The dog in the box had brown packing tape around her muzzle, three loops pulled tight, and when my boots scraped the wet concrete she didn’t back into the corner.
She lifted her head, found my face over the tape, and WAITED to see what I was going to be.
I almost drove off without looking. I’m saying that first, because of the phone call I made twenty minutes later, and who picked up.
It was a Tuesday in November, behind a strip of stores in Kankakee, the last stop on my route.
I drive a box truck for a produce outfit. Six mornings a week I back up to the same loading doors, drop onions and lettuce, and go.
Wanda, who runs the laundromat back there, waved me down with a cigarette in her fingers.
“There’s a box by our dumpster been sitting there THREE days,” she said. “Something in it keeps moving and I’m not touching it.”
I told her it was a cat. Cats get into everything.
I said it the way you say things when you want to go home.
Then I walked over anyway.
The box was jammed between a green trash bin and the cinder-block wall, the cardboard gone soft from rain.
Next to it on the ground sat the roll of tape. Whoever did it hadn’t even bothered to take it with them.
I pulled the flaps back.
A dog. Brown and white, maybe three years old, all ears, and so light I could feel EVERY bone of her back through my glove.
Then the tape.
It went over her nose and under her jaw, again and again, flat and shiny, so tight her mouth couldn’t open the width of a fingernail.
So she couldn’t bark.
I understood it right there and my stomach dropped. Somebody had a dog that made noise.
Nobody trained her. Nobody called a shelter or pinned a flyer up at the feed store.
They shut her mouth with packing tape, folded her into a box and set her out with the garbage so she’d be quiet for good.
She kept looking up at me.
No growl, because she had nothing to growl with.
She sat in that wet cardboard with her brown eyes going from my face to my hands and back, like my hands were the part that decided it.
She’d stopped deciding anything herself.
I got down on one knee and the concrete soaked straight through my jeans.
“Hey, girl,” I said. “I know.”
I reached in slow with my work glove still on so she could smell it first. Then I pulled it off with my teeth and got my thumbnail under the edge of the tape.
It was bad. I’ll keep this part short.
The tape had been on long enough to glue itself down, and the fur came up with it. Underneath, her nose was pink and raw and split at the corners of her mouth.
Every half inch I lifted, she shook. I could feel it hurting her through my fingertips.
I kept talking the whole time, sorry, almost, good girl, sorry.
Apologizing to a dog I’d known four minutes, for the only thing that was going to help her.
The last loop came away from under her jaw.
She didn’t yelp. She didn’t snap at the guy who’d just hurt her.
She pushed her head up out of that box and LICKED my wrist, slow, over and over, until I had to sit back on my heels.
People did this to her. A person was hurting her right that minute.
She licked the hand anyway.
I don’t know where a dog keeps something like that.
She was shaking all over by then, hard, and I didn’t understand the shaking yet.
I zipped her inside my work coat, set her on the passenger seat, and called the one person I know who works at an animal hospital.
Misty picked up on the second ring. She’s been married to my brother Clint for nine years.
“Travis? You okay?”
I told her about the tape. She didn’t ask ONE question.
“Bring her to the back door,” Misty said. “Don’t come through the front.”
She was there. Blue scrubs, hair up in a clip, and she lifted the dog out of my coat with both hands and carried her down the hall without looking at the tape marks once.
I figured that was her being professional.
Then two and a half hours in a plastic chair.
There was a fish tank by the front desk with one orange fish in it and a little ceramic diver that needed cleaning.
A little before nine, Dr. Bautista came out holding a clipboard, with a look on her face I couldn’t read.
“She’s going to be okay,” she said. “She’ll have a scar on her nose.”
I put my head back against the wall.
“There’s something else,” she said, and sat down next to me instead of across.
“She’s chipped. The owner on the chip reported her stolen six weeks ago.”
“Somebody stole her?” I said.
“From a fenced yard, according to the report.”
“The chip went in here, at this clinic,” she said. “I pulled her chart myself.”
“Eleven months ago somebody brought her in for shots under another name. Look at the phone number on the intake.”
She turned the clipboard around.
I looked.
I didn’t have to read past the area code.
It was the same number I’d dialed from the truck with a dog shaking inside my coat. The one that told me to use THE BACK DOOR, NOT THE FRONT.
“It belongs to one of our techs,” Dr. Bautista said. “She’s on tonight.”
She looked down the hall toward recovery, then back at me.
“She’s been in there with her since you walked in.”
The vet laid her hand flat on the clipboard.
“She hasn’t said one word.”
Recovery three
Dr. Bautista didn’t stop me.
I went down the hall past a mop bucket and a scale with a towel folded on it. The door marked 3 was propped open with a rubber wedge.
