Gully's Travels Read online

  He crouched there, heart pounding, breathing a mile a minute, while the dalmatian barked his head off just outside.

  Suddenly the beast was yanked away.

  “It’s them boxes of fancy steaks I got in back, ain’t it?” said a short, chubby deliveryman. “Sorry, Rover, they ain’t for you.”

  When the man plunked down in the driver’s seat, a spring dug into Gulliver’s back, but he swallowed his yelp and scooted over a bit. The man started the engine and drove away. He didn’t bother to close the sliding door, but Gulliver was far too traumatized to appreciate the view.

  In a few minutes the van stopped and the man left to deliver a package. Gulliver jumped out onto the curb, peered up and down an unfamiliar street, then climbed back to his place under the seat. At least it seemed safe there.

  The van’s engine had warmed the floorboards, and as his heartbeat slackened, a drowsiness crept over him. He’d been through so much in the last hour that, even though he was driving around an unknown neighborhood in a strange van, his eyelids grew heavy.

  When he woke up, it was cooler. The van wasn’t moving, the door was closed, the deliveryman’s boots were nowhere in sight. Gulliver poked his head out from under the seat. No deliveryman. Gulliver climbed onto the driver’s seat and put his front paws up on the steering wheel. It was dusk; he was in a parking lot chock-full of white FedEx vans.

  The windows of his were closed. So was the door to the back of the van. He crouched on the seat, quivering, realizing he couldn’t get out. Plus, it was getting dark.

  For the next couple of hours, tremors of panic ran from his oil-stained tail up his spine to the gerbil-less back of his neck. But once it was good and dark, his stomach began to growl, and he roused himself to search the van.

  His dinner was a piece of stale pretzel; dessert, two rock-hard M&Ms.

  Afterward, he curled up on the driver’s seat and tried to sleep. But a wind was whistling spookily among the parked vans. How he missed having J.C. to talk to! And before long he wasn’t just miserably lonely, he was miserably cold as well, for the wind was out of the north, bringing in a cold front.

  After a long, cold, and mostly sleepless night, day finally broke. And as the sun rose in the sky, the van gradually grew warmer. But no less lonely. It was Sunday, so no deliveryman arrived.

  Gulliver spent most of the day tormenting himself with memories of glorious Sundays of old with his professor, but at dusk hunger forced him to ransack the cab again. This time he came up with half a peanut and a leathery piece of pepperoni. And after this poor excuse for a meal, he had to face a new humiliation. It went against every fiber of his being to soil his own quarters. However, he had no choice but to go off to the corner farthest from the driver’s seat and do his business on an old sandwich wrapper.

  After another chilly, nearly sleepless night, Monday finally dawned. Before long, doors started banging and engines revved up. Gulliver crept back under the driver’s seat just as the side door of the van slid open.

  “P.U.!” muttered a man with a walrus mustache. “How the heck . . . ?”

  Gulliver remained huddled under the seat while the mustachioed deliveryman cleaned up the mess. Leaving both sliding doors open to air the cab, the man drove off to a depot where he loaded the back of the van with packages.

  As he made his rounds, the man left the sliding door on the driver’s side open, providing Gulliver with numerous chances to escape. But none of the neighborhoods looked the least bit familiar. During one delivery Gulliver hopped down to grab two french fries out of the gutter, but after gobbling them up, he climbed back under the seat.

  Once again the engine heated the van’s floorboards. Once again Gulliver grew drowsy and dozed off. So he missed the stop at the tollbooth and the trip through the Midtown Tunnel. But some time after entering Manhattan, the van got caught in a traffic jam. A cabby behind them laid on his horn. Gulliver opened his eyes. He blinked in astonishment. He squeezed his eyes shut again, figuring he must be dreaming. But when he reopened them, nothing had changed. There, visible between two parked Lincoln town cars, barely twenty-five feet away, were the pimply-faced doorman and the tinted-glass door to Rodney’s glass tower.

