“Cool!” Todd yelled. But Ethan just grew quiet, frowning at the little shards of plastic floating away in the creek. I sensed a jumble of confused emotions from him. When Todd tossed firecrackers up into the air and one came down near me, the percussion snapped against my side. I ran over to the boy for reassurance, and he hugged me and took me home.
Having such easy access to the backyard had some advantages. Ethan wasn’t always particularly attentive to the fence gate, which meant I sometimes was free to stroll the neighborhood. I’d trot out and go over to visit the brown and white dog named Marshmallow, who lived in a big wire cage on the side of her house. I marked her trees pretty well, and sometimes, caught by a scent that was both foreign and familiar, I would skip off, nose to the air, and wander far from home on an adventure. During those wanderings I sometimes forgot about the boy altogether and I was reminded of the time several of us were taken from the Yard to the cool room with the nice lady, how the front-seat dog had a provocative odor similar to the one luring me onward.
Usually I lost the scent and then would remember who I was and turn and trot home. The days that the bus brought Ethan home, I would go with him over to Chelsea and Marshmallow’s house and Chelsea’s mother would feed Ethan snacks, which he always shared with me. Other days Ethan came home in Mom’s car. And some days no one in the house got up for school and I would have to bark to wake them all up!
It was a good thing they no longer wanted me to sleep in the garage. I would hate for them to miss the morning!
One day I wandered farther than usual, so that when I headed back toward home it was getting late in the afternoon. I was anxious, my inner clock telling me that I had already missed Ethan’s arrival on the bus.
I cut through the creek, which took me right past Todd’s backyard. He was playing on the muddy bank, and when he saw me he called to me.
“Hey, Bailey. Here, Bailey.” He held out his hand to me.
I regarded him with open suspicion. There was just something different about Todd, something inside of him I didn’t trust.
“Come on, boy,” he said, slapping his hand against his leg. He turned and walked toward his house.
What could I do? I was compelled to do what a person told me. I lowered my head and followed.
{ EIGHT }
Todd let me in his house through the back door, shutting it noiselessly behind him. Some of the windows were covered, giving the place a dark, gloomy feel. Todd led me past the kitchen, where his mother was sitting and watching a flickering television. I knew from Todd’s behavior that I was supposed to be quiet, but I thumped my tail a little when I smelled the mother, who carried a strong chemical odor similar to the man who had found me by the road and named me Fella.
The mother didn’t see us, but Linda sure did. She sat upright when we walked past her in the living room. She, too, was watching television, but she slid off the couch and made to follow us down the hallway.
“No,” Todd hissed at her.
I certainly knew that word. I cringed a little at the venom in Todd’s voice.
Linda held her hand out and I licked it, and Todd pushed it away. “Leave me alone.” He opened a door and I went inside, sniffing at the clothes on the floor. It was a small room with a bed in it. He locked the door behind us.
I found a crust of bread and ate it quickly, just performing a quick cleanup. Todd pushed his hands into his pockets. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, now . . . now . . .”
He sat at his desk and opened a drawer. I could smell firecrackers in there; the pungent odor was unmistakable. “I don’t know where Bailey is,” he was saying quietly. “I haven’t seen Bailey.”
I wagged at my name, then yawned and collapsed on a soft pile of clothing. I was tired from my long adventure.
A tiny knock on the door electrified Todd, who leaped to his feet. I jumped up, too, and stood behind him while he whispered angrily out his door at Linda, whom I could smell more than see in the dark hallway. She seemed both scared and concerned, for some reason, making me anxious. I started to pant a little, yawning nervously. I felt too tense to lie back down.
The conversation ended with Todd slamming his door and locking it again. I watched as he went to his drawer, fished around, and brought out a small tube. He was emanating an agitated excitement. He removed the top and took a tentative sniff while heavy chemical vapors instantly filled the room. I knew the astringent odor from when the boy and Dad would sit at the table and play with their airplane toys.
