Holy Cow (9 page)
Authors: David Duchovny
After about fifteen minutes, we made our way back to the mohel. The door opened, and there stood Shalom, a makeshift diaper around his waist and a lollipop in his mouth. If it’s possible for a pig to be paler and whiter and pinker than usual, he was paler and whiter and pinker than usual.
“That was quick,” Tom said, trying to make light.
Shalom’s face was ashen. “My poor schvantz. We shall never speak of what happened in there. Is that clear?”
Tom and I both nodded, stifling laughter.
“Ever,” Shalom said, “never ever ever. That man, that man is a butcher! I’ve seen things. I tell you I’ve seen things a pig should not see. Things that cannot be unseen. What just happened never happened.”
We started away. “Let me get this straight,” Tom said, tongue firmly in beak. “Not a word ever about the mohel and the shtupper?”
Shalom, limping slightly, hissed, “Don’t say that word.”
“C’mon, forget it. It’s already such a schlong schlong time ago.” Tom was convulsing.
“Schmuck.”
“What word?
Mohel
?” I asked.
“Oh, everybody’s a comedian!” grunted Shalom.
Tom couldn’t help himself. “
Never Say Mohel
… wasn’t that a James Bond movie—
Never Say Mohel Again
?”
“Enough with the pupik jokes, you putz.”
A few moments of silence, then: “Moo-yl,” I lowed.
“Zip it!”
“What? I was mooing,” I said. “You can’t ask a cow not to moo-yl.”
“Not funny, guys, my diaper is chafing. You goyim are all alike.”
FLY LIKE AN EAGLE, OR A SQUIRREL
We knew we were getting close to the airport because the planes overhead started getting louder and louder and lower and lower. I noticed Tom was studying them intently, and flapping his wings a little. “What are you doing?” I asked. “It doesn’t look so hard,” he said, “to fly.”
And with that, he took a running start, flapping madly, trying to get airborne. Maybe he got a couple of inches off the ground. Maybe. “You see that?” he said. “I flew!”
“Yeah, yeah…” I lied.
“Check this out,” and he took off running again toward the edge of a little hill we were on, belting out the old Steve Miller classic, “I want to fly like an eagle…”
With that he jumped as high as he could off the cliff, seemed to hover for a moment, and then sank straight down like a stone. Shalom and I ran to the edge and looked down just in time to see Tom hit the ground with a grunt and a thud and roll a few times beak over tailfeather. It was funny the way a cartoon is funny.
Tom rolled to a stop, stood up, and exhaled. “That is another thing that never happened.”
“What never happened, you succumbing to the harsh law of gravity?” asked Shalom, tongue in snout. “I see you can dish but you can’t take, what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.”
“Yeah, never happened,” shouted Tom as he scampered back up the hill. “Like the mohel never happened, like your circum—”
Shalom cut Tom off. “I get it. No need to elaborate,” he said as he adjusted his diaper.
“Saw what?” I asked.
We walked on in silence for a while. I could see Shalom stealing glances at Tom, sensing Tom’s dream had died a little, and it seemed to soften the pig. Finally, Shalom said, “That thing that didn’t happen?”
“Yeah,” answered Tom, wary of an attack.
“Dude, I swear, maybe you didn’t fly, but you were gliding like a badass,” Shalom offered.
“Really?” asked Tom, cheering up just a bit. “Gliding is a lot like flying, isn’t it?” he said.
And now Shalom grinned. “Gliding like a goddamn flying squirrel, my avian friend, like a goddamn flying squirrel.”
The airport terminal was very big and confusing, but we knew we had to make it to one of those automated ticket machines. Tom was still in denial. “Maybe I’ll just glide myself to Turkey. Who needs a plane?”
I protested. “No, Tom, we need your beak, neither Shalom nor I have prehensile fingers, your beak is the nearest thing we have to a finger, please don’t glide away.”
“Okay, friend, for you I will temporarily ground Air Turkey.”
