Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings (15 page)

While we waited for Dave to pick us up, Rich had headed for the high school, following up on Lorraine’s advice to enlist kids in our search. On the way, right after the curve in Wyckoff Avenue where the road work had been going on the day Huck ran away, on the side of the road ahead, underneath a blue spruce evergreen tree towering above a grouping of smaller pine trees, he saw a large sand-colored stone about the height of a five-year-old child. There was a silver apple on the sign and the words
YOUNG WORLD DAY SCHOOL
.

Rich parked the car in the school’s lot, took a lost dog flyer off the front seat, and went inside. He stood just inside the double glass doors for a minute, listening to the sweet sound of young children’s voices accompanied by a piano. “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” their voices growing louder and more jubilant when they got to the chorus “fi fie fiddly-i-o.”

It was warm and bright and cheerful inside those doors. It was a refuge. There were bulletin boards on the pale yellow walls, each filled with a brigade of white snowmen fashioned from the children’s imaginations and put up against a blue background. Below the bulletin boards were rows of pegs, and hanging off each peg was a backpack. Above each classroom door was a welcome sign. Rich felt a bit like an intruder, and in an era when men are viewed with suspicion when they are around children other than their own, he wondered how he would be received. “Excuse me, I wonder if I could speak to the person in charge?” he asked the middle-aged woman behind the desk, who was cheerful and did not seem the least bit bothered by his request.

“She’s tied up right now, but if you’d like to sit and wait, she should be free in about ten or fifteen minutes.”

Rich was still thinking about the kindness of strangers, when the person in charge materialized, seemingly out of nowhere. Janet Jaarsma sat down next to Rich and listened intently while Rich once again related our saga to someone he had never set eyes on before.

Janet had been at Young World, a school for children as young as two years old that goes through fifth grade, for decades, making real her vision of a school with an emphasis on the positive, on what children can do instead of what they cannot. The warm, calm feel of the school that Rich felt as soon as he stepped through the doors was her indelible stamp.

Janet grew up in an era, she later described, as one in which “children were seen and not heard.” Her girlhood days were spent in the quiet community of Prospect Park, New Jersey, where she walked to school five days a week and to church on Sundays. As a teenager she volunteered some of her time at the local hospital, Paterson General.

She was a petite woman with graying hair. She had been raised with the expectation that she would work hard, do well, and use her considerable talents to help others. She did. She completed both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at a time when women were less likely to do so than they are now. Janet married a man named Richard with a passion for literature and who shared her can-do, independent approach to life. They raised two children.

Janet had a soft touch and a reverence for good manners and beautiful flowers. Sitting on the small bench-like seat next to the one Rich sat on, she thought he seemed quite distraught and tried to calm him by drawing him into the compassionate ethos of the school.

“I have always felt that if everyone bends their minds and hearts to a task, then good things will come,” she said to Rich as he sat there, stunned that this woman was so welcoming and so generously using her time and her energy to help him. “Let me take a look at the flyer.”

She took one look at the picture of Huck and smiled. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll make a large copy of this flyer and put it in the windows out front. When people drive by or when they come here to pick up their children, they’ll see it,” she said. “If anyone connected with the school has seen your dog, I am sure they will help.”

For Rich, it was the latest in a series of extraordinary acts of kindness by people who, without thinking twice, interrupted their day to give so freely of themselves. Everyone, even the people in a hurry, stopped and gave Rich their time, responding in whatever way they could to his plight. No one shut the door or turned him away. To a person, Ramsey was opening their hearts to Rich and by proxy to us.

Back in the car, Rich thought he ought to get to the other schools as quickly as possible and pursue the idea of a posse of kids. It was Friday, so if he did not reach kids today, he would not have another opportunity until the weekend was over. Driving back down Wyckoff Avenue toward Main Street, Rich, one of the most die-hard New Yorkers imaginable, a born city boy, was beginning to appreciate life in a small town. He was taken by how willing people were to give him the great gift of time. Most of the people he had talked to that morning had not made him feel that he had to tell them our story in a hurry. Like Janet Jaarsma, people seemed so open to giving him whatever amount of their time it took for him to explain our situation. It was such a contrast to life in New York, where a moment too long spent deciding on a bagel topping while ordering it in a deli could get you pushed aside in favor of a more decisive customer.

But Rich did not allow himself to bask too long in the warmth of all the compassion extended to him. The hours were passing and Huck had not been seen. Not one of the wonderful people who were sympathetic to our tale had seen Huck or knew of anyone who had seen Huck. There was no telling if he were even alive.

Rich forged ahead, hoping that what he was doing was laying the foundation for our publicity drive, which would keep the eyes of an entire community looking in the woods for Huck. He drove past the sloping lawn of Ramsey High School, parked the car in the lot in the back, and found his way to the principal’s office.

