Ivy Takes Care (8 page)

Mr. Burgess had shown Ivy how to make good use of a collection of old horse hurdles in the back of the barn. She set them up in a winter paddock. Using the command word
hup!,
she got Inca to go over a good four-footer with no trouble.

Ivy dreamed that one day Inca might be a Utility Dog Excellent, the highest rank in the dog training world, according to Mr. Burgess. She would have contributed to this. Maybe Mr. Burgess would find a big dog show out West and invite her to the ringside.

Ivy was just picturing this dream when Billy Joe’s voice rang out, “Ivy! Mail for you!”

On top of the pile of bills and flyers was a postcard. The picture side had a photo of Silver Lake in New Hampshire. In the lake was a squad of dark-green canoes, paddled by smiling girls, with
Allegro
in yellow script on the bows.

The message side simply read,
Hi! I’m having a great summer — wish you were here! Annie.

That was it? Ivy turned the postcard over and over. What did it mean? It was like a message from a stranger. Did Annie really wish Ivy were there? There was no way to know. Summer was practically over! Still, it was better than no postcard at all. But the ring had not been mentioned. Had the camp taken it from its wrapping and held it aside? Had the United States Post Office failed to deliver it?

That night, Ivy’s letter to Annie took up three pages, the maximum allowed for a three-cent stamp. She only hoped that Annie was not so caught up with canoes and campfires that she had lost interest in things from home. And she hoped the letter would make it to New Hampshire before Annie was turned around and already headed home.

In the morning, Ivy put the letter in their mailbox and turned up the flag. She was glad to be home, not in New Hampshire. She had seen the Allegro yearbook. Those eastern girls with their middy shirts and English saddles didn’t compare to beautiful Inca. She called Inca to her side. Ivy had collected a mess of old toys from the Butterworths’ attic and made Billy Joe put them in a bag, so the smell of her fingers would not be on any of them. It was all in a training book given to Ivy by Mr. Burgess, which Billy Joe had no patience to read.

Billy Joe was leaning both arms on the fence behind her, chewing a piece of timothy grass. “What do you want those old toys for?” he wanted to know.

“You’ll see,” said Ivy. She rubbed a six-inch shank of rope with her hands for a minute. Then Ivy made Inca fetch the rope over and over and over again. When she was ready, she got Billy Joe to throw one of her dad’s holey old leather gloves down next to the bit of rope and told Inca to fetch. Inca sniffed both glove and rope and chose the rope. He brought it back over the jump, sat, and dropped it at Ivy’s feet.

“Bet he won’t do it with all these old toys and socks,” said Billy Joe.

“Bet he will,” said Ivy. She knew it didn’t matter how many pieces of junk were on the ground. Inca would only pick up the one with her smell. Dogs’ noses were so good they could detect their person’s particular smell from a great distance.

In an instant Inca picked up the rope again. This made Billy Joe go and cut up a whole length of clothesline into identical pieces. He spread them on the ground and mixed in the Ivy one near the middle.

“Try
that
!” he said.

Ivy smiled. She sent Inca over his hurdle. In one second he grabbed the right rope and brought it back.

Billy Joe didn’t have a chance to say anything to that, because his mother’s voice rang out like a dinner bell from the kitchen.

“Billy Joe!” she called. “You get my oven scrubbed out yet?”

A couple of days later, when Inca was a full three months old, a manila envelope came in the mail for Ivy from Mr. Burgess in New Jersey. It contained a dog ticket for American Airlines to fly Inca to Newark, New Jersey, on the last Monday in August — just three days away! In a small silver wrapper was a tranquilizer pill, so Inca would sleep the whole journey. Also enclosed was another ten-dollar bill for Ivy’s dad, to pay for his trouble.

“Ain’t trouble,” said Ivy’s father. “Put it in the envelope, honey. You got college to pay for. Don’t let that boy know a thing about it, either.”

Inca was not a perfect dog. He liked to crawl on his belly, an inch at a time, toward the supper table when the guests were eating. No amount of
leave it
s or
down stay
s stopped him from begging ever so gently at the table and staring with false starving expressions at the guests. Ivy’s mom made the decision to keep Inca in a horse stall at supper time so he would not bother anyone. Inca howled from the stable because he could smell supper cooking in the kitchen across the way.

