“Okay, Ellie,” Maya said quietly, and pushed herself up again. “Okay. Let’s keep going.”
After that, we ran every day once we were finished with Work. It was gloriously fun. There were so many things to smell, and since we weren’t Working, I could stop and sniff the traces left by other dogs, trails from rabbits and squirrels and cats, scraps of food in the grass, fascinating bits of trash. Sometimes Maya even pulled ahead of me and I’d dash after her to keep up.
I loved it. The only part I didn’t love was how full of pain Maya was when we’d finally get back to the car. One night a few evenings after we’d been to see Jakob, she pulled into the driveway and simply sat there.
I got up, balanced on the backseat, ready to jump out. It was dinnertime. I was more than ready for something to eat.
But Maya didn’t move.
I stuck my head into the front seat, near her face, to investigate. She put a hand forward to turn the key and make the car stop its annoying noise. But after that, she just sat still, sweat running down her face.
I could tell she was tired—too tired to get out of the car.
“I’m going to fail, Ellie,” she said softly, not turning around to look at me. “I’m so sorry.”
I heard my name, but I couldn’t tell what she wanted me to do. So I just waited as patiently as I could. I could see Emmet and Stella both watching from the window. They probably didn’t even know what a car was. They certainly never got to go running. But that was the way it should be. Dogs are superior animals. I know Maya liked her cats for some reason, but even she would have had to admit they were useless.
I couldn’t even see Tinkerbell. Probably she’d heard the sound of the car and was cowering under something.
“Are you okay, Maya?”
It was a soft voice, and it was Al’s. The wind had been blowing away from me, so I hadn’t smelled him coming. I put my head out the window so that he could scratch my ears.
“Oh, hi, Al.” Maya seemed to wake up. She got out of the car, moving a little awkwardly, as if her legs were hurting her. “Yes, I was just … thinking.”
“Oh. I saw you pull up in your car.”
“Yes.”
“So I came over to see if you needed any help.”
There it was again, Al’s favorite word. I turned my head so that he could scratch behind my other ear.
“No, no. I was just running with the dog.”
Al opened the door for me, and I jumped out. I stared pointedly at Emmet and Stella, so that they would notice I was outside and they were in. They looked away in disgust.
“Okay.” Al took a deep breath. “You’ve lost weight, Maya.”
“What?” Maya stared at him.
Al seemed to shrink a little. “Not that you were fat. I just noticed, in your shorts, your legs look so thin.” A gust of misery flowed off him, as if he’d been drenched in it, and he started to back away. “I should go,” he said. I was sorry to see him leave. It meant no more ear scratching for a while. On the other hand, if he went away Maya would probably go inside and then we could have some dinner.
“Thank you, Al. That was sweet,” Maya said.
He stopped backing up and stood a little straighter. I could smell his relief. “In my opinion, you don’t need to exercise any more,” he said softly. “You are perfect the way you are.”
Maya laughed. Al laughed. I wagged my tail to show the cats inside on the windowsill that I understood the joke and they didn’t.
13
A week or so later, Maya and I went to Work. There were other dogs around, too, and people standing and watching. That wasn’t what it was usually like, but I didn’t mind. They couldn’t distract me. I had a job to do.
When Maya told me to, I climbed up a tippy board, balanced while it moved, and carefully climbed down. She ordered me up on another board that was perched between two sawhorses, and I sat patiently until she said I could get down again.
Then Maya moved to one end of a long tube and called to me.
I remembered how I’d done this first for Jakob. I hadn’t liked it then; the tube had seemed dark and frightening. Now it was easy, just part of Work. I plunged in, forcing my way through, to see Maya’s face break into a wide smile when I wiggled out.
“Good girl, Ellie!”
Then she told me to Find.
This was my favorite part. The other commands were important to Maya, as they had been to Jakob. I understood that, and I didn’t really mind climbing up unsteady boards or crawling into tubes. But Find was the most important. Find was what Work really meant.
