The bus always smelled like vinyl seats and somebody else’s lunch.
Tyler sat in the third row because the back was for eighth graders and the front was for kids who wanted to talk to the driver, and he didn’t want to do either.
He had his backpack on his lap and his forehead against the window, watching the houses go by. They all looked the same from the bus. Brick, then siding, then brick again, then the one with the above-ground pool that had turned green sometime in August and never got fixed.
His stop was the one after the pool house. He pulled the cord even though the driver already knew, because he liked the way it felt when the bus slowed down just because he asked it to.
Greg’s truck was in the driveway. That meant Greg was home, which meant the TV was on, which meant Tyler could come in and go straight to his room or straight to the kitchen or straight back outside and nobody would say anything about it either way.
He got off the bus and stood there for a second.
Across the street, the telephone pole at the bus stop had some papers stapled to it. He could see one had a picture on it, a photo of something, but the paper was already starting to curl from the weather and he was on the wrong side of the road to read it.
He didn’t go over. He never went over there. There was nothing on that side of the street.
The house next door to Greg’s had been empty since before Tyler’s mom moved them in.
The yard was more weeds than grass and one of the front windows had a crack running across it like a river on a map.
Tyler didn’t know who used to live there. He’d never asked. But the porch was low to the ground with a gap underneath where the lattice had fallen away on one side, and sometimes he sat on the steps after school because it was quieter than inside and nobody came looking for him.
Nobody came looking for him inside either, but at least out here the quiet felt like it was supposed to be there.
He dropped his backpack on the porch steps and sat down. The wood was warm from the sun. He could hear Greg’s TV through the walls of their house, some show where people yelled at each other about whose fault something was.
Tyler pulled at a splinter on the step and that’s when he heard it. A shuffling sound, underneath him. Something moving in the dirt below the porch.
He got down on his stomach and looked through the gap in the lattice. It was dark under there and it smelled like wet dirt and old leaves. He waited for his eyes to adjust and then he saw it.
A dog. Medium-sized, brownish, lying on its side in the cool dirt with its head up, looking right at him. Its ears were the kind that couldn’t decide what they wanted to do, standing up partway and then folding over. It had a wide chest and no collar. It didn’t growl or bark. It just looked at him the way you look at somebody who walked into the wrong room.
“Hey,” Tyler said.
The dog’s tail moved. Not a real wag, just a little back and forth, like it was thinking about wagging but hadn’t committed yet.
Tyler stayed on his stomach for a while. The dog stayed where it was. Neither of them moved and that felt okay. He watched it breathe, its ribs going up and down, and he could see its nose working, sniffing at the air coming through the gap. It sniffed in his direction and then put its head back down on the dirt.
He went inside to get it something to eat.
Greg was on the couch with a beer on the arm rest and his feet on the coffee table. The house smelled like carpet and old takeout. The show with the yelling people was still going. Greg looked up when Tyler walked through, but only barely.
“Hey bud.”
“Hey.”
Tyler opened the fridge. There were four beers on the top shelf, a thing of mustard, some leftover Chinese food in a white container that had been there long enough that he wasn’t going to open it, and half a package of bologna. He took three slices of bologna and folded them up and put them in his pocket.
Greg didn’t ask what he was doing. Greg was watching a commercial now for a truck that could tow other trucks.
Back outside, Tyler got down on his stomach again and pushed the bologna through the gap in the lattice. He set it on the dirt about a foot from the dog’s nose and pulled his hand back.
The dog lifted its head. Sniffed. Then it got up, which took a second because it had to hunch down under the low porch, and it ate the bologna in about three bites.
It licked the dirt where the bologna had been, checking for anything it missed, and then it looked at Tyler again. Its tail did the half-wag thing.
“You’re welcome,” Tyler said.
He sat on the porch steps after that, just sitting. He could hear a lawnmower somewhere far away and a car alarm that went off for about ten seconds and then stopped.
The dog was quiet under the porch. Tyler leaned back on his elbows and looked at the sky, which was that washed-out blue it gets in October when it’s not really trying anymore, and he thought about nothing.
That was the best part about the vacant house porch. You could think about nothing and it didn’t feel lazy or wrong. It just felt like sitting.
—-
The next day Tyler brought more bologna. This time he brought five slices because three didn’t seem like enough for a whole dog.
He also brought a plastic bowl from under the kitchen sink and filled it from the hose on the side of Greg’s house. The water came out warm at first and then cold and he waited for the cold part because that seemed like what a dog would want.
He set the water and the bologna under the porch and the dog came over without any hesitation this time. It drank the water first, lapping at it fast, and some of it splashed out of the bowl onto the dirt. Then it ate the bologna. Then it drank more water. Then it lay back down.
Tyler sat on the steps. After a while the dog crawled out from under the porch and moved through the yard with its nose down, zigzagging across the grass like it was following a map only it could read.
Then it came up the steps and sat next to him. Just sat there, not leaning on him or putting its head on his lap or anything like that. Just sitting close enough that Tyler could smell it, which was not a great smell, like dirt and something else, something warm and animal.
But he didn’t mind.
He reached over and touched the top of its head. The fur was rough and a little greasy. The dog didn’t pull away. It didn’t lean into his hand either. It just let him do it, like it was no big deal, like people touched its head all the time.
