Gary Paulsen

by Paintings From the Cave: Three Novellas

  Then, a few days after Carter came home, Jo saw a small Border collie in a box outside the grocery store with a sign that said FREE PUPPIES.

  Jo named her Betty after a grandmother she’d read about in a book. The grandmother had baked and sewed and read aloud from the Bible at night.

  Although Betty was the youngest, and the only female, she was the protector of the group, her eyes constantly scanning their surroundings. Her ears would flatten back against her head, the hair on her neck would rise and a low growl would rumble deep in her throat if she saw anything she didn’t like—squirrels, the Biologicals, the rattling old pickup that didn’t have a muffler and came roaring into the trailer park each night.

  Jo’s family: Mike, Carter and Betty.

  If the Biologicals noticed the dogs, They didn’t say anything. And the dogs learned quickly to ignore Them, looking away and padding silently through the trailer behind Jo, but keeping themselves always between Jo and Them.

  And now, instead of dreading the night because it was lonely and long, Jo loved it because they slept together, the four of them. And in the dark, she could not tell where one ended and another began—dog heat, dog breath, dog dreams—so close they were like one.

  Even the screaming and fighting were muffled, distant, less somehow than when she’d been alone. All she heard was the sighs and the yawns and the soft uff uff uff of the dogs’ breathing in the night. With the dresser pushed against the door, Jo and her dogfamily were safe.

  Once, late, Jo had awakened to see the dogs bathed in the soft moonlight that came through the window. She moved to the foot of the bed with them and sat in the silver light, felt it glow on the skin of her cheek and move into her to the rhythm of the dogs’ breathing. She closed her eyes and, timing her breath to match theirs, she inhaled the moonlight. She smelled the silver-nickel of the moonlight on the sides of her tongue and through her nose and in the back of her mouth with the dogs, of the dogs, as the dogs.

  Four doghearts breathing together in the quiet, bright dogmoon dognight.

  Before Mike and Carter and Betty, Jo had had bad dreams about the terror that came when she couldn’t run, when she couldn’t get to her bedroom with the dresser pushed against the door fast enough. For years she’d had the same dream, or, really, the same memory in the night. But once the dogs were with her, the memories stopped. For a few nights, she’d jerked awake, panting and sweaty, heart pounding, stomach in knots, a scream choking her, but then she’d see Mike and Carter and Betty watching, guarding, their eyes soft.

  Now the dreams were good. When she closed her eyes in half-sleep with her hands wrapped in their fur and felt their legs pedal as they slept, she knew she could run with them, be them in her dreams. They’d run through grass that tickled their bellies and her feet, run through green dappled woods with the speckled light shining on their coats and her hair. Never tiring, never stopping, free and smooth and fast and light, almost flying.

  Four doghearts together.

  Jo and her dogs were safe in the night, but she couldn’t leave them alone with the Biologicals during the day when she went to school.

  The back edge of the trailer park bordered a gully filled with thick brush that led to a small woods. Once, when Mike had been chasing rabbits, he’d led them to an old fort that had been abandoned by neighborhood kids, a rickety lean-to made of wooden pallets with a piece of plywood for a roof and a door with twine hinges that could be propped shut.

  Jo brought the dogs here on her way to school each morning. She’d taken an old sleeping bag from an empty trailer and wrapped it in a large plastic garbage bag to keep it dry. Every morning she shook it out and made a nest for her family next to a clean bucket of fresh water. She fed them bread and peanut butter, sometimes a few cans of sardines, dry dog food when she could slip fives and tens from His wallet or Her purse.

  During school, she imagined her dogfamily, curled up asleep, waiting for her, hidden safely in the woods. She wouldn’t look at the people around her, but past them, seeing Mike and Carter and Betty instead.

  Always the dogs.

  Only the dogs.

  Jo could have lived that way forever, with the rest of the world at a distance. Especially after He left.

  After a particularly horrible fight, when the neighbors started yelling to “shut the hell up,” He took his things and left.