“I appreciate that,” I said as we entered the terminal.
I was so happy our disguises were working.
I’m sure we made for an interesting sight—big ol’ me, well over six feet on my hind legs (Oy, as Shalom would say, was my back killing me), in a beige raincoat and sunglasses, and Shalom dressed in the velvet pants of a little schoolboy, holding our pet turkey by the leash.
We had had the foresight to register Tom as a comfort turkey, an emotional-support fowl. There was a program where you could get your dog permitted to travel in the cabin with you rather than in storage to comfort you if you were a nervous flyer, and we were able to get Tom the same accreditation online. He had taken the course on the phone, and had learned some rudimentary therapeutic insights. Which made him very annoying. He kept lapsing into a German accent and saying things like “Zat pig has ein ‘edible complex’” or “Tell me about your mother.” He told me the pain in my hooves was all in my head, and I told him the pain in my hooves was gonna be all in his ass if he didn’t quit it.
“Apparently, you are having some transference resistance. I should get a pipe. Would you respect me more if I smoked a pipe?” he asked me.
Tom’s other problem was that the leash made him very nervous and sweaty. Anything around his neck made him nervous, and I understood—his greatest primal fear, one that was in his DNA, passed down from centuries of turkeys that had endured the peculiar American custom of Thanksgiving, was of the chopping block. His neck stretched out long and the blade glinting through the air coming down at light speed, his truncated life flashing before his eyes.
“Shut up!” Tom barked. I hadn’t realized I’d been saying that last bit out loud.
“My bad,” I apologized as we approached the automated ticket dispenser. Tom continued to tug at the leash around his neck like Rodney Dangerfield in his heyday. Shalom was getting his jollies treating Tom like a dog, saying things like “Heel” and “Good boy!” Referring to the phone, I relayed Tom the confirmation numbers for our reservations and he pecked at them on the computer screen. It went off without a hitch. All our planning was paying off. Like magic, the printed boarding passes slid slowly out of the mouth of the screen, one, two, three—to us they looked like winning lottery tickets, ’cause that’s what they were.
We walked over to the big board where they show the times and gates of all arrivals and departures, and as we looked, we could see the flights to India, to Turkey, and to Israel, all on time. It was too good to be true. We each took one of the passports we had stolen from the farmer’s underwear drawer, and as we were fixing to say our goodbyes and head to our respective gates, we became aware that one of those bomb-sniffing dogs had become very interested in us, especially in Shalom. Shalom wheeled around and said, “Get your nose out of my butt, dude.”
“That’s all right, mama, don’t fight the law,” said this German shepherd with a thick Rhineland accent, even though he seemed partial to American urban patois, which made him end up sounding like Dirk Nowitzki.
“What’s your name, sweet thang?” I guess the diaper and disguise were fooling this particular doggy into thinking not only that Shalom was a dog, but that he was female as well.
“What? Did you just call me ‘mama’?”
I realized what was going down before Shalom did, and I started urgently shaking my head from side to side, imploring him not to blow our cover while we were so close to victory.
“I like me a feisty bitch,” the dog growled comically. “Well, all right now. Look at you standing tall on your hindies—you go, girl. Can I holla at ya? Can I holla? Can I holla?”
I felt for Shalom, doubling down on the indignity of having physically injured his manhood earlier in the day, and now this, a psychic injury to that same ailing masculinity.
“Did you just call me a bitch, Rin Tin Tin?”
The dog kept sniffing the air around Shalom like it was the sweetest of perfumes. “Funny story. I am related to the Rinster on my mother’s side. Truth. You ever dated a shepherd? We Germans, well, let’s just say we do our business and we take care of business, our clocks are not the only things that run on time, if you know what I’m saying.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“You want some of this?” The dog now angled his backside close to Shalom’s nose. This was not going to end well. “Can you tell they feed me steak? Go on, have a whiff. I would share with you, meine kleine bitch.”
