Dead Animal Man
(page two)
(page two)
“I guess we'd take him on the bus,” she says, knowing she has set up a tiresome, impossible
picture in my mind of it.
“What do they do with dead animals?” I had asked Ricky.
“Jell-O,” he had said. “They boil everything and skim off the top where the Jell-O is.”
There is a sound to the fog coming in, or an absence of it, as though you are where there is
sound and a wall of something with almost no sound is moving toward you, miles of it, birds
trying to hurry before it. My mother and I just tuck in after a while, she lighting up a cigarette,
wetness streaking against the window. Ricky will show up at the door in the midst of it, usually,
a heaven-boy, the edges of him erased.
“Where's your boyfriend?” she says to me, at some point, looking out like if she stepped off the
doorstep she'd drop and spin in watery space “It's late. You don't think they'd try to go in
this?” she says.
“I think I would have heard them,” I say. “Their fan belt is loose.”
My father had had a machine shop for a while across the bay in San Francisco, where
sometimes, when we still had the car, we went over to take him something or deliver a
crankshaft he had worked on to someone, the smell of the bay, as we drove, putrid smelling,
the steel loops of the Bay Bridge penmanship evaporating into the sky. Something had gone
wrong, although I never did know what, and my father had lost the shop and most of
everything else, sending him into a downward, free falling spiral like the birds that pitch from the
sky when the fog comes in. I know there was a woman who worked for him in the shop, a
building close to the waterfront and the bay clouds, the lights inside never bright enough to
really see her where she worked, she always seeming busy when we came in the back way for
what my father needed delivered. I think she was tall and brunette, but I never thought about
her until Jean mentioned Hazel Dubois.
“It's Thomas,” my mother had begun saying since then, “losing Thomas in the war. He just
couldn't take it. Jack's never been able to forget it.”
She went on, now, with us waiting in the stillness, our house a slow moving ship, the horns
from the bay warning us to caution, or warning the fog, steering it past us, around us, a long,
mournful vessel.
“It liked to kill him,” she was saying, “him and his mother. Liked to put knives through their
hearts.”
I always tried to remember Thomas, when she began, remembered him as the one who went off
to the war, who went somewhere far away and did not come back, Jimma, my grandmother,
saying Thomas had come to her in a dream and told her he would not be coming back.
“I think it did kill Jack,” she says, “he never was the same.”
I clear the window to see if I can see anything of Ricky or his house, listen for their car, try to
see if I can see the dog, but can not see past our steps for the lifelessness of the night. I think
I hear the car, think I hear one of the doors slam, the Pontiac's engine start up and then die and
then start up again in the way Jean has of trying to get it going, not able to pump the gas
peddle enough when the engine first turns over. I listen for the slip-whirring sound of their
loose fan belt, know they will not make it out of the Bay Area, listen and think I hear, like
something distant and small, finally, them starting off, imagine Jean telling them all to get the
hell in while she has the damned thing started, imagine the Pontiac rolling down the street past
the warehouses at the end, the turn signal bleating red inside the curtain of dampness, and
them coasting off in the direction of the bridge, Jean not having any idea where it or Missouri is.
“I think they left,” I say.
My mother looks at me from her reverie within the blank screen of window. “Well, that's love for
you,” she says.
“I think I ought to check on the dog,” I say.
“I think you ought to leave things the hell alone,” she says. “Who made you God?” she says.
I know we are leaving soon, too, although my mother doesn't have any of the details worked
out; know we don't have any money. I think of us when things started going wrong, when we
were driving back from San Francisco with it glowing behind us beautiful and as though
something risen and separating from its drab bay side, a spirit leaving a tired body, beauty
casting off awkwardness. I think of us stopping in San Leandro at the outdoor Laundromat, my
mother putting my father's dirty work clothes slick and bulky through wringers, the smell of
detergent and the bay air blowing over us, San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge backdrops
against a misty, setting California sun, my father no doubt already part of the city's lifted and
shining essence, the liberation of new horizons.
She starts packing, gets up and begins putting things in paper bags, pillow cases, anything she
can find, whether she is going to put it outside or try to take it with us I don't know, how we
are going, I don't know.
“Throw all of his goddamned things away,” she says, and starts pulling food out of the
refrigerator, although I'm sure there is nothing there of his, breaking things so that there is
ketchup and salad dressing all over the floor. “They've gone, too,” she says after a while,
leaning heavily against the sink, her fingers red with food coloring whose bottle has broken, or
she has cut herself. “Goddamned if they haven't gone, too. Goddamn all of them,” she says
and sinks, crying, to the floor. “I hate this fog,” she says, not looking up. “It feels the same as
my goddamned heart. I don't know where to go, or what to do. I told him I would die if he ever
did this. I feel like I'm dead,” she says, and then cries again.
