The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  And so it was that night by night I made the hole larger and night by night the coon presented more of himself to me. I’d say the coon had maybe come a quarter of the way out of the wall when Annie discovered my project. She was cleaning and found the busted plaster by my bedside and when she leaned in closer to look she saw the treat tidbits I’d started to use, all lined up on the wooden beam that ran just inside the wall. That night she and Cranston took me aside and with my bedroom door closed asked me what on earth I was doing. Because I had no fib readily available I simply told them the truth, wondering if this would be the sort of behavior for which unrelated children were kicked out, kicked back—and would I want that? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure. I told them the whole story, how I was courting a coon, my many midnight visits.

  When I was finished—a long silence. I could hear my heart. It was hammering high up. I thought of the things I’d found here in this severed space, the coons of course, the reading around a table, taste tests, and pink pork; it all seemed strange, still, and what I’d lost was so much larger but nevertheless, and having come this far, would I want to leave? The silence had stretch, went on and on. I’d ruined one of their walls.

  Now Cranston walked across the floor, knelt by the bed, and examined my punched-out place. Annie stood, looking serious.

  At last Cranston spoke. His back was to me as he fingered the rim of the hole. “Boy or girl,” he asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “Your midnight meetings,” he said. “Is the raccoon in question a boy or a girl?”

  “Boy,” I said, suddenly sure.

  “Why do you think that?” Annie asked, her face still solemn, but I thought I saw the small flicker of a smile.

  “It’s how he smells,” I said, and then suddenly they were laughing. Cranston went up on his feet and Annie’s shoulders were shaking as she swiped away a tear, and I said, “What? What?”

  “Kids,” Cranston called, striding across the floor, opening my bedroom door and leaning over the bannister, “kids! Come look at the coon hole Lauren has made.”

  All the kids came and I described for everyone going eye to eye with the beast, and even the boys were impressed. “I’ll tell you what,” Cranston said, looking at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Let’s make this hole a little larger and tonight we’ll pull him all the way out and make him ours.”

  “Can we really do that?” I asked.

  “We can try,” Cranston said and then he took my X-acto knife from where it lay on the desk, knelt on my bumpy bed, and began to widen what I’d already made, working his way up and down and around, up and down and around, his hole larger and darker than anything I’d dared to do. When he was done I went forward and put my whole hand through and then kept going, feeling with my fingers the dusty innards of this place, the spiral spiderwebs and broad beams, everything crisscrossed and crazy back there, not easy to interpret.

  “You want to try?” Cranston asked.

  Yes. I wanted to try.

  Because coons are nocturnal, we had to have darkness. Come midnight, and with the lights off, we all crowded around the cutout by my bed. Cranston handed me his bait, bits of bacon and blue cheese. I lay it all carefully on the ledge and then we sat back to wait. A light summer shower started and I could hear it ticking against the windows, but other than that, and for the first time since courting my coons, the house seemed completely at rest. The rain stopped, and in its wake came a deep nighttime kind of quiet, outside clouds scudding across a polished sky, wind teasing the trees, but inside, in this house, we heard not a single stirring, not a tiny footfall, not the merest squeak. It was as though all the animals that lived here caught wind of what we were up to and had fled, en masse, the mice followed by the coons followed by the bats and the beetles and the ants. “I think they’re gone,” I said.

  At last Cranston, sitting in a chair by my desk, rose without a word, left the room, and came back with a broom that he held high and swished against my ceiling shouting, “Wake up critters. It’s meal time.”

  Nothing.

  “Let’s sing,” suggested Annie.

  “Sing?” said Cranston.

  “You never know,” said Annie.

  “I’m not singing,” said Kyle.

  “I’d sing,” I said, because at home we sang, on Friday nights, we sang the blessing over the bread and the wine, we sang together, and even though god never answered, the singing itself seemed something.

  “Michael, row your boat ashore,” Annie began, and I joined in, and Cranston sighed, put down the broom, and Emma, the youngest started up and pretty soon, drunk on the darkness and the general silliness of the situation we were all yodeling away, pretending to paddle or trimming the sails, our pantomimes so intent that for a few moments we forgot all about our coon so it shocked me when I turned around to see a dark darting snout and two petite paws gripping the edge of the aperture. I elbowed Cranston who then coasted across the room and grabbed the coon by its ample scruff, pulling a shockingly small body into the air. The song stopped, all of us frozen in various poses of pantomime while the coon swayed, waved its tiny mitted paws, and then started to scream.

  Like crying, screaming, I’d always thought, was a uniquely hominoid form of distress. The coon suggested otherwise. With its mouth open and its tongue trembling, the animal screamed and screamed, its sound eerily familiar as it struggled under Cranston’s insistent grip. Tears sprang to my eyes. I hadn’t meant them to but there they were, and Cranston said, “Shush, little baby,” and curled the animal into the crook of his arm. It was just so small, so much smaller than what I’d expected, clearly an infant and barely even that. Cranston rocked it. The coon quieted. “I’d say,” Cranston announced, ferreting in the fur below its stomach, “I’d say our catch is a girl.”

