Gary Paulsen

by Paintings From the Cave: Three Novellas

  “I bet they’re good listeners, too,” Rose said. “I like the way they watch you when you talk, and look back and forth between us when we speak.”

  “Dogs hear things we can’t. Sometimes I believe they can hear me think.”

  “Do you really think so?” Rose sounded worried. “Can they do that with everyone?”

  “I’m sure they can.”

  “Oh.” Rose stared at her shoe, pushed a small rock back and forth with her foot. A sharp beep from her wristwatch startled everyone. The dogs jumped up. “I have to get home now.” Rose headed into the bushes toward her house. “I’ll see you another time.”

  She stopped, ran back and kissed each dog on the nose before smiling at Jo and turning to leave.

  Jo watched the dogs watching Rose disappear, their eyes pinched and worried, all three of them panting and uneasy as the sound of her moving through the underbrush faded away.

  Really bad things froze time, Jo knew, or worse—time even seemed to go backwards, so that you would live and relive painful moments over and over.…

  But time went fast when she was talking with Rose.

  So, bad things made time go slowly and good things made time go fast.

  “Rose is a good thing,” she told the dogs, who were still staring into the woods after Rose. “But you already know that.”

  As if they’d agreed to, Jo and Rose met in the woods late the next morning, a sunny Sunday, greeting each other with shy smiles. They walked silently through the trees, listening to the crunch of leaves beneath their feet and catching glimpses of the dogs in the brush as they chased each other before circling back to the girls. The quiet was full and warm and Jo felt a rightness in the day and in the way her steps matched Rose’s.

  “I brought a picnic lunch.” Rose poked her backpack. “Well, my mother packed it. There’s enough for us all.”

  “Here.” Jo pulled a plastic bag out of her backpack and thrust it into Rose’s hands. “I brought something too.”

  Earlier that morning, as Jo was taking the dogs out, she’d seen Her drop a wad of cash outside the car as She lurched home. Jo had pocketed the cash and headed to the pet store to get some canned dog food, a special treat. While she was there, she had seen something she knew would be perfect for Rose.

  Rose reached into the bag and pulled out a baseball cap with a picture of a Border collie that looked like Betty. The cap said DOGS RULE. She looked up at Jo and beamed.

  “Put it on.”

  Rose slipped the cap on. It came down over her ears, so Jo gently removed it, adjusted the strap, and set it back. “Perfect.”

  “Yeah, it is. You know that? It’s absolutely perfect.”

  “Dogs always are.”

  “It’s the best present I’ve ever gotten,” Rose said.

  It was the only gift Jo had ever given anyone.

  They sat, turning their faces up to the sun and breathing in the yellow warmth together.

  “Is it hard to understand your dogs?” Rose asked.

  “If you don’t know each one well, it probably is.”

  “Can you help me know them like you do?” Rose took off her cap and studied the picture of the Border collie.

  “I think so.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You have to learn how to see them.”

  Rose laughed. “That’s not hard; they’re right in front of me.”

  “No. Really see them, how they are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “Close your eyes to see better.” Rose smiled, and so did Jo. “Close them tight.”

  Rose closed her eyes and Jo noticed again how dark and smudgy Rose’s eyelids were compared to the paleness of her cheeks. Jo wanted to reach out and touch her. She raised a hand, but pulled back. Mike, who had been watching, put his paw on Rose’s leg.

  “Now tell me how the dogs look, what you see when you think of them.”

  “One is black-and-white and one is brown and one is almost all white.…”

  “More.”

  “Um … Mike is the small mutt, Carter is the brown one, and Betty is the black-and-white Border collie.”

  “And?”

  “Betty has one ear that sticks up and the other flops down, but wait, no, it’s more like it goes straight out. The little guy, Mike, has a lower jaw that kind of juts out so that he looks like he might bite. And Carter, the brown one, has a triangular-shaped head with a flat top. Oh! And Betty has a bump that sticks up in the middle of her head. And Carter has gray hairs around his muzzle like a beard, and Mike’s toenails are different colors, some are brown and some are white …”

  She went on as memory fed on memory and the speckled light shone down through the tree branches, bathing Rose’s face in soft green from the leaves.