Misty was on the floor with her back against the bottom row of cages, still in the blue scrubs. The dog lay across her lap in a green towel with only her ears and her nose showing. The nose was shaved around the tape marks and shiny with ointment.
Misty looked up at me. Her eyes were wet and she let them be.
“She’s your mom’s, Travis,” she said.
I was still holding the clipboard. I don’t remember taking it from Dr. Bautista, but it was in my hand, and this time I read the whole form.
JOYCE DOYLE. Our street, our house number. The landline Mom has had since I was tall enough to answer it.
“Mom doesn’t have a dog,” I said.
Misty ran her thumb down the dog’s neck, where the towel had flattened the fur.
“She got her last Christmas. A girl from her church had a landlord who said no. I brought her in here for her shots and the chip, and I put my number down because Joyce won’t pick up a number she doesn’t know.”
“Last Christmas,” I said.
“She sleeps on your dad’s side of the bed.”
I looked at the clipboard again. Reported stolen, six weeks.
My mother made that report. She stood in her own yard and talked to a policeman about this dog, and not one person in my family picked up a phone to tell me there was a dog to lose.
Misty kept her eyes on me.
“She’s had her eleven months,” she said. “Everybody knew but you.”
The carabiner
We moved into that house in July of 1987. I was seven. Clint was five.
Dad backed the rented truck over the curb and took a bite out of the neighbor’s lawn, and Stan Kowalski came across with his garden hose still running and told him to forget it. Stan’s still next door. He’s seventy-nine.
Mom labeled every box the same way. DOYLE across the top in black marker, the room under it, then two lines under the whole thing, pressed so hard the marker squeaked.
She said movers lose boxes that aren’t underlined. We didn’t have movers. She did it anyway, that move and every box after it, the Christmas lights, Dad’s tax papers, the basement junk.
Clint had a roll of masking tape that summer. He wrote CLINT on strips of it and stuck them on anything he wanted to keep. His box. His half of the bunk bed. My bike, which he never got.
He never quit. He roofs houses now, and every ladder and nail gun on his crew’s trailer has a strip of masking tape on it that says CLINT in the same square capitals.
Stuff walks off job sites, he says.
The gate latch on the chain-link was broken the day we moved in. Dad never fixed it. He hung a carabiner off a short piece of chain and clipped it through the fence, and that was the gate for thirty-nine years.
If you left it hanging open, you heard about it at supper.
“Clip it behind you,” he’d say. Every time, like we’d never been told.
Dad died four years ago in March. Clint lives ten minutes from the house and I live twenty-five, over a tire shop on the south side, so Clint started going by every day.
Then he had her checkbook. Then he had her pills, sorted into one of those boxes with the days on the lids.
People at church told Mom what a good son she had. I told her the same thing.
I’d been putting money away for eight years toward a truck of my own, and I remember thinking at least one of us had his act together.
Two Easters ago there was a letter from the county on the counter under the fruit bowl. Property taxes, a year behind, a little over twenty-three hundred dollars.
I asked Clint about it at the table. That’s all I did. I asked.
“You want her checkbook, Trav?” he said. “Come around more than twice a year.”
After that Easter Mom stopped picking up. When she finally did, in June, she said Clint had told her what I wanted to do with her.
“Do with you?”
“Put me in a home,” she said. “He said you’d say you never said it.”
I hadn’t been through that gate since.
Now her dog was on my sister-in-law’s lap with a scar coming on her nose, and my mother’s name was on a clipboard in my hand.
I sat on the floor across from them, and the dog put her shaved nose on my boot.
Mom’s landline
At nine-forty the girl from the front desk came to the door with a yellow sticky note.
She’d called the owner’s number off the chip registry. They do that with every stolen report.
“A man answered,” she said. “He said he’s her son and he’ll be here at seven when we open. He asked who brought her in, so I read him the name off the sign-in sheet.”
She checked the sticky note.
“He said please don’t release her to anybody else.”
She looked at me on the floor when she said anybody.
Nine-forty on a Tuesday night, and Clint was picking up the phone in our mother’s kitchen.
“Let him come get her, Trav,” Misty said. “Please. It’s easier.”
“Easier for who?”
She pulled the towel up over the dog’s ear and didn’t answer.
Dr. Bautista came in behind the desk girl with a bag of fluids. The dog was staying the night no matter what, she said, and in the morning she’d go to the registered owner or to whoever the owner sent.
She said policy twice. The second time she was looking at Misty.
I went out the back to the truck to call my mother myself.
The roll of tape was in the driver’s door pocket, on top of my fuel receipts. I’d picked it up off the concrete in the alley without thinking about it. On a loading dock you pick up anything that could end up under a tire. I left it where it was.
I dialed the landline. Four rings.
“Yeah,” Clint said.
“Put Mom on.”
“It’s ten o’clock. She’s asleep, Trav. She takes a pill now.”
