Shiloh (2 page)

“I'll eat it,” I say.

“Don't you be giving it to that dog,” says Ma.

I take a tiny bite.

“What's the doggy going to
eat,
then?” asks Becky. She's three, which is four years younger than Dara Lynn.

“Nothing here, that's what,” says Ma.

Becky and Dara Lynn look at Dad. Now I had
them
feeling sorry for the beagle, too. Sometimes girl-children get what they want easier than I do. But not this time.

“Dog's going right back across the river when we get through eating,” says Dad. “If that's Judd's new dog, he probably don't have sense enough yet to find his way home again. We'll put him in the Jeep and drive him over.”

Don't know what else I figured Dad to say. Do I really think he's going to tell me to wait till morning, and if the beagle's still here, we can keep him? I try all kinds of ways to figure how I could get that rabbit meat off my plate and into my pocket, but Ma's watching every move I make.

So I excuse myself and go outside and over to the chicken coop. It's off toward the back where Ma can't see. We keep three hens, and I take one of the two eggs that was in a nest and carry it out behind the bushes.

I whistle softly. Shiloh comes loping toward me. I crack the egg and empty it out in my hands. Hold my hands down low and Shiloh eats the egg, licking my hands clean afterward, then curling his
tongue down between my fingers to get every little bit.

“Good boy, Shiloh,” I whisper, and stroke him all over.

I hear the back screen slam, and Dad comes out on the stoop. “Marty?”

“Yeah?” I go around, Shiloh at my heels.

“Let's take that dog home now.” Dad goes over and opens the door of the Jeep. Shiloh puts his tail between his legs and just stands there, so I go around to the other side, get in, and whistle. Shiloh leaps up onto my lap, but he don't look too happy about it.

For the first time I have my arms around him. He feels warm, and when I stroke him, I can feel places on his body where he has ticks.

“Dog has ticks,” I tell my dad.

“Judd'll take 'em off,” Dad says.

“What if he don't?”

“It's his concern, Marty, not yours. It's not your dog. You keep to your own business.”

I press myself against the back of the seat as we start down our bumpy dirt driveway toward the road. “I want to be a vet someday,” I tell my dad.

“Hmm,” he says.

“I want to be a traveling vet. The kind that has his office in a van and goes around to people's homes, don't make folks come to him. Read about it in a magazine at school.”

“You know what you have to do to be a vet?” Dad asks.

“Got to go to school, I know that.”

“You've got to have college training. Like a doctor, almost. Takes a lot of money to go to veterinary school.”

My dream sort of leaks out like water in a paper bag. “I could be a veterinarian's helper,” I suggest, my second choice.

“You maybe could,” says Dad, and points the Jeep up the road into the hills.

Dusk is settling in now. Still warm, though. A warm July night. Trees look dark against the red sky; lights coming on in a house here, another one there. I'm thinking how in any one of these houses there's probably somebody who would take better care of Shiloh than Judd Travers would. How come this dog had to be his?

The reason I don't like Judd Travers is a whole lot of reasons, not the least is that I was in the corner store once down in Friendly and saw Judd cheat Mr. Wallace at the cash register. Judd gives the man a ten and gets him to talking, then—when Mr. Wallace gives him change—says he give him a twenty.

I blink, like I can't believe Judd done that, and old Mr. Wallace is all confused. So I say, “No, I think he give you a ten.”

Judd glares at me, whips out his wallet, and
waves a twenty-dollar bill in front of my eye. “Whose picture's on this bill, boy?” he says.

“I don't know.”

He gives me a look says, I thought so. “That's Andrew Jackson,” he says. “I had two of 'em in my wallet when I walked in here, and now I only got one. This here man's got the other, and I want my change.”

Mr. Wallace, he's so flustered he just digs in his money drawer and gives Judd change for a twenty, and afterward I thought what did Andrew Jackson have to do with it? Judd's so fast-talking he can get away with anything. Don't know anybody who likes him much, but around here folks keep to their own business, like Dad says. In Tyler County that's important. Way it's always been, anyhow.

