Chapter One: The Delivery Gal Delivers

At each stop in her delivery rounds, Missy makes a point of greeting the dog.

Sometimes she greets the human, too.

Sometimes she doesn’t.

It’s a good bet she’ll see a dog almost everywhere she goes. On Looser Island, no place is off limits. The post office, the bookstore, the library. It isn’t unusual to run into Jill in the Apple Cart Grocery, standing in the baking goods aisle, complaining to Fran and Nan about the shocking price of organic flour. (You might not think Scottish Terriers would be interested in the cost of dry goods, but there they sit, exuding empathy.)

At one point an officious islander—whose name has since been forgotten by the annals of Looser Island history—circulated the following overly punctuated, grammatically incorrect, passive aggressive sign:

Please understand we can only accommodate Service Animals
All you’re other Furry Friends must Wait “outside”

 A few of the village business owners allowed the now-nameless busybody to post the sign in a store window. Locals ignored the signs, and most people forgot about them. The yellowed paper with curling corners can still be seen in some places, feebly protesting the presence of you’re (sic) Furry Friends.

Missy is the exception to the general rule that Looser Islanders bring their dogs everywhere, and that’s only because she has a whole pack, and the logistics would be challenging. To put it mildly.

Missy and her dogs live in a ramshackle cabin in the woods on the west side of the island, where protocols for home maintenance and pet supervision are almost non-existent. Originally a one room house that has been added to over the years in haphazard fashion (and rarely, if ever, with a permit), it looks like a caricature of a house in a child’s picture book. The roof contributes to the overall impression. The trees have grown too close to the house to allow for meaningful upkeep, and after decades of Pacific Northwest rain there are so many layers of moss and ferns and even tufts of grass that it looks as though the whole odd structure is topped with a lumpy, multi-hued green quilt.

Photo by Ksenia Uotila

Then there is the fence Missy built with her own two hands, to contain her hairy horde. Rather than fighting the towering cedars and peeling madrones and sword ferns and flowering current and juneberry and thimbleberry bushes to construct the traditional square-shaped yard, she simply built around them, planting a post wherever the bedrock gave way to a clear patch of soil that was not already inhabited by a tree or a bush. The result is a meandering, whimsical fence-line that would have made Picasso proud.

Frank and Kasumi’s sprawling ranch borders Missy’s place, and Kasumi is one of the few islanders who has actually been inside Missy’s house. One day, after wandering over to say hello, Kasumi launched into the old nursery rhyme:

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

Missy just laughed her hoarse, smoker’s guffaw and said, “You got that about right. Except I’m not a man, and no cat would come anywhere near my house. The dogs’d eat it alive if it tried.”

That was before Kasumi was diagnosed with cancer.

These days, Frank and Kasumi rarely leave the house, and when Missy has something to deliver to one or both of them, she feels as though she’s delivering to a haunted house, inhabited by the ghosts of the people Frank and Kasumi used to be.

🐾🐾🐾

Inside Missy’s house, almost everywhere you look you’ll find a dog sitting or barking or scratching its fleas or licking its privates. The crew changes regularly, since Missy is known as the person who will take in an unwanted dog until someone wants it. People in the village call her up or flag her down on her delivery route, and ask if she’ll take a new orphan. She never says no. Sometimes, a stray shows up at her door, guided by unerring instinct to the Last Homely House on the island.

Currently, there is Buster, an ancient, Benji-ish mutt who trails after Missy, eyes misty with adoration and cataracts; Manly, a Great Dane whose former owners had vague thoughts of breeding so they never had him neutered, and now his testicles hang, pendulous, almost touching the ground; and Fetch, an overweight yellow Labrador who does indeed love fetching a ball more than anything else in the world, but who nonetheless seems incapable of maintaining a reasonable weight.

“Thyroid problems,” Missy speculates, when anyone comments on his sausage-like shape.

There is also Brunhilde, a gorgeous Afghan Hound named after the famous Norse warrior queen who allegedly required would-be lovers to best her in battle. Brunhilde-the-dog turns her mesmerizing eyes on the other dogs, and then snarls and snaps if they get too close. Manly is forever trying to sidle up to her, having been taken in by her beguiling glances, and he has several scars to show for it. The other dogs have learned their lesson and don’t even try any more, they just gaze from afar and sigh.

