Lost and Found by Hans Peterson

Jackson Price’s gaze subtly crept over his wife’s shoulder and out the living room window behind her. It was a grey Saturday; a typical day for the Northwest in late autumn. The pines in the woods across the street were the same deep green they had always been, but they seemed to Jackson to evoke the same essence as the clean, pale concrete of the road which wound in front of his house and signaled the far western border of this particular suburban corner of Clarkson, Washington. He casually wondered if maybe he just needed to wash the front window.

Jackson’s focus briefly revisited his wife’s ongoing monologue.

“…I don’t want to go any more than you do, but she helped me out a lot this last year, and I think we both owe it to her…”

Jackson concentrated on appearing concerned with Lisa’s explanation for why he was going to have to spend the following Friday at her friend Judy’s party; a party that sounded suspiciously similar to the one he’d had to attend about two months ago. Unfortunately, he focused so hard on looking adequately concerned and understanding that all of her words were completely lost on him. The situation worsened when his attention was distracted by movement through the window he had just finished examining. His neighbor’s kid, James, was walking alongside the woods and cupping his hands over his mouth as if he were yelling at someone. He paused, as if waiting for a response, then ran further down the street and beyond the limited rectangle of Jackson’s window.

“Jackson!”

His pupils gave away his inattention by jerking back to Lisa’s face.

“I’m not going to talk about this anymore. You need to rent a tux by Monday, because I am not going to this party by myself, and you are not going to be the only guy without a tux.” Lisa pinched her lips tightly together until they disappeared, and her eyebrows tensed as she paused and looked up at him, as if she was expecting, or perhaps desperately hoping for a specific response. Jackson nodded absently and Lisa looked down and exhaled slowly before shaking her head sadly and turning to walk toward the kitchen.

Jackson stared at her back before opening the closet next to him. He shuffled through his coats and jackets, wondering how he ended up with four of them and trying to remember which one had the cigarettes in it. He stopped on a tan jacket with a small lump in the left pocket and put it on as he stepped out the front door and closed it gently behind him.

He paused on the porch as he lit a cigarette from the package in his jacket. Smoking was a fairly rare indulgence for Jackson, and not much of one at that. He had never much enjoyed the habit; he mainly started to have an excuse to go be alone without looking antisocial. Letting the cigarette burn passively in his mouth, he wandered over and leaned against the white minivan in the driveway. As he did every time he saw it, Jackson reflected on how ridiculous he looked as a 35-year-old with no kids living in a three bedroom suburban house and driving a minivan to work everyday. They had bought the van almost four years ago when they first decided to have kids, but in all the excitement about the new house and vehicle, they had still never gotten around to the kid portion of the agreement.

He had found that the van was a much easier commitment, anyway. He remembered that after he bought it, he had thought: “Ok, now we have a van, we must be having a kid soon,” and once that deduction had occurred, he had stopped feeling so inadequate about being a married man over 30 with no children. It was like in college, when he finished one of his final exams, he never felt too pressed to study for the others. In his head, this situation was really no different. He had bought a van, so he deserved a period of complacent inaction before he was obligated to reproduce. It just turned out to be sort of a long period.

When he thought about it, Jackson wasn’t sure if he had ever really wanted the kid, or if he just felt like he should want a kid. He’d been having this feeling a lot recently. He didn’t even really care that he disappointed Lisa, but he was sure that he should care if he disappointed Lisa.

He wanted to care. He wondered if other people really cared about anything either. Were they just better at faking it than him? It was frustrating. How could he ever know what anyone else was thinking? It wasn’t like anyone at work told him about their feelings (although he probably preferred it that way). They told him about their new plasma TV, or about how their kid had swallowed a paperclip.

His thoughts were interrupted when he heard a strained voice from deep in the trees across the street. He heard rustling footsteps getting louder, and the voice seemed to get higher and more desperate with every call.

“Barry!” “Barry, where are you?” “Barry!” The last yell squeaked out with the hoarseness of vocal chords that have been pushed beyond their capacity.

James walked out of a gap between the trees looking back and forth frantically. Jackson watched him quietly as the boy leaned over, panting from running through the woods and screaming so loudly. The boy’s socks were blanketed with burrs, and he had a couple of twigs clinging to his long blonde hair. When James straightened back up, Jackson saw that his face was clenched and red. He wondered if the boy had been crying.

