Hotel For Dogs (3 page)

“I don’t care,” Andi said. “You can’t break a promise, Bruce, no matter what.”

“But don’t you see, I didn’t know what I was promising! If I’d known, I wouldn’t have promised.”

Bruce regarded his sister with exasperation. Andi was the most interesting person he knew, even if she was part of his family. There were things wrong with her, to be sure — she was always shutting herself off someplace with her scribbling, and she had a bad temper, and sometimes she told lies. But she was never boring. Most of the boys he knew complained about their sisters being drags. With Andi it was just the opposite; she never dragged. Sometimes, like now, Bruce almost wished that she did.

“Look, sis,” he said as patiently as he could, “you know as well as I do that we can’t keep dogs here.
Mom and Dad explained it to us before we left home, and you heard Aunt Alice at dinner tonight. All you have to do is mention the word ‘dog’ and her nose starts dripping.”

“I don’t know why you’re acting this way,” Andi said. “You didn’t start lecturing out in the kitchen. You said that you’d help me find the dog and feed her.”

“Well, sure, I wanted to feed her,” Bruce said reasonably. “I wouldn’t want any animal to starve. I could see letting her in out of a rainstorm, too.
Keeping
her here is something else. We can’t do that. Besides, it’s not just one dog now — it’s four.”

“What do you want to do, throw them out on the street?” Andi asked, trying to sound reasonable also. “With those little puppies just an hour old? And the nights turning cold — and maybe more rain — and nothing to eat —”

“If we told Dad and Mom —” Bruce began.

“What could they do? You can’t find homes for puppies this little; they have to stay with their mother. You know what the grown-ups would do. They’d send them to the pound.”

“Oh, no!” Bruce said. This was something he had not thought about. He had gone with his parents to
the pound in Albuquerque the day they got Bebe for Andi’s Christmas present. He still could remember the cages of sad-faced animals, all waiting hopefully for somebody to adopt them.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said slowly. “We won’t do anything tonight. The dogs are all settled, and nobody has to know about them. In the morning, of course, there’ll be a problem. After we leave for school, Mom or Aunt Alice might come in here —”

“I won’t go to school,” Andi said. “I’ll have a stomachache.”

“I guess you could do that,” Bruce agreed. “Mom always believes your stomachaches, and that way you could keep the door closed and say you wanted to sleep. That would give me a day to come up with some kind of plan. I hope I can do it in a day.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can,” Andi said confidently. She smiled, all the worry gone from her face.

Bruce, himself, was not nearly so certain. He stayed awake a long time that night thinking about the problem, and he concentrated on it so hard at school the next day that he missed three questions on his math quiz. Math had always been easy for
Bruce, so he was shocked when the teacher called out the grades.

From his seat in the next row, Jerry Gordon turned and grinned. It was such a pleased grin that Bruce was angrier with himself than ever.

It had been an unpleasant surprise on the first day of school to find Jerry in the class with him. It had been a shock for Jerry as well.

“What are you doing here?” he had asked that first morning, when the two boys had found themselves side by side in the same homeroom. “You’re not big enough for middle school.”

“I was twelve in February,” Bruce told him coldly.

“Nobody would guess it. You look like you ought to be in kindergarten.”

“Boys!” Miss Lowry had spoken from the front of the room.

At the sound of her voice, Jerry’s expression changed completely. Glancing up quickly, he gave the teacher a warm, bright smile.

“I’m sorry, Miss Lowry. I was just trying to help our new student feel at home.”

“That was nice of you, Jerry.” Miss Lowry’s stern face softened. “You’re very thoughtful, and I
know Bruce appreciates it. Let’s save our chatting for the playground and lunchroom, though. Okay?”

“Sure, Miss Lowry.” Jerry dropped his eyes as though embarrassed. Under his lowered lids he shot Bruce a side glance.