  Good. There would be no more touching. Ever.

  That made Her easier to live with too. She never tried to hit anymore and she was gone most of the time or passed out in her room.

  Jo developed a routine. Every day she got up early. The dogs would be sitting next to her, shifting impatiently to nudge her awake. She’d slip out of bed and pick up the clothes that she’d dropped on the floor the night before. She’d dress quickly and the dogs would follow her through the trailer and out to do their business in the yard. Jo would clean up after them with old newspapers and then take them for their morning walk.

  Back at the trailer, Jo would eat cold cereal and milk and fry one egg until it was hard, for a sandwich to take for lunch. Then she’d take the dogs to their hideaway in the woods, feed them, and head out.

  Four blocks north and then two blocks east to the middle school. Once she was clear of the trailer park and past the first corner, the streets were tree-lined, with pretty houses, small but neat and with big yards. She didn’t look in the windows as she walked by or even glance at the yards because maybe everything in those homes was perfect, like on TV, and she tried not to look at things that made her feel even more ugly and broken.

  She moved silently through the day, talking to no one, being talked to by no one, head down, eyes fixed on the floor. She went to school and learned to read and write and remember the i-before-e-except-after-c rule and how to change fractions into percentages and figure out when trains coming from different directions at different speeds would meet. She completed all her homework and took the tests and paid attention in class, although she never raised her hand. When called upon by her teachers, she answered so softly she could hardly be heard.

  She never ate in the cafeteria. Too many people, too close together. She went to the playground and sat on the side of the building where the wind didn’t blow and the sun felt warm on her skin. She ate her sandwich and thought of the doghearts waiting for her.

  She rolled in the love like a dog rolling in the grass.

  She thought about how Carter would narrow his eyes when he was listening; how Mike would drag his rear left leg when he was tired; how Betty would sit straight and attentive if she was nervous. Jo remembered the differences between their different tail wags—fast and side to side when she came to get them after school or in frantic circles when they played catch. And she examined the growls and barks and howls and yips and whines they made as if she were studying a foreign language.

  She imagined the warmth of them tucked next to her in sleep, saw the sun glinting in their eyes as they ran in the park, smelled that ripe-fresh-earthy-sweet-doggy smell when she’d bury her face in their fur.

  Before, when she was very young, when she still noticed other people, kids at school had teased her because she never had playdates and wasn’t enrolled in after-school activities and had weird clothes and didn’t eat out of fancy lunch boxes or drink store-bought juice in foil packets with built-in straws. But she’d been with most of the same kids year after year, and once she’d stopped responding—looking right through them as if they weren’t there—they stopped teasing. She knew they still stared, but they hid it better now that everyone was older.

  One boy, though, Loren Haugen, kept taunting her. Her silence and indifference seemed to infuriate him and, unlike everyone else, he didn’t know enough to ignore her.

  A few weeks earlier, when he saw her sketching the dogs in her notebook before homeroom began, he’d hooted and called her the Dog Girl. Then he’d gotten his hands on an old book about early circuses, with pictures about the sideshows: Alligator Man, the human with alligator
skin; the Bearded Lady, a homely woman with long facial hair; the Marvelous Tattooed Man, every inch of him tattooed; and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, the Original Freak of Nature.

  He’d thought that was hysterical, showed everyone the picture while pointing at Jo, and he shouted that name after her in the hallway.

  Jo looked at Loren’s leering face, but his sneer blurred in her sight and instead she saw Mike put his head on his paws and follow her with his eyes when she moved around their room, and Betty drop her chest to the ground and stick her rump in the air as she waited for Jo to slip the leash onto her collar, and Carter nuzzle Mike’s ear and Betty’s neck as they curled up in the shack every morning to wait for Jo to come back from school.

  She smiled: Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl.

  No, she thought, Jo the dogheart girl.

  Even if they weren’t with her, Jo’s dogs still protected her from everything that hurt.

