Chamaeleo chamaeleon
Once upon a time on Christmas Eve when she was six, my mom got a chameleon. She named it Charley. It was a present from my grandmother. I’m not sure she had a chameleon in mind—I think she asked for a kitten or a cameo ring or something—but a chameleon is what she got. And she fell in love with it. She loved its jointed eyelids, its Triassic snapper jaw—she could see its narrow tongue spooled inside like a fern frond when the chameleon sat with its mouth ajar on top of the fake, heated rock in its aquarium. It was a new creature every time she looked at it, as its skin turned from brownish-yellow to russet and back again. Sometimes its ridged scales took on a purple-black sheen, like the underside of a peacock’s wing. To her disappointment, it never turned bright white like chameleons she’d seen in children’s books. Some chameleons have limited imaginations.
My mom cherished Charley for twenty-six hours: the amount of time that elapsed between his being gifted in an old Doc Marten’s shoebox and his departure from this world into the next.
My mom attended Mass at St. Mary’s parish at dusk on Christmas Day with the rest of her family. She wore her rumpled green velvet Christmas jumper, white tights, and spit-polished black saddle shoes. It was about halfway through the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Father Bob intoned something holy in Latin and held the silver paten above his head. Incense erupted from the censer next to him, swung back and forth by the altar boy (Fred Nemucheck, a blonde neighbor kid who several years later, in 1974, would be caught out on the shingles of my grandfather’s roof smoking Lucky Strikes with my Aunt Katie, both of them starkers except for striped tube socks).
In the pews, tucked somewhere near the back of the church, my mom was seated next to her father. As the holy wafer transubstantiated and the deacon dutifully sounded a tiny bell signifying the presence of the Holy Body, my grandfather happened to look down at my mom. She was staring up at the annunciation mosiac on the church ceiling. Drooping out of the front pocket of her green velvet jumper, wrapped slyly about the pocket’s ivory button, was a long, spindly tail. It was lamely trying to match the color of my mom’s jumper. It was a couple shades off. My grandfather, furious, took Charley’s tail between the forceps of his thumb and forefinger and yanked. The tail came free in his hand. Blood came off the severed end in long red strings, the tail limp like a thick piece of fettuccini in his hand. Deep crimson spread across my mom’s pocket as the confused chameleon thrashed inside, its stiff claws tearing holes in the damp velvet. My grandfather threw the tail onto the floor and dragged his family out of church before anybody could ask questions. My mom started crying as my grandmother put on her coat for her.
The only reason I mention any of this is that sometimes, usually in the middle of a floundering conversation when I’m rifling with increasing urgency through my memories for something interesting to talk about, I feel a bit like I’ve got my fingers around a chameleon’s tail. Except it doesn’t pull clean off—it just keeps coming and coming out of the pocket, long grey ropes of tail that never get any broader. There are thin lines of lizard blood across my palms. I can’t get hold of the actual thing I’m searching for with my sweaty pink fingertips. And the entire congregation, along with Father Bob, stop what they’re doing and turn and look at me, fooling around with a lizard in the back of church under the eyes of God.
Branta canadensis
It’s Christmas but Nanna thinks it’s New Years she can’t even remember that she got me a lacrosse stick for Christmas even though I’m waving it in front of her face and she’s asking, who’d you get that from? Not really a surprise considering that everybody knows Christ I even know that the lacrosse stick was really bought by my mom and she’s gifting it to me in Nanna’s name so Nanna looks like she’s got it more together than she does but the truth is Nanna’s sitting in the den not smoking for once because she’s got two plastic prongs in her nostrils on oxygen and there’s the compressed air pufffffhiss every few seconds from the GE white plastic effulgent clean brushed bronze accents with easy carrying strap respirator at her feet
Nanna’s wearing her terry bathrobe the one covered in hydrangea blooms she’s sitting in the den beneath a picture of geese in flight with all of us as we tear the wrapping paper skins off of gifts and she’s got a strange towel wrapped around her head so none of us have to think about the pate under there still red raw fleshy looking like she’s been boiled alive “It’s ok, grandma,” I told Nanna said when she still was kind of with it right after the third round of chemo, “We’ll just tell everyone you’re trying the Sinead O’Connor look” and “Who’s that?” Nanna said but she still laughed because I think she got the gist of it
She’s laughing now because my three-year-old cousin Dominic tearing stale gingerbread ornaments off the tree and trying to feed them to Mr. Tumnus, Nanna’s fat Maine Coone tabby saying, “Eat it, Dumbness!”