“Save your chatting for the playground, shrimp, if you can find anybody to chat with,” he whispered, as Miss Lowry turned her attention to a student on the other side of the room. “You’re going to have a hard time finding any buds in this class, I can promise you that.”

As days went by, the statement had turned out to be more true than Bruce had expected. Jerry Gordon was the leader of the neighborhood gang, which seemed to consist of most of the boys in the seventh grade. On the playground, it was Jerry who chose what games they played and told people which sides they were on, and it was Jerry who organized the after-school activities and conducted special meetings in the basement of his home.

“What’s with that guy?” Bruce asked Tim Kelly, who sat in front of him in history class. “People jump when he gives orders like he was king of Elmwood.”

“Nobody wants to make him mad, that’s for sure. If he doesn’t like you, he can make life pretty tough.” Tim had a shock of red hair and the kind of open, freckled face that made Bruce wish he knew him better.

“Jerry
is
sort of like a king around here,” he continued. “He’s an only kid, and his parents don’t say no to anything. He’s got the whole basement floor of the house for his own. He can have all the guys he wants over there, and nobody ever bothers him.” He laughed. “It’s different at my house. I’ve got three little sisters. Nothing’s private over there.”

“I’ve got a sister, too,” Bruce said. “She bugs me sometimes, but I’d sure rather have her around than Jerry Gordon.”

“Oh, he’s not so bad if you don’t cross him,” Tim said. “He can be real charming and nice to people he likes.” He paused. “Of course, when things don’t go his way, that’s different. Like with the kid who used to live in that house down the street from you, the one that’s for sale now.”

“What about him?” Bruce asked curiously. “What happened?”

“I hear that Jerry had a run-in with the kid. I
don’t know what it was about; it was before our family moved here. Anyway, from the way I heard it, Jerry made life so miserable for that kid that he got where he wouldn’t go to school. None of the other kids would have anything to do with him for fear of making Jerry mad. Finally, the family moved to a different school district. Before they left, though, the kid’s dad went over and had a showdown with Mr. Gordon and told him how rotten Jerry was.”

“Wow!” It made Bruce feel good just to imagine that confrontation. “What did Mr. Gordon do?”

“Nothing.” Tim shrugged. “He didn’t believe it. Grown-ups never see that side of Jerry. The Gordons think he’s perfect. Anyway, Jerry got so steamed up when he learned what the kid’s dad had said about him that he went over to the house and threw rocks through all the back windows.”

Bruce was appalled. “Why do you hang out with him?” he asked incredulously. “You trail him around on the playground, just like the rest of them do.”

“Well, he’s never done anything to me personally.” Tim looked a little embarrassed. “We just
moved to Elmwood last spring. All the guys I met here were in Jerry’s gang. When you’re new in a place, you don’t have a lot of choices. You hang out with whoever’s there. It’s no fun being a loner.”

“I’d rather be a loner than hang out with somebody like Jerry,” Bruce said firmly.

There was a moment that afternoon, though, when he did not feel quite so definite. The last bell had rung, and as he left the building, Bruce saw a group of boys headed toward the park across the street. Tim was with them, and he was carrying a football.

As he reached the curb, Tim glanced back and saw Bruce watching them. He smiled and waved and gestured for Bruce to join them. For a moment Bruce was tempted. He had not played football yet this season. He was small for his age, but he was fast, and when he got the ball, he could usually leave the larger players behind. It would be fun —

Then he glanced beyond Tim and saw the boy who headed the group. Quickly, he shook his head. No matter how much he wanted to play, he would not go crawling over to beg permission from Jerry Gordon. Giving Tim a rueful smile, he headed off toward home.

The middle school was closer to Aunt Alice’s house than the grade school that Andi attended, so in reality Bruce did not have very far to walk. It seemed a long way, however, when walking alone. Bruce was used to having friends, and the lack of them now was even harder for him than for Andi. She could shut herself off and write poetry and lose track of time, but Bruce had no such talent. For him the after-school hours dragged, endless with their emptiness.

