H. W. Keith was the first recipient of his patented Vascular Bundle procedure. Twenty minutes into the procedure, as documented by Keith himself, the young man assisting him in the surgery fainted. Undeterred, and with the help of a large beveled mirror of his own design, Keith made one incision after another, and then, feeling light-headed but “confident and with steady and unhesitating hands,” completed the operation. Yet due to complications unexplained and unforeseen, he passed away shortly thereafter.
The Animal House
Wendy claimed she found the house on her way home. She claimed she could smell it from the sidewalk, and maybe she could. Her nose was better at smelling things than mine was. As it was, I couldn’t smell anything even standing on the small cement porch out front. Only after she opened the door and I stuck my head inside did the smell hit me. It was thick and damp, full of hoof and fur, though when I mentioned this to Wendy, she told me, “None of these animals have hooves.”
The noise was such that I was surprised we couldn’t hear them bawling and cawing and thrushing in our own house, two blocks away. The animals were caged, and I asked Wendy, “Where did those cages come from?”
She shook her head. “Animal shelter?”
“I thought the shelter closed,” I said, but she only shrugged.
Then we walked through the house. There were ducks and grackles, a couple of squirrels, a few feral cats, a litter of rats, and two brown animals I didn’t recognize that Wendy said she thought were nutrias, which didn’t sound like the name of an animal so much as a sinus medicine. In larger cages outside in the backyard, she told me, there were three stray dogs. She showed them to me, all of them, gave me a tour of the house and all its residents, and for a moment she acted as if they were her animals, her responsibility. And then she bent down to one of the cages and I asked her what the hell she was doing and she said, “I want to hold one of them.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think you should.”
She gave me a sharp and disapproving look and then shook her head and opened the cage and pulled out one of the nutrias, which climbed into her arms. She petted it on the head and cooed in its ear and lifted it out and held it for me to touch, and when I told her no way, no how, she told it not to listen to the bad man.
When I first met Wendy, I was lying in the middle of the floor of an empty house and it was dark and she was standing over me. A house I should mention I had broken into, thinking it could be a place I could live. She was brandishing what had at first looked like a shotgun, but which was a floor lamp, held not like you’d hold a gun, but like you’d aim a cattle prod or a spear. She was the first person, aside from my parents, I’d had any real interaction with since moving back.
I’d moved in with my parents, and I was short of cash, having used the last of it to work my way back to my hometown, which I came to discover had been all but abandoned for no other reason than that, for most people, it seemed like a good time to move on — to some other small town, or a city, maybe — and then, of course, some of the people didn’t move on, but instead passed away, which more or less had the same effect. In any case, it seemed like as good a time as any to move back to my parents’ house, my parents being some of the few who decided to stick it out, and there get my bearings straightened out, or oiled, or whatever thing you do to bearings to make them work again. After a short while I figured I needed to find my own place, but I still had no money and there was a shortage of jobs, so I found it difficult to scrounge up enough money to move out. But the town was sick with empty houses, old and run-down, and I figured they couldn’t be in such bad shape I couldn’t pull one of them together again and then live in it, and so I began to wander through town and study them with a critical eye.
The one I’d finally picked, though, turned out to be Wendy’s, which I discovered the first night I spent there.
The sight of her, silhouetted against the front window, faint moonlight filtering in through the threadbare shades, made me feel drowsy and unhurried, and for a moment I considered going back to sleep, knowing she’d stay standing over me until I woke again.
“That’s not how you hold a gun,” I told her.
“It’s not a gun,” she said, knowing, as she said it, she should’ve lied. “What are you doing here?”
“Is it a cattle prod? Or a spear?” I asked.
“A cattle prod?” she said, and in her voice I sensed that she wanted to laugh at what I’d said. Instead, she slammed the lamp onto my shin, which was how I understood it to be a lamp.
It hurt because it was unexpected, not because it hurt. She didn’t have the strength to hit me hard enough, and the lamp was cheaply made, and she didn’t have good leverage on the swing, throwing the end of it down from her chest like a hockey player slapping his stick against the ice. Which made me wonder, briefly, what had happened to all of the ice from the skating rink in the mall now that the mall had closed.
“What are you doing here?” she said again.
It had been a long time since I’d had to come up with anything substantial to say to anyone, and when she asked me the question, I didn’t know how to answer.
She swung her lamp down at my shin again, though this time I was prepared for the attack and moved mostly out of the way.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”
And she paused, her lamp brandished higher, ready for another, stronger swing, and she waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.
Six or seven or eight years ago I worked a little job for a small zoo near where I lived with my parents, or not a zoo, more a nature trail, or a series of trails that had animals on it. I mean, the land had animals on it, wild animals: owls, bobcats, squirrels, snakes, rats, mice, hawks, buzzards, and other sorts of wild animals; but it also had a small area set aside for an odd assortment of caged animals. These consisted of two dik-diks, four ring-tailed lemurs and two brown lemurs, a porcupine, a pair of wallabies, a greenhouse-like structure full of butterflies, a capybara, and an African wild dog. It wasn’t a good job. I was an office assistant and sometimes they would ask me to watch the ticket desk or to move furniture around in the small conference room they advertised for businesses that wanted to conduct meetings or ropes courses there. I didn’t do anything interesting and I wasn’t paid well and I didn’t receive any benefits, but it was, out of all the jobs I held before leaving home, my favorite, mainly because very little was asked of me, the smallest amount of effort on my part warranted high praise, and when no one was paying careful attention, I could easily sneak away from my desk or whatever clerical task I had been assigned and spend half an hour, and sometimes up to an hour, wandering through the trails.
This was the last job I had before I left home to go out into the world and make something of my life, and my first thought, after living with my parents again, was that I should live there, that if I was really going to leave my parents’ house, what better place to live than in the woods, among those trails and the animals that inhabited them. I pictured a small, mobile camp, somewhere in between the Hoot Owl Trail and the Woodduck Trail, or deep into the trees off the Bluestem Trail. I pictured a minimal kind of life, a paring down, a small fire just after dark when the weather turned truly cold, nothing to signal that I was there, that anyone was there.