Paintings from the Cave (7 page)

B
efore the dogs, Jo didn’t have a family.

All her life, her parents—or, as she thought of them, the Biologicals—were drunk, blind drunk, mean drunk, fighting with each other and screaming at her every night.

Mostly, They didn’t notice Jo. Which was good. Because when They saw her, She hit and He tried to touch. Jo learned to be invisible. And to push her dresser against the door of her room.

Before the dogs, she would move silently through the trailer to her room, where she would hide, alone in her special safe place—a shallow alcove in the trailer
wall behind her bed, near the floor, where a propane bottle had once been stored.

In the mornings, she ate cold cereal, simple food that she could get for herself while they slept off the drunk. In the evenings, she ate leftovers from the fast-food containers they dropped on the kitchen counter on their way to the couch with a new bottle.

She wore hand-me-downs and garage-sale finds and out-of-season pieces from the sale racks at discount stores, always too big and either too soft and worn, or stiff and cheap-feeling.

Before the dogs, she didn’t have friends. She saw how the other children at school looked at her—the sneers and the stares, the peeks at her out of the corners of their eyes before they glanced away quickly.

They must know, she thought, about how her life had made her ugly. The teachers looked at her with pity. She thought total strangers walking down the street could look at her and see the rips in the cloth of her life.

Before the dogs, she thought—no, she knew—that it would always be that way, and she had learned to shoulder it and taught herself to look past other people, glazing her eyes to not see what was in their faces.

She drifted through lonely days and lonesome nights and ripped, empty years.

But when Jo was twelve, it all changed.

T
he Biologicals were not her family. The people at school were not her friends.

Her true family was the dogs. Her only friends were the dogs.

Jo’s first dog was a small terrier that a neighbor had left behind after the sheriff had showed up with papers in a file folder. There had been a lot of yelling at the front door. Jo watched the truck pull away, loaded with boxes and a few pieces of furniture, the dog forgotten, still tied to the fence.

Jo ran to him before the dust settled in the driveway, crouching on her haunches and slipping the chain clasp off his collar. She read the tag,
MIKE
, and whispered his name.

He rested his chin on her knee and sighed at the sound of her voice, and she felt something warm and new flutter inside her at the sound. She rose and he followed her back to her yard and into her room, both knowing that now they belonged to each other.

Mike curled up next to her every night when they went to sleep, his head nestled alongside her leg, exhaling in quiet thanks, just as he had that first day in the yard.

A few weeks later, a skinny brown mutt loped into the yard and sat next to her and Mike on the steps of the trailer. As if he’d always been there and wasn’t about to leave.

Jo could tell he’d been a stray, living alone on the streets, because he was so skinny she could count his ribs, and the pads of his paws were ripped up and raw. Jo snuck into the living room, and while They yelled at each other, she rifled through Her purse and stole a twenty-dollar bill. She bought a pound of cheap hamburger to fatten this hungry dog up. And she went to the drugstore to buy ointment to rub on his sore paws. After They fell asleep, she lifted the new dog into the bathtub to wash away the dirt and grime with baby shampoo so his eyes wouldn’t sting. She dried him carefully with her bath towel. Then she gently removed all the burrs and knots from his fur with her own comb and brushed his coat until it gleamed and he was perfect and beautiful.

Jo named him Carter because a nice man named Carter had worked behind the bar at the tavern where the Biologicals used to take her when she was little. She’d tried to sleep in the back booth while They drank. She remembered that Carter had always smiled at her, even though it had been years since They’d bothered to take her anywhere with Them.

Carter the dog smiled too. And he’d bring the Frisbee back to her exactly five times. Not four. Never six. Always five. Carter didn’t care if the Frisbee was thrown fast five times in a row—
zip, zip, zip, zip, zip
—or if the game was dragged out, maybe one throw every half hour. After the fifth throw, no matter how long it took, Carter would lie on the ground, the Frisbee between his paws, and pant—or chuckle,
heh heh heh
—and the game was done for the day.

Then, a few days after Carter came home, Jo saw a small Border collie in a box outside the grocery store with a sign that said
FREE PUPPIES
.

Jo named her Betty after a grandmother she’d read about in a book. The grandmother had baked and sewed and read aloud from the Bible at night.

Although Betty was the youngest, and the only female, she was the protector of the group, her eyes constantly scanning their surroundings. Her ears would flatten back against her head, the hair on her neck would rise and a low growl would rumble deep in her throat if she saw anything she didn’t like—squirrels, the
Biologicals, the rattling old pickup that didn’t have a muffler and came roaring into the trailer park each night.

Jo’s family: Mike, Carter and Betty.

If the Biologicals noticed the dogs, They didn’t say anything. And the dogs learned quickly to ignore Them, looking away and padding silently through the trailer behind Jo, but keeping themselves always between Jo and Them.

