to do with me?”

  Glory rubbed her temples. “I don’t want you to hurt her, too. You said you’re leaving in April. I’m worried that if she bonds any more with you, it will kill her when you go.”

  Joseph paused before he spoke. “Glory, you may not be Juniper’s biological mother, but you are a good mother. My back injury’s changed my life. I can’t coach soccer. I can’t do the job I was good at. One thing I know is, I’m good with teenagers. From now until April, I have nothing but time on my hands. If you’ll allow it, I’d like to give Juniper some photography lessons. Does it have to be an all-or-nothing thing? When I return to New Mexico, we can e-mail photos back and forth.”

  “But you saw how unglued she got tonight. You’d subject your life to that kind of emotional drama?”

  “That was grief coming out is all. Everyone’s been there.”

  “Doesn’t make sense. Your accident, the pain you’re clearly in, your cabin being torn down—why take on this, too?”

  “Sometimes you meet people and you just know you’ve crossed paths for a reason.”

  Suddenly Dodge returned, ran a circle around Joseph, then jumped up, hitting him hard on the chest. The dog was a good fifty pounds, heavier than he looked. All that force pushed into Joseph’s chest and knocked the breath out of him.

  “Dodge, down!” Glory said sternly, and took hold of Joseph’s arms. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, gasping until his lungs filled again. It hurt like the dickens, but until the dog’s paws connected with his sternum, he’d been experiencing a minor miracle. His back pain had existed separately from their conversation. Put aside. No spasm, no dull ache, just a sense of being alive in the way he used to be. Living in the moment.

  “Excuse me a minute while Dodge and I have a little lesson,” Glory said. “Dodge, drop.” The dog lay down. “Good boy. Now stand.”

  The dog was on all four legs in an instant.

  “Sit. Good boy, now lie down. Roll over. Stand, and circle.”

  Joseph saw how the dog read her body language, and how she was partnered with him so well, it reminded him of formal dance competitions.

  “Good boy! Now weave! Zigzag!”

  Then she began to walk backward, bending her legs at the knees, lifting each one to the side, making a quick opening for the dog to duck under. Joseph couldn’t believe this was the barking, jumping, rowdy dog that had almost knocked him down. It was more than obedience; it was a woman dancing backward with her dog in the moonlight. “Where did you learn that?” Joseph asked.

  Glory changed direction so that Dodge was now the one backing up. “It’s called freestyle canine dancing. There are competitions for it. You should see it when it’s set to music. I haven’t figured that part out yet, but someday.” She held her arms up. “Jump!” she called, and Joseph couldn’t believe she could catch fifty pounds of dog without hurting her own back. She gave Dodge a kiss and set him down. “Okay, Dodge. Free dog. Go do your business.”

  “Very impressive.”

  It was fully dark now. Dodge was visible only when he ran under the barn light. The dog bumped his nose against Glory’s leg, a tennis ball in his mouth. “We’ll play tomorrow.” She rubbed his head. “Dodge has a ways to go. I’d always thought of myself as a pretty good dog trainer, but I’ve never been so wrong about a dog as Cadillac.”

  “How so?”

  She switched on the outside porch light, one of those compact fluorescents, and he saw her frown deepen. “My husband could read kids like they were books. Not me. I like to think I have a gift at sensing a dog’s talent, helping it to hone its skills, learn manners, and eventually find the right forever home. Cadillac was Casey McGuire’s dog. The one she was walking the day she disappeared.”

  “Predestinado.”

  “Are you serious? You believe in fate?”

  “Why not? La mano poderosa, the work of the mighty hand belonging to our Creator, is always at work. All the time things happen that are larger than we can understand.”

  “You really believe that? What kind of God allows a girl to be kidnapped and murdered?”

  “No se. I don’t know. We’re mortals. But who says we have to know everything?”

  “Because there are some things we need to make sense of. For example, I could tell from the start Cadillac needed kids. He’ll play ball or Frisbee all day long. The McGuires were his first placement—Juniper was barely ten, Casey fourteen. They were a happy family, a stay-at-home mom and a hardworking dad with two adorable little girls. Caddy instantly clicked with them. They had a fenced half acre, pretty much ideal. I did home visits, trained them, trial weekends, and then Cadillac was officially theirs. Another happy ending, I thought. At Christmas I’d get a card with a picture of the dog wearing felt antlers, stretched out in front of the family fireplace. The night Casey went missing, Cadillac came back here. He passed half of the Lassie test.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, you know. Dog travels countless miles to return to its original home, leads the family to the kid in trouble. But Cadillac couldn’t tell us where Casey was.” Glory began walking to the back porch.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you for saying that. The last thing the family needed was to be reminded of their loss, so I took him back, expanded his training. The cattle rancher he went to next to
ld me that one afternoon he just stopped herding. As if he’d reached his quota, or something. He turned around and walked out of the man’s property and walked five miles back here. Then I thought, well, perhaps he’s a candidate for search and rescue.”

