Lately I’ve been having dreams in which guys in black come into the room where I sleep and carry my rigid body out and into an awaiting chartreuse 64 Ford Fairlane. I am perfectly alive, yet immobile and turgid. It is the way I imagine my body looks when I have been on a week long drinking binge. When I haven’t eaten right in a while. I don’t want food. My body swells and I languish.
The guys in dark clothing come in and carry me into that car and we head off for Lake Mickey to check out how the city’s water supply is doing today.
When I was younger, much younger, my brother came into a duck. Or rather, a duck came into our family, and after trying to provide a proper household for a duck, and failing, my parents decided that we would take the duck to Lake Mickey so it could live in a colony with the other ducks there. We would occasionally go to visit and my brother and I would ask which duck was ours. My mother would point at one and say, “That one!” Even though we were young, we were old enough to know that that duck looked nothing like ours, but we nodded and chased it as if we believed her. We did not even keep the duck long enough to give it a name. Rochelle Street was no place for a duck.
We did keep Lester long enough to give him a name though.
Lester was a mutt of a hunting dog gotten from my Uncle Ray long before he had a heart attack in his tree stand and fell to his death. Lester was the runt and we rescued him in a way, as Ray would always take the runt, as my grandfather had done before him, and chop him briskly on the back of the neck, taking all life from him in one fail swoop. It was his own helping hand in natural selection is what I decided. I could never decide what threatening to cut my ears off with a buck knife had to do with natural selection though.
Anyway, I was talking about Lester. Lester was a dog whose cuteness as a puppy only belied the beast he would become as he grew. He was part German Shepherd, part Pointer, and part Uncle Ray. He would jump on my 8-year-old legs one day and scratch me until tiny rivulets of blood would run down my overtan legs. Four perfect parallel scabby lines down the nubile strigns that stood for legs.
That was the same summer that we would go to the beach and return and Lester would not be in the back yard, tied to the twist-in-the-ground security mechanism that we had attached him to to obey the Durham leash law. I know now it was to protect him from his own stupidity as well. (I later became a vegetarian and vowed not to hate any animal, but I could still not forgive Lester. RIP)
We returned from our beach trip that summer and Lester’s chain was broken. To my early brain, and given my experience with the bastard, I was sure that he was fierce enough to have snapped the 50 pound chain and escaped. I wasn’t sad, although my brother shed quite a few tears. I understood, I guess, as my brother was my tormenter number one and Lester was a close tormenter number two.
It was a few years earlier that, on a whim, mom had bought us hamsters. Two of them that had names which escape me now. We had kept them for a year or so it seems and another vacation came. The little rodents had to stay with friends of the family, the Belchers, who had sons roughly my and my brother’s age.
Upon return from Kure Beach, no mention was made of the hamsters for a couple of days until Felt finally asked. Mom told us that while we were gone the hamsters had died in the Belcher’s toilet. They had escaped their cage and climbed up a toilet-side mountain of dirty clothes in the Belcher’s bathroom. They had paused for a moment, looked at each other, and decided to mutually commit hamster suicide to avoid the house of filth that we had left them in. That was more or less mom’s story.
After the hamsters and Lester was Misty. She was a Poma-poo that we got from my Aunt Bonnie after she and her husband had acquired too many Chows and was afraid the little dog would be eaten up. Misty was my favorite and I cannot say much or too much about her. One side of her heart failed and all should could do was walk in circles. It was like watching Albert Einstein reduced to entertaining himself with an Etch-A-Sketch. She handily passed on the morning my mother was going to take her to be put under. She has been buried some 17 years now in the garden patch behind my parents’ house. Last summer I found 17 four leafed clovers on the ground above her grave in a manner of two minutes.
After Misty, my mother swore to never have another pet at the house. Whatever lesson that could be learned by us having them around had surely been already learned. And besides, the heartbreak was unbearable when they had to leave.
Until one day my brother arrived at home from his job painting computer parts, and in the back of his truck was a chow puppy. The puppy came with the name ‘Hulk’ which my brother had given him on the drive home as a testimony to our favorite TV hero as we were growing up, I suppose. (An appropriate hero, I suppose, as he would change into something different when he was angry, as everyone in my family tends to do, except my father. And we seem to be angry a lot.)
Hulk was with us for a few years. He grew in fits and starts, and by and by my mother came to love him after ther initial panic at having another pet in the house. He met his end with a speeding car when I was either in late Jr. High or early HS. I was awoken by the sound of a hot rod engine charging down the street early in the morning, only to be more awoken by mom’s screams moments later and our run to the top of the driveway where we found him with mucousy blood slung from his mouth and nose. My mother cried like she had been the first on the scene to find her son dead on the battlefield. Later she would tell me that she believed she heard the car speed up before it hit the dog. The only hot rod in the neighborhood with dual exhaust and glass packs that would sound like what my mother and I mutually agreed we had heard belonged to the Shepherd boys who also purportedly did and dealt drugs to the kids in the neighborhood and at the school. Drug-addled hot rod driving teenagers had killed Hulk and the world would never be the same.
After Hulk, my mother would make the same vow to not get another pet. Largely she would keep that vow. Until, of course, one day my brother arrived home with a half mutt, half English bulldog which he had named ‘Buddy’ on the drive home from the pound. Buddy lived and did not die in Dude Ranch. He moved with Felt when he finally got married to Carrla after 9 years. He died last year when his gas just finally ran out. Felt buried him in his back yard where I hope within a few years there will be plentiful four leaf clovers. I will teach my nieces and nephew the geometrical approach to finding them. We will call them shamrocks.
Tonight I will go to bed and the men in dark suit swill come again. We will go to Lake Mickey in a Fairlane to talk to the ducks. I have it all figured out out. I will make duck sounds. Talk to the ducks. I will make quack and whack and ack and quack again. Some old gray haired bag of poultry will walk out of the woods and say to me, “It’s alright my brother. I’ve been here all along. All is good. You will be good and do good. God loves you and that may very well be all you’ll need to make it in this minor place.”
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