Bruce walked slowly; there was nothing to hurry home for. When he came to the brown house with the “FOR SALE” sign, he regarded it with interest.

I bet that kid was glad to move away from here,
he thought sympathetically.
I’ll be glad myself when Dad finds out where he’s going to be working.

He remembered Tim’s statement about the back windows. Could Jerry really have been angry enough to break every one of them? It was hard to imagine, but there was no reason for Tim to have lied about it. Anyway, Tim did not appear to be the sort of boy who made up stories about people.

Bruce hesitated and then, as his curiosity got the better of him, left the sidewalk and walked around to the far side of the house.

The moment he left the front yard, the bushes seemed to close in on him. They rose on all sides, untrimmed and untended, surrounding him like a jungle. The whole backyard was overgrown with knee-high grass and brambles and vines gone wild from neglect.

All the first-floor windows in the back of the house gaped empty, and piles of broken glass lay under them, glinting in the afternoon sunlight.

“What a mess!” Bruce regarded the destruction with disgust. “Somebody ought to report this to the police.”

For one lovely moment he let himself toy with the idea of being the one to do it. It was a nice thought, and he enjoyed it before setting it aside for cold reality. He had no proof that Jerry was the one who had broken the windows. Tim himself had only heard about it from other people. Jerry would deny it, of course, and look innocent, and give that wide, sweet smile that always melted grown-ups, and the police would not believe it, and certainly the Gordons wouldn’t.

Discarding the idea regretfully, Bruce waded through the tall grass to inspect the damage more closely. Jerry had done a thorough job, all right.
All that remained of the windows were some jagged slivers of glass that were still stuck in the frames.

Working with care so as not to cut himself on the sharp edges, Bruce began to remove those. They could be dangerous, he told himself. Some little kid might come around here and decide to crawl in to explore.

The windows were set low and would be easy to straddle. Looking in, Bruce could see an empty room with a door standing open to a hallway. Beyond that was another room with the door closed.

Dust lay thick over everything. How long had Aunt Alice said the house had stood empty? Six months, without anyone even coming to look at it?

It was too bad for a place to stay vacant like this, Bruce thought. There must be people in the world without a home who would be glad to look after the place just for a chance to sleep there.

It was then that the idea hit him. It came suddenly, like a great floodlight going on in his brain. It was the answer to everything.

For a moment he stood contemplating. Would it work? There would be plenty of problems. Still,
even with problems, it seemed better than anything else they could come up with.

Tossing the last of the glass fragments into the bushes, he turned and began to run through the row of maples, across the vacant lot, toward Aunt Alice’s neat white house down the street.

It was on a Friday afternoon that the dogs moved in.

“And that’s what I’m naming her,” Andi said. “I’m going to name her Friday, because that’s the day she’s getting her very own home. Oh, Bruce, this was the most wonderful idea! Friday and her puppies will think they’re staying in a hotel!”

“Well, they’d better not get too used to it,” Bruce said. “As soon as the pups are old enough, we’re going to find homes for all of them and for Friday, too.”

He spoke decisively to cover the fact that he was beginning to feel a little nervous. The idea had seemed so reasonable when it first occurred to him: a vacant house with no one to tend it, four little dogs that needed a place to stay, so why not put them together for a few weeks?

The thing that was not reasonable was the way Andi was acting. In the day she had spent at home having her stomachache, she had formed a deep attachment to the group in the sewing closet. And now she was giving them names as if she expected to be their mistress for the rest of her life.

“This is just a short-term emergency thing,” Bruce kept saying, as he followed her about from one empty room to another. “This is somebody else’s property, even if they’re not living here. We really shouldn’t be using it at all.”

“I know, I know.” Andi’s eyes were shining with excitement. “I think Friday would like the pink bedroom at the front of the hotel, don’t you? It’s such a ladylike room, and that big window lets in so much light. We can fix her a bed in the corner, and when the puppies start walking, they can go exploring down the hall to the living room.”

