I was in the hallway opening my locker when Connor came up behind me and said what he said.
“You’re trying out for track, right?”
I turned around and shot him what I’m sure was a confused look.
“School lets out tomorrow.”
“Right. That’s why I was thinking you shouldn’t wait.”
He was trying to be helpful. I know that now, and I might even have known it at the time. But he wasn’t making any sense.
“But . . . what’s the point? I’ll just try out in the fall.”
I wouldn’t. I already knew I didn’t want to. I wanted to run in the woods, not on a flat track. I wanted to run with those dogs, not guys my age, most of whom I didn’t much like or trust.
“Oh,” Connor said. He sounded disappointed. “Coach Haskell might ask you to try out before fall.”
“Why would he do that? How would he even know I’m interested in running these days?”
“You told me you loved running,” he said. “I was talking to Coach. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I don’t,” I said. But it was a lie. I lied to keep from hurting his feelings. It was dawning on me that I was likely to try out for the team to keep from hurting his feelings as well.
I opened my mouth to say something more, but I was saved from a reply by Libby Weller. She walked by in a huge plaid A-line skirt that swung well below her knees. A short-sleeved sweater. She purposely caught my eye and paused.
“Lucas,” she said. “Heard anything from your brother?”
I was always nervous around Libby. Always had been. “Um . . . no.”
She nodded vaguely and walked on. Then I was forced to look up into Connor’s questioning face.
“If I’d told her I heard from him,” I said, “the next question she’d’ve asked is ‘How is he?’ I just didn’t want to get into that whole thing.”
He nodded his understanding. I pulled my math book out of my locker and slammed it shut, and we walked down the hall together. In silence at first.
Then Connor said, “I really think she likes you.”
He’d said it before. On many occasions. I hadn’t bought it any of the previous times, and I still wasn’t buying it. Thing is, Libby was a very pretty girl. As in, out-of-my-league pretty. And if I believed Connor, it would be a long way down if he was wrong. And I figured he was wrong.
“I don’t think so,” I said, as I always did. Then I added something that had been true all along but had not yet been spoken. “I think it’s just the thing with her brother.”
Libby’s brother Darren had come home from the war a few weeks earlier missing his right leg from the calf down. I mean, did Connor really not notice that Libby always asked how Roy was and never asked anything about me? It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.
I opened my mouth to say more, but never got there. Instead I looked up to see my path down the hallway blocked by the enormous Coach Haskell. He was about six five with shoulders like a mountain, standing spraddle-legged in sweatpants and a school T-shirt. He had his arms crossed over the whistle hanging around his neck. He was trying to catch my eye and I was trying to prevent it.
I made a move to duck around him. But of course it was not to be.
“Painter,” he bellowed.
I stopped.
“Yes, sir?”
“Tomorrow at eleven. You’re trying out for track.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if I just tried out in the fall?”
“I need to know who I can count on next semester. So be there and don’t let me down.”
Connor offered me an apologetic glance and slunk away.
I woke up the following morning before my alarm. Long before my alarm.
I had set it for the normal time. I mean, the old normal time—just early enough to get to school. Because it was a half day, like I said. I figured I’d go run with the dogs afterward. It would be a celebration of sorts.
But I was wide awake, and it was not only earlier than I needed to wake up to get to school on time, it was earlier than I’d been getting up to run.
And it’s funny, looking back. I think about it from time to time. A thing happens, and it’s a thing big enough to save a life, and you don’t know why it happened. And you sure didn’t know it was such a big deal at the time. But, looking back, you wonder why things work out the way they do.
I tossed and turned for a couple of minutes, then gave up.
I dressed quickly in sweats and trotted downstairs. Everybody else was asleep. The kitchen was dark and quiet, and I poured a bowl of cereal without turning on any lights. While I wolfed it down, the sky began to lighten outside the window.
I set my bowl in the sink and slipped out the door. Jogged toward the entry point where I always picked up a trail into the woods. Right away I could feel my lack of sleep dragging on me. It felt like something was missing inside my gut. But I kept going.
It was just light enough to make my way over the dropped branches, around the trees.
When I came over the rise and saw the cabin, the dogs were already outside. They were not in their doghouse. Which was unusual. They were on the porch of the cabin. Fretting. That’s the word that came into my head when I saw them, and I still think it’s the best one.
The bigger dog, the boy, was pacing on the porch. Literally pacing. Padding three long strides to cover the length of the boards, then spinning on his haunches and repeating the strides in the other direction. The smaller one, who I now knew was female, was scratching at the door. And I do mean scratching. Not the way a dog scratches to tell you he needs to go out. Not a little downward swipe with one paw. I mean the way a dog scratches when her goal is to dig straight through solid oak. And as I walked closer I could see she had done some fair damage.
They both looked up when they saw me trotting down the hill. But they didn’t come to me. They just looked away again and kept doing what they were doing. That’s when I got that sick feeling in my gut, knowing something was deeply wrong.
