Good Boy - Jennifer Finney Boylan Page 0,5

shadows.

“Hide,” said Lloyd. I’d been thinking the same thing. We ran into the First Baptist Cemetery, which was just through the trees to our left. It hadn’t occurred to us to look for Toby’s grave there, what with the dog not being human. We hunkered down behind the stone for Elizabeth Wayne, who’d died in 1793. She was a woman of distinguished piety and benevolence. We knew that she’d been the mother of Revolutionary War hero “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who was interred over in the cemetery at the St. David’s Friends meetinghouse, or most of him was, anyhow. We’d ridden our bikes there. After his death in 1796, the general had been buried up in Erie, but twelve years later Wayne’s son Isaac had ridden his carriage to the grave site and dug his father up so he could be reinterred in St. David’s. He dismembered the body by boiling it in a large kettle until he had only the bones. That being the fashion at the time.

These he drove back down to St. David’s. The rest he left in Erie.

The car came up the drive and then paused by the cemetery. We heard the door open and close, then the footsteps drawing near. A flashlight played off of the headstones.

“Okay, boys,” the voice said. “I think you can come out of there now.”

Lloyd and I stood up. Dr. Boyer shone the light in our faces. She was the veterinarian. Her practice was in the farmhouse at the end of the road, on the edge of the abandoned racetrack. There was a windmill by her farmhouse. Its sails were broken.

“Lloyd Goodyear,” she said in a voice that implied, I might have known. “And Jimmy Boylan.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Paying your respects?” she said, shining her light on the dandelions in my hand.

“We’re looking for Toby,” said Lloyd.

Dr. Boyer was a ruddy-faced woman with short hair and freckles. “Your dog,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. She knew all about Toby. It was to Dr. Boyer’s practice that Lloyd’s mother, Breda, had taken the dog’s body, after Lloyd had seen it on the median strip on his way to Marple Newtown Junior High that autumn. The dog had been missing for a week by then.

“We heard he was buried out here,” said Lloyd. “We wanted to see it.”

Dr. Boyer stood there, considering us.

“That’s the worst story I’ve ever heard,” she said.

Lloyd and I both opened our mouths to respond, because clearly a response was called for. But what could we say? We’d had plenty of experience lying to adults, and it was not uncommon to get caught. In those situations, the only thing you could do was tell the truth and take your licks. Sometimes you could try to explain why the circumstances had demanded mendacity—especially if the situation had called for protecting certain people from the world’s cruelties.

The truth had always been my last recourse. You knew that when you came out with the truth, no matter how humiliating its revelation might be, you couldn’t be punished for it. Or at least that had been my understanding. Now, for the first time in my life, I experienced what it was like to tell someone the truth and not to be believed.

As it turned out, there were times when the truth was no help at all.

“We heard—,” I started, but Lloyd was already looking down at the ground. He knew that it was pointless trying to explain. “We heard that he was buried here.”

“In the Baptist cemetery?” Dr. Boyer said. “The dog?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “On the farm.”

Now I was just pissing her off. “But who,” she asked incredulously, “who would bury a dog—here?”

The obvious answer, and the one we had believed to be true, of course, was, Why, you, Dr. Boyer. But this could not be spoken. Instead, I joined my friend in the universal pose of humiliation and stared down at the ground with him. There we stood, two shamefaced boys.

“You boys get off this property,” said Dr. Boyer. “I don’t ever want to see you here again. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Go on,” said the doctor. “Get.”

We turned and walked out of the cemetery, through the cluster of dead Waynes. From behind us came the sound of her car door opening and closing and the tires scraping on the dirt and the gravel.

“She didn’t believe us!” I said to Lloyd, furious.

But Lloyd didn’t answer back. I looked over at him to see fat tears rolling down his face. I