“By the time they can do that, they’ll be ready to leave,” Bruce said. “We should start right now trying to line up homes for them. Does your school have a bulletin board? You could pin up a sort of announcement —”

But Andi was gone again, hurrying through to the kitchen to see if the faucets were working. It
would be so much easier to fill Friday’s drinking bowl from there than to have to keep carrying water over from Aunt Alice’s.

Andi was up at dawn the next morning and out of the house before anyone else was awake. Mrs. Walker discovered her room empty when she went to call her to breakfast.

“I can’t understand it,” she said in bewilderment as she joined the rest of the family at the breakfast table. “Andi never gets up early if she can help it. Where in the world could she have gone?”

“Perhaps she’s over at somebody’s house,” Mr. Walker suggested. “From the way she talks, she has dozens of girlfriends.”

“This early in the morning?” Mrs. Walker shook her head. “Nobody goes visiting before breakfast.” She turned to Bruce. “Did your sister say anything to you about having plans for this morning?”

“I — I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t exactly remember.” Bruce felt his face growing hot. He had never been able to tell a lie successfully, even a little one.

“I do hope she doesn’t stay out too long,” Aunt Alice said. “Surely she knows that Saturday is cleaning day. There’s so much dust in the air these days
that we have to keep ahead of it, don’t we?” She gave a little sniff and reached for her handkerchief. “My poor nose! My allergies have been so bad these past few days. I can’t imagine what’s causing it.”

By the time breakfast was over and Andi still had not returned, Mrs. Walker was looking truly worried.

“Really, Bruce,” she said, drawing him aside, “do you have any idea where Andi might have gone? It’s so unlike her to miss a meal, and besides, she
does
know that Aunt Alice feels strongly about Saturday cleaning.”

“We cleaned last Saturday and the Saturday before that,” Bruce said. “Geez, Mom, we haven’t had a chance to get anything dirty!”

“I know,” Mrs. Walker said with a sigh, “but it must seem that way to Aunt Alice. She’s lived alone for so long that just normal tracking in and out brings in more dirt than she’s used to. Besides, dust
does
seem to bother her terribly. The poor thing has been sneezing constantly.”

“It’s not the dust,” Bruce said. “It’s the —” He stopped himself. How could he possibly tell
his mother, “it’s the dog hair, and the dogs are gone now”?

“Okay,” he said reluctantly, “if Aunt Alice says it’s cleaning day, I guess that’s it. There’s no reason Andi should be able to goof off when the rest of us can’t. I’ll go hunt her down.”

Actually, Bruce was more irritated at Andi than his mother was. He knew exactly where she was and what she was doing, and he thought it was a dirty trick for her to have run off on a Saturday and leave him behind to field questions about her whereabouts.

As he left the house and started toward the hotel, he rehearsed under his breath the things he was going to say to her.

“Those dogs can get along by themselves until we’ve got the chores done. If you start pulling this sort of stuff, you’re going to ruin everything. People are going to wonder what we’re doing, and then we’ll be in for it. Mom’s already asking questions.”

He was so intent on the speech he was planning that he was not aware of another presence until a voice called out to him, “Hey, shrimp, do you always go around talking to yourself?”

Turning with a start, he saw Jerry Gordon standing only a few yards away from him. Three other boys were with him. One of them was Tim, who smiled and waved good-naturedly.

“Hi, Bruce! Where are you going in such a hurry?”

“Oh, just — well — my sister’s wandered off someplace.” Ignoring Jerry, Bruce responded to the more pleasant greeting. “My mother asked me to go round her up.”

“Like a cow on a ranch?” Jerry threw out the insult like a challenge.

Bruce fought back the temptation to be drawn into a name-calling contest. Squaring his shoulders, he was about to walk on past when a flash of red caught his eye and he saw Jerry’s dog there with him. The dog was on a lead and had a rope tied across his chest. Alongside the boys on the sidewalk was a heavy wooden wagon.

