Therapy Mammals

by Jon Methven

  The burglary lasts moments. We are back in front of my fire pit watching the culminating gasps of sunlight disappear beyond the trees, the news vans losing interest in the Great Slancy Blaze. What began in the basement became a full structure fire, boats from Weehawken summoned to douse the flames from the river. Bill Chuck is eager to discuss his role in the calamity. I am the retirement he yearned for, the apex of a career in law enforcement he entered to make a difference. He knows all the fire chiefs, all the police lieutenants and retired captains within fifty miles of Slancy, a running encyclopedia of badge resurgence.

  “Lots of whispers around the island. Plenty of complaints after the storm. Should have left Duffy O’Neal out of it. He knows the tree houses were tampered with.”

  “They’re illegal, Bill. If you did your job, I wouldn’t have had to get involved.”

  He sips his scotch, enjoys our night at the fire. Like Lieutenant Misch, there are people who never retire, but yearn for a worthy endeavor to occupy their angst. “You asked about the Hendersons’ security tape.”

  He pulls out a portable hard drive no larger than his thumb. It contains death for certain, potentially a homicide. Logic demands the object that holds my secrets should be larger. A DVD, an eight-track cartridge.

  “How did you get it?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

  “How far back?”

  “Enough.”

  I set my glass in the yard. “Did you look?”

  Bill shakes his head. “I know without looking you didn’t do what you think you did. But in case I’m wrong, what I don’t know can’t be used against you.”

  I take the object and walk it to the porch. My screen destroyed, I point the projector against the house, spotlighting the vinyl siding that offers an added dreariness to the black and white images.

  Bill stands. “I’ll wait out front.”

  “No. Stay.”

  The video begins last spring, footage of my backyard from the Hendersons’ view. I fast forward through summer and autumn, and then the alternating scenes of blistery days and twinkling nights until we arrive on January 11. Hours pass in seconds when there is only daylight, the backyard empty, and once night falls I emerge, fat and lonely, depositing myself in the Jacuzzi. I fast forward to January 12.

  January was when the blackouts began. My facts are that I was at work on the morning of January 12, a storm system hovering in the Carolinas that I failed to mention was due to hit the region that week. I fast forward until a body emerges, our nanny, Tilly, wandering in the January cold. She deposits two buckets at the edge of the tub, staggering, hovering over the water and looking into the hungry heat. She does it, overturning one of the buckets into the now rocky Jacuzzi, the red dye innocently costing me hundreds of dollars. She stands upright and glances back toward where we stand. Looking at the house, paranoid, she steps opposite toward the woods, an awkward motion that seems significant. I play it back again.

  For an instant, I expect to see myself enter the backyard, a hockey mask from VillageShop perched on my brow, slamming a hammer into her porridge head before drowning her in my utopia. Karma intercedes instead. On the playback a chipmunk crawls out of the hill and flitters across the icy patio, Tilly’s head shifted so that she watches the house instead of where she steps. At the last moment she looks down, startled by the shadow. She attempts to halt her weight from coming down on the tiny chipmunk, the creature frightening her, the aerobics of old knees and inebriated reflexes colliding with the seasonal irritation of slippery landings. She falls hard against the pavement.

  Two spots of blood. The first, her forehead, as the forensics suggested, followed by her unconscious heap rolling into the water. The second, a chipmunk, its posterior crushed, bleeding as it tugs itself toward the woods, smearing its wretchedness onto our crime scene.

  “Yes!” I shoulder a fist to the heavens, turning to high-five Bill Chuck for what he always knew was an accident. I grab his head in my hands and kiss the top of his pate. The woman is dead either way, and I want to feel sadness. But she was, in fact, stealing from me. She did dump dye into my tub. And more importantly, just as the police suggested, I had nothing to do with her death. The definition of a serial killer is someone who murders three or more people. While it is possible I will have a hand in fulfilling that obligation before the week is out, I did not murder my nanny.

  “To Tilly,” I say, toasting Bill.

  “And chipmunks,” he adds.