“I want to talk to her.”
“Listen, I heard. The girl told me about the tape. Some sick son of a bitch, man. Thank God it was you that found her.”
“Put her on, Clint.”
“You’ll upset her. She’s had a hell of a six weeks, and you wouldn’t know, because you weren’t here. I’ll pick the dog up in the morning and I’ll handle it. Like I handle everything.”
“Why are you at Mom’s at ten at night?”
“Because somebody has to be,” he said, and hung up.
I sat there with the engine off. The heater ticked while it cooled.
Two minutes later my phone lit up on the dash. It was a text from Clint, the first one he’d sent me in nineteen months.
Got it from here. Don’t come by and get her all worked up.
The dumpster in the driveway
I drove over anyway. It was ten-fifty.
I didn’t pull in. I parked the box truck across the street by the Kowalskis’ mailbox, where it took up most of the block, and sat looking at the house.
There was a roll-off dumpster in the driveway, the green kind the city rents out, nearly full. Dad’s recliner stuck up out of the top with one arm bent back. Clint’s pickup sat beside it with the ladder rack on.
A realtor’s lockbox hung off the front doorknob. Against the porch rail there was a stack of flattened boxes and a tape gun.
The gate was shut. The carabiner was clipped through the fence on its little chain.
The Kowalskis’ porch light came on. Stan came down the steps in his slippers with a Bears jacket over his pajamas. When you’re seventy-nine and a box truck parks outside your house at eleven at night, you go and look.
“Travis?” he said. “That you?”
“Hey, Stan.”
He came and stood by my door and looked across at Mom’s house with me, like it was his.
“She signed for Maple Crest,” he said. “Out on Route 50. She moves the first of December.”
“Mom said she’d never go to one of those places.”
“Wouldn’t hear about it all summer. Clint brought the folder over every Sunday and she’d put it right back in his hands. She wasn’t going anyplace she couldn’t take that dog.”
He shook his head.
“They don’t take pets over there. Not so much as a bird.”
“And then the dog went,” I said.
“Out of the yard, middle of a Sunday. Police came and wrote it up. They said somebody must’ve lifted her over.”
He nodded at the chain-link, four feet high.
“Your mother told them the gate was clipped when she went out looking. Told them twice. The one cop wrote it down like she was mixed up.”
I looked at the carabiner on its chain.
“Three weeks after, she signed,” Stan said. “I carried the folder over for her myself. She didn’t have any fight left in her.”
“What did Clint say about the dog?”
Stan looked at the dumpster, at Dad’s chair with its arm bent back.
“Clint said it was a blessing, her going,” he said. “Made everything simpler.”
Five-ten behind Wanda’s
I didn’t go home.
I drove the south side for a while. I went past Clint’s shop on Court Street, two blocks up from the laundromat strip, with the bay door pulled down. I went past my apartment over the tire shop and didn’t stop.
Around three I parked in the lot of a closed Hardee’s and sat. I kept seeing that chair arm.
At five I drove back to the alley behind the laundromat with the flashlight from my glove box. Whoever did it had left two things behind, and one of them was still out there.
Wanda’s place was dark. The green bin was still full.
The box was still jammed against the cinder block where I’d left it. It had sagged lower in the night, and the flaps were open the way I’d pulled them.
I got down on the same wet spot and turned it over.
The side that had been against the wall was out of the rain. There was black marker on it.
DOYLE. Under it, BASEMENT. And under the whole thing, two lines, pressed so hard the marker had cut through the top skin of the cardboard.
I put my hand flat on it.
I have that handwriting on a box of baseball cards in my closet. I have it on the box that says TRAVIS, which went with me to three apartments and a marriage.
For three weeks somebody had been carrying my mother’s basement out to a dumpster in her driveway, one load at a time.
I walked back to the truck and took the roll out of the door pocket.
I’d never looked at it. It was an ordinary roll with a third of it gone and the loose end stuck down crooked. I turned it over in the flashlight.
Inside the cardboard core was a strip of masking tape, and on it, in square capitals: CLINT.
The back door
At 5:14 I sent Misty two pictures. The side of the box. The inside of the roll.
Then I typed the only thing I could think of, and it came out in her words.
Bring her to Mom’s. Back door, not the front.
It said read. She didn’t answer.
At six I parked by the Kowalskis’ mailbox again. I unclipped the carabiner, went through, and clipped it behind me. I carried the box up the side of the house with the roll inside it.
The kitchen light was on. Mom opened the door in her robe with the percolator going behind her. She was smaller than she’d been two Easters ago. She said my name like she was checking it.
“Travis.”
“Morning, Mom.”
Clint was at the table in his socks with a cup of coffee and his keys in front of him, set to leave at six-forty. His key ring had a strip of masking tape wrapped around the fob.