Mrs. Maxwell, a kind woman with a shy demeanor, said the principal was not in and suggested Rich discuss his desire to put signs in the school with someone over at the Board of Education. Those offices were housed in a stone building just behind the high school.

Rich hurried over. Just inside the door sat the receptionist, Annette Augello, a diminutive woman with dark eyes who had been sitting there, surrounded by children’s artwork, greeting people, for fifteen years.

“No, no one is in right now who could give you permission for that kind of thing,” she said.

Frustrated, Rich feared a descent into bureaucracy. The distance between his charged manner and Annette’s placid one was increasing. Annette asked Rich if he’d like some water and led him into a nearby conference room. Pictures of the town’s schools hung on the paneled walls; there was an American flag in one corner and a television hanging from the ceiling in another. In the center of the room was an enormous oval table with upholstered chairs pushed underneath it, taking up most of the floor space in the room.

Annette and Rich each pulled out a chair and sat down. Rich took a sip of water from the plastic cup Annette had handed to him and then tried to explain to her how important it was that he be allowed to put up a few signs right away in the school. He handed a sign to Annette, hoping she would be moved. But she was unyielding. She said she simply did not have the authority to say yes or no.

Trying to be helpful, she offered that there was a community service club in the high school that might be willing to help. It was now after 10:00. She suggested Rich call her later in the day and she would try by then to have an answer about the signs and the club.

At the same time Rich sat in the offices of the Ramsey Board of Education, worrying that he had hit a dead end, I was at a Staples store near the hotel with Michael and Dave. We were waiting, while an older, heavyset woman wearing a red smock made us five hundred color copies of the flyer. We had found the tape and the plastic sleeves. When she finished, she handed the stack to Michael and told us to pay at the register. “Are you the heartbroken boy in this flyer?” she asked Michael. Before he had a chance to answer, she said: “I’ll give you one piece of advice: Pray to St. Anthony. If you do, you’ll find your dog.” Once again, a stranger had suggested praying to St. Anthony for heavenly help in finding our lost dog.

Michael was nonplussed.

“Thank you,” I said, answering for him. “We will.”

We paid as quickly as possible and headed for the car. I called Rich and told him that we had to move quickly to get the ad in the local paper. We agreed to rendezvous back at the Clarks’ house, so Rich could use their computer to send the jpeg file. It would also give us a chance to figure out our next move. The charge in Rich’s cell phone was starting to run out and he was afraid to stay on the phone very long. Despite being frustrated at the Board of Ed, Rich was excited about the progress he had made in the hours since he had left our hotel room. “It has been a great morning,” he said. “I’ll fill you in when I see you.”

“Did you meet anyone who has seen Huck?” I asked.

“No, no, but I met a lot of good people who are going to help us.” I know it was terribly unfair, but I got off the phone wondering how Rich could possibly say it had been a good morning if he had not in fact met a single person who had seen Huck. It was a good thing Rich had been the one to go out in the morning and start meeting people. I was entirely too edgy and too sure that in the end I’d be the one to comb every corner of Ramsey looking for Huck. I suppose in that moment I had less faith than Rich did that people we didn’t even know would actually want to help.

“Where are we headed?” Dave asked.

“Back to your house.”

“Did Rich have any luck this morning?” he wanted to know.

“He says he had a great morning and met a lot of people who will help us,” I said. “But he also said he did not see Huck or meet anyone who had seen Huck, so I have no idea what to think.”

“Mom, do you think I should pray to St. Anthony?” Michael asked.

“It could only help,” I said.

The truth was, I didn’t know what to say.

C
HAPTER 10

B
ACK AT
the Clarks, after the jpeg file was successfully sent to the
Suburban News
, Rich, Dave, Michael, and I stood in the kitchen, leaning our backs against the edge of the counters, catching each other up on the events of the morning and deciding how to divide the next set of tasks. No one was relaxed enough to sit, even for a few minutes. It was getting near eleven and the day was slipping away.

After hearing about the idea of a posse of kids, Dave suggested we go to another area high school—Northern Highlands—in nearby Allendale. He walked over to the kitchen table where the map was and showed Rich how to get to the school.

Dave had a couple of business appointments, so he was going to be unavailable for a few hours, which also meant we would be down to one car. I offered to walk up and down Main Street and ask the merchants to put the flyers in their shop windows. Rich said he and Michael would go to the Ramsey police station and then to Northern Highlands.

Michael, the only person to have gotten any sleep at all or to have had anything to eat, although he had not eaten much, was eager to get going. “What are we standing around for, let’s go,” he implored.

We headed out to the car. I asked Rich to drop me at the top of Main Street. Once there, I set off with an arm full of posters and a bag full of tape. “Mom,” Michael called to me, “make sure they put the sign in a place where people will really see it.”