“What are you doing?” Bruce directed the question to Tim. “You’re not going to harness Red Rover to that thing, are you?”

“Jerry wanted to try it,” Tim said, “but it doesn’t look like he’s going to get very far. Red has ideas of his own. He doesn’t want to be a horse.”

“I bet he doesn’t,” Bruce said. “That dog’s not much more than a pup, even if he is a big one. His back’s not strong enough to take the weight of that wagon.”

“Run along and play with your sister, shrimp.” Jerry had dropped to his knees and was adjusting the poles that were attached to the sides of the wagon. “Nobody asked for your advice. We’re getting along just fine without it.”

“You are, huh?” Bruce tried to control the anger that was building inside him. “You’ve got a beautiful dog there. What do you want to do, cripple him?”

Jerry finished knotting the poles to the rope harness. Then he got slowly to his feet. His face was dark with fury.

“Let’s get something straight. This is my dog —
mine!
He belongs to me, and I’ll do what I want with him.” He turned to the dog and snapped his fingers. “Up, Red! Let’s see you go!”

The dog took a tentative step forward. The rope pulled tight against his chest, and he paused, bewildered. He was being ordered ahead and held back at the same time. He wasn’t certain what was expected of him.

“Bruce is right, Jerry,” Tim said, as he saw the animal’s confusion. “This is a game to you, but it isn’t one to Red. Let’s get him out of this tangle and play something else.”

The other two boys, whom Bruce knew only from having seen them at school, had drawn off a few paces, reluctant to become involved in the argument. They were looking at each other uncomfortably as though wishing they were somewhere else.

Jerry snapped his fingers again. “Giddyup, Red! Do you hear me?”

At the sound of his master’s voice, the dog cringed and sank down to a crouch between the traces.

“You see?” Bruce said. “He won’t even try. He’s got enough sense to know he’ll hurt himself.”

“He’ll try, all right, if he knows what’s good for him. Come on, guys, help me get him going!” Jerry motioned to the watching boys. “You give him a shove while I get out in front and call him.”

Bruce could stand it no longer.

“Leave him alone!” he shouted. “The poor thing’s already scared to death! If anybody shoves him anyplace, I’m going to go get my dad!”

“Oh, you are, huh?” Jerry’s reaction was quick and violent. Catching Bruce by the shoulder, he gave him a hard shove backward.

Bruce’s legs buckled as the edge of the wagon caught him at the back of the knees. An instant later, all breath went out of him as his shoulders struck the floor of the wagon and his head hit the sharp wooden corner.

“Now, that’s what our horse has been waiting for — a load to pull!” Jerry gave an excited laugh. “You stay right there, shrimp! You’re going to get a ride you’ll never forget!”

Raising the end of the leash high above his head, he brought it down with all his strength across the dog’s lean haunches. Then, for good measure, he kicked as hard as he could at Red’s left flank.

“Cool it, Jerry!” Tim’s face was a mask of horror. “What are you trying to do, kill him?”

Leaping forward, he grabbed for the leash, but the interference came too late. Red Rover let out a high-pitched, almost human, scream of fear and pain and threw himself against the harness.

Bruce felt the wagon lurch beneath him and dazedly tried to pull himself to a sitting position.
He was rolling along the sidewalk. The curb loomed ahead. Bruce threw himself over the edge of the wagon and onto the ground, just as the wagon crashed over the curb and into the street.

Free of Bruce’s weight, the wagon flew forward, striking the dog’s hind legs. This new assault was the final spur to the terrified animal. He plunged frantically out into the middle of the street, dragging the wagon behind him.

It was Tim who saw the car as it rounded the corner.

“Get him back!” he shouted, but by the time the words left his lips it was already too late. With a crash of splintering wood, the front wheel of the car struck the wagon and crushed it into the street.

Red Rover, the rope harness streaming behind him, tore free of the wreckage and kept running. A moment later, the morning sunlight caught the sheen of his red coat at the end of the street, and then he was gone.