Devoted(18)
“Never,” Rosa said, with a tremor in her voice.
“Yes, you will,” Dorothy insisted with another smile. “And now to an even bigger surprise. Much bigger. Excuse a bit of crudity, child, but this one will knock you on your ass. Are you ready?”
“No.”
Her arms on the desk, leaning forward, closer to the camera, Dorothy lowered her voice and spoke with a profound seriousness that mesmerized Rosa. “You know Kipp is a smart dog. But he’s enormously smarter than you realize. He’s a mystery, a wonder—and out there in the world are others like him. They call themselves ‘the Mysterium.’ I can only assume he’s the product of genetic engineering. Somewhere in his lineage must be laboratory dogs that were products of radical experimentation and perhaps escaped. Dear Rosa, he is as intelligent as we are, and he is a treasure who must be protected. You must be his guardian now. And after you see the videos that follow, after you watch dear Kipp communicating with me using the alphabet on the study wall, you’ll not only believe me, but you will, I’m sure, feel that you’ve found your life’s calling.”
Rosa swiveled in the chair to look at the foot-high black letters on the farther wall.
Behind her, Dorothy said, “Since I was just a little girl, which was a very long time ago, I’ve had this strange feeling down in the deepest and most secret place in my heart. I think you’ve had the same strange feeling and, just like me, you’ve felt you’d be a fool to speak of it.”
A pleasant chill craped the nape of Rosa’s neck. She looked through the big windows at the descending forest, the lake beyond: a mystical scene in the waning light, the water like a mysterious loch in another land, where something lived that spawned a legend.
“All my life, Rosa, I’ve felt that there’s hidden magic in the world, that life is more than what our five senses can reveal to us. I’ve believed miracles really happen and that one day a miracle would happen to me.”
Even a girl raised in poverty and without love could entertain such a feeling. Perhaps it was especially true of a girl raised in poverty and without love, who had no hope other than what she spun from her imagination.
“Life crushes that secret feeling out of us if we let it,” Dorothy continued. “But I never allowed it to crush that feeling in me, Rosa, and one day the miracle came to me on four paws.”
16
He was a lucky dog.
Children ran and jumped and capered throughout the campground. Little kids and older kids both enjoyed sneaking food to dogs.
As further proof of his luck, he seemed to be the only dog here for the children to feed. Kids tossed balls and skimmed Frisbees through the air, but nothing on four feet joined in the play.
Not everyone had begun cooking yet. A little early for dinner.
But at least two men stood ready at their portable barbecues. The scent of hot charcoal graced the air.
One of the cooks was marinating steaks in a deep pan. He had just begun to light his charcoal.
He was lean and deeply tanned, with his hair slicked back.
On his T-shirt blazed the words Fork Off, under an image of a fork with three tines. Two tines were bent down. Only the middle one was straight.
This guy did not appear friendly. He smelled of envy and anger.
The second man had thick hamburger patties sizzling on a gas griddle and frankfurters swelling-sweating-charring on the grill.
Kipp took up a position where the action was, next to the grill master with the lesser meats.
He sat, sweeping the ground with his tail, pendant ears pricked as much as their nature allowed, head cocked. Being cute.
Kipp had few peers at this, even if he did say so himself.
Dogs were incapable of bragging, but they were also incapable of false modesty. Things are what they are, and that’s that.
The grill master was a person who talked to animals. He was no Doctor Dolittle. He didn’t hold a dialogue. But he seemed nice.
He smelled of kindness, and he wasn’t wearing a rude T-shirt.
He called Kipp “buddy.” He said, “I had one like you when I was a kid.”
Instead of swishing his tail, Kipp thumped it on the ground.
“Are you lost, buddy?”
Kipp stopped thumping his tail.
Being lost made him more sympathetic, more likely to be fed.
In fact, however, he wasn’t lost. He knew where he was going. The murmuring boy on the Wire drew him.
If he whined and did movie-dog shtick to suggest he was lost, that would be lying.
Those in the Mysterium did not lie to human beings who smelled of kindness. This wasn’t exactly a commandment, but it was a serious protocol.
Deceiving people who smelled of anger or envy—or worse—was justified because they were dangerous. Deceiving them could be a matter of survival.
“Are you hungry, fella?”
Kipp thumped his tail against the ground, harder than before.
Without being deceived by a whine, the man who smelled of kindness evidently decided that before him sat a lost and hungry dog. “I’ve got something for you.”
With tongs, he put a big, mostly cooked hamburger patty on a paper plate. He put a fat frankfurter beside it.
“When these cool a bit, you can have them.”
Kipp could whine now, because this was a whine of gratitude.