  If jigs weren’t so unrefined, Gulliver would have danced one. For two solid days nothing remotely good had happened to him, and now, as if by magic, he’d landed on his friend’s doorstep!

  He darted out from under the driver’s seat and escaped the van without the deliveryman even noticing. Under one of the town cars, he found a peppermint Life Saver. It wasn’t very satisfying but somehow seemed a good omen. Up on the curb he hid behind a fire hydrant. His nose told him that numerous dogs had used it for their purposes, but it was a good vantage point.

  Every minute or so Rodney’s doorman opened the door of the glass apartment tower for someone or other, but for a while the only dogs to emerge were a pair of tall, slender Russian wolfhounds leading a tall, slender fashion model. Then half a dozen dogs emerged at once, followed by a young man with an earring like Roberto’s. Gulliver, who’d seen dog walkers downtown, always used to stick his snout up at the dogs: poor creatures forced to take their walks in gangs. But as these approached his hydrant, they stuck their snouts in the air.

  “Look at the bum,” said a pug.

  “Must be one of them strays,” said a bulldog.

  “Probably end up in the pound,” said a female whippet. “Then if nobody wants you, they put you to sleep.”

  A bum? A stray? Him? And what did that mean, “put you to sleep”? Gulliver rose to his full eleven inches and said:

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  The bulldog, not caring for the haughty tone, went for him, nearly yanking the walker off his feet.

  “Hey!” the young man cried, pulling the bulldog back.

  The doorman came racing over with a broom. “Git!” he cried, batting at Gulliver.

  This was a new low: being chased off by a pimply doorman. His self-esteem more bruised than ever, Gulliver crouched under a long white limousine parked farther down the block. From there he could still watch the door to the glass tower, but the chauffeur kept the engine running and the exhaust fumes began to burn Gulliver’s eyes and throat.

  Just as he was about to abandon his hiding place, out of the glass tower came Rodney, followed by his professor. Gulliver’s first impulse was to race over to them. But something told him this might not be a good idea, so he settled for shadowing them up the avenue, creeping along under parked vehicles while they used the sidewalk.

  At the first corner they turned left, and halfway up that block they entered a small pocket park. It was hemmed in by buildings on three sides, and at the back was a fenced-in dog run. After releasing Rodney in the run, the professor sat on an unoccupied bench, where he put on reading glasses and started leafing through an art magazine. On another bench a lady with a blue rinse was feeding pigeons bits of stale bread. On another, two women who looked like twin sisters were reading different sections of the same newspaper. Other than Rodney, the only dogs in the run were a pair of male Highland terriers who looked like twins themselves.

  Holly bushes had been planted at the base of the building on the east side of the park, and as Gulliver crept under them, the thorny leaves tore at his coat. But he managed to reach the wire fence that enclosed the dog run.

  “Liver and bacon,” one terrier was saying.

  “Mine was sirloin,” Rodney replied. “And this morning he gave me a piece of his sausage.”

  “Link or patty?” asked the other terrier.

  “Link. Quite spicy, but good.”

  Suddenly Gulliver’s mouth was watering. “Rodney!” he hissed.

  Rodney looked around in surprise.

  “Over here!” Gulliver said, emerging from under a holly bush.

  Rodney walked over to the fence, his eyes a-squint un
der his bushy eyebrows.

  “It’s me! Gulliver!”

  “Good grief, is it really? You look dreadful.” Rodney took a step back from the fence. “You smell dreadful, too.”

  “If you’d been through what I have, you might not smell so wonderful yourself.”

  “How come you’re alone? Where’s your professor?”

  “Oh, Rodney. You won’t believe it. He left me with our doorman in Queens.”

  “Queens!” Rodney said, aghast.

  “Then they took me to the beach and buried me alive.”

  “Buried you alive?”

  “Yes! Then I escaped and spent two days in a prison. Without my gerbil.”

  “Your gerbil? Have you been eating catnip?”

  “It’s all the dog’s truth! And I’ve hardly eaten in two days. I’m starving!”

