The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  And with that, Rose lifted the clippers to her own head, and crick-acrick-acrack, I saw her cut off a few snarly pieces of her own hair, just strands here and there, blond S’s and darker C’s floating to the floor, letters lying there; she looked down. For a few seconds it seemed she was reading her own wispy sentences, or trying to; I don’t know. What I do know is what I saw. All of a sudden, and I mean all of a sudden, Rose pulled back her leg and gave a swift, vicious kick to her curls.

  Rose kicked her curls with the same pent-up rage I’d seen on occasion in my massive mother, and instead of flinching as I might have before I’d come to this camp, I simply stood, knowing: Not me. True, I hadn’t found a way to fling myself off living ledges, but I could ride a horse bareback while he walked into the water, a second spine now mine, and later on, side by side with this big beast in a stall, I could cradle his foot in my hand and expertly pry dried crap from its innards—and how many people could do that?.

  And it was strange, that I should feel this quick surge of pride at just that mad moment, the moment of Rose kicking her curls and the clipper clipping, and then my pride coming, and then my pride going, so it all came down in flakes around me. And I was back in the barn then with nothing but pure plot, the events happening very fast now. Rose kicked her curls, switched off the shears, so for a second there was a blessed silence, and then I saw a brief shudder go all through her; her body just jolted, and she switched those damn shears on again, the blades clacking like mad beaks in front of Mr. K’s face, invading his space as she lifted them to his eyes for the quick trim he never said he wanted. What he wanted? Who can say. What he saw? No one knows. This is the saddest part for me, that we will never be able to say, for sure, what happens inside the minds of the four million five hundred thousand other species with whom we share this planet, even as we have our wordless ways of sensing. Still, I cannot say what Mr. K saw or felt as Rose lifted those buzzing blades to his face, but what he did, that I can tell you because I was there. Rose lifted the lip-smacking shears to his hair, came close enough to take a single swipe from the strands that fell into his eyes. She aimed those shears directly at Mr. K’s tethered face, and Mr. K, cooped up and freaked out from the swirl of crazy sounds around him; Mr. K, at once utterly obedient and regally self-possessed—a paradox only he had had the genius to master—Mr. K lost it. He reared back, this massive muscular horse going back high on his hind legs, so strong he snapped the ropes that tethered him and split the barn beams with a satisfying crrrack. And for a shaving of a second, Mr. K hovered there, freed, high on his hind legs, a huge but breathing statue of some equine in an ancient war, and I could see, I think, the imperfect pump pumping in his terrified chest. So, perhaps, could Rose. And he stayed there, risen up, his nostrils infernal, his chest sweat-slicked and erratic, and in my memory of this, I ceased entirely to see myself. Like Mr. K, I lost it; we all lost it, our hearts jammed with static while we dangled, waiting for the page to turn.

  And then it did. Turn. Mr. K, all one thousand six hundred pounds of him, including his heart and that valve that didn’t seal shut—came crashing down to the ground. And as he did, Rose grabbed hold of the broken rope with one hand but she couldn’t keep a grip on her horse. He was bucking back and forth now, side to side, unable to get calm, so the rope slipped right through Rose’s fist. Really, Rose had no business insisting on intimacy with an animal seventeen times her size and sixty times her strength, at least. She dropped the shears she’d been holding. They circled the floor idiotically, chomping on air.

  And then Rose grabbed hold of the rope with her two hands now while the shears clacked and Mr. K reared back again. And this time, when he came down, his front hoof sliced into Rose, so a small smile of blood appeared right above her temple; it was weird, how it appeared. It was as though a dark red smile appeared on her skull, just emerged there on the white wall of her skin, complete and insistent for an instant before dissolving into drips.

  I wonder if all warm-blooded mammals have a singular response to the sight of blood. Maybe here is where our perceptions touch together. It was just a little bit, really, a superficial slice, as these things go, but it stopped Mr. K in his tracks. Rose reached out and pressed the cut with the heel of her hand, then looked at the heel of her hand, and the second stretched out to the point of snapping as she studied her blood, the rich smear of it. And then she lifted her hand to her lips, mouthed her own fluids, and a sour-lemon look crossed her face. But blood is NOT sour, I wanted to yell, as if that might help the situation I was seeing form right before my eyes. Rose didn’t have her whip. The shears had at some point ceased, gone completely to sleep, lying on their side in a drunken coma, the plug pulled out in the melee.

