by John Jodzio
The only thing Scott was absolutely forbidden to do was go into his father’s office when his father was away on business. But whenever Scott’s new nanny, Rosarita, fell asleep on the couch in front of the television, Scott snuck downstairs and picked the office lock with a butter knife. Then Scott sat in his father’s high-backed leather desk chair and sipped Dr. Pepper from a bendy straw.
One afternoon, while he was in the office, Scott picked up his father’s ivory pen. The pen was cold and heavy and it felt similar to the spear he’d recently found in the back of the garage. Scott held up the pen under a desk lamp to get a closer look at it, but the pen was slippery and fell from his hand. The pen rolled under the desk and when he went to retrieve it, Scott found a red button sticking out of the floor.
Scott pressed down on the button with his hand and he heard the phone on his father’s desk ring. He waited for the phone to ring again, but it did not. Scott pressed it again and the phone rang again. Scott got up from under the desk and picked up the receiver. There was no one on the other end of the line.
Scott sat back down in the chair like his father always did. He took a sip of his Dr. Pepper and reached his foot down to press the button. The phone rang and he picked it up. Scott said “This is Ron Jacobs” in a deep voice. Again, there was no one on the other end of the line—no dial tone, no busy signal, no one wanting to talk to his dad.
The phone looked like a real phone, with a phone’s weight and heft, but when Scott followed the cord out the back of it he saw that it went down into a notch in the floorboards. And when he pulled on the cord it came out of the hole frayed, attached to nothing.
Scott’s father traded currency. Sometimes at dinner his father would sit down at the dining room table and take out a piece of paper and a pen and draw some diagrams and try to explain to Scott what he did. Scott would yawn or wonder if he could go outside and play. Sometimes his father would get a call on his cell phone and then his food would sit there at the table until Rosarita carried his father’s plate back to the kitchen.
Usually Rosarita ate dinner in the kitchen, but when his father took a phone call during dinner, Rosarita would bring her plate of food and sit down next to Scott.
“Will you take the canoe out tomorrow?” she asked him.
“I think I will,” he told her.
Sometimes Scott woke up at night screaming. He usually did not remember the nightmares that made him yell out, but whenever he woke from them Rosarita would be there. She would stroke his hair until he fell back asleep. Sometimes his father would be there too, pacing back and forth outside his room, but he would never come into Scott’s room.
“How come you don’t come in my room after I’ve had a nightmare?” he asked his dad one night at dinner.
“Are you having nightmares?” his dad asked. “That’s horrible.”
“I see you outside my door,” Scott said.
“You see me?” his dad said.
- - - - - - - -
Most days, when Scott got tired of being inside, he would go down to the lake and get into his canoe and paddle out to Gray’s Island. He was not supposed to go to Gray’s Island because it was a protected wetland and a nesting area for the endangered herons, but he dressed in a camouflage shirt and khaki shorts and wore a dark hat and sunglasses. When he got to the island he hid his canoe in the reeds. He had gotten close to one of the nests the last time he’d been there, but a mother heron had run at him, flapping her wings and squawking loudly. That time, Scott had not thrown his spear accurately. It had flown past the skinny bird and into the water of the channel. This time he tucked his pellet gun into the waistband of his shorts and if the bird charged him, he planned to take his time and shoot the bird right in its stupid face.
Scott slid his canoe onto the island and then he army crawled to the nest. The mother heron was not there. He got closer and saw that inside the nest were five speckled eggs, lying in a tightly packed half-circle. He lifted one up and shook it back and forth. It made a sloshing sound. He tapped on the shell with his finger and listened to the echo inside.
He knew the mother heron was going to return shortly, so he wrapped the egg in his shirt and stuffed it into his backpack. He ran back to the canoe and pushed off into the water. As he paddled away he stared up at the sky, waiting for the mother heron to swoop down and fight him for its baby, but the mother heron never came.
When he got home Scott grabbed a bath towel and wrapped it around the egg. He set the egg into Rusty Jones’s old aquarium and turned on the snake’s heat lamp to keep the egg warm.
“What did you do now?” Rosarita asked him when she came into his room. “Where did you get that?”
“I’m going to save it,” he told her. “I am going to hatch it and raise it as my own.”
Rosarita lifted up a picture and dusted off the top of Scott’s desk. She had been in a bad car accident when she was younger. Scott often made her take off her shoe and show him where a steel rod ran down her leg. When she first told him, he did not believe that there was metal inside her body, so she stuck a magnet to her shin.
“I will always tell you the truth,” she told him.
Scott went over and lifted the egg out of the aquarium. He held it out to her to hold, but she waved him off.
“You need to put the egg back where you found it,” she told him. “Before there is legal trouble.”
“It’s mine now,” he said. “It’s not anyone else’s anymore.”
“Maybe I’ll tell your father,” Rosarita said. “Then we’ll see?”
Scott knew that Rosarita would not tell his father. He’d recently peed off his bedroom balcony onto the top of an electrician’s truck. Rosarita had threatened to tell his father about that, but hadn’t followed through on her threat. Last week, she’d caught him in his father’s office, pressing the red button on the floor and making the phone ring again and again. She hadn’t said anything about that either.
