Little Girl Gone (7 page)

At Country Day the teacher would have had the brains to figure out who put the pudding on Django’s chair and sent him to the headmaster; but all Mrs. Costello did was sigh and tell Django to go to the boys’ bathroom and clean himself up. He stood outside the room after she closed the door, remembering Billy’s warning words. Maybe Billy was lying to scare him, but after just a half day at Arroyo Elementary the story sounded plausible, except maybe the part about the coma. He thought about going into the teachers’ bathroom, but being found there would be an additional humiliation. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that Billy, Halby, and Danny wanted him to go into the bathroom; and in a moment at least one of them would show up. Django would end up getting dunked. Or worse.

There had been mean kids at Beverly Hills Country Day. Nasty kids, even boys and girls who cheated on tests and stole from the little kids just because they could get away with it. Django had stayed away from them and they had never shown any interest in him. The worst name anyone had ever called him was “brainiac,” and he didn’t really mind that because everyone knew he was the smartest kid
in the class. He had never been afraid of getting beaten up and put in a coma.

His imagination told him just what would happen if he went into the boys’ bathroom. One of the mutants—probably his “buddy,” Billy—would follow him in, and then it would get nasty. Although this scared Django, at the same time he realized something that surprised him. Part of him
wanted
to fight with Billy,
wanted
a chance to punch him, and then when he was down, kick him in the balls. Of course, the other half of Django knew he’d be the one getting punched and kicked.

Instead of going to the bathroom nearest his classroom, Django walked down to the end of the long open corridor—Mrs. Costello had called it the breezeway—with classrooms and sorry-ass, dried-out landscaping on either side, until he got to an area where he could tell by the decorations on the doors that the first-and second-grade classrooms were located. In the little boys’ bathroom the sinks were so low he could pee in them if he wanted to and it smelled really bad, like one of the public bathrooms in Griffith Park where the pervs hung out and his dad had told him never to go alone. He held his breath and grabbed wads of paper towels and rubbed the backside of his jeans until the pudding seemed to be gone. He went back to class.

Mrs. Costello looked at him accusingly when he stepped through the door. “Where were you, D-jango? You’ve been gone ten minutes.”

Django looked at the three snickering mutants, and he tried not to smile as he said, “Billy told me never to use the big boys’ bathroom.” It was sort of embarrassing to talk about bathroom stuff in front of everybody, but he didn’t care. He was enjoying himself for the first time all day. “He told me a boy got beat up in there and had to go to the hospital with a coma and he’s probably gonna die. Billy said I should go down to the little kids’ bathroom.”

“I never!” Billy cried.

Django widened his eyes and made a cross on his chest. “I didn’t want to get beat up, Mrs. Costello.”

“Sit down, D-jango. Django, I mean. And you, Billy, I’ll talk to you after school.”

As he walked to his place in the line of spelling-bee twos, Django flipped the mutants the bird. He didn’t look at them as he waited for his turn to spell, his heart beating like crazy. He’d have to be careful they didn’t catch him after school, but the risk was worth it. Besides, Django had decided, he was never coming back to Arroyo Elementary.

D
uring the school day Django lost the little interest in exploring Arroyo that he’d had in the morning. When the closing bell rang at last, all he wanted was to get back to Aunt Robin’s house, scoot upstairs, and close the bedroom door behind him.

He gave his name and address to the woman with a
Bus Monitor
sign on her back, and she pointed him toward the yellow school bus No. 3. He was first in and nabbed the front-row seat almost opposite the driver. If any of his new buddies, Billy, Halby, or Danny, got on this bus and tried to give him a hard time, the driver would see it happen and be a witness at the inquest. Ha-ha.

The bus pulled out of the school parking lot, third in a line of nine. From the window he saw Hal and Danny shambling up the street. They looked up as the bus passed, and Django grinned and gave them the one-finger salute again.