Another reason I don't like Judd Travers is he spits tobacco out the corner of his mouth, and if he don't like you—and he sure don't like me—he sees just how close he can spit to where you're standing. Third reason I don't like him is because he was at the fairgrounds last year same day we were, and seemed like everyplace I was, he was in front of me, blocking my view. Standin' in front of me at the mud bog, sittin' in front of me at the tractor pull, and risin' right up out of his seat at the Jorden Globe of Death Motorcycle Act so's I missed the best part.

Fourth reason I don't like him is because he kills deer out of season. He says he don't, but I seen him once just about dusk with a young buck strapped over the hood of his truck. He tells me the buck run in front of him on the road and he accidentally run over it, but I saw the bullet hole myself. If he got caught, he'd have to pay two hundred dollars, more than he's got in the bank, I'll bet.

We're in Shiloh now. Dad's crossing the bridge by the old abandoned gristmill, turning at the boarded-up school, and for the first time I can feel Shiloh's body begin to shake. He's trembling all over. I swallow. Try to say something to my dad and have to swallow again.

“How do you go about reporting someone who don't take care of his dog right?” I ask finally.

“Who you fixing to report, Marty?”

“Judd.”

“If this dog's mistreated, he's only about one out of fifty thousand animals that is,” Dad says. “Folks even bring 'em up here in the hills and let 'em out, figure they can live on rats and rabbits. Wouldn't be the first dog that wasn't treated right.”

“But this one come to me to help him!” I insist. “
Knew
that's why he was following me. I got hooked on him, Dad, and I want to know he's treated right.”

For the first time I can tell Dad's getting impatient with me. “Now you get that out of your head right now. If it's Travers's dog, it's no mind of ours
how
he treats it.”

“What if it was a child?” I ask him, getting too smart for my own good. “If some kid was shaking like this dog is shaking, you wouldn't feel no pull for keeping an eye on him?”

“Marty,” Dad says, and now his voice is just plumb tired. “This here's a dog, not a child, and it's not our dog. I want you to quit going on about it. Hear?”

I shut up then. Let my hands run over Shiloh's body like maybe everywhere I touch I can protect him somehow. We're getting closer to the trailer where Judd lives with his other dogs, and already they're barking up a storm, hearing Dad's Jeep come up the road.

Dad pulls over. “You want to let him out?” he says.

I shake my head hard. “I'm not lettin' him out here till I know for sure he belongs to Judd.” I'm asking for a slap in the face, but Dad don't say anything, just gets out and goes up the boards Judd has laid out in place of a sidewalk.

Judd's at the door of his trailer already, in his undershirt, peering out.

“Looks like Ray Preston,” he says, through the screen.

“How you doin', Judd?”

Judd comes out on the little porch he's built at the side of his trailer, and they stand there and talk awhile. Up here in the hills you hardly ever get down to business right off. First you say your howdys and then you talk about anything else but what you come for, and finally, when the mosquitoes start to bite, you say what's on your mind. But you always edge into it, not to offend.

I can hear little bits and pieces floating out over the yard. The rain . . . the truck . . . the tomatoes . . . the price of gasoline . . . and all the while Shiloh lays low in my lap, tail between his legs, shaking like a window blind in a breeze.

And then, the awful words: “Say, Judd, my boy was up here along the river this afternoon, and a beagle followed him home. Don't have any tags on his collar, but I'm remembering you got yourself another hunting dog, and wondered if he might be yours.”

I'm thinking this is a bad mistake. Maybe it isn't Judd's at all, and he's such a liar he'd say it was, just to get himself still another animal to be mean to.

Judd hardly lets him finish; starts off across the muddy yard in his boots. “Sure as hell bet it is,” he says. “Can't keep that coon dog home to save my soul. Every time I take him hunting, he runs off before I'm through. I been out all day with the
dogs, and they all come back but him.”

I can hear Judd's heavy footsteps coming around the side of the Jeep, and I can smell his chewing tobacco, strong as coffee.