  “And look at your coat, it’s a disgrace. When were you last at the groomer?”

  Gulliver peered around at himself. His coat bore witness to — among other things — sand, oil, strawberry ice cream, mustard, mud puddles, and exhaust fumes.

  “The doorman’s oldest son brushes me regularly,” he said, trying to maintain a bit of dignity. “But the last two days . . . Oh, Rodney, you’ve got to help me. Would your professor take me in?”

  Rodney moved another step backward. “My dear Gulliver, you know that’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . because I’m his dog. Why on earth would he want a Lhasa when he already has a purebred schnauzer?”

  “But we’re precious! We’re sacred!”

  “Maybe to some kooky monk from Tibet. But this is the Upper East Side.”

  Gulliver’s throat was tightening up. “But . . . aren’t we friends?”

  “Well, certainly. I enjoyed our conversations. And your apartment . . . well, it’s not very high up, and it’s a bit old-fashioned, but it’s spacious and presentable.”

  What would Rodney say about the ramshackle house in Queens? And even that was lost to Gulliver now.

  “Couldn’t you get me something to eat?” he said, trying not to sound like a beggar. “I really am close to starving.”

  “I wish I could. But what am I supposed to do? Throw a can of Prime Premium out the window — from the forty-eighth floor? Do you have any idea how dangerous that would be? I could get my professor sued.”

  “Hey, Rodney,” called out one of the terriers. “Look who’s coming.”

  A man in a tweed jacket was walking into the park with a female toy poodle who’d clearly just had a French clip.

  “Er, excuse me,” Rodney said, not wanting Hermione — such was the poodle’s name — to catch him associating with a smelly stray.

  Of all the shocks Gulliver had had to absorb over the last few weeks, none was more wrenching than watching Rodney turn tail and walk away from him right after he’d pleaded for his help. Gulliver skulked off under the holly bush, his eyes filling with tears as the thorns pricked his soiled coat.

  Now he was lost in every sense of the word. He was uptown in Manhattan, but he wasn’t quite sure where, since on his previous visit to this neighborhood he’d come in a cab. And even if he’d been able to orient himself, what good would it do? He couldn’t go to One Fifth Avenue. His professor didn’t want him.

  He left the pocket park and slunk along underneath parked cars, blinking away his tears and thinking of the words of the whippet: “If nobody wants you, they put you to sleep.” Put you to sleep. How ominous that sounded — and yet how curiously comforting!

  Suddenly his ears were assaulted by screeching tires. He’d wandered right out onto an avenue! As he dashed under a bus and made it to the other side, people on the sidewalk yelled at him. Then a construction worker started chasing him.

  “I’ll help you, doggie,” the man cried. “Just stop.”

  Faint from hunger though he was, Gulliver took off down a side street at a full sprint. At the next avenue he followed a crowd of people across a crosswalk, then bolted down another side street. At the end of the block he stopped to catch his breath and looked back. The construction worker was nowhere in sight. Gulliver looked ahead to a ramp leading up to the towering Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.

  He trotted up the ramp onto a pedestrian path running along the northern side of the bridge’s lower roadway. He had to dodge a pack of bikers and several skateboarders, but in time he managed to reach the middle of the bridge. He stopped and peered out through crisscrossing girders. Off to his right was Roosevelt Island. Off to his left, the Upper East Side. He poked his head out between girders. Far below was the turbulent, gleaming river. He thought of Saturday, when the ocean had swept over him. If only he’d just drowned then and there and spared himself all the tortures and humiliations of the last two days!

  Gulliver shut his eyes and jumped.

  One morning a couple of weeks later, Carlos was sitting on his stool in the lobby of One Fifth Avenue reading the Daily News when the elevator door opened and out strode Professor Rattigan with his briefcase.

  Carlos stood uneasily. “Hey, Dr. Rattigan. Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “I took Madeline to visit my parents in Florida,” Professor Rattigan said a bit wearily. “We just got back last night.”

  “How was it down there?”

