The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  2: Fire

  According to myth, Pegasus lived a brief and noble life on earth before ascending to the sky, whereupon he atomized into a spray of stars that bear his name as an immortal constellation. Thus, on any clear night, you can look up and find him, his sequined eyes staring at you from a vast blackness in which he is either trapped or forever free, depending upon your view of infinity.

  I find it ironic that the horse of all horses does not gallop on the ground but rather lives his life amongst celestials, in a dark field of silver florals. Because to me, in my mind, and for my body, horses were the one, if not the only, way to tether my broken being to the earth, from which it always seemed I was drifting, disassociated, radically severed from self and soil.

  Surely I was not born this way. I arrived on March 21, 1963. Of my very early childhood I recall little, or little I wish to mention here, for in this story of horses and history, my life, it seems, started one spring evening. I don’t remember the date, but let’s call it May 28, 1973, ten years after my actual birth and just at the cusp of the sweetest season—June—when the gardens drop their modesty and begin their driven bloomings.

  I know on that evening I smelled summer coming right around the corner. At ten, I was cradled in the stage called latency, a peaceful time well past the throes of infancy and long enough before the next leap into adolescence.

  And I was playing that evening in the church’s empty parking lot, as I often did, with the children from a few streets over, let me call them the Callahans, a Catholic family and thus an oddity in the Golden Ghetto.

  The Callahan kids were six in all, ranging in age from Mary, fifteen, who smoked and sulked in a corner of the lot, watching us younger ones with the slight sneer that teenagers perfect, to Joey, aged three, his face a splatter of Irish freckles, slurry always running from his nose.

  We had a red wagon. It must have been the Callahans, and they must have left it behind in a hurry that evening because days later, after what happened had happened, the police found the wagon with Mary’s bracelet inside it, her name inscribed on the silver plate.

  The wagon had a long, black pull handle, and the body was rusted here and there. One wheel was loose on its axis, so it clattered crazily on the church’s bumpy asphalt. Each kid took his or her turn pulling while the rest of us crammed into the cart and screamed with delight as we ricocheted around and around the empty church lot, the split-level houses across the street so silent, so stubbornly suburban, with their little lawns and little windows and dark doors. The world, it seemed, was emptied of everyone except the Callahan children and me, one kid pulling the rest, stuffed into the rusted red wagon circling the asphalt beneath a fiery sky, the streaked clouds painted pink and welt.

  We had no notion that anything was or might soon be askew. Presiding over us was the gothic church with its windows of gorgeous glass that soared to the uppermost story, windows everyone in the Golden Ghetto, regardless of their religion, admired for their artistry and size, windows we all presumed were fixed because they seemed far too big to open and close, and much too special for such prosaic purposes.

  It was a Thursday. It could not have been much past 6 p.m., because I recall the setting sun, the svelte shadows on the cracked concrete of the lot. Soon, we knew, our mothers would call us in and so—would it be fair to say—we sensed our time was short? We were, all of us—minus Mary blowing smoke O’s into the cooling air—crammed into this rusted wagon, the loose wheel making such a very loud sound, the person pulling (was it Andrea’s turn?) making a show of our enormous weight and her enormous strength, groaning and spitting as she used all of her horsepower to propel this mass of youth and laughter over the wrecked asphalt of the empty lot.

  And thus it was that we did not immediately hear the strange sound, nor notice that one of those gargantuan and supposedly forever-frozen stained-glass windows was moving, yes, moving, inching out, and out, accompanied by a series of rusty bronchial screeches that suggested, in retrospect, hidden, unused hinges on every one of those supersized works of art.

  “What’s that?” I recall someone said, and then a “shhh,” and then, “Goddamn it, guys, shut up.” That did it. Andrea stopped her Clydesdale imitation, and, as if on cue, we all looked up, searching for the source of this strange sound. And that is when we saw it, the ten-, maybe fifteen-foot panel opening above us with a crackling, sickly creak that was still somehow strong enough to move a giant Jesus through the air, his crown and cross captured in the cut of glass and careful curves of lead.

  I was sitting smushed up against slurry-nosed baby Joe, who right then and there wet his pants, my pants soaking up his seepage and his smell. “Shhhh,” someone said again as the window kept coming, moving slowly out, and out, the late light landing on the colored glass, inflaming it. “God,” Andrea said, meaning, I think, that she thought God was making the window move, but I thought I saw the dark shadow of a person and a hand clutching what could have been—must have been—a crank, and then the crank cranked up and released the most unearthly rasp, a sound arthritic and scraping, as though the Jesus pictured on the moving panel had begun to speak of his agony in the only way he could.

  And the last of the light turned the blood of that approaching Jesus dark and darker still, until finally Jesus’s blood was the color of gravy falling from his form. We all froze solid fear. Mary, who had been standing the entire time smoking and sneering in the corner of the lot, dropped her cigarette, just let it fall from her hand and then held her hand there, in the same stuck posture.