  For a second all was silent while we took in the news. Then the coon started up again, shrieks of pure anguish as it flailed for its freedom, desperately twisting this way and that while Cranston held on hard, his expression suddenly grim. “Shush, shush,” he said, rocking fast now, speaking fast now—nervous now—I could tell. Even in the darkness I could see the sweat on his neck. When I looked back at the hole by my bed it seemed for the first time downright menacing, its edges all jagged and ripped, pouring dust and darkness. I don’t know how long we stood there, Cranston desperately trying to quiet the coon, the rest of us with our hands hanging uselessly by our sides; it could have been an hour before the animal’s voice gave out and the crying turned to croaks turned to quiet.

  “Jesus,” said Annie, her eyes wide.

  Exhausted, the animal suddenly settled. Cranston kept rocking. The coon’s eyes began to close and faster than I could say night now the animal was suddenly asleep.

  No one moved. From far away I heard a siren, and then a series of chimes. My clock glowed, the second hand silently sailing. The animal yet out a yelp and we all went stiff with startle, but then its breathing became rhythmic again. My feet tired, I went to sit on my bed. Slowly Cranston walked over to me, knelt by my side and, as carefully as he could, transferred the still-slumbering mammal into my arms. “She’s all yours” Cranston said to me. “She’s in a brand new home. Now help her find her way.”

  3: Some Slender String

  That night, the raccoon stayed in a large cage in my room. She made strange noises—chirps and chatters, squeals and yips, calls, perhaps, to her cohorts on the other side of the wall, and indeed I heard what seemed like answers, strange scratches, long yodels, nervous pacings back and forth above me. Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red. Gradually the hazy trees assumed their familiar shapes, and the tidy lawns of the neighbors came into view, hoses wrapped around reels and tiny tricycles tipped on their sides.

  Soon the family would awaken and crowd around the raccoon, wondering what she could do. I wanted to be the first to see and so, as quietly as possible, I freed the latch on the cage.
After crawling out, however, the animal refused to move. She stood in the center of my room, hunched on her hind legs, her front paws dangling down, kangaroo style, looking left and right as if assessing her surroundings, all traces of her terror gone, just gone, replaced with, it seemed to me, a systematic sort of study she carried out with staring—at the walls, at the floor beneath her feet, at the spackled ceiling, at a loose sock she batted with her paw while quietly cocking her head. It amazed me, how fast grief could go, how quickly, in certain sorts of beings anyway, curiosity took the place of terror. I watched her watch, my stare following hers, here a desk, there a book on the floor, these objects defined, it seemed to me, not by the fact of their foreignness but by what they might hold or have, her curiosity keen and clear and far from me, a girl who yearned for the familiar even when all its edges were sharp. “Here, here,” I whispered, kneeling down, holding out my hand, yet another unknown object she leaned forward for.

  I instantly admired that raccoon, even if I anthropomorphized her, and I’m sure I did, but not to the point that I failed to note her differences, everywhere, all the time. I admired the raccoon first for her curiosity and second for her affection, which I was about to see, how she could go from being completely at sea to securely anchored in what just happened to be this noun called me. Of course I could not have said so with such certainty at the time. These thoughts and reactions were in no way worded all those years ago, when I was perhaps too young to know my metaphors. What I did know, however, was how new this old house was, for her and for me, and whereas I’d wept for weeks, she for no more than a moment. Why wouldn’t that amaze me, a fifteen-year-old human who shared with this mammal almost all the same chromosomes, our brains eerily alike, save a few uniquely hominoid garnishes that guaranteed my grief would be wetter and longer and packed with a past she couldn’t carry.

  “Come,” I said, but the coon—alternatively absorbed in staring and sniffing and batting—paid me no mind. And because, watching her, I suddenly felt a wild, yes, wild elation, I opened the door to my room and, bowing like a butler while gesturing towards the hall, I offered her full run of the house. No thanks. At last, then, I simply stepped around her with no plan or strategy in mind, and it was then that I discovered how fast her ties formed, because here, in a few mere moments and with no language exchanged, that animal took to following me with what seemed like total faith, scampering after me as I made my way down the stairs, at my heels as I traveled towards the kitchen. As an experiment I circled the dining room table ten times and ten times she went with me. It was as though the raccoon were hitched to me by some slender string, which is why I finally turned the tumblers and unlocked the front door, stepping out into the dawn. The street, usually busy, was dead this time of day; I crossed, the coon still with me, and, after climbing the opposite curb, we both turned to see, from a distance, the house where, like it or not, we lived.

  We called her Amelia Earhart, Amelia for short, although looking back now I cannot recall the reason for the name. What I can recall is how much she changed my stay with that family, how impressed I was by her seemingly immediate adaptation to her new circumstances, how she attached to me so easily and then found the fridge, learning to open it with her agile paws, pulling out bunches of dark grapes and blocks of wrapped cheese. Unlike me, Amelia would eat anything and, taking my cues from her, I began to do the same, one warm night mixing my meat with my milk, another night sucking the mussel straight from its peeling shell, so who was following who here, and did it really matter? I loved to pat her backwards, the flat fur bunching up into bristles and then smoothed into sleekness again. Her gold mask was always spiky to the touch but her paws were soft, split into four velvety segments, it seemed they worked better than human hands, tossing small balls, closing round your thumb with a pulsing dexterity.

