The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (10 page)

Why Mrs. Auberchon didn't rush out there and find out what was going on, and put a stop to it, she didn't know. All she could do was stand there and look, like watching a movie she could not turn away from. It couldn't be possible that Evie planned to go into the pen with that barrel.

But there was her gloved hand on the latch. She waited to step inside until Hank was at the opposite end, and then inside she went, dragging the barrel at a tilt, her face straining with the effort. When she reached the halfway point of Hank's path, she placed the barrel on its side and pressed down on it, so that it lay in Hank's way like a roadblock. She placed herself at the mouth of it, and suddenly, as Hank neared it, she lifted her arms and swayed them in the air like a pair of waves cresting and falling.

Up went Hank's head. His eyes went wider. His lips were pulled back—a grimace? A warning sign? Should Mrs. Auberchon do something?

But Evie's voice boomed out like the burst of a bell.

“Jump, Hank! You can do it! Forget the pacing and JUMP!”

Hank's tail went up like an exclamation point. He stopped in his tracks for the first time ever. He looked up at Evie. He seemed to realize the barrel was too heavy for him to push out of his way. Going around it would have meant leaving his path. His body tensed up. What to do? What to do?

“You can do it! Do it now! It'll feel real good!” screamed Evie, and the next thing Mrs. Auberchon knew, Hank was leaping.

It wasn't merely that he went over that thing. He had made the decision to go airborne, and it seemed that he'd been waiting all his life for this moment to arrive. His body left the ground in a liftoff that took Mrs. Auberchon's breath away, and when he landed softly on all his paws in the snow, and turned around and
did it again,
even higher, Mrs. Auberchon found herself laughing a laugh that was sobbing too.

There were several more jumps before Evie calmly reached for the leash that was draped on the fence by the gate. She went over to him and snapped it on him. He let her. He let her pat his head. He let her bend toward his face, nuzzling him. Then he pulled hard, wanting to get back to it, and she held on, shaking her head. Mrs. Auberchon raised the window, mindless of the cold air rushing in. She wanted to know what Evie was saying to him. It didn't sound crazy. It sounded the opposite.

“That's enough for today,” she was saying. “If I let you keep doing that, you'll just get addicted. Believe me, the last thing you need is another thing to be obsessed about. Let's go for a walk where there aren't any trees, and you can jump again tomorrow.”

He pulled again, so forcefully that Evie tottered and nearly went down face first. But somehow she was holding on. The leash was a long one. She knew to wrap the end around her hand for a better grip. Strong girl, Mrs. Auberchon was thinking. Who knew?

Mrs. Auberchon watched them leave the pen, Hank resisting, Evie pulling. He was quite a strong dog. It didn't look like they'd get far.

Evie reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a biscuit. But when she held it out, Hank bumped her hand with his head, and it fell to the snow. He didn't try getting it. He wanted only to keep jumping.

And down to the ground went Evie. She still had the leash in her hand. She was flat on her back, same as the morning she lied about being able to snowshoe.

Mrs. Auberchon remembered that she was crazy. Should she put on her coat before she went out there to help, or should she just rush out there?

Then she heard Evie yelling again.

“Jump, Hank!”

Hank understood. He had plenty of room on the leash to make this new leap. Evie got up, walked him a few yards, and dropped down again.

“Jump, Hank!”

And where was George? He was supposed to be here to take Hank up the mountain, and leave Josie for an hour with Evie in the training room. George was assigned to Evie. He was expected to be responsible. Oh, he was young, but he knew the rules as well as Mrs. Auberchon did—when the Sanctuary took you in, you couldn't be some kind of freeloader.

Evie was on the ground again, shouting at Hank to jump over her. And there was George! If there were such a thing as creeping while being upright on your feet, he was doing it. He had a backpack strapped snugly on his shoulders. Poking up from the open top was Josie, completely quiet, in cahoots with the human she was riding. Her little white head and dark eyes were toylike, as if a manufacturer of stuffed dogs had created one in her image. In George's hands was a video camera. Evie and Hank didn't know they were being recorded.

