Hotel For Dogs (6 page)

There was nothing difficult about locating MacTavish. When school was out for the day, Debbie led the way to the back of the cafeteria, and there he was. When she saw him, Andi had the immediate feeling that he was waiting there just for her.

“I wish I could help you get him to the hotel,” Debbie said. “I would if I didn’t have a Scout meeting.”

“I can manage fine,” Andi told her. “He isn’t so big. I was afraid he might be the size of Red Rover.”

Actually, although he was a small dog, MacTavish was heavy, for he had gained a good deal of weight eating sandwich crusts and potato chips and spaghetti left over from school lunches. Andi was panting by the time she got him to the hotel.

Still, it was worth it! Never had she seen a dog so happy! She had decided to give him the blue room,
as it had a built-in window seat from which a dog could look out over the backyard, and MacTavish leaped up there at once. From there he jumped to the floor and ran around sniffing, exploring the room from one corner to another. Then he leaped upon Andi. Wagging and licking and wriggling with delight, he burrowed into her arms, making little squeaking sounds of joy.

Hooray!
he seemed to be saying.
At last I have a home!

“You poor thing! Imagine your master going off and leaving you!” Andi hugged the dog hard, ducking her head to keep the busy pink tongue from washing her face. “Just wait until Bruce sees you! Friday’s so busy with her puppies, she isn’t much company for Red Rover. Bruce will be so glad to have a friend for Red to play with!”

She was wrong about that, however. Bruce was not happy at all.

“Another dog!” He regarded his sister with disbelief. “Andi Walker, you must be crazy! Tim and I are working ourselves to death to take care of the ones we already have.”

“He won’t eat much,” Andi said. “He’s already fat. One meal a day should do him just fine.”

“Fat dogs eat more than thin ones,” Tim volunteered. He and Bruce had stopped by the hotel on their way over to the Kellys’ to get their rakes. “It’s the same with fat people. Their stomachs stretch, and they have to eat more and more food to fill them up.”

“That’s not so,” Andi contradicted. “Aunt Alice is fat, and she hardly eats anything. Besides, we won’t have to buy all the food. Debbie thinks if we ask the ladies at the cafeteria to save the scraps and put them in a bag —”

“Debbie!” Bruce pounced upon the unfamiliar name. “Who’s Debbie? Have you been blabbing around about the hotel? I thought we all promised —”

“I haven’t been blabbing,” Andi said. “I only told Debbie. She’s my best friend, just the way Tim is yours.”

“What do you mean, your best friend?” Bruce exploded. “I’ve never even heard of her! If you have a best friend, why haven’t you ever had her over?”

“I am going to have her over tomorrow,” Andi told him. “She’s going to help me with the hotel housework. Now that we have six guests, there’s
too much work for one person to do alone. You boys never help.”

“Never help!” Bruce was so angry that it was all he could do to keep from grabbing his sister and shaking her until her teeth rattled. “What do you call all those hours Tim and I put in after school and on weekends raking leaves?”

“That’s not the same thing,” Andi said. “It really isn’t, Bruce. I feed them and clean up after them.”

Then, because it seemed very likely that her brother might be about to hit her, she snatched MacTavish into her arms and ran out of the room.

“You shouldn’t let her get to you like that,” Tim remarked later, as the boys collected their rakes from the Kellys’ garage. “She’s just acting like a girl. My sisters are the same way sometimes.”

“I know,” Bruce said wearily. “I never used to get so mad at her. It’s just today — bringing home that blasted dog without even checking with us first —”

“He seems like a nice dog,” Tim said. “Those black ears and white face make him look like a clown. Those pups of Friday’s are going to be ready to leave her in another week or so anyway.”

“That’s true. They’re already beginning to eat solid food.” Bruce brightened slightly. “If we get rid of them, that will cut things down by half.”

Even so, he had far from a joyful expression on his face as he and Tim set off down the street toward their afternoon job.

Bruce was exhausted. He had always been a boy who enjoyed having time to himself — time for reading, for playing with other boys, for puttering around with his photography. Now suddenly there was no time at all. When he was not in school, he was working, and when he wasn’t working, he was trying to study —
trying
because by the time dinner was over and he was ready to settle down to his books, he was usually so sleepy that he could not keep the words on the page from running together.