She sits there like that, not moving. I try to comfort her but don't know what do, myself, my
own spirit void and hurting, the breadth and scope of the grayness outside too much for me
now without Ricky to assure me there is an end to it. It swipes against the windows as if
wanting in, as if trying to work its way through wood and glass, melt me away with it for my
own spiritlessness, my own drabness and nothingness. My mother eventually gets up and
continues putting things into bags, not bothering to clean the floor, walking back and forth over
it, tracking up the house. Then she falls asleep, her head on the arm of the couch, her hands
and feet still stained and soiled.
I had listened more intently for the cars at night since my father had left, not sleeping well since,
diagnosed their smallest failures for something to do. That night they went by as usual, and as
usual I didn't know how they could see, pictured the rays of their headlights blunted and
useless, thought of what they must be rolling over in their blindness, hoped the dog and
everything else had got out of their way. I counted the pings, the slapping of rubber, the
rasping of joints, waiting for the morning to break through, waiting for the landing of the Dead
Animal Man, knowing he was being ferried with the light.
There was a boy who lived down the street at the other end, when we lived in that house, an
albino boy, eyes red as a rabbit's. His father drove a Chrysler with one of those big V8 engines,
the Chrysler's taillights the same color as the red of his son's eyes.
I hear the Chrysler at about four in the morning, hear it brake and then surge forward. I look
out and see nothing but a vague glow from what seems the top of the sky, a layer of
grapefruitish matter that will filter, heavy and sweet, through gray. Sometimes the light comes
from somewhere else, pushing the fog away as if it is a crowd of forms; each one hurrying for
its own fears and worries. Sometimes it lifts from the street as though from inside the earth,
pulsating a tan radiance.
I feel the Dead Animal Man more than see him this morning, know approximately how far away
he is. The other sounds start up, warehouse and shipping yard toward the bay with their
morning sounds, the shortcut Jean would have taken the Pontiac; Ricky and them sitting
somewhere, I feel sure, the light of day pushing in all around them in more ways than one, the
Pontiac dead in its tracks. The mist is disappearing from the street, a sheet of light underneath,
when he appears, his truck moving square and liquidy.
I see the dog before the truck gets to him, know the Chrysler has hit him. I can see him in the
thin line of light; see that he is lying close to where he had waited, probably not able to have
understood the street from the sidewalk. The Chrysler has run over him as if he was a rag in
the street, something blown from the rear-end of a pickup. It looks from where I am as if he is
grinning, as if he had tried to bark, then decided to listen instead, hoping it was Jean, returned,
the Chrysler's V8 thundering from out of nowhere.
The Dead Animal Man rolls to a stop and gets out. He is large and seems slower than he
should, the mist keeping his movements half visible, the end and not the beginning of a motion,
and vice versa, as though you are running your fingers through an image of him on a
blackboard. He breathes heavily, I can hear, and groans, or it is his truck. He climbs onto
something, taking down a broom and shovel, opening a drawer when he has stepped back onto
the street. I hear the dog's body hit the metal of the drawer, and know it is useless to think
how it is cold and wet and what else is in there. I wonder, too, if the ticks go on living, what
happens to them.
The Dead Animal Man finishes what he is doing, and pulls himself into his truck. I see his face
for the first time. It is round and blank; ungiving as the fog at night. He starts the engine
again, and shifts into gear, the truck in motion, again, toward our house, in the darkness-
emerging-from-darkness way it has, flatness from a flat-seeming dimension. I know there are
other things on the street; ducks, seagulls, see him taking his time, the truck's lights orange for
fog-sight, sweeping down with half-closed yet careful eyes, looking for what has been left behind.
When he gets to our house, he stops, the motor of the truck idling smoothly. I think he has
taken time to drink something, has undone something and is drinking from a cup. But I see him
looking at our house, looking it over as the water-department representative looked my mother
over when he had come to turn off the water. As if she needed something and he was the man
to do the job. I'm thinking about the house, the truck's idle outside in the dampness, silky as
the ticking of a clock. The house is not ours and not well kept even if we had tried to keep it up;
there is no grass, and weeds have begun to grow over the sidewalk, the house, I know, tired
appearing as its inhabitants, my mother inside, dead looking as the dog, dirtied with what she
has pulled from the refrigerator, as if she, herself, has been hit by something out of a terrible
dark and is bleeding life away, too. We are a dead house. We are hardened and fluidless, and I
don't want the Dead Animal Man to take us.
