Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [49]
He could see sailboats in the distance, and lobster boats. Maybe, he thought, I could hide away on one of those. Travel by boat to York instead of walking. But so far, his one attempt at stowing away had not exactly been successful. With his luck, he’d end up docking in Canada, and, although he might avoid being arrested, the likelihood of seeing his mother again, he figured, would be much slimmer.
There was a seawall that lined the beach, and lobster traps were piled along it. Jack crawled behind the bank of lobster traps and plunked down. It was the perfect hiding spot — cozy and well concealed — and yet he could still look out at the sea. I’ll wait here until dark, he decided, then I’ll start walking to York. He’d have to be careful and duck whenever a car came into view, but if no one spotted him walking, he could make it pretty far overnight.
He dug around in the sand a bit, looking for shell fragments, and figured it was getting close to noon. Noon would mean midday hunger pangs. But he was learning that if he just ignored them, they would lessen in an hour or so. It was strange; hunger was like an alarm clock. It sounded for a while, but if you ignored it, it would eventually give up. The alarm would go off again around dinnertime, he knew, but he’d deal with that when the time came.
Sudden noises startled Jack: women’s voices and the easily recognizable sound of dog tags. Please let the dog be on a leash, thought Jack. If not, the dog would surely sniff him out, and there was no way he could convince the women that he was a homeschooled kid just hiding behind some lobster traps.
“Waldo!” shouted a woman. “Stop it!”
The dog drew nearer. He was big and black and, luckily, leashed. But he was barking and lunging at the lobster traps, and, although Jack could see the owner only from the waist down, he could tell that the dog was succeeding in pulling her closer.
“Do you think there’s an animal hiding back there?” asked the other woman, whose voice was calmer, deeper.
Jack tried to disappear into the wall behind him.
“What, like a seal? Whoa, Waldo! Cut it out! A seal would be sweet.”
“I was thinking a squirrel, or a cat from one of the houses around here.”
“Waldo, come!”
The dog immediately stopped lunging at the traps and began bouncing against the woman’s leg.
“He knows that command!” said the woman with the deeper voice.
“He knows that obeying it means a cookie,” said the owner. She gave the dog a treat, and the three of them moved on.
Jack let out his breath. He was lucky, but he wasn’t going to stay here. The next dog might be off leash, and not nearly as fond of Milk-Bones as this one.
He gave up on the beach and headed back into a nearby neighborhood, where he took a closer look at the toolsheds and garages. It wasn’t ideal, but it sure beat being sniffed out by a curious dog.
Before long, he found an open toolshed in the corner of a backyard. The shed mostly contained gardening equipment: plastic pots and bags of soil, clippers and rakes. But in the corner was a faded director’s chair, and next to the chair was a plastic bin filled with dingy mystery magazines from the 1970s. As Jack squeezed past the lawn mower and into the chair, he wondered about the person who escaped to this shed to do a little reading. He decided to move the chair to the one and only window, which gave him a view of the house — and, he hoped, of anyone approaching.
He read for hours, thankful for the distraction. Once, just after he’d finished a story about a man whose wife had disappeared, Jack heard the back door of the house open. A woman came out and sat for a while on her back step. That was all. She just sat, turning her face toward the sun. Then she got up and went back inside.
Another time, Jack saw a couple of little kids running across the yard. They seemed