  Weekends, Jo took Carter, Betty and Mike into the woods to run off the leash. She liked the privacy and quiet safety she felt among the trees. The dogs had taught her to see, to look for color and shape and movement. Out in the world, she looked away from people and kept her eyes down, but in the woods she could inspect everything around her.

  At first everything was just green. The woods blurred together like the faces in school did.

  But then she noticed how the dogs trotted along overgrown paths she hadn’t discovered on her own. She studied how they brushed against low-hanging branches of leafy bushes thick with shiny red berries. She scrambled to keep up as they leapt over piles of dead leaves and fallen logs in single file, waiting for her on the other side.

  The green wall of the woods changed after she copied the way the dogs peered at the trees. She saw leaves the color of moss and emerald and khaki and lime and olive, brown and beige and tan and gray and silver, all glowing under the yellow- and gold- and lemon- and honey- and wheat-colored sunshine that cut through the high branches in shafts.

  Mike and Carter and Betty showed Jo all the shades of color in the whole wide world on display in the small woods behind the trailer park.

  They’d run off barking, dashing through the trees and splashing into the small creek nearby, before coming back to sit by Jo and share her sandwich and talk.

  After a lifetime of silence, she found that she had much to say. She told them everything.

  But they never talked about the Biologicals or school: Jo had nothing to say about them and she didn’t want Mike and Carter and Betty to know about ugliness.

  Instead she told them about the books she read and the music she listened to on CDs at the library. They listened, watching her face, tails slowly wagging, ears twitching at the sound of her voice.

  And they talked to her with their eyes and their bodies and their voices. With a limp and a soft groan, Mike told her about the aches he felt in his hip when it was damp. Carter showed her how funny it was to put a feral cat up a tree, dancing around the trunk and barking at the hissing cat high in the branches. Betty taught Jo how important it was to always stay close together; she would circle Jo and the boys, herding them in a tight cluster as they walked.

  “You talk to your dogs?”

  The voice came from behind. Jo wheeled around, startled. Betty, who had wandered away without Jo’s noticing, was leading a girl toward her.

  The girl was about Jo’s age, though she was short and scrawny. She had dark eyes that pointed down at the outside corners, which made her look sad. Her eyelids were a little dark too, which made her seem even sadder.

  Except that she was smiling. “Do they answer?”

  “Always.” Jo was surprised that she spoke to this strange girl instead of looking down and away. Immediately, she regretted talking about her dogworld.

  Betty led the girl closer and they sat down next to Mike and Carter, who wiggled in happiness at this stranger’s company. Betty shifted her weight, pressing her side against the girl’s leg.

  They all faced Jo, who sat, silent. This girl was so close. Jo had felt so safe in the woods, so alone and protected, that she hadn’t kept her usual eye out for anyone nearby.

  “See,” the girl finally said, “this is where we have a conversation. I say something like ‘Those are beautiful dogs,’ and you say, ‘Thanks,’ and then I say, ‘What are their names?’ and you …” She smiled and put a hand out, palm up, prompting Jo.

  “Mike, Carter and Betty.”

  Betty leaned over and picked up the small branch that she had been carrying all morning because she was proud of the way it hung from her mouth. She placed it on the girl’s lap.

  The girl laughed. “Thank you! What a nice present—Er,” and she turned to Jo, “I don’t know which name is his.”

  “Her.”

  “Pardon?”

  “She’s not a boy dog.”

  “So it’s Betty, then. I’m Rose.”

  “I’m Jo.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d introduced herself to anyone. Had she ever done that?

  All three of the dogs were looking at Rose with gentle curiosity, and Jo could tell that the boys enjoyed being petted by her. Jo liked the way Rose traced the stick with her fingers, following each crook carefully, before setting it back down on Betty’s paws.

  “So you and your dogs come to the woods to talk?” Rose asked, smiling.

  “Uh-huh. Why are you here?”