“That’s good advice. I will,” I called back to him.

“Good luck.”

“Good luck to you, too.”

My first stop was a deli and convenience store, creatively named The Store, advertised in a bright green-and-white sign above the double glass doors. It was a place where just about anything anyone might need was packed into seven short aisles. A cup of coffee or a freshly made sandwich could be had anytime day or night.

A neatly dressed man named Unmesh had bought the store a half-dozen years earlier after coming to the United States from England to join his large extended family in New Jersey. Like so many of the people in Ramsey, Unmesh was civic-minded, allowing local charities to put their collection bins for used clothes in his parking lot. When I asked him if I could put one of our flyers in his window, he took the tape from me and put it up himself, separating it from the other homemade signs touting piano lessons, landscaping services, and babysitters.

“We want to be sure people see this one,” he said.

I wasn’t sure if Michael had phoned ahead or if St. Anthony was already intervening, but I was grateful Unmesh had thought to display the flyer so prominently, just as Michael had hoped.

“I see you have a lot of signs in your window,” I said. “It is really nice of you to help people out.”

“If it helps somebody, we want to do it,” he said. “It’s a small thing.”

It was not a small thing to me. We shook hands. I felt like I had scored an early success. If everyone was as nice as Unmesh, Huck’s picture would soon be in every store window in town.

I crossed over to the other side of the street and went into the redbrick post office. Inside the door was a bronze plaque:
UNITED STATES POST OFFICE JOHN F. KENNEDY, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1962
.

Nineteen sixty-two was exactly what all this was beginning to feel like. Walking up and down Main Street, despite the circumstances, had some of the charm of a bygone era—the open, welcoming attitude of the people, the slow tempo of the day, the unencumbered feel of things.

There was a bulletin board in the post office, like Unmesh’s window, filled with homemade posters and business cards advertising services of one kind or another. Roofers, travel agents, garage organizers. One sign had a picture of three perfectly erect dogs on it, a German shepherd and two golden retrievers; it was advertising dog training services.
TEACH YOUR DOG TO STAY BY YOUR SIDE
, it read. I took a stray tack and put our flyer next to it, hoping someone who saw it would appreciate the irony.

The movie theater took a flyer and put it right up in the ticket window. The hair salon took three. The bagel store took two. The hardware store put one in the window and a stack by the register.

In the middle of Main Street was a store I had passed in the car many times on visits to the Clarks, but never really knew what it was. There were two planters out front at either end of the large storefront window. In the window, heavy, colorful striped drapes were held open with tasseled fabric ropes revealing a big red wooden cabinet with oddly connected merchandise piled high—a wooden table, a watering can, a canister, two toy rakes, a stone penguin. I stopped and took a close look through the glass front door.

I stepped through the doorway and into a fairy-tale sugarland and was greeted by the owner, John Crames. He was a man with big hands and hair cut like a marine, a man who used to own car washes. He had created LoLo’s because he wanted to run a business with his wife, a business that made people happy. “I like candy. I like the way it looks. It’s like we’re a bar,” he said. “When you’re sad or you’re happy, you come here.”

LoLo’s is no ordinary candy store. Along the walls are all manner of candy to scoop into a bag and buy by the pound—chocolate gummy bears, chocolate krispies, chocolate pretzel poppers, and sour watermelons. Under a glass case with an American flag sticker on it are truffles—butter toffee, Irish coffee, white Russian, and black forest. Then there are chocolate pizza-making kits, books on cupcakes, cookies in the shapes of baseballs and basketballs. There is a tree of lollipops. When I commented on the unusual array of goodies in the immaculate store, John said, “If I can find it in the mall, I don’t want it in my store. We try to sell things you can’t find anywhere else.”

He offered up his delectable treats, but I politely refused. It was too early for chocolate and I probably did not have the stomach for it at that moment anyway. I told him our tale and he recounted his own, involving his dog Otis, an Akita pal from his bachelor days. John had left Otis in someone else’s care while he went to Florida. A medical emergency arose. Treatment did not come soon enough and Otis died. John didn’t say how long ago it was, but it was clear in his telling of the story that the pain of the loss was still close to the surface.

“Why don’t you go ahead and put one of your flyers up there on the bulletin board,” John said, pointing to a bulletin board near the front door with the words
LOLO’S TOWN CRIER
above it. “People stand around eating candy and reading whatever is up on the board. People will read it. They’ll see that cute picture of your dog, and they’ll read it.”

John’s story about Otis turned my mind back to Huck. As kind as everyone was, it was incredibly draining walking in and out of stores, repeating our story, asking for permission to use their store window as a billboard. My stamina was waning. I was committed to our plan of publicity, but I was starting to have more and more doubts that this intense effort was actually going to yield anything. Shouldn’t we be out driving around looking for Huck?