  Jo said, “Open your eyes. Touch the tops of their noses now. Run your hand back toward their eyes. When you do that they know you love them and want to know them. Now tell me how their fur feels, how each dog feels different from the other.”

  “Their ears are softer than the rest of their fur,” Rose said. “Their noses are cold and wet and I think it tickles them when I touch their whiskers. My fingers go bump-bump along their ribs and I can feel how the sides of their chests dip into the tucks of their flanks just in front of their legs. They all have four toenails on their back feet, and four together but one higher up on their front paws.”

  Rose pictured more details about the dogs as her hands roamed their fur. “Mike lowers his right shoulder and whines when he wants your attention. Carter has short or long tail wags, depending on whether or not he can see you. Betty is the loudest; she has rumbly growls and quick barks and grunty sighs and low howls, depending on what she’s trying to tell you.”

  Rose talked until the sun started down, and Jo sat with her eyes closed, seeing what Rose was imagining. They breathed together, the girls and the dogs. Jo wondered if all of their hearts were beating in time too.

  When at last Rose stopped talking and opened her eyes, the dogs were lying between the girls, their backs against Jo, touching her legs but looking at Rose, listening.

  Hearing her.

  Knowing her.

  Loving her.

  “I have leukemia.”

  Rose’s words turned everything dark. They were walking near the edge of the woods toward Rose’s house in the late afternoon after she’d seen the dogs with her memory.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry it came out so sudden.” Rose talked very fast. “It’s hard to say. For the longest time I thought if I didn’t say anything, it would just go away.”

  No, Jo thought. What she just said, that ugly word, doesn’t exist, isn’t true.

  “I’m going to have to go in again, soon, for more treatments. I just wanted you to know.”

  Jo matched the words in her mind to the pace of their footsteps, slow and halting. No … she’s a friend … to the dogs … and so my friend too. My first friend … my only friend … she can’t … no … this was a good day … the best day … my only right and perfect day ever, and now …

  She remembered then how carefully Mike and Carter and Betty studied Rose and how she had seen but not seen Rose’s dry lips and bony hands and pale skin and skinny shoulder blades poking through her sweatshirt, and the dark smudges underneath her eyes. She remembered how gently they leaned when they rested against Rose and how sad their eyes were when they watched her.

  “I already knew,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “My dogs knew the first day. They’ve been trying to tell me. I didn’t understand, though. I didn’t want to.”

  Rose stopped walking. “How could they know?”

  “They understand things people can’t, because they see you. And they saw something they didn’t like.”

  “I’m going to be fine, though.” Rose lifted her chin and made her voice hard. “That’s what everyone says. There’s nothi
ng to worry about, and in a few months this will all be behind me, and I just have to keep my spirits up until then.”

  Carter looked back at Rose. Mike sighed and sat on the path. Betty sneezed and shook her head once, hard.

  Jo could tell that Rose was lying, just like the dogs could. The only thing she didn’t know was whether Rose knew she wasn’t telling the truth.

  There was nothing to say and so Jo was quiet as they stood together in the twilight. Once again, Jo wanted to touch Rose, the way she touched Mike when he trembled during a thunderstorm. But she’d never reached out to any person before. It took her three tries, lifting her hand and pulling it back, before she finally slipped her hand into Rose’s.

  Rose squeezed back. And held on tight.

  Rose didn’t come to the woods the next day. Or the next or the next or the next. Jo stopped counting the nexts, but the dogs lifted their noses to the sky, trying to catch Rose’s scent, every time they went into the woods.

  Jo moved through those endless days the way she had lived before the dogs came, frozen, stiff and hollow. The dogs snapped at each other with sharp growls and quickly bared teeth. They didn’t run ahead of her the way they usually did as they moved through the trees, but they walked on either side and just in front, almost touching her.

