The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (19 page)

Every night now they came, walking in the wall beside my bed, so close to my ear I thought I could hear them breathe. I started to scratch at that space, trying to widen a tiny puncture already present. Plaster snowed onto my sheets. I found an X-acto knife in the desk in my room and, after checking to see that my door was closed, I used its precise point to trace a small porthole. Flexing my first finger, I gave the wall a push, surprised at how cleanly it all gave way. The hole I’d made was quarter sized and perfect for peering.

I turned out my light. I peered in. From far down the wall I heard the tell-tale lumbering of a single coon. He came closer and closer still, and then I could smell him, pungent and moist, and then I could hear him chuffing as he ambled, closer and closer still, my heart picking up, and suddenly, for the first time, I felt like I lived here, like I was pinned to this place that was silent with sleep except for me, still staring as his smell grew stronger and then, quite suddenly it seemed, he came around some corner and I was eye to eye with a beast.

The eye I saw had a wet shine, with a dark ink drop of a pupil. The pupil seemed suspended in liquid, and when the coon blinked I saw its lashes, thick and tar-black. “How goes it?” I asked and because he didn’t care to answer or perhaps had other business to do, the animal suddenly vanished, and I found myself staring at space.

Every night I waited at my porthole for communion with the coon. And every night the animal and I did nothing but simply sit and stare at one another. Still, it seemed to fulfill some need for both of us and then, abruptly, it was over. I would look away, look back and the beast would be gone, or the beast would blink several times in rapid succession and then, without further ado, ramble off. Whenever it happened that way I felt somehow stung, or sniped, and in response I reached for the X-acto knife, closing it in my grip. It was always late, midnight or plenty past. I sometimes tried to picture how this house would look from the street, every window black but mine, the one way off to the right, a cube of marigold. The coon had left. Alone, my hand closed round the stem of the knife, leaning in close to the hole and then bringing the blade up. Sometimes just then my eye caught sight of the moon outside; it was huge that June, swollen, indecent, and so close it seemed I could cup it. It was the exact same moon that hung over my real home, no more than twenty miles from here but seeming so much farther. I pictured a person awake there just as I was awake here, seeing that light in the sky and wondering if I was too. My mother? No. My father? He’d gone to Egypt. My siblings? Scattered in different schools. This moon was mine alone. And knowing that, and thinking that, I’d lean close to the hole I’d made in the wall and sculpt it larger, cutting crescents out of it until, one night, a pointed nose emerged from my aperture, leathery but wet, two dark dots for nostrils and then a tiny tongue. Slowly, I offered my upturned palm and the snout pushed further out, eagerly taking in my myriad scents, so many it seemed I had, because the snout just went on sniffing, salt and sand and who knows what else lay in the layers of me. This went on for I’m not sure how long, because when I woke up the coon was gone and I’d apparently slept slumped against the wall with my hand held out like an offering.

And so it was that night by night I made the hole larger and night by night the coon presented more of himself to me. I’d say the coon had maybe come a quarter of the way out of the wall when Annie discovered my project. She was cleaning and found the busted plaster by my bedside and when she leaned in closer to look she saw the treat tidbits I’d started to use, all lined up on the wooden beam that ran just inside the wall. That night she and Cranston took me aside and with my bedroom door closed asked me what on earth I was doing. Because I had no fib readily available I simply told them the truth, wondering if this would be the sort of behavior for which unrelated children were kicked out, kicked back—and would I want that? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure. I told them the whole story, how I was courting a coon, my many midnight visits.

When I was finished—a long silence. I could hear my heart. It was hammering high up. I thought of the things I’d found here in this severed space, the coons of course, the reading around a table, taste tests, and pink pork; it all seemed strange, still, and what I’d lost was so much larger but nevertheless, and having come this far, would I want to leave? The silence had stretch, went on and on. I’d ruined one of their walls.

Now Cranston walked across the floor, knelt by the bed, and examined my punched-out place. Annie stood, looking serious.

At last Cranston spoke. His back was to me as he fingered the rim of the hole. “Boy or girl,” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“Your midnight meetings,” he said. “Is the raccoon in question a boy or a girl?”