Photo by Arve Kern @arvekern

This is a small group, comparatively speaking, and Missy is already beginning to worry that somewhere there is another dog who needs a home.  

Every day, when Missy walks in at the end of her rounds, the entire pack hurls itself ecstatically at her, scrambling over each other, even standing on each other’s backs to get close to her face so she can be properly greeted.

With that kind of enthusiasm, there is no question of taking the dogs with her on her delivery route.

🐾🐾🐾

“Joie de vivre,” Amelia suggested. “The dogs take joy in life,” she translated, when Missy shrugged.

It was Sunday, Missy’s day off. She and Amelia were standing in line outside Bonnie’s Bakery. (Lines are rare on this small, quiet island, but when the smell of baking bread and pastries wafts over the village, everyone is drawn to the aroma like an addict angling for a hit.)  Missy was surprised to see Amelia in line—as the owner of The Coffee Hut, Amelia received regular deliveries from Bonnie’s Bakery, and Missy had always assumed Amelia would help herself from the product delivered for resale.

“I couldn’t wait,” Amelia explained, picking up her enormous gray cat, Sylvia. “I need my brown butter walnut tart, and if I wait until later, they’ll all be gone. So I just left a note: Be right back. If anyone’s desperate, there’s a carafe with drip coffee on the counter.”

Missy had brought Fetch with her to run errands. Amelia, noticing that he appeared anxious—likely owing to the fact that there was no ball in the immediate vicinity—asked where the rest of the crew was. Missy said she’d left them at home. “They’re a little, uh, crazy,” she said, and she described her end-of-day routine, with dogs piling on top of each other and slobber and dog-breath everywhere, and that’s when Amelia made the joie de vivre comment.

Missy had no foreign language skills to speak of—unless you count the impressive compilation of profanity she’d developed as a child. “They’re just stupid hyper,” she said, shrugging again.

Later, she tried it on for size, scratching Buster’s scraggly ear with one hand, patting Manly’s rump with the other: “Joie de vivre, that’s what you all got,” she said. Buster twisted his head around and licked her fingers, expressing his approval.

Missy was aware she was the odd man out (figuratively speaking since, as she’d previously noted to Kasumi, she was not a man). A high school dropout and refugee from the mainland, she stood in stark contrast to both born-and-bred islanders and those who had emigrated from urban areas, among whom there was a plethora of teachers, as well as (mostly retired) lawyers, accountants, and other professionals.

Amelia was a perfect example. Even the island’s coffee purveyor had a full contingent of college courses under her belt, and had held down a professional career before taking over The Coffee Hut.

Nothing could be further from Missy’s experience. Growing up in rural Oregon, with parents and step-parents and parents’ boyfriends and girlfriends and one-night stands who universally scoffed at education (not to mention regular meals, hygiene, and the concept that children should not be used as punching bags), the family unit of the day bounced from filthy trailer to filthier apartment, with more than one stint of homelessness, and never stayed in one place long enough for Missy to settle at any school. How she learned to read and write and perform basic math was anybody’s guess.

Learning French wasn’t an option. Going around saying joie de vivre was similarly off the table.

🐾🐾🐾

On her sixteenth birthday, Missy came to the conclusion that there wasn’t much tying her to any place or person she’d ever known, so she packed her few belongings in a Hefty sack, stole all the cash in her mother’s purse (thirty-two dollars and thirteen cents), and hitchhiked to the railroad station in Portland. No one noticed when she stretched out on one of the long, hard benches for a nap, or later when she washed her hair in the Ladies Room sink. She was invisible.

During her hours as a non-paying train-station tenant, she reviewed the schedules and watched the trains coming and going, and plotted the best timing and method for hopping onto a moving locomotive. Finally, aiming for the three-oh-five heading north, she moved to an area near the tracks, a little beyond the station itself, hidden by a small grove of tired trees. She waited until the train was just beginning to gain speed, and then she made the leap.

Photo by Ankush Minda @an_ku_sh

She almost didn’t make it, almost became another statistic in the long line of runaways who died with no one to bury them, no one to mourn their passing.

She rode from Portland, Oregon to Bellingham, Washington, the last stop before crossing the Canadian border. She slipped off the train, still unnoticed, and stashed her Hefty sack behind a nearby hardware store.