But I am looking at her face and head because her neck has withered away to its spinal stalk the outer layers of her body are messily sloughing off and all that’s left are a few wrinkly bags of skin and her sunken eyes stare out red-rimmed she’s looking into the Christmas tree with its rows endless rows depth of indigo lights. “It looks wonderful this year,” she says and two weeks later she’s in hospice with a new passage for her failing lungs to try to suck oxygen through it’s in her throat and the lung cancer is undergoing diaspora it’s in her lungs I imagine it a thick sleety layer of dead miller moths inside of her they’re dead but multiplying and blocking necessary conduits turning everything lightless and I think about this now sometimes when I smoke a Camel and you’d think it would make me want to never smoke again but the truth is I feel closer to Nanna sometimes when I smoke because I imagine we have the same blood even down to the nicotine content, even though she’s seven years in the ground buried next to my grandfather near an algae-covered lake somewhere in Ft. Logan National Cemetery and I can never find her damn gravestone because my grandfather was in the Air Force so he’s got one of those nondescript white marble ones that you can’t tell apart
There are these Canadian geese that wander the cemetery and shit on the gravestones and the cemetery keeper this Czech guy with a thick chin and hardly any eyebrows has to get out there and chase them off on winter mornings but I imagine Nanna couldn’t be prouder of those damn geese six feet above her doing what they’re supposed to do
Ursus americanus
I used to throw up on the sides of a lot of Interstates. I don’t really get carsick anymore, but sometimes I still get an echo of the nausea. Especially on long trips up into the mountains in winter. When the air gets bright and the road narrows, the back of my throat turns clammy and my brain feels like it’s evaporating right out of my head. Then these weird black spots that look like continental landmasses skitter across my vision.
We took a lot of roadtrips when I was a kid. Usually across Kansas to visit my Presbyterian, crew-cutted cousins in Tulsa. A couple times we drove out to see my toothy, decaying Great-aunt Anna in her white farmhouse in Clark County, Missouri. (Coincidentally, whoever was once the tallest woman in America died and is buried in Clark County. Aunt Anna, whose neurons must bend round on themselves like miniature pretzels because they always come back to the same sentences, reminds me of this fact at least three times whenever I talk to her on the phone, which isn’t that often.) I got sick on every trip at least once. When I was six, I got a really bad sinus infection after the melted, congealing remains of a Dairy Queen blizzard came back up through both my mouth and nose onto a picnic table at a rest stop outside of Abilene, Kansas.
“Just look at the yellow lines on the road,” my mom said, “it’ll help.” But it never did—their suggestive wiggling only made me feel worse. The only thing that made the nausea go away was to lie down in the backseat and jam my head against the door panel and count telephone poles.
One of my earliest memories is of a summer vacation my family took in the early nineties in a loop up north through Montana and the Dakotas. We crossed hundreds of bleached, sticky miles in a used, blue Subaru station wagon. Artificial wood paneling peeled dejectedly off its sides and its air conditioning smelled like there was a wet schnauzer trapped somewhere inside. It was pretty rare that we left the car. My mom packed tuna sandwiches on cracked wheat for the entire trip, at least forty of them. She put them in a hulking Coleman cooler the color of a dried scab that took up half of the backseat next to me.
I remember the Dakota trip because of the bears. Just outside of Rapid City, South Dakota, not far from other attractions like Reptile World and a civic park full of life-size weathered concrete dinosaurs, there’s a large swath of piney hillside surrounded by barbed wire: Bear Country, USA. It sort of looks like a prison camp.
Bear Country, USA has roughly two hundred black bears thrown together in a large central clear-cut field, as well as a handful of grizzlies, koalas, and polar bears. Each species is in a separate enclosure so they don’t try to eat one another. It is marketed as the country’s only drive-through wildlife park.