I go outside, down the steps and walkway that are overgrown, the mist rushing from me like I
am something strange to behold, something come to motion before it has all the way risen and
departed, Ricky's house and the Martinez' house visible, now, the Martinez' house its mustardy
yellow, bright this morning as a sun coming up.
The Dead Animal Man stops his cup in mid-movement, looks at me walking toward him. His face
seems rounder, closer up, his eyes unable for mine to connect with; the eyes of someone who
takes dead things. He looks at the house and back at me as though he has seen through the
walls of the house, as he sees through fog, to where my mother lies.
I know we don't have any money, but I'm thinking we have enough to get us back to Utah. I
think my mother could find work there, and I could too, with my knowledge of cars. I'm thinking
about how you can see forever there, how the air is so dry that the only impediments to vision
are waves that rise vertical and sheer and snakelike from the heat of the ground, separating like
grass when you walk through them; or they dance horizontal across streets, tapering off into
shimmering visions at the feet of high, beautifully visible mountains. At night the desert air
flows, clear, over you, and no matter where you stand you can see what seems to be all the
stars in the sky. I'm thinking there's no point in going north to find my father, what would
amount to trying to find the end of a street in the fog; it is never where you imagine it to be.
And in Utah, at least, if something were coming, you'd know what hit you.
I walk up to the Dead Animal Man. He rests his cup on his leg and looks at me.
“We're moving,” I say, and walk back into the house.
Kathleen Wakefield's stories have appeared in SALMAGUNDI, THE ALASKA QUARTERLY, WILLOW REVIEW, WEST
BRANCH, TABULA RASA, WESTWORD, THE PINEHURST JOURNAL, THE NEW PRESS, BLACK RIVER REVIEW, ASCENT,
IMAGO, and others. She began her songwriting career at Motown Records, working with Diana Ross, The Temptations,
Michael Jackson, Smokey Robinson, and The Supremes. Her songs have been recorded by James Ingram, Quincy Jones,
Barbra Streisand, Roberta Flack, Frank Sinatra, Brenda Russell, Oleta Adams, and many more. She has worked in film
and television with composers that include Academy Award winners Michel Colombier, Vangelis, and Gabriel Yared. She
has worked on projects with artists in many countries including France, Greece, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
She lives in Los Angeles and keeps a retreat in the Northwest where she has just finished a novel.
more by kathleen Wakefield
picture in my mind of it.
“What do they do with dead animals?” I had asked Ricky.
“Jell-O,” he had said. “They boil everything and skim off the top where the Jell-O is.”
There is a sound to the fog coming in, or an absence of it, as though you are where there is
sound and a wall of something with almost no sound is moving toward you, miles of it, birds
trying to hurry before it. My mother and I just tuck in after a while, she lighting up a cigarette,
wetness streaking against the window. Ricky will show up at the door in the midst of it, usually,
a heaven-boy, the edges of him erased.
“Where's your boyfriend?” she says to me, at some point, looking out like if she stepped off the
doorstep she'd drop and spin in watery space “It's late. You don't think they'd try to go in
this?” she says.
“I think I would have heard them,” I say. “Their fan belt is loose.”
My father had had a machine shop for a while across the bay in San Francisco, where
sometimes, when we still had the car, we went over to take him something or deliver a
crankshaft he had worked on to someone, the smell of the bay, as we drove, putrid smelling,
the steel loops of the Bay Bridge penmanship evaporating into the sky. Something had gone
wrong, although I never did know what, and my father had lost the shop and most of
everything else, sending him into a downward, free falling spiral like the birds that pitch from the
sky when the fog comes in. I know there was a woman who worked for him in the shop, a
building close to the waterfront and the bay clouds, the lights inside never bright enough to
really see her where she worked, she always seeming busy when we came in the back way for
what my father needed delivered. I think she was tall and brunette, but I never thought about
her until Jean mentioned Hazel Dubois.
“It's Thomas,” my mother had begun saying since then, “losing Thomas in the war. He just
couldn't take it. Jack's never been able to forget it.”
She went on, now, with us waiting in the stillness, our house a slow moving ship, the horns
from the bay warning us to caution, or warning the fog, steering it past us, around us, a long,
mournful vessel.
“It liked to kill him,” she was saying, “him and his mother. Liked to put knives through their
hearts.”
I always tried to remember Thomas, when she began, remembered him as the one who went off
to the war, who went somewhere far away and did not come back, Jimma, my grandmother,
saying Thomas had come to her in a dream and told her he would not be coming back.
“I think it did kill Jack,” she says, “he never was the same.”