I had my nose in the grass, sniffing eagerly. I caught a scent quickly, a man who smelled of peppermint gum, spicy cologne, coffee, and a leather coat. Maya was nervous and excited; I could tell from her voice and the tension in her body. So I raced after the trail as quickly as I could, leaving her to follow behind.
In a patch of weeds I made my first Find: a pair of the man’s socks. Humans were so odd about dropping their clothing. I wondered why they didn’t just have fur; it would be much easier. I dashed back to Maya. She was breathing hard, but not gasping, when I found her. “Show me!” she said quickly, after one look at my face.
She kept up with me, too, although she was starting to pant by the time we reached the socks. “Good, Ellie. Good girl! Find!” she said again.
I dashed off, running through trees and bushes, jumping over a muddy puddle, following the trail. This was easy. It was fun!
Then the scent seemed to lift off the ground. I paused with my nose up. The wind moved the man’s smell toward me. It was stronger in the air now than it was on the ground, and I knew what that meant. Wally had pulled this trick on me more than once.
I looked up. There the man was, on a branch of a tree. He stayed very still, probably hoping I didn’t know he was there. But he couldn’t fool me!
I spun in my tracks and headed back to Maya. She was not far behind me. “Show me!” she wheezed.
I did. She followed me, pushing through the bushes, ducking under branches. She grunted when a branch smacked her in the face, and I looked back. “Show me!” she called again.
I sat down at the base of the tree, staring up. Maya jogged up next to me and paused, looking around in confusion.
“Ellie? He’s not here. Why’d you stop, girl?”
I didn’t move. My eyes were on the man. He was so still, he might have been just an extra branch in the tree.
“Ellie? Show me.”
I was showing her. I twitched in frustration, but I kept my gaze on the man. Jakob would have figured it out by now.
“Ellie? Ellie? Oh, good girl, Ellie!”
Maya looked up, and she grinned. The man swung down out of the tree. He was grinning, too.
Maya quickly pulled the rubber bone out of her pocket to play with me, and I felt her pride and happiness as we wrestled and tugged.
“You’re quite a team,” said the man we’d found.
“Yes,” said Maya, and she let me have the bone, then went down on her knees to hug me around the neck. “Yes, we are!”
That night Maya took me to Mama’s house. It was packed with people. All the children were there, from the tall, lanky teenager Maya called Joe to the little ones who were still more like puppies than people. Lots of adults, too. Everyone hugged Maya, and everyone kept petting me and saying my name.
“Now that you are certified, you need to eat,” Mama told Maya.
Then the doorbell rang. That didn’t usually happen at Mama’s house. People just burst in. I followed Mama to the door, and when she opened it she gasped with happiness and smiled even wider than she usually did.
It was Al. He had a bunch of flowers in his hand, which he gave to Mama. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and he blushed, but he was happy. He scratched my ears in that excellent way he had.
“I hear you’re a good girl, Ellie,” he said, and I wagged.
The whole family got quiet when Al stepped out into the backyard. There w
ere picnic tables set up with food all over them and cans that had drinks inside them, and people were sitting and standing everywhere, with the young ones running and shouting. But they all stopped and turned their faces toward the doorway.
Then Maya went over to Al and he gently touched her cheek with his mouth. I felt nervousness from both of them, and I quickly dashed over in case there was something that needed to be done. Work, maybe, or a taco to eat? I was ready for anything.
Then Maya smiled widely and turned around, taking Al’s hand. “Al, this is my brother José and my sister Elisa. That little one there is Elisa’s youngest, and this is…”
Maya kept talking. Nobody was nervous anymore, so I wandered around the yard, eating tortilla chips and bits of hot dogs that the children snuck to me. Everybody seemed happy, and I couldn’t tell if Al, or Maya, or Mama was the happiest of all.
* * *
After that party in Mama’s backyard, Maya took me to the kennel at the police station on most days. I settled in with Cammie and Gypsy again, and when Maya took me out we Found all sorts of people. There were two children who’d wandered away from their house (I Found them beside a little stream, carefully colleting rocks and piling them up on the bank) and a woman who’d fallen off a horse and hurt her leg. Horses seemed about as useless as cats to me; I wondered why everyone just didn’t have dogs instead.
