Magical Thinking (23 page)

“Okay,” I said in the same flat tone of voice you hear cops use on TV. “What kind of psycho would go into out barn at night and steal dog shit?”

He let the coffee fall into the filter, and then he hit the switch.

We were silent for a moment.

“I don’t like the idea of somebody walking around here at night,” he said. “We may need to get a submachine gun from your brother.”

That evening we were having dinner, sitting at our long table. The table is long because I had originally purchased it as a combination desk/writing table. But I never write at it, so it’s only for the two of us. So each night we feel as though we are members of a large family, and they prefer not to dine with us.

Bentley sits on the floor between us, praying in his doggie way that a scrap will fall to the floor. Nothing ever falls, but he never gives up hope. I love this about him, his relentless optimism. This is a trait that we share.

He started barking, growling, actually, in a voice he never uses. He ran to the sliding-glass doors and pressed his already mashed-up nose against the glass. He sounded ferocious, like a pit bull. Although only thirty pounds, I could clearly see that if he wanted to, he was capable of causing harm.

“What the fuck?” Dennis said.

I instantly pushed back from the table and ran to the wall. I hit the light and looked out the door.

It was the shit-stealer; this much was clear. And it wasn’t
human. This much was also clear. But what the hell it was? This part was entirely unclear. “Oh my God,” I said, my default expression for everything from joy to horror. Inflection is the only difference. Here, it was shock, horror, and curiosity. “Oh my God, you have to see this . . . thing.”

Dennis got up from the table and rushed to my side. He peered out the window and looked at the creature in our backyard.

It had a long nose, thin, like a Swedish man’s penis. A water-balloon–shaped head and a full, hairy body. The tail was pink and at least a foot in length. It had rodent eyes, and it was nuzzling a plastic baggie of Bentley’s shit.

Whatever it was, it was fearless. Because even though I pounded on the glass with my hands and shouted, “Die, motherfucker!” it refused to so much as glance in my direction. Very briefly, it made direct eye contact with Bentley, which caused Bentley to literally jump in surprise.

I went online immediately and did a Google search. Keywords: “snout, Massachusetts, horrid, tail, garbage, pest.”

And to my amazement, I almost immediately located a photograph of the exact creature in our backyard. “It’s a North American opossum,” I called to Dennis.

Neither of us had been able to finish dinner. The creature had a powerful appetite-suppressant effect.

Dennis leaned over my shoulder and peered at the image on the computer screen. “That’s it,” he said, poking the screen with his index finger. Poke, poke, poke. “That’s exactly what the hell it is.” Then he said, “Scroll down and see if it says how to kill it.”

I did this, but unfortunately, I was at a website created by some varmint-lover at a university. Instead of instructions on how to kill, it provided useless information such as life cycle, eating habits (where it didn’t even mention French Bulldog shit), and mating rituals.

We both walked back to the sliding-glass doors and looked. It was still there, though now it was on the prowl. It moved slowly,
but I was worried that if I opened the door and threw something at it—an egg, a spatula, a can of Pepsi—that it would suddenly display speed and charge me at my own door.

We’d finally calmed Bentley down with a rawhide chew, but every once in a while he would glance in the direction of the glass and growl.

I went back to my computer and saw that the Undertaker was online. The Undertaker is a friend of mine, an actual former undertaker who now works in website development.

I sent him an instant message. “Hey. There’s a opossum loose in the yard. How do I kill it?”

He replied instantly. “Tylenol.”

I wrote, “U sure?”

“Yup.”

“How do u no?”

“Cause. Killed neighbor girl’s kitten with it.”

I said to Dennis, “I have to call the Undertaker, can you hand me the phone.”

After rummaging though my sixteen-year-old Filofax, I found the Undertaker’s phone number scrawled on an old, yellow Post-It note. I phoned him, and he answered on the first ring, as though expecting my call. “Yup?”

“Hey, it’s me,” I said.

“Yeah? So?” he said.

“So wait. You killed the neighbor girl’s kitten?”

He chuckled. “The fucking thing would come to my basement window, and it would make all these little yowling sounds all night long. So I went online and found out that Tylenol is fatal to cats. So I gave it some crushed up and mixed into a can of tuna.”

“That’s horrible,” I said. “You live in a basement?”

He said, “Yeah, well. The house has two floors, but I like the basement best.”

“Oh, you would. You really would. You are such an undertaker.”

Again, he laughed, pleased.

“And I can’t believe you killed a little girl’s kitten. That’s something serial killers do. That’s how it starts, with pets.”

“Oh, stop,” he said. “Cats are a dime a fucking dozen.”

I couldn’t argue with him. As much as I’m a dog person, I’m not a cat person. Still, I would never kill one. Shave it and paint it blue with food coloring? Okay, twist my arm. But I certainly wouldn’t kill one. I killed a mouse that crawled in my tub once, and I still feel guilty about it, ten years later.

“I think you’re a bad person,” I told him. “But do you think the Tylenol trick would work on this creature?”

He said, “It’s worth a try.”

After I hung up, I thought about this some more. Did normal Americans kill everything that caused them trouble? Was this what normal people did? Dennis and I were not only new to the country, but I am not normal in any way. So it’s very hard for me to know.

It was pretty clear that more mothers than you’d think routinely killed their kids with bathtubs and heavy rocks. My own mother was of this same strain. But that was appalling and certainly not representative.

But then I considered the statistics: each year four million dogs are “put down” in animal shelters. And twice as many cats. And even at our local supermarket, there is a glue trap designed especially for snakes.