This was making me uncomfortable in so many ways.
“Did you just call me a bitch, Rin Tin Tin?”
Shalom smacked the dog on the backside. “What is wrong with you? Can’t you tell I’m a pig?”
The dog froze, stopped breathing, his eyes registering shock, disappointment, and embarrassment all at once.
“Of course I know you’re a pig. My nose is a highly trained instrument. Not only did I smell out that you were a pig but that you also may be smuggling drugs.” He spoke into a radio attached to his collar. “Code green, repeat we have a code green, requesting backup.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” I said. “That’s not fair.”
“And I’m a guy!” said Shalom.
“Now that I didn’t get. I have to admit. Are you sure?” asked the dog.
“Am I sure?” Shalom squealed.
The dog nodded. “Okay, then, I am gonna have to ask you all to come with me. Is that a turkey?”
“Hey, good for you,” Shalom said, “you got one right.”
The dog barked to get the attention of his human handlers. This was all coming apart fast.
“Wait!” I said. I had to do something before the humans arrived. “It’s clear you are not good at your job.”
“Okay, yes, my olfactory powers were not the strongest in my graduating class. What are you, a deer?” he asked, sniffing the air around me.
“Close,” I said. “Yes … or cow. Deer or cow—either, really. Some days I’m not sure myself.”
“That was my second guess. I knew it. Very similar.”
“Listen,” I pleaded, “we are all chasing a dream here, mine is to go to India, the turkey to Turkey, and the pig, or dog, or whatever you feel like calling him, to Israel.”
“So?” asked the dog, seemingly unimpressed.
“Well, let’s be honest,” I hurried on, “this could not have been your first choice of occupation, your nose is not cut out for this work, if we’re being honest.”
“You are very perceptive, like many deer. Yes, my father forced me to go into the sniffing business like him and his father before him. I hate it.” The shepherd made sad dog eyes, and his tail collapsed between his legs.
“Well, you must have had a dream yourself, didn’t you?”
“I wanted to be a seeing-eye dog,” he confided. “I wanted to help people, but my father thought there was more job security in customs, so I didn’t chase that dream, and now I kinda feel like I’m just chasing my tail.”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” I said. “We are all chasing our dreams and so can you.”
“It’s too late.” He sighed. “I’m five years old, I’m middle-aged.”
“Hey, man, five is the new three. You can do it. Look, can you read the departure board up there?”
“I can. Anybody can—” blurted Tom and I kicked him, “—not. I cannot. Who could? No one could.”
Shalom said, “No, no, it’s so blurry from here, I would need a telescope or something.”
The dog glanced up. “I can read it.”
“You can?” I said. “That’s amazing!”
His tail stirred, went to half mast. “Sure, what do you need to know? India, you say—that’s 3:55, gate 31; Turkey 2:30, gate 11; and Israel not till 7:00, gate 41.”
We gave him the slow hoof clap of somber appreciation. “Man oh man, you don’t have eyes, dude, you have binoculars, lasers.” Shalom whistled.
I made a show of covering myself up. “Oh no, you don’t have X-ray vision too, do you? You can’t see through my clothes, can you?”
His tail started wagging so hard his whole rear end was wagging too. “Follow me,” he yipped as he jumped onto one of those big golf carts that beep around airports. “They’re with me,” he barked at the driver, and we all piled on for a VIP trip through passport control and straight to our gates. Forget about Global Entry, we had Global Exit!
The shepherd leaned over to me as he turned on the siren, and whispered, “And maybe you’re right, deer. It’s never too late.”
First up was Tom’s gate, 11. We said goodbye to the shepherd. He zoomed off in the cart, a new dog. Shalom and I walked Tom right up to the gate.
“Well, I guess this is goodbye,” Tom said. “How can I ever thank you? Let me see which is my ticket here.” He pulled the tickets out. “Uh-oh,” he said as he flipped from ticket to ticket.
“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”