“Go ahead and tell him,” Scott told her.
Scott’s father was traveling to Ecuador that morning to trade some currency. Before he left Scott went down to his office.
“I want a dog,” he said.
Scott did not want a dog. And he knew that his father would not get him a dog because his father had just lost his two dogs, Chief and General, after they drank some anti-freeze that a mechanic had spilled in the garage.
“I want a Jack Russell,” Scott said. “A white one with black and brown spots.”
Scott’s father nodded his head up and down and then Scott saw a slight movement in his father’s thigh. The fake phone broke the silence.
“Hold that thought,” his father said.
His father picked up the receiver and then spun his chair around away from Scott. His father’s hair had turned white long ago, but he dyed it jet-black now.
“Señor Gonsalves,” his father said. “¿Cómo está?”
Scott sat at the kitchen table and watched while Rosarita peeled carrots for dinner.
“It will be just you and me for dinner,” she told him. “We can eat in front of the television if you want.”
Rosarita once cut herself while chopping up a red pepper and when Scott begged her, she let him suck the blood from her thumb. He remembered how her blood tasted different than his, sort of salty, whereas his tasted sort of like dirt.
“If I cut myself would you suck some of my blood?” he asked Rosarita. “So we’re even?”
Rosarita did not look up from the carrots. She peeled with long strokes and the orange skin curled into the garbage can. When she finished one of them, she set it in the colander in the sink.
“That was a mistake,” she told him. “We don’t do that ever again.”
While she rinsed off the carrots, Scott walked over near her. He slid a knife out of the butcher block and pressed it into the tip of his index finger, splitting the skin. The blood came quickly to the cut and Scott snuck up behind Rosarita and press
ed his finger onto Rosarita’s lips.
Rosarita spun her head away from him and then spat into the sink. She took a washcloth and wiped her mouth with it.
“Why do you do these things?” she yelled.
- - - - - - - -
Scott checked on the egg every morning before breakfast and then at night before he went to sleep. He learned there was not much to do with an egg other than keep it warm. Occasionally when he was bored he would take it out and set it on the carpet of his bedroom and roll it across the floor with his foot. One day he took a pencil and wrote the word “Buddy” on the eggshell. This would be what he would name the bird. Either that or Merlin.
That night, even though there was bird shit all over the beach, Scott put on his trunks and went swimming. He jumped off the end of the dock and into the deep water. He dove down and rooted his hand around in the sandy bottom. A few months ago, he found a gold coin in the silt and when his father had a dinner party he had asked Scott to show it to some of the party guests.
Scott enjoyed holding the coin out to the guests and having these people look at it with excitement. Some of them asked him questions about the coin. Some of them laughed at how he answered their questions. His father was having another party next week and Scott wanted to find something else that was valuable and interesting enough to show to people. He dove and dove, but the only thing that he found was an old ceramic bowl. Rosarita called him for dinner, but he pretended not to hear her. He kept on diving and taking his hand and running it through the bottom of the lake.
He knew that if he waited long enough, Rosarita would bring his dinner down to the dock. Then he could sit with his feet in the water and eat his sandwich. His father often spoke of the appetite that comes after swimming, how food tasted different after you’d been in the water for a long time. Scott agreed that this was absolutely true.
Scott went to bed and then woke up later that night itching. He screamed and scratched and yelled for Rosarita.
“You and your father go into the lake when the caca is there,” she said. “And you expect something different?”
She ran a bath for him and poured salts into the water. She sat on the toilet and waited for the itching to stop. When it did, she helped him out of the tub and wrapped a towel around his body.
Scott knew that Rosarita sent money home to her children each month. Once, she had shown him a picture of her husband and their children standing in front of a train station. Scott had held the picture for a long time, staring at their faces. He had not asked her what he wanted to ask her.
“Do you think they miss you?” he asked her now as he climbed into bed.
“Does who miss me?” she said.
“Your children,” he said.
Rosarita pulled the blankets up to his chin and took her fingers and pushed his hair away from his eyes.
“It will not be like this forever,” she said.
“It might be like this forever,” Scott said. “You never know.”
Rosarita let her hair down and then she gathered it back up into a ponytail. She got up from the bed and walked across the room and turned off the light.
“Can I sleep with the egg?” Scott asked her.
“You cannot sleep with the egg,” she told him.
When his father came home from Ecuador, Scott asked him for a dog again. This time he found a picture on the Internet and showed it to his father. Scott made a good case for the dog. He told his father that a dog would teach him responsibility. He told him that he would take very good care of it, that he would feed it and that he would take it for walks. Scott said that if there were any vermin in the house the dog would certainly catch them or chase them into the water where they would drown or be eaten.
“This is what Jack Russells are bred for,” he said. “Killing stuff.”
He heard his father slide his foot across the floor. The phone rang.
“Ron Jacobs,” his father said into the mouthpiece. “Talk to me.”
His father covered the phone in his hand and then turned to Scott.
“Sorry, champ,” he said. “But I’ve got to take this.”