What I remember is a two-mile loop road choked with cars and RVs meandering nervously through the park, vehicles manned mostly by retirees on vacation. Knobby-kneed old guys with USS Intrepid hats, dressed in pleated shorts that revealed pasty, tonsured calves. Their fuchsia-haired wives eating Klondike bars and checking the roadmap to ensure they’re where they’re supposed to be, adjusting the climate control every thirty seconds, getting the Klondike bar all over the map. Anytime I’ve gone on a roadtrip in the West, I run into carbon copies of this same couple. They’re as ubiquitous as Kokopelli refrigerator magnets in gift shops.
Bear Country, USA was tended by a khaki-uniformed guy up in the tower who had a tranquilizer rifle and a bullhorn. He broadcasted the same message over and over again: DO NOT LEAVE YOUR VEHICLE FOR ANY REASON. IF YOUR PROGRESS IS IMPEDED BY A BEAR, PLEASE WAIT FOR BEAR TO CLEAR. CONTINUE FORWARD AT LESS THAN TEN MILES PER HOUR. THANK YOU FOR VISITING BEAR COUNTRY, USA, SOUTH DAKOTA.
At Bear Country, USA, the bears mostly ignore the cars and RVs, except to occasionally lick a side mirror or fall asleep in the middle of the road on hot days, creating gridlock. We filed through the enclosure, following a dusty Winnebago from Wisconsin at ten miles per hour. It was a warm afternoon and most of the bears were either asleep or Greco-Roman wrestling in the shade. I soon got bored and pulled a book out of my backpack. (I read my way through hundreds of hours in the car as a kid, even though it made both my carsickness and my myopia worse. They were usually paperbacks by Hugh Lofting, about whom I was wild at the time.) We’d almost completed the loop when the Subaru came to a stop. I looked up from the book.
“Christ, it’s looking right at me, Jean,” my dad said. A mature male black bear the size of a Wendy’s reared itself up on its hind legs a few yards in front of our windshield, considering my father. After a few slow, heavy moments, the bear turned and faced away. Its fatty flanks swayed underneath matted fur as it reared up again and flayed the cover off the spare tire on the rear of the RV in front of us with its claws. Growling. I’m pretty sure the people in the RV didn’t notice. Three cubs were playing some kind of bear game that resembled a conga line off to our right. Meanwhile, on the asphalt in front of us, the bear clumsily ingested the tire cover. It had a Green Bay Packers logo emblazoned on it. Staring through the windshield watching the green and yellow helmet gradually disappear into the bear, I remember thinking in a moment of icy panic that there was no escape from Bear Country, U.S.A. That the bear would catch the thick, pasty odor of the tuna sandwiches in the cooler in the backseat. It would amble over and wrench the door off of the backseat like the Jaws of Life in the paramedic safety video I’d seen in Mrs. Backstrom’s first grade health class. And I would be between it and the tuna sandwiches that it wanted.
I’ve never actually seen a black bear eat a human head, but I’ve always pictured it like this. Some guy wearing a Stetson exits his vehicle at Bear Country, USA. The employee in the watchtower is busy eating a sandwich and doesn’t notice. A black bear ambles over, weighing several hundred thousand pounds. Strings of saliva come lethargically off the fur on either side of its mouth like stalactites. It stands on its haunches, looking down at the guy, head tilted slightly to one side, sickeningly curious. The Stetson guy has his Nikon out and is adjusting the focus on the bear’s muzzle four feet away, craning his neck upward. He takes off the cowboy hat because the brim is in the frame, nestles it in the grass at his feet. The bear leans down and gingerly places its paws on either side of the man’s head, like it’s saying, “Earmuffs!” The man’s wife begins to scream from inside the car, her white face pressed flush against the driver’s side window, leaving greasy streaks on the glass. The bear cradles him in its paws, its thick, leathery pads and claws tightening around his head. The man is three feet off the ground. His feet thrash about like a panicked grouper’s tail when you throw it onto the bottom of your canoe, and imagines that if it wriggles hard enough it might clear the lip of the boat and get back into the water. The man is three feet off the ground and the bear brings him in close to its muzzle, which is streaked with lighter, coffee-colored fur. The man’s feet dangle limply in the air. The bear wetly sniffs his head with its sable, satiny nose, then (this always surprises me) nibbles. The black bear gets its chops around the guy’s head, the way a horse works its lips around a proffered apple. The bear goes about it daintily, like it’s eating a small piece of baklava and doesn’t want to get the fur around its mouth sticky. But then there is the distinctive sound of skull powdering as the bear submerges its long lean yellowed teeth deep into the guy. Blood is freaking everywhere.
