Looking for Marco Polo by Alan Armstrong Read Free Book Online

black plume.
    Mark gasped.
    “Boss?” he whispered. “You … you talk?”
    The dog grumped and nodded.
    “Up?” he asked again.
    Mark patted the covers.
    Boss glided up. Mark put his arm around him, curling his fingers in the dog’s deep fur. It felt good. He liked the smell. It didn’t make him sneeze.
    “I wasn’t really cold,” Boss rumbled as he snuggled close. “I just said that so you’d let me up. My breed is from Tibet. It’s cold there in the mountains, and we sleep outside, which is why my coat is so heavy. It sheds wet too. Except when I fall in the canal.”
    “Ooh!” Mark exclaimed, hugging the dog as if to save him. “Do you fall in a lot?”
    “Once,” Boss said with a shudder. “That was enough.
    “It was a couple of years ago. I was a puppy. I stumbled getting off a pitching boat and got crushed between it and the dock. My master fished me out of the water, but I was a mess, leg broken, bleeding all over. He figured I was as good as dead, so he chucked me onto a passing garbage scow.
    “Hornaday saw it happen. He flagged the scow, jumped aboard, waded through all the slime and stink, and picked me up. Filthy and bleeding as I was, he carried me close against his body.
    “He took me to his office, laid me out on the table, and gave me a shot. I went numb. He washed me with doctor soap. It smells like chemicals. One sniff of it now and it all comes back. He painted my cuts with medicine so bitter I gave up trying to lick it off when the cuts started itching.
    “It wasn’t until he started to stitch my cuts that Inoticed his hands. He got hurt in Iraq trying to doctor a teacher at a girls’ school when an unexploded bomb went off. He has to hold his right hand with his left to steady it.
    “To cast my leg he made splints from kindling wood, snapping them to size on the table edge. The snaps sounded like when my leg broke.
    “He put both hands on my chest. They were warm and dry, but they twitched. ‘Easy now,’ he said, looking me in the eye. ‘Don’t move.’ His eyes are the color of chocolate, steady as dogs’ eyes. His sweat has a sweet, strange smell. It’s the medicine he takes for his twitch that makes him smell the way he does, but I didn’t learn that until later.
    “He began pulling and twisting my leg to line up the ends of bone. It didn’t hurt, but I could feel the ends grinding together. It was like when you get dirt in your food and you chew it—you get this sandy grating sound in your head.”
    “Oh man,” Mark groaned.
    Boss grunted. “It was bad, all right. Doc said he should shave my leg before he taped it so the hair wouldn’t pull when the break healed and he’d have to pull off the splints and everything, but he didn’t have clippers, so he taped right over the hair.
    “When he finished, my leg looked like a wrapped ham. When the break healed and he unwrapped me, it was like you stuck a piece of duct tape on your arm and then ripped it off—get it?”
    Mark winced. “Yeah.”
    “The hair never did grow back right,” Boss said, sticking out a motley-looking leg. The hair was wispy like the back of an old man’s head.
    “Doc told me I was lucky the bone had snapped clean,” the dog said as he snuggled up against the boy again. “He said if it had been crushed, he would have had to put me down.”
    “Oh no!” Mark exclaimed so loudly he and Boss both looked to see if he’d awakened the doctor.
    Suddenly the dog’s blunt nose began twitching. “Have you got food up here?”
    “Food?” the boy asked.
    “Yes,” said Boss, snuffling around. “I smell food.”
    “In my backpack at the foot of the bed—I’ve got some leftover frittata from breakfast. You want it?”
    “Sure! I follow my mother’s rule: Never pass up anything that smells good.”
    Mark reached into the backpack. He’d left it unzipped.
    The napkin was empty. Not even a crumb.
    “That’s funny …,” he said.
    “No, it isn’t,” Boss growled. “It’s the rats.