So long, suckers,
he thought with a shot of elation that
lasted only a second before he realized that Arroyo was a small town and sooner or later the hole-heads would catch up to him, and it would be ugly. He was not going to stick around all summer, asking to get pulverized. But there was no point calling Huck again. It was too easy for him to say no on the phone. If Django had some money, he would hire a limo and get the driver to take him up to Los Gatos. If he showed up on Huck’s doorstep, fell on the ground, and begged him, his brother was one of the good guys and would never send him away twice. But Django needed money to hire a car or even to buy an el cheapo bus ticket, and apart from straight-out theft, he didn’t know where he’d get it. He might be a rich orphan, but until he grew up he’d never see any cash. His thoughts got gloomier as the bus ride seemed to take the longest route to his aunt’s house. By the time he got out and swung his backpack over his shoulder, he didn’t think his life could get any crappier.

He walked along the shoulder of the county road, staring at his shoes, watching the dust color them from white to tannish pink, like the powder in Mrs. Hancock’s compact. At some time during the jacked-up school day and without quite realizing it, he had accepted that what he was going through was the real thing, not part of a kidnapping plot or a secret government something-or-other. His mother and father really had died that night on Highway 395, and they were as gone as it was possible to be gone. Forever.

He turned off the county road and walked up the steep
hill to his aunt’s house. When the road leveled off, he stopped in the middle and closed his eyes and made a last-chance deal with God. If he wanted Django to believe in him, he would have to prove he was real. Django would shut his eyes and take twenty steps along the road without opening them. Even if he heard a car coming, he would keep his eyes shut because the bargain he was making with the Almighty required that he be brave under all circumstances. At the end of twenty steps, he figured he’d be right around the base of his aunt’s driveway. He would open his eyes then and if God was paying any attention at all and if he cared anything about Django, Django would see one of his mom and dad’s cars parked in front of Robin’s house.

He scuffed forward twenty steps, opened his eyes, and saw a black SUV in front of the garage. Hope lifted his feet, and he ran up the steep driveway, never touching the asphalt. On the flat he stopped and his feet and legs turned to lead. This car had nothing to do with his mother and father. No one he or they knew drove a dusty old Chevy Tahoe with a license plate so bent it could hardly be read. He remembered that Aunt Robin was interviewing someone to help his grandmother. He sagged against the far side of the SUV and laid his forehead on the window. He gave up everything and wept with resignation. His funny, interesting, glamorous, and loving parents were truly dead, and he was on his own.

Gradually, he became aware that there was something or someone in the Tahoe, right on the other side of the glass,
looking at him. He cupped his hands around his streaming eyes and peered into the vehicle’s interior. A few inches away, a dog with a distinctive pit-bull face stared at him, his pointed ears pinned against the side of his head, his nose almost touching the window glass. He wasn’t barking, but his upper lip was curled back, revealing his pointed incisors. If Django tried, he knew he would hear the dog growling.

Coming through town, the bus had stopped for a red light next to a bank building that had a digital clock and thermometer on its sign. It said the temperature on that June day was eighty-six degrees. At the same time that the dog was getting ready to attack Django through the glass, he was panting, his long tongue coming out every now and then, hanging like a limp pink flag.

The rage that came over Django was so quick and powerful that when he thought about it later, he knew it was something out of the ordinary, as much about his grief and his frustration at school as about the dog trapped in a hot car. He charged around the front of the Tahoe and across the driveway, taking the steps up to the house two at a time. He shoved through the porch door with his shoulder and was talking, loudly, before he stepped into the kitchen.

“That dog’s gonna die out there. It’s eighty-six fucking degrees outside.”

“Django!”

“And the sun’s hammering down on it. A black car might as well be a fucking coffin! It’s probably over a hundred degrees inside.”

He stopped.

Aunt Robin and a man were at the kitchen table, both staring at him. She had stopped in the act of tearing apart a form and giving him a copy.

“Watch your language, Django!”

“Is that your car?”

The man talking to his aunt stood up. He was big and broad shouldered and wore his hair in a thick braid down his back. He looked like a cross between a Sioux warrior and an old-time saint, but Django was too angry to be intimidated.