I only bring this stuff up because the entire time the bear was devouring the tire cover on the asphalt in front of the Subaru—it must have taken ten minutes—my dad was saying, “Buddy, are you ok? Cameron?” and I didn’t hear anything.
Lynx lynx
“What’s your spirit animal?” she is asking me. I am looking at her mouth, a chasm in a face so wrinkled it looks like a topographic map. Her hair is in long grey ropes around her face. “Mine’s a lynx. They have strong jaws. I once bit a cop’s thumb and ring finger off at the knuckle in a Safeway. I was having a seizure and you’d think a cop would know you’re not supposed to jam anything into anybody’s mouth who’s having a seizure—I’ve got epilepsy, you know? All that about putting a wallet or a wooden spoon or something into someone’s mouth is birdshit, man. I’m not going to fucking swallow my tongue. I’ve shook ever since I was a kid and I end up on the ground a couple times a day and that’s about it.” I’m reminded of Mr. Caldwell, a balding guy who used to come over to my house every Thursday when I was in eighth grade to help me with quadratic equations. He had epilepsy and once he ended up on the floor in my bedroom, his body jerking around of its own volition, gooseflesh peppering his arm. Then he asked for a glass of tap water and we got back to algebra. “And I didn’t ask for this, man. I ended up in jail because I couldn’t get a lawyer because I’m broke and I bit off a cop’s finger and they gave me some shit lawyer who couldn’t see me for anything more but a drunk. I had a seizure in his office and I knocked over his—”
I am trapped in the parking lot outside my apartment building by a red-eyed woman in muddy, mustard-colored pajamas. She lives in the next building over. She tells me her name is Trina and she’s thirty-six and probably going to die within ten months: her skeleton is disappearing.
She has gotten closer to me, about ten inches away. I can see yellow nicotine stains on the ratty half-moons of her fingernails. I’m fidgeting with my car keys. I cannot move, not really, beyond that. The driver’s side door of my Civic is hanging open. I’ve got one foot in, one foot out. The impatient, screeching bing bing bing my car makes whenever a door is ajar splits the air.
“I once had a teacher with epilepsy. It’s really hard,” I start to say, stupidly, but whatever I’m saying is eroded away by her voice and the violent movements of her hands accompanying her speech. “And my bones are the worst of all, man. I didn’t ask for this. You know? Who asks for this? I’m on this, this disulfiram, because I am, well I used to be, an alcoholic, right? And I’m having this weird reaction. It’s actually eating away at my bones—can you imagine it? Feeling your bones get sucked into your body and pissing them out?” I imagine it, inside her, in the dark, thrumming, aortal gloom, the white bones dissolving like Metamucil into her bloodstream. She is disappearing from the inside out. Bing bing bing.
“The doctors can’t do a goddamn thing about it. They treat me like some kind of animal. My mom, see, she can’t do anything either because she got in a car accident two years ago and got both her legs chopped off by the twisted metal on her truck door. The paramedics pulled her out in a ditch outside of Lyons. So she can’t do shit for me either. I didn’t ask for this, you know? She just watches tv and drinks and plays bingo down at some rec center in Littleton and occasionally tries to kill herself.” It strikes me that she is not saying words so much as forming them with a natural skill born out of urgency, the oxygen between us rarified. I have never heard anyone talk like this before. It’s like my lips have got fishing barbs through them and I’m being dragged further and further up into a shivering, bright world where I cannot distinguish between myself and the shambling, slowly disappearing wreck of a woman before me.
Bing bing bing. She takes a drag from a cigarette, and I start to get into the car before she can continue speaking. I start the car and roll down the window and try to tell her that I’ve got to run, but she starts talking again. Her cracked lips bob up and down, her head jammed into the car’s interior. I imagine putting the car into reverse and slowly trundling out of the parking space. I picture her crabwalking absurdly alongside, her head in my car still talking, trying to talk, me unable to do anything but listen.
