After I buried the grey male cat in the sandy soil beneath my magnolia, next to the broken-necked basset, I sold my BMW and got a three year old Ford pickup. I put the tarp and rubber gloves in the back and began making a trip down State Road 40 once every morning and once every evening, just before sunset.
Sometimes as I’m driving I hear an animal but can’t see it. I always pull over and search, but often I don’t find it. In the course of one such search I realized that I could identify each species by voice. Some animals sound like you would expect them to sound, if you expected them to talk: dead dogs speak quickly and with tangled syntax that often produces circular sentences, while deceased cats are slower and more careful, measuring out the meticulous pronunciations of a Latin teacher. Squirrels communicate in staccato snippets that sound vaguely like Vietnamese to my ears. The posthumous speech of two other species I also associate with foreign language accents: the wry humor of armadillos comes wrapped in the harsh back-of-the-throat consonants of German, while clever raccoons trade in the nasal delicacy of French.
When I feel the occasional desire to go back to work full time, I entertain the notion of becoming either a medical examiner or a detective. My avocation has given me the appropriate mindset for either occupation. In the hieroglyphic carnage of State Road 40 I see patterns; the visceral geometry of each individual metal-vs-flesh collision tells a story that I can read with increasing acumen.
Single direct hits leave one dark blotch on the pavement, attached by fragile vapor trails of blood that stretch to where the body comes to rest after its short and final migration. More often there is multiple contact: a rear wheel finishes what a front wheel started, or the impact against a front fender ricochets the hapless beast against one of the dark humps and sinews of an undercarriage.
The worst accident scenes feature bizarre zigzag patterns that indicate a poor creature’s careening path from one vehicle to another, sometimes from an unforgiving westbound chassis into an indifferent eastbound grillwork. After this sort of accident, the animal invariably confesses its confusion to me. ‘Everything happened so fast,’ it will tell me. ‘I lost my balance and couldn’t get it back.’
The ‘best’ scenes result from glancing blows, which most often produce quick and relatively painless broken necks. In many of these cases the victim literally does not know what hit it, and the bodies invariably have an attitude of peaceful drowsiness about them.
In a way, I feel better about my life now than I ever have. When I worked full time I was good at what I did, and I had a good relationship with most of my clients. But I had so little time for anything beyond ‘maintenance’: work, sleep, minimal conversation with Sarah and Chris. A forty-hour work week is a grotesque invention, if you think about it. That’s just too much time. That much work insulates you from the rhythms of nature. I never soaked in the birth of a day at dawn or its death at dusk; I never sensed the slow turning of the seasons in the air. The birth, growth and death – of plants, of pets, of my own son – these things I never really noticed.
I probably spent more time with Chris than most fathers spend with their kids. We went to Disney World and the beach, saw some spring training games in St Pete, had supper together as a family at least three or four nights a week. I loved him fiercely from the moment he was born, but that feeling always struck me as biological, instinctive. Later, as his personality developed, I found him likeable; in his innocence he found me wise. Even after Sarah and I began to grow apart she said I was great with him. The night after he died she told me she felt he never loved her as much as he did me. We were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table when she said this, the overhead light cruelly exposing the lines on her forehead and her dark-circled eyes. I’ll never forget the misery in her voice; I have no idea if she was right.
The dead animals I talk with show no signs of self-reproach, and very little concern for the mates and offspring they leave behind. Mostly they tell me the stories of their deaths. Sometimes an animal will spend its last energy regaling me with descriptions of the things it loved most on earth. One squirrel rivalled Wordsworth with her posthumous paeon to a kind of small nut that she favoured. Her sensual description – the tender cream of its waxy interior, the ripe brown smoothness of its outer shell, the delicate cap that sheltered its rounded top – was mesmerizing. The aesthetic alienness of a tin can, stripped of its wrapping and missing its top, elicited the fascinated admiration of one raccoon.
I used to be troubled by the gore that I see on State Road 40, but it doesn’t bother me anymore. Partly, I suspect, because the mind can adjust to most any situation after enough repeated exposure; ask a paramedic, or a trauma surgeon in an emergency room, or a mortician. But part of my newfound ability to face the bloody wreckage left by violent collisions comes from the animals’ own nonchalance. Not a single animal has ever dwelt in self-pity or compulsively bemoaned its mortal wounds to me. In fact, they demonstrate a remarkable equanimity about the physical processes their bodies undergo after death as well. Sometimes I come across their bodies shortly after they die, but most often I don’t arrive until after at least the first few flies and worms have begun their humble ministrations. I have never heard an animal begrudge those scavengers their due. After four months on State Road 40, what doesn’t bother my dead charges usually doesn’t bother me.
The one exception was when I came upon an orange female tabby just before sunset a quarter mile east of the St John’s river. I pulled over immediately, but it took me ten minutes to find her. She had been hit in the hindquarters, but crawled into the deep grass beside a fence post before giving up the ghost, or whatever it is animals give up when they die.
