“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 watch
ed 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.
After a while my dad seemed satisfied that he’d saved as much from the house as he could, and walked over to where I was standing. He looked sweaty and annoyed, but not nearly as angry as I would have expected.
“We can’t stay here tonight,” he said. “I’ll have to find us a place.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ll need to move our stuff, too,” he said. “We can’t just leave it out here on the lawn. It’d be easier if I could leave you with someone. What about those kids you were playing with? Could you stay there for a few hours?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They don’t like me that much.”
“What about their parents?”
“I was talking about their parents.”
“Oh,” he said. “Come on. I’ll talk to them.”
So I walked down the street to Mickey and Kurty’s house in the afternoon twilight, and my dad knocked on their door. When Mr. Wagner answered I got the same feeling of vertigo I usually experienced when Dad talked to straight people. Seeing him standing there in his flamboyant hippie clothes while Mr. Wagner stood in front of him in a Lycra polo shirt and plaid slacks, arms crossed, biceps flexed—it was like matter and antimatter were about to collide. I didn’t hear much of the conversation but Mr. Wagner seemed to appreciate that our house had caught on fire, and I went inside while Dad ran off to make arrangements for us and our stuff.
I’d never actually been inside Mickey and Kurty’s house before. It seemed not to have enough windows, and the dining room table was directly beyond the front door. The whole family was sitting there looking at me—the kids and Mrs. Wagner.
“Won’t you join us?” Mrs. Wagner asked.
“Uh,” I said. Then I looked at the table and felt my pulse quicken. It was covered in pretty much my favorite foods ever: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, broccoli, carrots, and peas. I’d never seen that much fried chicken in one place in my life. Everyone was still staring at me, and I remembered I’d been invited to share this bounty.
“Sure!” I said. I started for the table, but Mrs. Wagner looked horrified and I paused again.
“The bathroom’s through here,” Mr. Wagner said, guiding me to a small room off the dining room that had a toilet and a sink in it. I went in, because he seemed to expect me to, but after he closed the door I just stood there until I remembered that Grandma had sometimes told me to wash my hands before eating. So I rinsed my hands quickly under some cold water, toweled them off, and went back out. By then they’d made a place for me at the table.
“This looks great,” I said, sitting down and reaching for the nearby platter of chicken. “You guys eat like this all the time?”
Mickey and Kurty exchanged an embarrassed look. Mr. and Mrs. Wagner were giving each other looks, too, but I couldn’t read them. I paused and looked at everyone else’s plates. They’d all been eating, so I knew they weren’t waiting to say grace—the other weird ritual I’d learned from my grandparents. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, but all that good food was calling to me so I piled on the chicken, served up a heap of mashed potatoes and gravy, and dug in.
“Man,” I said, “this is delicious.”
“I’m glad you like it,” said Mrs. Wagner. Then they all started eating, but with a lot of sidelong glances at me and secret looks between each other.
Finally everyone else was done, and the kids got up to watch TV in the other room. I was basically full so I started to get up, too, but Mr. Wagner shook his head and said, “Uh-uh,” while he was looking at my plate.
“What?” I asked, looking around to see what I was missing.
“You have to clean your plate first,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
I started to scrape the remaining pieces of chicken back onto the chicken plate, but he stopped me again.
“No,” said Mr. Wagner. “You can’t put it back. You’ve touched it. It’s been on your plate. You have to eat it.”
And I finally realized what all those looks were about.
“But you all made me wash my hands before dinner,” I said. “They’re clean!”
I held out my hands so the Wagners could see how clean they were.
“You’ve been eating with them since then,” said Mrs. Wagner. “We don’t share germs in this house.”
“But…” I couldn’t even formulate a reply to that one. In my house we ate each other’s leftovers all the time. When our crew went out skinny-dipping in Fall Creek, ten or fifteen of us would eat watermelon and whatever else by passing it around and taking big sloppy bites out of it. We all drank out of the same jugs. Me and my dad even shared bathwater to save money on hot water; he’d take his bath first because he liked his water hot, and I’d take mine after when it was just warm.
