by Jane Bradley
I scraped the inside smooth with my knife-edge, listened to the soft dry rattle sound of metal grazing skin. I left the head on, couldn’t see a way of gutting the head without crushing the shape of it, and I loved that thin black tight line of a mouth, the glass black bead eyes. I hoped it would dry without stinking, hoped there wouldn’t be much in that paper-thin skull that could rot. I had heard that worms were just one long belly and figured it could be true of snake. I cut the guts out and hoped the brain would just shrivel and shrink to nothing more than a seed.
I ran the skin along my arms, hands, fingers, closed my eyes and felt the skin tickle across my neck and face. I wanted to slip inside that tight skin and wriggle through the grass to the woods and feed on bugs and berries — whatever snakes ate. I wanted to know the feel of living in snakeskin clothes and I thought maybe if I could find enough snakes, I could stitch the skins together and wear them, be supple and silent, yet still alive.
I curled the gutted snake around my wrist and liked the look of its smooth gray-black skin on my pale freckled arm. I tried knotting it together, but it wouldn’t hold. So I slipped into the house and found scotch tape and then made myself a snakeskin bracelet, arranged the head to fall centered on the back of my hand. I was something wild then, exotic. I sneaked in the bathroom and put on lipstick, powder, and practiced drawing on black-lined Cleopatra eyes.
We lived in the country, had six dogs, “Baby,” the mother German shepherd, married to her son “Bo” and their four puppies we had not been able to give away. But there were four kids so each of us claimed one until it was time to lose it, even then knowing that to own one was a temporary stage. My puppy was named Sybil because I’d read a story about Sybil, a beautiful witch, and the name seemed to fit her silver-black coat. My Sybil had been missing for days. “Dogs roam,” Momma kept saying. But she was only a puppy, I argued, and puppies were supposed to come home.
It happened every summer. There was a stench outside. The septic tank backed up, and Daddy had to lift the heavy lid, dip tools into the muck and clear whatever seemed to clog it when there wasn’t enough rain. The tank was in the backyard, not far from the swing set, its lid like a roof on a playhouse. My mother had planted lush green mint around it. We often played there, mindless of the muck beneath. We enjoyed the elevated square of wood where we could play house, board games, Barbies, pretend to be on a raft bobbing down a wide river in the backyard. But sometimes it smelled awful, and Daddy would shake his head, frown, go outside and fix it the way daddies were supposed to do. “Don’t play near that thing,” Momma said when it was stinking. “It’s nasty. You might pick up some kind of disease.”
It was a Sunday morning, still cool, just after breakfast. My daddy said he’d have a look. He put on overalls, thick brown gloves, and took a shovel, rake, and a broken broomstick. I followed and watched, still not understanding the mysteries of toilets and septic tanks any more than I grasped electricity, radios, the tides, the order of planets and movement of stars.
Sally and I sat far back in the grass as he bent, gripped the lid in his hands, and pulled. I could see it was heavy. My daddy was a big man and had to lift it, take a breath, then slide the wooden platform sideways where it tilted into the grass. My sister and I covered our mouths and noses with our shirts. The stench was awful, and we stood way back because we’d been told the trap was deep and full of sewage — we might drown if we got too close and slipped.
His face was awful, twisted, frowning in the heat. I could see he was doing his best to get this finished without having to breathe. He stirred the thick gray muck with the broomstick, made a face, stepped back. I moved closer, knew he had found the problem and could solve it, but he hated the job. I could see by the way he clenched his jaw and turned his head. He saw us watching. “Y’all get inside,” he said. But I wouldn’t move. “Get on! You kids don’t need to see this!” Those words only locked my determination, a forbidden sight from the sewer, I had to know. My little sister ran off, but I stood there and watched him bend to pick up the shovel, stoop and reach into the sludge and lift something, the sodden dead shape he had found. The thick muck dripped off in clumps, almost steaming in the sunlight as he swung the shovel, then dumped it all in the grass. “Go on!” he yelled.
But I went closer, saw it, the shape of Sybil there, my puppy, the flies already swarming, the mouth open, tongue gray and thick, stiff between her teeth. I couldn’t stop staring. I stood, clenched my hands at my sides, and screamed.
