“Much obliged, ma’am.”
Louise stood on the front porch and watched him walk down the driveway, headed to the next set of neighbors. No, she wasn’t a suspect. Nobody in their right mind would think that an old woman could overpower Sonny Gothaway.
She went out on the back deck. The wren chirped at her cheerfully, and she lifted a hand in salute. Her roses, completely free of Japanese beetles, released an elegant perfume into the air.
There had been several enormous flight feathers on the deck three days ago, from the wings of a Canada goose. Louise had read that a swan could break a man’s leg with its wing. She wondered what effect a goose’s wing could have on a man’s head. (The geese had, thankfully, flown away yesterday evening, leaving a great many green piles behind them. Her spiderwort would probably never be the same.)
It had rained heavily two nights before, which had nicely eliminated any tracks left in the yard. She’d had to use Clorox on the bloody smear that the back of Sonny’s head had left on the wall. It wasn’t likely that the FBI would be swabbing her vinyl siding, but you just never knew, did you?
She’d had a pretty good idea that something had happened when she’d found the sliding glass door ajar. Pibb had been absolutely frantic, but he couldn’t get the door open the extra inch that would let him fit his fat belly through the gap.
That weird little bit of metal that she’d found on the deck had gone into a box which had gone into the very back part of the attic, under the tangled Christmas lights and an old box of National Geographics.
She wondered, idly, if the birds had done it purely in self-defense, or if they had been making some kind of offering to unknown avian gods. A giant wicker nest, set on fire…well, you had to wonder. The newspapers were full of speculation about the birds these days, ranging from a side-effect of the R-strain West Nile vaccine, to a judgment from God. Somebody on FOX News had said that the birds were possessed by demons and the end times were upon the earth, but then again, they said that whenever there was a hurricane or a Democrat in the White House.
For her part, she preferred to think that it was a kindness. A favor done in return for a great deal of birdseed and occasional bits of peanut butter.
“I suppose it’s all for the best,” said Louise. “They’ll figure you out eventually. And you’ll always be welcome in my garden—but you know that, don’t you?”
“Chirr,” said the wren agreeably.
THAT TIME WITH BOB AND THE UNICORN
I went to sushi with a friend of mine and tried to explain this idea to her—which mostly involved me saying “Bob, virginity is a cultur-al con-struct,” in a bad Southern accent—and she told me that if I didn’t write it and send it to her, she would hunt me down. I would rather like to know more about the good doctor, honestly, who seems like a good person to have around.
So I was at the coffee shop the other day and I ran into Bob—not the Reverend, but Marlene’s boy—and he was talking about unicorns.
I don’t talk to Bob all that much, but being retired, I do spend a lot of time down at the coffee shop, partly so that I don’t get weird from being home alone all the time and partly because my niece Donna got me a fancy coffee maker and I’ve read the manual twice and I still don’t know how to use it. But she’s my favorite niece so I keep it out on the counter for when she comes to visit and I get all my coffee down at the coffee shop.
Anyway, Bob was going on about unicorns and how he aimed to catch himself one, for reasons that I was none too clear on myself. And I could see two problems with that right off, so I said “Bob, aren’t unicorns mythical?” and he said no, he was pretty sure they were just real sneaky, but he had a sure-fired method that was going to work, which was to get a virgin and sing a song he’d got from a book, and then he proceeded to sing a few bars and that was really all I needed to hear, though I assume the unicorns would have appreciated it.
So then I brought up the other problem, which was that Bob is definitely not a virgin, which I do not know from personal experience, you understand, but because everybody knows he pays child support to a woman over in Buncombe County, and we all know it because he talks about it on his Facebook page practically every day and posts a lot of tirades about how women are sucking the pioneering spirit out of men and the courts are all rigged against fathers and if women’s lib was really a thing, how come we don’t draft women?
I’d unfriended him quietly awhile back, and mostly relied on Marlene to tell me how he was doing. I respect everybody’s right to post stupid-ass screeds on their Facebook, but I don’t want to try and read it before breakfast. You start the day looking at that and you spend all day itching for a fight. I like to start with some pictures of tiny kittens who’ve made friends with big dogs and then maybe some science articles. It’s amazing how much science I’ve been able to catch up with, being retired.
But anyway, Bob showed me a ring he was wearing and said that it was a symbol that he’d undergone a re-virgining ceremony where he dedicated his life to purity and now he was a virgin again, which I guess is a thing you can do these days.
“But Bob,” I said, “virginity is a culturally constructed category,” and then I explained to him about how being a virgin in different cultures meant that sometimes you were a virgin ‘til you married or ‘til you had kids and if you were an Ancient Egyptian, you didn’t even have a concept of virginity at all. He was starting to get a little fidgety about that point, though, so I stopped with the Ancient Egyptians even though I think it’s fascinating and I explained that he needed to make sure the unicorn had the same cultural concept of virginity as he had, and if that involved re-virgining then he was maybe gonna wind up with an evangelical unicorn, not that this was necessarily a problem if it was what he was going for, but you like to know what to expect.
