by Bob Tarte
The dismal scene turned my limbs into windowsill pulp, and I nearly ended up on the linoleum alongside the tail. Linda usually handled the medical emergencies with our animals, while I performed the vital task of hovering in the background and moaning, “What are we going to do?” But her escalating back problems meant two visits to the chiropractor per week. So while Linda got a backbone manipulation from Dr. Potente, I got a reality adjustment from Stanley Sue, who stared at me while vigorously nodding her head in excitement, displeasure, or both. Bertie continued bathing his ears with such nonchalance that I picked up his tail to assure myself that the amputation had actually occurred. The pom-pom was vaguely cone-shaped on the end that had once connected to his body. A tiny dot of blood flecked a muscle no larger than the diameter of a toothpick. The rest of the tail consisted of fur.
“Sweetie, are you okay?” I asked with an unsteady voice as I interrupted Bertie’s toilette to pull him out of his cage. He didn’t act as if he had been emotionally attached to the snipped-off appendage, grunting indignantly as I carried him into the bathroom and examined him under the strong artificial light suitable for spotting defects in the floral wallpaper. The pinching action of the parrot’s beak must have kept the injury from bleeding. I didn’t detect any sign of trauma except for the dull throbbing inside me.
Plunking Stanley Sue back into her cage, I directed a few sharp words at her. I considered taking away her treasured bell as punishment, but I didn’t figure it would make sense to her. Though unfailingly gentle with Linda and me, she apparently regarded a rabbit or smaller bird as just another object to chew on.
Fighting the urge to return to bed, draw the covers over my head, and brood about what an irresponsible pet owner I’d turned out to be, I let gravity pull me down the basement stairs. Next to the unused wood furnace I found a few scraps of metal screening with a half-inch grid that neither bunny ear nor parrot beak could poke through. Scissoring the panels to proper proportions, I fitted shields to the front and sides of each rabbit cage to thwart future bird attacks. As I wired the pieces in place, I lamented the fact that I had shown more understanding with Stanley Sue than I had with my poor mother, who would never bite off a rabbit’s tail. Somehow I understood the futility of losing my temper with a parrot, but I hadn’t transferred that to human beings.
That evening I roiled with pangs of guilt while watching a tailless Bertie frolic in the living room. Though Linda calmed me down by pointing out that the loss didn’t seem to bother the bunny, she couldn’t resist wondering out loud, “Why would Stanley do something like that?”
“Why would my mom insist I stole her electric trimmer?” I asked, nudging the focus back to my suffering. “It’s some mysterious force of nature at work.”
“We’ve got to make sure she can’t hurt one of the bunnies again.”
“I put that screen around the cages. That will do the trick.”
“Because she could really injure Bertie or Walter,” Linda continued. “That’s probably how Walter ended up with his abscesses. We can’t let Stanley bite the bunnies.”
“They should be safe with the screen around their cages.”
“What if she pecked out one of their eyes?”
“She can’t do that with the screens on their cages,” I observed with growing futility.
“I don’t want any more abscesses,” she said. Then, before I could bring up the screens again, she asked, “Have you seen my reading glasses?”
That was my cue to walk out of the room. As a kind of pointless tribute to Bertie’s hindquarters subtraction, I saved his tail in a sandwich bag, which I taped up and temporarily stashed inside the top drawer of my dresser.
“What are you going to do with that?” Linda asked.
“Dig a hole in the backyard and throw dirt on top of it. He’ll be the only rabbit we’ve ever owned that we’ve had to bury twice.”
“I just don’t get why these weird things keep happening to us,” she muttered a little later as she clicked off the lamp on the bed-stand. That, of course, was the question that kept me awake long after Linda had ceased her nightly routine of hopping out of bed to set the air purifier on low, opening the window, setting the air purifier back to high, knocking over ceramic figurines on the headboard as she searched for her lip balm in the dark, shutting the window, turning on the fan, putting on a warmer nightgown, and shifting the air purifier to low. Each time she leaned over the side of the bed or flung herself off the mattress, she yanked the covers from my body, and I didn’t dare hold on to them for fear that a hearty tug from her would spin me like a top.