  Jo wondered if she’d imagined Rose. Had she made up someone to talk to, conjured someone who tried to see the dogs the same way she did? Invented a friend? But then she saw Mike nosing around the stump where Rose had sat that second day. Carter dug at the spot where they’d all sat together the first day. Betty kept running back to the place where they’d eaten sandwiches together. And Jo knew.

  Rose had been real.

  Jo walked slowly, Rose, Rose, Rose thumping through her mind with each step. The dogs quickened their pace, though, and she had to trot to keep up with them.

  They led her deep into the woods and then stopped next to the small stream. They sat in a line and watched the slow current tumble and roll the shallow waters. Jo didn’t sit next to them as she normally would, but instead paced along the water’s edge.

  Rose. Rose. Rose.

  No. No. No.

  She felt like hitting something, like breaking something. She shuddered, thinking how like the Biologicals that idea was. She looked to the dogs. For once they weren’t watching her every move. All three dogs had their eyes fixed on the flat, broad rock that loomed above the waterline in the center of the creek, listening to the water splash on the sides.

  The boulder was beautiful—gray speckles and green flecks and streaks of icy white quartz. The rock glistened where the water hit the sides and made it wet.

  Jo thought it might be magic, something she could touch and wish upon, like in a fairy story. She waded into the stream, stood in the water up to her knees and laid her hand flat against the rock. Rose. Rose. Rose.

  She dropped her chin onto her chest, staring down at the water trickling past her legs. Through the burning in her eyes, she saw the sudden appearance of brown and white and black.

  The dogs had paddled out and were scrambling up, their front claws scratching and their back legs pedaling to clamber up to the flat top. They sat, each facing in a different direction, and watched the creek flow past their rock island. Jo climbed up and looked down too.

  The water had to run around the boulder to keep flowing. It couldn’t move the stone but had to curve and ripple around the edges.

  The stream, she thought, was like everything ugly in her whole life, everything broken and damaged in the entire world. But the rock was like what the dogs had given her, what Rose had given her.

  And nothing could ever take that away. She had a family now, and a friend, and no matter what happened, that would never change.

  Jo had been sitting on the rock with the dogs for most of the afternoon when Betty jumped up as if she’d been stung by a bee, leaping into the water. Mike and Carter yipped at Jo until she followed, sliding off the rock and wading to the bank. The dogs shook the water from their coats and then led Jo through the woods. She hardly dared hope they were right, but she saw that they were taking her to the other side of the woods, to the edge of Rose’s yard. She held her breath and kept her eyes on the ground until they reached the yard.

  Jo lifted her head. Rose was sitting in a lawn chair, gazing at the woods, waiting for them. Her face lit up when they bounded out of the shade toward her.

  She had a bandana tied awkwardly around her head. Jo could see that she was trying to hide her baldness. Rose wore a huge sweatshirt and was wrapped in a blanket. She had shearling moccasins on her feet.

  “I didn’t have a chance to tell you.…”

  “I wanted to come and …” Jo couldn’t finish her sentence.

  “No one is very happy with me being outside.” Rose gestured over her shoulder to the house. Jo saw a curtain flick in the window as someone peeked out. “But I said I wanted to sit in the sunshine for a while.”

  “That’s always a good idea.”

  “I … I need to know some things that I think the dogs understand. No one else can tell me, and they … well, I think they—Oh, I don’t know how to say it right.”

  “I understand what you mean.”

  “My parents don’t know what I think about,” Rose said. “They tell me there’s hope, that the doctors say I’ll go into remission after this treatment. And they want it so bad that I …”

  Jo didn’t respond, but Mike placed his paw on Rose’s arm the way he always thanked Jo after she fed him.

  “Do your dogs always know what’s going to happen before it does?”

  “Probably. The sky’s blue right now, but it’s going to rain later. They step fast and light, like they’re doing right now, when rain is about to come.”