When they passed out of sight, Mrs. Auberchon looked at white sunlight glinting on the barrel in the pen. She looked at the snow prints of Hank's paws. She looked at the snow angels Evie had made in the clearing, and the paw prints there, too.

The sound of deep barking in the distance startled her, followed by the yapping of Josie, which in turn was followed by the shouting voice of Evie. She was telling George that if he taped her one more time without her permission, she was going to take that phone of his and break it and also cause him serious bodily harm, because she was a whole lot stronger than she looked; and also, in case he didn't know what she thought of him in general, she thought he was
an asshole.

Well, they'd found each other.

Mrs. Auberchon closed the window. She wasn't willing to call herself hasty or mistaken for maybe jumping to a wrong conclusion about “If the world had no animals and I couldn't be a dog trainer, I'd become someone who talks to aliens professionally.” But she was willing to give that thing another look, one of these days. She would have to read it again with new eyes.

T
HIS WAS THE
first time I was naked in front of a dog.

I had closed the bunkroom door before my shower, and I'd locked it. Where the little white dog had been hiding, I'd never know. She was sitting on the bunk closest to the bathroom when I came out, trailing steam and the smells of my soap and shampoo and bareness. Her head was tipped to one side. Her eyes were wide open and her lips were a little bit parted, like she'd caught me doing something not allowed, which surprised her, and which she very much disapproved of. I had to remind myself that animals and people don't feel the same way about clothing.

“Hi, Josie,” I said. “I know you're kind of deaf, but how about you and I starting over with each other?”

In answer, she pulled back her lips to show me her teeth, in case I'd forgotten she had them, as sharp as little knife points. Why didn't I have treats with me? Why wasn't I a person who never went anywhere, even in and out of a bathroom, without dog treats? Then I felt stupid and way too self-conscious about grabbing a towel and wrapping it around me, modest-like. I was hoping she'd look at me in a friendlier way.

She didn't. She looked at me like we were enemies. I remembered,
baby.
I remembered,
hit on the head
and in a shelter,
refusing to eat,
scheduled to be euthanized.
I remembered what it was like the day we met, when she thought I was going to hurt her. She had lowered her head to me—a sad dog trembling all over, small and alone, getting ready for the shock and the pain of a blow from the hand of a human, as if all she expected, for the rest of her life, was getting hurt.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” I said. “I don't care if you're saying you hate me. I totally do not hate you back, not that you're making it easy for me to say so.”

I took a step toward her. That was a mistake. She raised her hackles and let out a hissy little growl, showing her teeth even more. I was only trying to pretend I was a fully trained trainer with a lesson in mind for my pupil. The lesson involved letting me pat her. One pat! It seemed reasonable. It seemed like a thing we could get to. I was starting to think that if she bit me, which obviously she extremely much wanted to do, I wouldn't care. I'd call it an occupational hazard and go for the pat.

But I remembered, yoga.

“Okay,” I said, backing off. “I'll wait.”

I sat down on the floor at the foot of the bunk she was on. I told myself I was Buddha-like with my stillness. I listened to her short, nervous breaths, and found out about her anxiety in those rhythms, the same as if she'd been running around the room and collapsed exhausted, panting. I wondered about the force of will it had taken her to turn her face away from food bowls. Maybe, when she refused to eat, people tried to feed her by hand. Did she bite the hands that were trying to feed her? She would have been terribly hungry. She would have been terribly weak. I had the feeling she remembered that.

“Josie,” I said. “You would not believe how much I get it that your will is a whole lot bigger than your body. I'm in
awe
of you. I mean, I know about things like that.”

She let herself go out of a crouch into a lie-down. I could feel her unhappiness and confusion like a message being broadcast somehow to a part of my brain I didn't even know I had. I wished I could tell her she wasn't the only one in this room with memories that needed erasing. I wished she'd look warmly at all this
me.