I looked at the pile of food on my plate. Looked at Mr. and Mrs. Wagner. I could hear the TV playing in the other room, where Mickey and Kurty had gone. The Wagners looked at me. I looked at them. Then Mr. Wagner went in the other room to watch TV and Mrs. Wagner started cleaning up. And I just sat there while she took everything else off the table except my plate. Sat there while she did dishes in the kitchen. Sat there when she went into the TV room with the rest of her family, until finally, after an hour or so, the doorbell rang. When Mrs. Wagner answered it I heard my dad’s voice.
He’d found a place for us to stay. He was there to pick me up.
“He’s in here,” Mrs. Wagner said, stepping aside to let Dad see me at the table.
Dad just poked his head through the doorway and said, “C’mon, Jason. I got all our stuff in a storage unit. Got your chicken out at Laurie’s, with Miles. We’ll crash out at Sean’s place for a while.”
I looked at Mrs. Wagner. “Can I be excused now?”
“I suppose,” she said.
I hopped down off the chair and grabbed Dad’s hand. He thanked the Wagners for keeping an eye on me and we left out the front door. It was dark outside.
“What the hell was that all about?” Dad wanted to know.
When I told him what had happened, he started cursing the Wagners and said that if they had house rules they should’ve told me what they were before I got a pile of food on my plate. I thought he was right about that, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that most people, most of the time, would agree with what the Wagners had done. Most people would think I needed to be taught a lesson in civilized behavior. And I wondered, not for the last time, what being right gets you if everybody else thinks you’re wrong.
10
Forensic fire investigation was evidently still in its infancy in 1977, because not only did nobody figure out it was John who’d burned our house down, but somehow the thing was ruled an accident from faulty wiring. This was good news for John, who couldn’t afford to pay for the damages, but it didn’t mean much to me and my dad. Dad left all our stuff in storage and we couch-surfed with friends for a couple of weeks until he found us a place to live.
We ended up in a comfortable little apartment in downtown Eugene. My father had historically expressed his dislike of apartments—he didn’t like sharing walls with strangers—but he said this one reminded him of Los Angeles. Which he apparently thought of as a good thing. After we’d been there less than a month he decided to make me some fried chicken of my own—only once he got the chicken going he realized he was out of rolling papers, so he took me down to the liquor store a few blocks away. By the time we got back, the fire department was there and all our neighbors were out on the street. Dad stood on the sidewalk and looked t
hrough the open front door into the blackened, gutted interior. As I stood next to him, I was mostly struck by what a huge difference a few minutes of uncontrolled burning could make in the atmosphere of a charming mid-century modern. Older houses stood up to this kind of thing better, I decided.
One of the firefighters noticed us and said, “Is this your apartment?”
Dad looked at the firefighter, looked back through the open front door, and said, “Nope.”
Then he put his hand on my shoulder and started guiding me down the street toward the Vega. When I started to turn around to look back at the firefighters, Dad squeezed my shoulder. Hard.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
It wasn’t a huge loss for us. All we had in the apartment was a bunch of junk we’d picked up on the cheap at Goodwill. I felt kind of bad about the other people who lived in the building, but I hadn’t known any of them by name and it was an easy thing to put behind me.
* * *
After the unfortunate burning-down-the-apartment incident, we moved into a small house on Fillmore Street with a woman named Marcy and her three kids, Crystal, Faith, and Isaac. The house only had two bedrooms and space was tight, but the price was right. Marcy got her own room because it was her house, and Crystal and Faith shared the other bedroom because they were older, and girls. Isaac and I bunked in the laundry room. Dad slept in the unheated storage area behind the garage. Dad and I left most of our stuff in the long-term storage locker at the edge of town since there was no place to put it in Marcy’s house.
Pretty much the only member of my family who got a better situation at the new house was Charlie—though he may have considered it a step down from the accommodations he’d enjoyed at Miles and Laurie’s place. The way the backyard was set up, Dad was able to string some chicken wire between the garage and the neighbor’s fence and create a little safe space for Charlie. Or so we thought. He died a few months after we moved, and while Dad wouldn’t let me see the body, I got a glimpse of a mangled mass of white feathers. Dad’s theory was that Charlie died of natural causes, and that something—a cat or a raccoon, maybe—ate him afterward. I didn’t see any evidence to support that idea, but I was happy to believe the fiction.
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 5