As she stood in the drizzle under the flashing Home and Garden Supplies sign, hungry, cold, and frightened at the enormity of what she’d done, an elderly beagle came out of the store, toddled unsteadily over, and leaned against her. The place on her leg where his body touched hers was momentarily warm. A young man followed, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. His name tag said Hi I’m Curtis Ask Me Anything. Something in his face spoke of a homelessness of the soul, a kindred spirit, but before Missy could make up her mind to speak, he nodded at the beagle and said, “Spot likes you. He’s a great judge of character. You must be a good person.”

And just like that, Missy was A Good Person.

🐾🐾🐾

Over the course of a few days, during which Missy slept in an alley, used up her stolen cash, and bathed at the train station again, she returned to the hardware store and hung around near its sandwich board advertising Wheelbarrows to De-Junkify Your Life and Fertilizer to Jumpstart Your Growth.

Eventually, Spot would come out, and she’d pet him, gingerly. She’d never had a dog, and wasn’t quite certain how this petting thing was supposed to go.

Then Curtis would join them, in between customers, and offer her one of his cigarettes, which she accepted. Sometimes they’d smoke in silence, sometimes they’d talk. Missy let slip details of her life she never thought she’d tell anyone. Curtis told her his father owned the store, but he’d died recently. Though he didn’t say it in so many words, Missy understood Curtis had been thrust into a managerial role for which he was wholly unprepared.

Which was probably why he agreed to hire her, and why he felt little compunction about paying her under the table, and letting her live in the heated shed behind the store.

Missy learned how to make change, and how not to swear at the customers. She bought a few outfits at Goodwill, washed them in the shed’s sink, and draped them over a chair in front of the heater, to dry.

When she got bored, she dyed her hair purple.

She slept on bags of bark mulch, until Curtis discovered that’s what she was doing and brought in a cot and blankets and a slightly lumpy pillow.

She ate mostly Fruit Loops and boxed milk, and smoked cigarettes to kill the hunger, saving her wages in an empty plastic pesticide jar for . . . something. Something that belonged to her.

When Curtis asked her about the jar, she shrugged and said, “A penny saved is a penny for something else.” Growing up around social, emotional, and literal illiterates, common aphorisms had not been part of the conversation, and Missy knew just enough of the old sayings to mutilate them mercilessly.

About a year after arriving in Bellingham, Missy celebrated her seventeenth birthday. She sat in her storage shed, on her cot, huddled over a twin-pack of Twinkies and a broken battery-operated birthday candle she’d found in the trash. Spot wandered in, jumped up onto the cot beside her, and looked into her eyes. At that moment, suddenly and irrevocably, Missy decided a life without a dog wasn’t a life at all.

Photo by Joao Victor Xavier @joaovictorxavier

Later that year, Curtis happened to ask when her birthday was, and happened to write it down, and then when she turned eighteen, he brought her a whole chocolate cake, borrowed a machete from the store to cut it, and then, balancing the pieces on the machete blade, dumped them, mostly right-side up, onto small paper plates that read “Happy Retirement.”

“They were all out of birthday plates,” he said apologetically.

Missy wasn’t sure if it was okay to hug your boss, so she just grinned, and said thank you, and wished privately that her mother had taught her something more useful than how to hide.

🐾🐾🐾

One day, a customer mentioned that he’d come over from Looser Island, and Missy cackled, thinking he must be joking. Who would name an island “Looser”? But of course he wasn’t, and he waxed poetic about the beauty and the peace and the friendly islanders and their dogs, motioning to Spot in the mistaken belief that he must be Missy’s dog, and by the end of the day Missy had a plan.

The Bellingham Bugle had a recurring ad for a delivery person to work the islands: Interviews every Monday, Must Have Own Vehicle, No Experience Needed. Missy taught herself to drive by reading the DMV Guide on the Bellingham library computer. (Many islanders would later be of the opinion that her driving education had been somewhat lacking.) And then she got her driver’s license through a combination of dumb luck and a sympathetic Washington DMV official. Her accomplishment was only possible because, among the meager possessions in the Hefty sack she’d taken from home were her birth certificate and her social security card, both of which she’d found under a pile of newspapers and unpaid bills when she was nine years old. Even at that tender age, she’d sensed these papers were important, a tether to the world other people enjoyed, and she’d squirrelled them away for Some Day.