It was over a last bite of a chicken wing that Ivy noticed an unusual silence. She excused herself from the table and ran out to the stable to see if Inca was doing all right in his stall. Her heart fell exactly as fast as a roller-coaster car when she saw the stall door open and no Inca inside.

She ran to the Butterworths’ front door. “Where’s Inca?” she shouted at Billy Joe.

“He’ll come back,” said Billy Joe. “I just hated seeing him all confined like a jailbird.”

Ivy drew breath, narrowed her eyes, and swore at Billy Joe so no one but he could hear. “He’s
my
dog. He’s
my
responsibility, and you let him out into the night, you birdbrain!” she said.

Jim Butterworth came to the door and stood behind Billy Joe.

“He let Inca out,” explained Ivy. “He’s out there with coyotes and bears and I don’t know what-all.”

“Son, why’d you do that?” asked his father.

“ ’Cause I didn’t want to see him all cooped up,” whined Billy Joe. “I just meant for a minute. Then he . . . saw something, and . . . and he’ll come on back. Dogs always come back. Look at Hoover and Coover. They’re right here on the porch.”

“He’s not your dog to let out or let in. He belongs to that Burgess fellow, who paid a hundred dollars for him,” said Mr. Butterworth. “And if he’s not back here by airplane time Monday morning, you’re going to have an awful lot of fence posts to paint and a winter’s worth of bob wire to string, so you get your sorry rear end out there and find him. Y’hear?”

Ivy grabbed the best flashlight she could find in the barn. She swept its weak beam over the paddock and the hill beyond, and began a circle around the property. Billy Joe did the same thing, farther up the mountain.

“Inca! Inca, come!” they both called, again and again. But there was no Inca.

Owls hooted in the night wind. Coyotes yipped. Skunks, raccoons, mule deer, and other creatures padded and whisked through the scrub and sagebrush, invisible to Ivy, with her small flashlight.

At midnight, her mother made Ivy come back in, and despite her determination not to fall asleep, she drifted off at four in the morning in an armchair, none the hungrier for having missed half her dinner.

Ivy woke at six, the full light of the sun creeping in and then smacking her in the eyes where she sat, half-folded into the chair. She sat upright.

“Where am I?” Ivy asked herself, and then she remembered. It was Saturday morning. Her mother and Cora Butterworth were long gone to Reno for market day. Her dad was this minute on the trail with a few hardy guests who wanted to see the sunrise over the mountains. Her mother had left the front door open in case Inca should make his way back to her. But there was no Inca.

Ivy leaped up. She swallowed a gulp of orange juice, which her mother had left out for her, and ran outside to begin her search again.

Ivy didn’t have to wait long. In the distance, from back of one of the big foothills that surrounded the ranch, someone called her name.

“Ivy! Ivy, come and help me!”

Ivy ran. “I’m coming!” she shouted.

She saw him from fifty yards and ran toward him. Billy Joe was walking slowly, Inca in his arms. The puppy’s mouth was open and filled with bleeding slashes and bloody foam. His eyes and face and chest were covered with foot-long spines.

“Porcupine got him!” said Billy Joe. “He’s hurt real bad.”

Inca’s head and nose were swollen up so that Ivy would hardly have recognized him. She tried to pull one of the spines out from under Inca’s eye, but it was pinned into the dog’s flesh like a fishhook, and broke off in her hand.

Billy Joe panted and managed to say, “He couldn’t walk because he’s got the quills in his feet, from trying to rip them off his face.”

Ivy ran back to the house to call Dr. Rinaldi. There was no answer. Then she remembered — Saturday morning was his surgery time. He wouldn’t be able to answer the phone. “We gotta get him to Dr. Rinaldi’s!” shouted Ivy.

“How?” asked Billy Joe. He was shaking with the effort of carrying a forty-pound dog off the mountain. “How we gonna get him to the vet? Tell me that! We got nobody to drive us. My pop’s at the airport, dropping off guests. By the time he gets back, this dog’ll be a goner.”