Different kinds of people tended to attract certain types of events into their lives. I came to this decision during a brief interval when the covers still covered me. Some folks stumbled over money every time they left the house, like a friend of Linda’s who won the lottery so often, they considered replacing Jackson’s face with hers on the twenty-dollar bill. Other folks specialized in tragedy, settling on major-appliance breakdowns, scofflaw relatives, or medical maladies with hyphenated names as their ongoing torment. For reasons I could never comprehend, I drew weirdness to me like water into a straw. The granddaddy of all bizarre events, I reflected as I lay in bed waiting for the quilt to desert me again, was the telephone call I had once received from the space people.
One night during my junior college days I’d found myself unable to concentrate on the poetic prose of my political science textbook. Instead I dug into a science fiction story about a man who could mentally tune in to a kind of galactic two-way radio. At the drop of a thinking cap, he could intercept telepathic communications between advanced civilizations located in distant Milky Way zip codes. A mind meld with aliens appealed to me, especially when compared to trying to divine the logic behind political processes in Washington. So after finishing the story and pulling the sheet up to my neck at a time in my life when nobody but me would whisk it away again, I attempted to contact whatever extraterrestrials might be tuned to earthling brain-wave frequencies.
I hypnotized myself into a state of relaxation that I had learned from reading, of all things, a 1950s issue of Popular Science magazine plucked from a flea market. I marshaled my puny thought energy, waited for my inner ON THE AIR light to blink on, and transmitted a plea for the space people to contact me. “I’m ready to join you off-planet in a life that doesn’t involve memorizing members of Congress or being humiliated by the girl who sits next to me in biology class. Please reply. Over.” I lay still, palpitating as I concentrated on my thoughts for a response from Regulus or an answer from Antares. Nothing came, and I finally drifted off to sleep awaiting a vaguely Rod Serling – esque voice inside my head.
A few hours later, the jangling telephone woke me up. A woman asked, “Is Richard there?” as electronic tones burbled in the background. Her question scared me silly. That same day I’d received a Unitron telescope catalog in the mail, which I’d whimsically sent for under the name Richard Plantagenet. Nobody knew this fact other than the mailman and a Unitron employee, and I figured that postal and telescope personnel had better things to do at two A.M. than bother me. I wanted to ask, “Richard who?” But if I did and the voice supplied the appropriate last name, I would be alien food. So I chickened out by replying, “There’s no Richard here. Who are you calling?”
“I’m calling you, Bob Tarte,” she told me.
I couldn’t have been more frightened had I actually believed in the saucer people. “You’ve got the wrong number,” I told her and hung up.
The experience taught me several lessons. Never poke my nose into the cosmic equivalent of citizen-band radio. Never request catalogs under the name of a deceased British regent. And, of course, never assume that my mother was any more askew than a son who lived with one foot in a fantasy world. The memory of alien telephony reminded me that I needed to do something special for my mom to make amends for that other annoying phone call, the one where I had shouted at her, and I needed to do it soon.
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sp; THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, I mulled over potential restaurants for lunch with my mother as I ambled down the hill toward the duck pens. Judging her taste in food wasn’t easy once I’d factored in the oddball meals she’d treated us to over the years, such as ham balls in orange-flavored gravy and chicken casserole with a crust of saltines that expanded to take on the characteristics of ceiling tiles. Fortunately, my mom was so easy to please, I could take her to the Kmart snack bar for a corn dog and she would say, “This is nice.” I wanted to do a notch better than that, but I didn’t want to spend much money. Maybe she’d be so thrilled that I was treating her to a meal that she would actually insist on paying. This thought buoyed me as I started to unlock the girls’ pen and noticed that the atmosphere wasn’t right. Instead of honking and quacking at the sight of me and the prospect of an insect safari in our yard, the ducks and geese were eerily silent at my approach.