I am quitting smoking for the fourth time. It’s not working, and this is the reason she came over in the first place, to bum a cigarette. She’s gone through five since then. I dig the half-crumpled pack of Camels out of my pocket and I offer it dumbly through the window.
“Here, I’m trying to quit,” I say. She takes it. Now she’s coughing, thumping at her chest with a fist in a resuscitative sort of way, like she’s giving herself CPR. She’s just tapping the phlegm out; it comes out her throat into her mouth. I move unobtrusively and roll up the window. She coughs a ball of something green and black onto the asphalt. In my peripheral vision, through the dirty smear of my side window, her head jerks up as I start to move. She starts tapping at the glass, clawing at it, her mouth moving up and down. She is missing all but one of her incisors and she is mouthing something with white gums, but I’ve got the transmission in reverse and there is a layer of glass and dust between us.
Homo neanderthalensis
Westin Deats was a bad influence. That’s what my mom always said. The first time I ever had Hersey’s chocolate syrup, I was nine years old and it was drizzled over the steaming innards of a beef burrito at the Deats household. Westin Deats was allowed to put chocolate syrup on everything—Lucky Charms, toast, apple slices—but he especially liked it on Mexican food. Most of the stuff in the pantry at my house, just down the street from Westin’s, had wheat germ in it and had to be bought at a special store downtown where they filtered the air coming in and out of the produce section using ultraviolet light.
Westin had everything I was denied by my parents. His dad, an engineering manager at Lockheed Martin, built him a laser tag arena in his basement, including banks of fog and laser machines. Everyone at school thought it was a myth, but I spent my Saturday afternoons ducked behind a styrofoam barricade, screaming into a walkie talkie as I blasted Westin from across the concrete expanse of his basement. Westin gelled his short, dark brown bangs at a ninety-degree angle upward like a quail’s plumage, and wore overly baggy jean shorts. I wasn’t allowed to put anything in my hair except my mom’s Aquanet, which made the top part of my head look like a mushroom cloud and smell vaguely like cat litter. My mom bought me stonewashed jean shorts at Ross.
Westin was in possession of every video game system and cartridge contrived since 1982, including adult-only games where upon defeating the final boss you were rewarded with undulating, pixilated breasts. Westin had a waterbed with a huge frame in the shape of a train locomotive with wheels that moved. Westin had rap music. Westin had a butterfly knife his dad bought him at a bazaar in Taiwan on a business trip. It had a dragon spitting up flaming skulls engraved in gilt on it.
While I loved going over to Westin’s—he rarely, if ever, came over to my house—the chocolate burrito incident was not the first time I’d felt uncomfortable at the Deats house. The unease found purchase in my stomach, which rumbled threateningly as odors from sour cream, Velveeta, browned ground beef, and chocolate syrup collided in my nostrils. Westin held a plate of his creation below my nose. A corner of tortilla was coming free from the tight wrap of the burrito, and from it leaked a viscous substance that resembled the wet Alpo the Deats’ fed Bracey, their golden retriever.
“Try it,” he said, “it’s good.”
“It has calcium, so it’s good for you, too,” Mrs. Deats, who my mom called Cinda, said. Mrs. Deats had impeccable handwriting and a constant, tired resignation in her eyes. She spent at least an hour a week in Principal Metcalf’s office with the door closed. My mom had told me that Westin was going to get suspended from school if he didn’t get his act together. He’d bit a girl on the thigh during Earth Sciences class last year while we were watching a video about caribou. Later, lying in the darkness underneath his train bed during a sleepover, he’d told me why he’d done it.
“I had sex, dude.” Westin giggled.
“What’s sex?” I asked.
“What kind?”
“What do you mean, what kind?”
“There’s like two hundred and thirty eight different kinds of sex.”
“You’re full of it.”
“No, seriously,” Westin turned on his side to look at me, “each one has a number. Sex number thirty-one is biting a girl’s leg.” Westin picked at something in his ear, then added, “I had sex. Seriously.”