I clear the window to see if I can see anything of Ricky or his house, listen for their car, try to
see if I can see the dog, but can not see past our steps for the lifelessness of the night. I think
I hear the car, think I hear one of the doors slam, the Pontiac's engine start up and then die and
then start up again in the way Jean has of trying to get it going, not able to pump the gas
peddle enough when the engine first turns over. I listen for the slip-whirring sound of their
loose fan belt, know they will not make it out of the Bay Area, listen and think I hear, like
something distant and small, finally, them starting off, imagine Jean telling them all to get the
hell in while she has the damned thing started, imagine the Pontiac rolling down the street past
the warehouses at the end, the turn signal bleating red inside the curtain of dampness, and
them coasting off in the direction of the bridge, Jean not having any idea where it or Missouri is.
“I think they left,” I say.
My mother looks at me from her reverie within the blank screen of window. “Well, that's love for
you,” she says.
“I think I ought to check on the dog,” I say.
“I think you ought to leave things the hell alone,” she says. “Who made you God?” she says.
I know we are leaving soon, too, although my mother doesn't have any of the details worked
out; know we don't have any money. I think of us when things started going wrong, when we
were driving back from San Francisco with it glowing behind us beautiful and as though
something risen and separating from its drab bay side, a spirit leaving a tired body, beauty
casting off awkwardness. I think of us stopping in San Leandro at the outdoor Laundromat, my
mother putting my father's dirty work clothes slick and bulky through wringers, the smell of
detergent and the bay air blowing over us, San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge backdrops
against a misty, setting California sun, my father no doubt already part of the city's lifted and
shining essence, the liberation of new horizons.
She starts packing, gets up and begins putting things in paper bags, pillow cases, anything she
can find, whether she is going to put it outside or try to take it with us I don't know, how we
are going, I don't know.
“Throw all of his goddamned things away,” she says, and starts pulling food out of the
refrigerator, although I'm sure there is nothing there of his, breaking things so that there is
ketchup and salad dressing all over the floor. “They've gone, too,” she says after a while,
leaning heavily against the sink, her fingers red with food coloring whose bottle has broken, or
she has cut herself. “Goddamned if they haven't gone, too. Goddamn all of them,” she says
and sinks, crying, to the floor. “I hate this fog,” she says, not looking up. “It feels the same as
my goddamned heart. I don't know where to go, or what to do. I told him I would die if he ever
did this. I feel like I'm dead,” she says, and then cries again.
She sits there like that, not moving. I try to comfort her but don't know what do, myself, my
own spirit void and hurting, the breadth and scope of the grayness outside too much for me
now without Ricky to assure me there is an end to it. It swipes against the windows as if
wanting in, as if trying to work its way through wood and glass, melt me away with it for my
own spiritlessness, my own drabness and nothingness. My mother eventually gets up and
continues putting things into bags, not bothering to clean the floor, walking back and forth over
it, tracking up the house. Then she falls asleep, her head on the arm of the couch, her hands
and feet still stained and soiled.
I had listened more intently for the cars at night since my father had left, not sleeping well since,
diagnosed their smallest failures for something to do. That night they went by as usual, and as
usual I didn't know how they could see, pictured the rays of their headlights blunted and
useless, thought of what they must be rolling over in their blindness, hoped the dog and
everything else had got out of their way. I counted the pings, the slapping of rubber, the
rasping of joints, waiting for the morning to break through, waiting for the landing of the Dead
Animal Man, knowing he was being ferried with the light.
There was a boy who lived down the street at the other end, when we lived in that house, an
albino boy, eyes red as a rabbit's. His father drove a Chrysler with one of those big V8 engines,
the Chrysler's taillights the same color as the red of his son's eyes.
I hear the Chrysler at about four in the morning, hear it brake and then surge forward. I look
out and see nothing but a vague glow from what seems the top of the sky, a layer of
grapefruitish matter that will filter, heavy and sweet, through gray. Sometimes the light comes
from somewhere else, pushing the fog away as if it is a crowd of forms; each one hurrying for
its own fears and worries. Sometimes it lifts from the street as though from inside the earth,
pulsating a tan radiance.
I feel the Dead Animal Man more than see him this morning, know approximately how far away
he is. The other sounds start up, warehouse and shipping yard toward the bay with their
morning sounds, the shortcut Jean would have taken the Pontiac; Ricky and them sitting
somewhere, I feel sure, the light of day pushing in all around them in more ways than one, the
Pontiac dead in its tracks. The mist is disappearing from the street, a sheet of light underneath,
when he appears, his truck moving square and liquidy.