  And now, appearing in the open window, the upper half of an old, old man, only a few wispy whites on his scraped scalp. The old, old man was wearing, I could see, a stiff white yoke around his neck, and when he stretched his arms towards us, his black robes billowed in the breeze. “Mary,” the man said, and Mary’s sneer fell from her face so quickly and completely I could practically hear it hit the ground, and her face turned soft and scared, both at the same time. “Joseph,” the man now said to the boy crammed next to me, and then one by one he recited the names of those six Roman Catholic Callahan kids—his congregants every Sunday—from his ledge on high, the man’s hands on the sill of a window gone wide, so Jesus entered the Golden Ghetto with all his horror and none of his purported peace. The old, old man pronounced the six names of the children he must have baptized at their beginnings, articulating each name with a purpose so pure and so mysterious that the names kept echoing in my mind all that evening, the man pointing with one rickety finger to each child as he titled them, declared them, and then, when he was done, his finger found me—the singular Jew and, for a reason I still today cannot say, a great fear filled me, perhaps because I did not want to be declared, could not be called by a man in billowing black, his finger fixing me to some barbed spot. I sensed danger—what danger? why danger?—the stained glass burning in the last of the light as he pointed straight at me, his eyes beaming blue beams until a bird blew by, breaking his gaze with a sound I could almost hear: sweet snap. I was free.

  I ran. I ran away. I was at the edge of the parking lot when I heard the priest say to his congregation of children, articulating, again, each and every name as though their lives depended upon it: “Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph, go home. Go home now. It is late. Your mother must be worried.”

  Late, late that night I awoke to the smell of char, the sound of sirens, striped lights swinging across my wall. I fell back into the fastness of sleep.

  The next morning, in school, our teacher told us that a fire had taken the Callahans’ house and everyone in it as well. Only the mother, not home that night, had survived. Later, over days, the story seeped out. The children’s bodies had been found by the windows, which were not double hung, but crank operated, the aluminum handles too hot to touch, melted beyond shape or function.

  All gone. Every single child, plus their father, gone. Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph. I was ten years old, in the third grade, my mind too small for thes
e six singular facts, and yet not so small that I could slam shut some door, or window. Their names. Mary’s sneer. The pond-warm pee of a boy next to me. Gone now. And worse than gone, the going. How they must have clawed at the glass, flame-licked. The depth of human terror. Its persistent possibility.

  For years after that I walked, once a month or so, by the site where their house had been, and, in my mind, a window all wrong, a man in black billows, a bird blowing by, my name not called, not called, not called. If every childhood has its defining event, this perhaps was mine, not the fire, not the enormity of the loss, although those figure in, believe me, they do. But the defining event, in the end, is not what happened, but rather what did not, and how close it came to being otherwise. My name not called. Myself, and yours, just a few little letters away from going Pegasus, who began as flesh but ended up astral. I was ten but also ten no longer.

  I’m sure there are a thousand reasons for the fears that came to define me as definitively as my skin or my signature. I came of age in the 1970s and am old enough to recall the ending of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the nuclear era, missiles lining the banks of Europe, the threats, the button, a world emptied of people, a war where no one touches yet everyone dies.

  Yes, a thousand reasons for the fears that waxed and waned but never left and instead, in their perpetual presence, became the beat by which I marched my way through life. For me, starting at the age of ten, life was about a not, a near miss, and thus I ricocheted between dodging dangers real and imagined while concomitantly clutching at whatever I believed could keep me safe. By the age of twelve I could list every elevator crash since 1923. I knew the date on which Charles Manson had become eligible for parole. I walked in fear and yet knew enough to mock myself, and thus my peers thought me quirky enough to be almost (but not quite) cool. In junior high’s homeroom, during attendance time, when we were all sitting in rows, I would not infrequently whip out a thermometer and take my temperature just to get the giggles, making comedy out of neuroses too severe to stuff down.

  Two years after the Callahan fire, my father received his inheritance, and we moved from the Golden Ghetto to a much plusher place, 219 Chestnut Street. There, we had a butler and a burglar alarm that included what were called panic buttons positioned at calculated intervals along the corridors. The panic buttons glowed at night, mandarin bars of light we were told to never, ever push unless there was an emergency. The panic buttons presented me with a continuous unsolvable philosophical quandary that to this day I have not solved: unless there is an emergency. The panic button presumes that there is life on the one hand, crisis on the other. I had a more integrated approach. Panic did not exist apart from life. It was life, and to this day I swear I’m right. The sheer number of ways things can go wrong in a trillion-celled human body held together by gossamer threads of good luck confirm for me my stance. There are no freak accidents in life, and how could there be if the entirety of life is itself the most outrageous incredible freak event we will all never truly understand, even as we stumble through it, doing our best to dodge the dangers. And in my mind there is always a priest in billows of black leaning out over the sill of a window. Go home. Your mother must be worried.

  Amen.

  On the subject of god, as a child, I was skeptical, but my mother was not. Where I wavered, she stood strong. Where I wondered, she knew. If personalities can be described as punctuation points, I was a question mark, half erased. She was an exclamation point, typed in toner so dark it bled through and blackened the fingers.