When Todd shoved it at me I already knew I didn’t want my nose anywhere near the tube, and I jerked my head away. I sensed the flash of rage in Todd, and it frightened me. He picked up a cloth and dripped a lot of clear liquid from the tube onto it, folding and squeezing the cloth so that the sticky coating was all over it.
Just then I heard Ethan, a plaintive cry from outside the window. “Bayleeeee!” he was calling. I ran to the window and jumped up, but it was too high for me to see out, so I barked in frustration.
My rear end stung as Todd struck it with an open palm. “No! Bad dog! No barking!”
Again, the heat of his fury flowed off of him as strong as the vapors coming from the cloth in his hand.
“Todd?” a woman called from somewhere in the house.
He gave me a mean look. “You stay here. You stay,” he hissed. He backed out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
My eyes watering at the fumes that still filled the air, I paced around apprehensively. The boy was calling me, and I couldn’t figure out how Todd had the right to keep me locked up in here as if it were the garage.
Then a small sound alerted me: Linda was opening the door, holding out a soggy cracker. “Here, Bailey,” she whispered. “Good dog.”
What I really wanted was out of there, but I was no idiot; I ate the cracker. Linda held the door open wider. “Come on,” she urged, and that was all I needed. I bounded down the hallway after her, turning down some stairs and trotting to the front door. She pushed it open and the cool air washed those horrible fumes right out of my head.
Mom’s car was down the street, and the boy was leaning out of it, calling, “Bailey!” I took off as fast as I could, in hot pursuit. The car’s taillights flashed brightly and Ethan was out on the street, running to me. “Oh, Bailey, where have you been?” he said, burying his face in my fur. “You are a bad, bad dog.”
I knew being a bad dog was wrong, but the love pouring out of the boy was so strong, I couldn’t help but feel that in this case, being a bad dog was somehow good.
It wasn’t long after my adventure at Todd’s house that I was taken on a car ride to see a man in a clean, cool room. I realized I’d been to a similar place before. Dad drove Ethan and me to the place, and from Dad’s attitude I got the sense that I was somehow being punished, which hardly seemed fair. If anyone belonged in the cool room, in my opinion, it was Todd. He was mean to Linda and he kept me apart from my boy—it wasn’t my fault I had been a bad dog. Nonetheless, I wagged and lay quietly when a needle was slipped into my fur behind my head.
When I awoke I was stiff, sore, and itchy, with a familiar ache low in my belly, and I was wearing a stupid plastic collar, so that my face lay at the bottom of a cone again. Smokey clearly felt this was hilarious, so I did my best to ignore him. In fact, nothing felt better than lying on the cold cement floor of the garage for a few days, my rear legs splayed.
After the collar came off and I was back to my old self, I found that I was less interested in pursuing exotic odors outside the fence, though if the gate was left open I was always happy to explore the neighborhood and see what all the other dogs were up to. I stayed away from Todd’s end of the street, though, and if I saw him or his brother, Drake, playing in the creek, I usually shied away from them, slinking into the shadows the way my first mother had taught me.
I was learning new words every day. Besides being a good dog, and sometimes a bad dog, I was being told more and more that I was a “big” dog, which
to me mostly meant that I was finding it harder and harder to arrange myself comfortably on the boy’s bed. I learned that “snow,” which sounded so much like “no,” but was shouted joyously, meant that the world was coated in a cold, white coat. Sometimes we went sledding down a long, steep road, and I usually tried to stay on the sled with Ethan until we crashed. And “spring” meant warm weather and longer days and that Mom spent all weekend digging in the backyard and planting flowers, the dirt smelling so wonderful that when everyone went to school I dug the flowers up, chewing the bittersweet blossoms out of a sense of loyal obligation to Mom, though I eventually spat them all out.
That day I was a bad dog again, for some reason, and even had to spend the evening out in the garage instead of lying at Ethan’s feet while he worked on his papers.
