“Well, you’ve got sense, then. Not like some of them around here.” The baboon picked a flea from the cat’s head and stuck it gingerly between her teeth. “Take this wedding I went to—last Saturday, I think it was. Couple of marsh rabbits got married—you probably heard about it.”
The cat nodded.
“Now, I like a church service, but this was one of those write-your-own-vows sorts of things. Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes—being in love.”
“My husband and I wrote our own vows,” the cat said defensively.
“Sure you did,” countered the baboon, “but you probably had something to say, not like these marsh rabbits, carrying on that their love was like a tender sapling or some damn thing. And all the while they had this squirrel off to the side, plucking at a harp, I think it was.”
“I had a harp player at my wedding,” the cat said, “and it was lovely.”
“I bet it was, but you probably hired a professional, someone who could really play. This squirrel, I don’t think she’d taken a lesson in her life. Just clawed at those strings, almost like she was mad at them.”
“Well, I’m sure she tried her best,” the cat said.
The baboon nodded and smiled, the way one must in the service industry. She’d planned to tell a story about a drunken marsh rabbit, the brother of the groom at last week’s wedding, but there was no point in it now, not with this client anyway. Whatever she said, the cat disagreed with, and unless she found a patch of common ground she was sure to lose her tip. “You know,” she said, cleaning a scab off the cat’s neck, “I hate dogs. Simply cannot stand them.”
“What makes you bring that up?” the cat asked.
“Just thinking,” the baboon said. “Some kind of spaniel mix walked in yesterday, asking for a shampoo, and I sent him packing, said, ‘I don’t care how much money you have, I’m not making conversation with anyone who licks his own ass.’” And the moment she said it, she realized her mistake.
“Now, what’s wrong with that?” the cat protested. “It’s good to have a clean anus. Why, I lick mine at least five times a day.”
“And I admire you for it,” the baboon said, “but you’re not a dog.”
“Meaning?”
“On a cat it’s…classy,” the baboon said. “There’s a grace to it, but a dog, you know the way they hunker over, legs going every which way.”
“Well, yes,” the cat said. “I suppose you have a point.”
“Then they slobber and drool all over everything, and what they don’t get wet, they chew to pieces.”
“That they do.” The cat chuckled, and the baboon relaxed and searched her memory for a slanderous dog story. The collie, the German shepherd, the spaniel mix she claimed to have turned away: they were all good friends of hers, and faithful clients, but what would it hurt to pretend otherwise and cross that fine line between licking ass and simply kissing it?
The Motherless Bear
In the three hours before her death, the bear’s mother unearthed some acorns buried months earlier by a squirrel. They were damp and worm-eaten, as unappetizing as turds, and, sighing at her rotten luck, she kicked them back into their hole. At around ten she stopped to pull a burr from her left haunch, and then, her daughter would report, “Then she just…died.”
The first few times she said these words, the bear could not believe them. Her mother gone—how could it be! After a day, though, the shock wore off, and she tried to recapture it with an artfully placed pause and an array of amateur theatrical gestures. The faraway look was effective, and eventually she came to master it. “And then,” she would say, her eyes fixed on the distant horizon, “then she just…died.”
Seven times she cried, but as the weeks passed this became more difficult, and so she took to covering her face with her paws and doing a jerky thing with her shoulders. “There, there,” friends would say, and she would imagine them returning to their families. “I saw that poor motherless bear today, and if she doesn’t just break your heart, well, I don’t know what will.”
Her neighbors brought food, more than enough to get her through the winter, so she stayed awake that year and got very fat. In the spring the others awoke from their hibernations and found her finishing the first of the chokecherries. “Eating helps ease the pain,” she explained, the bright juice dripping from her chin. And when they turned away she followed behind them. “Did I mention to you that my mother died? We’d just spent a beautiful morning together, and the next thing I knew—”
“That’s no excuse for eating all our chokecherries,” they said, furious.
A few bears listened without interruption, but she could see in their eyes that their pity had turned to something else, boredom at best, and at worst a kind of embarrassment, not for themselves but for her.
The friend who had previously been the most sympathetic, who herself had cried upon first hearing the story, now offered a solution. “Throw yourself into a project,” she said. “That’s what I did after my grandfather’s heart attack, and it worked wonders.”
“A project?” the bear said.
“You know,” said her friend, “dig yourself a new den or something.”
“But I like my den the way it is.”
“Then help dig one for somebody else. My ex-husband’s aunt lost one of her paws in a trap and spent last winter in a ditch. Help her, why don’t you?”
“I hurt my paw once,” the bear said. “Broke a nail clean off, and when it finally grew back it looked like a Brazil nut.” She was trying to work the subject back to herself, hoping her friend might forget her suggestion, but it didn’t work.
“I’ll tell the old gal you’ll be by later this afternoon,” she said. “It’ll make her happy and help you to work off some of that weight you’ve gained.”
The friend ambled off, and the bear glared at her disappearing backside. “Help you work off some of that weight you gained,” she mimicked.
Then she overturned a log and ate some ants, low-calorie ones with stripes on their butts. After that, she lay in the sun and was sound asleep when her friend returned and shook her awake, saying, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Huh?”
