by Jenny Lawson
Day 1:
The day that Barnaby Jones Pickles died was a difficult one.
We were still getting used to our new house, and we were planning how to build a backyard fence that would keep him in and the scorpions out. Until then, though, we’d simply let him run around the house most of the day, terrorizing the cats, and then put him out on an incredibly long leash/dog run attached to the back-porch banister, so he could run down to the meadow behind our house. But having a dog in the backyard, even for a little bit a day, is risky, and in the country I learned that it was just damned dangerous.
Learn from my mistakes, people.
I convinced myself that he’d be fine, as he had a covered porch to rest under, with several outdoor ceiling fans that ran constantly, plus a sprinkler to run in. I was certain that he was perfectly safe from everything but himself. He’d be frolicking around as I watched from the living room, and then two minutes later I’d look up again to find him with no leash left, having somehow woven an enormous, terribly designed sort of spiderweb with his leash, all of my porch chairs now caught unnaturally inside of it as he looked at me, his little pug head cocked to the side as if to say, “. . . what the fuck just happened?” I’d painstakingly untangle him and move the porch chairs around to the front of the house, but by the time that I got back he’d be tied to the barbecue grill, giving me the exact same look.
I started to suspect that in a past life he’d been a small and not very good pirate whose specialty was lashing himself to the mast at the most inopportune times. I could imagine the captain giving him the same pitying but frustrated look when he came up from his nap to find that Barnaby Jones Pirate had lashed himself to the wheel of the ship because he thought he saw a cyclone, which turned out to be some birds. I knew exactly how that captain must have felt, as he undoubtedly sighed and spent another half-hour unwinding the knotted ropes as Barnaby Jones licked him uncontrollably on the face. Or at least, that’s what Barnaby Jones Pickles always did to me while I was untangling him. I suspect Barnaby Jones Pirate did it as well. There weren’t a lot of girl pirates around, and I’m not going to judge a bunch of pirates and their licking practices. I’m totally pro–same-sex-licking. And pro-pirate. Except for the raping and pillaging parts. I’m anti–raping-and-pillaging. I’m pro–hooks-and-peg-legs. Which I think makes me pirate agnostic.
I never yelled at Barnaby, though, because it’s hard to be mad at someone who’s so damned happy to see you. “Good old Jones,” I’d say gruffly, as I rubbed his ears while he joyfully attempted to gnaw the shoes I was wearing off of my feet. He’d smile in that semi-mindless way that pugs have perfected, and I’d try very hard not to fixate on the furious rabbit hiding in his forehead wrinkles (constantly glaring at me accusingly), both because it seemed to make the dog self-conscious, and also because Victor said that seeing an imaginary angry rabbit on your dog’s forehead is probably some sort of Rorschach test that proves some mental illness that we couldn’t afford to properly medicate anyway. But it was totally there. See below:
I drew in the rabbit face for people with little imagination, but once you’ve seen it, it can’t be unseen.
And then came the terrible day when I called Barnaby Jones to come inside, only to find him dead in the backyard, his furrowed bunny brow gone forever. His face was swollen, and our vet later said he’d most likely been bitten by a snake. I’d write something darkly comedic here to cut the sadness of the whole experience, but I just can’t, because I loved that damn dog.
In my head I screamed obscenities at myself for ever leaving him outside, but I had to stay quiet so that Hailey wouldn’t notice. I didn’t want her to see him that way. Victor was out of town, and the vet’s office answering machine said they were closed for the weekend, so I picked Barnaby up and carried him down to the meadow behind our house, and then cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Then, after an hour of backbreaking work digging a hole in ground that was almost entirely rock, I buried him there in the meadow he loved to frolic in. I piled a cairn of rocks on top of the grave to mark it. I did it alone, and it sucked.
When it was done, I told Hailey and hugged her while she cried. We held each other on the couch, and every few hours she’d ask me whether it was just a bad dream. I wished it were. She asked if we could go buy another pug and call him Barnaby Jones and just pretend that he never died. I told her that it wouldn’t be fair to do that to Barnaby, but the truth was that I knew I couldn’t handle this again, and I resolved then and there, “I will never own another dog.”
I called Victor to tell him what had happened, and he cried. I told him that I’d buried Barnaby Jones in our meadow, and then Victor got very quiet, because he was perfectly aware of the fact that there’s almost no dirt in the meadow. I suspected he was just quiet because he realized what a terrible predicament he’d put me in by not being home, but then he said enigmatically, “Keep an eye out to where you buried him.” He said it exactly the same way that the guy in Pet Sematary (still purposely misspelled) would say it if you accidentally buried someone you loved in the part of the cemetery that resurrects bodies. I sighed and started crying again, because the last thing I wanted to do was to have to kill my already dead dog again when his soulless body dug itself out of the grave, and then Victor was all, “What in the hell are you talking about?” and I said, “You know . . . SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK?” Then Victor said he was going to call his parents to come get me, because I was obviously having some sort of nervous breakdown. At the time I thought he was saying that because I was getting all of my Stephen King stories confused in my head, but in retrospect it might have been because I just started ranting about having to murder our already dead dog with no real context. Either way, though, the worst part was over, and I assured Victor that in time I’d be okay.