Then one day the kids on the big yellow bus were so loud I could hear them shrieking five minutes before the thing stopped in front of the house. The boy was full of joy when he burst out and ran up to me, his mood so high that I ran around and around in circles, barking extravagantly. We went to Chelsea’s house and I played with Marshmallow, and Mom was happy when she came home, too. And from that time on, the boy didn’t go to school anymore and we could lie in bed quietly instead of getting up for breakfast with Dad. Life had finally gotten back to normal!
I was happy. One day we took a long, long car ride and when we were done we were at the “Farm,” a whole new place with animals and smells I’d never before encountered.
Two older people came out of a big white house when we pulled into the driveway. Ethan called them Grandma and Grandpa and Mom did, too, though later I also heard her call them Mom and Dad, which I dismissed as mere confusion on her part.
There were so many things to do on the Farm that the boy and I spent the first few days on a dead run. An enormous horse stared at me from over a fence when I approached, though she was unwilling to play or do anything but look blankly at me, even when I climbed under the fence and barked at her. Instead of a creek there was a pond, big and deep enough for Ethan and me to swim in. A family of ducks lived on its banks and drove me crazy by taking to the water and paddling away when I approached, but then the mother duck would swim back toward me whenever I grew tired of barking at them, so I’d bark some more.
In the scheme of things, I put ducks right down there with Smokey the cat when it came to their value to the boy and myself.
Dad left after a few days, but Mom stayed with us on the Farm that whole summer. She was happy. Ethan slept on the porch, a room on the front of the house, and I slept right with him and no one even pretended the arrangement should be different. Grandpa liked to sit in a chair and scratch my ears, and Grandma was always slipping me little treats. The love from them made me squirm with joy.
There was no yard, just a big open field with a fence designed to let me in and out at any point I desired, like the world’s longest dog door, only without a flap. The horse, whose name was Flare, stayed inside the fence and spent the day eating grass, though I never saw her throw up once. The piles she left in the yard smelled as if they’d taste pretty good but were actually dry and bland, so I only ate a couple of them.
Having the run of the place meant I could explore the woods on the other side of the fence, or run down and play in the pond, or do just about anything I pleased. I mostly stuck close to the house, though, because Grandma seemed to be cooking delicious meals almost every minute of every day and needed me to be on hand to taste her concoctions to make sure they were acceptable. I was glad to do my part.
The boy liked to put me in the front of the rowboat and push it out in the pond, drop a worm into the water, and pull out a small, wriggling fish for me to bark at. He would then let it go.
“It’s too little, Bailey,” he always said, “but one of these days we’ll catch a big one; you watch.”
Eventually I discovered (much to my disappointment) that the Farm had a cat, a black one, who lived in an old, collapsing building called the barn. She always watched me, crouched in the darkness, whenever I took it into my head to go in there and try to sniff her out. This cat seemed afraid of me and therefore was a major improvement over Smokey, just like everything at this place.
And one day I thought I saw the black cat in the woods and took off in hot pursuit, though she was waddling slowly and, as I got closer, revealed that she was something else entirely, a whole new animal, with white stripes down her black body. Delighted, I barked at her, and she turned and gave me a solemn look, her fluffy black tail held high up in the air. She wasn’t running, which I figured meant she wanted to play, but when I jumped in to paw at her, the animal did a most curious thing, turning away from me, her tail still in the air.
The next thing I knew, a plume of horrid smell enveloped my nose, stinging my eyes and lips. Blinded, yelping, I retreated, wondering what in the world had just happened.
“Skunk!” Grandpa announced when I scratched at the door to be let in. “Oh, you’re not coming in, Bailey.”
“Bailey, did you get into a skunk?” Mom asked me through the screen door. “Ugh, you sure did.”
I didn’t know this word “skunk,” but I knew that something very odd had occurred out there in the woods, and it was followed by something odder still—wrinkling up his nose at me, the boy took me out into the yard and wetted me down with a hose. He held my head while Grandma carted up a basket of tomatoes from the garden and squeezed the tart juices all over my fur, turning it red.