  Deliveries At The Hendersons

  Twelve InstaDinner Ten-Quart Programmable Pressure Cookers ($120 each). Three Universal Two-Button Garage Door Remote Controls ($98 each). Four Enermonster Portable Lithium-Ion Batteries ($900 each). Three Wanderlust Oversized Collapsible Picnic Coolers ($54 each). Ten fire extinguishers ($70 each). Four rolls of Multiuse Duct Tape ($9 each). Miscellaneous toys: action figures, marbles, jacks, Legos, Matchbox Cars, Erector sets, copper-coated BBs ($400). Nails, bolts, screws, washers ($200). Terrorism is expensive.

  The boxes arrive at the Hendersons in waves, Bill Chuck and I watching the property and quickly shuffling the items into my shed. By Josey’s doing, Tug Reynolds’s phone number was shifted to a new cost center within the Gopa bureaucracy. Any purchases will be routed from the athletic department, to the faculty, to the administration, to an account Josey set up for miscellaneous expenses. There orders will rest for thirty days, at which point the company will reissue them to be cycled through the cost centers until someone bothers to notice.

  “Take this with you,” Little Petty says, shoving a knife into my waistband. He is not suspicious in Slancy, a devoted employee of the Sedlocks. He arrives and carts away the material, not offering details of where the equipment is being assembled.

  “What for?”

  “The blade is made of horse bone. In case they wave a metal detector, they won’t discover the knife. I used to wear a small one in my anus. Just in case.”

  My task is reconnaissance. I am as guilty as the others, although I do not know how to build bombs other than a brief explanation I obtained from the internet. The toys and nails and BBs and tiny projectiles are placed into the pressure cookers, which are packed into the coolers with the fire extinguishers and batteries. Each pressure cooker is connected to a battery and rigged up to the garage door openers, which Little Petty will be holding.

  When the power source is turned on, the pressure cookers heat the toys at temperatures of 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Petty has augmented the cookers by removing the steam valves that control the pressure. Once it reaches a breaking point, the cookers will explode, detonating the fire extinguishers, and dispersing the contained objects at speed of 1,500 miles per hour, roughly the velocity of thousands of toy bullets.

  Red Herring

  I meet Capra in a coffee shop on West Tenth Street, the horse-bone knife strapped to my ankle. It is June, and the front doors are open, spilling a soft jazz onto a sunlit sidewalk. I am showered and shaved, honoring my agreement with Gus, a clean suit. Capra wears a white cotton shirt and jeans, Louis Vuitton moccasins, dark sunglasses he removes to reveal blue eyes. When he smiles, his teeth are a piercing white. He has an optimistic sheen, as if a descendant of the original Frank Capra, and the same idealism that defined his ancestor’s films are vital to his drug operation. He looks like every Gopa father, and he sees the same when he looks at me, only I plan to destroy his life. This man is the source of the poison my daughter ingested.

  A man seated at a table nearby stands. As Little Petty predicted, he waves a metal detector across my extremities. No one speaks until the examination is complete. Capra summons a waiter to take my order, coffee. A pit bull with a giant neck lies panting near Capra’s foot, and it rises to greet me with a wet mouth.

  “Dezzy, be nice to Mister Pistilini.”

  “Call me, Pistol.” I let the dog lick my hand before I drop to one knee and massage his bell
y. The animal is on its side, my second killer dog in two weeks.

  “You have a way with animals, Mister Pistol. Dezzy doesn’t like anyone. Do you own a dog?”

  “A neighbor’s kid is violently allergic. We all agreed without discussing it we would not have pets.”

  He shrugs at my suburban allegory. “I recognize you from the TV. You say the weather, yes.”

  “I don’t work there any longer.”

  “A new occupation.” He offers a warm smile. I will destroy everything he has worked so hard to build.

  Bill Chuck and Lieutenant Misch have researched Capra. Antonio Bernardo Capra, age forty-seven, has long considered himself a musician. Releasing several hip-hop albums in the late nineties that did not achieve sufficient sales, he moved into the production end of the business. He has a stable of musicians, although no one who has broken through the perilous mediocrity of today’s musical apex. It is mostly a hobby, a front to his more lucrative occupation as a white-collar drug dealer.