But Bob was convinced he’d figured it all out and he finished his coffee and left off and I read an article about what that probe on Pluto found out and then another one about a momma pig that adopted a whole bunch of little baby ducks.
Anyway, I went out of town for a bit and what with one thing and another, I didn’t see Bob for a couple of weeks, and when I got back into the coffee shop, there he was, hunched over a cup of coffee like a hawk with a hangover.
So I asked him about how his unicorn hunting went and he gave me a look and he said that I’d know if I bothered to follow him on Facebook.
“Bob,” I said, “we have been over this ground before. There is an acceptable ratio of cat pictures to screeds about men’s rights and you have reversed the numbers on that particular ratio, and that is why I don’t plan to friend you again. So what happened with the unicorn?”
He gave a hollow sort of laugh, like a mortician who’s heard the same joke too many times before and he said he’d got himself a narwhal.
“A narwhal!” I say.
“A narwhal,” he says. Apparently he’d been sitting in the pool singing the unicorn song with the re-virgining ring in the water and WHAM, there was a narwhal cuddling up next to him, as best one could given the size of the pool and the size of the narwhal and the size of Bob.
Well, that was not one of the ways I had pictured Bob’s unicorn hunting going—my money’d been on him shooting himself in the foot, actually, like the time he took out after a snipe, except the other foot this time, for symmetry’s sake. But when I stopped and thought about it, it did make a certain kind of sense, if you start off by thinking that maybe unicorns aren’t a thing themselves, but a condition that happens to your hoofed mammals, like some of them being born white with blue eyes. And then you figure that you get unicorn horses and unicorn cows and some of those unicorn gazelles over in the desert where they got all the stories about evil antelope unicorns, and of course whales are all descended from hoofstock that went back into the ocean a shit-ton of time ago, pardon my language, but I don’t think you can really express geologic time properly without profanity and you figure that maybe that Ambulocetus what they call the “wa
lking whale” took the unicorn genes with him and if it happened a bunch and they all swam around together and kept marrying their cousins the way you’re not supposed to do, you’d get your narwhals eventually.
I tried to explain this all to Bob, and even went so far as to draw out an Ambulocetus on a napkin, but I could tell he wasn’t all that interested, even though it was a pretty good drawing, if I do say so myself.
“Bob,” I say, “a man who is no longer interested in the genetics of inbred hillbilly water unicorns is a man who is no longer interested in life. I am afraid for your priorities, son.”
“Fine,” he says, “but that doesn't change the fact that I got a narwhal in my above-ground swimming pool, now does it?”
“Bob,” I say, “that is animal cruelty. You cannot keep a narwhal in an above-ground swimming pool. They are cold-water animals and the chlorine can’t be good for them.”
“I’ve been feeding it frozen fish sticks,” he said, and I vowed then and there to save that poor narwhal, which deserved a whole lot better than Bob.
So I finished my coffee and I went home and I called up Donna, my niece, who is still a virgin on account of her being one of those gold-star lesbians, which I know because she talked about it on her Facebook page and I was most of the way into the post before I realized what was going on. She posts a pretty good ratio of cat pictures to screeds so I hadn’t been expecting it at the time. Donna answered the phone, and I explained about Bob and the narwhal first, so she wouldn’t think I was asking for a weird reason, and then asked if she was still one of those gold-star lesbians, and she allowed how she was, but she didn’t talk about it online any more in case it was insensitive to people who’d taken a bit of a different path to get where they were going.
“Right,” I said, “I need your help because I think I need a virgin to soothe this narwhal who’s been traumatized,” and she asked how it had been traumatized and I reminded her about when she’d gone on a blind date with Bob back when she was in the closet and she slammed down the phone and was coming down the driveway before I’d finished talking. I barely had enough time to throw the coffee pot into the sink so it looked like I’d been using the coffee maker she got me.
(A couple months after all this went down, I learned that narwhals are like the Ancient Egyptians and don’t have a cultural concept of virginity, which would have made things a whole lot easier, but none of us knew it at the time, and hindsight’s a bear. But I still would have called Donna anyway, since she’s my favorite niece.)
So I got out the Buffalo then, which is what I call the truck my mother left me, because of the time I went to Namibia and saw the African buffalo which are fearless and charge without warning and kill more people than any other animal on the continent and as it happens all those things also described my mother driving her truck, so the name stuck. The Buffalo’s still in good shape for its age, and Donna followed me in her little Subaru and we went out to Bob’s place and went around back and there was the poor narwhal stuffed in the aboveground pool like a dog in a toilet.
It was obviously in a pretty bad way, what with the heat, and I can’t imagine the fresh water made it too happy—not that you could call it fresh when it was full of narwhal turds like it was—so I did not feel any qualms about relieving Bob of his ill-gotten narwhal while he was at work.
We backed up the Buffalo to the pool and getting the narwhal into the bed of the truck was a mess that I won’t bore you with, even though I’d brought a tarp and a winch. It took a couple of hours, even though the narwhal figured out what we were doing and was eager to help. It was pretty easy to see that it’d gone off Bob, which happens to nearly everybody eventually, although in retrospect I can’t imagine the narwhal had Facebook.
