Tommy and the Talking Dog | Page 3

windows open and the hot, dusty smell of the outdoors in all the rooms it was almost pointless to continue. Teachers struggled on anyway, to the accompaniment of shuffling feet and shifting bodies and stampedes at recess.
For Tommy it didn't matter anymore. He looked at Mrs. Aleio and thought about the fat woman in the motel room, and the woman whose picture had been on the businessman's desk. When he looked at Susie Bishop, the prettiest girl in class, he saw her in tight shorts and too much makeup. When Bobby Cubitto called out an answer in class, Tommy thought of him shouting into a phone.
He went by the old motel on the way home every day. There was never a sign of the dog. He even looked in the room with the broken window, but the shoes were gone. His parents knew something was bothering him, and his father tried to talk to him.
"Do you believe in magic, Dad?" Tommy asked. "Talking animals, stuff like that?"
"Well, Tommy," he said, and cleared his throat. Tommy noticed that his father had started parting his hair on the other side and combing it up to cover a thin place on top. "Things like that are called allegories. That means they aren't real themselves, but they stand for something real. Do you see? So if an animal in a story tells you something, it may just mean that you're getting a message from your conscience or something like that."
"But it's not real."
"Not really."
*
On the last day of school they got out at noon. Tommy wandered the streets aimlessly, not wanting to go home. He found himself in a subdivision he didn't know very well. He walked with his head down, kicking a small black rock ahead of him as he went.
Something moved in the corner of his vision. It was a big bulldog.
Tommy ran after it. The dog saw him and cut through somebody's yard. Tommy didn't slow down. He ducked under a clothesline and chased the dog down an alley. It veered again and Tommy stayed right behind and suddenly it skidded into a flower bed, cornered by a chain link fence. Tommy jumped on it and forced it to the ground.
"Talk to me!" Tommy said. He remembered what the man had shouted into the phone. "Talk to me, goddammit!"
A screen door banged behind them. "Hey, you!" said a woman's voice. "Get out of those flowers! What are you doing?"
"I'm sorry," Tommy said, grabbing a fistful of the dog's fur. "My dog ran away. I'll pay you for the flowers. I'm sorry, I really am."
"That's okay," the woman said. "Just be more careful." She looked him up and down. "How are you going to get him home? He doesn't even have a collar."
Tommy shrugged.
"I'll get you a piece of rope," the woman said. She went into the house and came back with a piece of scratchy cord. "Here."
"Thank you," Tommy said. "I'm sorry about the flowers."
He dragged the dog out to the street. He hoped the woman hadn't seen him yelling at it. He would have looked really stupid, yelling at a dog to talk to him. He sat down on a curb. It was stupid. The dog was just a dog, and didn't deserve to be treated this way.
"Hey," the dog said. "This rope really itches."
"You can talk."
"Of course."
"Why did you give me those shoes? Why did you send me into those motel rooms with all those miserable people? What was the big idea?"
"No big idea. You're a special kid. Special things happen to special people. You don't ask for explanations."
"What about the treasure?"
The dog licked its chops noisily. "Take off the rope first, how about?"
"Tell me about the treasure."
"I don't feel much like talking with this rope around my neck."
The dog and the boy stared at each other, and then Tommy took off the rope.
"There isn't any treasure, is there?" Tommy asked.
"Not in that motel, no."
"Then you lied to me."
"Look, kid, I didn't say it was in there, I said you had to look for it there. See, sometimes you already have something and you don't know it. So you still have to look for it, even though you already have it."
"Have what?"
"A way of looking at things. Of finding people in empty motels or finding words in the mouth of a dog."
"Then I just made you up. You're not even real."
"Reality is whatever you decide it's going to be. You can have a reality where there are talking dogs and magic shoes, or you can be like the people in that motel. Like your parents. It's up to you."
"That's the treasure?"
"That's it." The dog got up and snuffled away down the street. It stopped in front of a big new car, lifted its leg, and peed on the tire.