‘This will be hard on you,’ she warned me as I bent over her and stared at her distended abdomen. ‘Two males and three females,’ she said. ‘I would have delivered them in eight days, but a van hit my legs and now there’s no hope for them. One of the females wouldn’t have made it anyway, but the others were fine.’
I knelt beside her and felt the tiny waves and ripples from inside her. ‘Maybe it’s not too late for all of them,’ I said, wondering where a caesarean incision would be made on a cat.
‘A mother knows these things,’ she said in a very tired voice. ‘This will be hard on you.’ She said no more.
The first kitten died just as I laid the mother on the cold corrugations of my truck’s bed. It started mewling the moment it died – too young, I suppose, to have the power of speech.
My house is less than nine miles from the St John’s river, but by the time I got home a chorus of pitiful mewling filled my head. Five small dead voices. After a moment there were only four, then three. By the time I had dug a small sandy hollow – outside the shady reach of the magnolia’s furthest limb now – the last voice had died away. The tabby had been right. It had been hard on me.
That night I awoke from a nightmare listening to the echoes of five pre-verbal voices. I put on some clothes and walked into the back yard. The sounds and smells of two in the morning always fill me with the hoarded privilege of sweet secrecy, and I started to walk down to the lake. As I passed the magnolia, I sensed a stirring. I knew without looking that small eyes were opening, small limbs being stretched.
I kept walking, afraid that if I stopped, or turned, or squinted into the shadows, the spell would be broken. I heard behind and around me the soft rustling of many paws, padded and rough, three- and four-toed. At the water’s edge I headed east. I dared my first look at my spectral companions after I had moved halfway around the lake. A raccoon trundled along on the ribbon of packed sand to my left. To my right five kittens trailed on unsteady legs behind their mother.
I made a complete circle around the lake that night, and when I got back into my bed, the tightness in my chest was gone for the first time since Chris died.
Tonight I pulled into my driveway with a bloated cocker spaniel in the back of the truck to find Sarah’s car parked there. She got up from where she had been
sitting on the porch and walked over to meet me as I got out of the truck. She smelled the dog and stopped a couple of yards away.
‘What is that?’
I shut the door and walked back toward the bed. ‘Dead dog. Found him a couple of miles down 40.’
‘Why did you bring him here?’ she asked, up on her toes to get a glimpse of the body.
‘You won’t want to see this,’ I said. She turned away quickly when I lifted him and started for the corner of the house. ‘Why don’t you go inside while I take care of this? I’ll be in in just a minute.’
Digging is easy in sandy North Florida, and in ten minutes I stepped into the kitchen and took a drink of the ice water Sarah had poured for me. I went into the bathroom and washed my face and arms, and returned to the chair across the kitchen table from my ex-wife.
‘How many are there?’ she finally asked. She was looking out the sliding glass door toward the magnolia tree.
‘More than twenty,’ I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘It makes me feel good.’ She stared at me. ‘It seems like they deserve better than to just lie beside the road and rot.’
I watched her while she thought about that, and I considered what a fragile thing a marriage is. It’s as easily killed as any of those animals in the back yard. She sat across from me and I couldn’t begin to tell her a true answer to her question. What would she think if I said that the animals talked to me after they died? If I said that I was their caretaker, their bereaved, their final confessor?
After some reflection, Sarah let the subject drop. She started to talk about what had brought her here. She said she had needed to be alone for a while after the funeral, to sort things out. She talked about being mad at Chris for dying, about blaming me, and about sleeping too much. She talked about getting a prescription for Valium from her doctor, about numbly going through the motions at work, and about loneliness.
As she talked I found that I still loved her, and that I had missed her. Some clinical part of my mind took note of the details of her face and body, instantly familiar again, but I felt no sexual attraction to her. I suppose that my administration of the last rites so often in the previous months imbued me with something of the priest’s mortification of the flesh. In the absence of physical desire, though, I still found myself wanting Sarah back.
Soon she tentatively raised the subject of our marriage. She started to leave long pauses in her sentences, which I started to fill. We gradually realized that we both wanted to try again, but neither of us knew how. The wounds and grievances of a severed marriage rose up and silenced us. My mind was full, but I was mute. I expected her to leave.
But she said something about Chris, and I said something I remembered him doing, and before I knew it she was crying. Soon talk and memories and tears poured out of both of us and filled my small house on the lake.
After three hours of this a strange formality settled over both of us, and we both knew it was enough for tonight.
‘I should be going,’ she said, getting up. ‘I have to be in at eight tomorrow.’
‘Okay.’ I followed her to the door, and we both felt stiff and self-conscious. I knew then that Chris was still between us, and that he would be for some time.
She found her keys and we stepped out onto the front porch. She looked at her car, and then down at her keys, and then back up at me. I kissed her, but the kiss didn’t kill the awkwardness, and she stepped off the porch.
‘I’ll see you again soon?’ she asked.
‘I hope so,’ I said.
She got into her car, and then leaned back out. ‘I’ll be extra careful to watch for animals crossing the road.’
‘Please,’ I said.
