Let's Pretend This Never Happened (45 page)

I could hear Victor shuffling around on the other side of the aisle, and I sheepishly poked the tiny alligator over the top.
“Hello, mon ami! I am Jean Louise,”
I said in a daring French accent.
“I have never been on zee plane before and would love an adventure!”

“Oh,” said the confused elderly woman on the other side of the aisle. “Well, good luck to you?”

Victor tapped me on the shoulder and I screamed in surprise, and he looked at me and Jean Louise with disgust. “Don’t judge us,” I said meekly, as I hugged the alligator protectively. “We’re all we have.”

Victor shook his head but said nothing as he silently walked up to the cash register to pay. Jean Louise leaned forward and whispered,
“Enabler,”
but Victor still held out his credit card to the baffled cashier. Luckily Victor doesn’t speak French.

“I’ll need to make him a tiny hook for his missing hand,” I said as we walked out. He was far too brittle to go in my suitcase, so I put him in my purse, and Victor insisted there was no way they were going to let me get on the plane with a dead alligator. I disagreed, pointing out that he was quite literally “unarmed,” but his tiny gleaming teeth said otherwise, as I remembered the fingernail clippers we’d been forced to throw out at security once before. I turned to the experts (everyone following me on Twitter).

To make a long story short, if you ask people on Twitter whether it’s legal to carry a smallish sort of taxidermied alligator onto a plane with you, most of them will say, “Um,
no
. You can’t even bring breast milk on a plane.” Then you’ll point out that the alligator is at least fifty years old, is wearing clothes, and is missing a hand, and some of them will change their mind, but most will still say he’ll be considered a weapon. Then you’ll write, “I can’t imagine anyone
seriously
thinking I’d try to take over a plane using only a tiny clothed alligator as a weapon,” and everyone on Twitter will be like, “
Really?
Have you met you? Because that
totally
sounds like something you’d do.” And they had a point.

But I wasn’t truly concerned until we were already in line at security, and then I suddenly wondered whether someone had once used this alligator to smuggle cocaine in fifty years ago but then forgot to take it out, and now
I’m
gonna get arrested in the airport for alligator-stomach cocaine that’s older than me. I quietly asked Victor whether you could tell if cocaine was expired, or if it just stays fresh forever, and he was all,
“CAN WE NOT TALK ABOUT THIS IN SECURITY?”
and I was like, “It’s not for me.
I’m asking because of the alligator
,” and he kind of glared at me. I took a deep breath and calmed myself, imagining myself saying to the security officer, “Oh, this? That’s old cocaine. It probably expired, like, forty years ago. It’s not mine. It’s the alligator’s. I can’t be responsible for the wild lifestyle an alligator had before I was even born. Besides, he doesn’t know your rules. He’s from Cuba.” I felt sure they’d understand. Besides, these are the risks you take when you bring a dead alligator on a plane trip.

Of course, Jean Louise and I got through just fine, and no one even blinked at the alligator on the security conveyor belt. Victor was stopped for a full body search. Probably because he was sweating, and the vein on his forehead was popping out. In the confusion, Jean Louise and I calmly walked through with no problem. Victor could learn a lot from that alligator.

When we finally got settled in I pulled down Victor’s tray table and perched Jean Louise on it so that he could see outside. “Take that goddamn
thing off my tray,” Victor whispered between clenched teeth.

“But he’s never been on a plane before,” I explained.

“Voulez-vous les
window seat?” Jean Louise asked pleasantly.

Victor glared at me. “I’m not kidding. We’re going to get kicked off the plane.
Put it away
.”

“You’re being
ridiculous
,” I said. The man sitting across the aisle was staring at Jean Louise, so I swung him toward his face.
“Votre chemise est mooey bueno,”
Jean Louise said confidently. The man stared at Jean Louise with a slightly open mouth.

“He says he likes your shirt,” I explained matter-of-factly.

Victor put his head in his hands. “If I lose my SkyMiles because of this I will murder you.”

Just then the flight attendant walked by, a businesslike woman who looked as if she needed a cocktail. I gestured at her and smiled widely as she walked near me, Jean Louise on my lap. “Excuse me, my son would like to see the cockpit.”

She hesitated for a moment as she looked at Jean Louise, and then said, “Oh. We don’t do that anymore,” before briskly walking off.

“These people are racist,” I said to Victor, who was pretending to be engrossed in the SkyMall catalog.

“Mmm,” he said, noncommittally.

“When we get home I’m going to buy Jean Louise a tiny ruffled pirate shirt. And a hook for his missing hand. And a saucy little ponytail.”

Victor put down his magazine and glowered at the dead alligator, whom he seemed to be viewing as a veritable money pit. “That’s it,” he said. “You’ve done it. You’ve managed to become your father.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said flippantly, as I contemplated how many
Barbies I’d have to scalp to make a serviceable alligator wig. “My father has no taste at all when it comes to alligator pirate attire. I’m
nothing
like my father. Honestly, when it comes right down to it, I’m not really like
anyone
.”