A glance into Stewart and Trevor’s pen sobered my mood. I went back into the house, exchanged a few quiet words with Linda, then went out again and gently lifted the latch on their gate. Linda had no peer when it came to treating sick and injured animals, but I didn’t want her to have to face what had happened to our handsome Khaki Campbell boys. For once I was grateful for a life spent avoiding reality, as a psychological black hole mercifully slipped between my eyes and the bodies of our ducks while I wrapped each in a towel, then buried them under a shade tree.
When I had finished, Linda joined me at the graveside. Holding my hand she told Stewart and Trevor how sorry she was for what had happened. I reminded her how they would sometimes waddle up to me when I stretched out on my back in the soft summer grass and nibble at my shoelaces. Linda mentioned how much they had enjoyed spending time in the yard with the female ducks. Their offshoots, Carla, Marla, and Darla, testified to that fact. We also talked about the day a few years earlier when we had brought them home from a woman who had lost her job and couldn’t afford to keep her pets. Then we let go of each other’s hands and wiped our eyes.
I rattled through the top floor of the barn until I located another section of wire screening. Once again I fetched the tin snips and a spool of wire to belatedly remedy a problem. The boys’ enclosure itself was secure. However, we’d added a storage shed behind the pens that was intended to function as winter waterfowl housing. The girls and boys could walk through a pair of corridors and enter separate enclosures in the shed to escape subzero outdoor temperatures—but even in the coldest weather they preferred frolicking in their wading pools instead. The builder who had constructed the shed hadn’t secured the corridor on the boys’ side properly, and a raccoon had apparently dug under the fencing. I had known about the defect, but I hadn’t bothered to fix it, figuring that no animal would be able to fight its way through our rock-impacted soil. I had also expected that our geese would raise a ruckus and wake us at the first sign of any attempted break-in. But they hadn’t made a peep during the night. We found out later that birds often react in silence when they can’t escape a predator in their midst.
In one respect, we had been lucky. If the raccoon had wandered into the shed after killing Stewart and Trevor, it could have climbed over a squat barrier to reach the girls’ side of the pen and killed every one of them as well. But instead of consoling me, the close brush with a mass extinction plunged me into a deep hole, and I considered phoning my mom to postpone our lunch. “She’ll understand,” Linda assured me, but I couldn’t face the added guilt of standing her up.
“I’m just paying bills,” my mom told me when I walked into the dining room. Sure enough, her dining room table was coated with a thick paper icing of envelopes, bill statements, junk mail, old receipts, and folders that my sister Bett had labeled “Bills to Pay,” “Paid Bills,” “Auto Insurance,” “Health Insurance,” “Funeral Expenses,” and “Death Certificates.” The implied spiral from unpaid invoices to death seemed excessive, as did the amount of clutter for what turned out to be exactly three bills due: cable TV, natural gas, and a Good Housekeeping subscription. I wrote out three checks in record time. Using other people’s money always energized me, and the exercise helped take my mind off the miserable start to the morning. As I cleared the table, it dawned on me that these were the same three bills my mom had been in the process of “paying” a week earlier.
“Why don’t I just take care of your bills from now on,” I suggested.
“You don’t need to do that,” she said, but I could tell that the idea appealed to her.
We decided on a neighborhood restaurant frequented by members of her church. As she ate a chicken-salad sandwich and hailed an elderly woman in a tweed dress whose face and clothing I remembered from the funeral home, I told my mom about the accident with our ducks. Although my affection for poultry perplexed her, she was genuinely sympathetic. “Try not to think about it,” she advised me, which was rather like advising an ant not to live underground.
