A man emerged from a sliding glass door and walked over to the grill and flipped over whatever was on it. Then he went back into the house.
That was when Chipper made his move.
Swiftly, he emerged from the woods and vaulted the hedge. The first thing he had to do was quench his thirst, and the kiddie pool was like the biggest dog bowl in the world. Chipper dropped his snout into it and furiously lapped up water.
His plan had been to check out the barbecue next, but when he heard the glass door slide open, he crouched low behind the pool. The man was back with an empty plate in his hand. With a set of tongs, he took three hot dogs from the grill and put them on the plate.
He put the plate on the shelf next to the barbecue, went back into the house and shouted, “Where are the buns?”
Chipper went into action.
He came out from his hiding spot behind the pool, rose up on his hind legs, turned his snout sideways and snatched two of the three wieners from the plate. He dropped back down to all fours and ran.
The door opened again.
“Hey! Hey! Come back here!”
Chipper did not go back.
The wieners were delicious. Chipper was thinking they might just be the most delicious things he had ever eaten.
He sought shelter in the woods again before enjoying his takeout meal. He was careful to chew the wieners well so there was no risk of one of them getting caught in his throat. The meal was enough to make Chipper forget, at least for a few moments, all that he had been through.
He was happy.
And wasn’t that exactly why the White Coats wanted to put him down? To end his life? He wasn’t supposed to feel happy. He wasn’t supposed to feel sad. He wasn’t supposed to feel anything.
He was just supposed to do his job.
And where would he have performed this job, if he had turned out the way they’d wanted him to? Where would they have sent him? China? Russia? Maybe someplace right here at home where they suspected some kind of nefarious activity going on? Someplace where a dog could hang around unnoticed, pick up things, overhear things, in a way no human being could?
Better to think about moving on.
So once he’d downed the wieners, he proceeded further into the forest. If his GPS program was to be trusted — and he had no reason to think it shouldn’t be — sooner or later he would come out onto a road. If he followed it west, it would take him where he wanted to be.
He definitely had more of a spring in his step now. He moved confidently through the forest. Walking for a while, then running. Enjoying the thousands of different scents. Trees, flowers, animals, bugs, the earth beneath his paws.
There was a slight wind coming from the west, and with it came a variety of different smells. Rotting food. He could smell fish and vegetables and meat and all kinds of other things. Even some smoke, which suggested that some of these things were being burned. These were the types of smells a person would find pretty disgusting, but for Chipper it made the atmosphere all that much richer.
More stinky stuff! Love it!
He was tempted to go see where the smells were coming from, but he’d already lost enough time recovering from the bus incident, sleeping and finding food. And besides, he was nearly at the road.
Chipper emerged from the woods, stopped, looked left and then right. He’d come upon a gravel road. With the exception of an approaching pickup truck in the distance, trailing dust in its wake, there was no traffic.
The dog came up to the shoulder of the road, intending to trot along in a westerly direction.
Behind him, the truck got closer.
Chipper was beginning to feel... excited. He was almost at his destination. He wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got there, but he’d play things as they came. He’d been doing that all day and it had been working out pretty well for him.
He couldn’t wait to— AHHHHH!
There was suddenly an awful buzzing in Chipper’s brain. Not his real brain, not the one he was born with, but something was going on with one of his attachments. An unbearable, internal screeching. It was akin to having a food processor whirring between one’s ears on the highest setting.
He knew what was going on.
It was the White Coats.
They were trying to lock in on him. They were trying to initiate a reconnection.
He felt as though his head would explode.
And as the screeching continued, Chipper began to stumble. He became disoriented. His four legs had stopped working the way they were supposed to. He took a couple of sideways steps, then one forward, then one back.
What his eyes allowed him to see became distorted. The world turned upside down, then righted itself, then went sideways.
Chipper stumbled further into the middle of the road.
A horn blared.
Brakes squealed.
He was so close.
Sixteen
Aunt Flo had been furious when Jeff got back to the camp.
“Where have you been?” she demanded to know when he came through the door of her house.
“Just out,” he said. “I wasn’t gone all that long.”
“Really? Really?” She’d made her hands into fists and had them jabbed into her hips, elbows out. It was her favourite stance. She was leaning against the kitchen counter in front of the sink. A lock of hair had slipped free of one of her bobby pins and was hanging across one eye. “I want you to come with me,” she said.
Aunt Flo went to grab for Jeff’s arm but he headed for the door too quickly for her. If there was something she wanted him to see, fine, but he wasn’t going to let her physically drag him to it.
“This way!” she said. “If you hadn’t been goofing off, you’d have known what was going on here.”
She led him to the roofless enclosure where all the cans of garbage were kept, and filled, before they were taken to the dump. She opened the slatted wood door and said, “Behold.”
Oh, wow.
Three of the trash cans had been tipped over, the lids removed, and the green bags dragged out and torn open. Food scraps and dirty napkins and all sorts of other disgusting things were spread across the ground.
“Uh oh,” Jeff said.
“Uh oh, indeed,” Aunt Flo said. “Looks like somebody forgot to snap the lids on tight. You’ve turned this into a raccoon restaurant.”
Jeff had to admit it was possible. The raccoons around here were pretty smart, no doubt about that. They were like safecrackers when it came to getting into garbage cans.
“Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Aunt Flo said, then turned around and walked back to the house.
There were a lot of disgusting things in the world, but few were as disgusting as the guts of a garbage bag. As Jeff got closer he could see chicken bones and fish heads and coffee grounds and something oozy leaking out of one of the torn bags that looked like it could be blood from some kind of alien.
Jeff thought he might puke.
But somehow he kept the contents of his stomach in place while he shoveled all the mess into brand new trash bags. Then he went and got Aunt Flo’s old pickup truck so that he could load everything into the back.
And then he was off to the dump.
Even though he’d already made dozens of trips down this road without any problems, Jeff still worried that one of these days he would be stopped by the police and arrested for driving without a license. He thought Aunt Flo didn’t worry about his being arrested mainly because it wouldn’t be happening to her.
Jeff remembered what his father used to say about his older sister, Flo. How when they were growing up, she was always talking him into doing things she considered too risky to tackle herself. If her kite were stuck in a tree, she’d send her little brother up the trunk to retrieve it. Same thing when her Frisbee landed on the roof. Once, she talked him into stealing a bag of Fritos from the corner store when she was consumed with a junk food craving, and had no money.