Listen! (9780062213358) (2 page)

Charley stops herself. The woods trail is part of what she will never have back again. Besides, it's tough going, winding steeply up and down, skirting the ridge above the water. Her leg hurts way too much to go that way, even if she wanted to.

She stands in the sticky North Carolina June afternoon, wishing she could fly like that hawk. She will have to turn back and go the long way. At least there's the bench by the dam where she can rest. She will not do this walk again anytime soon, that she knows for sure.

She pulls her soggy T-shirt away from her skin, wipes the sweat off her face again, and turns to start back. That is when she sees the dog.

It is sitting tall and rock still on a smooth patch of bare red dirt at the base of a big sweet gum tree in the woods, barely visible between the scrubby bushes and the tangle of honeysuckle vine that edge the road. It is red-gold, almost the color of the ground it is sitting on, its head high, its dark ears pricked sharply in her direction. The dog's eyes, dark in a narrow, golden face, are looking directly at her. She feels a kind of tremor, as if an electric shock has passed from the dog to her and back again.

She knows all the Eagle Lake dogs. This isn't one of them. For that matter, it doesn't really look like a dog. Not like someone's pet. There's a wildness about it, like a wolf. Or a coyote. It is beautiful. It has a coyote's pointed ears, a black muzzle, and those electrifying eyes. For just a moment there is nothing in all the world except Charley and the dog.

She remembers, then, a dog she saw in the winter, February maybe, scrounging around the Dumpster up past Eagle Lake's stone gates, near the power lines. That dog was about the same size as this one, a dirty reddish color. That dog wasn't beautiful. It had looked wild, though—wild and wary—its shoulders hunched, its ears back, its tail down as it scuttled off into the woods.

Surely this can't be that dog. It couldn't have lived on its own in the woods all these months. She blinks. The dog has vanished. The patch of bare ground where it was sitting is empty now. She can't remember looking away, but she must have. Because the dog is gone. Like a ghost. Just gone.

S
he is standing there, trying to figure out where the dog is, how it could have gone without a sound, without her seeing it go, when she hears a car coming up the slope of the road behind her. That probably explains the dog's leaving, she thinks. Its sharp ears must have heard the crunch of tires on gravel long before she did.

A black SUV appears over the crest of the hill. It is Mrs. Davis with her kids, Jeremy and Bethanne, and Sadie, their golden retriever. The car comes on past their drive and stops beside her.

Mrs. Davis puts down her window. “Hey, Charley! You're looking great! A little hot—but great. This your first time around the lake?”

Charley nods.

“Good for you!”

The back window goes down, and Bethanne puts her head out. “Are you all done with your crutches?”

“All done.” Charley says to Mrs. Davis, “Have you all seen a wild dog hanging around?”

“You mean Wolfie?” Bethanne says.

Mrs. Davis laughs. “Have we seen him? He's Sadie's best friend—follows her everywhere she goes. He showed up about a month ago, and he's been hanging around ever since. That dog's a real sweetie, if you ask me, except he's terrified of people. Something really bad must have happened to him.”

In spite of the heat, Charley feels goose bumps rise on her arms.
Something really bad
. “How does he eat?” she asks.

“Doesn't much, as far as I know. He's thin as a rail.”

“He's practically starving. But Mommy won't let us feed him,” Bethanne says.

Mrs. Davis shrugs. “You feed a dog and you're stuck with it. Sadie's more than enough dog for us. Somebody around here must be giving him something, though. I can't believe he's living entirely on mice and voles.”

“He could catch squirrels,” Jeremy says, sticking his blond head out the window next to Bethanne. “There's bazillions of squirrels.”

“Too many trees,” Mrs. Davis tells him. “It's too easy for them to get away.” She turns back to Charley. “I called Animal Control—thought maybe if they took him, somebody might adopt him. They couldn't catch him. That dog's too wily. They baited the trap with a can of tuna—told us tuna'd catch any dog. Not that one. They said they'd come back when they could gather up enough volunteers to surround him, but it's been weeks and I haven't heard anything.”

