For Juancho,
as always
PART ONE
PIXIE
Our dog learned obedience from a murdered man.
Before he was murdered, of course. I suppose it could've been after, which would explain why the training didn't take. Crystal ball, dark room, round table, woman with a turban … Hal Liston, if you're with us, thump twice if you think Patience is a bad, bad dog.
But the facts are weird enough without dragging mediums into it. As it happened, he taught her while he was still breathing.
Hal Liston was a dog whisperer to Seattle stars. He trained the pit bulls of Mariners, the Rottweilers and German shepherds of coffee magnates, and even a Great Dane owned by that retired movie star who always played Reluctant Stoner Hero of the Seventies.
Not that we knew any of this before we sent Patience to Liston Kennels. All we knew was that, on the sly, my brother Sammy had sent $1,600 to a breeder in Alabama and bought a bloodhound, sight unseen. It cleared out his college savings. He was only ten years old at the time (we all were), so you have to give him tactical points for scamming the banks on his own. The idea that he could hide the dog from Mom, who frequently said, "No pets. I have a hard enough time dealing with five children," was not so smart.
He said he ordered the dog because he had the wacky idea that he wanted to be involved in search-and-rescue, even though he couldn't ski or rock-climb or operate a helicopter. Kind of a romantic, our Sammy. Not a big thinker-througher.
When the dog arrived in a crate, deposited on our doorstep by the FedEx guy, Mom threw a hissy fit. "Tell me you got this beast from the pound," she said.
"Yes," Sammy said. "Yes, I did. I still have a savings account."
Which, of course, meant he didn't. The rest of us knew a storm was brewing, so we got the hell out of the house. My other three brothers—Dean and Lawford and Frank—and I hopped on our bikes and pedaled off toward Langley, which was four miles away.
We were halfway there when I considered the quivering ball of fur still cowering in a crate on our front porch.
I said, "What are we going to do about that stupid mutt?"
There were five of us, all born two minutes apart. Even at ten years old, our personalities were set. Dean, the oldest, was our leader. Captain on and off the basketball court. Lawford, the second oldest, was the enforcer. When Dean issued a command, Lawford was at his right shoulder, spoiling for a takedown. He practiced on us all the time. Third in the lineup was Sammy, the prankster and believer in improbable causes like overbred puppies. He was the kid you always see riding his bicycle off the roof into a pile of grass clippings. And when the schemes invariably led to bloodshed and broken bones, Frank, the fourth of us, was always there to sew him up and set him straight. Don't get me wrong—we were all graduates of Red Cross Senior Lifesaving, but Frank was the one who thought open head wounds were "neat." He got plenty of practice on Sammy.
I was the youngest. I was just the Girl. My only talent, as far as I knew, was keeping up with my four brothers, and on that particular day, remembering lost causes.
Nobody wanted to think about the dog. Dean and Frank and Lawford didn't even turn around. None of us wanted to be within miles of a Mom storm. When she was mad, her rage was bigger than a tsunami. All we could do was head for higher ground.
I didn't want to face her any more than my brothers did, but it didn't seem fair to abandon Patience just because she was overpriced. So I rode back, ditched my bike out of sight, and sneaked up the front yard so Mom wouldn't notice me. She had her Rat Pack music cranked up to cover the yelling. But it still didn't drown out Mom's voice. I heard "… how long it took to save that money on my salary?"
You've heard of the Rat Pack. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. Those guys with slicked-back hair and fedoras who sang, "Ain't That a Kick in the Head." They played poker and paraded around with blond bombshells. It was the last part that got me. I didn't mind so much that Mom named my brothers after the Rat Pack, but she named me after the biggest blond bombshell of them all. Marilyn Monroe Gray. Which was why it was easier, at six foot two, for me to live down the nickname Pixie.
Quietly as I could, I unlatched the crate and waited for the dog to crawl out. Which she did. Slowly.