  “My yard backs to the trees.” Rose pointed toward the neat houses on the pretty streets. “Sometimes I just go wandering. It’s nice”—she looked away, blinking hard for a second—“to be outside. And I like how quiet it feels in the trees, you know?”

  Jo nodded.

  “I don’t have dogs. My mother doesn’t like dogs. No”—Rose paused and frowned, thinking—“it’s not that she doesn’t like dogs, it’s just that she doesn’t know about them. Does that make sense?”

  “It does to me.”

  “She thinks they’re a lot of work and mess up the carpet and carry bugs.”

  “That’s not what they’re about.”

  “I bet it would be wonderful to have—no, to be with dogs.”

  “It is.”

  “But we move too much too; my dad is a reorganization and downsizing consultant and so we’re always going where his jobs are. I haven’t even started school here yet. Not that—Well. What does your dad do?”

  My dad drinks, my dad fights, my dad tries to touch, my dad left, Jo thought. She took three, four, five breaths before answering, “No dad.”

  “Oh. A mom?”

  “Just the dogs.”

  Rose shot her a glance but sat quietly watching Betty snuffling Jo’s ear.

  “I didn’t think I’d make any friends until I started school,” Rose said, “but here you are in the woods.”

  “You don’t want to be my friend.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not the kind of”—Jo almost said “dog”—“person anyone wants to be friends with.”

  Jo stood and started to walk away. But the dogs stopped as Rose spoke:

  “Neither am I.”

  One place Jo felt safe was the library.

  Everything about the library was good.

  It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer and always dry and safe and Jo never felt the stares at the library. The Biologicals had never been there, might not have even known it existed, for all Jo knew.

  She would go to check out books on Saturday afternoon and Wednesday evening. There was an overgrown lilac bush near the reading room windows and Mike and Carter and Betty would crawl under the lowest branches and wait. She kept glancing out the windows, checking that she could always see the dogs hidden under the bush.

  Jo loved books. Not as much as her dogs, and in a different way, but pretty close. Every Saturday and Wednesday she’d pick out three books—novels, graphic novels, picture books, poetry, history, short stories, plays, mysteries, travel guides, equipment repair manuals, stories of aliens or myths or true crime
. It didn’t matter what she read.

  What did matter was that when she read, she could forget how ugly her life was.

  She read aloud to the dogs when they were in the woods or in her room with the dresser pushed across the door. They usually fell asleep, but even if they didn’t pay attention, reading to them made the words go inside her the way the moonlight had gone into her, so that she felt-heard-smelled the words.

  The day before, when Rose had been talking, Jo had seen the color of her words. She’d felt the hope in her voice. She’d tasted the loneliness in Rose’s sentences. She understood that Rose had been trying to tell her something, with the words she used and the ones she didn’t.

  Still thinking about Rose, Jo checked out her books, gathered the dogs and headed home the short way, through the woods. She wasn’t surprised to see Rose sitting on a stump near the edge of the trees.

  Waiting for them.

  Mike barked a happy greeting, Carter bounded over and Betty tried to make Jo hurry.

  “I hoped you’d all be here today,” Rose said.

  “Betty’s eyes tip up. Yours tip down.”

  “They do? I didn’t know that.”

  “The dogs taught me to notice things.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Dogs are better—” Jo stopped.

  “Go on. What were you going to say? Better than …?”

  “Better than people.” Rose nodded and Jo went on. “Humans aren’t as smart as dogs. Even though they think they are. Even people who like dogs and have them as pets don’t always understand how smart dogs are and how much they know.”

  “What do they know?”

  “How to see, smell, run. They can do all those things better than humans.” Jo took a breath. “They feel more too. Dogs know how to love better than people.”

  Both girls watched Mike settle his chin on one of Rose’s feet and close his eyes. Carter, lifting his front paws, rested them on Rose’s lap and stared into her face, and Betty rolled onto her back, presenting her tummy for Jo to scratch. Jo peeked up from Betty and saw Rose smiling at her.