That night Scott’s father left for another business trip. Scott broke into his office and sat in his desk chair. There were some herons hooting outside. No matter how many people his father hired and fired birds would always come back and shit on their beach.
Scott had taken some wood matches from the kitchen and he lit one and threw it into the wastebasket next to the desk. The paper inside the can started on fire. While it burned, Scott went upstairs and grabbed the egg from the aquarium. He brought it down and he set it on top of the desk and rolled it back and forth. He shook it, heard it slosh. The smoke from the garbage can was billowing up toward the ceiling. Scott lifted the egg up above his head and dropped it onto the desk. The egg split apart and a grey sludge spilled out of the shell and ran over the desk and onto the carpet. Scott ran his fingers through the slurry, trying to find something he could recognize, a feather or a beak. It was just goo inside, worse than water.
“Where are you?” he yelled.
Scott leaned back into his father’s chair and he took his foot and pressed the red button on the floor. The fake phone rang. The smoke alarm went off, a horrible screech, but he plugged his ears. He kept pushing the red button. He wished Rosarita would hurry up and find him. He wished that she would put out the fire and then wrap her arms around him and carry him upstairs to bed.
WHISKERS
After Chloe’s last suicide attempt, the one with the grapefruit knife, her father, Greer Burton, cleaned out the storage space above his garage. He horsed an exam table destined for scrap off the University Hospital’s loading dock and bumped it up his back stairs with the hospital’s dolly. He purchased a cut-rate X-ray machine from a shady Russian named Yuri over in Las Cruces and then conned Alice Trincado from Invidrogen into letting him demo the rest of what he needed. Two of the four chairs from his dining room were taken hostage and placed next to a coffee table he’d found at Goodwill. The magazines that he fanned out there were mostly old and mostly his dead wife’s.
Small animals and exotics were examined upstairs. Anything large or bleeding Greer motioned into the vacant stall next to his Buick LeSabre.
One afternoon, as he hosed matted horse fur from the floor of his garage, three Mexicans drove up with a longhorn steer bumping around in the payload of their pickup.
“You that vet?” the driver of the truck yelled over the idling engine.
Greer looked over at Chloe. When she was upstairs, he handcuffed her to the radiator. When she was down here, he shackled her to the door handle of his car. He knew how bad it looked, but things were exactly this bad or worse. Something had unraveled in his daughter, and keeping her close was the only way he thought that everything in her might be spooled up again.
“You the vet?” the man asked him again.
“Sure,” he said. “For now.”
For the first month it was all word of mouth, this impromptu animal husbandry of Greer’s. He’d taken a leave of absence from his immunology research at the University to take over Chloe’s corporeal care. When money ran short, he’d let slip to a select few that he could take a look at their pets to make ends meet. He hadn’t expected much more than the occasional dog or cat, but then people began to show up on his doorstep at all hours.
A Flemish rabbit with ears the length of Greer’s entire arm. A yellow lab that had swallowed a ziplocked bag of weed. A man holding an entire pickle bucket full of angry white rats.
Whatever they brought, Greer did what he could. When he could not do anything he took some horse tranquilizer from his lockbox and made the animals very comfortable.
“You are just like a regular vet,” everyone told him. “Except that you are way cheaper.”
One Sunday in June, Greer’s neighbor, Randy Wright, rolled up Greer’s driveway. Greer watched from the dormer window as Randy pulled an ant
ique birdcage out of the passenger seat of his Jeep and lugged a large blue bird up the stairs.
“I bought him from a street vendor two weeks ago,” Randy said. “Thought the damn thing would be better company than a radio.”
Chloe was sitting on the floor across the room. Her handcuffs clinked over the tines of the radiator whenever she shifted her body. The meds that Greer forced past her tongue each morning were giving her nosebleeds, and the two wads of Kleenex she had shoved up her nostrils protruded like small tusks. She wore one of Greer’s old cowboy shirts with pearl snap buttons and a pair of his chinos that had faded to the color of twine. In the last few weeks most of her clothes had become spattered with blood—what her psychiatrist, Dr. Gupta, called “an unfortunate side effect of the side effects”—and now Greer had begun to raid his own closet, dress her in clothes he himself hadn’t seen fit to wear in years.
“Gretchen says hola,” Randy told Chloe.
Gretchen was Randy’s daughter. She was the same age as Chloe, a rail-thin girl who before Wright’s divorce Greer had often seen driving on the dirt road into town, her hands set rigidly on the wheel at ten and two. Gretchen had played on the same volleyball team as Chloe before Chloe started to stab and cut and swallow anything she could to help her depart the earth.
“Then tell her hola back,” Chloe snapped.
Randy flopped down on the couch in the waiting area, pinched a mint from the candy dish.
“I’d apologize for Chloe’s manners,” Greer told him. “But it would just make it worse for both of us.”
Wright nodded. The men had been semi-decent friends when Greer’s wife, Cathy, was still alive. They had once gone on a golf junket in Myrtle Beach and gotten wasted enough one night to run naked into the ocean together. Since Cathy died and Randall split with Lisa, neither of them made much of an effort to remain friends.