Snapper (20 page)

There was something about divorcing this bone from its twin that rankled with me. Death is insulting enough without help from an idiot dog.

I came across an injured female starling in between headstones shortly before Charlie the spaniel sniffed her out, too. Fortunately he was on the leash.

When I come across an injured songbird, I usually kill it. The alternatives are a long slow death by dehydration, an Old English death by cats’ claws, a quick but undignified end in the jaws of Kia, or a quick and humane mercy blow from me. Larger birds like raptors and pigeons and crows may recover from their injuries, even broken wings, but a songbird’s life is
such a delicate, second-by-second proposition that they stand almost no chance of recovery from serious harm. This starling looked as though it had escaped, just barely, from one of those medieval-minded housecats. She was missing feathers and drooping wings and oozing blood from her speckled breast.

“Poor thing,” said Charlie’s owner. I hadn’t seen her approaching. She wore a pretty summer dress full of blue and purple flowers.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was going to kill it.”

For the second time she ran away from me, heaving Charlie by his poor uncomprehending neck.

This starling posed a dilemma. I resented the group that introduced them in Central Park in 1890 so that America could have every sort of bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. The traditional technique for dispatching a bird is to wring its neck, but when I have seen this done I have found it repulsive. The neck can sustain two or three full revolutions before the vertebrae disconnect, which means you need to hold the head between the thumb and forefinger of one hand while twirling the body with the other. If you should miscalculate and reach four or five revolutions, the two may separate. Previously in the field I had used a rock across the neck with pressure from my foot, which allowed me to feel that the rock had killed the bird with some assistance from my big unfeeling boot. I had hardly been involved. In the cemetery that day I could see no small rocks or sturdy twigs nearby. Failing that, the best method, which I used, was to pick the bird up and apply steady pressure to its sternum, which prevents it from breathing. Ten seconds later it was dead. For those ten seconds, however, I did not feel very enlightened or humane. I leashed Kia and went slowly home for a rueful afternoon.

Later I telephoned the police, and I was passed up a chain of disbelieving personnel, beginning with two women administrators and culminating with a sergeant detective who didn’t say what department she worked in.

“I found a human bone,” I explained.

A pause suggested this conversation might not go as planned, either.

“Right,” she said at last. “Where and when and how do you know it’s human?”

I related these details to her.

“A cemetery is a natural place for a bone,” she observed. “Did you see any disturbances in the earth nearby?”

“No.”

“Well, did you look?”

“Absolutely.”

“Did you contact the cemetery directly?” she said.

“They didn’t seem to believe me.”

“What’s around there?” she said. “I can’t picture it.”

“It’s heavily residential,” I said.

“Do you think your dog might have left the cemetery grounds?”

“I don’t see how she could have. It’s surrounded by a wrought-iron fence.”

“Did you put it back?”

“I couldn’t figure out where it came from.”

“So you took it home. In a way, you stole the bone.”

“No, no, no, I—”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I am not sure what to investigate. Or how. If I could call it a crime I could open an investigation. I’m trying to find an angle. A bone in an enclosed cemetery
does not sound very suspicious. I’ll run someone out there to look around, but it might be a few days, and, as you say, you’ve already looked.”

“But can you take the bone off my hands?”

Kia loped over and mournfully inspected my crotch.

“Well, yes. But why?”

“You could run tests or something.”

“That would cost money, which would require a formal investigation. We’ll take it, though, sure. We’ll put it in a ziplock bag and store it in the evidence room.”

She was not unhelpful, just bemused. She promised again that someone would look the cemetery over and that the police would accept the bone if I handed it in, but mainly she recommended trying to return it to Rose Hill personnel first.

Afterward I took Kia to a park slightly farther away, crowded with other dogs and girls on bicycles or Rollerblades. Kia chased anything with a wheel, giving me an excuse to speak to these girls, but they rarely seemed to appreciate my apologies. I also didn’t think it was the kind of exercise she needed. She liked to bound pointlessly, spastically around, her tail twitching like some very hairy pastry barely attached to her rump; racing after things merely stressed her out. I told myself that if I could afford my own dog I’d get a basset hound, so girls would think I was sensitive but not too smart. Back home I tried to get her to join me on “I Fought the Law (and The Law Won),” which is over the word limit but still beats sentimental pap about baby shoes. She just watched me with one elevated eyebrow as though she found me slightly odd.

I have a friend named Alex who lives in England—he married a Somerset lass or some such romantic thing. When his grandmother died his sister sent some photos of their grandmother lying in her casket. I guess they don’t do open caskets in England, because Alex told me his wife thought those photos the creepiest thing she ever saw and she wouldn’t even let them stay in the apartment. They were banished to a cupboard in the public stairwell, and even then she complained. I didn’t think it right to consign my bone to a closet with the Scrabble and the winter coats. Not that I had either of those things then.

Maybe this bone was Mexican. They take their dead seriously. I know, because I flew down there once to supervise a census of vermilion tanagers in urban environments. They don’t have one Day of the Dead, they have three. Every family makes an altar in the living room framed by marigolds and on it they put whatever the dead family member or members enjoyed in life. It might be steak and it might be Marlboros. Later they go down to the local cemetery with guitars and candles and tequila and beer, where they clap hands and sing until the sun comes up. I did not feel right sticking this bone in the kitchen trash, or dropping it nonchalantly in Rose Hill somewhere Charlie might find it. I felt that if it were my bone I’d want it celebrated somehow, honored.

