I didn’t try to follow. I knew there would be no car ride for us.
When the car drove away, its sounds fading, Dutch cried, reaching out with a paw and scratching the wooden gate. I could feel his distress, but I had learned that people are not as reliable as a dog would like. They went places, sometimes for long periods of time, or entrusted their canines to the care of other people. Dutch could scratch and cry all he wanted, but that would not bring back Gavin and Taylor. If he wanted them, he would have to go find them, just as I was making my way back to my Lucas.
I thought about the time that Dutch saw a cat and nearly pulled Gavin over, how the leash fell from his hand. Sylvia was much smaller than Gavin—when she pushed Dutch’s head away from a plate of food she placed next to her on her chair, she could barely move him. I knew that when we went for a walk with her, I could simply strain on my leash and yank it out of her hands and I would be free.
I could not feel Lucas, but I had a sense of the direction Gavin and Taylor had taken. I would go that way until I could smell the collection of odors that was the town where I lived, and then I would turn and follow my nose.
Next walk. I would Go Home the next time Sylvia took us on a walk.
Twenty
Sylvia did not take us for walks. We did Do Your Business in the sad tangle of weeds and plants along the back fence, and were never allowed to leave the yard. Dutch didn’t seem to mind—he spent a lot of time sitting at the gate, waiting patiently. When he wasn’t standing sentry there, he would lie in an oval of shadow under a wooden table, little flies pestering his mouth.
With no walks and no slide, I did not know what to do. I felt like a bad dog. I needed to do Go Home, and I was no longer certain how to do that.
Sylvia liked to lie next to the pool every day and rest in the sun. She sucked her cigarettes and talked on the phone and drank her drinks. I had my own spot in the shade under the awning. Chloe the cat rarely made an appearance in the heat of the day, but when she did she made a point of completely ignoring Dutch. I left her alone, noting that as she sashayed around the edge of the pool she was spending more and more time gazing at me. I was not at all surprised when she finally came over to sniff at my face. I wagged, but did not try to play with her. Dutch watched Chloe intently, but she had smacked him on the nose with her claw when he trapped her under a chair, which seemed to surprise him. Dutch obviously didn’t understand that while we were both superior to cats, it’s smarter to just leave them alone.
When the sun slipped down in the sky, Sylvia would wake up and let us inside but not Chloe, who would come and go not like a good dog but whenever she felt like it, mewing presumptuously at the door to be allowed inside.
Sylvia rarely had company. The first person we ever saw was a man, heavy and short and smelling like tangy food and a much stronger smoke than the one that clung to Sylvia. Dutch and I both pressed at the front door when Sylvia opened it.
“Hi, honey,” murmured the man we would learn was named Mike. He carried flowers.
The flowers were put in a jar on the table, filling the house with their fragrance, and the two humans went to bed before sundown. Sylvia forgot to feed us. Dutch paced in the kitchen, sniffing along the floor, checking his bowl over and over, but I curled up to sleep. I had been hungry before. Dutch nosed me and I wagged, but I had no way of letting him know that things would be all right.
Dutch was part of my pack and I knew he was distressed. He missed Gavin and Taylor. He was hungry and did not understand why we were living with Sylvia and he was upset to share the backyard with a cat.
Mike and Sylvia liked to have loud conversations. The anger in their voices frightened Dutch and me. We sniffed each other and yawned and paced while it was going on.
We were especially frightened the time Sylvia picked up her glass and threw it at the wall, where it shattered loudly, the sharp, chemical Sylvia-smell running down the walls. We lowered our heads, feeling like bad dogs, and I saw Chloe streak down the back hallway. “You told me you paid it!” Sylvia shouted.
“I can’t pay if I don’t got any money, you stupid cow.”
“You lied to me!”
“To get you to shut up! You’re always talking, you know that, Sylvia, you just never stop moving your damn lips.”
“So now what, they send the repo man for my car?” Sylvia put her hands on her hips.
“They’re not going to repo that piece of junk,” Mike declared dismissively.
I remembered when a man came to see Mom, and she was angry and she hit him and he crawled out the front door. This was an even louder fight, and I wondered if Sylvia would now hurt Mike and make him leave. Instead, though, Mike crossed the floor with his fist raised. There was a dull sound and Sylvia gasped. She cried out when he pushed her against the table, the now-dead flowers toppling and sour water draining off the table and sopping the carpet.
I felt that to be a good dog I needed to do No Barks, but everything was too bewildering for Dutch, who snarled and barked. Mike grabbed Sylvia’s arms exactly the same way the crawling man grabbed Mom. “Stop it!” she shrieked.
Sylvia’s distress and Mike’s fury galvanized me and now I barked, too, and Dutch lunged, snapping his jaws in the air right in front of Mike’s pants. Mike let go of Sylvia and fell back, knocking over a chair. We both kept barking.
“Jesus! Get the goddamn dogs off of me!”
“Try it. Try to hit me,” Sylvia replied tauntingly.
“You know what? I don’t need this. I don’t need you.”
Dutch and I did not know what to do now. This was unfamiliar to both of us, the way we were threatening a human. We both stopped barking but Dutch was tense, growling, his lips back from his fangs, and I thought he might bite this man.
“Gonna sue you for all you got,” Mike said.
“Oh yeah? Well good luck getting anything because you took all my money!”
“Kill you, Bella,” he muttered. He walked heavily toward the door, staggering a little.
“That one’s Dutch, you moron.”