My brother used to terrorize me with a small rubber hippopotamus named Longfellow. He was about the size of a tooth, and he spoke in an extremely high, piercing voice. Longfellow said it wasn’t my fault I was so limited intellectually, that it was simply the luck of the draw and with hard work, and perhaps some family connections, one day I might be able to eke out a living. Now, Big Bill Thompson-Fox was the mayor of the town where Longfellow lived. Unlike Longfellow, the mayor was kind to me. The town was called Pubic, Illinois. Big Bill Thompson-Fox was a finger puppet of a fox in a policeman’s uniform and my brother endowed him with the gentle, patient drawl of Sheriff Andy Taylor. A child psychologist might say that Longfellow and Big Bill Thompson-Fox represented the two sides of my brother’s nature. On the one hand, I was his brother and he hated me, and on the other hand, I was his brother and he loved me. I don’t know. All I know is that Big Bill’s kindness barely made a dent, because even though he had a relatively important job (part-time mayor of a town of about 550 Pubians) and Longfellow didn’t seem to have a job at all, the mayor was no match for the hippo.
I also lived in Pubic, or my voice did. I was the voice of the Matchbox Chevrolet Caprice that served as Big Bill Thompson-Fox’s limousine. I wasn’t supposed to say any words. The car didn’t know any. My role was to make automotive noises at appropriate moments. As I say, Longfellow’s chief preoccupation was making me cry, but he also spent much of his time and energy disrupting city council meetings and haranguing Big Bill Thompson-Fox for things like misappropriation of public funds, giving out no-bid contracts to shadowy underworld cronies, and in general fostering a culture of corruption that pervaded Pubic from the lowliest branch post office to the fifth floor of City Hall. One day Longfellow advocated impeachment of Big Bill after he allowed me (i.e., his car) to vote on an important resolution that would have limited fluorocarbon emissions. Longfellow claimed that it was a blatant conflict of interest. For the record, I voted against the resolution, because I felt that any restrictions on the auto industry would have resulted in the loss of American jobs. After Longfellow raised his loud objections (Kickbacks! Backroom cigars! Sweetheart deals!), Big Bill Thompson-Fox, in what I thought was a pretty brilliant switcheroo, claimed that my vote actually hadn’t counted, that it was nonbinding. “In certain circumstances,” Mayor Thompson-Fox said, “interested members of the public may, according to our charter, weigh in, in a purely advisory capacity, on matters of particular interest, in order to give them more of a voice in government. It’s a unique and quite participatory feature of our democracy here in Pubic. It’s actually based on a pre-Napoleonic French model.”
“Ah ha, Chevrolet. I knew all along there was something francophone about that car!”
“Please, sir, we’ll have no unseemly outbursts.”
“Oh, you and your Robert’s Rules of Order…”
“Bailiff!” Big Bill Thompson-Fox cried. “Where’s the bailiff?”
I made car noises to the effect that we didn’t have a bailiff on the payroll.
Longfellow would not be silenced. Big Bill Thompson-Fox and his car remained on the carpet. It was Longfellow who attained the heights of the prophet. My brother set the hippo on his head and intoned: “Taxidermy without representation is tyranny. If this be treason, you can kiss my ass back to the Zambezi.”
In 1990, I found Longfellow in a drawer in my mother’s house, along with some rolling papers (my mother’s), circa 1975. He’d survived my parents’ divorce, three moves, and two remarriages, the little shit. I held a summary trial. Longfellow stood accused of assault, slander, noise pollution, and a myriad of immigration violations.
“Any last words?”
“Yo, toothache, what’s with the shilly-shally? If you’re going to do it, do it.”
I popped his head off with a toenail clipper. And though there was ample evidence (the clipper in my hand, the severed rubber head on the carpet), I could not be prosecuted, because the municipality where the execution allegedly occurred no longer existed and local criminal statutes could not apply. Under the letter of the law, you can’t be found guilty of killing anybody in Atlantis unless you can dredge up that jurisdiction from the bottom of the sea. Same is true for Narnia, Bedrock, and Nimh, where the brave rats live. Nonetheless, legal niceties aside, there is the human heart to consider. The only certain thing is, you’ll be brothers forever, my mother used to say. Everything else in your entire life—health, money, sex—is all crapshoot.
I clip his head off and still—still, thy brother’s blood cries out in a high, high voice only dogs and myself can hear.