Normally I tried to stay as far away from the cabin as possible, out of respect to whoever owned it. That morning I walked up onto the porch boards for the first time. I had to duck out of the way to keep the pacing male dog from bowling me over. He didn’t even slow his step or change direction for me.
I took a deep breath, gathered all my courage, and rapped hard on the door.
Nothing. No answer.
“Hello?” I called. “Everything okay in there?”
Silence.
I heard the birds singing in the trees, excitedly. Probably they had no idea of any trouble below them. The sun was coming up, and they were likely reacting to that welcome daily occurrence. The light, lovely sound of them was punctuated—and made ugly somehow—by the obsessive scratching.
I rapped again. Harder.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
Nothing.
There was no window in the front of the cabin, so I moved around to the side. My feet crunched through pine needles as I walked up to the window. I took another deep breath and looked inside.
A woman was lying in the bed, eyes closed. On her back, as if sleeping peacefully, a patchwork quilt pulled up under her armpits. She was an older woman. Not ancient-old like my great-grandmother, but old compared to me. Mid-fifties, maybe. Her long, straight gray hair fell around her face and shoulders. It would have been a peaceful enough scene if not for the reaction of the dogs. I would have just figured she was a heavy sleeper.
I knocked on the window, braced for her to open her eyes and scream at the sight of a guy staring through her window.
She did not open her eyes.
I banged harder.
“Ma’am?” I shouted. “Are you okay? Is everything okay in there?”
No reaction.
That was when the panic of the thing really set up shop in my gut. Because I had banged hard. I’d yelled loudly. Nobody was that sound a sleeper. It struck me with a shiver that I might be shout
ing at a corpse.
“Ma’am!” I screamed, my volume powered by the fear rushing out of me. “Ma’am, are you okay?”
Then I stopped yelling, leaned on the windowsill, and pulled a couple of deep breaths.
She was not okay.
I took off running.
“I’ll get help!” I shouted as I ran by the pacing, scratching dogs on the porch.
They paid me no mind at all.
My parents were still asleep when I burst back through the kitchen door.
I ran straight to the phone. On the side of the refrigerator my mom had a sheet of emergency numbers held up with a magnet. She’d ripped it out of the county phone book.
I dialed the sheriff’s office with trembling hands.
“Taylor County Sheriff,” a high female voice said.
“I need to report a . . .” But I stalled there for a second or two. What exactly did I need to report? Two uneasy dogs and a woman who would not wake up? “. . . somebody who might be in trouble.”
A longish silence on the line, which I took to be this woman rolling her eyes at my stupidity. But it turned out she was transferring me. After a click on the line I heard a bored-sounding male voice.
“Deputy Warren,” the voice said. “Who do I have on the phone?”
“Lucas Painter. From over on Deerskill Lane.”
“And what kinda trouble we talkin’ here, son?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s this lady. She’s by herself in the middle of nowhere. And she’s in bed like she’s asleep, but nothing wakes her up. Nothing.”
“Maybe she’s just a heavy sleeper,” Warren said, still apparently bored.
“I banged on her window like crazy. Nobody could sleep through the noise I was making. And her dogs are all upset. One of them is trying to dig through the door to get in to her.”
A silence on the line. Then I heard him sigh. Maybe because we had just crossed the border into his believing he might need to get up and do something.
“Okay, gimme her address. I’ll go look in on her. Check her welfare.”
“I don’t have an address.”
“That doesn’t help our situation, son.”
“Sorry. I don’t think there is one. She lives out in the middle of the woods. There’s no street. So how can there be an address?”
“Middle of the woods, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Log cabin? Tin roof?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. I know it. That’s Zoe Dinsmore’s place. I figured it must be. If we have more than one lady living all by herself out in the middle of those woods, it’s news to me. Okay, son. I’ll go see what’s what with her.”
And he hung up the phone.
I looked up to see my mother leaning in the kitchen doorway, watching me with sleepy eyes.
“Everything okay?” she asked. But not like she really wanted to get too deeply into things.
“Yeah. Fine. I was just on my way to school.”
“In sweats?” she asked, looking down at the lower parts of me.
“Oh. No. I was going to go change first.”
I ran upstairs and did that.
When I got out onto the track for my 11:00 a.m. tryout, there were two other guys there. Juniors, I think. So, older. I didn’t really know them. I mean, I’d seen them. But why would juniors want to be anywhere near a mere freshman like me?
We took our places with one of them on either side of me, which felt vaguely intimidating. There were starting blocks in place, and I’d never used them before. They looked simple enough, but a guy isn’t born knowing how to brace his body to push off against a thing like that. Looking back, I know I should have asked. But I was too embarrassed.
One of the guys, the one on my left, was staring straight ahead down the track, perfectly focused. All serious intensity. The other guy was watching me struggle with the blocks and my starting position, snickering.
The coach made short work of that. He stepped up from behind us and whacked Snicker Boy on the back of the head with the flat of his open hand.
“Ow!” the guy said, and rubbed the spot where he’d been struck.