So anyway, we finally got the narwhal into the pickup bed and Donna was real bitter because we’d torn her bumper off in the process, although I promised I’d replace it, and then we had to stash the Subaru down the road so that she could ride in the bed with the narwhal and keep hosing it down. I’d put a couple of coolers full of ice cubes in the bed of the Buffalo, and it was clear that the narwhal appreciated it, although the problem with beached whales as I understand it is that their internal organs get so heavy that they can’t breathe all that well, and I couldn’t do anything about that while it was in the pickup.
Donna banged on the window and asked where we were going and I said the aquarium up in Nag’s Head, since the ASPCA didn’t have much in the way of facilities for unwanted narwhals and she was skeptical that they’d just let us dump a narwhal at the aquarium, but I said it’d be fine. They know me up at the aquarium, and they’ve been real friendly ever since my mother died and we spent a lot of her money from the wrongful death settlement to build them one of those centers where little kids can come in and pet starfish in the big shallow tanks. She’d always loved that story about the little boy and all the beached starfish and he keeps throwing them back even though there so many of them, and the moral is that even if you can’t save everybody, you can make a difference for individuals. Mom made a difference herself for a lot of individuals, many of whom would have maybe preferred to be left undifferentiated, so it seemed appropriate. It was called the Phyllis T. Williams Hands On Learning Center, hands-on learning being another one of those things that Mom practiced frequently and to the detriment of others.
“I don’t think they’re gonna let you dump a narwhal on them,” she said.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “I am a member of their Platinum Leadership Council,” which is true because that’s what they call you if you give them enough money, as opposed to their regular Leadership Council, which is if you only give them enough to hose the oil off a couple of unfortunate sea turtles.
So we rolled up to the aquarium and sure enough, the back door was open and the head director was out there and he was real nice and shook hands with everybody and called me “Doctor Williams,” which hardly anybody does these days since I’m retired.
A little bit of the niceness sort of oozed off him when he looked in the back of the pickup and saw Donna icing down the narwhal, and he got a funny expression like a man who has just stepped in something and is afraid to look down and see what it might be, and then he wanted to know if it was a stolen narwhal and I am afraid I lied and said that narwhal had been a voluntary surrender and then I was a little bit nervous because I could feel it going bad so I spun him a story about a friend who hadn’t gotten his narwhal spayed and now there was a litter but he’d found good homes except for this one and I don’t think he believed me on account of that being a monumentally stupid story but he also didn’t want to call one of the Platinum Leadership Council people a liar to their face, just in case I was looking to die myself and leave them money for a black-light jellyfish tank, which was what they were currently trying to fund according to the newsletters that they occasionally sent out to the house. (I don’t know why the jellyfish needed a black-light, unless they were trying to appeal to the local stoner demographic and get kids in there watching jellyfish and listening to Dark Side of the Moon, which would admittedly be pretty cool, when you think about it.)
Anyway, the narwhal let out a groan then, like a cow giving birth to a cinder block, and the head director decided maybe stolen narwhals were bad but letting a narwhal die out back of the aquarium was going to look real bad in the papers, so they rolled the narwhal onto the gurney they use for their belugas and hustled it inside. Donna went along to keep the narwhal calm, but I stayed outside and talked about how I’d always been a big fan of both Pink Floyd and jellyfish conservation, and eventually Donna came back and gave me the thumbs up.
So I wrote the man a check and that is why there is now the Doctor Williams Jellyfish Experience at the aquarium, to the left when you walk in.
They called me up a few months later to ask if I could get another narwhal, on account of them trying to breed the one we’d delivered, and I tried to volunteer Bob to magic up another one, but he wouldn’t ha
ve any of it. Said he’d gone and re-de-virgined himself, and I’d have known that if I followed his Facebook page. I told him that if he was putting that sort of thing of Facebook, I was doubly glad not to be watching it. Marlene says he’s interested in frogs now. I kind of feel sorry for the frogs, but I imagine they’ll be a lot easier to transport if push comes to shove.
I wrote up my theory about unicornism as a magical genetic expression in ungulates and sent it off to a nature journal, and they say they’re going to publish it, which is nice. I even made a little money of it, though not nearly enough to pay for the Doctor Williams Jellyfish Experience. But you know, I’m just glad I’ve had so much more time to do these sorts of things, now that I’m retired.
RAZORBACK
The story of Rawhead and Bloody Bones originated in Europe but migrated to the American South and underwent a local transformation. The definitive folklore version is likely S. E. Schlosser’s and is very much worth reading on its own.
There was a witch who lived up in the mountains, and I never heard but that she was a good one.
Some people will tell you she was old, but I don’t think she was. She just had one of those faces full of lines. With a face like that, you look a lot older than everybody else, but as time goes on, they all look older and you don’t, and you end up looking younger than everybody else by the time you die.
And you do learn early on not to get by on your looks, so there’s that.
I never did learn who her people were or if she had any. A whole lot of people wound up in the mountains—Lumbee and Cherokee and escaped slaves and the grandkids of people who lit off into the hills for one thing or another. Little bitty scraps of this group and that, all of ‘em living together and having kids. Leftover people.
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 8