“It’s against the law to leave a dog in a car like that.”

Red faced, his aunt began apologizing to the man.

Bust an artery. I don’t care.

Caro and Jacky were dead, and next to that fact, there were no consequences that mattered to Django.

“You can’t leave a dog in a closed car, a black car. In hot weather. He’s dying in there.”

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do, kid.” The man smiled when he said it, but behind that smile Django saw straight into his heart, and what he saw made him take a breath and then a second one. The boys at Arroyo Elementary didn’t like Django, and that was okay. Their right. But this man hated him. “Your aunt and me are finished here. I’m heading home.” He smiled at Robin, a different kind of smile. Django called it a man-woman smile. “It’s my girlfriend’s dog. He got the last of his shots today.”

“Django, this is Willis Brock. I told you he’s going to help Grannie after her surgery.”

Django had a whole-body, bad feeling about Willis Brock.

“He works at Shady Hills sometimes,” she said. “That’s how we know each other.”

It was like she was pretending to be a hostess. But Django read her anxiety as clearly as he did Willis’s hostility. She was worried that he would take offense and cancel whatever contract they had made.

“Dogs die in cars closed up like that,” Django said again.

“I’ll remember that,” Willis said.

A dog would freeze solid closed in a car with that voice.

Django watched his aunt walk Willis out to the car and knew from the way she shook her head and shrugged that she was apologizing. Probably explaining that he was a poor little orphan boy and would Willis cut him some slack. Willis opened the car door, and the pit bull jumped out and began to run around in circles.

After the Michael Vick scandal, Django had gone online and read all about the pit bulls that had been rescued. Most of those dogs had been rehabilitated and gone to live with families that understood their special needs. Willis Brock and his girlfriend probably did not know that pit bulls were high-strung and needed consistency and firm, loving control. To Django it was obvious that Willis Brock might know how to be firm but he would be clueless about love. Django almost started crying again, he so much wanted to rescue that dog for himself.

His aunt came back into the kitchen with steam coming out of her ears, and for the next ten minutes she gave
him a scolding that burned him up one side and then the other. Django tuned her out until she was finished.

“I don’t like him,” he said. “I don’t think he should take care of Grannie.”

“You don’t even know him! He’s very popular with the old people at Shady Hills.”

“I bet he steals from them.”

“Django! You have no reason to say that.”

It was no good telling her that he was an empath. She probably didn’t know what the word meant. “There’s something creepy about him. And he’s mean.”

“Django, the dog was closed in the car for twenty minutes. Less than half an hour.”

“It was more than one hundred degrees inside.”

“You don’t know that.” She leaned back against the sink and folded her arms over her chest. She stared at her sandals for a moment. “Well, you’re right. The windows should have been open. But that’s no excuse for insolence…” She stared at her shoes for so long that Django wondered if he could leave and go upstairs.

She looked up. “Is this the way you were… before?”

“What do you mean?”

“Were you always a knight on a white horse?”

She was being kind. It would be better if she ignored him. He didn’t want to care about her.

“If you want a dog, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. They’re dirty and they require a lot of care, and I just don’t have the time for that.”

Her voice reminded him of a girl at Beverly Country Day who walked around on tiptoes all the time and never spoke above a whisper.

“Willis has been working at Shady Hills for six months and he’s just what Grannie needs.”

“If that dog died, he wouldn’t care.”

“That’s an awful accusation.”

“But I’m right. Don’t ask me how I know. I just do. Okay?”

“No, it’s not okay. You were rude to him and he was a guest. You can’t do that, Django. There are rules in this house.”

As if there had been no rules in the house in Beverly Hills. There had been plenty, and sometimes Django broke them; but mostly he didn’t because they made sense. Letting a dog die in a car made no sense at all.

She sighed again and opened the refrigerator. “I don’t want to hear any more about this.” She started taking things out—cheese and lettuce and salad dressing. “Do you like Caesar salad?”

He did, but probably not her version.