I couldn’t see how any of this helped matters any, particularly since I was then subjected to the indignity of what Ethan informed me was a bath. Perfumed soap was rubbed into my wet fur until I smelled like a cross between Mom and a tomato.
I had never been so thoroughly humiliated in my life. When I was dry, I was consigned to the porch, and though Ethan slept out there with me, he kicked me out of his bed.
“You stink, Bailey,” he said.
The assault on my person thus complete, I lay on the floor and tried to sleep despite the riot of odors wafting around the room. When morning finally came I ran down to the pond and rolled in a dead fish that had washed up onshore, but not even that helped, much—I still smelled like perfume.
Eager to figure out what had happened, I went back into the woods to see if I could find that catlike animal and get an explanation. Now that I knew her scent, she wasn’t hard to locate, but I’d hardly begun to sniff at her when the same exact thing happened, a blinding spray that hit me from, of all places, the animal’s rear end!
I couldn’t figure out how to resolve this misunderstanding and wondered if I wouldn’t be better off just ignoring the animal altogether, making her suffer for all the ignominy she had put me through.
In fact, that’s exactly what I decided to do once I trotted home and was put through the entire cycle of washings and tomato juice dunkings again—was this my life, now? Every day I’d be slathered in vegetables, have stinky soaps rubbed into me, and be barred from entry into the main part of the house, even when Grandma was cooking?
“You are so stupid, Bailey!” the boy scolded me while he scrubbed me out in the yard.
“Don’t use the word ‘stupid’; it is such an ugly word,” Grandma said. “Tell him . . . tell him he’s a doodle; that’s what my mother always called me when I was a little girl and I did something wrong.”
The boy faced me sternly. “Bailey, you are a doodle dog. You are a doodle, doodle dog.” And then he laughed and Grandma laughed, but I was so miserable I could barely move my tail.
Fortunately, around about the time that the smells faded from my fur the family stopped behaving so strangely and allowed me to rejoin them. The boy sometimes called me a doodle dog, but never angrily, more as an alternative to my name.
“Want to go fishing, doodle dog?” he’d ask, and we’d shove out in the rowboat and pull tiny fish out of the water for a few hours.
One day toward the very end of summer it was colder than usual and we were out in the
boat, Ethan wearing a hood that was attached to his shirt at the neck. And suddenly he jumped up. “I’ve got a big one, Bailey, a big one!”
I responded to his excitement, leaping to my feet and barking. He wrestled with his rod for more than a minute, grinning and laughing, and then I saw it, a fish the size of a cat, coming to the surface right next to our boat! Ethan and I both leaned forward to see it, the boat rocked, and then with a yell the boy fell overboard!
I leaped to the side of the boat and stared down into the dark green water. I could see the boy vanishing from sight, and the bubbles rising to the surface carried his scent to me, but he showed no signs of resurfacing.
I didn’t hesitate; I dove right in after him, my eyes open as I pushed against the water and struggled to follow the trail of bubbles down into the cold darkness.
{ NINE }
I couldn’t see much of anything down there in the water, which pressed against my ears and slowed my desperate descent. I could sense the boy, though, sinking slowly ahead of me. I swam even harder, finally catching blurry sight of him—it was almost like my first vision of Mother, a smeared image in murky shadows. I lunged, jaws open, and when I was right up to him I was able to seize the hood of his sweatshirt in my mouth. I lifted my head and, dragging him with me, rose as quickly as I could toward the sunlit surface of the pond.
We burst up into the air. “Bailey!” the boy shouted, laughing. “Are you trying to save me, boy?” He reached out and snagged the boat with his arm. Frantically I tried to claw my way up his body and into the boat, so I could pull him the rest of the way to safety.
He was still laughing. “Bailey, no, you doodle dog! Stop it!” He pushed me away, and I swam a tight circle.