I was careful not to look into her eyes too long, which I somehow knew would set off new alarms in her. I stared at my own feet, then my legs, which I saw were in need of a shaving. I was usually so fussy about that. I could not believe I'd just showered without noticing I was growing leg hair. Or maybe I'd noticed, and thought, so what?

It was late afternoon. I had the window shutters open. Evening was beginning to slide to us from the mountain, gray and soft like fur. I was chilly in my towel. I was only human, only skin, hair. How was I supposed to get through to this dog? What did I know about life anyway, except that, against incredible odds, even when it's been really hurt, it can still keep going, ticking along, heartbeat to heartbeat? Why couldn't I think of a way to let this dog know she might like it if I patted her in the spot where her heart was?

All I was getting was tired. I told her that.

“I'm wiped out, Josie,” I whispered. “I know you can't hear me, but I just feel like telling someone I'm pretty wiped.”

Sometimes in my body I still didn't know the difference between sleep need and dangling at the edge of coming down from a high, especially a high I'd forgotten to cushion with a pill or something to drink. Sometimes I'd really been careless with that. So instead of being okay with dropping into slumber like a normal person, I could sort of panic.

I was sitting there. I couldn't know what sort of look came into my eyes and over my face, what sort of vibrations started passing from me upward, invisibly, to that little white dog. It wasn't as if I was shaking.

I had the towel tucked in so I didn't have to hold on to it. I crisscrossed my arms at my chest, and suddenly Josie's expression changed. First it seemed to me that she was telling me she knew the meaning of
scared.
Then it seemed she'd just learned the meaning of
hold on.
I looked into her eyes. She let me. And then she rose and jumped down to the floor, landing lightly at my side.

I was so busy with my own self, I couldn't reach out a hand to pat her. So we didn't have to go through the whole reach-out-and-get-bitten thing, even though patting her was my goal. What are goals anyway? Goals are for fields where people play games. Goals are totally overrated. In fact, over the last couple of years, whenever anyone started nagging me again about my goals, I'd say, “Hello? Am I supposed to think life is a game? Do I look like someone who's into
sports?
”

Josie stared at me as if reading my thoughts and finding herself in complete agreement with me. She came closer, closer. She acted as though she'd just been swimming, or she'd been out in snow or rain getting drenched. She rubbed herself against my towel, left side and back. Then she hunkered down flat at my right, pressing herself against me, her head in the curve above my hip. Her body was relaxed. Her tail wagged from side to side, very slowly. I could feel her weight as she leaned into me. I felt she was letting me hold her, sort of.

I became so all right, I nearly dozed off upright, as if I were slipping out of being awake as sweetly and softly as a baby. But she felt she'd had enough. She went to the door and positioned herself in front of it, looking at me over her shoulder. I saw how polite she was about asking me to open it for her.

I got up. I wanted to dress in a hurry and follow her downstairs, but it took everything I had just to get myself to my bunk for a nap. I didn't care that the towel was damp. It smelled good. It smelled like a dog.

“L
ET'S START A
conversation, Shadow.”

He looked up at me: the puzzle, speckled, spotted, tan, brown, black, as quiet as snow with his droopy eyes, with his face so narrow and haunted. He and I were in the lobby. Mrs. Auberchon had promised she'd signal from the kitchen when she was ready to hide in the broom closet and scream for help, so I could see what Shadow would do. While I waited for the scream, I chose the beagle aspect of his heritage for our first try at one-on-one.

“When I was a kid,” I told him, “I was the only one I knew who hated
Peanuts.
Every holiday there was a special—Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, everything. I had a teacher who made us say who your favorite character was, and everyone else was saying, Charlie Brown! Snoopy! Or whoever else they picked. I stayed out of it. I couldn't pick a character because I thought they all were morons. I thought Snoopy was a smug little jerk. I thought he was an insult to beagles, not that I knew any beagles.”

I was sitting in the heavily upholstered armchair not far from the wood stove. It looked like it was placed there maybe fifty years ago and never moved. It was so high, my feet weren't touching the floor. Shadow was sitting in front of me. I held a tennis ball in my hand. He wanted it. But he didn't know how to ask for it.