“Boy,” I said, suddenly sure.

“Why do you think that?” Annie asked, her face still solemn, but I thought I saw the small flicker of a smile.

“It’s how he smells,” I said, and then suddenly they were laughing. Cranston went up on his feet and Annie’s shoulders were shaking as she swiped away a tear, and I said, “What? What?”

“Kids,” Cranston called, striding across the floor, opening my bedroom door and leaning over the bannister, “kids! Come look at the coon hole Lauren has made.”

All the kids came and I described for everyone going eye to eye with the beast, and even the boys were impressed. “I’ll tell you what,” Cranston said, looking at me.

“What?” I said.

“Let’s make this hole a little larger and tonight we’ll pull him all the way out and make him ours.”

“Can we really do that?” I asked.

“We can try,” Cranston said and then he took my X-acto knife from where it lay on the desk, knelt on my bumpy bed, and began to widen what I’d already made, working his way up and down and around, up and down and around, his hole larger and darker than anything I’d dared to do. When he was done I went forward and put my whole hand through and then kept going, feeling with my fingers the dusty innards of this place, the spiral spiderwebs and broad beams, everything crisscrossed and crazy back there, not easy to interpret.

“You want to try?” Cranston asked.

Yes. I wanted to try.

Because coons are nocturnal, we had to have darkness. Come midnight, and with the lights off, we all crowded around the cutout by my bed. Cranston handed me his bait, bits of bacon and blue cheese. I lay it all carefully on the ledge and then we sat back to wait. A light summer shower started and I could hear it ticking against the windows, but other than that, and for the first time since courting my coons, the house seemed completely at rest. The rain stopped, and in its wake came a deep nighttime kind of quiet, outside clouds scudding across a polished sky, wind teasing the trees, but inside, in this house, we heard not a single stirring, not a tiny footfall, not the merest squeak. It was as though all the animals that lived here caught wind of what we were up to and had fled, en masse, the mice followed by the coons followed by the bats and the beetles and the ants. “I think they’re gone,” I said.

At last Cranston, sitting in a chair by my desk, rose without a word, left the room, and came back with a broom that he held high and swished against my ceiling shouting, “Wake up critters. It’s meal time.”

Nothing.

“Let’s sing,” suggested Annie.

“Sing?” said Cranston.

“You never know,” said Annie.

“I’m not singing,” said Kyle.

“I’d sing,” I said, because at home we sang, on Friday nights, we sang the blessing over the bread and the wine, we sang together, and even though god never answered, the singing itself seemed something.

“Michael, row your boat ashore,” Annie began, and I joined in, and Cranston sighed, put down the broom, and Emma, the youngest started up and pretty soon, drunk on the darkness and the general silliness of the situation we were all yodeling away, pretending to paddle or trimming the sails, our pantomimes so intent that for a few moments we forgot all about our coon so it shocked me when I turned around to see a dark darting snout and two petite paws gripping the edge of the aperture. I elbowed Cranston who then coasted across the room and grabbed the coon by its ample scruff, pulling a shockingly small body into the air. The song stopped, all of us frozen in various poses of pantomime while the coon swayed, waved its tiny mitted paws, and then started to scream.

Like crying, screaming, I’d always thought, was a uniquely hominoid form of distress. The coon suggested otherwise. With its mouth open and its tongue trembling, the animal screamed and screamed, its sound eerily familiar as it struggled under Cranston’s insistent grip. Tears sprang to my eyes. I hadn’t meant them to but there they were, and Cranston said, “Shush, little baby,” and curled the animal into the crook of his arm. It was just so small, so much smaller than what I’d expected, clearly an infant and barely even that. Cranston rocked it. The coon quieted. “I’d say,” Cranston announced, ferreting in the fur below its stomach, “I’d say our catch is a girl.”

For a second all was silent while we took in the news. Then the coon started up again, shrieks of pure anguish as it flailed for its freedom, desperately twisting this way and that while Cranston held on hard, his expression suddenly grim. “Shush, shush,” he said, rocking fast now, speaking fast now—nervous now—I could tell. Even in the darkness I could see the sweat on his neck. When I looked back at the hole by my bed it seemed for the first time downright menacing, its edges all jagged and ripped, pouring dust and darkness. I don’t know how long we stood there, Cranston desperately trying to quiet the coon, the rest of us with our hands hanging uselessly by our sides; it could have been an hour before the animal’s voice gave out and the crying turned to croaks turned to quiet.