And oh, that little round puppy belly. A belly that was attached to an actual dog, whose ears were so low she kept tripping over them. She shivered. She howled. She begged to be picked up. She begged to be put down. She begged for a drink of water. She begged for the granola bar in my back pocket.
I took her to the beach. She barked at tide pools. She snapped at sand fleas. And she sniffed. And she sniffed. And she sniffed.
Patience was real cute when she was twenty pounds. Even Mom couldn't resist her and didn't try (very hard) to send her back to the breeder.
But then she grew. A lot. And all the time Sammy should've spent obedience-training her? That went to mowing lawns and serving sno-cones at art fairs and removing tree stumps—anything to replace the money he'd "so carelessly thrown away."
Before we knew it, Patience was 150 pounds of puppy who was used to getting her way.
Then she got a taste for fresh game.
She started with quail. Then moved on to hare. Then a rubber boa. And even once a coyote almost as big as she was, mangy and dripping gore by the time she was done with it.
My brothers and I dealt with these remains mostly by toeing them over the bluff at the end of our back yard. Let the scavengers in the mud flats below sort them out. Most corpses washed up there anyway, so what was the big deal?
The worst came when Patience took on the Pellegrinis' beloved Lhasa apso, Murphy.
I can't really blame her. Murphy was small and black and white, like a walking Oreo. But even factoring in that aspect, Patience freaked the hell out of me.
I've seen dogs nip and bark at each other before. But they've never really meant it. It was just a warning, a back off.
What Patience did was something completely different. I'd never seen an animal transform so quickly from calmly sunbathing to berserker frenzy.
I had to hand it to Sammy. He may have been the romantic of us, but he never forgot that Patience was still technically his dog. He was the one who got between the two of them while Mrs. Pellegrini screamed at the top of her lungs, "Get her off! Get her off!" Sammy thrust his hand right into the scrum and pried apart their jaws. It took so much effort I could see the veins standing out on his forearms. His shirt may have even ripped down the back, Hulk-style. He was a strong kid. We were all strong kids.
When it was over, Patience went back to scratching her ear with her hind leg, but Murphy was in shreds, and Sammy needed seven stitches in his right palm. It looked so gross, we couldn't wait to outdo him. We were a family of five. Competitive didn't begin to cover it. Especially in terms of injuries.
Murphy, the yippy dog who looked like cookie dough bites, lost an eye and a leg. She spent the rest of her long, fart-filled existence being led around in a dog-size chariot that supported was what left of her hindquarters. The contraption made her look like a short-snouted Roman gladiator.
The worst was the day after the attack, when Mr. Pellegrini presented us with an order from Island County Animal Control to put Patience down.
None of us could argue with him. The Pellegrinis were not witches. They were retirees in their late seventies living on a fixed income. When we mowed their lawn, they tipped us in hard butterscotch candies and lemonade that still had yellow dust at the bottom of the pitcher. They were decent people.
Plus Patience had done something terrible. We'd all seen it; there was no defending her.
But we love whom we love, I suppose, no matter how vicious. So I brought up the idea of doggy boot camp.
I'd read about this guy, Hal Liston, who operated a kennel out of Deception Pass at the northern tip of Whidbey Island, where the current was so fast and deep, the water was the churning bright blue of toilet bowl cleaner. I'm serious. It should be called Ty-D-Bol Pass. Nobody had dumped anything toxic in it—it was nature all on its own, water churning through a narrow gorge.
My brother Dean, our de facto captain, liked the idea. "We're very sorry, Mr. Pellegrini. Of course we'll pay Murphy's vet bill. But what if we give Patience another chance? This guy Liston has a rep for whipping dogs like her into shape. It's your call, of course. We'll do what you say."
I could see the look in Mr. Pellegrini's eye. It said he used to like us. And he wanted to like us now—he really did—but he was just too old and tired.
"All right, since that's what Jesus would want," he said as he crumpled up the order. "But if I hear of one more incident …" He didn't finish. He didn't have to. There were lots of Christians in the neighborhood, and most of them owned guns.
