Shelter Me (2 page)

So rules were bent, twisted and broken to rescue me, but it was a must-do operation to complete my mission. To understand my mission fully, you need to know how I ended up with Sergeant Kowalski.

Back when I ran in a pack with my cousins, we scavenged for scraps. Best place to look? U.S. military installations. The guys in uniforms, the ones from across the ocean, fed us. Good stuff, too. So we howled out the locale of new troops setting up camp so our pack buddies would know.

I hit the mother lode with those guys.

“No MREs for you, Trooper. You get steak,” said a colonel with silver hair, dusty camos and creaky knees.

The first time I ate steak, I almost peed myself. Of course I peed myself for a lot of reasons in those days because I was still a puppy. Six months old then. Twelve months old when I left that place. Eleven years old now.

During my puppy days, the rest of my pack didn’t want to stay at that particular camp because it was busy and big, and they were ancient and wary. But I was the youngest, the only one of my litter to survive, and gut-deep hungry from only scraps of leftovers. I was way below being the alpha dog. Not even really a beta dog. More like a zeta. Or would that be omega?

Anyhow, after we ate our fill for a week, it was a tough choice sticking around by myself, because yeah, I would lose my pack, but hunger won out. Six months later when the time came to leave on that plane? I didn’t hesitate for a second. Sure I would miss this place where they tossed a tennis ball and seemed to think I was a rock star because I figured out fast they wanted me to bring it back. Like that was hard after tracking rats in the desert for dinner?

But I knew it was time to leave Babylon. Iraq. Home.

I had a mission. That was what the Sergeant told me. I was
needed
. Magic words to a dog. We live for a job, a purpose. It’s what we were created for by the Big Master.

My mission: to heal a family, the family that had lost their person. I was supposed to be their link to him because he was the one who found me. The silver-haired Army colonel who fed me steak.

I’m ashamed to admit that the first time I saw him, I tried to bite him. I bared my teeth and all the fur rose up on my spine. That’s dog talk for “back the hell away because I’m thinking about taking your face off.”

Except he didn’t back away. Colonel McDaniel dropped the slab of meat on the sand, and the smell hit my nose like a drug. Drool pooled in my mouth, and before I could think, I lunged. I ate the whole thing in three bites, along with rocks and sand scraping over my tongue into my starving belly. The silver-haired man nodded and left.

The next day, he did the same thing.

And the next.

Until my fur didn’t rise anymore and I nipped the edge of the steak, tugging it from his hand.

One day, the Colonel touched the top of my head and said, “Good boy, Trooper. Good boy.”

I didn’t know what a human hand felt like until then. His fingers smelled like grease from the steak and salt from his sweat, tempting me to lick them. But I was afraid I might slip and bite him. So I held the steak between my teeth and stayed still while his hand brushed between my ears just once.

I was scared. Pee-myself scared. But that first quick touch? I wanted that again as much as I wanted another steak.

Maybe more.

So yes, I stayed even when my pack left. I let him scratch my ears for a lot of days and a lot of meals. Even when he brought along a military doctor to jab me with a bunch of needles. And people wondered why I didn’t like the doc. Really?

After a while, Colonel McDaniel sat in the dirt and talked while he fed me chopped-up chunks from his hand. He told me about his family, his childhood dog also named Trooper and other stuff. Secrets between him and me that made tears leak out of his eyes. I just listened because it was all I could offer in return for the food and the scratches.

Then one day he didn’t come. The Sergeant did, though. Other buddies, too. They told me that before the Colonel had died, they’d promised him they would look out for me.

I didn’t know what “died” meant then. So I waited for the silver-haired man to return. While I waited, I learned to play fetch, and since they kept on feeding me, I didn’t go off searching for Colonel McDaniel. I would catch that ball all day long and bark when anybody came up to their camp.

That didn’t always go well for me, but we’ll save that tale for another time. Like the story about why the steak man didn’t make it back home. Some things are hard to think about, even for a dog. We have to figure it out in smaller nibbles rather than gobbling it up. Because if we try to take everything in at once, the next thing you know, we might chew up somebody’s pillow or pee on their boots. Which meant I was lucky to get a rubbery hot dog.

So to keep your pillow and boots safe since we’ve just met, I’ll think about a happier time, that special day when I was twelve months old. The day I left home. It was all about the airplane. The family. My mission.

The day I flew to the United Steaks of America.

PART 1

Whoever invented crate training should have to spend eighteen hours in a wooden box strapped inside a cargo hold. Baby, I was born to run.

—TROOPER, OVER THE ATLANTIC

One

S
IERRA MCDANIEL HAD
ordered a drug test for a whacked-out Pomeranian, then milked a nanny goat to bottle-feed a litter of motherless pit bull pups. And it wasn’t even noon yet.

The Tennessee summer sun baked her hair faster than the professional highlights she couldn’t afford anyway. She checked the latches of each kennel run attached to her mom’s converted barn/animal rescue, complete with doggie doors and an air conditioner. Someone had tampered with the locks and let all the dogs out last week, torquing off their cranky neighbors even more.

But then who wanted an animal rescue next door? Even if next door was an acre away on either side.

She double-checked the detoxing Pomeranian sprawled on a puppy bed, looking loopy. The fur ball had bitten a teenager, and the cops had soon deduced the dog discovered a hidden bag of pot, started chowing down on the weed and objected when the outraged teen tried to recover his stash. Animal Control had called her mom’s rescue for the pup that Sierra now called Doobie even though his real name was Lucky.

