You can imagine what I thought. I thought she could hear him. I thought that somehow, through the backpack, with her one good ear, she could hear the hiss and the faint far snoring that I had to press my head against the wall to catch, and that it bothered her the way a fly in a room bothers some dogs, and that one of these days one of the men was going to pick up my backpack and hear it too. And then Captain Ulibarri would know. And Captain Ulibarri had known my grandfather since before I was born, and he would look at me with the face he used for men who'd left a hose line kinked, and he would walk me home across the alley by the back of my collar, and he would tell my mother.
So I tried things. On the third day I left the backpack in the bay, hanging on the side mirror of Engine 4, and Ingot came out of the kitchen and sat under the mirror and barked at it. On the fourth day I kept it on my lap at the table, and she put her front paws up on my chair and barked into my face, and Hank said, "Ingot, off," in his real voice, and she got down, but she lay with her chin on my sneaker the whole hour and growled every few minutes, so low it was more of a feeling in my foot than a sound. On the fifth day, which was a Monday, I turned the volume on the receiver all the way down, to zero, so that it was only the red light flickering in the dark of the front pocket, and I couldn't hear my grandfather at all, and that was worse, because then I sat there for an hour with my stomach in a knot, imagining him on the floor. And she barked anyway. Not as much, and not as hard. But she barked.
That should have told me something. It didn't. I was eleven, and I was guilty, and when you're guilty everything that happens is about the thing you did.
The strange part, the part Hank noticed first, was that it wasn't all the time. Ingot didn't bark the whole hour. She'd sit under the backpack, watching it, with her head tipped and her black ear up, and for long stretches she'd be quiet, and then all at once she'd go off, three barks and a stop, three barks and a stop, standing up stiff-legged, and then she'd whine and lie down again. It was like she was answering something. Hank said it was always around half past four.
"Every day," he said, on the sixth or seventh day. He looked at the clock over the stove, an old electric clock with a red second hand and a Coca-Cola logo, and then at the dog. "Four-thirty, four-thirty-five. Like clockwork. You know what that is? That's mail time. That's when Lucero comes by. She's got the bark in her, it's four-thirty, Lucero's late, so she barks at the next best thing." He nodded at the backpack. "It's red. The mail truck's got red on it."
"The mail truck's got a stripe," said Chuy.
"So she's not an expert."