The day we found the woman in the woods, Maya took me home in the car. But after she’d changed out of her uniform at home and put some food down for the cats, she called to me again and we walked across the street to Al’s house.
I could tell that Al was nervous again as soon as he opened the door. “Maya, you look … y-y-ou look fantastic,” he stammered.
Maya laughed. “Oh, Al, I do not,” she said, as if she wasn’t sure. “You’re just not used to seeing me out of uniform, that’s all.”
“Um. Come on in?” Al backed up and let us come into the living room.
I was pleased to discover that there were no cats here. I quickly sniffed around the living room while Al brought Maya a glass of something cold to drink and they sat on the couches, sometimes talking and sometimes just sitting.
There was a funny smell coming from the kitchen. I quickly checked it out. There were all sorts of food scattered around the counter; I could smell bread, and lettuce, and tomatoes, and onions that made my nose sting. But something in the oven did not smell right. I shook my head so that my collar rang, trying to get the smell out of my nose, and backed away into the living room.
“Oh, Ellie, silly dog, what are you doing?” Maya said.
Al jumped up. “The chicken!” he gasped, and ran into the kitchen. The smell was much worse when he opened the oven door.
Al and Maya ran around opening windows. Maya tried not to laugh until Al started to, and then they both laughed together so much Maya had to sit down at the table until she could breathe again. Then Al brought the food, including the funny-smelling chicken, out to the table where Maya was waiting.
“No, Al, it’s good,” Maya said, chewing. “Really it is. Can I have some more?”
Al stared at her and shook his head. Then he got up and walked over to a phone.
“Hello?” he said, loud enough so that Maya could hear clearly. “Can I order a large pepperoni with extra cheese?… Half an hour? Sounds great.”
Then he sat down at the table again, and he and Maya laughed some more. Al put some pieces of the chicken on a plate and set them on the floor for me.
I sniffed them. They were dry and coated with something black that tasted like smoke.
“See, Al, it’s not so bad. Ellie likes it!” Maya said, giggling.
“I think she’s only being polite. Like you.”
When the pizza came, Al gave me a piece of that, too. It tasted much better than the chicken.
14
One day Maya took me to the airport, a busy place full of strange smells—diesel fumes, asphalt, disinfectant on the floors, and many, many people. I had to ride in my crate in a dark, noisy room for a very long time. At last Maya appeared again to take me out and clip a leash on my collar.
She walked out with me to a stretch of asphalt, which felt hot on my feet. Helicopters were nearby, blades whirring. I remembered the day Jakob had been taken away on one of those, and I stuck close to Maya’s side.
But the helicopter didn’t take Maya away. She climbed in, but she called to me and I jumped in after her. I was back to being a chopper dog! It wasn’t as much fun as a car ride; the loud noise hurt my ears. But I was glad about it, all the same. Being a chopper dog meant I got to stay with Maya, and it meant I was going somewhere to Work.
We landed in a place like nowhere I’d ever been.
There were lots of dogs and police officers hurrying past. Sirens wailed. The air was thick with smoke and dust. I didn’t like the smells at all.
There was something wrong with the buildings. Their walls were tilted; their doors hung lopsidedly or had been wrenched off. Roofs had holes in them or had slid off the buildings entirely and lay in heaps of boards and shingles on the ground.
Maya didn’t seem sure where to go after we’d gotten off the helicopter. She stood still on the slab of asphalt where we had landed, looking around. “Oh, Ellie,” she said, very softly, just for me to hear.
I pressed against her leg, feeling the fear in the tension of her muscles. It made me nervous; the strange smells and noises did, too. I yawned anxiously, wishing we could start Work. I wouldn’t feel nervous when I was Working.
A man came up to us. His clothes and his skin were smeared with dirt and oil; his hair was hidden under a plastic helmet. He held out a hand to Maya and one to me. It smelled of ashes, blood, and clay.
