The gas station is attached to a Cumberland Farms convenience store. A large man in a baggy New England Patriot’s hoodie over stained Carhartt pants is leaning against the side of the Cumberland Farms building, paper cup in one hand and the other stuffed in the kangaroo pocket of the sweatshirt, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He looks like someone you’d avoid. Beside him is a well-made yellow Labrador retriever. The man’s eyes are focused on nothing, but the dog’s are on Ruby. Even from the distance between the pumps and the building, Ruby feels the intensity of the dog’s gaze. It isn’t a hostile intensity; she doesn’t feel threatened as the yellow Lab leaves his master’s side and heads toward her. Inside her van, little forepaws balancing on the dashboard, the black and white hitchhiker barks twice, communicating in her own language that this van is already occupied by a dog. No need for another.
Ruby finishes gassing up the van, hangs the pump nozzle back in place. As the yellow dog meanders over to Ruby, she clears her throat and then her mind. This might be as good a time as any to see if this bizarre new ability is authentic.
“Hey, fella.” Ruby pats the dog’s blocky head and instantly feels a prickle of connection as if she’s touched something faintly electric, not dissimilar to the feeling she may get when she holds a client’s hand for a reading. A charge, not so much electrical as emotional. She puts both hands on his head and now it feels more like the vibration she’d gotten this morning with the black and white dog. The yellow dog sits, leans his weight against Ruby’s legs. He lifts his eyes to hers and Ruby is suddenly aware of a humming sound like wind across a wire, vaguely musical. She takes her hands off the dog’s head and the humming stops; the prickle stops.
“Get over here, Duke.” The man half-heartedly calls the dog over. “Come on, leave the lady alone. Come ’ere.”
“He’s fine. He’s a good boy.”
The dog presses his head into Ruby’s thigh. When she touches him on the shoulder, the sensations are back.
“My name isn’t Duke.”
A slow smile spreads across Ruby’s face. This must be what it’s like to understand a foreign language without having to study it. Or to suddenly be able to play the piano when you actually can’t. Ruby leans closer to the dog’s face, her eyes holding his over his boxy muzzle. “Too much anger word.”
Ruby rubs her hands together, replaces them on either side of the dog’s blocky cheeks. She closes her eyes and touches her forehead to his skull. Instantly dreadful images flood her mind, pain, darkness, hunger. She pulls away. Let’s go of the dog. “Who hurt you?” She’s ready to confront the guy who has dropped his cigarette onto the ground, is crushing it out with the toe of his boot.
“Other man.”
She can smell whiskey, cigar, and pond water and what she thinks might be the odor of gunpowder.
Ruby gestures toward the man with her eyes. “Him?” The guy looks so rough that she half expects the dog to ask for asylum with her.
The hum grows louder. “He’s my friend.” A new image, a shared bed, the taste of cheese.
As with the little hitchhiker, this canine’s thoughts are very clear; although not in actual language, more like waves of thought. Beams. Like sunlight or radar. Images that seem like she’s breathing them in.
“What name do you want?”
“Boy.”
“Why Boy?” she asks, but Ruby understands, the dog associates the generic “Boy” with kindness.
“Please.” The dog points his nose toward the man, wags his tail. “Tell him my name.” The dog shifts his body away from Ruby, and the humming begins to fade away; the prickle in the tips of her fingers is gone. The dog trots back to his person who gives him a loving thump on the ribs.
“Okay.” Ruby says this under her breath. “Why not?”
She shoulders her purse, tells the dog in her van to wait, and heads toward the door.
“Sorry about Duke. He’s real friendly, just not so good with manners.” Up close the man’s face looks like he’s done a lot of living in it, but it’s open and friendly, not unlike an overgrown ten-year-old.
“He’s fine. I like dogs.” To prove her point, she fondles the dog’s triangle-shaped ears. He licks his dewlaps and offers a paw. No prickle, no humming. Maybe it was all in her head. The dog sneezes, woofs, gives Ruby a meaningful glance. “By the way, he says that his name isn’t Duke. He’d prefer to be called Boy.” Ruby pulls open the heavy glass door and, without so much as a sidelong glance to judge the dog owner’s expression, goes into the convenience store, keeping her self-satisfied smile to herself. She doesn’t do it often, but when she drops a bomb like that on the unsuspecting, it is kind of fun.