“Yep,” he says, thrusting his face in the open window. “That's him, all right.” He opens the door. “
Git
on down here!” he says, and before I can even give the dog one last pat, Shiloh leaps off my lap onto the ground and connects with Judd's right foot. He yelps and runs off behind the trailer, tail tucked down, belly to the ground. All Judd's dogs chained out back bark like crazy.

I jump out of the Jeep, too. “Please don't kick him like that,” I say. “Some dogs just like to run.”

“He runs all over creation,” Judd says. I can tell he's studying me in the dark, trying to figure what's it to me.

“I'll keep an eye out for him,” I say. “Anytime I see him away from home, I'll bring him back. I promise. Just don't kick him.”

Judd only growls. “He could be a fine huntin' dog, but he tries my patience. I'll leave him be tonight, but he wanders off again, I'll whup the daylights out of him. Guarantee you that.”

I swallow and swallow, and all the way home I can't speak a word, trying to hold the tears back.

I
don't sleep more than a couple hours that night. When I do, I dream of Shiloh. When I don't, I'm thinking about him out in the rain all afternoon, head on his paws, watching our door. Thinking how I'd disappointed him, whistling like I meant something that first time, gettin' him to come to me, then taking him on back to Judd Travers to be kicked all over again.

By five o'clock, when it's growing light, I know pretty much what I have to do: I have to buy that dog from Judd Travers.

I don't let my mind go any further; don't dwell on what Judd would want for Shiloh, or even
whether he'd sell. Especially don't ask myself how I'm supposed to get the money. All I know is that I can think of only one way to get that dog away from Judd, and that's what I'm going to have to do.

My bed is the couch in the living room, so when Dad comes in to fix his breakfast, I pull on my jeans and go out to sit across from him in the kitchen. First he makes himself a lunch to carry to work. He drives his Jeep to the post office in Sistersville, where he cases mail for around two hundred families and delivers it, then comes back to the Friendly post office where he cases mail for two hundred more. Delivers that, too. Route takes him 'bout eighty-five miles on roads you can hardly git by on in winter.

“‘Mornin',” he says to me as he stuffs a sandwich in a sack, then starts in on his breakfast, which is Wheat Chex and any fruit he can get from our peach tree. He makes himself coffee and eats the cornbread or biscuits Ma saves for him from our meal the night before.

“Can you think of a way I could earn myself some money?” I ask him, with this froggy kind of voice that shows you aren't woke up yet.

Dad takes another bite of cornbread, looks at me for a moment, then goes on studying his cereal. Says exactly what I figure he'd say: “Collect some bottles, take 'em in for deposit.
Pick up some aluminum cans, maybe, for the recycling place.”

“I mean real money. Got to have it faster than that.”

“How fast?”

I try to think. Wish I could earn it in a week, but know I can't. Have to go out every day for a whole summer collecting cans and bottles to have much of anything at all.

“A month, maybe,” I tell him.

“I'll ask along my mail route, but don't know many folks with money to spare,” he says. Which is what I thought.

After Dad's gone off, Becky gets up before Ma, and I fix her a bowl of Cheerios, put her sneakers on so she won't stub her toes, and brush the snarls from her hair.

Read once in a book about how some kids earned money baby-sitting. Boy, if
I
ever got paid even a nickel for every time I've taken care of Becky—Dara Lynn, too—I'd have a lot of dollars. I do a whole bunch of jobs that other kids, other places, get paid to do, but it wouldn't ever occur to me to ask for pay. If I asked Dad, he'd say, “You live in this house, boy?” And when I'd say yes, he'd say, “Then you do your share like the rest of us.”

Which is why I never asked.

“More Cheerios,” says Becky, and all the while
I'm making her breakfast, I'm thinking the best route to take to find aluminum cans. By the time Dara Lynn gets up, wearing one of Dad's old T-shirts for her nightgown, I'd figured how I could double my can count. But when Ma gets up a few minutes later, she takes one look at me and guesses what I'm thinking.

“You got that dog on your mind,” she says, lifting the big iron skillet to the stove top and laying some bacon in it.

“Thinking don't cost nothing,” I tell her.

She just gives me a little smile then and sets about making my bacon crisp, the way I like it, and we don't say any more about Judd's dog.