Enter Hal Liston, a man who seemed nice enough but didn't understand that grunge had gone out with the nineties. In a way, he looked like we did—plaid shirt, Timberland work boots, wrinkled and muddy jeans. But he had this long brown stringy hair draped over his right eye, and a bulbous nose that made him look like some creature out of a fairy tale—and not a nice one, either. Someone who would eat you up like a billy goat if you didn't answer his riddle correctly.
He whisked Patience off to his compound in Deception Pass before we had a chance to say goodbye. My brothers and I had a family conference about it later in their bunk room, and we realized none of us liked the guy—least of all Sammy—who'd endured the storm of the century from Mom to keep that dog.
We couldn't explain why we didn't like Hal Liston. He had a smoker's voice, but so what? So did everybody in the Rod and Gun Club down the road.
"It was the hair," I told my brothers. "It made him look like a troll."
When the murdered man (still not yet murdered, of course) brought Patience back a month later, she had a medieval-looking pinch collar around her neck. Liston trained us all how to make "corrections." His gravelly voice freaked me out. "As long as Patience is on this leash, she should be okay. Sit, Patience." Quick yank on the leash, followed by a high-pitched yelp. Patience sat.
"What about when she's off-leash?" Sammy asked.
Liston squinted at him. "Off-leash? You want to control her off-leash? That's another solid month of boot camp. Two thousand bucks, kid." And he looked at our roof, with the rotting cedar shingles and weeds growing from the gutters, and he smiled a gruesome smile. Without waiting for a response, he got back into his truck, which was loaded with other people's over-bred dogs that couldn't be controlled.
At that moment, I was overcome by an urge to open the back of the truck and let them all out. All of them. No matter whose Lhasa apsos they took on. The urge was so strong, I couldn't stand still.
I hated the guy. Not just because of his looks, but because he was perfectly comfortable half-assing an important job. My four brothers and I had our faults, but not finishing a job you'd started? That was a sin. This Liston guy had to go down.
I charged toward the truck, determined to wrench it open. I knew there'd be a canine scrum, but if Sammy could deal with it, so could I. I even had my hand on the door handle when, with some kind of animal supersense, Liston turned around in the driver's seat and looked right at me. The windows were up, and the aggressive dogs were all barking and howling to be let out, so I couldn't hear what he said. But I could see his lips as he pointed at me and mouthed the words Stay … Good girl.
I froze. It was as if Liston's greasy hands had snapped a leash around my neck. I didn't want to obey him, but I did. With his greasy hair and his piercing eyes, he scared me into submission.
Then he drove off, kicking up a rooster tail of pollen in our circular drive.
I stood there staring at nothing for a while before I realized that Patience was leaning against me. Without knowing I was doing it, I was stroking her long velvety ears. Her eyes were half closed, as if she were on vacation right there in our front yard.
I made two vows that day. The first was that since I hadn't been able to rescue those other dogs, I would finish rescuing Patience.
The second was that I was not going to back down from any more bullies. The next time some alpha wanted to pick a fight with me, I would fight back.
? ? ?
A month later, Sammy came running into my room and said, "Hey, Pixie, whaddaya think this means?"
I didn't know what he meant, since he wasn't carrying anything and since, as we've seen, Sammy isn't long on planning. Or explaining. All I knew was that something had his dander up. His eyes were narrowed the way they were in math class.
I followed him to Mom's home office. Mom herself was nowhere to be seen. Sammy kept checking over his shoulder, like we were government spies about to hack international DEFCON codes—even though she was just a telecommuting code monkey for some gaming company.
Her e-mail was up on her monitor, with the message that had Sammy so perplexed. At first, it looked like spam—the message began, "Dear Customer." It was from Liston Kennels. The body of the message read, "We're all praying for Hal's safe return. In the meantime, we'll continue to serve you and the furry members of your family as best we can."
