“What?” Mom said, seeing some version of all this wash over my face, I guess.
“The bus,” I said, rising with my bowl.
She took it from me, studied me for a moment too long, then flicked her head to the outside world, meaning go, school already, and like that, me and Dino were hand in hand down the rut-road to the bus stop, the dogs pacing us on the other side of the chainlink.
This time, when the kid from my PE nudged Dino over into a kid I didn’t know, trying to get the game started, instead of my usual repositioning, my usual guiding Dino over to my other side, I lit into this kid without even saying anything first.
The bus driver had to pull me off. The kid was going to need a note for PE today. Maybe all week.
I hadn’t even heard the air brakes hiss to a stop behind us.
Dino was just watching me, standing there with my chest heaving, tears coming all down my face.
“I’ve got him,” the bus driver said, his hand to Dino’s shoulder, and I nodded thank-you, was already running back along the chainlink, scraping my fingers over the rough wire the whole way, the dogs rising to the top of the fence again and again, snapping and snarling.
I ran faster, more headlong, and was just to the side of the house when the front door opened.
Our car started on the third try for Mom, and she didn’t know she should have been looking behind the house for me. I was at school. It was just another day.
You look like him, she’d told me.
I could see him back home, too, just like this. My dad, at my age. Hiding behind my grandma’s house, his face wet, the mountains opening up behind him.
But I could also see him standing from that, taller and taller, his shadow feathered and already moving like a dance.
The reason he was only showing up now to help Dino, it was that it had taken him a long time to walk all the way down here.
“I won’t let them hurt Dino,” I said into the side of the house, but really, I was trying to make sure he could hear me through the windblown cracks in the skirt.
Inside, the cartoon in the living room was still playing.
I sat down on the propane tank and ate my lunch three hours early and watched the skirt of the house for a response. For a finger reaching through. For an eye, watching out. For an older version of me, here to save us.
You could pull the skirt of the house out easy, I found. It was just tin or aluminum or something, corrugated like cardboard, but it would flap back into place as soon as you let go. So, I went out to the tetherball pole, leaned it over like pulling a flag down, and rolled it in about a thousand switchback arcs to the house.
Then it was just a matter of guiding the top of the pole in through a crack and working the wheel so the pole could hold the flap open.
That it worked so perfect told me I was on the right path.
But I still couldn’t go in.
He was my dad, yeah. But he was also dead.
I walked back and forth in front of the house. I looked as deep into the dark as I could without crossing the threshold.
I squatted there and said, quiet because ghosts hear everything anyway, “Dad?”
I bet every Indian kid who’s lost a dad, he does this at some point. I don’t know why it’s special to Indians. But I think it is.
He didn’t say anything back at first, but when he did, I wasn’t sure if it was in my ear or in my head. Either way, it was like he was using my own voice to do it.
It wasn’t my name he said, or Mom’s, or Dino’s, or even hello.
What he said, what I heard, it was Look.
It made an instant lump in my throat. I fell back, sat in the dirt, the muscles close to all my bones grabbing tighter on to the bone.
Look.
I leaned forward, thought that was what he meant, but then a rustle behind me pulled my head around.
The rustle wasn’t the top cuffs of boots brushing into each other, and it wasn’t a rattle being held deep in a hand, to hush it.
It was a dog, standing there, big strings of saliva coming down from its mouth.
It was halfway between me and where the tetherball pole had been buried. The reason it was just standing there, it was that it was probably questioning what it had done to deserve a gift like this. It was waiting for me to just be a mirage, a dream.
One that was making it slobber all the way down to the ground.
It had gone to that dug-up hole first, I think. For the new smells. Maybe that was part of the route it took into the pasture every day, when it jumped the fence, went on patrol, or hunting, or whatever it did.
But now here was me. I didn’t even make sense. At first.
When I did, the dog’s haunches bunched and dirt shot up behind it and its mouth opened to tell me what all it was going to do to me.
I squeaked a sound of pure fear, twisted around, and kicked through the skirt, into the darkness under the house, and only just managed to guide the tetherball pole out at the last instant, so the flap could shut the dog out.
It clawed at the base of the skirt and barked and snarled enough that the rest of the dogs finally came over the fence for whatever this was.
It was me.
I was crying and snuffling and hugging myself, having to keep my head low so it wouldn’t collect all the webs spun under the floor of the living room—which, if this was the underside of the living room, then what did that make it, right?
I wouldn’t say it out loud, even in my head.
I’d seen coyotes go after a rabbit, when they didn’t have anything better to kill. They don’t just dig a bit and give up, they excavate until they find a beating heart.
I was that rabbit, now.
The neighbor dogs, they’d been waiting for this ever since we moved in. The only thing that was saving me was that dogs only know to push, not to pull, and the one flap of the skirt that was loose, it overlapped a solid flap, so it would only push in for a car bumper someday.
Not that the dogs weren’t trying.
That just scraped my nerves raw, though, which isn’t permanent damage. What would be more permanent was when the other three caught onto what the yellowy-white one was already doing: reaching down with one big paddle of a paw, to dig under.
As big as these dogs were, and as sharp as the bottom of the skirt would be, they were going to have to really tunnel. But I trusted that they hated me enough to do just that. The prize would be worth the work.
I swallowed and the sound was loud in my ears.
My eyes had adjusted some now. Enough that the sunlight edging in through the cracks and seams in the skirt showed shapes, anyway.
I’d imagined it would smell like an animal den in here, that it would be moist and sticky.
It was just dry and dead.
I beat the side of my fist on the bottom of the living room, even though I’d seen my mom leave already. Moms are capable of a lot, I knew. I didn’t put it past her to hear me needing help somehow and shrike across the thirteen miles from her work, tear into this pack with her bare hands.
What I got back, instead of an answering knock or a footstep, was a faceful of fine dust I was too slow to close my eyes against.
And then something was on my hand, something with feet. I panicked back into a strut or a pipe, shaking my whole arm like it was on fire, and a moth batted into my face. I registered what it was right away but still flinched back all the same, into that same strut or pipe or whatever, nearly knocking myself senseless.
This reinvigorated the dogs.
I didn’t have to act like a hurt rabbit for them anymore. It wasn’t an act anymore, I mean.