  He has developed a unique clientele. Rather than bankers and executives, he services the privileged mothers and faculty and even students in the private school community. He does not dabble with heroin or cocaine or corner dealers, only designer drugs and crooked laboratory workers and dirty pharmacists. The new drug culture. His clients do not go on methamphetamine rages. They seek a controlled buzz, an ordered chemistry. This is polite addiction. He wears loafers to business meetings instead of a Ruger.

  According to Misch, he feeds drugs to similar schools from Maine to Virginia, civil places where no one likes to talk about chemical opiates, which is good for business. He has a Russ Haverly in every school, and often several Toby Daltons operating at the student rung. Misch claims drug enforcement agents know about Capra, although he is smart, overly cautious, civil in ways that other drug dealers are not. It is possible he knows that I have been a customer for some time, paying thousands for the elusive Luderica. He is recruiting me to be his new Russ. That his dog approves of me is fortunate.

  “I was sorry to hear about your friend, Mister Tug.”

  “Terrible thing.”

  “A good associate. I had nothing to do with his departure.” No, but someone at our table did. I nod. “The phone, Mister Pistol. Why you keep it?”

  “I thought he might come back for it.”

  The waiter arrives with my coffee. Capra drinks his black so I do the same. “And after the body was discovered, you still thought he might return?”

  I cannot tell him that my associates are as dangerous as him, idealist hackers who are using the phone to fund-raise for a terrorist act. “It was silly to keep.”

  “Perhaps you wondered who was on the other end,” Capra says. “Perhaps you were waiting for me.” He sets down his mug and moves the chair forward, shoving Dezzy out of the way. “You see, Mister Pistol, I know who you are. I know where you live. You have a wife, just like me. You have kids. Whatever dispute you had with Mister Tug does not concern me other than the money I am owed. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “We are the same. If you follow my direction, we can make much money together.” He takes out a pen and writes on a sheet of paper that he passes across the table. Months earlier, Russ owed this man forty grand. With interest, it is now eighty-five. “You arrived empty handed, Mister Pistol. Our young associate tells me he sent you with my money.”

  I shake my head. “Toby is mistaken.”

  “Dishonesty.” Capra sips his coffee. “You see my difficulty with your Toby. He is young. He possesses an arrogance that does not coalesce with my operation.”

  “Toby can be useful.” I reach inside my pocket, Capra and the man at the next table watching my hand, which emerges with a piece of paper. It is a list from Toby, a new order, which I pass across the table. “One hundred thousand on delivery. The money you are owed plus an advance. To begin on the right foot.”

  Capra smiles. He likes that his dog likes me. He appreciates that we have a mutual distrust of Toby Dalton.

  He hands the paper to the man, who tucks it into his coat. “Are you prepared to make this exchange today?”

  “Next Saturday.” He frowns, expecting the answer. “A school near Chinatown. Address is on the paper,” I say before he can give instructions. “There will be a black bus. The money will be on the bus.”

  “We used to meet at a harbor in Weehawken.”

  “I don’t own a boat, Mister Capra.”

  He considers the location. “School on Saturday. Empty. What else is on this bus?”

  “Tourists.”

  He smiles. “Tourists never know where they are.” He sips coffee, enjoying my company. “Where are they going?”

  “Red herring,” I say, wondering if he’ll understand the cultural metaphor. “It has nothing to do with our business.”

  He nods. The large man stands and buttons his jacket. “Mister Pistol, may I make a suggestion.”

  “Of course.”

  “Toby,” Capra says. “Perhaps he should be present for the exchange. I believe it does a young man wonders not to take things for granted.”

  My sentiments exactly.

  Gus Murders Millicent

  Clint Eastwood gives birth to four kittens in the seclusion of my backyard shed, the brood proving the opposite of their hermitic mother and fawning for attention. We each name one. Gus chose the soft brown kitten with a dark eye, Millicent. Iliza the runt, Burt; Laura’s choice was Pancake, the brute, which sidles next to its mother drinking milk, stopping only to scratch away a playful hand. One kitten is distinguishable from the others in that it looks exactly like Clint Eastwood. I name her Worthy. Iliza notifies me we are keeping them. I will not attempt an auction. These are not kittens that will appear on fliers attached to telephone poles, or wear cat hats, or sleep in cat beds. They will live in our backyard where they will kill chipmunks and shit in sand traps and avoid cuddling if they can help it.