Charley thinks about a dog too wily to be caught like other dogs. A starving dog that something really bad happened to. She imagines the golden dog with the wild eyes surrounded by people closing in to catch him and put him in a cage. It makes her feel sick to her stomach. “Maybe I could get him to come live with us.”

As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she wants to take them back. She's never had a dog. She knows nothing about dogs.

Mrs. Davis grins. “That would be super! We've been worried to death about him.”

“Can't nobody get close to him,” Jeremy says. “We been trying. How're y'all even going to get him over to the other side of the lake?”

Charley doesn't have an answer. It isn't as if she's thought this out.

“Well, good luck to you,” Mrs. Davis says, and begins to back the car down the road. “Anything we can do to help, just let us know.”

Charley stands there feeling like an idiot. She doesn't want a dog. Not any dog, let alone a wild and terrified one.

Except there was that moment when she first saw him. Maybe it was the way he was sitting, so straight and tall, so incredibly alert. Right then he didn't look scared or starving. He looked … wild. Magical. Part of the woods.

When Jeremy and Bethanne get out of the car in their driveway, Sadie leaps out between them and tears down the road toward Charley. She jumps up and puts both paws on Charley's chest so that Charley has to hang on to her walking stick to keep from being knocked over. Sadie's tongue slathers Charley's face.

“Down, Sadie!” Mrs. Davis yells. “Get down! Charley's in no shape to have dogs jumping on her.”

“It's okay.” Charley pushes Sadie down and wipes her cheek on the shoulder of her T-shirt. The wild dog is suddenly there, as if he has materialized out of the woods. Like a ghost, Charley thinks again. Sadie runs to greet him. Tails wagging, they touch noses and then jump at each other. The wild dog is very nearly the same color as Sadie, except for his black muzzle and ears, and very nearly the same size. Charley can see his ribs through his fur, and his tail is matted. If it were combed, Charley thinks, it would be every bit as thick and plumy as Sadie's.

Sadie begins chasing him around a hydrangea bush in the Davises' yard. The wild dog swerves and cuts behind a tree, leaping out as Sadie runs past and grabbing her by the scruff of the neck. Bigger and heavier, Sadie knocks him sideways and breaks his grip, then grabs him by one ear.

“I told you they were best friends,” Mrs. Davis says, pulling a bag of groceries out of the back end of her car. “Come help, kids!”

Charley thinks about what Mrs. Davis said about the wild dog following Sadie. “Do you think if Sadie came around the lake with me, he would follow us?”

“I wouldn't be surprised. He follows when Don takes Sadie running. He doesn't like the road, though. It's too wide. Too exposed, I think. He likes to stay under cover in the woods.”

Not the road. If she tries this, walking Sadie to get the wild dog to follow, she'll
have
to take the woods trail. No. She won't do that.

But the dog is starving. Again her mouth seems to work without her permission, as if somebody else is using it. “Would it be okay, then, if I walked Sadie over to my house? If the dog follows, I could feed him something.”

“Good idea.” Mrs. Davis reaches into her grocery bag and pulls out a can of dog food. She gives it to Jeremy to take to Charley. “Give him that.”

“Thanks.” Charley puts the can of dog food into the pocket of her cargo shorts.

“Good luck!” Mrs. Davis starts for the house. “When we want Sadie home,” she calls over her shoulder, “we'll just holler for her. She can swim back.”

“Can I go along with Charley?” Bethanne asks.

“You may not! That dog doesn't need any extra people to contend with. Bring the milk!”

When Mrs. Davis and the children go into the house, Charley calls to Sadie, “You want to go for a walk?”

Before she has a chance to fend the dog off with her walking stick, there are new red-orange paw prints on the front of her shirt.

Charley looks for the wild dog and sees that he's back in the woods across the road. “I'm not making any promises,” she tells the dog. “Except this one. If you come around the lake with Sadie and me now, I'll give you some food. That's all.” A slant of sunlight through the trees catches the gold of his fur, and he twitches his ears. But he doesn't move.

