How Loveta Got Her Baby by Nicholas Ruddock Read Free Book Online

himself. There was a radiator under the window, and that was where the little dog slept all day, on a raggy blue blanket. There was an empty bowl sitting there for kibble. Now and then, the little dog got up and growled at nothing. It tugged and pulled away at the edge of the blanket with its teeth. Then a pigeon flew by and landed on the outside, up on the windowsill, and the fox terrier jumped up and barked and the pigeon flew away.
    â€œIt flew away like the passing of a spirit,” said Aaron Stoodley.
    He had another scenario which showed the same room, but this time there was no dog. The blue blanket was there, and so was the radiator, but the pigeon perched up on the windowsill for a long time. Coo-coo-coo it went, and that was the only sound you could hear because the apartment was empty. It was the middle of the afternoon, a lot of light came in from the window.
    Next thing that happened, in both scenarios, were footsteps on the stairs and the front door opened. Then either the fox terrier jumped up from the blanket and ran to the door, or the fox terrier came in on a leash from the outside. Either way, the scene was set and Aaron liked it better when he pictured it the first way, the dog all alone in the house for such a long time.
    Then the six people who lived there came inside, all of them together. They were dressed up in their soccer uniforms, they were a team. Falcons, was what it said on the front of the shirts, and there were numbers, all different, on the back. They all laughed and clumped straight into the kitchen, took off their soccer shoes, pushed them into a pile.
    â€œThey spent the rest of their lives in just their socks,” Aaron said.
    First through the door was Otto Bond and then in came Johnny Drake. Johnny Drake put a carton of beer on the floor. Then he filled up the refrigerator with the beer bottles, one by one. He had one open already, it looked like he didn’t care if it was warm or maybe they’d bought it cold, refrigerated. Aaron wasn’t sure. Then in came the others.Terry Snook, Shawn Blagdon, Barry Rose, and Justin Peach. Aaron rhymed off the names like that. He knew them all from the lawyer’s papers, from the inheritance, from the stories in the newspapers.
    Otto Bond was stocky, he had his hair cut short and he was the quickest soccer player you ever seen. They won the men’s championship that night.
    â€œAll Halifax,” said Aaron.
    That was the truth all right. He’d read it in the Daily News , read what the police found when they came in, later on.
    It was Otto Bond who owned the dog and you could tell he liked it. First he took the dog out to the park. Then he came back and he went over and got out some kibble from the cupboard, put it into the bowl and shook it, so it made a sound. The dog came over and snuffed at it, but you could tell that he’d had a awful lot of kibble before.
    â€œOh, eat the food, doggy-oh,” sang Otto Bond.
    Then the boys got hungry and the dog was up on the couch curled up in one lap or another. There were no girls there at all. That meant the six of them concentrated on laughing and hooting and joking, just being themselves.
    Six, seven o’clock came around and by then they were all in the livingroom. There was a couch, a TV, and a bean-bag chair. Three of them sat on the floor on a rag-rug from home. There was a picture woven into that rug, the S.S. Caribou , the ship full of innocent passengers that the Germans sank with a torpedo back in 1942. Down it went, the Caribou ship, down to the bottom off Port-aux-Basques. Hundreds drowned. Trouble was, Aaron saw in his scenario, the rag-rug was so old and so twisted out of shape, the ship bent here and there in the fabric, it looked like an old wreck even before the torpedo hit.
    That said, it was still afloat on the sea, smoke from the funnels.
    â€œIt was an omen too then, the rug, like the pigeon,” Henry Fiander said.
    â€œThat’s