  And now, slowly, Rose lifted her arm, palm flat, blood sucked, wound its way back, folded her hand into a fist, and then hurled her grip forward in a blow across the bony bridge of K’s face. And Mr. K, well, he hollered, let loose a sound I’d never heard before and have never heard since: pain, shock, insult, betrayal. And then she did it again. Sock. Sharp. Crack. Was that a bone in his head? Or was that her head, breaking up, gone mad for good; good-bye.

  Yes, good-bye. Because the force of her wallops made the huge horse stumble backwards, his eyes all bloodshot and startled. And then Mr. K—fantastic, brave, dignified Mr. K—the pain of her punches was such that he did what we’d never seen a horse of his spirit do. He buckled. It was like watching a person who has been hit over the head, or who has had the breath knocked out of him by surprise. You could practically see stars whirling around that horse’s stunned, scared face and his heart had always been just a little off, which is maybe why the animal crashed down, all one thousand plus pounds of him, falling first to one knee, then to the other, keeling sideways, the whole stable shuddering as he hit the floor hard, landing on his left side. He lay there, one eye open, the shears next to him, all unplugged. And so still.

  Silences come like characters—there are many kinds. Some are sweet, some are sad, or severe. The silence that followed the fall of Mr. K was unlike any of these; it was stunned. Rose held her hand up before her eyes, then let it drop uselessly to her side.

  “He’s dead,” whispered Jenna.

  “Shut up,” said Aggy, tears squeezing out of her eyes. We were, all twelve of us, pressed back against the far wall. Rose stood frozen, and for a second I thought I’d see her topple right on top of Mr. K, but she didn’t. Moments passed. More moments passed. The flies seemed unaware of the atmosphere; they kept right on buzzing, as busy as ever with their germy work. I kept brushing them from my face, my hair. Outside rain began again in those soft loose splashes; we could hear it on the barn’s tin roof. “Mr. K?” Rose finally asked, her voice a tiny, barely there question. And then the floodgates broke. “Mr. K,” Rose screamed, and she rushed towards the horse she loved and hated to love, and loved to hate, and that voice shattered the spell, and the giant, Mr. K, well, his huge body shuddered and he snorted in air, and then, as though pulled by some puppeteer in the sky he awoke and stood, one leg up, second leg up, steadying on the strings of god, the massive animal moved, lurched back on his haunches, heaved forward, chest to floor, and then, gathering the energy it takes a one-thousand-pound beast to defy gravity (which is why horses rarely lie down), Mr. K heaved himself onto his hoofs and got back into balance.

  And now there they were, woman and horse, face to face. I swear, it seemed like Mr. K was staring her down. And then he turned, apparently disgusted, and at his own behest, trotted right out of that barn, neighing high into the hills, his herd answering back from their locked stalls. He was picking up speed now, his gait as magnificent as ever, trotting through the grasses, the mud meaning nothing to him; he’d go as far as he could, as far as the wires would let him, but we could see, as he broke into a canter, we could see the fence was of no consequence to him, because he’d have his dignity back long before he ever reached that point.

  And down in the barn now stood Rose, all alone. She stoo
d there silent for a while, and we never saw her face, and then we heard her whisper. “Shit,” she said, and walked away.

  That evening, the old farmhouse was quiet. Around 7 p.m., Alice’s station wagon crunched across the driveway. She got out, kicked the door closed, unlocked the basement door, and slipped inside. Maybe an hour passed before the dinner bell rang. We never ate in the family’s dining room, or even in their house for that matter. Alice served us our meals at a long table on the screened-in porch, just as she did that night, the table set as it always was, apron tied around her waist, as it always was. The only differences I could detect: the lipstick she was wearing, a fruity pink that made her mouth stand separate from her whitened face, plus the food she served, fried chicken and butter beans, both unusually good that night. Hank wasn’t at that dinner and Rose never came to any meals, instead eating by herself in the stable office. But Alice was there, trying to be bright because that was her way, but something was beyond broken in that family, and we could feel it. “So much stuff to do,” Alice said. She pointed to the calendar, an exact copy of the one Rose kept at the barn, each box crammed with appointments. We could see large X’s drawn through the boxes of the past. The box of tomorrow had a full moon in it and beneath that, a single event scrawled; no surprise. We knew what was up: Jill’s turn.