“Ok,” I said, “then what’s sex number one hundred and ten?”
Westin thought for a minute.
“That’s when you and a girl go ride bikes in the woods and then you eat Wonderbread and then you get to see her mah-China.” He pronounced it like the country.
“Her mah-China?”
“What girls have instead of dongs.”
“Weird.”
“I know,” Westin said.
~~~
I ended up eating the burrito. I think it was pretty bad— I can’t imagine that it wasn’t bad—but thankfully the taste didn’t leave an imprint on my long-term memory. I ate all of it, Westin looking on proudly.
“Good, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Mrs. Deats went to go get some mint chocolate chip out of the freezer. Mr. Deats stayed in his chair at the dinner table and polished his black loafers with tassels on them, his russet moustache wriggling in concentration. Westin got bored and scooted his chair close to mine to start a thumbwar. I lost.
“Want to go put on costumes?” he asked as Mrs. Deats came back into the dining room with two white bowls of ice cream. I was already full and feeling sort of sick from the burrito. The contents of my stomach mingled nervously and I was entertaining the idea of asking Mrs. Deats to call my mom to come pick me up.
“We already put on costumes today, dude.”
“Let’s do it again. C’mon,” Westin said, his right leg jolting up and down like it was working a sewing machine. Mrs. Deats put down the bowls on the table and looked tiredly at Westin.
“You guys can go play in a sec. Westin, please take your medicine first.” Westin had ADD, which my mom still maintains is nothing other than a guise for overindulgent parenting, although if she’d spent as much time as I did with Westin, she might have changed her opinion.
The ice cream sat dejectedly in its bowls and melted as Westin scurried down the carpeted stairs into the basement after swallowing a couple Ritalins with some chocolate milk. I followed, feeling my stomach swell and bloat with each step. As Westin riffled through a box full of multicolored polyester costumes, I leaned against a wall.
“I don’t feel very good.”
“Here, put this on and let’s wrestle.” Westin offered me an old Halloween costume. The one he’d chosen wasn’t a surprise. I always had to be the astronaut when we wrestled. The costume was a silver lamè jumpsuit Mrs. Deats had bought on sale at K-Mart. Attached was a floppy helmet with a clear vinyl visor that buttoned to the jumpsuit at the collar, creating a kind of hermetic seal. The suit had its own interior climate. The fabric was totally unbreathable, and whenever I put the suit on, trails of sweat would immediately begin to run down my legs and soak my socks. The visor had a tendency to fog up as soon as I started breathing and the temperature inside the suit was unbearably hot. Westin always won at wrestling because I usually ended up on the verge on passing out in the pre-Cambrian heat and humidity of the suit. Plus I couldn’t see anything he was doing through the condensation on the visor.
It took a lot less time for Westin to put on his usual costume, which was a homemade caveman outfit, replete with a huge black wig and a hollow plastic club. By the time I’d buttoned the helmet to the jumpsuit, my stomach was really starting to hurt. I could feel muscles in my lower abdomen tensing up and shifting against one another. I thought of the water balloons we filled in Westin’s bathroom sink in the summer. Westin liked to keep the faucet on, the balloons growing increasingly transparent and making protesting, rubbery noises until they exploded in-sink, flooding the bathroom. Sweat popped out on my forehead and the suit’s visor immediately went grey.
“Let’s WWF!” Westin said, as he punched me in the stomach, darted behind me, and twisted my arm behind my back, “Sleeper hold! Sleeper hold!” He pulled my arm further and further upwards. I couldn’t see anything and my eyelids fluttered.
As the pain in my arm socket increased and I could hear my heartbeat echoing in my eardrums, like in the final minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, my stomach finally gave way. My spacesuit was compromised. The lamè threads at the seat of the jumpsuit grew moist and began to disintegrate. Westin stopped in shock and let my arm go free.
“You pooped your suit!” Westin screamed in delight, banging his club against the floor. He craned his head into the stairwell and shouted upstairs, “Mom! Cameron pooped the spacesuit!” He turned back to me, “I win wrestling today for sure.”