  A Monday in June. I enjoy coffee with my wife while uploading the video of me not murdering my nanny to the Gopa website, a subtle achievement I feel honored to expose. No one doubts I had something to do with it, but in the conversations we are not part of, vindication will earn me points with the nannies. Gus arrives in the kitchen dressed not as Millicent, but in a regular Gopa uniform, his hair combed, shoes polished, an impostor to our morning routine.

  He pours himself a bowl of cereal. “I’ve been thinking about taking a writing course this summer. There are workshops for teenagers in the city.”

  “Sure, we should look into it.” My tribe leaps from my skin, a sonic thunder in my chest. “I didn’t know you were interested in writing.”

  “Miss Mateo talked to me about it. She says memoir writing is a hot topic.”

  “That’s great,” Laura says. She contains a similar excitement over the transformation even as we process that thirteen-year-olds do not write memoirs. “What is your memoir about?”

  “Some Millicent. Some school. Mostly about being an outsider.” Gus explains through the cereal. “It’s titled, My Year As An Old Woman. That was Miss Mateo’s idea.”

  It is a relief to have Gus back, even if he is taking cues from a terrorist. “Crazy Miss Mateo,” I say.

  Gus stops eating and stares with his tender eyes, his serious side. “She’s not crazy, dad. She just cares too much.”

  If Our Peace Was Everlasting

  “Mix of insanity and greed as we hustle through the work week, an angry, suffocating, comatose slog toward Friday,” I write. “Chance of inebriation, seventy percent, the dog meat trade out of Thailand impossible not to consider humane each time I see a therapy mutt riding shotgun in a Gucci crocodile tote. As far as crocodiles, expect mild hatred and distrust toward the species with very few consumer groups advocating for preservation of their hides. Local fishermen will do well to hit the eastern shores of Sl
ancy even though it is a gated community, the water and beaches illegal for most anglers. There’s a sixty-two percent chance of God, according to the neighbor attempting to evict me. There is no past or present or future, it is all happening simultaneously, that we are surrounded by Gods, inside and out. Pressure systems out of the subconscious suggest we are all our own Gods. Be a good God today.”

  This morning on Lustfizzle, “22 Times Penelope Garcia Had an Itch During the Weather,” an assembly of just that—short videos of the beautiful newscaster scratching a mild disturbance and distracting the broadcast region. Popular on the Gopa website, a discussion about sexual currency, a number of parents weighing in, both moms and dads, that they would either receive or issue fellatio to assist their child’s academic career. We are all on our best behavior about the ECI program. A mother accused one of the fathers of sexually assaulting her in a school elevator when the tip of his flaccid penis bumped against her thigh in the crowded space. It is a claim she cannot prove and he cannot refute because we voted for elevator privacy during last year’s PTA, forcing removal of the cameras. Most parents believe the victim is lying to gain advantage with the ECI board, although our inherent multicultural agenda insists we ostracize the pervert. There is a petition to have my family removed from Gopa Academy next year. Posted to the site anonymously, more than a hundred parents have signed the document, which would mark the first time a parent, and not the child, was the result of expulsion.

  I concentrate on my cell phone as we make our way to Gopa, the dwindling days of the school campaign. Jackson and Jay and Rhythm and Damian sit toward the front of the bus, ignoring me. The Sedlocks sit behind me, where they can monitor my movements, Tungsten occasionally reading aloud a line in preparation for opening night, and also to bother Iliza. Ray McClutchen has stopped pedaling to work, jeopardizing our civilization’s last stand against global warming. Rumors out of the nanny chain are that Olivia McClutchen is pregnant with Devin Brenner’s child, and they are deciding whether to abort or announce it. We all have been invited to Maddie’s birthday party this week, an invitation that cannot be rescinded or adequately ignored because it is inconceivable to take our grievances out on a three-year-old and her temperamental mucous membranes.