There isn’t a house in all of Connecticut that doesn’t have a twelve-hundred-dollar “bug zapper” from Brookstone in the backyard. And these are often designed to emit a pleasing glow yet destroy everything that flies into them.

And, of course, in New York City there are entire committees of suit-wearing professionals devoted to the destruction of rats in Central Park.

So it did seem that the American way of dealing with a pest was to make a kill.

I was hoping for a less nefarious solution, so I called my friend Suzanne, who lives in California. Suzanne is one of these people who is always smiling and you can see her smile, even over the phone. She is quintessentially Californian in this way. “Set a trap,” she said. “And then you can take it into a field and let it go.”

But this required a bit more of a relationship with the opossum than I was willing to have. I just wanted it to go away from wherever it came from and leave me and my dog’s shit alone. The idea of trapping the scavenger in some sort of contraption and then going on a little nature hike with it just so I could then let it go seemed like more than an act of kindness than I was capable. That, to me, was approaching an act of God.

Wasn’t there some sort of giant mouse trap that would just clamp down on its head? And couldn’t I place this deep in the woods, near the river? And just never, ever go for a walk back there again, so that I wouldn’t have to see it?

But then Dennis, as he is prone to do, had a brilliant idea. “Why don’t we just get a trash can with a lid.”

Well . . . yeah? Why didn’t we?

The next afternoon we bought a small canister designed to hold wood stove pellets. It was smaller than a typical trash can, but it was sturdy. The lid fit snuggly. It was perfect.

We set the can in the barn, tucked against the wall, right near the door. And for a while, this solution seemed to be perfect.

Each time Bentley relieved himself on the driveway, we simply collected the mess in a baggie and tossed it in the trash can.

The opossum, finding nothing of interest on the floor of the barn, did not make another appearance.

I felt really good, positive, and nature-friendly.

For a month.

As adults, Easter morning means little to us. In fact, I don’t think we’ve exchanged baskets or hunted for eggs in all the years we’ve
been together. For us, Easter is just another day. But on the Easter Sunday one month after we bought our poo can, we did wake up early. Because there was a little girl screaming in our backyard.

“Mommy!”

“What the fuck?” Dennis said.

I don’t think either of us had ever heard a little girl scream, except on television. If you don’t actually
have
a little girl, to suddenly hear one screaming in your own backyard is shocking.

“Mommy! Hurry!”

We both climbed out of bed and walked across the hall into the guest bedroom. Here, we peered like perverts out the window overlooking the backyard. We were crouched down low, so nobody would see us. And just beyond our yard, in the field that abuts the riverfront, we saw a little girl. She was dressed in a pretty blue dress, bordered in white ribbon. She wore a white hat. In one hand, she held a basket, overflowing with green, artificial Easter grass. In her other hand, she held a plastic bag of dog shit.

She screamed for her mother again. “I thought it was an egg!” she cried.

And then Dennis said, “Oh no, look at that. Look over to her left. And there,” he pointed, “to her right, over by that tree.”

The field was filled with plastic bags. Because it was morning, the sun hit the plastic at an angle and the bags actually appeared to sparkle, like treasures. What little girl wouldn’t see one of the sparkly bags and then run toward it? Only to discover that it contained not candy or perhaps gems, but turds.

More bags littered our own backyard. And when I pressed my face against the window, I could just make out the front of the barn. And I could just see the trash can turned over on its side. There was no lid.

“We should have killed it,” Dennis said that evening. We’d spent the afternoon on our own nasty little Easter Egg hunt.

“Yeah, we should have,” I said. Because I felt pretty certain that sometimes, you really do have to kill. It’s the American way.

And these people forbid zippers?

I thought Dennis was joking when he read the names from the map. “What?” I asked, “No Fist Fucking? Check the map again.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “There should be a Fist Fucking, Pennsylvania. And it should be in Gang Bang County.”

Had the Amish moved to towns with these names, or had the Amish named the towns after they arrived? It seemed important to know.

The one thing we did know was that neither Blue Ball nor
Intercourse was anything like they were when the Amish first arrived. Because while there were still hints of nature—the occasional farm, a gently rolling pasture or two—most of these towns had been developed into strip malls and superstores. So at any given intersection, you might see Banana Republic and Adidas factory outlet stores. And just across the street, another store twice the size of the Best Buy: a Mishmash Amish Treasures and more!

The traffic on the narrow, two-lane road that led to Blue Ball was particularly dense. It was bumper-to-bumper from one Wendy’s to the next.

“Oh my God,” I said, pointing to a remarkable sight out the window.

“See,” Dennis said. “I told you.”

In the opposite lane, right behind a white BMW 5 Series sedan, was a small black buggy drawn by a single old horse. The driver appeared to be a man with a peculiar beard and a black hat with a wide brim. But perhaps it was only Kelly McGillis, who is rumored to have moved to this area? Then as we passed the buggy, I could see that it was not Kelly but in fact a real-life Amish man. He was smiling and waving and, to my utter shock, did not appear drunk. Behind him, a line of cars inched forward, the drivers rolling their eyes and slapping at the steering wheels. This peaceful old Amish man was unknowingly being willed cardiac arrest by every driver a mile behind him.

“Is he insane?” I asked. “I mean, how can he live here? This is like the most commercial area of the state. It’s awful.”

Dennis agreed. “Yeah, it does seem that strip malls are contrary to the Amish way of life.”