The Dead Animal Man comes in the morning as the mist is rising, comes in a truck like a
square thing rolling, the truck's eyes dead looking as the eyes of the animals it comes after,
comes silent and bleary like it was something melting. Ricky's mother said they couldn't take
Slip with them, said the damned dog would eat them out of house and home, the mangy son-of-
a-bitch anyway, she said. Said he had so many ticks on him he look pearled.
This was when we didn't have any water and neither did they and both our families carried it
from the house across the street, threw bucketsful down the toilets to flush them, Ricky's
father going off about the same time as mine, his to I don't know where, mine to Adak, Alaska
on the Bering Sea where you could see the lights of Russia across, he wrote back. This was
when we lived by an alley I thought was the alley by the Alamo, across from where there lived a
pinto pony and a Navajo, like in the song.
The Dead Animal Man wakes me up. I can hear the gears of his truck a mile away; swear it floats
onto earth like an angel from a shadowy side of heaven. I can hear it when it touches down.
“Are they Okies?” I had asked my mother when they first moved in, when I had seen them out
the window, Ricky, his mother, sister and father before his father went away somewhere, his
father tall and thin looking, his mother a red head, collar-and-cuffs red head Ricky said, his
sister the way I pictured an Okie to appear, hair messed, body all knees and elbows, and lacking
in vitamins C and D. My cousin Boyd Lee in Utah had had his head grow too big from lack of
vitamins C and D and I had looked out the window again at the girl, but her head had seemed
normal.
The Dead Animal Man comes because of the fog that presses in at night so that birds fall from
the sky and walk into things, seagulls and ducks standing in the yard looking bewildered, dogs
and cats wandering into the street and under the tires of cars trying to get somewhere, too, the
fog pushing in like a wave from the ocean and then leaving behind it everything confused and
slow moving, sometimes dead.
“Why wouldn't she take him?” I asked Ricky. “You can't just leave a dog behind,” I said.
My father had gone off north and had said he'd send for us or come back to get us, or send
money, but other than the letters about the lights of Russia, we hadn't heard anything for a
long time. We were going to try and find him in some way and be reunited, but I imagined the
dumb animal standing there when Ricky and his mother and sister had gone, and not having any
idea what to do or how to find them, and then the fog pressing in and what would always follow
one way or the other.
I remembered one time when I had gone to school and come back home, my mother had
changed all the furniture around, and all I could do was stand and be uncertain, there being
phantom chairs and a sofa where I wanted to sit, I thought, the chairs and sofa in their new
places, the coffee tables and end tables and bookcases having a particular bewilderment too, it
seemed, the same confusion I had had when coming out of the store one day and heading in
the wrong direction and suddenly it was like something had shifted and only I had not changed
and I wasn't completely sure about that. If the fog had come in that day I think I might have
just laid down and waited for some white-winged angel to find me, lift me above to where I could
see, outthink the Dead Animal Man.
“She just won't and that's all there is to it, she said.” Ricky and I were in love, and he protected
me in the fog, when it came, held his hand out in it when his body had disappeared into its thick
and dripping otherworld.
He had learned the dimensions of the sidewalk, knew where the curb was leading to the street.
If I held his hand and watched the outline of his feet I wasn't afraid. It was like being led
through a cloud, it rushing past and against and through me, cool and circling. We walked the
block of where our houses were, the streetlights above us wide, faint halos, sounds and cries
from animals weak and boxed-in sounding, the cries of the birds as if sliding down long drizzles
of dampness, Ricky's hand and feet sometimes disappearing from me, my own hand
disappearing.
“What if your father comes back?” I had said to him in the conversation about leaving the dog.
“He'll know we're gone is what,” he said. “What did he think we were supposed to eat, anyway?
How long did he think we were supposed to wait?”
My mother and Ricky's had become friendly since having to borrow water, their house on the
other side of the Martinez', who said they were Spanish, my mother saying they spoke Mexican
as far as she was concerned. She said Ricky's mother, Jean, had said they were going back to
Missouri, the “Show Me” state, it having it all over lying and cheating California, there being
another woman involved in the mess of the whole thing and they were going back to Jean's
parent's. She said the other woman's name was Hazel Dubois, of all things, like something
someone would make up for that kind of California woman, and she, Hazel Dubois had followed
Ricky's father off to somewhere south, leaving everything she owned, including two children. I
had had dinner at their house, before Ricky's father had gone away and Jean seemed nervous
and flighty to me, directing everyone to walk around the table to get what they wanted on their
plate, and it was a turmoil of motion. I wondered about Jean in the fog, if she were ever out in
it, would she know which way to turn.
I'd wondered if the Dead Animal Man took things when sometimes their hearts are were beating,
when they were exhausted from blindness and soundlessness, from trying to determine
measure and familiarity, from seeing their wings, or their bodies and feet disappear before their
eyes, not knowing how far down was, where there were buildings and steeples of bridges.
All day long the dog watches the house and I'm trying to think of how and when it is that
something dawns on you, something you can't see or hear or doesn't come with any particular
pattern of thought. My father being gone, or AWOL, Away Without Leaving, my mother calls it
because he is usually going to some next town to look for a job, or clear something or other
up; there is always a point when I've looked up and said to myself, “He isn't coming back.” My
mother might be at the kitchen table or someplace when it hits her, but it always does, and it
has never been from any clear passage of time or anything else as observable. It seems more
from something on the air, something beyond normal feeling, or something sour smelling as old
hamburger cooking. The dog can smell or feel whatever it is and all day long he watches Ricky's
house as if it would get up and rush away, and he wants to be ready, his eyes, ears and nose
twitching to every sound. He seems embarrassed for the way he looks, ticks all over him rough
as gravel, embarrassed that he got them there, it looks, that maybe they are why he has to
keep his eyes on the house, that that's why they are leaving.
My father is a machinist and he has made the language of cars familiar to me. I can easily drop
the words piston, ball-bearing, manifold, transmission into thoughts and sentences, can detect
what might be going wrong with what is coming down a street, fog or no fog, what might be
proceeding in its denseness if it's there, vaguely how much horsepower it has. The Dead Animal
Man's truck is fined tuned and in decent working order except for a little roughness in the gear
shift. It has a kind of hum to it as if it is keeping a low bass sound to the rest of the sounds of
the morning, other engines and apparatus providing higher notes and rhythm. It seems as if its
mission is important and it needs a good machine to do its work. I have looked out when it
passes and it is sleek and sectioned, having drawer space and doors, brooms, shovels and
hoses. I have never seen the Dead Animal Man. His section of truck has either just gone by
when I've looked out, or the glare of early daylight has caught his window in such a way as to
make him invisible.
“Why couldn't we take him?” I say to my mother, because she is noticing the way the dog has
been lying on the sidewalk watching the house where there is more crossing back and forth in
front of windows than is usual, as far as we can see, lights on in more rooms, things being left
outside in back.
R-KV-R-Y
Winter 2006 Fiction
Dead Animal Man
by Kathleen Wakefield
Winter 2006 Fiction
Dead Animal Man
by Kathleen Wakefield
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