A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (6 page)

Charlie was the product of a school science project. The teachers had designed and built an egg incubator out of stuff they got at the hardware store and told us all about how it worked. Then they brought in some fertilized eggs and put them in the incubator, under a bank of warm lights. We all watched the eggs obsessively and when the teachers passed around permission slips that would allow students to take the chickens home with us, I talked my dad into signing one.

“We don't have any place to put it,” he said at first.

“We've got the whole backyard!” I said.

“It's not fenced.”

“We can build something.”

By which I obviously meant that he could build something. He sighed.

“Fine,” he said. “But it's your problem.”

Keeping in mind here that I was four.

When the chickens hatched, all us kids were ecstatic. We watched the birds poke their way out of their shells, and we talked about how long it took them to be born. Sometimes a chick would spend a couple of hours working its way to freedom, sometimes the process would last overnight. And once they were out, the entire school got to play with them for a few days before they started getting sent home with the kids who'd talked their parents into signing permission slips. My dad balked again when he came to pick me up and actually saw—and smelled—the baby chickens in the incubator, but I whined until he let me bring Charlie home.

It started out well enough. I kept Charlie in a cardboard box in the living room. He was small. He didn't eat much or make much noise. But as he grew, it started to become obvious we'd need to take him outside. Dad stalled as long as he could on building me a chicken coop, but then one day he found an old playpen in an alley and brought it home for me to put Charlie in. He unfolded it proudly and stood back to show how the vinyl-padded metal frame supported the pink polyester mesh walls that would keep Charlie safe and sound in the backyard.

“It's got holes in it,” I said. “He'll get out.”

“No problem,” Dad said. He went into the house and came out with a darning needle and a roll of dental floss. A few minutes later he'd patched all the largest holes with dental floss, in such a way that it looked like a giant spider had been making half-assed webs in the gaps.

“Won't he peck through?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Dad said.

And the playpen worked pretty well for a few weeks, until Charlie started to crow. By this time he'd gone from a little yellow fuzzball to a medium-size white rooster with a bright red crest, and he wanted to let the world know he was in our backyard. Eugene was still rural enough that the neighbors didn't give us any grief about the crowing, but the sound drove Dad batshit.

“Jason,” he said one day. “We can't keep Charlie. He's too noisy.”

“What do you want to do with him?” I asked.

“Give him to Sean,” Dad said, referring to a friend of ours who owned a farmhouse out near Dexter, some twenty-five miles from the center of town.

“Sean eats his chickens, Dad.”

“Well—okay. But he won't eat Charlie if we ask him not to.”

Sean was a car mechanic from Georgia who was best known in our circles for getting so jacked up on speed that he once blew all the windows out of his house with a shotgun. That, and beating a murder rap for supposedly killing a woman he'd picked up in a bar one night. He was one of the least child- and animal-friendly people I'd ever met, and I had absolutely no faith in any promise he might make not to eat my chicken. I could already imagine him saying, “Charlie? Oh yeah, that's him, right there. What's that? Charlie was white and that one's orange? Well shit. I don't know what to tell you, kid.”

Something on my face conveyed all this to my dad, and he sighed dramatically.

“What if I get you another pet?” he asked.

“Like what?” I said.

“Something quiet. Like a gerbil. That way you can keep it in the house. And play with it.”

I had to admit that second part sounded nice. As much as I loved Charlie, he wasn't much fun to play with. He didn't really learn tricks, and he tended to peck at me when I tried to pick him up. Sometimes, when my friends were over, we'd make little mazes in the front yard by flattening the tall grass with our feet or cutting it with a steak knife, and then we'd run Charlie through the maze. But mostly he just ate, crowed—and pecked holes in the playpen.

“I'll try a gerbil,” I said.

“So I can call Sean about Charlie?”

“No!”

“Well. I guess Miles and his mom might take Charlie out at their place.”

Miles and his mom, Laurie, were part of our extended social network. They lived in a house that was situated on an actual farm just east of Springfield. The land around their house wasn't being cultivated anymore, but they had a lot of space and a long dirt driveway and an abandoned barn next to it. The whole setup was perfect for a chicken, and I figured they might be willing to give Charlie a patch of yard or something.

“Okay,” I said. “If I like the gerbil.”

The next day, when Dad brought me home from day care, I found a brown gerbil in a shoebox in my room. I took him out and tried to play with him, but he didn't seem to like being held any better than Charlie did and when he bit me, it hurt a lot worse than getting pecked. I played around with him for an hour or so before I put him back in his box and went to ask my dad where the gerbil's permanent home would be.

“Can't we just use the shoebox?” he asked.

“Won't he chew his way out?”

“I don't think so,” he said. “The sides of the box are too smooth. His teeth can't get a grip.”

I could feel something warm and soft on the bottom of the box.

“I think he peed in there, Dad.”

Dad opened the box and wrinkled his nose.

“Hold on,” he said. He went to the kitchen and came back a minute later with a paper bag.

“We can keep him in here while I line his shoebox with newspaper,” Dad said. We moved the whole operation out to the kitchen table and Dad tried to grab the gerbil out of the box. He seemed reluctant to touch the little brown creature, and I didn't offer to help because I sort of enjoyed watching him squirm. Finally he gave up trying to pick it up in his hand and just hoisted it out by its tail.

“That looks like it hurts him,” I said as the gerbil gyrated around and tried to get a grip on my dad's fingers with his little pink paws.

“No,” Dad said. “It's fine. They—”

Then the gerbil dropped back down into the shoebox.

At first I thought Dad had just lost his grip on the tail, but when I looked I saw he was still clutching it in his hand like a little scrap of ragged brown string. Dad and I both looked at the tail in his hand, then at each other—then down into the box.

