Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings (20 page)

“I don’t know if he’ll go, but I’ll ask him,” I said. “We’re just trying to figure out what’s next. Have you gotten any calls so far today?” I asked.

“Not a one. I’m really kind of surprised,” Barbara said. “Maybe it is just that people have been out. Maybe we’ll hear something later.”

“Let me call you back once we plan our next move,” I said.

Michael had overheard enough of the conversation to surmise that Barbara was urging he have some downtime. “I want to stay with Dad,” he said. “I don’t want to go back to the Clarks.”

I told Rich and Michael the distressing news that there had not been a single call all day. Other than the man with the tarp-covered pile of wood, as far as we knew, no one else had seen Huck all morning or into the afternoon. There was only one more X to put on Dave’s tracking map.

Thinking that we may have left the area where Huck had been seen that morning prematurely, I suggested we go back up the streets around Fawn Hill Drive, or else that we put up signs on trees and poles in Ramsey. It was impossible to know what to do and I was easily pulled away from my own ideas, something completely out of character for me.

Michael was not so easily swayed. At that moment he was insistent about staying on Carriage Lane, in the neighborhood where the night before he had come so close to holding Huck in his arms again. He thought Huck would return there. He wanted to go to the Seelbach house to see if the bologna and cream cheese had magically lured Huck back to the area.

I don’t think either Rich or I wanted to tell Michael that we thought his notion was the least likely of scenarios. “How about this?” Rich proposed. “Michael, you and I will drop Mom back on Main Street, and she can start nailing up the posters to trees and poles there. Then we’ll come back here and look some more. We’ll do what you said and make sure everyone on the block has a copy of the flyer. Then we’ll meet Mom back at the Clarks’ house and have something to eat before going back up to Fawn Hill Drive.”

Michael was satisfied. He had been heard. “That sounds like a good idea,” he said.

I knew it was more than likely a waste of time, though I did think both Michael and I were being guided by wanting to return to where Huck had been. For Michael, it was a matter of returning to where he had seen Huck with his own eyes. For me, it was a matter of returning to the place where anyone had last laid eyes on Huck.

As I called Barbara back and told her our plan, Rich started driving back toward Main Street. Just as they had done the day before, Rich and Michael dropped me at the top, past the high school, only this time I was carrying a hammer and nails, along with posters covered in plastic. I suddenly realized that I did not even know if what I was doing, or, for that matter, what we had all been doing all morning, was legal. I hadn’t given it a thought before now. I imagined myself standing in front of a judge explaining to him why I had defaced every telephone pole in Ramsey and Mahwah. In my fantasy, he was lenient, since he had his own dog and son.

Rich and Michael headed once more to Pine Tree Road. Michael was heartened now that the adults or at least one of them was following his lead. “I want to go back into the woods where we saw Huck run last night,” Michael said. “I just think he might be there.”

Michael had a desperate need to search those woods for himself. Ever since he had watched Huck run into the thicket of trees and brush, Michael could not understand why his beloved dog would run from him and not to him. Wasn’t the sound of his voice enough to bring Huck home? Didn’t Huck ache for Michael as much as Michael ached for Huck?

When Michael and Rich got out of the car on Pine Tree Road, Michael got down on his hands and knees in front of the car to try and understand what the car must have looked like from Huck’s perspective, to try and gain some understanding of why Huck had run.

“If you are a little puppy, the car looks pretty scary from down here,” Michael said to Rich. “All you can really see are these blinding lights and this big machine that looks like it could squash you in a second. You can’t even see the windshield from down here to see people’s faces,” Michael described while still on his knees in front of the parked car.

“I’ll bet with the car running, he didn’t even hear me call to him. He just ran because he was afraid of the car.”

“I’ll bet you are right,” Rich said, reaching down to give Michael a hand up.

Rich and Michael first walked up one side of the street and then down the other, leaving a flyer in every curbside mailbox or stuffed between the storm door and front door of every house. Then they did the same on nearby Carriage Lane, before going into the woods for one more look. They saw the bologna and the cream cheese untouched in front of the Seelbach house. Unbeknownst to Michael, Rich was determined to make quick work of this latest search of the woods. He was doing it only to satisfy his son. Just as I was, Rich was eager to get back up to Fawn Hill Drive.

Rich and Michael traipsed through the grove of bare trees. As they moved toward the edge, near Carriage Lane, they spotted a father and his two young sons, out with a spirited dog, a Shiba Inu, about four times the size of Huck. “Let’s talk to them,” Rich said to Michael.

When they were closer to the family, the man called out. “Are you looking for something?” the father asked Rich. He walked toward Rich, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Ben Mamola. And these are my sons, Ben and Peter, and that’s our dog, Scooter. We live right here,” he added and pointed to a sprawling house up against the edge of the woods.

Ben was in his thirties, a vigorous, handsome man, with dark hair, and dark eyes, who was unusually open and friendly, even for Ramsey. “We saw you in the woods and it looked like you were looking for something, rather than just out for a walk, so we thought we’d ask.”

Rich introduced himself and Michael and started explaining what, or rather who, they were looking for, and how they happened to end up in the woods bordering the side yard of the Mamola home. Ben seemed to be listening intently to Rich’s every word. It made Rich, who had long tired of repeating our tale, want to tell Ben every detail—all about the cancer, and getting Huck, and going away on vacation, and losing Huck. He told him about our close call of last night.