Victor looked at me and Jean Louise, and slowly his gaze softened. “You know what? You have no idea how true that is.”

I stared back at Victor, and then rested my head on his shoulder as I moved Jean Louis to the empty seat beside us. And, as I wasn’t quite sure whether I should say thank-you or be insulted, I simply closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep while wondering whether anyone made tiny pocket watches for alligators anymore.

1.
I’d planned on naming her “Pocahontas Wikipedia,” but Victor said that the cats would chew the hands off, but then I pointed out that even if that happened I’d love her even more, because then she couldn’t paddle
and
she’d be up a creek without hands, which seemed more and more like a metaphor for my life.

You Can’t Go Home Again (Unless You Want to Get Mauled by Wild Dogs)

So,” my sister says, as she leans back in the wooden chair on our parents’ front porch, “Victor told me you were mauled by a pack of wild dogs last time you were here.” She says it pleasantly, more like a statement than a question, in the same impassive way someone might say, “So, you decided to let your hair grow out again.”

“Mmm . . .
sort of
. It’s a long story.” I drowsily sit back in the matching chair and put my feet up on the authentic child-size chuck wagon my dad had built. In the Christmas months my dad hitches it to a taxidermied pygmy deer with a giant elk horn tied with a red bow to its head, in a strange homage to
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
, but the rest of the year it stands ownerless, as if abandoned after a 1970s dog food commercial.

“And I have somewhere to go?” Lisa asks.

She has a point. We were both in town to visit our parents for the week. Lisa now lives in California with her husband and a beautiful litter of children, but each year she’ll drive down to spend a few weeks in Texas, and I’ll bring my family, and we’ll have a disorganized family reunion. One where our kids gleefully ride the family goats, where our husbands complain that they are slowly suffocating from the heat and the lack of Wi-Fi
access, and where my sister and I shake our heads in disbelief at their soft, sheltered ways, remembering days of bread-sack shoes and of pulling our mattresses out onto the porch so the whole family could sleep there on the hottest summer nights.

“So was it really an all-out
mauling
, or did the dogs just lick you violently?” she asks.

“It was less of an all-out maul and more of a prelude to a maul,” I answer. “Like when Julia Roberts got molested by George Costanza in
Pretty Woman
.” She looked at me expectantly, and so I told her the story.

When you cross over into our old hometown, you can pretty much guarantee that something fucked up is going to happen, but you’re really never prepared for what it is. You may come in knowing that you’re probably going to get a little blood on you, but you never think it’s going to be your own.

The morning of the day when I was partially mauled, Hailey and I walked outside my parents’ back door to see a stranger in a black hat and a bloody rubber apron, who was missing only a mask made of human skin and a chain saw to bring his whole outfit together. He apparently worked for my father, and he’d strung up a buck that he was in the process of skinning. He smiled naturally at Hailey and me, while he seemed to be digging his hands deep into the deer’s pockets, as if he were looking for his keys. Turned out, though, that deer don’t even have pockets, and he’d simply lost a glove in the deer. These are the things you come in expecting when you’re in Wall, and so you aren’t
completely
surprised when a stranger cheerfully yells at your preschooler to come over and help him “undress Mr. Reindeer because that’ll be a hootload of fun!” And when he tells her she can swing on the deer’s skin to help him get it all off, you’ll already have one arm on her sleeve pulling her back toward you, because this is the sort of thing you come prepared for. (Side note for nonnatives—“This’ll be a hootload of fun,” coming from a taxidermist’s assistant translates to: “This will cost thousands in psychoanalysis and will probably ruin your dress.”) Personally I prefer to avoid any activity that ends with a strange man offering to
“hose the blood off of ye afterward, mate.” It’s just a rule I have. Because I’m picky. Also, when did my father hire a pirate to do taxidermy? The whole thing was weird.

Lisa agreed that it was unusual, but felt it fell short of being all-out “weird.” “Take yesterday, for example,” she explained. “Yesterday Victor walked into that swampy puddle behind the house and he was all, ‘Ew, is this from the septic tank?’ and I was like, ‘Where do you think you are?
Beverly Hills?
That’s leftover skull-boiling water.’ He looked ill, but I thought he should know. Comparatively, deer pockets are really pretty humdrum.”

She had a point, but it still struck me as odd. Here’s a picture of it, but it might gross you out, so use your discretion:

My dad, dinner for weeks, random drifter/cowboy/pirate/taxidermist.

I know. I’m sorry. But in my defense, I did warn you.

Anyway, I expect a lot of odd things in a town known for armadillo races, and bobcat urine collections, and high school bovine fertility rituals, but one thing I did
not
expect was to be attacked by a pack of wild dogs. And yes, perhaps
technically
they weren’t “wild” so much as they were “excitable,” and maybe I wasn’t attacked by a
pack
of dogs as much as
it was one jumpy dog and one bitey dog, but I can honestly say that the dog that bit me was probably infused with radioactive spider juice and had diesel-fueled vampire fangs. And adamantium claws. Also, he was part bear and his whiskers were made of scorpions.