  “Extremely hot.” He rolled his eyes. “She’s still recovering. How’s Gulliver? Behaving himself?”

  “He’s quite a dog” was all Carlos said as he opened the door for the professor.

  The reason Carlos answered so evasively was that he had no idea if Gulliver was behaving or not. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since the dog raced off down the beach three Saturdays ago. He’d checked with the Far Rockaway police, with the local ASPCA, and with the dog pound, but no lost Lhasa apso had been reported. He felt terrible about it, especially for Roberto, who was even more upset than Juanita — perhaps because Juanita had the consolation of getting her gerbil back. Even Pogo seemed upset, moping around with none of her usual bounce. Roberto had made missing-dog flyers and motorbiked over to Far Rockaway and posted them all over the place, but so far no one had called to get the fifty-dollar reward they’d offered for news of Gulliver.

  Carlos, who dreaded telling Professor Rattigan that his precious dog was lost or maybe even dead, went home to Queens that night hoping against hope for good news. Instead, there was another missing-animal crisis. Juanita had come home from school to find the Ponsons’ cat in her room. The cat had actually opened the door of J.C.’s cage and was groping around inside for the gerbil. After grabbing the cat by the scruff of the neck and lugging the howling thing out to the backyard, Juanita had gone back to her room to close up the cage, only to find it empty. A thorough hunt of the apartment had turned up nothing.

  At dinner Juanita milked the loss for all it was worth, twice bursting into tears. She was clearly laying it on thick, but Roberto, off from work that night, couldn’t help admiring her natural acting ability. He was genuinely torn up about Gulliver, but when he’d tried to bring tears to his eyes about it, as a sort of acting exercise, he’d failed.

  Just as remarkable as Juanita’s ability to turn on the waterworks at will was the way she was instantly all sunshine and smiles when old Mrs. Ponson came down with a homemade spice cake by way of apologizing for the cat. Consuela insisted the old woman sit and have a piece of cake with them.

  It wasn’t long before Mr. Ponson appeared at the back screen door.

  “Come on in, François,” Carlos said. “Your mom’s cake’s fantastic.”

  Mr. Ponson stepped inside but remained standing.

  “Sorry about the gerbil,” he said. “But on the brighter side, I may have some news about the Lhasa.”

  “Really?” Roberto said eagerly. “Somebody found him?”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to believe. But I ju
st checked my e-mail, and there’s one from my brother, Pierre. He claims to have the dog.”

  “I thought your brother lived in France,” Carlos said.

  “He does,” Mr. Ponson said. “Paris.”

  “What?” said Roberto. “That’s nuts. And how would he know about Gully, anyway?”

  “Well, I told you how the dog’s always staring at his photo? I sent him a snapshot of it. He says it’s the same dog. Same fancy collar.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Carlos.

  “How on earth could a dog get from Far Rockaway to Paris, France?” Consuela said.

  “You never know,” said old Mrs. Ponson. “When I was young I never think I go from Martinique to New York City.”

  “Pierre sent along a digital photo,” François said. “Want to see?”

  Roberto and Juanita jumped up, their napkins falling to the floor. Nor could Carlos resist following them upstairs to the second-floor apartment.

  François’s laptop was open on a desk in the master bedroom. When he pulled up the photo attached to his brother’s e-mail, Juanita cried, “That’s not Gully. He’s too skinny!”

  Roberto leaned close to the screen. The Lhasa apso in the photo, posed on a metal café chair, was indeed emaciated, and not well-groomed. But around his neck was the salmon-colored collar with the silver and turquoise studs. And though the eyes peering out from under the tangled bangs were awfully sad, he was almost positive they were Gulliver’s.

  Besides a trip to Puerto Rico to meet his dying grandmother, Roberto had never been out of the northeastern United States. But a mere thirty-six hours after seeing the digital photo on Mr. Ponson’s laptop he was tossing his knapsack and Gulliver’s carrying case into the backseat of a funny taxicab — pale green instead of yellow — at Orly airport in Paris.