The car retreated down my driveway, and she gave me a little wave. After she was on the road and out of sight I stood on the porch and listened to the receding sounds of her car. Finally there were only the sounds of the breeze and the night. I stepped back into my house.
A garden of dead animals blooms in my back yard. Some nights when I’m walking around the lake, they just show up. I never know when it’s going to happen. At first I thought maybe it happened the same time of the month. Moon phases or something. But that wasn’t it. Then I thought maybe it had something to do with the weather, but that couldn’t be, because sometimes they materialize after dry days and cloudless sunsets, and sometimes after rain and low skies. I only know it’s happening again once I’m walking in the back yard and find myself surrounded by them. They pad all around me on soft feet, and each retains its personality. The squirrels maintain their small, nervous movements, the dogs their manic sociability, the raccoon its oddly masked guilelessness, the armadillo its impervious dignity. The cats stalk and pounce, and deep in their throats they softly hum their rightness with, and in, the world.
On such nights I walk among them and do not willingly go back indoors, St Francis in the final stages of mourning. I think Sarah’s coming back, but I will still walk around the lake on nights when I can’t sleep.
One night, I hope, when I am walking with them, we’ll be joined by another.
Will he look in my eyes, in that quiet, crowded yard, and wonder at his presence there, and know me?
The Ocean and All Its Devices
William Browning Spencer
William Browning Spencer (1946–) is an award-winning American writer living in Austin, Texas. His weird tales often contain an undercurrent of dark humor while novels like 1995’s quirky Résumé With Monsters and Zod Wallop seem both sui generis and steeped in the history of strange fiction. In 2005, his short story ‘Pep Talk’ was turned into a short film for Project Greenlight and premiered at the Santa Fe Film Festival in December 2006. ‘The Ocean and All of Its Devices’ (1994), about a strange family secret at an off-season hotel, is typical of Spencer’s work: effortless, understated, at times terrifying, and nicely updating the weird tales tradition.
Left to its own enormouas devices the sea in timeless reverie conceives of life being itself the world in pantomime.
Lloyd Frankenberg, The Sea
The hotel’s owner and manager, George Hume, sat on the edge of his bed and smoked a cigarette. ‘The Franklins arrived today,’ he said.
‘Regular as clockwork,’ his wife said.
George nodded. ‘Eight years now. And why? Why ever do they come?’
George Hume’s wife, an ample woman with soft, motherly features, sighed. ‘They seem to get no pleasure from it, that’s for certain. Might as well be a funeral they come for.’
The Franklins always arrived in late fall, when the beaches were cold and empty and the ocean, under dark skies, reclaimed its terrible majesty. The hotel was almost deserted at this time of year, and George had suggested closing early for the winter. Mrs. Hume had said, ‘The Franklins will be coming, dear.’
So what? George might have said. Let them find other accommodations this year. But he didn’t say that. They were sort of a tradition, the Franklins, and in a world so fraught with change, one just naturally protected the rare, enduring pattern.
They were a reserved family who came to this quiet hotel in North Carolina like refugees seeking safe harbor. George couldn’t close early and send the Franklins off to some inferior establishment. Lord, they might wind up at The Cove with its garish lagoon pool and gaudy tropical lounge. That wouldn’t suit them at all.
The Franklins (husband, younger wife, and pale, delicate-featured daughter) would dress rather formally and sit in the small opened section of the dining room – the rest of the room shrouded in dust covers while Jack, the hotel’s aging waiter and handyman, would stand off to one side with a bleak, stoic expression.
Over the years George had come to know many of his regular guests well. But the Franklins had always remained aloof and enigmatic. Mr. Greg Franklin was a man in his mid or late forties, a handsome man, tall – over six feet – with precise, slow gestures and an oddly uninflected voice, as though h
e were reading from some internal script that failed to interest him. His much younger wife was stunning, her hair massed in brown ringlets, her eyes large and luminous and containing something like fear in their depths. She spoke rarely, and then in a whisper, preferring to let her husband talk.
Their child, Melissa, was a dark-haired girl – twelve or thirteen now, George guessed – a girl as pale as the moon’s reflection in a rain barrel. Always dressed impeccably, she was as quiet as her mother, and George had the distinct impression, although he could not remember being told this by anyone, that she was sickly, that some traumatic infant’s illness had almost killed her and so accounted for her methodical, wounded economy of motion.
George ushered the Franklins from his mind. It was late. He extinguished his cigarette and walked over to the window. Rain blew against the glass, and lightning would occasionally illuminate the white-capped waves.
‘Is Nancy still coming?’ Nancy, their daughter and only child, was a senior at Duke University. She had called the week before saying she might come and hang out for a week or two.
‘As far as I know,’ Mrs. Hume said. ‘You know how she is. Everything on a whim. That’s your side of the family, George.’
George turned away from the window and grinned. ‘Well, I can’t accuse your family of ever acting impulsively – although it would do them a world of good. Your family packs a suitcase to go to the grocery store.’
‘And your side steals a car and goes to California without a toothbrush or a prayer.’
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 177