Miss Dowdy lived near the end of the block where the road curved down and to the right. Her home was a grayed, wood-shingled bungalow with a front porch with a low-riding roof. She was a really old woman, at least 200 Jena thought, but I knew people couldn’t live that long so I put her at 150. Neither of us had seen her, though. Until that summer we had never played as far away as Miss Dowdy’s house, not that we’d wanted to. We’d heard the rumors. She was a witch. If you got too close, you’d be cursed. Nobody knew what kind of curses she wielded, but they couldn’t be good.
On July 2nd David’s dog got away from us. Usually the dog, as round and short-legged as a footstool, never went far when he tired of our attentions. He’d just trot a few paces then role over on the gravel. This time, though, he must have smelled or heard something enticing, because he dashed down the sidewalk, cutting catty-corner across to the other side, never looking back, his tail sticking straight out like the flag the crossing guard holds when we walk to school.
“Buddy!” called David.
Buddy kept on running.
“You better catch him before he gets hit by a car,” Marla said.
“Damn stupid dog,” I said.
“Ah, Annie, you cussed!” said Jena.
“It’s not cussing if you’re not saying it to somebody.”
“Oh, yeah, it is,” said Jena.
"Buddy!” shouted Marla.
“Buddy!” David called again.
After a good full minute of calling, David kicked at a discarded Mountain Dew bottle and said, “Ya’ll coming with me?”
“Not my dog,” I said.
“Yeah, but…”
“Yeah, but what?”
“But if he went, you know.”
“What?”
“Near that woman’s house.”
“What woman?”
“You know. Miss Dowdy.” He whispered it so softly I really only read his lips.
“You mean the witch?” asked Marla.
“Shh!”
“She’s not a witch,” I said, though the word chased a chill down the back of my t-shirt. “That’s baby talk.”
“Then you get Buddy since you aren’t scared,” said Marla.
“I said already, it’s not my dog.”
“Then you are scared,” said David. “And if you don’t come with me, I’ll tell your mama you cussed and you’ll get a spanking like last time.”
And I knew he would do it. He and my sister had gotten me several spankings in the last few weeks.
I cursed again, this time under my breath. Then I took a deep breath and puffed out my cheeks until they stung. I was scared, but as the oldest, I couldn’t show it.
Clenching my fists, I marched off after Buddy. Jena, David, and Marla tagged behind, a nervous, chittering parade. My heart felt like a water balloon being squeezed in and out, in and out, so hard it might pop. Down the sidewalk we went, scuffing the hopscotch chalk and avoiding cracks so as not to break our moms’ backs. Trees heavy with mid-summer foliage shaded our footsteps. Little kids behind chain link fences wanted to know where we were going.
The road turned and dipped; we turned and dipped with it. Then we stopped. There was Miss Dowdy’s house, tucked up in her yard, grass grown tall and tangled, the pine trees next to it pressed so tightly they seemed to be holding it so it wouldn’t collapse. The porch roof hung down like a droopy eyelid.
I heard David’s sharp intake of breath. Buddy was in the old woman’s yard, sniffing at a dead cardinal.
“Buddy!” he whispered. “C’mere, boy!”
The dog looked over but then continued to sniff.
“Buddy!”
Marla grabbed David’s arm. In any other circumstance, he would have shaken her off or shoved her away. But this time I think he was glad for the touch. “Let’s go. Buddy’ll come back when he’s ready.”
I’d never really looked closely at Miss Dowdy’s house before; I’d never really wanted to. When our family went shopping, we always drove the other way. On the rare occasion we did travel in this direction, like when we went out of town to visit Mom’s sister, we went by fast enough that it didn’t really register. As I stood on the sidewalk with my sister and friends, my teeth set hard against each other, I wondered if the old woman was on her porch. It was hard to tell; the shadows were deep, near black. Yet I detected what looked like the outline of a glider or porch swing moving slowly back and forth.
“Let’s go,” urged Jena.
I took a small step forward, right to the edge of her yard, tilting my head, looking at the porch but not really wanting to see.
And then she coughed.
David, Jena, and Marla squealed and ran. I wanted to, but for some reason, my legs had other ideas. I held my ground.
Buddy had heard the cough, too. He looked up, shook his head, and then waded through the weeds to the porch. I wanted to call him back but was afraid that if I spoke, the witch would suck up my soul.
Miss Dowdy coughed again, then said something I couldn’t hear but that Buddy clearly could. He stopped at the foot of the porch steps and stared. And then he climbed up the steps and vanished into the shadows.
Buddy…you’re done for now!
I went home. There was no way I was going to ask for the dog back.
But it didn’t seem to matter. Because when I found David, Marla, and Jena in our tree house, trying to see who could throw pieces of bark the farthest, and I told David what Buddy had done, he stopped flicking bark and said, “Who’s Buddy?”
I let out an exasperated grunt. “Don’t play stupid with me.”
“Don’t call me stupid, stupid!”
"You don’t care what happened to your dog, then fine. I don’t care, either.”
“I don’t have a dog, you moron!”
“Yes, you do, you dumb shit!”
“I’m telling you mama!” squawked David.
I wanted to punch him, but knew it would only make things worse for myself so I gritted my teeth. One of these days, I thought, just you wait!
Jena dropped her pieces of bark and looked at me with genuine, seven-year-old seriousness. “He doesn’t have a dog, Annie, why are you saying that?”
“So,” I insisted, “what’s that doghouse doing in your backyard?”
“I don’t have a doghouse in my backyard!”
“We’ll see about that!” I stomped across the street to David’s house, around to the back where Buddy’s homemade hovel was nestled against the tool shed.
But it was not there.
David’s Mom was watering her rose-of-Sharon, sunglasses slipping on her nose. “Mrs. Hirst, where is Buddy’s doghouse?”
Mrs. Hirst gave me an odd look. “Who is Buddy?”
That night, I stared at the ceiling long after Jena had drifted to sleep. At dinner I had asked Mom if I could have a dog like Buddy. She said she didn’t know what I was talking about.
Buddy was gone, sucked into the witch’s house and forgotten.
I had to know if it was real or if I was just going crazy from the summer sun, like my grandmother warned would happen to kids who didn’t wear sunhats.
Marla had a hamster, Hitty-Pitty. We liked to take it outside to run in the grass and then we would catch it. The morning after Buddy became a non-dog, I borrowed Hitty-Pitty. None of us locked our doors, and we knew each other’s homes almost as well as we knew our own. Marla was playing with Jena in the tree house and Marla’s Mom was sunbathing in the hammock outside. I sneaked in, collected the hamster in a paper bag, and went down the alley so as not to be spotted. In the pocket of my shorts was a roll of masking tape. Under my arm were six cardboard tubes that had held wrapping paper an hour earlier. The paper was now crammed in my closet. I’d put cotton balls in my ears so I wouldn’t hear Miss Dowdy if she coughed or spoke.