The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [78]
“Sure,” he said, still talking to someone else.
“Okay. See you in a few weeks,” I said.
“Well, you can’t live here,” he replied. “I put all your stuff in the Goodwill bin.”
I knew that meant he’d sold it, so I didn’t say anything.
“I had to do something with it, didn’t I?”
“Sure, Junior,” I said, and hung up.
A feeling of sadness poured over me. Had he thrown out my yearbooks? My pictures? I thought of favorite sweaters and my two pairs of handmade mittens. My black Doc Marten boots. My books. My small collection of worthless but sentimental jewelry. My report cards. My beaded prom dress.
I was sad, but surprised that I didn’t care more. Those things had meant a lot once, but something had changed. I had changed. I wasn’t just some skinny kid from Hollow Ford anymore. I was about to begin a new life as a new person. Before I wasted one more minute thinking about Junior, I took off for the beach, determined to find what I was looking for.
At about two thirty, I passed the glass house and continued for fifty steps. To my right was the sea grape grove, fenced on the road side. I looked around, noting a landmark that I would be able to see from the road—a perfectly fan-shaped shrub—and continued to the end of the grove. There, I crouched down and crawled past the undergrowth.
I wasn’t ten steps in when the Doberman appeared. I heard him, first, crunching crisp leaves under his heavy feet, then saw his slow, tired body fifty feet away. It was obvious from a distance that something was wrong with him. I didn’t see the blood until he came closer. It had matted most of his facial hair into brown clumps.
“Oh no. What happened, boy?”
He came to me, wincing a bit under his breath. I inspected the wound in a sunbeam and found a small shard of glass lodged in the top of his head where the blood trickled. I picked it out and tried to press the cut together and apply pressure, but the dog couldn’t stand still with the pain. I walked slowly toward the sea, and he followed lazily after a few seconds. I walked into the shallow water and scooped up a handful of saltwater, placing it gently on his head and hoping he wouldn’t freak out too much. I was very aware whose house I was fifty yards away from, whose dog this was. I washed the cut and gently scrubbed out the blood in his coat. He didn’t flinch once.
When I returned to the grove and crawled my way through the growth toward my perfectly fan-shaped landmark, the Doberman loyally followed.
I patted his back. “Good boy.”
As I squatted and paced fifty steps from the roadside fence, he trotted behind me and counted along. When I stopped and began moving dead leaves from the ground with my hands, he circled me and watched, curious about what I was looking for.
I looked at him, face to face, and smiled. “Where is it?”
He cocked his head, nudged me, and led me through the trees toward the glass house. As we got closer and closer, I started to doubt that the dog knew what he was doing, and I slowed down. I certainly had no intention of another audience with creepy Fred Livingstone that day, or ever again.
The dog stopped about twenty feet from the edge of the tree line and sat down, panting and looking at me. I crept toward him, and when I got there, he stood up and nosed an area of worn, compacted sand. He winced again.
The dog knew what he was doing.
He knew there was something special under that spot.
He nosed a protruding root and scratched it with his paw. He did the same thing with another root. Then, as if he was frustrated with me for being so stupid, he wedged himself into the worn area and lay down in it.
“Is this your bed?” I asked.
He winced and shifted himself around, trying to get comfortable, and then stood up again. He nosed what looked like another root—but when I felt its sharp edge, I knew it was something else.
I sat down in the sand to get a closer look. As I pulled it back and forth, stealing it from the grip of three hundred-year-old sand, I recognized what it was. I’d completely forgotten about the shovel Emer buried that night long ago, and could