“I’m coordinating the U.S. response in this sector,” he told Maya. “Thanks for coming down.”
“I had no idea it was going to be this bad,” Maya said. Her voice shook the tiniest bit.
“Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The El Salvadoran government is completely overwhelmed,” the man said. “We’ve got more than four thousand people injured, hundreds dead. And we’re still finding folks trapped. There’ve been more than half a dozen aftershocks since the earthquake on January 13th, some of them pretty bad. Be careful going into these places.”
Maya put me on a leash and led me out into the streets.
We had to climb over piles of stones and cinder blocks or find a way around piles of splintered boards with nails sticking out of them. Everything was coated with dust and ash. Soon it was all over Maya’s hair and clothes, all over my fur, sticking to my nose. I didn’t like it at all.
We came to a house with a crack along one side that reached from the foundation to the roof. “Don’t go in,” a man said, rubbing sweat out of his eyes. “That roof won’t be up for much longer.”
“Ellie, find!” Maya said. But she kept the leash on my collar and called me back when I tried to go in the open door. We just checked along the outside of the house. I smelled mostly dust and ashes, dirt underneath. Smoke in the air. No people.
If sadness had a smell, this would be it.
We checked other houses. Sometimes Maya let me inside, sometimes not. I didn’t Find anyone in the first two.
Alongside the third house, I Found my first person.
One wall had tumbled, and the roof had crashed down as if it were made of paper. I smelled something at once and pulled quickly at the leash. Maya followed, kicking aside boards and shingles and glass, as I dragged her toward the ruined wall.
The person I’d Found smelled … wrong. I could smell a woman, smell her hair and the shampoo she’d used. But I also smelled blood and something else. Something cold and still.
I stopped, my attention focused on a pile of cinder blocks.
“There, Ellie? Somebody’s there?” Maya asked.
I didn’t move.
“Here!” she called.
Men came with shovels and crowbars, pulling aside the broken cinder block
s. I sat watching tensely. I’d Found somebody, but it didn’t feel right. Wally had never hidden under something as big and heavy as this pile of crushed and cracked stone, so I wasn’t sure what would happen next. Maybe when they got all the cinder blocks moved and I could see who I’d Found everything would feel all right.
Maya knelt down beside me. “Good girl, Ellie,” she whispered. But her “good girl” felt wrong, too. She wasn’t excited and happy. She was crying.
“Okay,” one of the men said. “We got her.”
“It’s a woman?” Maya asked, wiping away tears and getting to her feet. “She’s…”
“Yeah. Too late. We’ll get her out, but you can move on.”
I stared up at Maya, looking over at the men, who kept on digging, and then returning my gaze to Maya’s face.
“Good girl, Ellie.” Maya straightened her back and pulled my old rubber bone out of her pocket. “You did your job. Good girl!”
She played tug-of-war with me, but it wasn’t like it usually was. I was anxious to keep Working. Maybe next time it would be better.
It wasn’t. I Found three more people. They all had that same cold, dull smell. None of them moved. No one was happy that I’d Found them.
This wasn’t right. Finding people was about saving them. I knew that these people could not be saved.
When Maya held the bone in front of me for the fourth time, I turned my head away.
“Oh, Ellie.” Tears ran down her face, making marks in the pale dust on her cheeks. “It’s not your fault, Ellie. You’re a good girl.”
Her words didn’t help. I felt like a bad dog. I was doing Find wrong. I was not saving anyone.
I lay down in the dirt and gritty rubble at Maya’s feet. For the first time since Jakob had started showing me how to Work, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wished we could go home. I wouldn’t even mind Stella lying in my bed or Emmet sniffing at my food.
“Vernon?” Maya called to one of the men with shovels. “Would you do me a favor and go hide somewhere?”
“Hide?” He stared at her blankly.
“She needs to find someone alive. Would you go hide? Like over in that house we just searched. And when she locates you, act all excited.”