“All my life, Rosa, I’ve felt that there’s hidden magic in the world, that life is more than what our five senses can reveal to us. I’ve believed miracles really happen and that one day a miracle would happen to me.”
Even a girl raised in poverty and without love could entertain such a feeling. Perhaps it was especially true of a girl raised in poverty and without love, who had no hope other than what she spun from her imagination.
“Life crushes that secret feeling out of us if we let it,” Dorothy continued. “But I never allowed it to crush that feeling in me, Rosa, and one day the miracle came to me on four paws.”
16
He was a lucky dog.
Children ran and jumped and capered throughout the campground. Little kids and older kids both enjoyed sneaking food to dogs.
As further proof of his luck, he seemed to be the only dog here for the children to feed. Kids tossed balls and skimmed Frisbees through the air, but nothing on four feet joined in the play.
Not everyone had begun cooking yet. A little early for dinner.
But at least two men stood ready at their portable barbecues. The scent of hot charcoal graced the air.
One of the cooks was marinating steaks in a deep pan. He had just begun to light his charcoal.
He was lean and deeply tanned, with his hair slicked back.
On his T-shirt blazed the words Fork Off, under an image of a fork with three tines. Two tines were bent down. Only the middle one was straight.
This guy did not appear friendly. He smelled of envy and anger.
The second man had thick hamburger patties sizzling on a gas griddle and frankfurters swelling-sweating-charring on the grill.
Kipp took up a position where the action was, next to the grill master with the lesser meats.
He sat, sweeping the ground with his tail, pendant ears pricked as much as their nature allowed, head cocked. Being cute.
Kipp had few peers at this, even if he did say so himself.
Dogs were incapable of bragging, but they were also incapable of false modesty. Things are what they are, and that’s that.
The grill master was a person who talked to animals. He was no Doctor Dolittle. He didn’t hold a dialogue. But he seemed nice.
He smelled of kindness, and he wasn’t wearing a rude T-shirt.
He called Kipp “buddy.” He said, “I had one like you when I was a kid.”
Instead of swishing his tail, Kipp thumped it on the ground.
“Are you lost, buddy?”
Kipp stopped thumping his tail.
Being lost made him more sympathetic, more likely to be fed.
In fact, however, he wasn’t lost. He knew where he was going. The murmuring boy on the Wire drew him.
If he whined and did movie-dog shtick to suggest he was lost, that would be lying.
Those in the Mysterium did not lie to human beings who smelled of kindness. This wasn’t exactly a commandment, but it was a serious protocol.
Deceiving people who smelled of anger or envy—or worse—was justified because they were dangerous. Deceiving them could be a matter of survival.
“Are you hungry, fella?”
Kipp thumped his tail against the ground, harder than before.
Without being deceived by a whine, the man who smelled of kindness evidently decided that before him sat a lost and hungry dog. “I’ve got something for you.”
With tongs, he put a big, mostly cooked hamburger patty on a paper plate. He put a fat frankfurter beside it.
“When these cool a bit, you can have them.”
Kipp could whine now, because this was a whine of gratitude.
The man stooped and examined Kipp’s collar and said, “No name. No phone number. Maybe you’ve been injected with a chip.”
Kipp didn’t have a chip, but the clasp of his collar contained a GPS and a small lithium battery to power it.
Dorothy hadn’t feared that he would run away. But she worried he might be dognapped.
After flipping a few hamburger patties, the man cut into pieces the burger and frankfurter that he set aside for Kipp, to help the meat cool faster.
A woman herded four children to a nearby picnic table. The two boys and two girls resembled her and the kind man. Their puppies.
On the table were potato salad and potato chips and pasta salad and other things that smelled wonderful.
The woman carried a platter of cooked patties and frankfurters to the table. The kids cheered and started building sandwiches.
This was a happy place.
The kind man put the paper plate on the ground, and the