“Are you ok, James?” Jackson called out as he tossed aside the remaining half of his cigarette.

James’ head jerked up as if he was surprised to discover he was being watched. “Mr. Price!” The boy said. “I’m looking for my new dog, Barry. He ran away and I can’t find him anywhere! Will you tell me if you see him? Please?”

“New dog, huh? What does he look like?”

“He’s big and black.” James paused and squinted for a moment. “With medium hair.”

“Well. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

The ten year old nodded and thanked him, then ran down the street toward his house.

Jackson had never had a dog as a kid, although he never felt like he had missed out on anything either. He had always been sort of scared of them anyway. He did find a stray cat when he was nine, and his parents had let him keep it. He had named her Pickles, and he was absolutely crazy about the damn thing. Everyone else had hated her, and in retrospect, he should have too. The only thing Pickles ever did was hide under his bed, and he used to drag her out to play with her while she dug her claws into his hands and bit hard against the tendons on his wrist. His arms were always lined with cuts and punctures, and his friend’s dad used to ask him if he had been punching through windows. Looking back, he realized that he took pride in so loyally loving something that was so utterly unlikable. Maybe it made him feel like he was a good person.

He still remembered when he was seventeen and he had found Pickles’ dead body under the bushes in the front yard. He never really played with the cat anymore, but he still cried when he buried her.

As his thoughts shifted back into the present, Jackson stared blankly at the woods for another moment, and casually wiped a smudge of dirt off of his minivan. He wondered what he would have done if Pickles had run away when he was a kid. He would have gone crazy looking for her most likely. He felt bad for James. The dog probably didn’t really improve his life in any noticeable way, but he will be crying for a week if he doesn’t find it. Jackson’s mind started wandering toward where the dog might have gone. Suddenly, he was struck with a thought that, surprisingly, excited him. Maybe he could find the dog. He wasn’t sure why the idea had struck him so violently at that moment, but he was unable to ignore the first strong impulse he had felt in quite some time. He resolved to find Barry and bring him back to James. He couldn’t care about anything in his own life, but maybe he could make himself care about something that seemed so important to James. He pictured himself standing on the porch to James’ house and the door slowly opening with the sniffling boy standing in the entrance. He imagined the boy’s eyes, swollen and red from crying, opening wide and his lip quivering into a smile as he hugged his lost dog. Jackson smiled at the thought. Maybe he could do something that mattered to someone, even if it didn’t really matter to him. Maybe that was enough.

He turned and jogged back into the house. He went to the kitchen and pulled a hot dog from the refrigerator and put it in his pocket as he quietly went back out the front door, not wanting to explain to Lisa that he was going to find his neighbor’s kid’s dog. She’d think he was having an affair or something.

He quickly walked halfway down the street to a less dense portion of the forest and entered. He was sure the dog would be in the woods. Mainly because it was the place where is would be the hardest to catch it, and James wanted this to be difficult. He wanted to earn it.

Jackson’s neighborhood was relatively new, so there were no well-worn paths running through the woods, and branches swiped against his face and arms as he pushed between the trees. He waited until he was further away from the street to start calling for the dog, because he wanted to surprise James when he came back with it. He didn’t want anyone to know he was looking until he had found Barry.

He glanced up through the gaps in the trees as he walked, and noticed that the sky seemed less dark when viewed through the contrast of the shadowy silhouettes of the tree branches. Speeding up his pace, he started trotting through the dried leaves and branches, looking down to make sure he didn’t trip on any concealed roots. He paused only briefly as he felt the stringy cling of a spider web suddenly grasping his face and hair. He pulled the sticky residue from his eyes and didn’t bother to check whether the web’s architect was crawling down his shirt. His determination gave him courage. He realized that at work or at his house, he was rarely alone. Now that he was, he felt more sure of himself. If he didn’t find the dog, no one was going to do it, and that made him feel important and confident. When Jackson was very young, and he heard a noise in the basement at night, he would always insist that his father investigate the origin of the sound. He had later wondered if his father ever felt scared or insecure when he walked down into the dark. He now knew that he didn’t.