And now, instead of dreading the night because it was lonely and long, Jo loved it because they slept together, the four of them. And in the dark, she could not tell where one ended and another began—dog heat, dog breath, dog dreams—so close they were like one.

Even the screaming and fighting were muffled, distant, less somehow than when she’d been alone. All she heard was the sighs and the yawns and the soft
uff uff uff
of the dogs’ breathing in the night. With the dresser pushed against the door, Jo and her dogfamily were safe.

Once, late, Jo had awakened to see the dogs bathed in the soft moonlight that came through the window. She moved to the foot of the bed with them and sat in the silver light, felt it glow on the skin of her cheek and move into her to the rhythm of the dogs’ breathing. She closed her eyes and, timing her breath to match theirs, she inhaled the moonlight. She smelled the silver-nickel of the moonlight on the sides of her tongue and through
her nose and in the back of her mouth
with
the dogs,
of
the dogs,
as
the dogs.

Four doghearts breathing together in the quiet, bright dogmoon dognight.

Before Mike and Carter and Betty, Jo had had bad dreams about the terror that came when she couldn’t run, when she couldn’t get to her bedroom with the dresser pushed against the door fast enough. For years she’d had the same dream, or, really, the same memory in the night. But once the dogs were with her, the memories stopped. For a few nights, she’d jerked awake, panting and sweaty, heart pounding, stomach in knots, a scream choking her, but then she’d see Mike and Carter and Betty watching, guarding, their eyes soft.

Now the dreams were good. When she closed her eyes in half-sleep with her hands wrapped in their fur and felt their legs pedal as they slept, she knew she could run with them,
be
them in her dreams. They’d run through grass that tickled their bellies and her feet, run through green dappled woods with the speckled light shining on their coats and her hair. Never tiring, never stopping, free and smooth and fast and light, almost flying.

Four doghearts together.

Jo and her dogs were safe in the night, but she couldn’t leave them alone with the Biologicals during the day when she went to school.

The back edge of the trailer park bordered a gully filled with thick brush that led to a small woods. Once, when Mike had been chasing rabbits, he’d led them to an old fort that had been abandoned by neighborhood kids, a rickety lean-to made of wooden pallets with a piece of plywood for a roof and a door with twine hinges that could be propped shut.

Jo brought the dogs here on her way to school each morning. She’d taken an old sleeping bag from an empty trailer and wrapped it in a large plastic garbage bag to keep it dry. Every morning she shook it out and made a nest for her family next to a clean bucket of fresh water. She fed them bread and peanut butter, sometimes a few cans of sardines, dry dog food when she could slip fives and tens from His wallet or Her purse.

During school, she imagined her dogfamily, curled up asleep, waiting for her, hidden safely in the woods. She wouldn’t look at the people around her, but past them, seeing Mike and Carter and Betty instead.

Always the dogs.

Only the dogs.

J
o could have lived that way forever, with the rest of the world at a distance. Especially after He left.

After a particularly horrible fight, when the neighbors started yelling to “shut the hell up,” He took his things and left.

Good. There would be no more touching. Ever.

That made Her easier to live with too. She never tried to hit anymore and she was gone most of the time or passed out in her room.

Jo developed a routine. Every day she got up early. The dogs would be sitting next to her, shifting impatiently to nudge her awake. She’d slip out of bed and pick up the clothes that she’d dropped on the floor the night before. She’d dress quickly and the dogs would
follow her through the trailer and out to do their business in the yard. Jo would clean up after them with old newspapers and then take them for their morning walk.

Back at the trailer, Jo would eat cold cereal and milk and fry one egg until it was hard, for a sandwich to take for lunch. Then she’d take the dogs to their hideaway in the woods, feed them, and head out.

Four blocks north and then two blocks east to the middle school. Once she was clear of the trailer park and past the first corner, the streets were tree-lined, with pretty houses, small but neat and with big yards. She didn’t look in the windows as she walked by or even glance at the yards because maybe everything in those homes was perfect, like on TV, and she tried not to look at things that made her feel even more ugly and broken.

She moved silently through the day, talking to no one, being talked to by no one, head down, eyes fixed on the floor. She went to school and learned to read and write and remember the
i
-before
-e
-except-after
-c
rule and how to change fractions into percentages and figure out when trains coming from different directions at different speeds would meet. She completed all her homework and took the tests and paid attention in class, although she never raised her hand. When called upon by her teachers, she answered so softly she could hardly be heard.

She never ate in the cafeteria. Too many people, too
close together. She went to the playground and sat on the side of the building where the wind didn’t blow and the sun felt warm on her skin. She ate her sandwich and thought of the doghearts waiting for her.