Tyler scratched behind one of the floppy ears and the dog closed its eyes halfway. Its tail brushed against the porch boards.
“You live here now?” Tyler asked.
The dog opened its eyes and looked at a squirrel that was doing something in the yard. It watched the squirrel for a long time with its ears forward and its body still, and then the squirrel went up a tree and the dog relaxed and went back to just sitting.
Tyler stayed until the streetlights came on. Then he went inside and heated up a Hot Pocket and ate it standing at the kitchen counter. Greg was asleep on the couch with the TV still going. Tyler put a blanket over him because his mom would have wanted him to, and went to his room and lay on his bed and thought about the dog.
He wondered where it came from. He wondered if it had a house before, with people who fed it real dog food and let it sleep inside. He wondered if it missed those people or if dogs didn’t work that way.
Maybe dogs just went wherever they were and that was enough.
—-
The third day was a Saturday, which meant Tyler had all day. He woke up early without meaning to and went out to the porch and the dog was already sitting on the steps like it had been waiting for him.
When it saw him it stood up and its whole back end wagged, not just the tail, that thing dogs do where they’re so happy their body can’t contain it. Then it settled down and its tail slowed to that barely-there back and forth, and it sat back on the step like it was embarrassed about the whole display.
Tyler sat next to it. He’d brought more bologna and the water bowl. The dog ate and drank and then it lay down with its side pressed against Tyler’s leg.
He could feel its heartbeat through his jeans, or maybe he was imagining that, but he liked thinking it was real.
He leaned against the dog. Just leaned his weight into it a little, his shoulder against its back, and the dog let him. It didn’t get up or shift away. It was warm and solid and it breathed in that slow, steady way dogs breathe when they’re comfortable.
Tyler watched the street. Nothing happened. A car went by. A man walking with grocery bags. The wind moved the weeds in the vacant house yard.
He sat there for three hours. He knew because he checked the clock on the microwave when he went in to use the bathroom, and when he came back out the dog was still there, lying on the porch in a patch of sun that had moved across the boards. It lifted its head when Tyler came back and then put it down again.
In the afternoon he went inside and made two peanut butter sandwiches. One for him and one for the dog. He set the dog’s sandwich on the porch boards and watched it eat, licking the peanut butter off the roof of its mouth in a way that made Tyler laugh.
It was the first time he’d laughed out loud in a while and the sound surprised him, coming out of his own mouth like it belonged to someone else.
Greg came outside once to smoke a cigarette on their porch. He looked over and saw Tyler sitting on the vacant house steps with the dog.
“That your dog?”
“No.”
“Whose is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Greg nodded like that was a totally satisfying answer and went back inside. Tyler heard the TV volume go up.
That night Tyler wanted to bring the dog inside but he knew Greg would say something about it eventually, and his mom would find out when she got home from her shift in the morning, and then there’d be a conversation about fleas and deposits and who was going to pay for dog food, and the conversation would end with the dog not being allowed inside.
So he didn’t bring it up.
He went to his room and looked out the window and he could see the dog on the vacant house porch, curling up the way it did, nose tucked under its tail, and it looked like a brown circle in the dark.
He fell asleep watching it.
The fourth day was Sunday. Tyler went out to the porch with bologna and the water bowl and the dog wasn’t there. He looked under the porch. Nothing but the plastic bowl from yesterday, tipped on its side in the dirt. The yard was empty. The street was empty both ways.
He walked around the back of the vacant house and checked along the fence line where the weeds were tallest, listening for something moving in there, but it was just wind.
The dog was gone.
He stood on the porch for a while holding the bologna. The street was quiet.
Across the road, the telephone pole still had those papers stapled to it. One of them had peeled away and was lying in the gutter. The other one was still up there, the one with the picture, and from here he thought maybe it was a photo of a dog or a cat. People put those up all the time.
Lost pet, reward, call this number. He looked at it and then he looked away.
He sat on the steps for about twenty minutes. The wood was cold because it was early and the sun hadn’t gotten to the porch yet.
He held the bologna in his lap and looked at the spot where the dog used to sit next to him and he waited, because maybe the dog was just somewhere else for a minute, sniffing at something in another yard, and it would come trotting back with that half-wag and sit down like nothing had happened.
It didn’t come back.
Tyler folded up the bologna and put it in his pocket. He went inside. Greg was at the kitchen table eating cereal and scrolling through his phone.
“Morning bud.”
“Morning.”
Tyler put the bologna back in the fridge. Then he took out the bread and the peanut butter and a butter knife from the drawer.
He made himself a sandwich. He pressed the two slices together and cut it diagonal, the way his mom did when she was home in the evenings, which wasn’t very often. He put the sandwich on a paper towel and sat at the table across from Greg and ate it.
It was quiet except for Greg chewing and the TV in the other room, turned low, somebody talking about the weather. Tyler ate his sandwich and didn’t say anything about the dog. There was nothing to say.
He finished the sandwich. He wiped the crumbs off the table into his hand and dropped them in the trash. Then he went to his room and closed the door and sat on his bed and looked out the window at the empty porch next door. The sun was coming through at a low angle, lighting up the boards where the dog used to sit.
After a while he got up and did his homework.