Let's Pretend This Never Happened (38 page)

Day 3:

“Holy fuck,” I thought to myself. “This is
totally
happening.”

There were now a dozen vultures hovering around Barnaby’s grave and knocking off stones. I called a million (a million = fourteen) places to get someone to come disinter my dog—who was already partially disinterred by the horrible vultures that I’d been attacking with a machete—but no one would come, because it was the weekend. Apparently people need to have
their dogs’ corpses disinterred only Monday through Friday. Then I found a guy on the “services” part of Craigslist who claimed on his listing that he would “do absolutely
any job
for the right price,” but when I looked up his e-mail address on the Internet I found that he also ran ads for people looking for prostitutes, so basically he’s a pimp, and it felt weird to invite a pimp over when it was just me and Hailey, and this was when I screamed in my head,
“WHY IS VICTOR NOT HOME YET?”

I called him again. “Barnaby Jones was actually killed by a horde of . . . I don’t know.
I don’t even have the strength to make shit up.
But I found a pimp who’ll come dig him up.” Then Victor pointed out that the pimp was probably referring less to jobs that involved digging up dead animals, and more to jobs that involve hands and blow, and I said, “I can’t pay him in cocaine. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO GET COCAINE.” And then Victor told me to just go stay at a hotel, and that he’d take care of everything when he came back in a few days. I was half tempted, but I told Victor that I already felt bad enough for not being there for Barnaby when he’d died, and I was damned if I was going to desert him while he was being eaten. Victor told me to calm down, because I sounded like I was hyperventilating. I pointed out that I was just out of breath because I was outside, swinging the machete at the vultures.

Then Victor realized that I must be using his hands-free headset, and he got all kinds of pissed off that I was “getting it sweaty.” And that’s when I hung up on him. Because getting a headset sweaty was kind of small potatoes compared to the fact that I was brandishing a machete at large raptors, while considering the pros and cons of hiring a pimp to dig up our dead dog. Victor kept yelling at me, though, since technically I didn’t actually know how to hang up a hands-free headset, but I explained that he was wasting his breath, because I’d already hung up the phone in my mind and wasn’t listening anymore. Then he got really shouty, so I started singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to drown him out, and that’s when my neighbor showed up again.

She seemed more concerned this time, possibly because I was belting out Bonnie Tyler and crying while swinging around a machete over a partially disturbed grave. Or possibly it was because she was thinking, “You’re totally getting that headset all sweaty.” People are weird, and it’s hard to guess what’s going through their heads. She looked up at the vultures and immediately realized what was going on, and brought over a giant blue plastic tarp to help me cover Barnaby. We put heavy rocks all around the edges of the tarp and the vultures looked pissed, but I was so grateful I cried. Then I went inside and took a very, very long shower. When I came back out I realized that vultures are surprisingly strong, and that the blue plastic tarp had become a kind of vulture Rubik’s Cube, each of the birds trying a corner to get it all solved. I was having a nervous breakdown, but at least I was bringing the vulture community together.

My friend Laura (yes, the same one who’d dragged me to wine country) noticed that my Twitter stream was filled with updates about vultures, and machetes, and dead dogs, and how glad I am that Cartoon Network exists, and so she called. I was all,
“I’m fine,”
and she very plaintively said, “Well, you don’t
sound
fine. I’m coming over to dig up your dead dog,” and I immediately said, “
No!
No one needs to see that.
Especially
you, because you knew him.” Then she said, “You sound terrible. We’ll be right over. I’m bringing my four-year-old. And a shovel.” And she did.

I couldn’t let her do it alone, so we put on a video game for Hailey and Harry and told them we were going gardening. Then we both put on gloves, and she put on a bandanna to mask the smell, and we did it. And by “did it” I mean that we dug up my dog and sealed him into an Igloo cooler. Except that
technically
I did it with my eyes mostly closed, because I couldn’t bear to look, and so Laura was all, “Okay, lift. Shovel to the left. YOUR OTHER LEFT. HOLY SHIT, DO NOT LOOK. Further . . . further . . . lower into the box . . .
DONE!
HIGH FIVE, TEAM.”

And then it was done, and Laura, an Emmy Award–winning cosmopolitan woman who owned shoes that cost more than my wedding, stuck her
chin out at the vultures (who were all glaring at us from a few feet away) and muttered menacingly, “That’s right, assholes. This shit is
over
.” It was surprisingly empowering for both of us.