How did it happen? How did a puppy get trapped in a septic tank covered with a lid that was difficult even for my daddy to lift? We looked for a sign that she had clawed her way in, drawn by the smell. Dogs are like that. Maybe she had dug a hole under the lid somehow and fell in. But there were no signs of digging. Momma said someone must have done it on purpose. Someone threw her in for meanness, someone’s idea of a trick. I’d seen boys blow up frogs with firecrackers; I’d seen them club an opossum to a bloody mess for fun. I’d heard how easy it is to stomp mice, swallow goldfish, drown cats. I grasped what should have been beyond me. My Sybil was thrown in a sewer and drowned.
I never got the chance to bury her. Daddy said he would take care of it, but from the window I saw him load the trash can and carry my Sybil off to the dump.
I laughed at death once. Not long after the death of Sybil, I learned the tool of irony, distance, humor, how to take off from pain. It was my goldfish: Flip and Flap. I was cleaning out their fishbowl, standing at the kitchen sink, my mom peeling potatoes alongside me at the counter. I used a ladle to scoop the fish out, put them in a fresh bowl of water while I used a rag to scrub their bowl, wipe the scum off the glass, arrange little rocks and seashells at the bottom. I wanted them to be happy, and dutiful as always, I took care of my pets. But this time for some reason I was hurried, felt the pressure of something over or behind me. I was nervous, felt the ground trembling under my feet, and in my confusion I switched Flip and Flap from bowl to bowl, cleaning each bowl out, and then poured them down the drain. I saw the bright flashing tails sloshing down the dark hole in an instant. I gasped, saw them in my mind again, spilling and splashing with water down the drain.
“What happened?” Momma said.
“They’re gone,” I whispered. I glanced at her, then looked from bowl to bowl to be sure of their absence. I bent and stared down the drain as if somehow they might throw themselves up again into the air. I’d seen it at the lake; sometimes fish threw themselves out of the water. But not Flip and Flap. “They’re gone,” I said again. “I poured them down the drain.” Suddenly I was laughing. I held on to the rim of the sink. “Flip and Flap are gone.” I could see them together in the dark tunnel of water, looking puzzled at each other like cartoon fish. I could see them gush from pipe to pipe to the Tennessee River, see Flip and Flap, yellow cartoon characters beyond death in animation, flapping their fins and talking to each other as they found their way out to sea. I couldn’t stop laughing. Then I was crying, laughing, and crying until my mother pulled me to a chair, held me and said, “Don’t worry baby, we’ll get you more,” as if that could bring them back.
My friend April lived beyond the small patch of woods across from my house. When her dog Joe died, she immediately came panting red-faced, out of breath to me. “We gotta bury Joe,” she said. She didn’t tell me how he died, just that we had to bury him, and she stood there waiting for me to tell her what to do. The problem was he was a big dog, part golden retriever maybe, some German shepherd mixed with something else. He weighed as much as I did, at least. She said she wanted to start her own cemetery in her backyard and since I had my own tiny graveyard for my pets, I had to come and help her pick the spot.
I took Daddy’s shovel and a yardstick, and I ran inside to get the small white leather New Testament that had been given to me at vacation Bible school. I knew I was to read “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” but I’d never find the phrase in all those words, so w
e would say what we knew of the traditional ceremony and grip little Bibles in our pious, sweaty hands.
As we entered her backyard she told me, “Joe looks awful.” I stopped and stared over at the heap wrapped in an old red blanket in the corner of her yard.
“Let’s just do it,” I said. I found a spot where the dirt looked soft under saplings, so we cleared leaves and started to dig. The heat was thick with gnats, flies, mosquitoes, bees. April wanted to wait until it got cooler. I frowned at the dirt and kept digging, said, “He’ll only stink, April. And the flies will get him. How would you like flies crawling all over you?”
We dug silently until the hole looked huge. It was late, and we were hot and hungry. “It’s supposed to be six feet for humans,” I said, “and half that, three feet for a dog,” as if there were a formula for the way these things were done. We pushed, pulled, and prodded old Joe over, rolled him into the hole, and covered him quickly. But the hole wasn’t deep enough. There was one blond paw still sticking out. We piled on more dirt, tried adding rocks and leaves, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Finally I stepped back wanting to cry from the sheer heat and dirt of it. “We’ve got to pull him out again,” I said.