“Let's go,” Charley calls to Sadie. “Let's walk!”

Sadie barks and runs ahead toward where the road ends at the kudzu-covered slope down to the power line right-of-way. Charley uses the bottom of her T-shirt to wipe the sweat from her face, and starts limping after her. As if she understands the plan, Sadie turns onto the narrow trail that winds down the steep hill next to the last house on the south side of the lake, Crazy Sherman's log cabin, with its odd collection of sculptures made from bits of rusted junk.

Limping, Charley follows. At first she is glad to get off the road, where walking on the gravel keeps twisting her ankle and knee, sending jolts of pain through her leg. But the trail, narrow and uneven underfoot, isn't much better. It is crisscrossed with kudzu vines, like an obstacle course of trip wires.

Halfway down she turns to see if the wild dog is following, and her foot catches on a vine. She has to grab for a sapling and stab her stick into the dirt to keep from falling down the hill.

As she pulls herself upright, she catches a glimpse of the wild dog slipping in between the trees up near the road. He is following.

G
ritting her teeth against the pain and keeping her walking stick ahead of her to slow her progress, Charley manages to get down the rest of the hill. At the bottom the trail levels out and crosses the embankment that separates Hawk Pond, the first of two feeder ponds, from the lake.

The trail here is easy walking compared to the hill Charley has just come down and the even steeper hill she'll have to climb on the other side. She is just thinking how grateful she is for this when she notices that the greenery crowding the trail on both sides is dark and shiny and three-leaved. Someone has been keeping the trail open, but just barely. Poison ivy is pushing in toward her bare arms and legs.

There's more poison ivy out here than kudzu and barbed-wire vine and honeysuckle put together
.

Charley catches her breath and stops. No. She does not want this voice, this clear and unmistakable voice, in her head. This is what she has been afraid of, why she doesn't walk this trail.

It is too late not to have heard it. She is here at the wild end of the lake, right in the middle of her mother's world. Here, where her mother used to come day after day, season after season, year after year, to take the nature photographs that made her famous—the photographs that eventually took her away forever. Charley shakes her head, as if she can shake memory away.

Focus, she tells herself firmly. Pay attention to this moment, to the reason you are here. Nothing else. Since the day her father, his face gray, turned from the telephone to tell her about the plane crash in the Brazilian rainforest, Charley has worked at closing down the past. She has gotten very good at it.

Ahead of her, Sadie is standing chest deep in the pond, drinking. Charley looks around for the wild dog. He is nowhere to be seen. This is crazy, she thinks. Just crazy. If it weren't for the wild dog, she would never have come here, stirred up memories, raised her mother's voice in her mind. She swallows hard a couple of times around the sharpness in her throat, and then begins moving carefully forward, concentrating on staying in the very middle of the trail, using her walking stick to fend off the poison ivy that seems to be reaching out at her. She will have to remember to wash really well when she gets home and hope for the best.

When she reaches the end of the ivy patch, she crosses the water trickling into a foot-wide crack in the old concrete spillway between pond and lake, and stands for a moment facing the hill ahead of her. She needs to rest before tackling it. A tree has fallen into the pond, dragging up a mass of red dirt where its roots broke free of the hillside. The roots reach out toward the trail. She grabs one and pulls herself up the first steep rise, pushing with her stick. Then she manages to clamber onto the wide trunk that stretches like a bench toward the water and she sits, aware of the throbbing in her leg, doing her best to keep her mind on this moment.

It is no good. She is looking across the water as her mother used to, camera poised, waiting for a heron to come stalking through the reeds, a kingfisher to settle on a branch over the water, or the pond's resident muskrat to come out of his den beneath the embankment. Even now a photograph of that muskrat, nose barely breaking the water's surface, early sunlight glinting on the ripples that v out behind, hangs on the wall of the lake room. The day of the funeral, Charley took every single one of her mother's photographs down from the walls of her room. But her father left others up all over the house. She has learned to live among them without seeing them.