“It’s almost dark, and my ex-husband’s aunt has been waiting all day.”
“Right,” said the bear, and she headed up the hill, deciding after a few dozen yards that this was not going to happen. Forget following advice she had never asked for in the first place. Rather than digging a den for a stranger, someone old who was just going to die anyway, she’d leave home and settle on the other side of the mountain. There, she could meet some new bears, strangers who would listen to her story and allow her once again to feel tragic.
The following morning she set out, taking care to avoid the old amputee, who still sat waiting beside her wretched ditch. Beyond a burned-out grove of birch trees there was a stream, and, following it, she came upon a cub who sat waist-deep in the rushing water, swatting at fish with his untrained paws.
“I used to do the same thing when I was your age,” called the bear. And the cub looked up and let out a cry of surprise.
“I must have sat in the water all morning, until my mother came over and showed me how to catch fish properly.” She waited a beat and then continued. “Of course, that could never happen now, and you know why?”
The cub said nothing.
“It couldn’t happen now because my mother is dead,” the bear announced. “Happened suddenly, when I least expected it. One moment she was there, and the next she just…wasn’t.”
The cub began to whimper.
“You wake up an orphan, your mom’s body slowly rotting beside you, and what can you do but soldier on, all alone, with no one to love or protect you.”
As the cub began to wail, his mother charged out of the thicket. “What are you, sick?” she shouted. “Get your kicks scaring innocent children, is that it? Go on, now
, get the hell out of here.”
The bear ran to the opposite shore and into the forest, tripping on logs as she turned to look behind her. What with her weight, she was soon out of breath, so she slowed to a trot after the first hundred yards, her pace gradually degenerating as the morning turned to afternoon and then early evening. Just before dusk she smelled chimney smoke and ambled to the outskirts of a village. Peering through a gap in a thick hedge, she saw a crowd of humans standing with their backs to her. They seemed to be regarding something that stood in a clearing, and when one of them shifted position, she saw that it was a bear, a male, though it took a moment to realize it, as he was wearing a skirt and a tall, cone-shaped hat topped with a satin scarf. The male bear’s mouth was muzzled with leather straps and connected to a leash, which was alternately held and yanked by a man in a dirty cape. A boy who was also dressed in a cape carried a drum on a rope around his neck, and as he began to play, the male stood on his hind legs and swayed back and forth to the music.
“Faster,” called a soldier at the front of the crowd, and the boy quickened his beat. The male bear struggled to keep up, and when he tripped over the hem of his skirt, the man pulled out a stick and beat him across the face until his nose bled. This made the people laugh, and a few of them threw coins, which the drummer collected before moving on to his next song.
When night fell and the audience went home to their suppers, the man removed the muzzle from the male’s snout. Then he put a collar around his neck and attached it by a chain to an iron stake driven deep into the ground. He and the boy retired to a tent, and when she was sure they had fallen asleep, the bear crept out from behind the hedge and approached the chained dancer.
“I don’t normally talk to strangers,” she said, “but I saw you here and figured, well, I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
The male was lying in an awkward position. His skirt was gathered around his waist, and she saw that great patches of his legs were without hair and that the skin in these areas was covered with open sores. “I used to talk a lot to my mother,” she told him. “She and I were all each other had, and then one morning, out of nowhere, she just…died. Gone. Before I could say goodbye or anything.” Maybe it was the moonlight, maybe the excitement of meeting an entertainer, but for whatever reason, she actually managed a tear—her first in almost six months. It was running slowly down her cheek when the chained male raised his head and spoke. “Can you understand me?” he asked.
The bear nodded, though in fact it was quite difficult.
“That’s good,” he said. “Most animals can’t make out a word I’m saying, and you know why?”
She shook her head.
“It’s because I have no teeth,” he said. “Not a one of them. The man in the tent took a rock and hammered them out of my head.”
“But the muzzle—,” the bear said.
“That’s just to make me look dangerous.”
“Oh,” the bear said. “I get it.”
“No,” he told her, “I don’t think you do. See, I have maggots living in my knees. I’m alive, but flies are raising families in my flesh. Okay?”
The bear shivered at the thought of it.
“It’s been years since I’ve eaten solid food. My digestive system is shot, my right foot is broken in three places, and you’re coming to me all teary-eyed because your stepmother died?”
“She wasn’t a step,” the bear said.
“Oh, she was too. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Well, she was just like a real mother,” the bear said.
“Yeah, and piss is just like honey if you’re hungry enough.”
“Maybe males in this part of the country say every ugly thing that enters their heads,” the bear said, “but where I’m from—” That was as far as she got before the man and the boy came up from behind and hit her over the head with a padded club. When she came to, it was morning, and the male lay on the ground before her, his throat slit into a meaty smile.
“He wasn’t no good to us anyhow,” the man said to his assistant. “The knees go, and that’s that.”