It appeared Some Day had finally arrived.

Then, though it wiped out most of her savings, she bought an old blue and white VW bus, and on the following Monday presented herself as the first—and only—person in line to apply for the delivery job.

That was twelve years ago. She’d been back to Bellingham regularly to pick up deliveries, often stopping in to say hello to Curtis and Spot, and eventually Spot Two. Once, Curtis came to Looser Island to visit, which was uncomfortable and awkward, as they discovered they really had nothing in common except the Spots and Curtis’s rescue of the terrified adolescent Missy had once been.

No one from Oregon ever came looking for her.

🐾🐾🐾

Missy had never shared her history with anyone on Looser Island. She was embarrassed at her shabby beginnings, maybe, or possibly she just wanted to let the past bury itself.

Until one day, surprising even herself, she gave a truncated, slightly sarcastic summary to TeeKay, owner of Island Books. Something about TeeKay invited confidences, suggested this was a person who had her own share of chain-rattling skeletons, and wouldn’t judge.

“That’s my story,” she told TeeKay. “From snot-nosed trailer-park kid to Looser Island Delivery Gal.”

“Mhm,” TeeKay said, looking up from her inventory list. She could have added I’m sorry you had such a terrible childhood, but the angle of Missy’s chin and the set of Missy’s mouth held a challenge: don’t you dare pity me.

Mazie, TeeKay’s small white mop-dog, trotted over and snuffled Missy’s shin, saying what TeeKay hadn’t.

Missy didn’t mind pity from Mazie, somehow.

🐾🐾🐾

Even among the eclectic crazy quilt of islanders, there is no one quite like Missy.

Her van, christened SB (short for Shitty Shitty Bang Bang), can be heard and smelled long before it can be seen. It sounds like it wants to be a Harley, and belches putrid black smoke from the tailpipe. As she makes her rounds, Missy cranks her music, oldies rock or sometimes grunge, and bellows along with the songs.

Her favorite speed is breakneck. The speed limit is fifteen miles an hour in the village, twenty-five everywhere else, except along a short, straight stretch across the center of the island, where it pops up to thirty. Some people push their luck and drive at thirty-five, only to end up with a citation from Sheriff Tom. But not Missy. Sheriff Tom no longer bothers giving Missy a citation, because she always pays it with a smile and goes right back to tearing along the narrow, winding roads, so what is the point, really?

When Missy passes a dog along her route, she swerves dangerously and tosses a dog biscuit out the window in the dog’s general direction. What with the racing and the swerving, fragile packages are at serious risk, and everyone knows if you need something to arrive intact your best bet is to order delivery through the US Post Office. For anything ordered through one of the other delivery services, it is understood: You pays your money and you takes your chances.

Missy’s other signature characteristic is the unlit cigarette dangling from her lower lip all day, every day, mysteriously connected by some combination of saliva and willpower. Missy isn’t supposed to smoke while working, and she cradles the cigarette in anticipation of enjoying it at the end of the day, which is one of her greatest pleasures.

That, and being greeted by her dogs.

🐾🐾🐾

“Did you hear about Hound?” Retha asked.

It was March, which meant the water in Gull Bay was frosted with whitecaps, and the towering pines alternated, moment to moment, between creaking in the cold wind, and stretching tall to reach the occasional bursts of tantalizing, almost-spring sunshine.

Missy unloaded a hundred pounds of sausages and chicken wings, and began hauling the boxes into Retha’s Bar and Grill, closely observed by Retha’s Newfoundland-mix, Charlie.

Charlie had all the genetic traits of his breed except one. Charlie was massive and hairy, with industrial-strength saliva constantly hanging from both sides of his mouth, as gentle and slow-moving as any other Newfoundland . . . but he was terrified of the water. In vain Retha had attempted to introduce him to the joys of swimming, but even in calm Gull Bay Charlie would take a few tentative steps into the water, reach the deeper area, and sink like a stone. Rescuing a hundred pound, soaking wet, frightened dog was no mean feat, and Retha eventually stopped trying to convince him he was supposed to like the water.

Gently pushing Charlie out of her way, Missy said, “What about Hound?”

“He’s missing,” Retha said.

“Jesus, that guy is so old, he can’t have gone very far.” The statement applied equally to the crotchety old man known to all and sundry as “old Jens Jensen” and to his ancient sheepdog, Hound.