  We went to sleep scared, the memory inside me: Mr. K’s giant body falling down, shuddering the floor beneath my feet. In sleep, the whole earth shuddered and then I was above, seeing countries falling from the globe like so much scrap—there goes Europe, a jigsaw piece dropping through space. My sleep was fitful. Several times I woke with a thick thirst that could not be slaked. I fumbled for my canteen, drained the warm tin-tasting water to the last drop.

  There are stories of shipwrecked sailors drinking the ocean and seeing stars and streamers before they die. If the water in the canteen had been salted, maybe that could account for the oddity of what happened next, could confirm it all as a hallucination stemming from stress. But that water wasn’t salted. It was pure, from the well drilled beyond bedrock two hundred and fifty feet down in the Maine ground.

  So if it wasn’t the water, what else could explain what happened but could not have happened, and if the answer is nothing, then what am I left holding, in the end?

  The first time I woke up it could not have been later than 10 p.m. My mouth was thick with this strange stubborn thirst and outside the bunk I saw the sky was swirled with stars, the constellations crazy, the farmhouse so dark it seemed nearly snuffed, only its chimney and edges visible here and there. It was as if its occupants had died or collapsed from the intensity of their emotions. The water dribbled down my throat, cooled some spot in me, and sleep came quick and true. The next time I awoke, I snapped out of sleep so fast I heard my own hurdling. I sat up. A bolt in my back.

  I could tell we were in the thickest part of the night now, when time takes on texture, a black material plush and drenching both. Outside the bunk everything was submerged, except for the farmhouse, which was, now, completely, inappropriately ablaze, golden lights gushing from every chink and square, lights so glittery I had to keep blinking in order to bear them, and when I closed my eyes my lids lit up, and on those two silk screens I saw vortexes morph into millions of tiny tacks. I fell back asleep once again.

  And when I woke for the third time (or was it the fourth; I am not quite sure) all the lights were once again doused, and the farmhouse was sitting hunched and quiet in a damp dawn at the barest beginning of any old day in late summer, the dawn so new that shapes had only recently asserted themselves, in pieces here and there, the fence visible, the barn not yet. And now all the windows in the house were open, gray, and, although there was no wind, although not a single tree stirred, although the meadows were settled and still, every curtain in every window of that house was blowing madly, Alice’s white sheers and Swiss polkas and laces. Classical music soared from some room I was sure I’d never seen, some room deep in the core of the home. Complicated crescendos came and went—cellos waltzing with violins vibrating with trombones deep and true. Then the brief beat of a pause—and then, just at the point when you were primed for the crashing of a complex orchestra—instead came the pure simple sound of a lone piccolo. I opened my screen, stuck my hand into the stagnant air while watching all the curtains twist, while listening to the light swift steps of that lone piccolo, and then sleep hit my head again in a swift blow, and I was down for what felt like hours but must have been just a second or so, because next when I next sat up the dawn was just as undecided, the house still hunched, the piccolo still playing. Only now I saw Dr. Fascal walking across the lawn, coming to inquire, it seemed, about Mr. K. She slowly, with immense exhaustion, climbed the porch steps, stood on the stoop at a time too early for a doctor to normally arrive, except this was maybe an emergency. Dr. Fascal tugged on the bell, which I’d never seen before—brand new—some fancy thing Alice must have bought during the twelve or so hours she’d left the farm, after the fight, the night, the clothes coming down. The brand-new bell was skirt-shaped silver, its clapper a girl’s lean legs melded at the entwined feet. Now Dr. Fascal pulled on the cord and the bell let out its peals clear and perfect in the dead-still dawn. The door opened.

