What People Are Saying About Puppalicious And Beyond
“Entertaining, with a natural flow.” Houston Writers Guild
“Puppalicious will warm the hearts of animal lovers everywhere. It is a beautiful collection of stories that will have you laughing and sometimes crying, while enjoying the comical view of author Pamela Fagan Hutchins. If you enjoyed the stories of James Herriot, you will love this book.” Animal lover Sandy Webb
“What a fabulous read. I was so sad it ended. The book was perfect: full of laughter and emotion narrated in the delightful yet humorous style that is what Pamela specializes in. I loved that I could sense the love of this close-knit family. And? I’ve nothing but admiration for this woman who makes her experiences sound so funny. I am still giggling over parts of the book. I just KNOW I’ll be reading it often.” Vidya Sury, Creator of Going A-Musing
Puppalicious And Beyond
Life Outside The Center Of The Universe
Pamela Fagan Hutchins
SkipJack Publishing
Puppalicious And Beyond
Copyright 2012
Smashwords Edition
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
To all the pets I’ve loved before, who’ve traveled in and out my door, I’m glad I undertook and I dedicate this book, to all the pets I’ve loved before.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: I am not a whackjob.
Chapter Two: Froggy Went A’Courtin’
Chapter Three: Creepy Crawlies and Things That Go Bump in the Night
Chapter Four: Guard Dog in Training
Chapter Five: Ghosties, ghoulies, and long-leggedy beasties
Chapter Seven: Giving Me Hives
Chapter Eight: Hi Ho Silver, Away!
Chapter Nine: Rats, and I don’t mean darn.
Chapter Eleven: Ménage à Tortoise
Chapter Thirteen: Every dog has its day.
Chapter Fourteen: The Gimpy Chicken
Chapter Fifteen: A Lot Like Cannibals
Chapter Sixteen: It’s De Islans, Mon It’s De Islans, Mon
Chapter Seventeen: The Bird Man
Chapter Eighteen: The Ninjanator
Chapter Nineteen: Homicide: 22 Unnamed Victims
Chapter Twenty: Family Killing Spree Continues
Chapter Twenty-two: The Ninjcompoop
Chapter Twenty-three: At least the dog feels great.
Chapter Twenty-four: The Prodigal Cat
Chapter Twenty-five: Urban Jungle
Chapter Twenty-six: Good Karma or Bad Karma?
Chapter Twenty-seven: Home Office Mates
Chapter Twenty-eight: RIP, my fine-feathered friend.
Chapter Twenty-nine: Crackhead Possum Moves In
Chapter Thirty-one: Our Dog Whisperer
Chapter Thirty-two: Raptors 1, Industry 0
Chapter Thirty-three: New Favorite Pet
Chapter Thirty-four: Not A Beaver
Chapter Thirty-five: Redneck Adventures
Chapter Thirty-six: How do I love thee?
Chapter Thirty-seven: Felinity
Chapter Thirty-eight: Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?
Chapter Thirty-nine: Bitten by the five-second rule.
Chapter Forty: The Pain of Puppy Love
Chapter Forty-one: A Waking Dream
Chapter Forty-four: For Sale, $5.00—One-Eyed Dog Who Pees on Bed
Chapter Forty-five: Ewe’s not fat, ewe’s just fluffy.
Chapter Forty-seven: Tiny Catholic
Chapter Forty-eight: At least we’ll always be able to find it.
Chapter Fifty-one: Cold Nose, Warm Feet
Chapter Fifty-two: Running Out Of Time
Other Books By Pamela Fagan Hutchins
Excerpt from How To Screw Up Your Kids: Blended Families, Blendered Style
Chapter One: Despite Our Best Efforts
Chapter Two: How did the Bradys do it?
Do you rank Where The Red Fern Grows along with Wuthering Heights amongst your favorite books of all time? All Creatures Great and Small with Pet Sematary? If so, chances are you get it: there’s something magical about giving literary immortality and voice to the nonhumans that capture our collective imagination. If these are the stories that glue you to the page, then Puppalicious and Beyond: Life Outside The Center Of The Universe is the book for you. Set in the Caribbean and Texas, it tells the sometimes true and sometimes fictional tales of the magnificent and interrelated creatures – natural and supernatural -- that passed through the author’s life, bringing her delight, fright, and every emotion in between.
~~~
Chapter One: I am not a whackjob.
I am not some whacko who writes about her labradoodle Schnookums. Let’s just get that straight right off the bat. Hell, I’m practically anti-animal, and I don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, either. Dogs? They shed. Poop. Pee. Barf. Drool. Chew. Bark. Cats? Ditto, except make that yowl instead of bark, plus I’m deathly allergic. That’s why currently we have only three dogs and one cat. Oh, and five fish. And I hardly even like them, except for maybe a little. We’ve cut back, too. It wasn’t so long ago the dog count was six, the cat count three, and the fish count innumerable, along with guinea pigs, birds, ducks, rabbits, and a pig. As in swine.
My most vivid memories of growing up in Wyoming and Texas are of animals. We had the normal sorts of pets, plus the absolute luxury of living in the country. I raised sheep for 4-H and rode my horse to sleepovers. We had visitors furry, feathered, and scaly, of both the hooved and clawed varieties. My husband grew up on St. Croix where the animals were different, but his wild upbringing, close to nature, matched mine. His mother tells stories of her sons bringing geckos on the plane from the island to the mainland, and finding their little skeletons outside the family’s summer home in Maine months later. Eric’s favorite photograph from his youth shows him standing on the beach holding the booby he rescued while surfing, then nursed back to health and released.
