Twelve
The sack-wearing boy pushed on the pipe, forcing it up and away. “Hey! What are you doing?” he asked sharply.
The boy with the pipe pointed it at the sky. “It’s a stray.”
“We’re not going to shoot it. That’s illegal.”
“Dude, what we’re doing is already illegal.”
“You don’t shoot somebody’s dog just because it’s lost. You wouldn’t really do that, would you?”
Something about this situation made me hesitate to approach any closer. The boys didn’t sound angry but they did seem tense with each other. The pipe drooped. “What the hell, Warren. I don’t know. Probably not,” he mumbled.
“I mean, Jesus. We came out here to shoot bottles.”
“You shot at that crow,” the boy with the pipe said.
“Yeah, a crow, not a dog. And I missed.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t miss the dog?”
“Here, boy! Here!” The sack-boy slapped his legs.
“It’s female,” said the other boy. The acrid tang from his pipe was on his hands and clothing.
“Okay, I see that now, dude,” Sack-boy said. “How are you, girl, huh? What are you doing way out here, are you lost?” I sniffed his hands carefully. He did not have food in his pockets, but his fingers smelled as if they had been holding pungent meat recently. I licked them for confirmation. Yes! This boy had access to good dog treats!
“So now what?” asked the boy with the pipe.
“I’ve got some beef jerky back at the car.”
“Hang on.” The boy with the pipe raised it to his shoulder and lay his head on it. I watched curiously, then jumped when a roar burst from the pipe’s end, filling the air with the same caustic stench.
“It’s okay, girl,” Sack-boy said to me. “Hey, nice shot.”
We went for a walk then, but I was off leash and ran ahead, nose to the ground as I picked up the trail of some small rodent. I heard the boys talking and treading steadily behind me on the trail. I understood that for the moment I was with them, just as I had temporarily been with Jose and Loretta. Perhaps, until I was back with Lucas, I would be with other people on a short-term basis.
The sack-boy was Warren, and the other was named Dude. Sometimes, though, Dude called Warren “Dude,” which was confusing to me. We strolled through warm green grasses to a car and when Warren opened it a delicious odor floated out. We’d found the dog treats, they were in the car! “Want some beef jerky, girl?”
I was so excited I was spinning in circles, but then I sat down to show I could be a good dog. Warren handed me a chewy, smoky piece of meat that I quickly swallowed.
“She’s really hungry,” Dude observed. “Has to be, to eat that crap.”
“I’ve seen you eat it,” Warren said.
“I didn’t eat it because it was good, I ate it because it was available.”
“You want some now?”
“Yeah.”
Both boys ate some of the dog snacks, which I found both odd and disturbing. With all the wonderful foods people can pick from, why would they take away the treats from a deserving good dog?
“What kind of dog is it, you think?” Warren asked.
“Dude, no idea,” Dude replied. “So what, you have a dog now?”
“No, ’course not,” Warren answered. “My mom wouldn’t let me have a dog.”
I glanced at Warren. Mom? Did he know Mom?
“What do we do, then?” Dude wanted to know. He squinted up at the sun.
“Well, we can’t just leave her out here,” Warren said. “She probably belongs to somebody. I mean, she’s got a collar. She maybe got separated from her owners.”
“So like what?” Dude asked. “We take her with us?”
“Maybe call somebody?”
“So you’re like, ‘We were on the Colorado Trail shooting at beer bottles and we found this giant dog, can you come pick her up?’”
“Okay. No.”
“No which part?”
Warren grinned. “We leave out the target practice. Look, maybe there’s even a reward or something. We should call it in.”
“Except how long is that going to take?”
“I don’t know, dude, I’m just figuring it out, here.”
“Because I got to be at work at four thirty.”
“I don’t even know if they would send somebody out here anyway. How ’bout this? Let’s just load her into the backseat and take her to the Silverton sheriff’s station. They’ll know what to do.”
“You want me to voluntarily go to the sheriff’s,” Dude observed dryly.
Both boys laughed. My attention had become focused on the crinkly package in Warren’s hand. There was still a little piece of dog snack in there. I wondered if he knew it. I was doing Sit, and now I shuffled my weight from one front paw and back to signal that such excellent behavior deserved that last fragment of meat.
“Come on, girl!” Warren called to me. He held the back door of his car open. I hesitated—I loved car rides, but this felt strange. Where was he taking me? But then Warren rustled the bag and tossed the last morsel into his car and I knew what would be the correct decision. I bounded onto the backseat and the boys climbed in the front and that was it: we were off on a car ride.
We were a long distance from Lucas. I could smell home, and it was far, far away. But maybe that was where the boys were taking me.
*
I lifted my nose up to the crack in the window, pulling in the clear, clean fragrances from outside. I could tell we were heading toward a town because the combination of aromas grew stronger and stronger, but I also smelled many animals, most completely foreign to me.
I was not enjoying this car ride as much as when Olivia drove. Neither of the boys had repeated Mom’s name, nor had they mentioned anyone else I recognized. This was what some people did—they took dogs for car rides, because having a dog along made things more fun. But I had been driven places before, which, upon arrival, were new and not home.
“So you do know I don’t have exactly the best relationship with the San Juan Sheriff’s Department,” Dude told Warren.
“It’s not like they’re going to take our fingerprints. We’re just dropping off a dog.”
“What if they find the rifle in the trunk?”
“Dude, why would they look in the trunk? Quit being so paranoid. And anyway, there’s no law against having a gun, it’s our constitutional amendment.”
“We weren’t supposed to be shooting in the national forest, though,” Dude said worriedly. I picked up the anxiety in his voice and glanced at him curiously.
“How would they even know about that? Gimme a break. God.” Warren snorted derisively. “You think they’re going to find the bottles and do forensics or something?”
“It’s just we had one thing going and now we’re driving to see the cops.”