Jackson looked at his watch. It was almost 3:00, and he had been walking for nearly half an hour. The trees and brush seemed to be thinning out some off to his left. He began heading in that direction, assuming Barry wouldn’t like the burs in his fur much more than Jackson liked the ones that had somehow slipped up his pants’ legs and wrapped themselves into his leg hairs. He started to shout the dog’s name more loudly, but he only got through the first syllable before he abruptly cut off his voice. About 30 yards ahead of him was a smallish black dog, standing still and staring at him.

He had been so sure that he would find the dog, but he wasn’t really prepared to see it and have to figure out how to retrieve it. He had assumed he would look for hours, only to finally find it miles away from home and have it rush to him and begin licking his face, thankful to have been rescued. Also, he wasn’t sure this was the right dog. He didn’t know how much dogs weighed, but this one couldn’t have been more than 30 pounds. Would that qualify as “big”? Of course, James wasn’t a very large human himself, so maybe it was a matter of proportions. Jackson quietly whistled and called to the dog. It perked its ears but continued to stare at him blankly. He slowly took a couple of steps toward it, but the sound of the leaves under his feet was excruciatingly loud, and the dog turned and trotted quickly through a thick line of trees and was gone.

Jackson clenched his fists so hard he felt his arms vibrate slightly, and he pursed his lips while still staring ahead. He felt some doubt for the first time since he had decided to pursue the dog. Maybe he couldn’t catch it. He ignored the thought and began sprinting through the woods toward the trees where the dog had vanished, not caring about the branches lashing against his arms and the noise the leaves were making under his feet. He stopped ten feet short of the trees, and he could now see that beyond them, there was a long field with a house in the distance. He hesitated as it occurred to him that the dog might run to the house and whoever lived there would catch it and return it. But then he saw it sniffing along the edge of the woods about 20 yards away. Jackson quickly dropped to his knees and crawled to the edge of the trees and bushes. He gently pulled the hot dog from his pocket and placed it just outside the brush separating him from the open field. He squatted back against a tree and waited.

The dog moved unbearably slowly, sniffing some grass, and then starting to walk closer to Jackson before turning around and sniffing the same grass once more. Jackson was furious.

“It’s fucking grass, Barry,” he muttered to himself. “There’s about a square mile of it behind you, you know what it smells like.”

Suddenly, the dog looked over in Jackson’s direction and started trotting quickly toward him. Jackson’s eyes widened and he wondered desperately whether it was approaching him or the hot dog. His question was answered when it abruptly stooped before the hot dog and licked it tentatively. The dog was only a couple paces away, but Jackson couldn’t make himself move. If he emerged, would it run away again? Could he grab it before it did? Before he had time to make a satisfactory plan, the dog’s patience suddenly ended and it quickly bit the hot dog into two pieces and swallowed both within seconds. It paused for just an instant to lick its mouth clean and then turned to head across the field again. Only one thought passed through Jackson’s head: “I’m going to lose him.” Without planning, Jackson dove through the trees toward the dog, landing hard on his chest, but still stabbing out his right arm and grabbing the dog’s back leg tightly. The dog whirled around in shock as Jackson heard a low rumbling from its throat. Somehow, in the milliseconds that it took the dog to lash its head back toward him, Jackson got out the strangely calm and complete thought: “Don’t you bite me you son-of-a-bitch. Don’t you fucking bite me.”

The dog bit him. Hard. It clamped its teeth around Jackson’s wrist and dug in with desperate force. Jackson did not let go. The pain was shocking, but it seemed to be locked in a box in the corner of his mind. He just gritted his teeth and locked them. He believed that if he bit harder than the dog, he would win somehow. The dog seemed surprised that its attack had not dissuaded its abductor, and it released its jaws from Jackson’s arm and concentrated its efforts on struggling to free itself from his grasp. Jackson dragged himself forward through the dirt with his left arm, then reached up with it and got his second hand on the dog’s collar. Now that he felt more confident in his hold on the squirming dog, he sat up and noticed a small metal circle on the collar. He released his hand from its leg and then twisted the tag around to stare at the writing on it. All of his adrenaline and anticipation drained out of his body as he read:

“Shadow”

He looked up and, for the first time, actually acknowledged the small house across the field. Obviously, this dog lived there. His body went limp, and his hands released their grip on the dog. It had stopped struggling and it paused after gaining its freedom. It looked up at Jackson suspiciously, and then turned and sprinted toward its house.