  “Sounds difficult.”

  “Not really. You start out the same way you do with any dog, the basic commands. Then you teach ‘find,’ using a brinsel—a fancy word for a stick you tuck under the dog’s collar, which he places in his mouth to let you know he’s found something. Then you complicate things, graduate to a piece of clothing, and eventually people, or corpses. Cadillac loves bones. Once he brought home the rotting leg of a cow, so pleased with himself, and believe me, the smell was awful. Took days to get it away from him.” She looked at Joseph. “Sometimes I can’t get over the fact that this dog ended up touching both girls’ lives.”

  “I’d like to hear more about this search and rescue training.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just making polite conversation?”

  “Aieee. What do I have to do to prove to you I’m one of the good guys?”

  “Forgive me. It’s just when it comes to Casey … ” She stopped. “I’ll never get over feeling like there was, or should have been, something I could have done.”

  Glory blinked and he could see the tears in her eyes. “Search and rescue,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  “You teach the dog to discriminate between scents, and to cue the handler in different ways, to let her know exactly what he’s found. ‘Digging’ for skeletal remains, ‘jump up’ for live human scent, ‘sit and bark’ for cadavers. We never got as far as cadavers. Obviously, opportunities for that were not readily available.”

  “Why’d you stop?”

  Glory shooed Dodge to his kennel. He immediately climbed on top of his doghouse. Joseph felt the chill of the night air at work on his back. He wondered if he offered his jacket to Glory, could he keep the conversation going?

  “Besides it being a full-time job, and expensive? Training a dog for S and R is a lifestyle. Unless you work for the county, there’s no money in it. Then my husband died. Plain and simple, I needed money to live on. When I got hired at Target, there weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done.”

  “The newspaper article made me wish I’d known your husband.”

  “Dan would have liked you, too.”

  “In Juniper’s papers—I assume the police tried dogs to hunt for Casey?”

  “Police, sheriff, firefighters, civilian volunteers. They tried everything. Bloodhounds used in the Murrah bombing flew up from Oklahoma and Georgia. The trail ended on a pullout on a road twelve miles from here. All the dogs stopped there. It was as if she vanished on that spot.”

  Abducted in a car, Joseph thought. Two kidnappers. There’d have to be one to restrain her, one to drive. Drugged her, took her elsewhere, and then dumped her body. With so many acres of wilderness, the Santa Lucia Mountains, the ocean, she’d probably never be found.

  “It breaks the dog’s heart when he can’t complete the ‘find,’ ” Glory said. “They get depressed the same as humans.” She rubbed her arms. “I’ve kept you outside so long I’m embarrassed. But it helped, just talking to you.”

  “I’m glad.”

  She looked at him. “You want to know the cherry on the top of this awful day? Today was Juniper’s first day back at school after the holiday break. A fresh start. So what does she do? Gets suspended. For the second time. I have no idea what consequences to give her. Nothing I did the last time seems to have made an impression. Here I go again. Can we shelve this discussion for another time? I should check on Juniper.”

  Joseph smiled because the phrase “another time” meant there would be one. “The right thing to do will come to you.”

  The wind came up moving through the tree and they heard the kennel gate clank open. “Oh, no. I forgot to latch it. Where’s Dodge?” she said. “Dodge?”

  Joseph put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, and the dog came trotting over, tail wagging. Glory took hold of the dog’s collar and sighed. “Thank goodness.” She looked at Joseph. “Cameras, guns, meth labs, and dog whistling; Joseph Vigil, you are full of surprises.”

  “Don’t forget my superior spaghetti.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Joseph couldn’t figure what it was about Glory that interested him. She was the antithesis of Isabel, who went for traditional furniture and cultivated roses in her garden. She wore dresses, not denim. The soles of her Sunday shoes somehow never scuffed. Though head coverings were no longer a requirement in the Catholic Church, she wore a shoulder-length mantilla to mass anyway. She would not consider surrogacy or adoption. Glory Solomon was like prairie roses allowed to wander. Kids drifted in and out of her life like changing seasons. He didn’t want a romance, but how this worked into a possible friendship he did not know. “Thank you again for the dinner.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He had only walked about three feet or so when she called out, “Joseph!”

  He turned, careful not to pivot. “Yes?”