We reminisced about my dad as we each ate a scoop of ice cream. This inevitably led to my favorite story, mainly because I steered her in that direction. Shortly after moving back to Grand Rapids from Washington, D.C., at the end of World War II, my dad had asked the clerk at Dodd’s Record Shop for a copy of Sammy Kaye’s song “Remember Pearl Harbor.” My father, who had worked for the Pentagon during the war, was as patriotic as anyone. “But he hated that song,” my mother chuckled. “He said it was commercializing on a tragedy.” Once he had paid for the 78 rpm phonograph record, he snapped it in half on the spot and politely handed the pieces to the clerk. I laughed out loud thinking of my mild-mannered dad acting so audaciously, but that wasn’t the payoff to the tale.
“It must have been ten years later that your father went back to Dodd’s to buy a different record. I think it was something by Steve Allen. When he brought the record to the front counter, the woman looked at him and said, ‘You!’ “
I was hoping that my mom might follow this up with the improbable story about the time my dad had been hauled off to jail in his pajamas—but the memories of married life saddened her. We drove home in silence, brooding about our respective losses, big and small.
LINDA SURPRISED ME by implicating a television program in our bad luck. She didn’t exactly blame the show, which was about a woman who communicated telepathically with animals rather than space aliens. But I had just pressed play after feeding Moobie a heart-shaped cat treat when Linda interrupted the episode to tell me, “I had this horrible thought, and I feel like I have to say something about it. I can’t get it out of my head that Stewart and Trevor might have died because maybe God was punishing us for watching a show about a psychic.”
I hit the pause key to underscore my puzzlement. “Now, what was that again?”
“The Bible says that God disapproves of divination and false prophets.”
My eyes darted from the freeze-framed psychic’s friendly face to Linda’s pained expression. Moobie’s head popped up in expectation of another cat treat. “Does that mean we can never watch the show again? I thought you enjoyed it.”
From her faux-sheepskin rug on the living room floor, Linda considered the issue. Moobie walked over and tapped her leg with a front paw, demanding another heart-shaped goodie. “She’s not exactly fortune-telling, I guess, when you come right down to it,” she decided.
“No,” I agreed. “Reading the mind of a kitten isn’t the same as divining what the cat is going to do tomorrow, though with Moobie it would be an easy prediction.”
“‘Eat. Sleep. Drink water. Get petted. Beg for treats,” Linda muttered as she rose from the rug to snag the can of cat treats from the entertainment center. “I guess it’s okay to watch it,” she said. “You know how I am. When I get obsessed with something, it usually doesn’t go away unless I say something. You’re lucky you don’t get obsessed with things.”
“That’s one problem I don’t seem to have,” I told her with a total lack of conviction. As a matter of fact, the snipping off of Bertie’s tail followed by the snuffing of
Stewart and Trevor had spooked me to such a degree that I inwardly flinched whenever I walked into the dining room, backyard pens, or barn, for fear of the disaster that I might encounter next. Whenever the phone rang, I worried that my mother might be calling to claim I had absconded with the gas cap for her snowblower.
“She certainly isn’t doing anything evil,” Linda added. “She’s helping people and animals.”
I pressed the play button as a way of signaling my concurrence and wondered if I could find other devices to do my talking for me. The next time I was angry, I might boil a pan of water. At any rate, I was relieved to start the show moving again. While staring at the petrified image of the psychic, I had briefly imagined I’d noticed a glint of malevolence in her eye.
I didn’t know what I thought about the woman in terms of paranormal powers. When it came to human subjects, I believed that mind reading was the cheap stunt of carnies and evangelists, but my pessimism took a dive when it came to mental melding with a duck or beagle. The idea of someone speaking up for creatures that most people regarded as disposable possessions hit my emotional center with the force of a Muscovy charge. Anyway, I didn’t suppose that God would fling his wrath upon folks who watched the wrong TV show, especially when sitting through most shows was punishment enough. But Linda had increased my general uneasiness. A possible connection between pet deaths and television viewing gave me yet another reason to worry, no matter how illogical the cause.