Jackson breathed heavily and looked down at himself. His sweater was caked with dirt and dry pieces of grass. He pulled back his right sleeve and saw that the forearm underneath it bled freely from four bruised, shallow, and imprecise holes in his skin. It was surprising how little damage the dog had done. He suddenly realized that he was starting to get cold, and looking up, noticed that it was starting to get dark. He stood up slowly and wobbled slightly, then wrapped his left hand around the bite marks and trudged back into the woods toward his neighborhood. Now his arm hurt badly. He didn’t really think about anything. There was no regret that his earlier heroic fantasy would not come true, he didn’t think about how he had ruined his nice sweater, and he didn’t look around as he walked to try and find Barry. He just walked straight back in the direction of his neighborhood.

The sky was still grey, but it was starting to mix in patches of shadowy purple when his foot stepped onto the concrete of the street running in front of his house. He looked at his watch: 5:24. He stopped and looked up at James’ house for a long time. He really wasn’t sure why, but he walked toward it, all the way up to the porch, and then quickly tapped the doorbell.

The woman he recognized from previous passing greetings as James’ mother, Lindsey, answered the door. She had been smiling politely as the door swung open, and the interior of the house was warm and well-lit behind her. Jackson heard the TV on in the living room. James’ mother’s eyes quickly surveyed his filthy clothes and tangled hair, but her smile remained pasted on her face, and it appeared that she had decided not to mention his appearance.

“Jackson! What brings you over for a visit?” She asked pleasantly. Jackson silently commended the believability of her casual good nature.

“Hello Lindsey. I just wanted to come over and see if Barry ever turned up.”

Lindsey tilted her head slightly as she replied, “Who?”

“James told me that his new dog ran away today. I thought he said its name was Barry.”

In one smooth motion, Lindsey gently crossed her arms and raised one hand to cover her mouth as she said “Oh!” She paused briefly and then said, “I’m sorry Jackson, I’m afraid you were taken for a ride by our little actor.”

Jackson stared for a moment. “What?”

“Well, we really wanted to get James a dog; he’s always wanted one badly. But his father has just terrible allergies, so we’ve never been able to do it. James has always had a vivid imagination though. He tells us stories every day at dinner about what he did with ‘Barry’ during the day. It’s enough to break your heart, but y’know, it’s really incredible. He doesn’t really seem upset about not getting a real dog anymore. I guess kids are just very good at coping.”

“James doesn’t have a dog.” Jackson repeated slowly.

“No, he’s never had a dog. I’m so sorry if he inconvenienced you Jackson.”

He smiled at her hollowly for a second, unsure what to say. Unconsciously he managed to get out a quick sentence, “No, no, Lindsey. Don’t worry about a thing. He was just doing what kids do.”

“Can I interest you in some coffee or something?” She asked politely.

“No, that’s alright. I should really go get ready for dinner. Have a nice night.”

She returned his good wishes and shut the door as he turned and started walking back down the street toward his house. He could only think one word: unbelievable. He had trampled through the woods and ruined his clothes and wasted his afternoon and gotten bit to save a kid’s dog, and he had not only failed to retrieve the dog, but there had been no fucking dog. He bitterly noted that he had put more effort into looking for an imaginary pet than he had for anything in months.

Right before he stepped onto his porch, he stopped and stared at his door for a moment. His anger began to subside slightly as he reviewed the event in his head. There had been no dog. Slowly, his face gave a subtle hint of a smile. He looked down at the ground, shook his head and chuckled audibly. Taking a deep breath, he looked through the window of his front door and saw Lisa moving around back in the kitchen. Maybe he would go rent that tuxedo tomorrow. It was not like he had any other plans for next Friday. And hell, at least this time he could talk about getting bit by an imaginary dog instead of what sort of insurance rates he was getting. He stepped inside to go take a shower, and as he walked up the stairs, he looked back down at the bite mark on his forearm. He suddenly remembered what he always used to say to his mother after he had hurt himself as a kid. He had forgotten all about it, but now he found himself thinking it with the same enthusiasm he had in his childhood: I hope it leaves a scar.