“Stop acting like you’re better than everybody else, and show him how to use the blocks.”
So I took a quick lesson while the coach loomed over us to be sure there would be no more trouble. I could actually see the great shadow of him falling over us the whole time. My mind kept straying back to the lady in the cabin, as it had all morning, but I had to push the image away just long enough to do my run and do it right.
We lined up, ready to go, but then the coach came around and adjusted my position some.
He stepped back and raised his starter’s pistol. Fired it.
The guys on either side of me launched down the track.
I stumbled badly.
I was a good twenty feet behind them, but I knew I could find more inside myself. It was just a matter of wanting it, I think, for me. I had to want it so badly that I just did it, whether I was really able to do it or not. Sounds weird, but that’s how it felt. And I wanted it that day. Enough. Not because I liked the way I felt running on a track. Not because I wanted a place on the team. Because the guys who were beating me would still be snickering when they beat me, if they beat me, but just on the inside where Coach couldn’t see or hear it. Which meant nobody could stop them.
As I came around the bend I pulled close enough to reach my hand out to where I needed to be. I mean, I could’ve. I’m not saying I did.
I barely made up the distance coming down the final stretch, running almost completely on heart.
I could see the tape coming up, and my chest was not the closest to it, so I put on an extra surge. I passed Focus Guy, who had lost a step, pulled an inch or two ahead of Snicker Boy, and hit the tape.
Then I slowed and stopped, and leaned on my knees, panting.
“Okay, Painter,” Coach Haskell said. He had crossed the infield and was standing beside us at the finish line, staring at his stopwatch. “You’re on the team.”
I straightened up and looked him right in the face. “I don’t want to be on the team,” I said. I was surprised to hear myself say it out loud. I tended to bow to authority at that age. But Connor was nowhere around to hurt. And I think it had not yet dawned on me that my tryout would be anything but a blessed flop.
“Too bad,” he said. “Because you already are.”
I shook my head and said no more about it. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. At least I had the whole summer to figure a way to wriggle out.
“How long you been training?” Coach added.
“Training? I’m not sure I really train. I just go out and run.”
This time both boys sneered at me. They were standing behind the coach’s back, breathing hard. They laughed at me as though I had just said the stupidest thing imaginable. But they were smart enough to do it silently.
“How in the Sam Hill do you think a runner trains,” Coach bellowed, “if it’s not by going out and running?”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. About two weeks, then.”
Three mouths dropped open. The two boys shook their heads and turned away from me, shuffling off toward the locker room. Focus Guy shot me a dirty look over his shoulder.
Coach and I just stood a moment, staring at each other.
“Did those other guys not make the team?” I asked, hoping to understand what I had done to offend them.
“Those other guys have been on the team for more than a year,” he said. “You just beat my two best guys. On a couple of weeks of training.”
“Oh,” I said.
My dream of wriggling out of the commitment more or less abandoned me in that moment.
I ran back to the cabin the minute school let out, my stomach jangling from my track experience and lack of sleep, but more from the general awfulness of my morning. And the not knowing. The not knowing how awful things might have turned out to be while I was gone.<
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The dogs were lying on the porch, listless. They tapped their tails on the boards when they saw me but didn’t bother getting up.
The door was ajar. I could see about a three-inch gap, through which I could look in at the unmade bed on the other side of the single room.
I stepped up and knocked, just to be sure there was nobody there.
Nothing.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
I looked at the dogs and they looked back. Their eyes told me that my morning had been a damned picnic compared to theirs.
I wondered if they had eaten.
I walked around the property for a few minutes. Taking stock. There was an old-fashioned well that worked on a hand pump. A tiny building that I realized with a shudder must be an outhouse. A shed that I was hoping might contain dog food, but which—when I cautiously opened the door—only contained tools and such. There was an aluminum water bucket against the side of the doghouse, its handle secured on a hook so the dogs couldn’t upend it. It was less than half full. They each had a plastic food dish in front, but both bowls were dead empty.
I carried the bucket over to the well and hung the handle on the pump nozzle, and cranked until it filled up with water. It wasn’t easy. I was out of breath by the time I was done. I figured that middle-aged lady must have arms like a wrestler and the stamina of a mule.
I secured the bucket back into place and decided the dog food must be inside the cabin.
I rapped on the door again, just to be safe, then pushed the door partway open and peered in. It wasn’t much for a person to call home. A woodstove right in the middle for heat. An ancient cookstove, a porcelain sink standing free. Nothing much in the way of counters. A little half refrigerator like the kind people put in their travel trailers or fallout shelters.
There was a floor-to-ceiling cupboard that looked like a pantry, so I walked to it and opened the door. I found canned soup, and rice, and spaghetti, and tins of pork and beans. And a fifty-pound sack of dog kibble.
The dog food had a saucepan inside to be used as a scoop, so I figured that was more or less what each dog was supposed to eat. I filled the pan. Carried it out and poured it into a bowl. Repeated.
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