Star in the Forest Read online

  At lunch, over mushy cafeteria pizza, she explained how to add and subtract fractions, since I’d missed it in math class. On her napkin, she drew a picture of a pizza with ten pieces. “That’s ten tenths,” she began. “And each of these pieces is one tenth.”

  After she finished, I thought of the $10,000 Mamá needed as one pizza. She had $5,000 left from selling Papá’s truck, which was $5,000/$10,000, like half the pizza. And she had $1,000 saved in the bank, which was like one piece of pizza. So she had to beg all her friends and relatives and people she worked with for $4,000 more, which was like four slices of pizza. Problem was, each of her friends only had a little bite-sized piece of pizza. This meant she was on the phone all the time, searching for the four-tenths she needed, saying secuestrado, secuestrado, secuestrado.

  The word had started hurting, like a little needle, stabbing me. I didn’t want to go home and have to hear it again all afternoon. “Want to go to the forest today?” I asked Crystal.

  “Yeah,” she said. She made her voice low and serious. “Zitlally, we need to make a plan.”

  In the forest, we leaned against the tires of the truck, with our heads back and eyes closed and mouths open. The sun was shining onto our faces, straight into our mouths.

  We were eating sunshine.

  That was Crystal’s idea. She said that when she was little and there wasn’t any food in the house, she’d go outside and eat sunshine. She’d find patches of it shining through tree leaves and lick it up with her finger. It always made her feel better.

  That’s what we were doing in the car part forest, trying to feel better.

  Crystal smacked her lips. “Yum.” Then she said, “Zitlally. Where’s your dad?”

  I thought about saying Antarctica or Madagascar. But I couldn’t think of another country that fast, and if I said Antarctica or Madagascar, she’d know I was copying. Anyway, why lie? Even if she told other people about Papá, they’d figure she was lying. But really, I didn’t think she’d tell anyone.

  “He’s kidnapped.”

  “Oh my God!” Crystal said.

  And I spilled out the whole story, even the part about how he didn’t have papers. I tried to end on a positive note. “We don’t think they blindfolded him, at least.”

  “Well, that’s good, I guess.” She sat quiet for a minute, thinking, and I could practically see the thoughts firing off like comets in her head. She was smart, I realized. The way she’d explained fractions at lunch, even better than our math teacher could do—that’s what made me realize how smart she was. There was a whole galaxy of smart thoughts in her brain, all lit up like stars.

  Suddenly, her head snapped up and she said, “That’s it!”

  “What?”

  Her eyes were blazing, like a meteor shower was happening behind them. “Guess who your dad’s spirit animal is, Zit?”

  For a second I didn’t say anything. Then, quietly, I said, “Star.”

  “Exactly. Right when Star went missing, your dad went missing.”

  Of course, I’d known this all along, but now that Crystal said it out loud, I knew what I had to do. “If I get Star back, my dad will come home.”

  Crystal patted my shoulder. “I’ll help you find him.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and she kept patting my shoulder.

  “It’s my duty as your best friend,” she said. She rested her hand on my back. “Plus, your dad’s life depends on it.”

  Our plan was to knock on the door of every single trailer in Forest View and ask if they knew anything about Star. There were two hundred trailers total. We knew this because each one was numbered, black numbers on a white sign over the door, except for some trailers where it had fallen off and no one bothered to put it back up. We decided to do forty trailers per day, or one-fifth.

  So, in five days or sooner, we’d find Star. Or at least information leading to Star.

  I just hoped Papá could hold out for that long.

  It’s amazing how many different kinds of people there are in this world, even in this trailer park.

  Some people were nice, and smiled sadly when we asked about Star, and said they’d pray for him. One lady offered us a puppy to take Star’s place, but we said no thanks. It was Star we wanted, not any other dog in the world besides Star.

  Some people didn’t open the screen door. They looked up from the TV and called out “What?!” And when we asked about Star, they grunted “No.” Some people acted like we were dumb because we didn’t know Star’s breed and he didn’t have tags.