  I saw the door open. But whoever greeted the doctor stood where I could not see, and I only caught her shadow thrown down like a welcome mat. I saw Dr. Fascal shake her head back and forth, back and forth—bad news?—and then she knelt down, in the same exhausted way as she had walked. She set the big black bag she’d come with on the granite stoop, and then, unclasping it, she dumped its contents out and spread them around: mounds of lockets, big silver ones, blue and yellow ones, lockets of glass and gold and turquoise, all twinkling in her heap. “Here, for the horse,” Dr. Fascal said, gesturing to the jewelry, and then she walked away. From what seemed to be a second-story window came Rose’s voice, unmistakable. “Look up here,” Rose said. Then I was asleep because the next time I opened my eyes the day was definite and fully formed. The sky was not strange. The weather was perfect: 85 degrees.

  August 21, Jill in a box. Alice served biscuits and eggs for breakfast. Around her neck, dangling by her breasts, was a small golden locket I’d never seen before.

  “Where’d you get that necklace?” I asked.

  Alice looked down, palmed the piece of jewelry, studied it thoughtfully. I saw a thousand things cross her face then. She looked up at me, her brow all furrowed. “Lauren,” she said, “I honestly forget.”

  Hank appeared in the breakfast room then wearing his breaking-to-bridle-clothes.

  “Hank,” Alice said, “where’d I get this necklace?” She held it out to him.

  Hank came over close. He traced its shape with his thick forefinger. “Guess I must’ve given it to you,” he said.

  “You guess?” Alice said.

  And then Rose came in, Just passing through, does anyone have some thread?

  “Hey Rose, Rose,” Hank said. “Slow down a sec. Where’d Ma get this necklace?”

  And then Rose went close to her parents, closer than we’d ever seen those three be, and for a second they were all there together, studying this heart, and then another second went by, and they didn’t seem to be studying the heart anymore. They seemed to be just standing near one another, feeling what that felt like now, and maybe remembering what it had once felt like at some point in their past. Alice pressed her lips with her two fingers and shook her head fast. “Ma,” Rose said, softly. She put her hand on her mother’s shoulder, and Hank put his hand over Rose’s hand, and there they were for a little while, on Alice’s shoulder. We were watching, forks poised in mid-air, knowing we were seeing a special spell. Alice nodded, her eyes squeezed shut. “Thank you, Rose,” she said. “No words,” I think I heard Rose whisper. Alice nodded again, and then we saw her back out, into the kitchen, her slow steps on the stair treads above our heads. Rose and Hank turned towards us, cleared their throats.

  Hank touched th
e brim of his big cowboy hat. Rose had a bridle slung over her shoulder. Jill’s turn. “You and me, kid,” Hank said to Rose, his voice thin and almost hopeful. This was, it seemed to me, the one activity they shared together. “We’ve got some work to do,” Hank said.

  “No.” Rose said. She took a long look at Hank and then she said, simply—

  “Dad.”

  It seemed like an hour passed between the word Dad and what Hank did next, and who knows, maybe that’s true.

  Hank nodded then, once, decisively. “Okay, Rose,” he said, as though he understood, and clearly he did. He took off his big broad-brimmed hat, hung it on a hook in the breakfast room, and then went out the door. And that was the last I ever saw of him close up, Hank hanging his hat on that hook and walking down the still damp steps one morning at the end of August. I’d be there four more days.

  And Rose. Well, Rose, for the first time that whole summer, she ate breakfast with us. She pulled out a chair, laid the breaking bridle on the table. And that’s when I saw that this was different than the other breaking bits; it was not studded. This bit was dainty, two silver tines linked with a rubber 0 in the middle, a teething ring. “Pass me the jam,” Rose said to no one, and Jenny passed the jam. “You know the expression there’s more than one way to skin a cat?” Rose said. We nodded. “Well,” said Rose. “That’s not true, is it? There is really only one way to skin a cat, if one was ever so inclined, but when it comes to most other things, I’d say you usually have several options.”

  Now, Rose pulled the lid off the jam jar, held it up, sniffed. “Apricot,” she announced. She slathered that baby bit with the apricot jam and then, once it was totally tacky, she sprinkled it with sugar, the grains visibly white, and bright, in the golden gel. And then she brought us all down to the barn, holding the bridle out well in front of her.