It showed in his grades.

“I don’t understand what’s happened,” his father said the day report cards came out. “You’ve always been an A student. Where did these Bs and Cs come from all of a sudden?”

“Maybe the schools in Elmwood are more advanced than the ones out West,” Aunt Alice suggested. “Perhaps they grade harder here.”

“In that case, Bruce should be working harder.”

Mr. Walker had no patience with average marks. He knew that both Bruce and Andi were bright children, and he had always expected them to stay at the top of their classes. The fact that his wife was a teacher only enhanced those expectations.

“I know I should, Dad.” Bruce struggled to stifle a yawn. “I’ll get at that math tonight.”

“You look as though you could fall asleep right here at the table,” his mother said worriedly. “Can’t you do some of your studying in the afternoon?” She turned to her husband. “He and Andi both go out to play right after school every day. They’re out all afternoon,
every
afternoon.”

“I’m not tired. It’s only eight o’clock.” Bruce forced his eyes wide. The last thing he wanted was to be forbidden to spend his afternoons away from the house. “I’m just sort of groggy from eating so much. I’ll wake right up as soon as I get going on that math.”

But the math problems, when he opened his book to them, seemed to be written in a foreign language. There was no sense to any of them, even the simple ones. Numbers danced before Bruce’s eyes like black dots, shifting and whirling about against the white page. By the time twenty minutes had
passed, he was fast asleep with his face buried in the book.

There was good reason for Bruce’s weariness. Not only was he doing more outdoor physical work than he ever had done in his life, but he was getting up at five o’clock every morning. It was at this time of day that Red Rover had his exercise.

Exercising the small dogs was no problem. They could romp in the yard behind the hotel where the bushes were a protective screen cutting them off from the street. Every afternoon Andi took them outdoors for playtime, and they went out again after dinner.

Red Rover presented a different problem. He could not be satisfied with chasing a ball around a tiny restricted area. Red was a big dog, a dog bred for running. As his wounds began to heal and his health and good spirits returned, so too did his energy. He roamed restlessly around the hotel, scratching at the doors and propping his big paws on the sills to gaze wistfully out windows. Sometimes he barked.

“That’s not good,” Tim said worriedly. “Even with the house set back like it is, sounds carry. Somebody might be walking past and hear him.”

“I can run him at night.” It was Bruce who had come up with the idea. “That way there wouldn’t be any chance of Jerry and his parents seeing him. I sleep on the couch in the den. Everybody else in the family sleeps upstairs. I could sneak out when they’re all asleep and nobody would know the difference.”

“I wish I could help you,” Tim said. “I feel like a cop-out not doing my part, but my bedroom is next to the girls’. There’s always one of them hopping up and down for water or something. They’d catch me first thing and go tattling off to our parents.”

“That’s okay,” Bruce said. “I don’t mind doing it myself. I’ll set my alarm for two hours earlier than I usually get up and have Red out and back again before it gets light.”

The first time he had tried this, the alarm clock had gone off like a fire alarm. The shrill sound had been so shattering in the stillness of the sleeping house that both his parents and Aunt Alice had awakened in terror.

“What was that? Did you hear that? Was it the doorbell?”

“Telephone?”

“Could someone have set off a car alarm?”

“I’m sure it was an air-raid siren!” screamed Aunt Alice. “Do you suppose some foreign country has decided to attack us in the night?”

Lying huddled in his bed with the now-silent clock clutched protectively to his chest, Bruce heard their frantic voices as they rushed through the upstairs hall, pulling on robes, snatching up the phone receiver, and finally running down the stairs to see if someone was at the front door.

After that he kept the alarm clock under his pillow. This muffled the sound, and soon he grew so used to having it there that he began to waken at the first tiny click before the bell even had a chance to ring.

Getting out of bed was the hard part. Once he was into his clothes and out of the house, there was something exhilarating about being up and about before the rest of the world. The sky, still dotted with stars, and the cold, fresh smell of the air filled him with a special kind of excitement.

