When the van made its way through Houston, the drive continued into the countryside on roads that eventually turned to gravel. At a dead-end on one of the primitive roads, the ramshackle van pulled into a hardscrabble yard. Marty and friends piled out of the van, but Jared, hindquarters wagging with impatience, needed to wait for someone to open the door at the back of the van.
Marty opened the door, the leash Jared's dad had given him at the time of their transaction, in his hand. "C'mon, fella. Let's get you settled."
Jared let the man attach the leash to his collar. Now free to exit the van, he stepped out onto the ground and beheld a hovel that looked a far cry from the nice suburban home he had left behind. A back porch looked to be nothing more than plywood on concrete blocks. Fallen limbs and leaves from some huge overhanging trees had carpeted the roof of the small house. A window had been broken and the damage repaired with an application of tape across the hole in the glass. A rusty window unit air conditioner chugged along but looked on its last legs.
Getting him settled turned out to be shoving him in a narrow dog pen. There wasn't a dog house, but someone's devotion to plywood meant that a section of the pen had a roof that offered a narrow band of shade as the Texas sun shone high in the sky. One of Marty's buddies gave the pen a disapproving look.
"Marty, that's a big dog for such a small space," the guy remarked.
"Well, if he wants better, he'll have to start earning his keep," Marty said. "That reminds me...I should call my cousin and see about when we can get together and introduce his dog to Fuzz-face."
"Fuzz-face!" Jared objected, not connecting the dots to everything Marty had said as his indignity welled up.
"I'll have to go to a store and get some dog chow," Marty said. He fished in his pocket. "Here, Fuzz-face. You can have this in the meantime."
He flung a piece of beef jerky to the sheepdog. The lurking canine persona plowed past Jared's continued outrage at discovering the name Fuzz-face looked likely to stick and scarfed up the jerky.
The sense of contentment generated by chewing on the meaty, chewy snack did a lot to sidetrack Jared efforts to dominate the unwieldy mix of human and canine mindsets, at least for the time being.
"Looks like we had some rain, so you have water," Marty gestured toward a galvanized steel bucket that did contain water, as well as fallen leaves and drowned insects.
Jared, having finished off the jerky, took a look at the bucket and whimpered. One of the bugs that had fallen into the bucket still squirmed. He never thought he could miss the life of a pampered suburban pet, but now he began to glimpse how things might be getting a lot worse for him.
Marty and his buddy, ignoring the whimpering, walked off and headed toward the back door of the ugly house, leaving the teenager-turned-sheepdog to ponder his situation.