by Bob Tarte
After the finale of the show, in which the host relayed reassuring messages from pets frolicking in the next world to their former owners sobbing in the studio, I walked into the bathroom with Moobie hot on my heels. I didn’t want an elderly, overweight cat breaking a leg hopping down from the sink, so I had broken her of the habit of drinking from the faucet by holding her water dish as she stood on the toilet seat. The plan had been to convince her to accept water from her own dish—and she would, as long I held the bowl aloft. Moving deliberately, I could even lower the bowl to within a millimeter of the floor as long as I clutched it in my hand. As soon as dish touched floor and fingers disengaged, Moobie would fix me with a withering expression that said, “How am I supposed to drink now?” Never mind that we had frequently caught her slurping muddy water from the pot of a freshly watered plant. Her own bowl was taboo unless I suspended it in space.
She raced me to the bathroom the next evening just before I headed out to the barn, exercising impressive fussiness by drinking first from one edge of the dish, then sniffing and shifting her head to several other carefully chosen spots in search of the optimal lapping experience. But I didn’t let this prolonged annoyance bother me. My mood had jumped several notches as the bright sunshine of the day had dispelled the superstitions of the previous night. A catbird sang its scratchy song from a tree overhanging an abandoned cattle trough. A floral scent politely glossed over the smell of a spoiled and broken duck egg I’d tossed into our field a few days ago.
From the darkness of the barn interior, I strode merrily outdoors into Timmy’s pen to shoo first him, then Ramone into their bachelor quarters. I hunted for a while before happening upon chickens Buffy and Brenda crouching behind a wickedly pointy thistle. Brenda’s sister Helen had inserted herself into the heart of a stinging nettle patch that had zero effect on her, but every nerve ending in my featherless hand hit the fire alarm when I brushed up against the leaves. After rousting her into the barn and determining that there were no more stragglers, I visited Richie’s pen. When I stepped outside, the Pekin bobbled inside with annoyed wing flaps and grousing duck, duck, duck mumbling. Victor and the rest of the hens slowly followed. Hamilton refused to budge, which surprised me. He usually couldn’t wait to launch himself at me, yet through a thicket of weeds I could just make out his upright form at the fence between the pens.
“Come on, Hamilton,” I called. “C’mon, buddy. Time to get your treat.” As I made my way through the bushes it became clear why he didn’t respond.
His feet hung limply an inch or two above the ground. I couldn’t simply whisk his body away with a towel, as I had with Stewart and Trevor. I had no alternative except to closely study the small but stabbing horror of his fate. It was as if the fence had grown around him. His neck threaded in and out of one heavy strand of wire, while his beak and the bottom of his skull were wedged into a second. I cursed and cried as I swept the flies off his bloodied head and struggled to pry him loose. His yellow eyes fixed me with a cold glare while I went about the grisly work of releasing him. I thought I might have to cut the fence apart.
We had moved Ramone to Timmy’s pen a week earlier, when Hamilton’s aggression toward the shyer Muscovy had escalated into violent explosions. We hadn’t seen any harm in the two of them hissing at each other with a fence separating them. But an enraged Hamilton had apparently flung himself at his rival, caught his head in the wire, and strangled himself as he fell. I finally managed to coax Hamilton loose. Buffy pecked the dirt near my boots, uncertain whether my activity ought to involve her. I laid him on the grass behind the barn and compulsively stroked his back. Nothing similar had ever happened before, but failing to foresee any possibility for injury, no matter how remote, was a serious breech on my part. I didn’t know what to say to him. What can you ever say to a dead duck? Feeling entangled by my own body and caught inside an inexplicable cycle of loss, I steered myself toward the house to get a towel from Linda.
I PUT OFF WATCHING the next episode of the animal psychic as long as I could without being too obvious about my dread of the show. Two episodes in a row followed by two pet disasters had seriously undermined my faith in the laws of causality. Linda had tossed aside her objections to the show and started asking me when we were going to see it again. We usually watched only one TV program a night, preferring to read books or groan in exhaustion after a day of animal chores.
“There’s a special on tonight about the history of the hamburger,” I told her. “Let’s watch that instead of the psychic.”
