T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

She saw Erhard plunge forward and snatch at them, the grass rising up to meet him and both dogs tearing free. “Admiral!” he called, scrambling to his knees. “Here, boy. Come!” The moment thundered in her ears. The dogs hesitated, the ridiculous sea of fur smoothing and settling momentarily, and then one of them — it was Admiral, it had to be — came to him and he got hold of it even as the other pricked up its ears at the sound of the car and bolted round the corner of the house.

“I’ll stall her,” she called.

Erhard, all six feet and five inches of him, was already humping across the grass in the direction of the pool house, the dog writhing in his arms.

But the other dog — it was Fred, it had to be — was chasing the car up the drive now, nipping at the wheels, and as Nisha came round the corner she could read the look on her employer’s face. A moment and she was there, grabbing for the dog as the car rolled to a stop and the engine died. Gretchen stepped out of the car, heels coming down squarely on the pavement, her shoulders thrust back tightly against the grip of her jacket. “I thought I told you…,” she began, her voice high and querulous, but then she faltered and her expression changed. “But where’s Admiral?” she said. “And whose dog is that?”

In the course of her life, short though it had been, she’d known her share of embittered people — her father, for one; her mother, for another — and she’d promised herself she’d never go there, never descend to that hopeless state of despair and regret that ground you down till you were nothing but raw animus, but increasingly now everything she thought or felt or tasted was bitter to the root. Erhard was gone. The Strikers were inflexible. Her mother lingered.

Admiral reigned supreme. When the car had come up the drive and Gretchen had stood there confronting her, she’d never felt lower in her life. Until Admiral began howling in the distance and then broke free of Erhard to come careening round the corner of the house and launch himself in one wholly coordinated and mighty leap right into the arms of his protector. And then Erhard appeared, head bowed and shoulders slumped, looking abashed.

“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” Gretchen said, setting down the dog (which sprang right up again, this time at Erhard) and at the same time shooting Nisha a look before stepping forward and extending her hand.

“Oh, this is, uh, Erhard,” she heard herself say. “He’s from Switzerland, and I, well, I just met him in the dog park and since he had an Afghan too—”

Erhard was miserable, as miserable as she’d ever seen him, but he mustered a counterfeit of his smile and said, “Nice to meet you,”

even as Gretchen dropped his hand and turned to Nisha.

“Well, it’s a nice idea,” she said, looking down at the dogs, comparing them, “—good for you for taking the initiative, Nisha …

but really, you have to know that Admiral didn’t have any — playmates — here on the property, Afghans or no, and I’m sure he wasn’t exposed to anybody from Switzerland, if you catch my drift?”

There was nothing Nisha could do but nod her acquiescence.

“So,” Gretchen said, squaring her shoulders and turning back to Erhard. “Nice to meet you,” she said, “but I’m going to have to ask that you take your dog — what’s his name?”

Erhard ducked his head. “Fred.”

“Fred? What an odd name. For a dog, I mean. His does have papers, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, yes, he’s of the highest order, very well-bred.”

Gretchen glanced dubiously down at the dog, then back at Erhard. “Yes, well, he looks it,” she said, “and they do make great dogs, Afghans — we ought to know. I don’t know if Nisha told you, but Admiral is very special, very, very special, and we can’t have any other dogs on the property. And I don’t mean to be abrupt”—a sharp look for Nisha—“but strangers of any sort, or species, just cannot be part of this, this …” she trailed off, fighting, at the end, to recover the cold impress of her smile. “Nice meeting you,” she repeated, and there was nowhere to go from there.

It had taken Nisha a while to put it all behind her. She kept thinking Erhard was lying low, that he’d be back, that there had been something between them after all, but by the end of the second week she no longer looked for him at the gate or at the dog park or anywhere else. And very slowly, as the days beat on, she began to understand what her role was, her true role. Admiral chased his tail and she encouraged him. When he did his business along the street, she nudged the hard little bolus with the tip of her shoe till he stooped to take it up in his mouth. Yes, she was living in the past and her mother was dying and she’d gone to college for nothing, but she was determined to create a new future — for herself and Admiral — and when she took him to the dog park she lingered outside the gate, to let him run free where he really wanted to be, out there on the street where the cars shunted by and the wheels spun and stalled and caught the light till there was nothing else in the world. “Good boy,”

she’d say. “Good boy.”

He’d always loved the smell of gasoline. It reminded him of when he was little, when he was seven or eight and Grady came to live with them. When Grady moved in he’d brought his yellow Chevy Super Sport with him, backing it into the weeds by the side of the garage on a sleek black trailer he must have rented for the day because it was gone in the morning. That first night had fallen over Dill like an absence, like all the nights then and most of the days too, a whole tumble of nothing that sparked with a particle of memory here and there. But he remembered the trailer, and Grady — of course he remembered Grady because Grady was here in this house till he was eleven years old — and he remembered seeing the car mounted on cement blocks the next morning as if it had gone through a wall at a hundred miles an hour and got hung up on the rubble. And he remembered the smell of gasoline. Grady wore it like perfume.

Now Dill was thirteen, with a car of his own, or at least the one he’d have when he was old enough to get his learner’s permit, and when he tried to picture Grady, what Grady looked like, he could see Grady’s hat, the grease-feathered baseball cap that had a #4 and a star sign on it in a little silver box in front, and he could see Grady’s silver shades beneath the bill of that cap, and below that there must have been a nose and a mouth but all he could remember was the mustache that hooked down over the corners of Grady’s lips, making him look like the sad face Billy Bottoms used to draw on every available surface when they were in fifth grade.

At the moment, he was in the yard, smelling gasoline, thinking of Grady, looking at his own piece-of-shit car parked there by the garage where the Super Sport had sunk into its cement blocks till his mother had it towed away to the junkyard. He felt the weight of the gas can in his hand, lifted his face to the sun and the hot breath sifting through the canyon, but for just a fraction of a second he forgot what he was doing there, as if he’d gone outside of himself.

This was a thing that happened to him, that had always happened to him, another kind of absence that was so usual he hardly noticed it.

It irritated his mother. Baffled his teachers. He wished it wouldn’t happen or happen so often, but there it was. He was a dreamer, he guessed. That was what his mother called him. A dreamer.

And here came her voice through the kitchen window, her caught-high-in-the-throat voice that snapped like the braided tail of a whip: “Dill, what are you doing standing there? The potatoes are almost done. I need you to light the fire and put up the meat right this minute!”