Raising the ramp against the window ledge, he would hear Red Rover stirring around inside, already awake and eager for his outing.

“Red?”

He never had to speak more than once. The big dog would be upon him, tail thumping excitedly, body quivering with anticipation.

Once they were outside, the world opened before them, theirs alone. It was night when they started off along the deserted streets, but soon the dark shapes of trees began to emerge against the gradually paling sky. Red was like a wild thing in the joy of his freedom, first racing ahead, then loping back to circle Bruce and fly off again in another direction.

Then, in what seemed a matter of minutes, it was morning. The sky lightened in the east, turning from gray to a soft pink. Birds began to twitter in the trees, making drowsy, coming-awake noises. Somewhere a baby cried, the sound surprisingly loud through the stillness.

Then the sun itself appeared, a bright red ball over the treetops, and the whole sky exploded with color. It was so much brighter, so much more thrilling, Bruce thought in wonder, than it ever was in an evening sunset! This was the point at which he turned Red toward home.

As he told Tim, he did not mind those morning outings. It was fun being out alone with Red. It
made him feel in a way as though he were the dog’s real master.

No matter how much he enjoyed himself, however, the fact remained that each morning he was sacrificing two hours of sleep. The rest of the day seemed to drag on forever. Sitting in class, Bruce would find his head nodding, his eyelids drooping. The sound of the teacher’s voice would begin to drone like a lullaby, and before class was half over he would be fighting to stay awake.

Despite his exhaustion, Bruce did make an effort to do more studying. The grades on his first-quarter report card had shocked him as much as they had his father. He was used to being at the top of his class, and to find himself getting Cs where he once had gotten As was an upsetting experience.

Every night after dinner he spread his books out on the table in the den and tried to concentrate. Often he ended up falling asleep on top of them.

It was during one of these times that his mother came in and found him there. She stood gazing down at him worriedly.

“I can’t understand it,” she said softly. “It isn’t even eight-thirty. Can he be sick, I wonder? Maybe
I should make a doctor’s appointment and see that he gets a complete checkup.” Leaning over, she touched his arm. “Bruce? You’d better go to bed. You’re not going to get any studying done tonight.”

Bruce mumbled something and turned his face against his outstretched arm.

“Come, honey, I’ll help you.”

Mrs. Walker put her arm around him and dragged him to his feet. Steering him to the sofa, she helped him onto it. Bruce was so heavily asleep the moment his head touched the pillow that he was not even aware of his mother removing his shoes. She drew a blanket over him and quietly turned out the light.

The next day he awoke to the pale light of early morning. For a moment he lay there wondering what had happened. It had been weeks since he had wakened to anything but total darkness. Sliding his hand under the pillow, he groped for the clock. It wasn’t there. Lifting his head, he saw it on the table next to the couch. He had fallen asleep the night before without setting the alarm, and now it was morning.

“Poor Red!” Bruce snapped into a sitting position, shocked wide awake. “He’s probably over there, tearing the walls down!”

Grabbing for the shoes that his mother had placed beside the sofa, he hurriedly began to put them on. It was still early. It had to be. The light was dim. He could barely make out the blur of his jacket thrown across the back of the chair by the door. People in Elmwood were not generally early risers. Streets were free of cars until close to seven.

I can still give him a quick run,
Bruce thought as he pulled on his jacket.
The Gordons aren’t going to be sitting on their lawn to watch the sunrise. We’ll just take a fast trek down the street and back again. It won’t be much for Red, but it will be better than nothing.

Heavy fog engulfed him as he left the house. He could hardly see ten feet before him, but by the time he reached the empty lot between the houses, he could hear the short, sharp sounds of impatient barking.

When he reached the hotel, Red Rover was so happy to see him that he nearly knocked him over.

“Simmer down, boy. Calm down.” Bruce gave the leaping animal a quick pat. “This is going to be a short one this morning.”

When he opened the door at the end of the hall the dog shot past him with the speed of a bullet. Up
he went to the back window and down the ramp. By the time Bruce had followed him outside, he was nowhere to be seen.