“We don’t even eat hamburgers.”
“Either that or I’d like to see The World’s Most Luxurious Truck Stops.”
Had it been simply a matter of admitting my superstitiousness to Linda, I could have lived with it. Far more alarming was the notion that I had suddenly slipped into a world where dark undercurrents had risen to the top like worms after a rain, and the worms were now in charge. I’d had a taste of this deep anxiety over intangible but seemingly real forces in my college days—also known as my dodging-telephone-calls-from-extraterrestrials days. My friend Cole had developed a fascination with his Ouija board, and we whiled away long hours giggling and transcribing gibberish from supposed spirits. On one fateful occasion, Cole challenged an entity who called himself Gatsby to predict which Star Trek rerun a local television station would air at eleven-thirty that night. The newspaper listing hadn’t provided a description, so this seemed like a reasonable test for even the most menial of disembodied beings.
“MOBSTERSPIECEOFTHEACTION,” the board spelled out.
Neither of us could connect the underworld with the Enterprise, so taking this as just another of Gatsby’s nonsensical missives, Cole guffawed, and I followed suit. We swallowed our mirth when eleven-thirty rolled around and the teaser at the beginning of the program presented Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and expendable crew members visiting a planet whose society was based on 1940s Hollywood mob films. The opening credits trumpeted the episode title as “A Piece of the Action.”
I barely slept that night, worrying that Gatsby and his cohorts had a bird’s-eye view of every twist, turn, and pillow hug I made. A haze of unreality clung to me for days, a dizziness resembling the onset of a head cold. I was constantly conscious of the idea of bumping elbows with dead souls who had nothing better to do than fritter away eternity performing clairvoyant stunts for college students. That didn’t speak well about the quality of life in the afterlife, and the experience skewed my residual belief in the neat cosmology of my Catholic upbringing. Only the triumph of reason and an explanation from Cole when I visited him the following Saturday restored my faith in an orderly universe—a universe populated by English-speaking aliens with Roman haircuts and double-knit Starfleet uniforms.
“We’re both rational people,” Cole assured me. “We both know that a spirit named Gatsby doesn’t exist. He’s just an amplification of our subconscious thoughts. All of them are,” he added with a significant glance at the Ouija board, which crouched on the card table, pretending that it hadn’t caused me all kinds of emotional trouble.
“So how did our subconscious thoughts know what was going to be on Star Trek?”
“I watched it the week before,” Cole replied. “That means I undoubtedly saw the preview for ‘A Piece of the Action’ but wasn’t paying attention. The information registered in my subconscious anyway, and it came out when we asked the board the question.”
“So that’s all there was to it,” I said with relief. “Let’s ask Gatsby about tonight’s Hogan’s Heroes.”
Linda kept asking about the animal-psychic show. The evening finally rolled around when I couldn’t face a documentary about harvesting peat moss. So I gritted my teeth, grabbed a mental handful of Mr. Spock – style logic, and informed Linda that we would indeed be watching the program. Popping in the tape, I soon found myself enjoying an episode about a Californian ostrich who wanted the psychic to tell his owner that he strongly disapproved of the smell of his encl
osure.
“I hope the psychic doesn’t visit us,” I said to Linda. “Think of how Penny would complain about her litter box.”
“You’re supposed to be changing that. The whole upstairs stinks.”
“It’s not that bad,” I said. “I’ll burn a stick of incense.”
The show ended, as usual, with the psychic relaying messages from deceased cats and dogs to their owners and, as usual, I caught myself sniffling. Our Netherland dwarf bunny Bertie sat on my lap while I petted him. His brother Rollo had been the lap rabbit, but after Rollo had suffered a heart attack in the office of a loudmouthed emergency veterinarian eighteen months earlier, Bertie had grown increasingly affectionate with us. “Rollo’s ghost must have told him he’d enjoy being petted,” I’d joke to Linda. But now the deaths of Stewart, Trevor, and Hamilton, the weeping pet owners on TV, and my anxieties about the show ganged up to clout me with a feeling of great vulnerability on behalf of all our animals.
