“Fight!” Billy yelled.
I started to surge forward to protect my boy, but Chelsea put a firm hand on my collar. “No, Bailey. Stay.”
The boys rolled around, the two of them tied together in a tight knot of anger. I twisted around, trying to slip my collar, but Chelsea held fast. Frustrated, I barked.
Ethan was soon sitting up on top of Todd. Both boys were panting. “You give?” Ethan demanded.
Todd looked away, his eyes squeezed shut. Humiliation and hate wafted off of him in equal amounts. Finally, he nodded. The boys stood up warily, beating at the dirt on their pants.
I felt the sudden rage from Drake at the exact moment he lunged forward, slamming Ethan with both hands. Ethan rocked back but didn’t fall.
“Come on, Ethan. Come on,” Drake snarled.
There was a long pause while Ethan stood looking up at the older boy, and then Billy stepped forward. “No,” Billy said.
“No,” Chelsea said.
“No,” some of the other children said. “No.”
Drake looked at us all for a minute, and then he spat on the ground and picked up the go-kart. Without a word, the two brothers walked away.
“Well, we sure showed everybody today, didn’t we, Bailey?” Ethan said to me. Everyone hauled their go-karts to the top of the hill and rolled them back down, all day long. Ethan allowed Chelsea to ride his go-kart, since hers had lost a wheel, and she had me ride behind her every time.
That night Ethan was excited at dinner, talking rapidly to Mom and Dad, who smiled as they listened. It took the boy a long time to fall asleep, and after he did so his restlessness made me slide off the bed and lie on the floor. This meant I wasn’t really asleep when I heard a huge crash from downstairs.
“What was that?” the boy asked me, sitting bolt upright in bed. He jumped down onto the floor as the lights came on in the hallway.
“Ethan, stay in your room,” Dad told him. He was tense, angry, and afraid. “Bailey, come.”
I obediently eased down the stairs with Dad, who moved cautiously and turned on the lights in the living room. “Who’s there?” he asked loudly.
Wind blew the curtains on the front window—a window that was normally never opened. “Don’t come down with bare feet!” Dad shouted.
“What is it?” Mom asked.
“Someone threw a rock through our window. Stay back, Bailey.”
I sensed Dad’s concern and sniffed around the room at all the glass. On the floor was a rock, little shards of the window clinging to it. When I put my nose to it, I instantly recognized the smell.
Todd.
{ THIRTEEN }
A year or so later, in the spring, Smokey the cat got sick. He lay around moaning and didn’t protest when I put my nose down in his face to investigate this new behavior. Mom became very worried and took Smokey for a car ride. When Mom came home, she was sad, probably because cats are no fun in a car.
A week or so later, Smokey died. After dinner the family went into the backyard, where Ethan had excavated a big hole, and they wrapped Smokey’s body in a blanket and put it in the hole and covered it with dirt. Ethan hammered a piece of wood into the soil next to the mound of wet dirt, and he and Mom cried a little. I nuzzled them both to remind them that there was really no need to grieve, since I was okay and really a much better pet than Smokey ever was.
The next day, after Mom and the boy left for school, I went out into the yard and dug Smokey back up, figuring they couldn’t have meant to bury a perfectly good dead cat.
That summer we didn’t go to the Farm at all. Ethan and some friends in the neighborhood would get up every day and go to people’s houses and cut grass with loud lawn mowers. The boy would take me along with him but always tied me to a tree. I loved the smell of the newly cut grass, but I did not care for lawn mowing in general and felt this activity was somehow involved in us not visiting the Farm. Grandpa and Grandma did drive in for a week, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun, especially when Dad and Grandpa exchanged some harsh words when they were alone in the backyard peeling husks off of corn. I felt the anger in both of them and wondered if it was a reaction to the fact that the corn husks were inedible, something I’d verified by both smelling and chewing. After that day, Dad and Grandpa were very uneasy in each other’s company.
When school started again, several things were different. The boy no longer went to Chelsea’s house when he got home—in fact, he usually was the last one to arrive, smelling of dirt, grass, and sweat as he raced up the driveway after a car dropped him off in the street. And some nights we’d go on a car ride to what I came to understand was a football game, where I would sit on a leash at the end of a long yard next to Mom and people would yell and scream for no reason. Boys wrestled and threw a ball to each other, sometimes running down close to where I was standing and other times playing all the way at the far end of the big yard.
I could smell Ethan in the group of boys sometimes. It was a little frustrating to just sit there and not go out and enhance the game—at home, I’d learned to get my mouth around a football. One time I was playing with the boy and I bit too hard and the football collapsed until it was a saggy flat wad of leather, sort of like the flip. After that, Ethan didn’t want me chewing on footballs, but I was still allowed to play with them as long as I was careful. Mom didn’t know this and held me tight by the leash. I knew if she would just let me go get the football, the boys would have a lot more fun chasing me than each other, because I was faster than any of them.
Chelsea’s puppy, Duchess, grew up, and we became good friends, once I demonstrated to her how she was to behave around me. One day when the gate was open I trotted over to see her and she was wearing a plastic cone around her neck and seemed very out of sorts. She thumped her tail a little when she saw me outside her cage, but