Now the bear travels from village to village. Her jaws are sunken, her gums swollen with the abscesses left by broken teeth, and between the disfigurement and the muzzle, it’s nearly impossible to catch what she’s saying. Always, though, while tripping and stumbling to the music, she looks out into her audience and tells the story about her mother. Most people laugh and yell for her to lift her skirts, but every so often she’ll spot someone weeping and swear they can understand her every word.
The Faithful Setter
Back before I met her, my wife lived on a farm. It was a small operation, organic vegetables, pick-your-own strawberries, and a dozen or so chickens, each and every one of them, to hear her tell it, “an absolute raging asshole.” The first time she said this I laughed, as I’d always thought that word was reserved for males. The same goes for “dick,” which she uses for females all the time—this raccoon, for example, that sometimes gets into our garbage cans. “Can you believe the nerve of that dick?” she’ll say to me, her nose pressed flat against the dining room window. Then she’ll bark, “Hey, asshole, go trash somebody else’s fucking yard.”
I attribute my wife’s language to the fact that she’s one-quarter spaniel. She says she’s only an eighth, but, come on, the ears say it all. That and her mouth.
Still, though, I can’t help but love her—forgave her even after she cheated. “They are too your children,” she’d said, referring to her last litter, a party of four that looked no more like me than that dick of a raccoon. I knew they were fathered by the English bull terrier across the street, but what are you going to do? Everyone’s entitled to one mistake, aren’t they?
I’d like to tell you that I hated this terrier right from the start, that I’d never, for one moment, trusted him. But what would that say about my wife and me, that our tastes are that dissimilar? If you want to know the truth about it, I actually hadn’t given the guy much thought. His ugliness I’d noticed, sure—those creepy little eyes. His stupidity was evident as well, but I can’t say I’d fashioned a formal “opinion.” At least not until this puppy business.
The litter was born, and not one week later the bull terrier bit a kid in the face, practically tore it right off, as a matter of fact. It was the little blond girl who lived in the house next door to him. I was in the backseat of the car, just pulling into the driveway, when the ambulance arrived, and, man, was that ever a scene. The parents were beside themselves.
“Oh well,” my wife yawned when I told her about it later that afternoon. “It’s not like they can’t have more children.”
I said, “Come again?”
She said, “That’s the way they feel about us, so why should we be any different?”
“So we need to stoop to their level?” I said. As for the bull terrier, my wife admitted that he was a hothead. She said he had a lousy sense of humor, but she never quite denounced him the way I needed her to. After he was trundled away and put down, she spent the day sulking. “A headache,” she said to the kids. “Mommy has a sick headache.” She claimed to have one the following day as well. On and on for a week, and all the while she had her eye on the house across the street, the place where her boyfriend had lived.
It wasn’t long afterward that the little girl came home from the hospital, her head cocooned in bandages. There were holes for her to look through, and others for her nose and mouth, all of them gunked up with their corresponding fluids: tears, snot, drool. Even if you hated children, you had to feel sorry for her. At least I thought you had to. My wife, though, I could see that she blamed this girl, thinking that were it not for her, the bull terrier would still be alive.
I figured she’d get over him eventually, and in the meantime I’d just settle back and be patient. It helped when our owner put an ad in the paper and got rid of those godforsaken puppies. Oh sure, I cried, but it was more for my wife than for myself. I don�
��t care what you hear about step-parenting, it’s just not the same when they’re somebody else’s kids. Don’t get me wrong—I wish them the best. I just don’t feel the need to see them again.
Now that it was just the two of us, I hoped that things would return to normal. It was then that our owner took my wife in for a hysterectomy. She was out cold for the operation, saw nothing, felt nothing, went to sleep fertile and woke up a shell, her uterus and whatever else was in there, gone.
I told her that as far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter in the least. To this she growled, “Oh, I’m sure it doesn’t. I’m sure you’re just fine with it.”
I said, “What are you talking about?”
“You’re thinking that this will keep me from cheating on you again. Or that if I do at least nothing will come of it.”
It was like she was blaming me for the hysterectomy. I said, “Baby, don’t do this.”
She didn’t talk to me for three days after that. What was going through her mind is anyone’s guess. Me, though, I kept thinking about this Weimaraner I met once at the dog run. He had one of those owners who’d get on all fours and try to communicate with him, not just barking but lying on his back, acting submissive and so forth. There are quite a few people like that at the dog run—nuts is what they are—but this guy really took the cake. One morning last fall he went to the hospital and had his tonsils taken out. They weren’t raw or swollen or anything, he just wanted them. “In a jar,” he supposedly told the doctor. “And don’t trim off the fat.”
At the end of the day, he returned home, cut the tonsils into pieces with a steak knife, and hand-fed them to this Weimaraner, like, “Here, boy, I love you so much, I want you to have a part of me.”
“And?” I said.
“It was a lot like chicken,” the Weimaraner told me. So that’s what I wondered during the time my wife and I weren’t talking. What did her hysterectomy taste like? It was crazy, I know, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Did my thoughts bespeak an urge toward cannibalism? Or did the flesh in question—the fact that it was her uterus—reduce this to a normal sexual fantasy? I would’ve liked to have discussed it, but the way things stood, I thought it best to keep my mouth shut.
The Best of Me Page 17