A large Farmhouse Blend flavored with vanilla nondairy creamer just cries out for an accompanying pastry, and she lingers a bit over the array in a clear plastic box. Sighing, Ruby allows herself only the fantasy of a doughnut, grabbing a less satisfactory but wiser granola bar for breakfast. Then she heads to the grocery aisles and tracks down a bag of kibble. And a box of Milk-Bones.
“Do you know that guy out there, the one with the dog?”
The clerk, a skinny pale-cheeked boy sporting long skater hair, shrugs. “Bull. Bull Harrison. He won’t bother you. He’s harmless. He’s not supposed to hang around, but he does.”
“He’s fine, I just wanted to know his name. Thanks.” Ruby picks up her purchases and the cup of coffee and pushes the heavy door open with her shoulder. Bull Harrison grabs the handle to help.
“Thank you.”
“So, how’d you know that? About his name?”
Ruby likes that he isn’t trying to deny the message like most men would or tell her that she’s full of it. “He thinks that ‘Duke’ has too hard a sound to it. He doesn’t like hard things. He’s afraid of them.”
“Well, considering his background, that makes sense.” Bull scratches at a grizzled cheek. “So, you some kind of an animal whatchacallit?”
“Psychic. Not really.” He’s been open-minded about all this; she should be honest with Bull. “I usually read people.” Ruby knew that there were ladies, and they were most often ladies, in her line of work who specialized in animal communication, but she had never, before today, experienced the phenomena. Food for thought.
“So, Duke, umm, Boy is your first?”
Ruby points to the black and white hitchhiker staring out at them. “Second.”
Bull bends to kiss his dog on the head. “Okay, Boy. Boy it is.”
The dog, Boy, thrashes his back end around in joy.
“Good. He’ll be happier. Goodbye, Bull.” Ruby heads toward her car slowly enough that she’d give him enough time to twig on the fact that she’d said his name and call out to her to ask how she knew. But he doesn’t; he doesn’t even look curious. Maybe everyone around here knows who this semi-vagrant is.
Ruby grabs a cereal bowl from the tiny overhead cupboard in the van and dumps some kibble into it. The Hitchhiker looks at the food, then at Ruby’s granola bar, then back to the food in the bowl.
“That’s all they had. Sorry.”
The Hitchhiker nibbles at the dry food, throws Ruby a baleful look.
“Oh, come on,” Ruby says. She pours the coffee from the paper cup into a mug, unwraps the granola bar. “The first pet store we pass, I’ll get you something better. I promise.”
On impulse, Ruby touches the dog again, wondering how temporary or fragile this new gift might be. Will it last for a day or become a part of her repertoire for years to come? Will it disappear in the next thunderstorm? Taken away. “How long will I be able to understand you?”
“I stay. You stay. Hear me. Here with me.” She wags her white tail, which fans out like a banner behind her.
The nuns at Sacred Heart School for Girls, located in a tiny village in Ottawa, were the last of their kind, their wimples soon to be replaced with short modern veils and their voluminous black habits with street clothes. The knuckle rapping and ear grabbing would fade to history. But when Ruby Heartwood, known then as Mary Jones, a name assigned to her upon her newborn arrival at the orphanage, grew up in that foursquare brick edifice, the nuns looked like nuns. Pale faces framed by starched white bands, heads veiled in black, female bodies uniformly draped, and any spirit they might have been born with suppressed. Most of them had been given to Jesus by families too poor to feed them. Only one of them had come to the convent through her own volition, Mother Superior.
Mary Jones was considered an orphan because, she was told, she had been left on the convent’s doorstep. In those days, it wasn’t an entirely unusual event and Ruby has always imagined that the sister who found the cardboard box with the day-old infant only sighed with annoyance, not shock. Mary would be settled in the nursery with two other babes recently arrived. The girls would remain, the boy child would soon be transferred to a city orphanage. The girls would repay the kindness of the nuns with sixteen years of work. And, if either of them showed any inclination, they too would be brought into the fold.
It wasn’t an entirely awful life, only a bit Dickensian. The nuns were not warm and fuzzy, but nearly all of them were kind. Firm but not unfair. Two were well educated and Ruby flourished in their classrooms. On the cusp of puberty, Ruby began to receive the visions that changed everything. Still a child, she wasn’t guarded against revealing this gift to see into the futures of her classmates and teachers. Soon enough, she was considered in league with the Devil and punished for predicting Sister Anne’s cancer as if she had caused it herself.
Clairvoyant, psychic, seer, fortune-teller, all decidedly against the Rule.