  Crystal talked most of the time, and I hung back, feeling shy. “Hi!” she’d say. “I’m Crystal and this is my best friend, Zitlally. …”

  In about one-third of the houses, no one spoke English, so I had to speak Spanish. After the first one, Crystal said, “Wow! You’re smart! You speak two languages perfectly!”

  I’d never thought about it that way before. I liked thinking about it that way. I especially liked thinking, Wow, Mamá’s smart. She speaks two languages, and even if her English isn’t perfect, she still speaks two, which is more than most people. And Papá speaks three!

  For three days, we went from house to house, carrying a notebook to mark off which houses we’d been to, and also to write down clues. But no one knew anything. Our page titled Notes was blank.

  Meanwhile, over those days, Mamá collected the $4,000 she needed in bits and pieces. On the fourth day, Saturday, she went to send the money from the Tienda Mexicana just outside Forest View. I didn’t go with her because I didn’t want to get behind on our forty trailers per day. And good thing I didn’t, because on the fourth day, something happened.

  In trailer #142, a little kid, maybe four years old, with wild black hair, answered the door.

  “Is your mom or dad here?” Crystal asked.

  He stared.

  I asked him in Spanish.

  He shook his head.

  “Any grown-ups or big kids?” I asked in Spanish.

  He nodded. “But Nora’s asleep.”

  After I translated, Crystal bent down to his level and looked him straight in the eyes. “Have you seen a well-trained, fit, handsome white dog about this tall with a beautiful black star on the back of his neck?” Then she said to me, out of the corner of her mouth, “Ask him in Spanish, Zit.”

  I did, except I didn’t know how to say well-trained or fit, so I skipped those parts.

  The boy said, “A long time ago. When it was still cold.”

  “Where?” I said.

  He pointed to the trailer next door, #143. “Mr. Ed got a dog but it kept digging holes everywhere and my mom said she was calling the dog police to take him away.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then the dog was gone.”

  When I explained everything to Crystal, her eyes got big. “Could be Star,” she said.

  “Could be,” I agreed.

  We thanked the boy and went to trailer #143.

  We rang the doorbell.

  No answer.

  We knocked.

  No answer.

  We pounded with our fists.

  No answer.

  We peered through the window. It was dirty and the blinds were down but we saw a sliver of a very messy living room, packed with furniture and boxes and magazines and junk. No sign of Star.

  Beside the trailer, in a patch of gravel, was a lopsided truck with a falling-off bumper. Lacy bits of brown rust peeked through the orange paint. This truck would have fit right into the car part forest.

  Behind the truck was a small, scrappy yard, mostly mud and dirt with some grass around the edges. Sad-looking, forgotten-looking junk was piled up against the side of the trailer—an old refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner and a toaster oven. And at the back sat a little shed, with peeling red paint and the roof half caved in.

  “Listen!” Crystal said.

  I listened.

  The faintest sound came from the shed, a high whine. A whimper. An animal in pain.

>   I creaked open the metal gate and walked to the shed. Crystal followed. We creeped around it. The whimpering was louder now. There were no windows, only a door with an open padlock.

  “Should we open it?” I asked.

  “We have to,” said Crystal.

  And she took my hand in hers and I squeezed it, hard, and with my other hand I opened the door, just a little, just enough to see in. A thin line of light came through the door and lit up Star.

  “Star!” Crystal shouted.

  “Star!” I shouted.

  For a long time we hugged him. He stopped whimpering and licked us all over our faces and up and down our arms. And then, our eyes got used to the darkness, and we saw that Star was hurt.

  There was a torn-up strip of a blue flannel shirt tied around his front leg, right where the leg met his body. Silver duct tape was wrapped over the flannel. The shirt was dirty and stained with blood. Some of the blood looked old and brown and dried. Some looked fresh and red and new. And it stank so much it covered up Star’s naturally good dog smell.

  His nose was dry and he seemed thirsty, but the bowl beside him was empty.

  “He’s been kidnapped,” Crystal said solemnly.

  “Secuestrado,” I whispered to myself. And then, more loudly, I said, “Let’s get him out of here.” The place was creepy, full of old, broken machines, lawn mowers and Weedwackers and chain saws and tools and wheelbarrows. Toward the back were bags of dirt and bottles of weed poisons and stacks of old plastic boxes and fishing rods. It smelled like old metal mixed with dirt and chemicals.