“You sure have been a nice bunny over the years,” I told Bertie as I hugged him on the way back to his cage. “We’ll sure miss you when you’re gone.”
That was exactly the wrong thing to say. The next day, Linda called me at work and said, “Sweetheart, I don’t want you to get too upset, but Bertie doesn’t look very good this morning.”
“He was running around the dining room an hour ago,” I protested.
“I know. But you have to remember that he’s an old rabbit, and it might just be his time to go. I really don’t expect him to last the day.” Fifteen minutes she called back to tell me that Bertie had died.
Bertie’s death ruined me. I could barely string two thoughts together, unless they were the same thought. But as we were burying him, I still had the presence of mind to lumber into the house, rummage through the top drawer of my dresser, and grab the plastic sandwich bag I had stashed away. Back at the grave, I delicately positioned the tail behind Bertie’s body in a rough approximation of where it belonged.
ONE THING HAD ALWAYS bothered me about Cole’s explanation. Sure, he could have watched the previous week’s rerun of Star Trek and let his attention wander to the inside of his eyelids during the preview. And, certainly, the coming attraction could have embossed itself on his unconscious for retrieval by the Ouija board later. Trouble is, the Star Trek previews definitely, decidedly, and absolutely did not include the title of the upcoming episode. I confirmed this shortly after Cole’s supposed solution. Gatsby—whoever or whatever he was or was not—had somehow come up with “A Piece of the Action” on his own, and that “somehow” still nettled me twenty-five years later.
I brooded on this and the animal psychic while sitting in a field behind the barn, listening to the complaining twilight song of an eastern peewee. Since Bertie’s death, I’d gotten into the habit of wandering outdoors after a few minutes of watching our nightly TV show. “You don’t like not having Bertie on your lap, do you?” Linda asked me. I hadn’t realized that this double negative of a condition was precisely what agitated me. I had figured that The Crocodile Hunter and programs about balmy, exotic islands had begun to rub raw my nerves. But she had gotten it exactly right.
Our black cat Agnes made sure I didn’t keep a lonely vigil out in the weeds, midway between Hamilton’s grave and the hillock where I’d discarded spoiled eggs. Indoors, Agnes practiced aloofness. She often reacted with an indignant yowl if one of us petted her, then vigorously tongued the fur we had disturbed. Outdoors, she treated us as guests in her wide-open home. She cheered me up by jumping onto my legs, rubbing her head against my chest, purring, and rolling around. And her welcoming didn’t wear off in a moment or two, in the manner of most cats. For the half hour that I fixated on Bertie and Captain Kirk alfresco, Agnes treated me to bountiful pleasantries.
Walter took his friend’s death even harder than I did. Although the two rivals couldn’t share a room without a wire barrier between them, they had sniffed and nuzzled each other through the mesh. The height of enjoyment for Walter was plopping himself down on the linoleum and pressing his bulk against the front of Bertie’s cage when the dwarf bunny was inside. The absence of his buddy affected Walter’s appetite. Despite our agreement that we wouldn’t get another rabbit—a bunny’s modest life span ensured a tragedy every seven years or so—Linda and I decided that for Walter’s sake we needed to pick out another long-eared wire-chewing rug wetter.
“Do you know any rabbit breeders?” I asked Linda when I came back into the house. Agnes had accompanied me, but at first glance and snarl at Moobie, she turned to the door and demanded to go outdoors again.
Years had passed since we’d paid money for a pet. Most of our animals had come to us in need of a good home through channels that miraculously sprang open once word got around that we were suckers. But we decided that we wanted oodles of rabbits to choose from in order to pick out a suitable chum for our Checker Giant and a laptop companion for me. Hundreds of choices were what we preferred, and we received exactly that with our visit to Paul and Magda and their bustling backyard warren. Linda had discovered them via the frequently untrustworthy business-card-on-a-bulletin-board technique, which in the past had introduced us to junk men who wouldn’t haul junk and handymen who promised to take on Any Job, No Matter How Large or How Small, as long as it wasn’t ours. But Linda had found Paul and Magda’s card at the ever dependable Blue Ribbon Feed Company, where I weighted down my Ford Focus each Saturday with fifty-pound bags of poultry feed, rabbit pellets, and wild-bird seed. So I experienced only minor rumblings of trepidation on our drive to nearby Ionia.