“This is a great bone!” I said. I don’t think Kia took my meaning, though she agreed with an emphatic woof.

On the following morning Charlie found a human tooth. I saw his owner crouching to inspect something but not to pick it up with an inverted plastic bag. I thought she might have
found some other, more substantial thing, and that we might improve our rapport in discussing it.

“That looks like a tooth,” I said. It was a molar, one third of it dense and yellow, the rest of it long tapered white roots. It lay atop the earth and was nowhere submerged.

“I can see that,” she said.

“Where do you suppose it’s from?”

“Someone’s mouth, probably.”

I should have left her alone then; just wandered off to find Kia. But testy as she was I still imagined that we had some common bond she had yet to discover. Not that I planned to mention the bone just yet.

“What are you going to do with it?” I said.

“Do with it?” she said, standing up. “Why on earth would I do anything with it?”

“It’s somebody’s tooth,” I said.

“Yes, but it’s not my tooth. Is it yours?”

“No, but if it were your tooth, would you want you to just leave it lying around?”

“What kind of question is that?” she demanded.

“Well, you wouldn’t want your tooth just lying around in the rain, would you?”

“I’m not touching it,” she said. She probably should have just turned and hauled Charlie away as usual, but now we were having an argument, and I sensed that she liked arguments.

“Besides, if it were my tooth, I would pretty obviously not be able to use it.”

“So you would leave it out in the rain.”

“Why not? If you leave a tooth at the dentist he just throws it away.”

“Yeah, but he always offers them to you in case you want to take them home.”

“That’s just morbid,” she said. “Taking your teeth home.”

“Morbid?”

“Unnatural.”

“What about baby teeth? Did your parents keep your baby teeth?”

“That’s different.”

“Why is it different?”

“Don’t be an ass,” she said. “They’re baby teeth.”

“So you’re going to leave it there,” I said. She glared.

“What if it were a bone?” I said.

“Are you deranged?” she said.

“I’m just asking a question,” I said.

“If it were a bone I wouldn’t touch it, either,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It could be completely unhygienic, for one thing,” she said. I doubted this, unless it was still sleeved in putrescent flesh, but I didn’t point that out. “In the second place, it’s just none of my business, and in the third, it would be rather creepy.”

“So you’d leave it there,” I persisted.

“It’s a tooth, for God’s sake, not a bone!”

I stared at it awhile. She stared at me.

“What are you going to do with it then?” she demanded.

I shrugged. “Nothing. As you say, it’s a tooth, not a bone.”

“Then why are you playing twenty questions? Are you trying to come on to me?” I couldn’t suppress a harsh laugh. “Because Charlie used to enjoy coming here,” she added. She gave one of her neck-snapping yanks in his direction and marched away.

I did leave the tooth where it lay, but I stood pondering it for some time. I think that strange exchange was the reason, ultimately, that I kept the bone. There is a difference between
tooth and bone, though I can’t put my finger on it. What stuck in my mind, though, was the thought that the only thing that made either one human was me. To Kia the bone was a thing to be fetched, to Charlie’s owner an unhygienic, creepy irrelevance, in police hands it would be an exhibit lumped between confiscated drugs and firearms, and to the cemetery authorities it was a phantom of my imagination. Of these interpretations, the latter was closest to true; I had imagined a phantom human, though I could not ascribe it a gender or a time or an occupation.

And yet I had not imagined it: at the other end of my bone, so to speak, lay a real human being about whom nothing was known or knowable beyond its undeniable humanity. It fell to me to preserve that humanity: to prevent it winding up in Kia’s swampy mouth again, or in the landfill among toaster ovens and eggshells. Even if I returned it to the cemetery, it was likely to sit in a desk drawer as a kind of prank-in-waiting for new employees.

I returned Kia the next day, as her owner had come home. That is, she jerked me along for twenty-six city blocks while I tried to keep half a ten-pound bag of dog food, two blankets, and some toys from slipping out of my grasp.

Kia was overjoyed to see Peter. Peter was less enthusiastic. He didn’t particularly want a dog. His glamorous pole-dancing housemates had eventually drawn the attention of a mentally unstable ex-marine. After befriending Peter for access, he turned the lives of all three into a nightmare of surveillance, stolen underwear, and intimidation. Kiki had confronted him: If you watch us perform, why do you need to watch us wash dishes? The ex-marine threatened
her, and Anna suggested getting a dog. For a while Kia had actually been useful. Peter felt terrible, thought it was his fault. He rang the police, who suggested that a certain kind of girl takes a certain kind of risk, and it’s up to her to face the consequences. Peter hung up. Eventually Kiki and Anna quit their jobs and moved away, and their stalker vanished, but Peter in appearance had gone straight from jaded youth to abject middle age.

He gave me twenty dollars for my trouble. It wasn’t much, but all he had on him. We stood at the door and he didn’t invite me in, so I scratched Kia behind the ears and made my long lonely way home.

Pinned to my screen door was a note:
FEEDING YOU TONIGHT WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT: 8:00 P.M. VALERIE
. That gave me a few hours to finish my book and procure sixteen dollars’ worth of wine and a block of cheese for myself later. I did not take the bone with me. I didn’t think it wanted to be a party trick.