Let's Pretend This Never Happened (37 page)

1.
Spell-check refuses to recognize the word “chupacabra.” Probably because it’s racist. Spell-check, I mean. Not chupacabras. Chupacabras are monsters from Mexico that suck blood out of goats. They don’t care what race you are. Bizarrely, spell-check is perfectly fine with the word “CHUPACABRA!” in all caps, which makes no sense at all. Unless it’s because it recognizes that you’d use that word only while screaming. Touché, spell-check. P.S. Actual words used in this book that spell-check insists are not real words: Velociraptors. Shiv. Chupacabra. Yay. It’s like spell-check doesn’t even
want
me to write my memoir.

Honestly, I Don’t Even Know Where I Got That Machete: A Comic Tragedy in Three
Parts
Days

Day 1:

The day that Barnaby Jones Pickles died was a difficult one.

We were still getting used to our new house, and we were planning how to build a backyard fence that would keep him in and the scorpions out. Until then, though, we’d simply let him run around the house most of the day, terrorizing the cats, and then put him out on an incredibly long leash/dog run attached to the back-porch banister, so he could run down to the meadow behind our house. But having a dog in the backyard, even for a little bit a day, is risky, and in the country I learned that it was just damned dangerous.

Learn from my mistakes, people.

I convinced myself that he’d be fine, as he had a covered porch to rest under, with several outdoor ceiling fans that ran constantly, plus a sprinkler to run in. I was certain that he was perfectly safe from everything but himself. He’d be frolicking around as I watched from the living room, and
then two minutes later I’d look up again to find him with no leash left, having somehow woven an enormous, terribly designed sort of spiderweb with his leash, all of my porch chairs now caught unnaturally inside of it as he looked at me, his little pug head cocked to the side as if to say, “
. . . what the fuck just happened?
” I’d painstakingly untangle him and move the porch chairs around to the front of the house, but by the time that I got back he’d be tied to the barbecue grill, giving me the exact same look.

I started to suspect that in a past life he’d been a small and not very good pirate whose specialty was lashing himself to the mast at the most inopportune times. I could imagine the captain giving him the same pitying but frustrated look when he came up from his nap to find that Barnaby Jones Pirate had lashed himself to the wheel of the ship because he thought he saw a cyclone, which turned out to be some birds. I knew exactly how that captain must have felt, as he undoubtedly sighed and spent another half-hour unwinding the knotted ropes as Barnaby Jones licked him uncontrollably on the face. Or at least, that’s what Barnaby Jones Pickles always did to me while I was untangling him. I suspect Barnaby Jones Pirate did it as well. There weren’t a lot of girl pirates around, and I’m not going to judge a bunch of pirates and their licking practices. I’m totally pro–same-sex-licking. And pro-pirate. Except for the raping and pillaging parts. I’m anti–raping-and-pillaging. I’m pro–hooks-and-peg-legs. Which I think makes me pirate agnostic.

I never yelled at Barnaby, though, because it’s hard to be mad at someone who’s so damned happy to see you. “Good old Jones,” I’d say gruffly, as I rubbed his ears while he joyfully attempted to gnaw the shoes I was wearing off of my feet. He’d smile in that semi-mindless way that pugs have perfected, and I’d try very hard not to fixate on the furious rabbit hiding in his forehead wrinkles (constantly glaring at me accusingly), both because it seemed to make the dog self-conscious, and also because Victor said that seeing an imaginary angry rabbit on your dog’s forehead is probably some sort of Rorschach test that proves some mental illness that we couldn’t afford to properly medicate anyway. But it was totally there. See below:

I drew in the rabbit face for people with little imagination, but once you’ve seen it, it can’t be unseen.

And then came the terrible day when I called Barnaby Jones to come inside, only to find him dead in the backyard, his furrowed bunny brow gone forever. His face was swollen, and our vet later said he’d most likely been bitten by a snake. I’d write something darkly comedic here to cut the sadness of the whole experience, but I just can’t, because
I loved that damn dog.

In my head I screamed obscenities at myself for ever leaving him outside, but I had to stay quiet so that Hailey wouldn’t notice. I didn’t want her to see him that way. Victor was out of town, and the vet’s office answering machine said they were closed for the weekend, so I picked Barnaby up and carried him down to the meadow behind our house, and then cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Then, after an hour of backbreaking work digging a hole in ground that was almost entirely rock, I buried him there in the meadow he loved to frolic in. I piled a cairn of rocks on top of the grave to mark it. I did it alone, and it sucked.

When it was done, I told Hailey and hugged her while she cried. We held each other on the couch, and every few hours she’d ask me whether it was just a bad dream. I wished it were. She asked if we could go buy another pug and call him Barnaby Jones and just pretend that he never died. I told her that it wouldn’t be fair to do that to Barnaby, but the truth was that I
knew I couldn’t handle this again, and I resolved then and there,
“I will never own another dog.”

I called Victor to tell him what had happened, and he cried. I told him that I’d buried Barnaby Jones in our meadow, and then Victor got very quiet, because he was perfectly aware of the fact that there’s almost no dirt in the meadow. I suspected he was just quiet because he realized what a terrible predicament he’d put me in by not being home, but then he said enigmatically, “Keep an eye out to where you buried him.” He said it exactly the same way that the guy in
Pet Sematary
(still purposely misspelled) would say it if you accidentally buried someone you loved in the part of the cemetery that resurrects bodies. I sighed and started crying again, because the last thing I wanted to do was to have to kill my already dead dog again when his soulless body dug itself out of the grave, and then Victor was all,
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
and I said, “You know . . .
SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK?
” Then Victor said he was going to call his parents to come get me, because I was obviously having some sort of nervous breakdown. At the time I thought he was saying that because I was getting all of my Stephen King stories confused in my head, but in retrospect it might have been because I just started ranting about having to murder our already dead dog with no real context. Either way, though, the worst part was over, and I assured Victor that in time I’d be okay.