“Yeah,” Retha grunted. “But Hound is the third dog to disappear.”

“Third?” Missy said, alarm rippling through her. “Who else?”

“I don’t know,” Retha said. “Maybe some goddamn tourist’s dogs. I overheard Sheriff Tom taking the report about Hound on his car radio, and he mentioned two others.” She ran her fingers through her ultra-short gray hair, leaving it spiked haphazardly in all directions, and in her eyes there was the unspoken fear: if other dogs could disappear, what about Charlie? She sighed, and pointed her finger at Charlie. “I don’t have time to worry about your stupid ass,” she said. “So just stay put.”

Charlie shook his head, wrapping a particularly long strand of drool around his nose, and tried to look like a dog who would stay put.

Rough and curt, Retha was the polar opposite of her gentle, timid dog. Missy sometimes thought maybe that was the way it was supposed to be, your dog rounding out the rough edges in your soul, or playing the tough guy if you lacked grit.

That night, Missy knelt in front of the dogs, locking eyes with them one at a time. “Don’t go anywhere,” she told them each in turn. “I love ya.” She had learned early on that I love you is a weighty phrase, fraught with too much meaning, but if you shorten the final word and say it with a laugh, you are just joking around, and that’s safe. Safer, at least.

Tucked away in the crooked little house in the forest, the dogs were relatively secure. Nevertheless, Missy resolved to temporarily close the dog door and lock them in the house while she was working.

Also, she decided to suspend her habit of bringing one dog at a time with her when she ran errands on her day off.

About that: Missy had read once that parents with more than one child should spend a little time alone with each, and she had adopted the policy for her dogs. “I figured dogs and kids are a lot alike, y’know?” she told Retha when she was making a delivery to the bar, a few days after she’d seen the article. “Always hungry. Noise and poop and pee and dirt everywhere. ”

“Yes,” Retha agreed, “but dogs never talk back.”

🐾🐾🐾

For a few weeks after Hound went missing, nothing else happened, except that old Jens Jensen in his grief withdrew even further from communal life. No one knew quite how to offer comfort to the prickly old man, and so they said nothing.

Most people, unaware that other dogs had gone missing, assumed Hound had wandered into the woods and peacefully met his Maker.

Then, on the first Friday in April, it happened again.

Cold spring rain (almost a tautology—if it was spring on Looser Island, there was cold rain) drenched the already sodden land. The sun managed to break through just long enough to gild Gull Bay and the green lump of No-Name Island beyond, and then it ceded the fight.

Missy screeched to a stop in front of Island Books, singing loudly and tunelessly along with Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life”: I want something else, to get me through this . . . .

TeeKay came out to meet her, to review the boxes with the fond, faint hope that a few of the books weren’t hopelessly damaged from their journey in the back of Missy’s van. “Fran disappeared,” she told Missy, referring to one of Jill’s Scottish Terriers. TeeKay spoke softly, as if by whispering she could keep it from being real.

“God!” Missy said. It didn’t occur to her that she had now called on two of the three members of the holy trinity, which meant she had only one more to go before she was out of divine exclamations. “When . . .? How did it . . . ? Who could have . . . ?”

“Exactly,” TeeKay said grimly. She pulled out a utility knife, unsheathed the blade, and began slicing open boxes with an uncanny combination of care to avoid further damaging the books and savagery to warn off any dog-thief who might be considering Mazie as a potential target.

Mazie watched warily, raising first one whiskered eyebrow and then another, and stayed far away from the slashing utility knife.

Later that day, Missy ran into Jill, standing outside the Community Center. She had Nan with her, on a leash built for two dogs. The other prong of the leash trailed forlornly on the ground, one half of a whole. Jill told Missy that Fran had been banned from the Apple Cart Grocery for helping herself to a package of snickerdoodles, so she’d left both dogs in the car while she picked up some cabbage for dinner. When she got back to the car, Nan was still there, but Fran was gone.

“Just goes to show Fran has good taste,” Missy said. “You know. Only the good ones like snickerdoodles.” She was trying for lighthearted, a joke that implied all will be well, but Jill didn’t smile.

All her smiles had disappeared with her dog.

🐾🐾🐾

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK WHEN MISSY DECIDES TO TAKE ACTION . . .