Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,46
“her little fur-baby,” which sounds weird and somehow porny to Atlanta’s ears and for a moment that thought lets her escape the woman’s grief—grief which is as deep and profound as quarry water, as hungry and wet as a sucking chest wound, and when the woman has that glimmer of hope because she thinks Atlanta knows something, all Atlanta can do is panic and hang up on her.
The Vizsla: The Viszla is, in fact, a dog, a red Hungarian retriever who the man says he was breeding to be a hunting dog, but everyone around here wanted pointers or spaniels and didn’t know what the hell a Vizsla was and so nobody bit and now the man doesn’t know what to do, and Atlanta almost almost reminds him that it doesn’t much matter now because the dog is gone, though he doesn’t seem to care about the dog so much as he’s pissed about the “lost investment,” and when she gets off the phone she thinks, ugh, people.
Lucky: It’s a little girl that answers, maybe 9, maybe 10 years old, and she tells Atlanta that her mother is outside pulling weeds and her father’s not home and so Atlanta takes a chance, asks about Lucky, and then the girl tells a story that pries open Atlanta’s breastbone and punches her right in the heart—the girl woke up at night when someone (mother or father the girl doesn’t remember) let Lucky out to go to the bathroom and it’s only five minutes later when the girl wakes up again (she fell back asleep) and heard Lucky yelping and—in the girl’s words, “screaming”—and then after that she heard people laughing and the screech of tires and she even said that outside the house they found burned rubber tire tracks on the street and curb, and does Atlanta have Lucky? and Atlanta tells her no and it punches her heart again to tell the girl no, and the girl doesn’t cry but she says the saddest, quietest little “oh” that Atlanta’s ever heard.
Four phone calls over the course of an hour and Atlanta feels tense, her guts pulled taut like a clothesline. And she feels sad, too—the sorrow serving as the heavy wet clothes hanging from the line and pulling it down, down, down toward the ground.
But, at least she learned something.
All four of the people on the phone told her when the dogs were taken.
They were taken at night.
And they were taken within a couple miles of one another up on Gallows Hill.
Atlanta starts looking through her closet for dark clothing.
* * *
Gallows Hill at night. Floodlights and sidewalks wet from spitting sprinklers. Everything clean and walkable. A small playground every mile. The cars in driveways are a mixture of BMWs and Subarus, Mercedes and Hondas, a Lexus here, a Porsche there. Atlanta wonders what it must be like. To buy gourmet food and to have foreign housekeepers and to know what it means to pump the really expensive gas. Then she wonders what it’s like on the other end of the spectrum: to have no car to drive, no house to clean, no money for any food at all.
She’s trying to figure out where she falls in this spectrum and whether or not she feels envious that she doesn’t have all this or guilty because she’s still a white girl in America, when she sees Shane riding up on his dingy rust-gobbled ten-speed. Panting.
“The hill,” he says, gasping. Leaning up against the light pole. That’s the other thing—all the homes and developments in Gallows Hill are lit by bright white streetlights. Where she’s at down in the valley—or, worse, on the other side on Grainger Hill with the trailer parks and dirty Amish—everything’s dead and dark and when you hear a sound in the woods you don’t know if it’s a skunk or a rabbit. Or someone come to hurt you. Sometimes she hears screaming in the woods, a sound like a woman getting killed, but everyone assures her it’s just a fox’s cry.
“You okay?” she asks Shane.
“Yeah.” But it comes out as a breathy gyeaaaauuhh. He looks like he might throw up.
“You can throw up if you have to.”
“I’m not…” Cough, cough. “Not going to throw up. So what’s…” Hawwwwwk, ptoo. “What’s up?”
She’d called him, left a message with his mother. Told him to meet her up on Gallows Hill around 9:30. She’s not sure if she’s surprised he came. It’s been a while. “I’m… doing something for someone.”