After saying good-bye to John, I was back on the sidewalk, walking past the gas station. I had been canvassing the area for more than an hour and wanted to sit down but I wouldn’t allow myself the respite. There was a lot of territory to cover. Results, the exercise studio, took a couple of flyers; so did the video store. Next to it was Pet-A-Groom, a store devoted solely to the grooming of the town’s pets. Just as I opened the door to walk in, a young woman holding a thick red leash with a perfectly coiffed collie on the other end was walking out. She spied the flyers in my hand. “Did you lose your dog?” she asked. “I’ll take one of your flyers and put it up at my church. I’m on my way there now.”

“Thank you so much,” I said as I handed her a flyer.

She held it in her hand, taking a few seconds to read it, and then looked up at me and asked: “What happened?”

I filled her in as quickly as I could, not wanting to appear anything but thankful for her help, but it was hard to mask my sense that time was disappearing and talking to her was eating up precious minutes. She must have realized my sense of urgency because she brought the conversation to a close, saying, “We’ll pray for you.”

Inside the pet store were bulletin boards filled with pictures of well-groomed cats and dogs—on the beach, in front of Halloween pumpkins, there was even one of a dog sitting on Santa’s lap. It was like being in a pediatrician’s office, only with pictures of terriers, retrievers, and mutts instead of children. I was always wary of people who had crossed the line and completely anthropomorphized their pets. And although I kept telling myself I was nowhere near that line myself, owning a dog as an adult, I saw how easy it is for dogs to become peoplelike members of the family. I had not yet put Huck on Santa’s lap, but it was not totally out of the question either. I was hoping I would still get that chance.

Doreen Tietjen didn’t worry about such boundaries. Franky, short for Champion Robbans Four Seasons, was her prizewinning rottweiler, also known as “her girl,” but only one of many animals she had raised and loved. This was her store. She presided there like a devoted schoolteacher over her charges. “I know who they are the minute they walk in,” she said of the animals left in her care.

Doreen was a self-proclaimed tomboy, a fierce competitor while growing up, who had an unusual feel for all inhabitants of the animal world, including the kind most of us have a hard time warming up to, like snakes and turtles. She’d find them in the woods and bring them home.

When she was ten years old, her parents enrolled her in horseback-riding lessons. Before long she was carefully tending to the horses, keeping up the sheen on their coats, and with her mother behind the wheel, hauling them around in a trailer attached to the back of the car to horse shows where she often walked away with a ribbon or trophy.

By the time she graduated from high school, she was a pro. But the family’s fortunes were unstable, and though she wanted to go, she could not afford college. Nor could she afford to keep on riding and showing horses. She married at nineteen and divorced at twenty-one.

Doreen held life and limb together with a series of jobs—she was a liquor store manager, she studied and became a wine sommelier (finishing first in her class), and she worked in a computer store. But each of those posts was wrong. She longed for the connection nurtured in her as a child, the connection to animals.

One day, fate and a boyfriend took her to the Westminster dog show at Madison Square Garden. It changed her life. She loved being around the dogs. She loved the tension of being a competitor. Six months later, she bought her first show dog.

She did not stop there. Dogs began to take the place of horses in her heart. She wanted to be near them every day. She enrolled in the Nash Academy for Dog Grooming in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and after six hundred hours of apprenticeship and little else, had the temerity to open her own grooming store in Ramsey.

Doreen was immediately sympathetic to a family in search of a lost dog. Our connection to our dog did not have to be explained. “Let’s put up a bunch of signs; we’ll put a couple in the window and a few around the store and one in the back where we groom the dogs,” she said.

I asked her, based on her experience, if she thought someone might steal Huck and bring him to a groomer to change his look, as Lisa, the breeder, had suggested when I called her from the airport in Florida.

“Nothing like that would happen around here,” Doreen said. “But it is possible someone would find him and not be able to figure out how to reach the owner and eventually bring him in here. We will all keep an eye out. You know people around here are pretty good about things like this. If anyone finds your dog, they’ll make an effort to get him back to you.”

“That’s good to know,” I said. “What do you think happens with runaway dogs most of the time, really?” It was the question I kept asking, hoping for some kind of assurance, something to stifle the gnawing uncertainty that we might ever see Huck alive again.

“Well, I think most of the time the dogs eventually find their way home, but your situation is different because your dog ran away from a place that is not his home,” she said in a straightforward manner. “It is hard to know.”

I appreciated her honesty, even though it was not the least bit reassuring. Picking up on my undiminished level of anxiety, Doreen said: “Listen, I’m happy to help you in any way I can. Just let me know. Here’s a card with our number on it. Call if you need anything at all. If I’m not here, the girls here know how to reach me.”