And I totally would have been. If Barnaby Jones Pickles had not risen from the grave.

Day 2:

My neighbor came over to tell me she’d seen me digging a grave in the meadow yesterday, and thought she’d stop by to see if everything was okay. I was touched, both because she’d come to check on me and also because she’d assumed I was digging a grave but hadn’t called the police.
“This,”
I
thought to myself, “is
exactly
why I love the country.” She also told me that it was likely that a rattlesnake had bitten Barnaby, as that had happened to two of her dogs.
“And this,”
I thought to myself, “is exactly why I
hate
the country.”

I called Victor, who was still out of town for the week. “Barnaby Jones Pickles was actually killed by a rattlesnake. Also, apparently they’re everywhere here, and they all want to kill your dog. I’m never leaving the house again. How do the guns work?” Victor was freaked out about that series of questions, and refused to give me the combination to the gun safe, because apparently he wanted the rattlesnakes to eat Hailey and me. Then he pointed out that rattlesnakes don’t eat people, and that it was just as likely that Barnaby was killed by an allergic reaction from a bee as from a rattlesnake, and that I was probably just fixating on rattlesnakes to keep from having to mourn about Barnaby. Then I hung up on Victor and Googled, “How do I make rattlesnakes leave me alone?”

According to Wikipedia, snakes despise mothballs and will run from them at all costs (which seemed questionable, since snakes don’t have legs). I suspected that Wikipedia had confused snakes with moths, but the mothball remedy was repeated on other sites as well, so I bought six economy-size boxes of mothballs and sprinkled them around the perimeter of the house so thickly that it looked like it had hailed in an incredibly fucked-up pattern. It also smelled as if my house were being surrounded by little old ladies, which was unfortunate, but I visualized that they were vicious old grannies who were all armed with snake-chopping battle-axes, and that made it easier to deal with.

I also called an exterminator, who said the mothballs were a good start, and that he’d bring over a giant can of snake repellent to spray around the perimeter to keep the snakes at bay. I asked, “So how do you make sure that the snake isn’t already hiding
inside
the perimeter, and will now be trapped in here with me?”

He paused for a second, then replied, “Wow. That’s a good question.
How
do
you know?” And I was like, “
This isn’t a quiz
. I’m asking
you
 . . . how do you know?” Then he said that if the snake wasn’t already gone, it would be able to pass over the Snake-A-Way just to get far away from the scent. I asked, “So it’s not like when you put a circle of salt around you to keep demons away?” And he was like,
“That works?”
And then I thought that maybe I needed to find a new exterminator.

I went out to do a second line of mothballs, and that was when I noticed that Barnaby Jones’s grave had been disturbed. The cairn of stones I’d put on his little tomb had been knocked down, and I saw the tiny, horrifying hint of a paw sticking out. For a brief second I was terrified that Barnaby Jones was actually returning from the grave, and I froze, wondering whether I should help dig him out or call an exorcist. But as I watched, an enormous dark bird swooped down and pulled at the leg. I slowly made my way down the hill toward the meadow as a giant horde of raptors shrieked and took off from the tree they were perched in.

Vultures.

I ran to the garage to grab a machete, but every time I would walk away from Barnaby’s grave they would swoop back in. Then I would scream and run at them, waving my machete angrily, and they would take a step back and look at me like I was being ridiculous. “You’ve left us food,” they seemed to be saying. “Please stop trying to whack us in the heads with a machete. It’s bad enough that you’ve
buried
our snack. Honestly, you’re embarrassing all of us here.”

I felt like Laura Ingalls when she was shooing away locusts from the wheat crop, except that my wheat crop was a dead dog and I didn’t have a sunbonnet. I finally came inside and called my mom, and she was very understanding and supportive. She is, however, also a realist, and she suggested that maybe I should leave the house for a few days and just let Barnaby Jones have some sort of accidental Tibetan sky burial. My mom is the worst atheist ever. Also, it’s possible that she was less pro–Tibetan-sky-burial and more just unsettled to learn that I own my own machete. It’s like my mom has never even met me.

She had a point, though. It
was
the circle of life, but I wasn’t okay with Barnaby Jones being an appetizer at that circle. I was also afraid that Hailey would see all the vultures pull Barnaby from his grave. She was already peering at the enormous birds suspiciously, and had asked why they were there. “They’re . . . praying,” I replied, saying the first thing that came to mind. “They’re praying and having a funeral for Barnaby.” Luckily, this made perfect sense to a six-year-old raised on illogical Disney movies.

I called Victor again. “Barnaby Jones Pickles was actually killed by a shark.”

“What?”
he choked out.

“Just kidding. But he
is
rising from the grave.”

“I’m
working
here,” he whispered, voice strained. “Are you drunk right now?”

“I have never been more sober—
or more in need of a drink
—in my entire life.” Then Victor hung up to get back to work, and I considered throwing all of our house cats outside to chase off the vultures, but I was afraid that they’d either get lost, since they’d never been outside before, or that the vultures would simply see them as an easier snack, pick them up, and carry them off. Not only would that be very depressing, but I was also keenly aware that if I accidentally killed all of our pets in a single weekend Victor would never leave me alone again, and would probably take to hiding the machete. Instead I decided to just draw all the curtains and pretend that this was totally not happening.