  “Because they see what we can’t and so they know what we don’t?” Rose’s eyes looked tired.

  “Yes, I think that’s it.”

  Rose’s voice was soft. “Do they know what happens when somebody dies?”

  “Yes. They must know that.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad. I’ve been so—” Rose inhaled, quick and sharp.

  When Rose broke off, Betty turned to gaze at her. Betty pushed her forehead up into Rose’s hand and slowly wagged her tail.

  Rose looked up at Jo for a second, a minute, a week, a year, all of time, as if they knew something together, just the two of them.

  Jo took a huge breath and felt that same warm flutter she had when Mike had first laid his head on her thigh.

  “The dogs make me feel safe,” Rose said.

  “Me too.”

  Rose smoothed the fur near Betty’s crooked ear, carefully stroking it into a straight line, looking into Betty’s kind brown eyes, which never left her face. Mike and Carter were pushing into her legs with their shoulders. “They’re more than just dogs, aren’t they?”

  Jo nodded. “They never hurt anyone and they know everything there is about love and all they want is to help us not be alone and scared. They never give up.”

  Rose said, “Could they help me?”

  “Of course.”

  For the first time in years, Jo was crying. For the first time ever, she was crying for someone else.

  Rose rested her hand in Jo’s. They stayed still for a long time, their hands clasped as darkness fell, looking above the trees, where small white clouds were being gently pushed past the full moon by a soft wind.

  Finally, the dogs stood with a jingling of collar tags, filling the air with the sound of bells.

  “Jamie. Time to wake up.”

  I open my eyes and see Erik, my older brother, crouched next to where I’m sleeping on the floor. He’s shaking me awake. The apartment is dark and he’s whispering. “We’ve got to get moving. C’mon. Time to go.”

  I sit up, stretch and yawn while Erik rolls up his sleeping bag. He gestures to me and I slide out of my bag, slip my shoes on and tie the laces while he ties up my sleeping bag. We sleep in our clothes, so after rolling up our bed
ding and grabbing our backpacks and the duffel bag with our spare clothes, we’re out the door.

  He gives me a dollar when we get to his car before he goes to work.

  I have $1.78.

  That means I can afford a bagel for breakfast because, with tax, a plain bagel costs $1.21. If I’m smart, I’ll only eat half and save the other half for lunch. I’m not that smart, though, so I’ll eat the whole bagel this morning on the way to school and then my gut will be complaining this afternoon.

  But I can usually fool my stomach by drinking enough water at the fountain to feel full. I’m into quick fixes. Quick fixes are the only thing I’ve got these days.

  I don’t have to worry about supper; Erik always brings me food. He works at the Burger Barn and his manager lets him have the patties that have been sitting in the warming tray long enough that they start getting dried up around the edges. No ketchup or mustard or pickles or onions or tomatoes or cheese, and by the time I get them, they’re cold and rubbery and the buns are stale. But there’s usually enough to eat to make me feel stuffed.

  Erik and I ran away from home two years ago when I was ten and he was fifteen.

  No. That’s not quite right.

  We drove away in the car he stole.

  And what we left was no kind of home.

  Erik’s Rule #1: Don’t talk about—don’t even think about—what happened before.

  “That’s over,” he said as we pulled away in the blue Toyota that belonged to some guy who was passed out in our mother’s room.

  I nodded.

  “We’re never going back there.”

  I nodded again.

  “No one will ever try to hurt you again.”

  My brother doesn’t talk much, and when he does, it sounds like rules, or warnings, or instructions. Not regular conversation. But that’s okay because he never yells and all the words he uses are PG-13. Which is a nice change of pace.

  Erik and I have been on the move ever since we left. I tried to remember exactly when that was, but I’m not good with dates so I can only guess. I know it was summertime, because for the first few weeks we camped out, kind of, spreading our sleeping bags in the storage shed at the beach and showering in the locker room.