We sealed the cooler completely and carried it toward the garage, where it could wait in peace until the crematory came to pick up Barnaby Jones on Monday. It seemed both ridiculous and terribly sad, but then Laura looked at me with understanding eyes and said, “
Aw
. We’re Barnaby Jones’s paw-bearers. Get it?
Laugh now
.” And I did. I laughed for the first time in days as I carried my sweet, dead dog from his shallow desecrated little grave. And that’s when I realized how incredibly lucky I am to have friends like Laura. Because she took something traumatic and awful and made it . . .
okay.
And also because when I apologized—for the eighteenth time—for getting her into this, she said, “It’s totally fine,” and waved her hands in dismissal, as if I’d simply spilled my martini on the table. Then she said, “Dude. Your dog is like Jesus. He’s rising on the third day.” And then I told her she was like “Mary Magdalene, only less whorey,” and she was like, “Well, it’s not a
contest
.” Then we came inside and scrubbed our hands for two hours, and then she told me that she had everything in her purse to make fresh salsa, including beer and a tiny Cuisinart, because she knows I don’t own appliances. It was like her purse was magical, and I peered in, asking her where the pony was.
“Ew,”
she said, looking at me with judgment for the first time that whole day. “Who the hell puts
pony
in salsa? You really
are
a terrible cook.” And at the end of a week that was so horrific that I didn’t think I’d come out the other side again, I somehow ended it feeling something that I would never have expected.

I felt
lucky
.

I was reminded of something my father used to say when I would deplore his taste in friends (who occasionally turned out to be murderers and homeless people). For once I found myself agreeing with his mantra: “A friend is someone who knows where all your bodies are buried. Because they’re the ones who helped you put them there.”

He was right. And sometimes, if you’re really lucky, they help you dig them back up.

EPILOGUE:
Hailey and Harry decided they needed to take a picture of Laura and me after we were finished “gardening.” It is the single worst
and best
picture I own.

Shovel, Laura, shovel for dwarves (apparently), me.

It’s like some kinda fucked-up
American Gothic
portrait, but with fewer pitchforks and more rappers. If there was a song for this chapter it would be the
Golden Girls
theme. But less douchey, and with a kick-ass drum solo in the middle. And the lyrics would be like
“You would see the biggest gift would be from me, and the card attached would say, ‘Thank you for helping me dig up my dead dog.’”
That shit’s Grammy
gold
, y’all.

Several weeks later, a deliveryman came to the door with a package for me to sign for, and I was so excited because I thought it was a scarf I’d ordered, but then I opened it and realized it was a box of Barnaby Jones Pickles’s ashes. You’re really never prepared for packages like that. But really, you should be. Some days are good, and some days are bad, and some days are the days you get a dead dog in the mail. They can’t all be winners.

Later we disposed of some of Barnaby Jones Pickles’s ashes in the Devil’s Backbone where we live, because it’s apparently very haunted by Indians and Spanish monks, and I’d like to think it would be less horrifying if people drove up on the ghost of a lone Indian, grudgingly accompanied by a smiling pug who was just
so damn happy to see you
.

You’re welcome, Texas.

I’m Going to Need an Old Priest and a Young Priest

The following is a series of actual events pulled from my journal that led to me believe that our home was possessed by demons and/or built over an Indian burial ground. (Also, please note that the first part of this chapter actually happens just
before
the previous chapter, and the last part of it happens just
after
it. This could be viewed as “clunky and awkward,” but I prefer to think of it as “intellectually challenging and chronologically surreal. Like if
Memento
was a book. About dead dogs and vaginas and puppets made of squirrel corpses.” You can feel free to use that quote if you’re reviewing this chapter, or if you’re a student and your teacher asks you, “What was the author trying to say here?” That was it.
That’s
what I was trying to say. That and
“Use condoms if you’re going to have sex, for God’s sake. There are a lot of skanks out there.”
That’s not really covered in this book, but it’s still good advice.)

Let’s get started.

You know what would suck? If, after you moved, you suddenly remembered that you might have left a cigar box with a ten-year-old joint in your
garage, and your husband doesn’t remember whether he saw it, and you don’t know whether the movers found it and packed it for you, and so now you
may or may not
have illegal drugs somewhere in your house. And you want to hire a drug dog to come sniff it out so that your kid doesn’t find the box one day, but you don’t know anyone who rents out drug dogs. And you kind of just want to call the cops to have them come find it, and you’ll just tell them that they can have it if they find it, but you don’t know whether they’ll arrest you or not, even though technically you’re just trying to rid yourself of illegal drugs. This is all hypothetical. It’s also the reason we’re losing the war on drugs. Also, is pot illegal if it’s expired? And how do you know whether it’s expired? These are all questions I’d ask the police if I weren’t so afraid to call them.

Holy shit, y’all. I just looked up and there was a fox in our yard.
A fucking fox.
I know this is no big deal to most people, but it kind of blows my mind that we live so far out in the country that there are actual foxen that live in our hills. Also, spell-check refuses to recognize the legitimacy of “foxen,” even though it is
clearly
a word. One ox,
two oxen
. One fox,
two foxen
. This is all basic linguistic stuff here.