The Padlocked Box Behind The Foreclosed House

I stayed until sunup. It was the best I had slept in two years.

By Monday afternoon the whole town had it.

Somebody posted on the Halbrook community page about a dog padlocked in a freezer behind the old Harlan place. By supper there were two hundred comments, and Wade Harlan’s name was in half of them, along with things about what ought to be done to a man like that.

I did not write anything. But I will be honest with you: I believed every word of it.

The broken bank sign. The threat at the Cenex. The hole in the wall by the back door. The phone number scratched off the tag so nobody could trace him home.

On Tuesday morning I found out Wade was working at the car wash out on the bypass, and I drove out there.

He was a big man, about forty, sunburned, drying a minivan with a chamois, and he knew who I was before I said a word.

“You’re the guy who bought my house,” he said.

“I’m the guy who found your dog.”

He stopped drying. He turned all the way around.

“What?”

“Rooster. In the freezer out back. Padlocked in.” I heard my own voice getting louder and did not stop it. “He’s at Nan Schroeder’s on a drip. No thanks to whoever bought an eleven-dollar lock at Kessler’s.”

I have seen guilty faces. What happened to Wade Harlan’s face did not look like guilt. It looked like the floor had gone out from under him.

“Rooster ran off,” he said. “The night before we moved. Josie said he got out through the fence. We looked for him.” He swallowed. “I looked for him.”

“In the freezer?”

“I haven’t been back to that house since the sixteenth of June.” His hands were shaking now, the chamois dripping on his boots. “Mister, I couldn’t take him. We’re in my mother’s duplex on the east side and the landlord said one animal and we’re all out on the street. I told Josie he had to go to the county shelter. I told her if he wasn’t gone by Friday I’d drive him over there myself. I hated it. I hated every word of it. But I never…”

He could not finish. Two men waiting on their trucks were watching, and I could see they had read the same two hundred comments I had.

“You’ll want to tell that to Cal Brewer,” I said, and I left him standing there.

I drove away sure of myself. If he wasn’t gone by Friday. I had heard it from his own mouth.

The trouble was the quilt.

I kept seeing it. Purple, with yellow stars, folded twice. And the air holes. And the pink cereal bowl, and the thirteen marks, and those letters pressed hard into the enamel. BE BRAVE ROOSTER. A man who wanted to be rid of a dog does not bring it a quilt. A man in a rage does not count the days.

The person who hid that dog loved him. Whoever locked him in had not.

So that evening I drove back to Mercer Street, and I sat down in one of those white plastic chairs in the weeds, and I waited.

Whoever had come to that yard for thirteen evenings had not stopped because they wanted to.

The sun went down orange behind the elevator. Next door, Bev Sutton’s kitchen light came on and her curtain moved and went still.