“Jesus,” said Annie, her eyes wide.

Exhausted, the animal suddenly settled. Cranston kept rocking. The coon’s eyes began to close and faster than I could say
night now
the animal was suddenly asleep.

No one moved. From far away I heard a siren, and then a series of chimes. My clock glowed, the second hand silently sailing. The animal yet out a yelp and we all went stiff with startle, but then its breathing became rhythmic again. My feet tired, I went to sit on my bed. Slowly Cranston walked over to me, knelt by my side and, as carefully as he could, transferred the still-slumbering mammal into my arms. “She’s all yours” Cranston said to me. “She’s in a brand new home. Now help her find her way.”

That night, the raccoon stayed in a large cage in my room. She made strange noises—chirps and chatters, squeals and yips, calls, perhaps, to her cohorts on the other side of the wall, and indeed I heard what seemed like answers, strange scratches, long yodels, nervous pacings back and forth above me. Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red. Gradually the hazy trees assumed their familiar shapes, and the tidy lawns of the neighbors came into view, hoses wrapped around reels and tiny tricycles tipped on their sides.

Soon the family would awaken and crowd around the raccoon, wondering what she could do. I wanted to be the first to see and so, as quietly as possible, I freed the latch on the cage. After crawling out, however, the animal refused to move. She stood in the center of my room, hunched on her hind legs, her front paws dangling down, kangaroo style, looking left and right as if assessing her surroundings, all traces of her terror gone, just gone, replaced with, it seemed to me, a systematic sort of study she carried out with staring—at the walls, at the floor beneath her feet, at the spackled ceiling, at a loose sock she batted with her paw while quietly cocking her head. It amazed me, how fast grief could go, how quickly, in certain sorts of beings anyway, curiosity took the place of terror. I watched her watch, my stare following hers, here a desk, there a book on the floor, these objects defined, it seemed to me, not by the fact of their foreignness but by what they might hold or have, her curiosity keen and clear and far from me, a girl who yearned for the familiar even when all its edges were sharp. “Here, here,” I whispered, kneeling down, holding out my hand, yet another unknown object she leaned forward for.

I instantly admired that raccoon, even if I anthropomorphized her, and I’m sure I did, but not to the point that I failed to note her differences, everywhere, all the time. I admired the raccoon first for her curiosity and second for her affection, which I was about to see, how she could go from being completely at sea to securely anchored in what just happened to be this noun called me. Of course I could not have said so with such certainty at the time. These thoughts and reactions were in no way worded all those years ago, when I was perhaps too young to know my metaphors. What I did know, however, was how new this old house was, for her and for me, and whereas I’d wept for weeks, she for no more than a moment. Why wouldn’t that amaze me, a fifteen-year-old human who shared with this mammal almost all the same chromosomes, our brains eerily alike, save a few uniquely hominoid garnishes that guaranteed my grief would be wetter and longer and packed with a past she couldn’t carry.

“Come,” I said, but the coon—alternatively absorbed in staring and sniffing and batting—paid me no mind. And because, watching her, I suddenly felt a wild, yes, wild elation, I opened the door to my room and, bowing like a butler while gesturing towards the hall, I offered her full run of the house. No thanks. At last, then, I simply stepped around her with no plan or strategy in mind, and it was then that I discovered how fast her ties formed, because here, in a few mere moments and with no language exchanged, that animal took to following me with what seemed like total faith, scampering after me as I made my way down the stairs, at my heels as I traveled towards the kitchen. As an experiment I circled the dining room table ten times and ten times she went with me. It was as though the raccoon were hitched to me by some slender string, which is why I finally turned the tumblers and unlocked the front door, stepping out into the dawn. The street, usually busy, was dead this time of day; I crossed, the coon still with me, and, after climbing the opposite curb, we both turned to see, from a distance, the house where, like it or not, we lived.