April stepped back, turned toward her house, plopped on the ground, and said. “We’ve got some peanuts and lemonade in my house.” She stood and without a word I followed. We washed our hands and faces, stuffed ourselves, and watched Popeye cartoons on TV until her dad came home. We told him the story, and I felt like crying with relief when he said, “That’s all right, girls. I’ll do it. You go on and play.”
What a daddy, I thought, as we went to April’s room to play grown-up with her momma’s makeup. Her momma was snapping beans for supper, and her daddy was sitting at the kitchen table eating peanuts and drinking iced tea. It was quiet in her house. I watched April sit with cotton balls stuffed between her toes, painting her toenails cherry red. She wasn’t worried about Joe. Her daddy would bury him; her daddy wouldn’t take him to the dump. All she had to think about was perfectly painted toes. I turned to the mirror and looked at myself, forced a smile to show my dimples, then turned my profile, lifting my chin, and tried a sultry look. No use. I still had a baby face, even though I’d made my mother cut off those Shirley Temple curls. I wanted a new look. I was ten, almost a grown-up. Some girls in my class were already wearing bras, though I still had the wiry thin body of a boy. I picked up a black eyeliner pencil, touched the tip with my tongue, and pulled at the corner of my eye. I practiced again and again, erasing the mistakes with Vaseline, worked until I had it. I stepped back to see myself, sucked in my cheeks, trying to show cheekbones. My mouth looked like a fish, and my hair was stringy from sweat and dust, but I had it. I turned to April, did my best to tilt my head in a regal pose. “Look, I’ve got Cleopatra eyes.”
“Count your blessings,” my momma always said. “Be grateful for what you’ve got.”
One Christmas I got an Annie the Accident Doll. It was a cheap Christmas, a desperate Christmas, a struggle to act out the required drama of peace and good will. We knew our toys came from the “Toys for Tots Drive.” Annie the Accident Doll came in a torn white cardboard box with a red cross stamped on the front. She came with accessories that could only sicken, hurt, or heal: A thermometer painted with a red line permanently fixed at 102 degrees, a pink plastic crutch that fit in her slotted pink hand and under her arm, a bloody gauze bandage to tie around her head, a sling for one arm that was jointed at the elbow to bend into the readymade cast, and even stick-on pink circles for chicken pox or measles, whatever disease I desired. She was a stiff sad thing in a pink dress, her panties missing along with the Band-Aids and half of what would be her chicken-pox scars. Her hair was tangled, dress rumpled from some other little girl’s hands. Clearly a used thing, her hair would never go back right again, and one glass eye kept sticking shut.
It was a day of tangerines, candy canes, dirty stuffed animals, used sweaters, cars with wobbling wheels, bent Slinkys, tangled yo-yo’s, old things one step away from someone else’s trash. There was one new toy, a red plastic fireman’s hat for Glenn. He was proud of that hat, ran around the house with a detergent bottle ready to squirt and extinguish an imaginary fire. My daddy grabbed him, a long arm swung out from the chair where he sprawled, dozing, or cussing, drooling, chewing his dead wet cigar, crying, yelling, head shaking, a pathetic stinking drunk. His hand reached, caught Glenn around the waist, grabbed the fireman’s hat and flung it, plastic crashing with a smack against the wall. Glenn scooped it up and, silently crying, stood there and punched the dents back out to some kind of shape. I stared at this man I called my daddy. He glared at Glenn and said, “Throw it out, goddamn it. You don’t want to be a fireman like your daddy. Your daddy is sorry as hell. He’s no damn good.” Then he leaned forward and sobbed.
There was no room for anger, rage, no defense against my daddy drunk and crying on Christmas. I was the used doll, newly wrapped and unwrapped only to comfort, listen, staring blankly as he clutched and mashed me against his sweating chest. I was a doll who did what the man at the factory had made me do.
I listened for my mother, prayed she’d stay in the kitchen, drinking from her own hidden bottle of bourbon as she mashed and tore white dough canned biscuits for chicken and dumplings, her homemade Christmas specialty.
