"Lucero came at two today."
"So she doesn't know that. She's a dog. She's got a clock in her. Four-thirty, something's supposed to happen, she sounds off."
They all agreed this was probably it, and laughed about it, and after that whenever Ingot barked at my backpack somebody would say "Mail's here!" and somebody else would say "Nothing but bills," and Ingot would bark three more times and lie down. I laughed along with them. I would have agreed the backpack was the mailman if it got them to stop looking at it.
But I noticed something too, and I didn't tell anybody, because I didn't understand it. When she barked, I would lean my head back against the wall to check on my grandfather, the way I always did, and sometimes, right then, the snoring wasn't there. There'd be a little gap in it, a few seconds of plain hiss, and under the hiss, very small, that yapping I'd been hearing for a week, yap yap yap, high and tinny and far off, and then the snoring would come back. I figured that when the dog barked my ears were just ringing, or that something was coming through from a commercial on Channel 5. I figured the monitor was acting up again. I figured a lot of things.
There is a thing about my neighborhood I should put in here, though I didn't think about it at all at the time. Across Evans Avenue from the station, catty-corner, there was a little frame house with green asbestos siding and a porch that sagged on one end, which everybody still called the Gurulé house even though the Gurulés had sold out and moved to Houston in 1980, after Mr. Gurulé got on at a refinery down there. Since then it had been a rental, empty more often than not. Sometime in early February somebody moved in. I saw a station wagon in the driveway one morning on my way to school, an old Ford Country Squire with fake wood on the sides and a dent in the back door and Texas plates, and a mattress still tied to the roof, and that afternoon there was a little girl in a pink snowsuit standing at the front window with both hands on the glass, and a small dog standing on the back of the couch next to her, a scrawny black-and-tan thing with ears like a bat. That's all I knew. I didn't know their names.
There's one other thing. On the Friday of that second week, Captain Ulibarri came back from a call at the table with a look on his face I hadn't seen before. They'd gone out on a medical, an old couple over on Orman Avenue, both of them sick, headaches and throwing up, the wife so dizzy she couldn't stand. It wasn't the flu. The gas company had shut off their service for not paying, and the husband had brought a charcoal grill in from the yard and lit it in the living room to keep warm.
"Carbon monoxide," the captain said, to nobody in particular, sitting down heavily across from me. "You can't smell it, you can't see it. It just gets you sleepy. You get a headache, you lie down, you don't get up. That's the third one this month." He rubbed his eyes. "People are scared of the gas bill. They run the oven with the door open, they bring the hibachi inside, they run the car in the garage to warm it up. They get sleepy and they think it's because they're sad."