I see the dog before the truck gets to him, know the Chrysler has hit him. I can see him in the
thin line of light; see that he is lying close to where he had waited, probably not able to have
understood the street from the sidewalk. The Chrysler has run over him as if he was a rag in
the street, something blown from the rear-end of a pickup. It looks from where I am as if he is
grinning, as if he had tried to bark, then decided to listen instead, hoping it was Jean, returned,
the Chrysler's V8 thundering from out of nowhere.
The Dead Animal Man rolls to a stop and gets out. He is large and seems slower than he
should, the mist keeping his movements half visible, the end and not the beginning of a motion,
and vice versa, as though you are running your fingers through an image of him on a
blackboard. He breathes heavily, I can hear, and groans, or it is his truck. He climbs onto
something, taking down a broom and shovel, opening a drawer when he has stepped back onto
the street. I hear the dog's body hit the metal of the drawer, and know it is useless to think
how it is cold and wet and what else is in there. I wonder, too, if the ticks go on living, what
happens to them.
The Dead Animal Man finishes what he is doing, and pulls himself into his truck. I see his face
for the first time. It is round and blank; ungiving as the fog at night. He starts the engine
again, and shifts into gear, the truck in motion, again, toward our house, in the darkness-
emerging-from-darkness way it has, flatness from a flat-seeming dimension. I know there are
other things on the street; ducks, seagulls, see him taking his time, the truck's lights orange for
fog-sight, sweeping down with half-closed yet careful eyes, looking for what has been left behind.
When he gets to our house, he stops, the motor of the truck idling smoothly. I think he has
taken time to drink something, has undone something and is drinking from a cup. But I see him
looking at our house, looking it over as the water-department representative looked my mother
over when he had come to turn off the water. As if she needed something and he was the man
to do the job. I'm thinking about the house, the truck's idle outside in the dampness, silky as
the ticking of a clock. The house is not ours and not well kept even if we had tried to keep it up;
there is no grass, and weeds have begun to grow over the sidewalk, the house, I know, tired
appearing as its inhabitants, my mother inside, dead looking as the dog, dirtied with what she
has pulled from the refrigerator, as if she, herself, has been hit by something out of a terrible
dark and is bleeding life away, too. We are a dead house. We are hardened and fluidless, and I
don't want the Dead Animal Man to take us.
I go outside, down the steps and walkway that are overgrown, the mist rushing from me like I
am something strange to behold, something come to motion before it has all the way risen and
departed, Ricky's house and the Martinez' house visible, now, the Martinez' house its mustardy
yellow, bright this morning as a sun coming up.
The Dead Animal Man stops his cup in mid-movement, looks at me walking toward him. His face
seems rounder, closer up, his eyes unable for mine to connect with; the eyes of someone who
takes dead things. He looks at the house and back at me as though he has seen through the
walls of the house, as he sees through fog, to where my mother lies.
I know we don't have any money, but I'm thinking we have enough to get us back to Utah. I
think my mother could find work there, and I could too, with my knowledge of cars. I'm thinking
about how you can see forever there, how the air is so dry that the only impediments to vision
are waves that rise vertical and sheer and snakelike from the heat of the ground, separating like
grass when you walk through them; or they dance horizontal across streets, tapering off into
shimmering visions at the feet of high, beautifully visible mountains. At night the desert air
flows, clear, over you, and no matter where you stand you can see what seems to be all the
stars in the sky. I'm thinking there's no point in going north to find my father, what would
amount to trying to find the end of a street in the fog; it is never where you imagine it to be.
And in Utah, at least, if something were coming, you'd know what hit you.
I walk up to the Dead Animal Man. He rests his cup on his leg and looks at me.
“We're moving,” I say, and walk back into the house.
Kathleen Wakefield's stories have appeared in SALMAGUNDI, THE ALASKA QUARTERLY, WILLOW REVIEW, WEST
BRANCH, TABULA RASA, WESTWORD, THE PINEHURST JOURNAL, THE NEW PRESS, BLACK RIVER REVIEW, ASCENT,
IMAGO, and others. She began her songwriting career at Motown Records, working with Diana Ross, The Temptations,
Michael Jackson, Smokey Robinson, and The Supremes. Her songs have been recorded by James Ingram, Quincy Jones,
Barbra Streisand, Roberta Flack, Frank Sinatra, Brenda Russell, Oleta Adams, and many more. She has worked in film
and television with composers that include Academy Award winners Michel Colombier, Vangelis, and Gabriel Yared. She
has worked on projects with artists in many countries including France, Greece, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
She lives in Los Angeles and keeps a retreat in the Northwest where she has just finished a novel.
more by kathleen Wakefield