I was Annie the Accident Doll, the broken thing with dirty red hair and lost panties. I came equipped with a fixed blank mouth and eyes, uncomplaining, and ready to survive all kinds of pain.
I burned that doll that Christmas. I gave her all available diseases and accidents in a single day, then carried her out to the trash. I burned her in the barrel, watched her face blacken and melt, saw her pink dress shrivel and burn. I was Chatty Kathy locked away in a closet, shaking my head, shouting into the darkness, my silent voice crying, “No! No! No!”
I used to shave my heels in the bathtub after a long soak in hot water, using my mother’s razor. I liked to watch the dead white skin clump up the blade, shake it clean in hot water, and shave the balls of my feet, toes, ankles, legs. I even shaved my arms. Had I been old enough for pubic hair, no doubt I would have shaved that too, aiming for the clean bare folds of skin as pink and white as the plastic bottom of a doll.
I bit my nails, chewed my hair, plucked out my eyelashes, peeled my lips with my teeth, tore scabs just to see the bright bursting drop of blood. I was alive if I was bleeding. Anyone knew that only girls, not dolls, could bleed.
“Ignore her, and she’ll quit,” Momma said. But I kept at it, ripping at myself, blind and indifferent to whether I was noticed. I drew back into my own secret closet inside where I could do what I wanted, clicking and whirring out my mechanical habits until a gear snapped, a wire loosened, a battery sealed tightly in my back ran down. I stopped in time, a dead thing, a doll worn down who only stood still, opened her eyes when they raised her, waited for her arms and legs to be moved.
“Whore slut bitch cunt. You goddamned no good cocksuckin’ whore.” Words I knew before I knew them. Slap-sound words pounded my ears. I stood back, held the wall behind me, listened, watched, not knowing what the words meant, but knowing by the way he spit them out that they were something awful like the cat pissing on the couch, the puppy shitting in the hallway, something awful, disgusting and mean. My mother stood there, face blank, shaking the ice in her drink, staring at him defiantly, sometimes whispering, “You son of a bitch.” Words slapped, wrestled, grabbed, and clawed until finally he exploded across the room, grabbed her with one hand and slapped, punched, shook, slapped again, until she screamed, “Please! Stop it! Please!”
What was a whore, I wondered, knowing somehow it was a bad woman, something dirty, like a bug or a rat, something rotten and sneaky and mean. My mother was one sometimes, according to Daddy. Even my sister, Ruby, was one, he said. And he fucked whores sometimes. He’d tell us. He’d come in drunk and tell how he fucked whores, and he said it with a grin
. He puffed up his chest, and shot the words out with pride, as if he had hit a moving target or caught a monster fish. He would come in drunk and dirty, swagger across the kitchen and throw a beer bottle at my mother. “Yeah,” he’d sneer. “Goddamn it, I went out and fucked me a nigger blond whore!”
I tried to see this, but couldn’t. I saw images of black women like the ones in his magazines, women with giant round breasts, long legs spread. Some had straight black hair; some had Afros; and some with those white-blond bubble hairdo wigs. I’d seen the magazines he kept under the mattress on his side of the bed. My sister had shown me. “That’s what happens when you grow up,” she said. I saw the white woman laid out on a table with fruits piled all around her and between her legs, the men with their clothes on bent over eating, one licking cream off her belly and one reaching for a grape from the cluster between her legs with his teeth. She looked dead to me, and I knew she was a whore. I cried and told Ruby that I was a good girl and that would never happen to me. But I couldn’t stop looking at the dead whore woman being eaten like fruit. Her eyes were closed, arms at her sides, her palms turned up empty to the air. The men crowded around her like our dogs at feeding time when I scraped kitchen scraps into pans scattered in the backyard. The bad-girl-whore-dead-woman lay there, in the black and white photograph, her blond hair sprayed into a flip just above her shoulders, her eyes — I looked closely, they were shaped with black liner, and her darkly painted lips were slightly open as if she were about to kiss the air. She lay still, waiting, and Ruby would never answer when I’d ask, “What happens after the picture. Will she wake up? What are they going to do?”