  “Have you ever owned a dog?”

  Joseph thought of the red and blue heelers on his father’s farm, all working dogs, named Bambo or Gallo, or Estrellita that one time his mother had got her way. When it snowed, they slept in the barn, and when it was hot, they slept under his dad’s truck. Reservation mutts, “brown dogs,” sometimes strayed onto the property, mangy and antisocial. They wouldn’t even take dog food you put out. They rested awhile and went on their way. “No,” he said. “I never did.”

  “Dodge would make a good dog for you. He’s young, and when he’s not being a brat, he learns fast. You could train him to pick things up that you have trouble reaching. I can tell he likes you.”

  “Glory, you know I can’t give a dog the treatment he deserves.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, I can’t take him on long walks.”

  “Saying ‘for one thing’ implies there’s a second thing. So what is it?”

  “How about the fact that I own no cattle?”

  She laughed. “There’s a first time for everything.”

  Joseph reached into his pocket and took out his car keys. He looped them around his finger and tried to think of the right thing to say. I’m moving out of here in less than three months? I don’t want to be left twice? I don’t want to love something that will die before I do? The words wouldn’t come.

  “Come to my house for dinner next week and we can talk about it.” He could see that his boldness flustered her. “It’s up to you. If you get a chance, e-mail me how Juniper’s doing. And good luck with the suspension consequences.”

  “Good night, Joseph.”

  “Good night.” When he opened his car door, he heard her call out, “Think about Dodge.”

  Man, she did not let up.

  In the Land Cruiser, he started the engine and let it idle while he clicked his seat belt into place. Oh, his back was punishing him now. It felt as if the vertebrae were grinding bone on bone, like a basalt molcajete. The lights in the barn went out, but through the kitchen window one continued to gleam. He imagined Glory working on a fancy cake for, say, Valentine’s Day. Surely at least one wedding was scheduled on that day of sweethearts and roses. The bride in the traditional white dress, her man in a black tux with the pink faja, cummerbund, surely one of the silliest words on the planet in English or Spanish, which literally translated to “panty girdle.”

  He doubted Juniper would make it to her senior year without getting expelled. Some kids were better off going for the GED. Glory reminded him of that white oak tree. Something thriving that shouldn’t be, a force to be respected, and photographed to document, lest people assume you were telling a fish story.

  While driving home he thought about Casey McGuire and the pages he’d scanned. People blamed the parents for not instilling the proper fear of strangers into their children. They ought to log on to m
issingkids.com and check out the faces. Look past the makeup, the piercings and tattoos, the age-enhanced photos. Violence could never be a child’s fault. Fault lay with a fundamentally loose spring in the human mind. Some freakish intersection of circumstance and opportunity that tapped into the reptilian depths of the brain, a place that had yet to be mapped or remotely understood. An area that, thank God, slept in most humans. In his opinion, a place someone ought to stick a needle into, deeply, and fry it so it could never wake up.

  That next morning, back pain be damned, Joseph decided to attempt a walk around the lake. He’d taken his medication at breakfast, in anticipation of the effort. He put on hiking boots he hadn’t worn since the accident. Every step into the leafy mulch made a satisfying crunch. The lake rippled silver, and a blue heron was wading in the marshy shallows. He kept his focus well ahead of his feet. The chill air tasted crisp. But after only fifteen minutes, needing a rest, he had to stop at the same boulder he used to dive from when he was a kid. Someone had dumped beer bottles. He picked them up and put them in his jacket pockets. The wind here hit his face gently; in Albuquerque, it was abrasive. In the middle of cold, gray winter, you’d see a shock of yellow forsythia on the prairie and it felt like a promise. Here, flowers bloomed year-round and you needed a calendar to tell the season. While pain corkscrewed up his back, he shut his eyes and listened to the water lapping the shore. Mysterious birdsong came from the evergreen trees. There was no way to decipher what they were saying. But once he thought of it, he couldn’t stop wondering.

  Casey would have been eighteen years old now. She’d have worked her first job, fallen in love, and in a few months she’d graduate high school, then head off to college. Last night, despite his efforts not to, Joseph Googled Juniper’s sister. Every article, every picture, every tribute written in her memory. Sixteen months after the disappearance, the father moved out. When the divorce was final, Mrs. McGuire overdosed on sleeping pills. How could she be so selfish, leaving Juniper? Maybe she thought the dad would take over. Joseph surprised himself wishing he could confront the father and give him an earful. Only cowards skipped out on kids. What did the dad think? That if he left her behind like an abandoned pet, some kind heart would feel sorry for her and take her in? Thank God someone had. That someone was Glory.