Billy Joe was right. Ivy knew it. But then they saw their answer. Parked halfway into the rear entrance of the barn was Mr. Butterworth’s old pickup truck. Ivy hopped into the passenger seat, then Billy Joe passed Inca to her. Billy Joe climbed into the driver’s seat and put his hands on the wheel. They were shaking so badly he couldn’t even move the gearshift or turn the key in the ignition.

“Get out of that seat, Billie Joe,” said Ivy. “You’re not allowed to drive, anyway. You hold Inca!”

For the first time that Ivy could recall, Billy Joe did not argue with her. He was too shaken up. Instead, he slid across the front seat and held Inca steady while Ivy got behind the wheel. She had never driven a vehicle before. She made her hands stop trembling, forcing herself to concentrate.

“Okay,” Billy Joe said. “Turn the key. Right. Put your foot on that left-hand pedal. That’s the clutch. Put the truck in reverse. Let the clutch out easy and put a little pressure on the gas. When you get to the road, back it around and shift up to where it says three. That’s third. Drive all the way in third gear so you don’t have to shift.”

That’s exactly what Ivy did. They wheeled out onto the highway and drove the truck at forty miles an hour into town. If it took four hours or ten minutes, Ivy didn’t know. She just knew that she began to breathe again when she saw the sign for Carson City Animal Hospital and turned into the vet’s driveway.

“Let the clutch out now!” said Billy Joe. “Ease off that gas pedal. Right foot on the brake. Left foot back on the clutch. Pull that gearshift into neutral. Put your foot slow on the brake!”

There were tears of effort in Ivy’s eyes, and she nearly bit through her lip with concentration. The truck stopped with a terrible metallic shudder and screech. By accident, Ivy hit the horn. The horn stuck and wouldn’t stop blasting. Inside of a confused minute full of shouts and door slammings, Inca was in Dr. Rinaldi’s arms.

The vet shot Inca full of anesthetic and morphine while his nurse connected a fluid feed into his front leg. For the next hour and a half, Dr. Rinaldi, Ivy, and Billy Joe carefully unhooked each one of a hundred and sixty-five needle-sharp porcupine quills from Inca’s ears, face, and chest.

By evening, only the little shaved square on Inca’s front leg where the intravenous needle had gone in gave a clue that anything bad had happened to the puppy at all. Once the anesthetic wore off, he was bouncing around the way he always did.

At seven o’clock Monday morning, Inca swallowed a square of Velveeta cheese with the tranquilizer in it and kissed everybody good-bye a dozen times. Ivy closed up his hard-sided carrier with the water bottle full and in place, and gave him over to the nice man with a crew cut in the American Airlines uniform.

“Good-bye, my Inca,” she said shakily, and opened the crate door to once more hold his head and kiss his ears.

The man with the crew cut put the crate on a dolly and wheeled Inca away.

At eleven o’clock that night, the telephone rang. It was a telegram from Teaneck, New Jersey. The Western Union lady read it aloud to Ivy’s dad, who then asked her to repeat the message to Ivy.

“Wife is gone (stop) but Inca is here (stop) Very happy (stop) Thanks (stop) Burgess (stop) Gift follows (stop).”

The gift was for Ivy. It came on September first in a green box with
GERMAN SHEPHERD CLUB OF AMERICA
stamped in gold on the lid. Inside was a Timex watch. Pictured on its face was a black-and-tan shepherd head, just like Inca’s.
You’ll need this if you are to run a business, girl!
read the card.
Best wishes, George Burgess.

That night, Ivy kept a hand on Inca’s empty crate. Annie would be back in two days. School would begin in five. She realized that she missed Inca much more than she had missed Annie. With a dog, there was no guessing as to who loved whom in the world. There were no embarrassments or shifting loyalties. Ivy kept her feelings silent in case Billy Joe could hear through her window. But Ivy’s mother knew. She came in and sat on the edge of Ivy’s bed. “We’ll find you a pup at the pound, honey.”

But Ivy didn’t want a pup from the pound. She wanted Inca. She knew that disappointment was a part of life. You couldn’t always get what you wanted. But, oh, she wanted that Inca.