  “Think he can walk okay?” Crystal asked.

  “He has to,” I said. “At least three-fourths of his legs work okay. He can do it. He’s strong. He’s Star.”

  “We better hurry,” Crystal said. “His evil kidnapper could be back any minute now.”

  And that’s when the door swung open and daylight blinded me.

  I blinked a few times, and then I saw him, the evil kidnapper, looming over us, holding a pointy-tipped cane above his head.

  He was old, maybe seventy, and his hair was white and clipped close to his skull and his face was all wrinkles and brown age spots and big ugly moles and warts and black dots and heavy bags pulling down his eyes. His fingernails were like yellow claws clamped around the cane. He was skinny, with a flannel shirt hanging from his bones, like the one around Star’s leg, only his was red and black with a holey T-shirt underneath, and little white hairs poking out the neckline. He hardly had lips, just two tiny slivers of chappedness a shade darker than his pasty skin, and bubbles of spit at the corners.

  He lowered his cane.

  Crystal stood up and held out her hand. “You must be Mr. Ed.”

  “Speak up, child,” he said. “These ears ain’t what they used to be.” His words creaked out like he was an old machine himself, like his voice was something that needed to be oiled.

  Crystal shouted, “YOU MUST BE MR. ED!”

  “Indeed I am, child, indeed I am.” He coughed a few times without covering his mouth. Then he said, “What are you gals doing in my shed?”

  I thought this would be a good time to run for it, because who knew if he’d start bashing us with his cane? But that would mean abandoning Star, which I just couldn’t do.

  Crystal yelled, “YOU HAVE OUR DOG!”

  Mr. Ed chuckled, and you could see his teeth, which were stained all shades of yellow and brown, crooked, some missing, about one-fifth. “You gals been the ones feeding him down there in that old junkyard?”

  I felt offended that he called our forest a junkyard. Especially considering what his own house looked like.

  But Crystal just nodded.

  “Well, then I owe you some thanks, gals.”

  Crystal and I looked at each other.

  “And good thing you came when you did. Say yer goodbyes. I’m just about to take him to the pound.”

  “OVER OUR DEAD BODIES!” Crystal screamed, throwing her arms around Star.

  “Now, calm yerself down, child.”

  “WHAT DID YOU DO TO HIM?” Crystal demanded.

  He coughed a few more times and put down his cane and sat on a stump by the shed door. Then he laid the cane across his lap and told us the story of how he got Star, who he called Jim-Boy.

  “This past winter, one nice, warm day, I’m fishing up the Poudre River, and I find a dirty, skinny dog on the roadside. He sits next to me real nice, and I say to myself, he’ll make a fine fishing companion. So I take him home and then he starts with this digging. Digging holes everywhere, and then the neighbors start their bellyaching. ‘Oh, he’s messing up my garden! Oh, I’m calling the dog cops!’ So I tie him up in that junkyard, thinking he’s just digging ’cause he’s bored, and come spring, when we go fishing every day, he’ll stop. Why is it that dogs are always digging? Like them squirrels. I put bird seeds out for the birds, but them squirrels gobble it right up, the rascals.”

  I was wondering what birdseed and squirrels had to do with Star, when Mr. Ed looked at his cane, all muddled, and said, “Now, what was I saying?”

  “You’re talking about Star,” Crystal said.

  “What’s that?”

  “STAR!” Crystal shouted. “WHY YOU TIED HIM UP AND LEFT HIM FOR DEAD.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, wouldn’t you know it, day after I tie him up, I fall and break my hip. In the hospital for weeks. I tell my nurses, I say, there’s a dog in the junkyard that’s wanting water and food pretty bad. And they think I’m crazy and tell me, ‘Now, sir, you just rest up and eat and watch TV and get yerself better.’ And I was happy there, with the good food, and all those channels. They got cable, you know. And you know what they say about hospital food tasting like cardboard? Not true! Every morning, oatmeal. Coffee. Juice. That fancy green fruit, what’s that called—honey something—”

  Crystal stood up, like the fancy green fruit was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “STAR! STAR! WHAT HAPPENED WITH STAR?!”