  As for god’s particulars, these my mother also knew. In fact, when she spoke of God it seemed she was so intimate with him that they’d just gone golfing or had a dinner out at the Capitol Grill. When there were wars—and the 1970s were full of wars or hijackings or kidnappings in the Holy Land or about the Holy Land—God, like Santa, always knew who was wrong and who was right, and he always told my mother, who always told us. Despite my doubts, I never went to bed unless I’d recited the Schmah at least twenty three times, in Hebrew, lights out.

  This, I know, has nothing to do with horses, at least not on the surface. But beneath the surface, it was Judaism, or more specifically Zionism, that brought horses to me and also, ironically, prevented me from becoming the rider I so wanted to be, because, as my mother often repeated once the great affair had begun, “Lauren [all exasperation], Jewish people do not ride horses. They play tennis or golf.”

  There’s probably some truth to this statement in the aggregate, but here’s the problem: I was not the aggregate but rather some speck spinning within it. And the particular speck called Lauren (and not Mary, Jim, Mark, Grace, Andrea, Joseph) one day, sometime around the age of twelve, two years after the fire, well, that speck began to burn in a whole new way.

  We travelled to Israel, my brother, two sisters, parents, and me, sometime after the Yom Kippur War. I don’t remember much from this trip except a vague boredom and the tinted windows of tour buses. I do recall landing at the airport and how my mother, so stern, so fisted, how she bent down to kiss the ground and told us to do the same. I remember kissing Jewish ground, the smell of smog and soil combined. I remember seeing horses on the highways, so odd, the dusty, plodding equines side by side with peppy cars whizzing and tooting hysterically. This was Tel Aviv. The war was over, but still the streets were full of soldiers and Red Cross cars. My brother and I collected bullet casings on the Golan Heights, where the fighting had been fiercest. Inside one casing mysteriously speckled with black, I found a ladybug. I fed her from a secret stash of leaves. I brought her home within her home, snuck her through the airport search on one side, customs on the other. A few days later, back in the States, when I looked into the casing, there was not one ladybug but hundreds. How could this be? The bugs were tiny, each bright being the size of a pencil point, but growing day by day. I brought my cornucopia to the science teacher. She put her glasses on, peered inside and announced, “Babies,” as though this were the most common thing in the world. Babies in a bullet shell. Babies from another world. Babies that had survived against all odds, in a place devoid of resources. At recess I took the shell outside and, kneeling at the far end of the schoolyard field, where the woods began, I tipped the bullet-nest downward, tapped on its copper bottom, and, after several delicate thumps, the whole infant galaxy slid into the moss. I couldn’t find the mother though. I said an improvised prayer—Good luck. Schmah y’Israel. When I came back to check the next day, they weren’t there.

  When I think of Israel now, from the graying, worried age of forty-eight, I think of ladybugs in a desert. I think of blooms in bullet shells and the Golan Heights. I think of the bedouins we met, people in a warp, untouched by time. They wore long white shirts that billowed in the desert winds; they seemed to sail on the Sahara sand. They had horses.

  I first fell in love with horses near the end of that trip, right before I’d found the ladybugs, so the two are entwined in my mind—miraculous and equine.

  The bedouins’ horses were unlike those we have here in overfed, glossy America, where even our beasts gleam as though they’ve stepped from a Clairol commercial, their coats blow-dried and scented. The bedouin horses were predominantly tired, and when you touched their hides you felt matted fur. Flies sizzled in their eyes, covering the rims and lids. The bedouins offered tourists’ children the chance to ride, for a shekel or two. In fact, if I’m remembering correctly, something like two shekels got you a camel ride; one shekel, a plain old pony. I wanted the camel, and we had the money, but on that particular day, the camel was tied up, quite literally, to a post, and for some reason out of commission. Thus I got my first ever horseback ride by default.

  We waited, my mother, siblings, father and I, we waited for my turn by the flapping bedouin tents. The wind was roaring. Army planes flew in formation overhead. They flew wing to wing, made mischief with the clouds, darting in and out. Somewhere someone was singing, the sound so slender it could barely be heard. To the side of t
he tent clusters, a bedouin woman was washing fabric in a bucket and then smacking the drenched garments on stone. Why was she smacking the stone? Why did the planes fly above? Why do the clouds stay up but the branches fall down? Nothing seemed sure except a certain singular fact—the balance beam we’re always on.

  And there we waited for the bedouin to bring me the paid-for pony, my parents, my siblings, myself standing sun-struck in the desert, so still, we were, as though made mute by the intensity of the Sahara light, the heat, the white tents pinned to posts in the sand but nevertheless sagging and flapping in the wind while the woman fished bolt after bolt of bright cloth from a bucket, pulling from a seemingly endless source, like a magician coaxing handkerchiefs from his hat; the fabric kept coming. She kept wringing, as did my mother in our washroom at home, wringing the dirt from my soiled shirts, furious that it was there, wringing hanks of my hair, furious that they were there; wringing her two hands after one more fight with my father, furious that he was here, all of us kids gone mute, blinded by the bright light from the ice landscaping their marriage.

  Where oh where was my horse? We waited by the white tents. I heard a tinny little tune but could not see its source. I felt a familiar leaden deadness smack in the center of myself. My breath rasped, in and out. Where oh where was my horse?