My head rattled with scattered thoughts when I said hello to Magda. Three nights earlier, as a personal challenge to the supernatural powers of videotaped television shows, I had watched another installment of the animal psychic with Linda, all but daring the magnetically charged particles inside the cassette to mess with us again. The following morning, I had expected a catastrophe, but none had come. And no cataclysm arrived the day after that, just a clunk when Ollie fell two inches to the bottom of his cage after chewing through a wooden perch. The black cloud that had pressed down on us for a month had finally begun to dissipate. We weren’t merely shopping for a bunny, I realized. We were ushering in a brand-new epoch of pet happiness and well-being.
As Magda showed us around the complicated complex of cages behind the house, she spoke in such a quiet monotone that in my distracted state of half-a-mind, I thought I was hearing the hum of distant farm machinery. Although my own personality could hardly be described as dynamic, compared to the resolutely lowkey Magda, my pores oozed charisma. But once I had ratcheted myself down to a near-sleepwalking condition, I detected Magda’s subtle enthusiasm for her rabbits as she stopped here to greet a Mini Lop and refresh its water, and paused there to encourage a nursing Mini Rex mother.
I counted six rows of enclosures divided into thirty cages each and elevated three feet off the ground for easy maintenance and to discourage predators from sniffing around. Everything looked spotless. I don’t approve of keeping pet rabbits outdoors. They enjoy human contact, and the elements can be hard on them. But these bunnies seemed exuberantly healthy, and the cages all included shelters from cloudbursts. Magda’s excessively tall husband, Paul, bent at the waist to assure me that the majority would find homes long before the summer ended. It struck me that you could double the cage elevation and Paul would still have to stoop to reach the rabbits, which was probably why he concentrated on the sales pitches instead.
“This English Lop won a blue ribbon at the 4-H fair,” he said. “We let the little neighbor kid enter her. We raised her and did everything except put our names on the entry.”
Instead of questioning the ethics of cheating at a youth fair, I piped up, “She certainly looks friendly.”
“All our rabbits are friendly.” He twitched his nose in a manner that seemed endemic to bunny breeders. “That’s one of the main traits we go for. We don’t keep ones that bite.”
“What happ
ens to them?” Linda asked reluctantly.
“We sell them at the flea market to people who don’t know any better.”
Deciding that the sales pitch should be left to Magda after all, I asked her to show us the dwarf rabbits. We’d barely started down the first row when Linda pointed excitedly at a tiny grey bunny. “Is that one old enough to take home? I just love him. Look at that little face.”
“He’s already weaned and eating dry food,” said Magda.
“I don’t know. He seems awfully small.”
“We’ve sold smaller rabbits than that one,” Paul volunteered, though that would have made them nearly microscopic. I’d seen larger hamsters, but the diminutive size added to his appeal.
“If you’re sure it’s not too soon to take him,” Linda told Magda, and take him home we did. Linda fretted a bit about how quiet he acted in his cage, and I wondered why he wasn’t taking to his pellets like most rabbits. We wrote this off to his tender age, as we did his lack of enthusiasm when we set him on the couch with us after dinner.
“At least he isn’t peeing all over me,” I pointed out, recalling the opinion our first rabbit, Binky, had expressed when I’d held him for the first time.
After letting him sniff around for a few minutes, Linda put him back in his cage and covered him for the night. The next morning, she was up before I was to check on our newest resident. I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to bring us each a cup of coffee per our usual routine, but instead she came back into the room right away.
“Sweetheart,” she told me, tightening her robe. “Now, don’t get too upset. But the little bunny died.”
I couldn’t generate any enthusiasm for hauling myself out of bed. I didn’t do well with death. I didn’t do so well with the chaos of life, either. That didn’t leave much in between except for sleep, and I couldn’t sleep twenty-four hours a day, despite my most valiant efforts. The best I could do was to haul myself to my feet and in a haze of sleepwalking obliviousness try to drag myself through the rest of the day. But that didn’t prevent Bobo from finding me anyway, as sure as a tail finds its rabbit.