Their frightful dying squeals compelled Excelsior to leap off Mama Russell’s porch into Saberhagen’s yard. Crazed on squirrel meat, Moxie lunged for the much larger sheepdog’s throat. Excelsior seized the corgi by his scruff and whipsawed her head to fling Moxie a good ten feet. The dog’s ungraceful trajectory took him over the tree; he hit harshly and rolled as tumbleweeds do.
Excelsior rooted through the branches to recover the remaining squirrels. That all four fit safely in the pouches on either side of her teeth was the first oddity. The second was that she dropped them on four different lawns. One she left at the Hills. One she left at Mama Russell’s house, where it was taken in by her “boy,” Jeffrey. One for Abigail Burger. Alvin given to me.
“The momma squirrel won’t take it back now,” my father said. “Your scent’s on it. It’s tainted. The mother might eat it. Mothers can be like that. In the animal kingdom.”
We packed a shoebox with cotton batten and set Alvin beneath a gooseneck lamp. I was concerned this may scald him: his pink skin put me in mind of the flesh under a fresh-picked scab. His paws so much like tiny human hands. I wished he would open his eyes so I might intuit what he wanted. But when his eyes did open they were inexpressive black bulbs.
Each day Alvin remained alive, often barely so, I took as a breed of miracle. My father filled an eyedropper with cornstarch-thickened milk and fed him. He’d squirt hypoallergenic soap into his palm, set Alvin in the bowl of his hand to clean him with gentleness bordering on reverence.
“So fragile. Bones like sugar.”
A covering of black fur filled over Alvin’s body. His tail, a nippley nubbin, came in bushy. He never grew quite as big as a squirrel should.
One afternoon he dashed out the patio door. My father pursued—“Alvin! Come to your senses!”— and, spying him in the crotch of the backyard elm, jabbed a banana on the end of a stick as an enticement. When the squirrel refused, Dad mooned by the window, yet he soon turned philosophical. Not an abandonment, he reasoned, but the animal’s natural predilection.
“Squirrels live in trees. Gather nuts. As they’ve always done.”
“Sorry I left the patio door open, Dad.”
“Never mind, pet. Recall the old saying: ‘If you love something, let it go.’”
Overjoyed as my father was when Alvin returned that night, he resolved to let an animal be an animal. Mornings Alvin bolted out his squirrel-door — a miniature doggy door my father installed — to dash across the fencelines attaching yard to yard. Plaguing, in the inimitable manner of squirrels, the local canine population. Even Excelsior chased Alvin, who chattered cheekily from a high bough while the poor sheepdog howled.
Later, Alvin was shot dead with a revolver.
Mama Russell took in troubled children. Her “boys,” they were known. Teddy and Jeffrey spent years in her care. Others who broke curfew or broke into neighbours’ houses were sent away. At the time of Alvin’s death, Social Services remanded an infant into Mama’s custody until a foster family could be secured. Mama named him Carter, though she had no right. Afternoons she paraded baby Carter round the court in a pram. Alvin, naturally curious, stole into the pram. I pieced this together afterwards.
Mama swatted at Alvin, who scrambled up a tree. Mama called the police. A cruiser was dispatched. A deputy not long on duty unloaded on Alvin with his service revolver. Centre of mass, as they teach at the academy.
A squirrel weighing that of a bar of soap. Annihilated. My first attempt at parenthood culminated with a squirrel so blown apart there wasn’t much to bury.
“You mustn’t give your heart to wild things,” my father said that night. “Or take on burdens of care more than you need to.”
“But aren’t I a burden?”
“I had no choice with you, pet. And was glad not to. But.” Spoken with finality. “But.”
Take the hospital elevator to the pediatric ward. The evening shift nurse — body garrulous in heft but her face having none of it — eyes me in my military surplus parka. REYNOLDS stamped in black on the breast pocket.
“A fine thing, what you did,” she says, after I identify myself. “Lucky you were there.”
The compliment comes off backhanded: as if my managing to rescue the baby was as unbelievable as my having landed a harrier jump-jet on a cocktail napkin. The nurse glides past darkened delivery rooms on soft-soled shoes silent as a razor blade through a bowl of water. A mesh-inlaid mirror runs the length of the nursery. Inside I am struck by the smell of new life.
We’re all rotting. Your body hits a peak at eighteen, maybe, and that perfect bodily zenith lasts how long? A day, or a few hours of that day? Next, descent and decay. Strains and aches and dimming sight. Stuff yourself with carcinogens because you’ve surrendered to the inevitability of collapse. You get winded climbing a flight of stairs. Following that, lumps and lesions to ice your heart. The Big C? Hold the whole tortured works together another fifty years and you’re granted the merciful stillness of the grave.
But the nursery is stuffed full of showroommodel humans. Brand-spanking new, factory-fresh rolled off the assembly line. Impregnated with that new-baby smell. Assaulted by pound upon pound of sprightly, helpless baby-meat, I fleetingly wish I was some breed of vampire. A youth vampire. Flap round the nursery on talcum-powdered wings poking my head into hermetically-sanitized tubs to hoover the youthful essence out of these helpless things. Partake of their luscious and nourishing, sinfully yummy esprit. Drain these beautiful babes until I was a child again and my organs no longer on the rot, cherubic as I dash away shed of my too-big clothes. I’d flee barefoot from a nursery full of withered crepe-paper baby husks.
“So small,” I say, peering at my little toilet baby. “Was she…”
“A preemie?” The nurse shakes her head. “Only malnourished. Think of a plant under a porch: it’ll grow down there in the dark and damp. Just not so well.”
“May I have some time alone?”
“Make it quiet time. If one wakes, they all wake.”
The baby’s name card affixed to the tub: JANE DOE #2. I section her sleeping face in search of the woman who’d tried to murder her. But that woman exists in my memory only as a tangle of emotional drives. Her face is my own face. The face of everyone I’ve even known. She made a premeditated choice to dump this life in a retail chain toilet. Abdicate her responsibilities in such vicious fashion. How had she seen her life changing? Your own defenseless child— how deep must you core into any heart to find that mammoth well of expedience?
Unbutton my coat. Cradled in stirrups of my own creation — oversize suspenders accommodating a cardboard papoose — is a doll I’d stolen from a toy store.
Teddy, another of Mama Russell’s boys, set fire to my father’s workshop and burnt to death in our basement. Dad was mailing a package. I was in my bedroom with Abigail Burger, Fletcher Burger’s daughter.
Teddy was a pygmy pyromaniac with burn scars on his arms pink as pulled taffy. He wore boxy black glasses with melted armatures. He’d soak ant hills in lighter fluid and set them ablaze. He said things like: “My penis is two and a third inches long” or “Anacondas have one twelve-foot-long lung” or “My mama had a nerve disorder. And Poppa is a sailor.” He was known to eat his elbow and knee scabs. Cut holes in his trouser pockets so he could squeeze his testicles. Mama had Teddy wear linen gloves so he wouldn’t break the skin as he throttled them. He shimmied through our basement window while Abigail and I ran our squirrels through a maze of shoe boxes and toilet paper rolls.