I set the box on the table with the marker side toward her and stood the roll on top of it.
Mom looked at it a long time.
“That’s my writing,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” Clint said. “You’re hauling garbage in here at six in the morning? That’s out of the dumpster, Trav. Anybody could’ve pulled that out of there. Half this street’s been through it for scrap.”
“Where did you find her?” Mom said to me.
“In that box,” I said. “With that tape on her mouth.”
Mom sat down.
“Mom, don’t,” Clint said. “Don’t let him do this. You know what this is? This is the house. He’s been waiting two years to hang something on me, and he walks in here with a box and a roll of tape you can buy at any Walgreens in town—”
The back door opened.
Misty came in with her coat over the scrubs and the green towel in her arms. She didn’t knock.
“Dr. Bautista signed her out to Joyce Doyle,” she said. “Not to you.”
The dog’s head came up out of the towel. She saw Mom, and she about climbed over Misty’s shoulder getting down.
Mom went down on the linoleum in her robe, and the dog went into her lap and licked her chin and her hands and the belt of her robe. She made a sound through her nose, because her mouth was still sore.
Then the dog saw Clint.
She went flat. She backed off Mom’s lap, pushed herself under Mom’s chair as far as she could get, and shook.
“She’s scared of everybody right now,” Clint said. “She’s been through hell, look at her—”
“She was never scared of you,” Mom said.
Misty was still standing by the back door.
“You told me you drove her to a farm in Momence,” she said. “You showed me a picture of a barn.”
“Misty.”
“Saturday you came home at one in the morning and ran your own jeans through the washer. You haven’t touched that washer in nine years. There was brown and white hair in the lint trap.”
She looked at me.
“When you said tape on the phone, I knew. I told you the back door because the front desk logs everybody who comes in the front. I was going to fix her up and bring her to Joyce and say I found her. I was going to keep him out of it. Dr. Bautista scanned her before I could.”
Clint stood up. His chair went back into the counter.
“Somebody had to do it,” he said. “Four years, Mom. Four years of your pills and your bills, and your calls at two in the morning because the furnace made a noise. Every Sunday I brought that folder. Every Sunday. They had one room. One. They don’t hold it for you.”
He pointed at the basement door.
“You were going to sit in this house till you went down those stairs, over a dog. And where was he?” He pointed at me. “Where the hell was he?”
The percolator kept going.
“I kept her at the shop six weeks,” he said. “I fed her. Every day I fed her. Gary heard her barking Saturday and said either she goes or I go. I couldn’t take her to the shelter in Watseka, they scan them, they’d have called you by lunch. What was I supposed to do? The tape was so she’d keep quiet in the truck. One night.”
“She was out there three days, Clint,” I said.
Mom held her hand out to him from the floor, palm up.
“Your key,” she said.
He looked at her hand for a while. Then he worked the house key off the ring. He had to pick at the masking tape to get it loose. He set it on the box, next to the roll.
“You want her?” he said to me. “Then you take her. You do the pills. You sit at the eye doctor every other Thursday. You answer the phone at two in the morning. You figure out the county. You take all of it.”
“Okay,” I said.
Misty didn’t move from the back door.
Clint went out through the front room. The lockbox knocked against the wood when he pulled the door open.
The front door shut behind him, and under Mom’s chair the dog barked once.
Sunday
The first Sunday in December. It’s the one day a week I don’t drive.
The lockbox is gone from the front door. Mom called the realtor herself on the landline and had him come take it off. The dumpster’s gone too, and Dad’s recliner went with it. I got there an hour after the truck did.
Maple Crest kept her twenty-five hundred.
There was another letter from the county under the fruit bowl, with a bigger number on it. I paid it on the Monday. That was most of the eight years. I’ll be driving somebody else’s truck for a while yet.
The lease on my place over the tire shop runs through March. I sleep there two nights a week. The rest I’m in the room where half the bunk bed used to say CLINT.
Misty calls Mom on Sundays around four. Clint hasn’t called. His key is in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and the rubber bands, masking tape and all.
I came up the side of the house at ten with a bag of dog food on my shoulder, and she heard my car door before she saw me.
She came off the back step and planted herself at the chain-link, the scar pink across her nose, and barked at me. Loud. She kept it up until she got a good look at my face. Then she stopped, and waited to see.
Mom pushed the screen door open with her hip.
“Clip it behind you,” she said.
I clipped it behind me.
If this one stayed with you, send it to the brother or sister who still gets the two a.m. calls.
For more stories about unexpected family moments, read about how His Mother Asked Me to Take Our Honeymoon Hotel Off the Wedding Website or the time My Husband’s Sister Said He Could Be Fired for the Folder I Was Holding. You might also appreciate the story of I Poured Those Five Steps. The County Left the Ramp Ten Days..