I read it four times. I could see why Sammy needed someone to help interpret it.
"'Safe return.' Do you think that means he's been in a hiking accident?" he said.
I wondered the same thing. So I pulled up the Seattle Times website, thinking I would have to dig for information, but I didn't. There was Liston's troll face right on the front page. He did not look like a happy man. The way he looked, if he could've thrown a pinch collar over all of us and given us a good yank, he would've. The headline read: Dog Trainer to the Stars Missing, Presumed Dead.
"Oh my God! Dean! Lawford! Frank! You have to see this!" Sammy yelled, grossed out but also excited.
Here was the story, the best we could tell: Hal Liston had an ex-wife. The ex-wife had a new boyfriend. The new boyfriend, for whatever reason (and I could imagine many, beginning with the grungy hair), did not like Hal Liston. The new boyfriend was in a rage when he left the apartment he shared with Hal Liston's ex-wife.
She, worried about what might happen, called the police. The police went to Liston Kennels and found an empty house, with a rug missing from the living room. The hardwood floors where the rug had been were a lighter shade than the boards around them and smelled strongly of bleach.
Nothing else.
What the police did find two days later was the new boyfriend's car, abandoned in a parking lot that backed out onto a particularly deep and swift part of Puget Sound. With the toilet-cleaner kind of current.
The trunk of the car did not smell like bleach. It was saturated in blood.
None of us knew how to make sense of the story. We'd seen the guy only twice in our lives—once when he picked up our dog, and then when he dropped her off. Only Patience knew Hal Liston, and she wasn't talking.
Gradually, over the years, the incident morphed into a pickup line my brothers used on girls. "Did you know that our dog was trained by a murdered man?"
But I could never bring myself to think of it that way. Every time I opened my mouth to talk about it, I felt like someone had thrown a noose around my neck and pinched me speechless.
I will never forget the smile on Hal Liston's face when he told me to stay.
And he was never found. His body was still out there, somewhere in Puget Sound.
Useless Bay, where we live, on the southern half of Whidbey Island, is where the saltwater current vomits up what it doesn't want. After a high tide, the saltwater lagoon below our bluff is always littered with broken Frisbees, pieces of a Styrofoam cooler, deflated Mylar balloons, and signboards for fishing companies that have been out of business for twenty years. And the rest, the rotten and stinking: corpses of harbor seals, corpses of halibut with two eyes on one side of their heads, corpses of sailboats that haven't been moored properly elsewhere.
I don't believe in predetermination. I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe that certain people are "susceptible" to messages from the other side.
But every night before something disastrous has happened to me, I've dreamed of Hal Liston smiling his troll smile. Only, in my dreams, the salt water has had its way with him. His eyes are black holes from which hermit crabs crawl. His stringy hair is green kelp. There are Penn Cove mussels growing on his bones. He creeps ashore, and his fingertips look like tentacles, grabbing hold of everything they touch. He gnashes his teeth and whispers, I'm not done training you yet, and he's not talking about our dog. He's talking about me.
With one tentacled hand, he reaches for Patience, and then he crunches down on her with sharp barnacle teeth. He spits out her bones. And then he reaches again.
I am next.
Like that day on the driveway, I'm too afraid to run or fight back.
He grabs me with a slimy tentacle, dragging me toward his open mouth, which smells of bleach and dead things and abandoned hope.
Dean is the one who wakes me up on nights like this. Sometimes he slaps me; sometimes he dumps Clamato juice on my face. His methods aren't subtle, but they work. He looks down at me, thrashing on the bed, and says, "You're howling again. Why do you howl?"
Because something is coming, I want to say. But I never do, because that would mean admitting to fear—something my brothers and I never did.
I dreamed of Hal Liston the night before I met Henry Shepherd and his little brother, Grant.
I dreamed of Hal Liston the night before, six years later, the Shepherds came to our door and Grant wasn't with them.
