Free The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard Page B

even as we said, repeatedly, things like, “Man, oh, I wish I’d been there.”
    The dog’s back legs were mangled, sloppy, limp. There was blood all over the backseat, though neither Danny nor Trey could stop the bleeding. “Blood all over,” Danny told us from his station at the sliding glass doors. The night a black wall in front of him. “That’s true. Blood everywhere.”
    Trey asked about a tag once Danny was back in the front seat. Maybe he thought they could dump the dog with the owners and keep going, forget the accident ever happened.
    “Collar. No tag,” said Danny. “I checked.” He wiped his face.
    “Oh shit,” said Trey. “You’re crying? Oh shit. Too much, man. Crying?” (And this is where Danny had said from his spot at the sliding glass doors, again softly, “No, that’s wrong. No crying,” though he didn’t say it angrily; it was just a necessary argument to make.) Trey was laughing in the passenger seat; it would have been impossible not to laugh. Laugh or cry, your choice, but if you imagine the moment—really close your eyes and think about two boys sitting in a car by the side of the road late at night, all alone, a dying dog in their backseat—you understand that something—something guttural and uncontrollable—had to be released from the body in order just to make it through.
    “Fuck you,” said Danny finally. “Fuck you, fuck you.”
    Sitting in the front seats, the boys turned and looked at the dog. It was cold that night and Danny should have been cold without his shirt but if he was, he wasn’t aware of it. He was skinny and muscle-y in that undeniably poor way. The muscles of hard times, of a body ready to fend for itself, of a body whose mother wasn’t around to feed it properly. He touched the dog’s ribs. It whimpered.
    Trey broke the silence. “What’s the plan, man? This is bad, you know. Bad. So what’s the plan?”
    Danny started the car. “We take him to the vet.” Simple, straightforward, the right thing to do.
    And that was the plan, and it’s what Danny meant to do. It’s where Danny pointed the car when they finally started moving again. But the dog died before they’d driven a mile, and so where they ended up—some indeterminate number of hours later, past curfew if either of those two had had a curfew, which they didn’t, but many hours past our curfew—where they ended up was in the woods, probably not too far from where the man in the Catalina might eventually take Nora Lindell. Two counties over, who knows how many miles away from us and our houses, into the forest, near the water, close to the clearing. They drove the Nissan into the woods and the dog, dead finally, was chucked by both boys onto the ground. “A missing dog is better than a dead one,” Trey had said, and left it at that.
    Danny would have covered the dog with leaves. Trey didn’t have to say it for us to know for certain this happened. Danny didn’t like things in pain; he wouldn’t have liked the idea of a dead dog exposed, and so he would have covered the dog with leaves. In part out of respect for the dog, in part out of disgust for what he’d done, in part out of some twisted memory of his mother. Trey would have gotten back in the car, ready for the night to be over, the novelty of the hit having worn off for him. Maybe he would have used Danny’s shirt to wipe up the blood while he waited. But the blood would have been dry by then or at least clumpy, gelatinous. If anything, he would have made the mess bigger, spread the stain farther.
    T he dog, we found out later, belonged to the Wilsons, whose kids were still in middle school. We didn’t feel accountable to them, and so when the “missing” signs went up, we kept our mouths shut, managing somehow to keep this secret from our mothers. It felt like the first of any real conspiracies.
    All over town, the signs were posted, signs that, unwittingly, were the precursor to Nora Lindell’s “missing” signs.