Mrs. Deats came downstairs. As she sent Westin upstairs to get some clean underwear out of his dresser for me to wear, I removed my helmet and stood dazed, warm muck running down the backs of my thighs. The smells of half-digested chocolate and beef malevolently filled the basement.
“It’s ok,” Mrs. Deats said mechanically, “This kind of thing happens all the time.” She stared blanky at the wall for a moment, then said, “Would you like some Oreos?”
My mom came about fifteen minutes later. I sat in the backseat in a pair of Westin’s too-big jeans and X-Men underwear. My mom pointed the car down the long driveway to the Deats’ house, past their green front yard, manicured regularly by Mr. Deats. They kept their trashcans in a corner of the yard near the driveway, where the crabgrass was impossible to defeat, despite Mr. Deats’ purchase of Japanese weedkiller a few months ago. As my mom made the left turn out of the driveway to go home, I looked at the Deats yard. Bracey, their golden retriever, had somehow gotten out—she was normally only allowed in the backyard—and had dragged the ruined, brown carcass of the spacesuit out of a trashcan and laid it out in the grass. She was licking the fabric with a mixture of what looked like melancholia and duty.
Cavia porcellus
Aunt Donna was the accidental pet murderer in my mom’s family.
I should say in her defense that the deaths were always accidental. Delouise, a Pomeranian, asphyxiated after attempting to ingest a used condom on Donna’s floor the night of her senior prom when the rest of the family was visiting my aunt Katie at college in Cincinnati. Melville and Marcia, the two hermit crabs, poisoned after Donna mistook bacon bits for their food pellets (nobody quite knows why it was bacon that killed them, but it probably had something to do with the sodium).
Snip, the guinea pig, snapped his neck. On the linoleum at the bottom of a flight of stairs, descending a slide of old magazines of Donna’s original design (Donna now works as an architectural engineer, designing office buildings that looked like giant suppositories). Donna was six and my mom was four.
“Are you sure he’ll be ok?” My mom asked from the sunken living room adjoining the stairs.
“Yeah, of course,” said Donna. She snapped her Juicyfruit violently against her palate. Aunt Donna was at the top of the stairs, holding Snip around his middle, his legs dangling in air. His brown and orange fur fanned out from the tops of her hands like an Elizabethan ruffle collar. Donna had her hair in the tight braided pigtails all the Melcher girls wore growing up, which pulled the skin of her forehead so tight that you could see blue, throbbing veins.
“You’re sure?”
“He’ll love it. Guinea pigs love slides. I saw it on TV.”
“You’re such a fibber.”
“Nuh-uh,” she snapped her gum, “it was on Bozo the Clown yesterday—they took a bunch of petting zoo animals to the park and then they played on the swings and a guinea pig named Pippy went down the slide and squealed all the way down. I saw it.”
“What if he gets hurt?”
“He won’t get hurt—he’s so fat, he’ll probably just bounce off the floor right back on up the stairs.”
“Don’t call him fat!”
“Ok,” Donna said, “But he is.”
“No he isn’t. He’s supposed to look like that.”
“It’s ok if he’s fat. I don’t know why you like him so much, anyway. They eat guinea pigs in Peru, you know.”
“Shut up!”
“He’ll have more fun than those skinny guinea pigs in Peru would, anyway. Fat things go faster. Because of gravity.”
Before my mom could get in another word of protest, Donna placed Snip at the top of the first magazine and gave him a gentle push.
Years later, my mom told me that actually she didn’t feel too sorry for Snip. His last moments were ones of exhilaration and freedom as he accelerated downwards, wind ruffling wildly through his fur, rotating counter clockwise like an obese pinwheel across the glossy surfaces of Wine Spectator 1964 and Vanity Fair.