  “I’m just getting to that, missy. I come back from the hospital last week, and I’m thinking I got to go find that dog and bury him. But I’ll be doggoned, he’s alive. So I say, Jim-Boy, it’s a pretty day, and you and me are going fishing! I put him in the back of my old pickup and we head out. But we’re on that Poudre Canyon road, going fast, when he gets it in his pea brain to jump out. I pull over, and I’m thinking he’s a goner, but he’s laying there whining.

  “So I bring him home and put him in the shed. No money to take him to the dog doctor. But every day it’s worse, and that shoulder’s smelling bad now, so I got no choice but the pound. Make matters worse, my daughter says I’m moving in with her. Says I’m incompetent or some such thing. Says I got no business having a dog if I can’t hardly take care of myself. Won’t let me drive no more, neither. Look, here Jenny comes now.”

  And at that moment, a little two-door car screeched to a stop next to Mr. Ed’s truck. Like a fast, mean dust storm, Jenny jumped out.

  Jenny’s face was twisted into a frown. Maybe it got stuck that way and she didn’t know how to unstick it. Maybe her frown had something to do with her hair, which was frizzy, like it had gotten tangled up in Velcro. Her black jeans and gray T-shirt matched the shadows under her eyes. Sharp elbows jutted out from her waist in angry little triangles.

  She looked at me and Crystal and her frown got deeper, but she didn’t say anything to us. She just waved her hand in front of her nose and said, “Pee-yooo, that dog smells bad.”

  Right away I thought, Now, she’s someone I would not want to be best friends with. And I felt extra-appreciative of Crystal.

  “Come on, Dad,” Jenny said. She grabbed his arm and pushed his cane into his hand. Then she frowned at Star. “How are we gonna get it into the truck, I’d like to know?”

  Crystal clamped her arms around Star and said, like she was queen of the universe, “We’ll be taking Star.”

  Jenny furrowed her eyebrows. “Star?”

  “He’s not It,” Crystal
said. “He’s Star.”

  “Go on home, girls.” Jenny waved us away, while Mr. Ed stayed quiet at her side. “I got to do this,” she said. “Not exactly a fun thing, taking a dog to meet his end.”

  “What?!” I heard myself scream.

  “You think they got medicine to waste on a full-grown dog? No, they’ll put him right out of his misery.”

  I threw myself on Star and hung on. He whimpered, but I’m sure that inside he was glad we were protecting him.

  Jenny leaned against the wall, blew her bangs out of her eyes. “Your parents want a dog? You got the money for his vet bills?”

  Crystal stuck out her chin. “Of course. My father’s a vet. We have a giant fenced-in yard and a state-of-the-art doghouse. It’s dog paradise. Actually, we were in the market for a dog, a big white one, as a matter of fact. Well trained and fit and handsome.”

  Jenny narrowed her eyes. The black eyeliner around the edges made her look a little like a frizzly-haired vampire. I hugged Star tighter.

  “Fine,” she said after a while. “Take him. But if this so-called vet father of yours says you can’t keep him, don’t bring him back here.”

  Mr. Ed gave Star a pat on the head and then let Jenny drag him toward the trailer by the elbow. He called over his shoulder, “You gals take him on home in that there wheelbarrow. Keep it. Lord knows I won’t be wheeling nothing around myself anymore. Take care of old Jim-Boy. He’s a good dog.”

  “THANKS, MR. ED!” we said, and started heaving Star into the wheelbarrow.

  On the way home Crystal said, “I don’t hate Mr. Ed. Not exactly.”

  “Yeah, he’s not an evil kidnapper after all.”

  “He reminds me of my grandpa a little,” she said.

  It was hard to hear her over the squeaky wheels, which sounded like a herd of dying elephants.

  In Crystal’s trailer, we could hear yelling.

  “The dictator’s back?” I said.

  “He’s back,” she sighed.

  So we wheeled Star to my trailer instead. Mamá didn’t like dogs, and I had a feeling she wouldn’t be happy to have Star stay with us in the middle of a catastrophe.