And I totally would have been. If Barnaby Jones Pickles had not risen from the grave.
Day 2:
My neighbor came over to tell me she’d seen me digging a grave in the meadow yesterday, and thought she’d stop by to see if everything was okay. I was touched, both because she’d come to check on me and also because she’d assumed I was digging a grave but hadn’t called the police. “This,” I thought to myself, “is exactly why I love the country.” She also told me that it was likely that a rattlesnake had bitten Barnaby, as that had happened to two of her dogs. “And this,” I thought to myself, “is exactly why I hate the country.”
I called Victor, who was still out of town for the week. “Barnaby Jones Pickles was actually killed by a rattlesnake. Also, apparently they’re everywhere here, and they all want to kill your dog. I’m never leaving the house again. How do the guns work?” Victor was freaked out about that series of questions, and refused to give me the combination to the gun safe, because apparently he wanted the rattlesnakes to eat Hailey and me. Then he pointed out that rattlesnakes don’t eat people, and that it was just as likely that Barnaby was killed by an allergic reaction from a bee as from a rattlesnake, and that I was probably just fixating on rattlesnakes to keep from having to mourn about Barnaby. Then I hung up on Victor and Googled, “How do I make rattlesnakes leave me alone?”
According to Wikipedia, snakes despise mothballs and will run from them at all costs (which seemed questionable, since snakes don’t have legs). I suspected that Wikipedia had confused snakes with moths, but the mothball remedy was repeated on other sites as well, so I bought six economy-size boxes of mothballs and sprinkled them around the perimeter of the house so thickly that it looked like it had hailed in an incredibly fucked-up pattern. It also smelled as if my house were being surrounded by little old ladies, which was unfortunate, but I visualized that they were vicious old grannies who were all armed with snake-chopping battle-axes, and that made it easier to deal with.
I also called an exterminator, who said the mothballs were a good start, and that he’d bring over a giant can of snake repellent to spray around the perimeter to keep the snakes at bay. I asked, “So how do you make
sure that the snake isn’t already hiding inside the perimeter, and will now be trapped in here with me?”
He paused for a second, then replied, “Wow. That’s a good question. How do you know?” And I was like, “This isn’t a quiz. I’m asking you . . . how do you know?” Then he said that if the snake wasn’t already gone, it would be able to pass over the Snake-A-Way just to get far away from the scent. I asked, “So it’s not like when you put a circle of salt around you to keep demons away?” And he was like, “That works?” And then I thought that maybe I needed to find a new exterminator.
I went out to do a second line of mothballs, and that was when I noticed that Barnaby Jones’s grave had been disturbed. The cairn of stones I’d put on his little tomb had been knocked down, and I saw the tiny, horrifying hint of a paw sticking out. For a brief second I was terrified that Barnaby Jones was actually returning from the grave, and I froze, wondering whether I should help dig him out or call an exorcist. But as I watched, an enormous dark bird swooped down and pulled at the leg. I slowly made my way down the hill toward the meadow as a giant horde of raptors shrieked and took off from the tree they were perched in.
Vultures.
I ran to the garage to grab a machete, but every time I would walk away from Barnaby’s grave they would swoop back in. Then I would scream and run at them, waving my machete angrily, and they would take a step back and look at me like I was being ridiculous. “You’ve left us food,” they seemed to be saying. “Please stop trying to whack us in the heads with a machete. It’s bad enough that you’ve buried our snack. Honestly, you’re embarrassing all of us here.”
I felt like Laura Ingalls when she was shooing away locusts from the wheat crop, except that my wheat crop was a dead dog and I didn’t have a sunbonnet. I finally came inside and called my mom, and she was very understanding and supportive. She is, however, also a realist, and she suggested that maybe I should leave the house for a few days and just let Barnaby Jones have some sort of accidental Tibetan sky burial. My mom is the worst atheist ever. Also, it’s possible that she was less pro–Tibetan-sky-burial and more just unsettled to learn that I own my own machete. It’s like my mom has never even met me.
She had a point, though. It was the circle of life, but I wasn’t okay with Barnaby Jones being an appetizer at that circle. I was also afraid that Hailey would see all the vultures pull Barnaby from his grave. She was already peering at the enormous birds suspiciously, and had asked why they were there. “They’re . . . praying,” I replied, saying the first thing that came to mind. “They’re praying and having a funeral for Barnaby.” Luckily, this made perfect sense to a six-year-old raised on illogical Disney movies.
I called Victor again. “Barnaby Jones Pickles was actually killed by a shark.”
“What?” he choked out.
“Just kidding. But he is rising from the grave.”
“I’m working here,” he whispered, voice strained. “Are you drunk right now?”
“I have never been more sober—or more in need of a drink—in my entire life.” Then Victor hung up to get back to work, and I considered throwing all of our house cats outside to chase off the vultures, but I was afraid that they’d either get lost, since they’d never been outside before, or that the vultures would simply see them as an easier snack, pick them up, and carry them off. Not only would that be very depressing, but I was also keenly aware that if I accidentally killed all of our pets in a single weekend Victor would never leave me alone again, and would probably take to hiding the machete. Instead I decided to just draw all the curtains and pretend that this was totally not happening.
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 FI
VE, 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.”