Canis lupus familiarias
Black starlings building nests in the fawn crabapple trees thick outside the back porch I can hear them chittering low and confidentially among the branches as I come in from taking Rudy my grandma’s dog into the backyard and Christ am I glad to be inside because outside it’s just streaks of dead air it’s like the atmosphere itself is trying to kill me on a day like this when the bumpy grey cumulus clouds hang just above the branches and it refuses to rain it’d be enough to depress me except for the yellow-red smell of Nanna’s yellow-red bourbon roses inside it’s crinkly spirals of blue cigarette smoke congregating near the ceiling in the den Letterman has a skiing chimpanzee on and my grandma five foot two inches all German likes popular country music widowed is cackling at the television go microwave yourself a hotdog, Cameron there’s some Mountain Dew in the fridge I think if you’re thirsty and then from the backyard I can hear Rudy chases the obese red squirrel with a tuft of fur missing from its tail and there are decorative dinner plates on the wall with my mother and her siblings’ childhood silhouettes on them (my Uncle Tim’s aquiline lawyer nose is noticeable)
Nanna says shit as she pricks her upper arm on a cluster of thorns pruning the bourbon roses out in front near the netless basketball hoop rusting away it looks dead on top of its pole Spotswood Street the street my grandma’s house is about halfway down on a blue house with thick hedges and nettles and flowers out front the street is empty and asphyxiating on last year’s fallen leaves they still haven’t put in storm drains on Spotswood street but Nanna she’s got yellow-handled garden gloves on and a cigarette jammed between her teeth silver fillings on the incisors glinting it is gloomy and miserable outside and I have to wear a grey Broncos sweatshirt that’s too big for me and I don’t even like football I watch the Chicago Bulls even though I think Scottie Pippen has a weird-looking nose
Nanna’s teeth are the color of old Bible pages and her face is a yellowing dried apple core but she’s smiling and smoking at the same time I’ve never seen anybody who’s been able to do that like her and then she’s done gardening and Nanna’s wrapping up some yellow-red roses in yesterday’s newspaper and tying the bundle with a bit of brown twine then we head up the street walking the dogs with us too streaming around our heels It’s around one o’clock we’re heading to dour old Mrs. Nemuchek’s homemade tuna sandwiches on near-petrified Wonderbread, the tuna perspiring through the bread, making the sandwich pliable and watery and very very pale Eat it anyway, Cameron, says Nanna so I stuff it down and excuse myself to go spit it out into the garbage disposal and when I come back and she and Mrs. Nemuchek are talking about their neighbor Kathy Ritz, whose MS has gotten worse lately and did you hear soon she probably won’t be even able to use her legs anymore? How soon? A couple weeks, maybe even. She’s been so pale she looks like she’s already starting to go. And I think that Nanna must be thinking of her late husband the grandfather I never knew the United pilot with a hot temper and blood cancer and starched knit neckties and then
We leave but grandma and I are still hungry on account of the tuna being such a disappointment so now we’re in the Buick and we’re heading to McDonald’s with me in the back with the dogs Rudy and Beauregard the latter a small Cocker Spaniel named after the muttonchopped Civil War general by Aunt Chrissy and they’re licking my face and I’m licking their noses back and Nanna says that it’s ok because dog saliva has natural antibiotics in it but my mom doesn’t believe her my mom doesn’t believe a lot of things Nanna says and thinks she shouldn’t just write checks to my aunts and uncles the way Nanna does what with Uncle Jim only just a year or so out of AA meetings but she’s never been all that good with money since grandpa died in the hospital in eighty-nine
But Nanna isn’t thinking about that now we’ve got cheeseburgers by God and Rudy is going apeshit barking at the acned drive thru attendant, smearing her nose against the window leaving transverse streaks making the McDonald’s look like it’s been painted by Degas
My mom hates Rudy she thinks she’s just about the most worthless dog on the planet and is grossed out by her blue-black tongue and my mom doesn’t really like Beauregard all that much either because he has this weird smell that he carries around on his coat something to do with an old skin problem the vet’s never been able to figure out but whenever I spent the night over at Nanna’s when I was younger sometimes I’d get scared and wander into her bedroom and she’d be in there looking through photo albums and snubbing out Lucky Strikes into a cracked glass ashtray on the nightstand and she is completely covered in animals Beauregard looking like a platinum blonde wig as he snores on the pillow above her head Mr. Tumnus’ gravelly purr from somewhere underneath the sheets and Rudy lying on top of my grandmother’s legs
Rudy’s legs are twitching because she’s chasing some kind of squirrel in her dreams and I ask my grandmother how can she breathe with all these animals on her and she says, “They’re just doing what they’re supposed to do, Cameron.”
