"That one," he said. "So I can find you."
I asked him what he meant. He said that when he came home, whenever that turned out to be, he was going to drive straight from the highway to the school without stopping, and he wanted to be able to pick me out of the whole playground from the car. "You'll be the red dot," he said. "I'll aim for the red dot." Then he paid for it with a five and two ones out of an envelope he kept in his jacket, and on the way home he did not say anything at all, and I held the backpack on my lap the whole way and smelled the new nylon, which smelled like a swimming pool and a tire at the same time.
So that was the backpack. It was bright red, fire-engine red, a red that didn't exist anywhere else in Bessemer in the winter, when everything was brown grass and gray slush and the gray-brown of the mill. I carried it every day. I carried it on weekends when there was nothing in it. I was eleven years old and in the sixth grade at Bessemer Elementary, and it was the only new thing I owned.
And for twelve days, starting on a Thursday, Ingot barked at it.
She was not a barker, that was the thing. Everybody said so. She was the calmest Dalmatian anybody had ever met, which the firemen said was like being the quietest jackhammer. She had come to Station 4 as a puppy in 1978, a gift from a widow on Abriendo Avenue, and by 1983 she was as much a part of the station as the brass pole. She was mostly white with black spots, of course, but the spots were uneven, crowded on her left side and thin on her right, so that from one side she looked like a Dalmatian and from the other side she looked like a white dog somebody had flicked a paintbrush at. Her left ear was solid black. Her left eye was brown and her right eye was blue, a pale cloudy blue like the sky over the mill on a hot day, and she was deaf on that side. A lot of Dalmatians are deaf, Captain Ulibarri told me once. It comes with the spots. Ingot could hear fine out of her left ear, and she went around the world with her head tipped a little to the right, as if she was always about to ask a question.
She did have behaviors. Every fireman at Station 4 could list them for you. She slept on the bench seat of Engine 4 if they left the door open and on the canvas hose bed if they didn't. She stole gloves, only ever the left glove, and buried them in the dog bed by the kitchen. She howled along with the siren, a long low falling howl that started a half second after the siren did and stopped a half second after it stopped, and people on Northern Avenue would tell you they could tell Engine 4 from any other rig in the city by the dog's part of the harmony. When the station bell went off she was at the side of the engine before the men were out of their chairs, and she rode to every call sitting up between the captain and the engineer like a passenger who has paid for her seat. At a fire she stayed with the engine. She lay underneath it, between the front wheels, and watched the men go in and watched them come out, and she didn't move until she had counted all of them, or that was what they said. Hank Dolezal, the engineer, swore she counted. "She does a head count," he said. "Better than the captain does."
She ate Gaines-Burgers, the soft red patties that came in cellophane and looked like hamburger and smelled like nothing on earth, and she ate them in four bites, never three and never five. She leaned. That was the main thing. She would come up next to you and lean the whole side of her body against your legs until you either sat down or fell over. It was the way she said hello and the way she said she was hungry and the way she said she was sorry, and you could not stay standing up straight in Station 4 for long.