  The summer stayed hot. Amelia, however, was always on the move, couldn’t be caged, rarely seemed to sleep, her sounds making their way into my dreaming, my night-mind now full of impossible animals: humans with tails, fish with feet. Occasionally I’d startle awake to find her hunched at the end of my bed, looking straight at me, something so insistent in her gaze one could almost think she was trying to pass me a message. Sometimes, unable to fall back asleep, I’d toss aside my single sweaty sheet and, with Amelia next to me, I learned my new nocturnal neighborhood, the houses doused in darkness as we walked here and there, back and forth, setting our stamp in soil, leaving behind us a trail of where we had been, proof I’d done my discovery.

  We’d return at dawn or well before, slipping into a silent house, her fur wet with dew. Any insomnia we both had was cured by these long dark walks, or perhaps her nature was incontrovertible and, despite living with humans, she could only sleep when the sun came up. From almost the first second she became mine I wondered what of her I could change and what would stay the same. How far could a being bend and at what point did a flex become broken? I was still a child and thus I believed, somewhere inside, that she had these questions too, because I thought I saw them in her intelligent eyes that inched down slowly as light filled my room and she dreamt like a dog, her paws paddling while she chased invisible prey. She slept each morning away and, as if propelled by an invisible clock, reliably woke by four, stretching responsibly as though she’d taken a course on the importance of it all, taking care to bend each limb before finally finding her feet. We fed her fish or meats from a can and once she was done we’d venture forth a second time, her urge to explore becoming mine, or could it possibly have been my heretofore hidden urge hers, but either way, both by day and by night, my new neighborhood now revealed itself to me as, with the help of a six-pound mammal, I made the grids and crossroads my own.

  Even today, thirty some odd years later, I recall the names of those streets I found with Amelia, perhaps because of Amelia, but I recall more what it was like to learn them—Oakvale Road, where the Carneys lived, and Dale Way, where almost every house had an above-ground swimming pool hidden by high fencing. I recall telling Annie with a studied sort of nonchalance, “Oh, I was up on Dale Way today,” as though this were a major accomplishment. Maybe it was. That girl back then and this woman now—both hated and hate change, preferring to cling to the creaky rather than to stretch into space.

  I don’t know what drew so many to us when we walked. Or perhaps I do. People like to watch the wild, but we like it even more when nature and culture collide. There I was, a fully formed human, my tongue trained for language, my hands for napkins and knives. And there Amelia was, at my heels or perched upon my shoulder, an animal pulled from a parallel universe and living proof that two separate spheres could happily intersect. Back then, as now, I had a fascination with cosmology, and I remember I was reading a book about how, after the big bang, not one universe but billions formed side by side like bubbles sitting on a string. According to that book’s author we were living in a vast world right next to neighbors in a dimension we simply couldn’t see, and so it was the same for our neighbors, blind to the existences on either side of them, and yet still somehow we sense them. We try to imagine our way into ants and aliens and come up struck by the barrier called skin.

  That small plain raccoon had none of the grandeur of grand questions even as the fact of her following me tickled people pink because it suggested, I think, proof of what was possible, down here, up there, and all around. And thus, when people saw us exploring the streets, parading up and down, Amelia’s tail atwitch, as curious as we were proud—for, Look what we had found! Look what we had formed!—everyone came running out of their houses, hurrying down their walks, old women holding curlers in their hair, mothers with mixing bowls, men, their tails untucked. “What have you here? What animal is that?” they all wanted to know. The children surged forward, held back by nannies while Amelia chattered deeply, luxuriantly, standing high on her hind feet and turning in showy circles. Except for the immediate neighbors, no one knew where I came from and no one cared to ask; the final point perhaps
was this: cosmology aside, I went from being an invisible person to “The Girl with the Raccoon,” and by midsummer it seemed everyone in my new town had heard of me. I was practically popular.

  One day, out walking, I came to a squat house on the edge of town, down by the railroad tracks where the hip-high grasses were. Bindweed grew wild here, great white wheels of it strewn everywhere through the field, the long stems tangling at my feet. I picked armloads of the flowers, feeling their fleshiness and admiring their centers, the tiny pistils packed with pollen.

  I didn’t see the man, at first. I wasn’t sure if I was walking on his property, although I thought not for he had a tidy lawn that ended abruptly where the tangle of flowers began, the two separated by a clear seam.

  The man was standing on the small porch of the small house painted a dark green or maybe a grey. He was smoking a cigarette but flicked it away after only a moment or two. “You live around here?” he asked, one eye on me and the other on Amelia who was sitting on my shoulder, preening. The man had silver hair combed in a side part, and he scowled at Amelia, unimpressed with her presence.