God, what she wouldn’t give to be a
regular
English Lit grad student at Vanderbilt, living in a crappy apartment with flea-market furniture. Rather than going to the local college and living in her childhood bedroom of pink ruffles and faded boy-band posters. What she wouldn’t give to have her dad come home today with his unit.

But he wasn’t, and no amount of wishing could change that.

She could, however, honor his memory by doing what he would want. So she spent every spare moment between summer classes and her grad assistantship duties pitching in at her mother’s Second Chance Ranch Animal Rescue. Not that her mom would ask for help with the rescue or her own job teaching online classes year-round. Even though Sierra saw the pain and struggle in her mother’s eyes, to the rest of the world Lacey was the ultimate independent military wife, giving all for her man. Holding down the home front. Raising Sierra and Nathan to be the perfect military brats.

Oh, hey, and caring for Grandpa McDaniel while Alzheimer’s sucked him deeper into the quicksand of dementia.

As if that wasn’t enough, Mom decided to save homeless and abused animals in all her free time, starting up a nonprofit rescue organization that didn’t pay a dime. The nanny goat—freshly milked—bleated in agreement from across the yard, bell clanking around her neck before she went back to chomping grass.

Seriously, weren’t goats supposed to be gifts for third-world villages?

Huffing her sweaty bangs off her brow, Sierra yanked open the door to the mudroom on their rambling white farmhouse and quickly slammed it closed behind her, muffling the din of barking to a dull roar. Checkered curtains on the door fluttered. Through the window, Tennessee fields stretched out as far as she could see, dotted with other homesteads. Her family only owned a couple of acres total, fenced in, but even still, half the neighbors complained.

Some more vocally than others, threatening to file an injunction to shut the whole operation down at a county council meeting scheduled for next month. Another problem for another day.

She scuffed the poop off her gym shoes once, twice, then gave up and ditched her sneakers in the sink. They landed on top of the black galoshes Lacey used for kennel work, sending their old calico kitty soaring away. Sierra eyed her own purple monkey rain boots with a stab of regret that she hadn’t tugged them on this morning.

She padded into the kitchen to wash her hands and grab another cup of coffee before they had to leave for Fort Campbell. Not that an IV dose of straight caffeine would help her face what waited for them at the Army post when that planeload of returning troops landed. When
Mike Kowalski
landed with a living, breathing reminder of the father that hadn’t returned.

Her chest went tight and she mentally recited William Butler Yeats to soothe herself.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made—

Footsteps thundered down the stairs, followed by the reverberation of General Gramps’s Army cadence marching across her ears seconds ahead of him entering the kitchen, overpowering her literary ramble.

“They say that in the Army the coffee’s mighty fine . . .” Her silver-haired grandfather wore a smile and his old uniform, high-stepping his way to the gurgling java maker.

He didn’t so much as shoot a look her way, but she knew the drill. Yeats was done for now. Gramps had his own “poems.” At least it was a clean one today.

She repeated his chant like a good soldier. “They say that in the Army the coffee’s mighty fine.”

They’d played this game for decades. Her life had been military issue from the cradle.

“Looks like muddy water and tastes like turpentine.” He snagged a chipped mug from a mismatched set of crockery as he continued chanting his current Jody of choice.

“Looks like muddy water and tastes like turpentine.”

“They say that in the Army the chow is mighty fine.”

“They say that in the Army the chow is mighty fine,” she echoed, childhood memories curling through her like the scent of Kona blend wafting from the pot as he poured.

He lifted his mug in toast. “A chicken jumped off the table and started marking time.”

“A chicken jumped off the table and started marking time.”

“Hoo-ah!” her grandpa grunted.

“Hoo-ah.” Happy times with Gramps were few and far between lately. Even if this moment ached as it reminded her of her dad, she could hang tough and enjoy a ritual of semi normalcy in the crazy house. “We need to leave in about fifteen minutes. I have to shower fast and change.”

Preferably into something that didn’t smell of dog poop and goat’s milk. She washed her hands, double-pumping the antibacterial soap.

Gramps opened a Tupperware container and scowled, the light mood fading fast. “Croissants? What is this? A fancy-ass French bakery or a real kitchen? I need a soldier’s breakfast.”

So much for normalcy. He’d eaten breakfast three hours ago. Eggs, bacon
and
pancakes, with their family Labrador snoozing on his feet. Except reminding Gramps of that wouldn’t accomplish anything. Her grandfather, Joshua McDaniel, a two-star general and veteran of three wars, remembered less and less every day.

“How about a muffin on the run, Gramps?” She patted the pan of apple nut muffins still warm from the oven. “We have to get to Fort Campbell.”

He glanced down at his open uniform jacket her mom had aired out for him. Probably at about four in the morning since her supermom insisted she never needed anything so mundane as sleep. But Sierra could see her mother fraying around the edges, the little weakness slipping through, such as lost files and forgotten errands.

And God, that thought sounded petty to nitpick, but this was a crummy day, going to pick up a dog her father had found overseas—as if there weren’t already enough animals here at her mother’s rescue. As if there weren’t already enough reminders of her dead dad. She blinked back tears. Was it so wrong to want some part of her life that wasn’t military issued and full of good-byes?

Sierra pushed aside dreams of Innisfree and patted her grandfather’s shoulder, right over the two shiny stars. “General, you
are
looking mighty fine today.”

“A good soldier never forgets how to polish his shoes or shine his brass.” He grimaced at the rare second’s understanding at how much of himself he’d lost.