The gerbil was on his back, legs flailing in the air, making little gasping movements with his mouth. There was surprisingly little blood from the stump of his tail, but it was clear the rodent was fucked.

“Shit,” I said.

Dad didn't say anything back.

“What's wrong with him?” I asked.

“I think it's in shock,” Dad said.

“In shock?” I asked.

“Yeah. I've heard it happens to rabbits and stuff, when they get really scared. It usually kills them. Like, from a heart attack.”

“Is there anything we can do?” I asked.

“Nope.”

Suddenly Dad got up and went out the back door of the house. I had no idea where he'd gone, but I didn't want to leave the gerbil alone. Not because I had a lot of love for the animal, but because I was afraid he'd jump out of the box and start running around the kitchen, like one of Sean's chickens with its head cut off.

When Dad came back a few minutes later he had a shovel.

“Is that so we can bury him after he dies?” I asked.

“Why wait?” he said, scooping up the box and walking toward the front door.

I couldn't really believe he was going to do what he said he was going to do, so I followed him out the front door. He put the box down on the stairs and used the shovel to dig a deep hole behind the iris bulbs, near the foundation of the house. It was still daylight outside and I looked around to see if anyone was watching, but, as usual, nobody was out on the street or in their yard. When Dad had a hole about the right size, he put the box in the bottom of the hole and put the lid on it. As the lid came down I could see the gerbil was still twitching, but it did seem to be winding down. I hoped that meant it was actually dying.

“Hold on,” Dad said, going back into the house. When he came back he dropped the gerbil's tail on top of the box, then started shoveling dirt in on it.

“Is it going to … hurt?” I asked.

“Nope,” Dad said. “Just like going to sleep.”

“Jesus,” I said, revising my opinion of sleep on the spot. “Are you gonna say something?”

“What do you want me to say, Jason? A gerbil's pretty much a rat. We put out mousetraps. When we catch one we just throw it in the garbage. At least this one's getting buried.”

“Okay,” I said, as he finished up.

When he was done he paused with the tip of the shovel resting on the fresh-turned earth and looked down at what he'd done. We exchanged a look and he sighed dramatically.

“Dear Mr. Gerbil,” he said. “I'm very sorry that things didn't work out. Better luck in your next life. Jason?”

“Sorry, Mr. Gerbil,” I said to the garden.

“All right,” Dad said. He left the shovel leaning against the house and led me inside to the kitchen table. After he sat me down he went to the refrigerator and poured some of Beth's milk into a Mason jar. Then he went to the cupboard and stole one of her cookies. He set both things down in front of me, then went to his room and came back with his stash box. While I ate the cookie, he rolled himself a big fat joint and lit up. He took the first hit with a shaking hand and leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

“So,” I said after a few minutes. “I can keep Charlie, right?”

He put his free hand over his eyes and made a noise, partway between a sob and a laugh.

“Yeah,” he said. “You can keep the fucking chicken.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Yeah—fine. Okay. Could you be quiet for a little while, please?”

“All right,” I said. It was getting dark outside, and I knew Beth might be home soon. I finished the milk and cookie, rinsed out the Mason jar and wiped the crumbs off the table, so hopefully she wouldn't notice we'd been into her food.

*   *   *

Dad still didn't build a coop for Charlie, but he moved the rooster to the garage, where the sound of his crowing wasn't quite as loud. I felt bad about it—I knew it was dark out there and that the garage was full of broken glass and other old junk that the bird could hurt himself on. I thought about what I might be able to do to get Charlie out of there. But nothing I could think of—short of getting my dad to build a coop, which had been impossible so far—would improve Charlie's situation much.

Then, a few months later, John solved the problem for me when he accidentally left a candle going in his room and halfway burned the house down. After that there was no question of staying on Hayes Street. We'd all have to move, including Charlie.

 

9

In a way, we were lucky about how John caught the house on fire. The fire happened in the middle of the day and Dad was the only one home. John was actually out of town. He'd left the day before, to take a shipment of kefir and whole-grain bread down to San Francisco. Which gives you an idea of how big that goddamn candle was. I was out playing with Mickey and Kurty, the straight kids down the street, and I didn't realize anything was wrong until I saw the smoke and heard the fire trucks.

“Hey,” Mickey said, walking out to the street so she could look down the block. “I think your house is on fire.”

“No,” I said. “That can't…” I walked out and stood next to her and looked at where the fire trucks were gathered.

“Well fuck,” I said.

“Jason!” Mickey said.

“Sorry.”

I walked down the block to my house and saw my dad carrying loads of our stuff out of the house one armful at a time: TV, stereo, record collection, and then various antiques. He stacked it all as neatly as he could, off on one side of the yard, while firefighters wearing dirty yellow bunker gear went in and out past him. They'd already blasted one of their giant hoses through John's bedroom window. The attic was smoking fitfully, but the fire was mostly out. Dad was just trying to get as much of our stuff out as possible before the water started to make its way through the ceilings and into the lower part of the house.

Right as I got there, one of the firefighters called out the window for everyone to get clear, then tossed John's scorched mattress and box spring from the second floor onto the front lawn. I looked at the exposed metal springs and wondered if this was what had happened to the mattress Marianne had told me to be careful on, back at our house on 15th.

“Step back, kid,” one of the firemen on the street said to me as I tried to get into the yard to help Dad move our stuff.

“That's my house,” I said.

“Jason!” Dad called to me. “Stay back there. I'll be with you in a minute.”

So I stood and watched while the firefighters threw more of John's stuff out the window onto the lawn, and Dad kept hauling our stuff to safety. Once he was done with our things, he started bringing Beth's belongings out and putting them in another pile. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting Mickey and Kurty to come and watch the whole thing, but they didn't even come back to the street to wave at me. Either this was a lot less interesting than I thought it was, or their parents had told them to come inside.