Which was no problem until that day in April of ’13. Which I will now tell you about.
12
I stopped at the corner of Pine and Sycamore on my way home from baseball practice to unpeel my left hand from the handlebars of my bike and give it a shake. It was still red and throbbing from that afternoon’s drills in the gym （the field was still too muddy to be playable）。 Coach Harkness—who coached baseball as well as hoops—had me on first while a number of guys trying out for pitcher practiced pickoff throws. Some of those guys threw really hard. I won’t say Coach was getting back at me for refusing to play basketball—where the Hedgehogs had gone 5–20 the previous season—but I won’t say he wasn’t, either.
Mr. Bowditch’s slumped and rambling old Victorian was on my right, and from that angle it looked more like the Psycho House than ever. I was wrapping my hand around the left grip of my bike, ready to get going again, when I heard a dog let out a howl. It came from behind the house. I thought of the monster dog Andy had described, all big teeth and red eyes above its slavering jaws, but this was no YABBA-YABBA-ROW-ROW of a vicious attack animal; it sounded sad and scared. Maybe even desolate. I have thought back on that, wondering if it’s only hindsight, and have decided it wasn’t. Because it came again. And a third time, but low and kind of unwinding, as if the animal making it was thinking what’s the use.
Then, much lower than that last unwinding howl: “Help.”
If not for those howls, I would have coasted down the hill to my house and had a glass of milk and half a box of Pepperidge Farm Milanos, happy as a clam. Which could have been bad for Mr. Bowditch. It was getting late, the shadows drawing long toward evening, and that was a damn cold April. Mr. Bowditch could have lain there all night.
I got the credit for saving him—another gold star for my college applications, should I throw modesty to the winds as my father suggested and attach the newspaper article that was published a week later—but it wasn’t me, not really.
It was Radar that saved him, with those desolate howls.
CHAPTER TWO Mr. Bowditch. Radar. Night in the Psycho House.
1
I pedaled around the corner to the gate on Sycamore Street and leaned my bike against the sagging picket fence. The gate—short, hardly up to my waist—wouldn’t open. I peered over it and saw a big bolt, as rusty as the gate it was barring. I yanked on it, but it was frozen solid. The dog howled again. I slipped out of my backpack, which was loaded with books, and used it for a step. I clambered over the gate, banging my knee on the BEWARE OF DOG sign and going to the other knee on the far side when one of my sneakers caught at the top. I wondered if I could broad-jump it back to the sidewalk if the dog decided to come after me the way it had at Andy. I remembered the old cliché about fear giving somebody wings and hoped I wouldn’t have to find out if that was true. I was football and baseball. I left high-jumping to the trackies.
I ran around to the back, the high grass whickering against my pants. I don’t think I saw the shed, not then, because I was mostly looking for the dog. It was on the back porch. Andy Chen said it must have gone a hundred and twenty pounds, and maybe it did when we were just little kids with high school far in our future, but the dog I was looking at couldn’t have weighed more than sixty or seventy. It was skinny, with patchy fur and a bedraggled tail and a muzzle that was mostly white. It saw me, started down the rickety steps, and almost fell avoiding the man who was sprawled on them. It came at me, but this was no full-out charge, just a limping, arthritic run.
“Radar, down,” I said. Not really expecting it to obey me, but it went to its belly in the weeds and began to whine. I gave it a wide berth on my way to the back porch, just the same.
Mr. Bowditch was on his left side. There was a knot pushing out his khaki pants above his right knee. You didn’t need to be a doctor to know the leg was broken, and based on that bulge, the break had to be pretty bad. I couldn’t tell how old Mr. Bowditch was, but pretty old. His hair was mostly white, although he must have been a real carrot-top when he was younger, because there were still streaks of red in it. They made it look like his hair was rusting. The lines on his cheeks and around his mouth were so deep they were grooves. It was cold, but his forehead was beaded with sweat.
“Need some help,” he said. “Fell off the fucking ladder.” He tried to point. That made him shift a little on the steps and he groaned.
“Have you called 911?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I was stupid. “The phone’s in the house, boy. I’m out here.”