Rich’s unfailing devotion to his family, his ardent and relentless search for the family dog, touched Ben deeply. Ben could feel Rich’s anguish. Madly in love with his own wife, Ben kept mulling over what it must have felt like for Rich to have had a sick wife, to have taken her away to celebrate good health, and then to have had the celebration fall apart.

Then Ben’s older son, Ben Jr., a boy of about five or six, volunteered the family: “Dad, let’s help them look for their dog.”

“We’re going to,” Ben replied. “This is the oddest thing,” he said to Rich, “but it feels like I’ve known you all my life. Let me help. We know these woods really well. Why don’t you let us look here, and then we’ll get in the car and head up toward Mahwah.”

Even though so many people in Ramsey had gone above and beyond the niceties, had been far more than merely polite or courteous, had truly befriended us outsiders, Ben’s offer of turning over his Saturday afternoon to help us look for Huck still struck Rich as extraordinary.

In a twist on the character played by Jack Lemmon in the movie
The Out-of-Towners
, an abrasive man who had kept a log of names and phone numbers of people who had wronged him and his exasperated wife on their trip from Twin Oaks, Ohio, to New York, Rich was keeping a log of all the names and phone numbers of people who had helped us, with the intention of thanking them when our saga ended. No matter how it ended. The list was long. Now it included Ben Mamola.

“That would be a huge help,” Rich said in response to Ben’s offer. “But are you sure? I’d hate for you to lose the better part of Saturday afternoon.”

“Not a problem at all,” Ben said. “My wife is away on a church retreat. The boys and I were going to do some errands this afternoon, but the errands can wait.”

“You are a great guy. Thank you so much,” Rich said as he put his arm on Ben’s back in a gesture of warmth and gratitude. “Let me give you a copy of our flyer, which will give you a picture of Huck and also all of our contact numbers.”

Ben and his wife, Catherine, were active participants at St. Paul’s, Ramsey’s Catholic church. Catherine was spending the weekend at a women’s church retreat called “Cornerstone,” at which the participants give testimony and talk in depth with each other about their own singular life-changing events. For some of the women, coming to terms was painful; for others, it was a chance to give thanks.

Ben had met Catherine on a blind date of sorts on a warm night in May of 1993, at a bar in Clifton, New Jersey, called Yakety Yaks. “I took one look at her and thought, this won’t work, there’s got to be something wrong, she’s too beautiful,” Ben said, as he recalled the first moment he laid eyes on the pretty, blond Catherine.

But it did work. He introduced her to his parents over the July 4th weekend, and they were engaged by October and married the following August. The two of them succeeded at one career after another. She, having given up a Manhattan-centered career in marketing to stay home with their children, then took up oil painting and established herself as an artist, selling her works through a gallery in Rhode Island. And he, giving up Wall Street for private investing, then gave that up because he wanted to feel that he was actually making something. He had been trained as a chemical engineer, and after meeting someone at church who sparked an idea about using omega-3 in consumer products, he started Zymes, a company on a mission to do just that.

Rich was grateful to Ben, for his undaunted spirit, and the selfless way he made himself and his sons available to help us do the impossible—find our small dog in the warren of streets and woods.

Ben also made an impression on Michael. “Wow. I can’t believe how nice that guy was,” Michael said to Rich as they walked back to Pine Tree to get the car. “He said he’s not just going to look in the woods by his house, but go to Mahwah, too. That is unbelievable.”

The rain, which had been threatening all day with periodic drizzle, was now turning into a steady shower. I had put up flyers inside their plastic covers all the way down Ramsey’s Main Street and onto Wyckoff Avenue until I ran out of them. My hands were sore from driving the nails into poles and trees. I made it back to the Clarks’ house just before the rain teemed down. Rich and Michael came through the back door and into the kitchen shortly after me.

Barbara and Dave were sitting at the kitchen table staring down at the map with Dave’s markings. “Do we have anything new to add?” Dave asked.

“No,” Rich and I said at the same time.

“I met a guy who saw him all afternoon on Friday, before we did,” Rich started to explain. “And then that other guy I told you about who heard him in the yard last night. And we just met another guy in the same neighborhood who said he was going to take his sons and look in those woods back on Pine Tree and then take a ride up in the Mahwah area where Huck was this morning,” Rich said. “But no, we have no new sightings.”

“Yeah, but the guy who saw Huck on Friday afternoon is a new sighting,” Dave said. “It is not recent and it is the same area where we know he was on Friday evening, but still, it is another sighting, another point on the map.”

“That’s true,” Rich said. “Let’s look at the map and see if we can figure out whether or not it makes sense for us to go back up to Fawn Hill Drive.” While we all stood poring over the map watching Dave trace Huck’s movements, or at least what we knew of Huck’s movements from the reports we had, Michael went upstairs to find Darian.

Assuming their war general pose over the map, Rich and Dave were at a loss. “It is hard to know, but I think it makes the most sense right now for us to go back to the streets surrounding Fawn Hill Drive,” Rich said. “That is the last place he was seen alive, and we don’t have any other sightings that would suggest he’s moved out of that area.”

The lousy weather was not a deterrent for me and I knew it would not be for Rich. But I didn’t want Michael out, walking around in the freezing cold rain. I thought it best if Rich and I went alone. The challenge would be convincing Michael.