As a child, I devoured books about animals, like Black Beauty and Where the Red Fern Grows. I idolized James Herriot and Jacques Cousteau. I could never quite decide whether to be a veterinarian or a marine biologist or Shamu’s trainer. Somehow I sold out early on and became a lawyer, but that didn’t stop the animal love. There, I’ve admitted it: animal love. I ♥ animals, with a big red heart and sparkly glitter. All of them, nearly, except for maybe insects and reptiles. Also I am not a big fan of rats. But other than that, I love every one. Eric and I spend all the time we can outdoors looking for critters, whether we do it from bicycles or cars, or in the water or on our own four feet. We watch All Creatures Great and Small on Netflix. Our offspring naturally love God’s creatures, too, at least as much as they love their smartphones, and a whole lot more than they love us.
In the Virgin Islands of Eric’s youth, Christianity made plenty of room for the ghosts, spirits, and jumbies of obeah, a folk-magic religion with elements of sorcery and voodoo. The locals couldn’t comprehend why continentals like me scoffed at what was so plainly true to them, but scoff I did. Ghosts? Jumbies? As in Casper the friendly? It was hard for me to follow—until I met Eric. He and the islands opened my eyes to a world that existed just beyond the visible. Sometimes these non-humans scared me, and sometimes they comforted me. I liked my pets and the animals of the wild better, but I was captivated by the jumbies. Especially the one guarding Annaly, the house we bought in the rainforest.
When my lawyer career morphed into human resources and then I finally started writing, non-humans started spilling out of every story. Sometimes they are the stars, and sometimes they are the supporting actors. No matter their role, they always manage to steal the show from the unsuspecting humans who believe they are the center of the universe.
~~~
Chapter Two: Froggy Went A’Courtin’
All the signs were there. We even talked about them, way back when. “The owners must love frogs,” Eric said as we toured the back yard of the house in Houston that would become our home when we left the islands. He nudged a knee-high pottery frog planter with his foot.
“Umm hmmm,” I said. I couldn’t have cared less. I was calculating our offer.
“That one is odd,” he said. He pointed at a large concrete frog Buddha, almost hidden by giant elephant ears and bougainvillea beside the waterfall that poured from the top pond into the middle one. You could see the ponds all the way from the front door, through the seamless full-length back windows. It reminded us of home, of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, of our beloved rainforest home Estate Annaly. How could we not buy this house? Eric continued, “It’s like a frog shrine.”
I remember saying something noncommittal, like, “Whoa, that is odd,” as I walked back into the house with the real estate agent. In retrospect, she seemed . . . in a hurry.
We moved in on the ninth of March, springtime in Houston. Beautiful springtime. For roughly six weeks, the temperatures are in the seventies and there’s a soft breeze. Flowers bloom but mosquitoes don’t yet. Sunlight dapples the ground through the vibrant foliage of the trees. Birds don’t chirp, they sing. The fragrance is clean, more than sweet. It’s heaven. We moved in, and our new house was like heaven.
Until everything arrived from the islands in another month, we had exactly one piece of furniture: a standard double mattress on the master bedroom floor. The kids slept in sleeping bags. It was spare. We ate our meals on paper plates sitting cross-legged on the floor. When we called to each other, our voices bounced from wall to wall in our 4,000-square-foot echo chamber. Still, it was like heaven.
But around midnight during our fateful third week in Houston, the first frog croaked. His piercing rasp drew our attention, but not our consternation. What was one frog to us, here in heaven?
Oh, had it only been one frog. Or one hundred frogs. Or even one thousand. By three a.m., Eric was standing pondside in his skivvies with three hundred pounds of canine looky-loos beside him in the forms of Cowboy the giant yellow Lab, Layla the Gollum-like boxer, and Karma the emotionally fragile German shepherd. I stood in the doorway.
“Fucking frogs,” Eric said, no trace of love in his voice.
Well, yes. Yes, they were. Frogs were, ahem, fornicating everywhere. It was overwhelming, really. I swear, if you’d Googled “swingers’ resort for frogs,” you’d get our address. The amorous amphibians held their tongues as soon as Eric switched on the backyard light. Muttering more curses, he snatched them up in stubbornly conjoined pairs and flung them over the fence. I did not dare ask his plan and after ten minutes, I sneaked off to bed.
Night after sleepless spring night, Eric battled the frogs with a homicidal drive. Day after spring day, he shirked his work as a chemical engineer and looked online for ways to off them. This campaign was beginning to drive me insane, too. Their sounds had long since become white noise, or at worst, bedtime music to me. Eric’s tossing, turning, cursing, and trips in- and outside, on the other hand, kept me wide awake. He would report the body count when he returned to bed.
“If I could just think of a way to poison them, I could sleep,” he said.
“If you poison them, you’ll poison the dogs, maybe even birds,” I said into my pillow.
“Acceptable collateral damage,” he replied.
In response to my urgings for him to quell his frog-blood lust, Eric tried to repatriate his little nemeses. He loaded them into industrial-sized black garbage bags and headed for the bayou. Unfortunately, the good citizens of Houston were on alert for a serial murderer that spring, and a man seen dumping lumpy garbage bags into the waterway attracted attention. Eric had only just barely returned home before the cops came to check him out. Reluctantly, I vouched for him.
The kids got into the spirit. Instead of just one underwear-clad man in the back yard, we now had him (thank the Lord, he’d started taking the time to don a pair of camo shorts—although I had the feeling he’d spring for camo face and body paint, too given the chance) plus the nine-, eleven-, and thirteen-year-old kids. Like me, the dogs were sleeping through most of it now, except when one of the kids would make a particularly good snatch and yell in triumph. At least it was taking care of any lingering need for sex education.
When the children created an offering of dead froggies to the Buddha, I feared the repercussions. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could swear their numbers doubled that night. It was bad. It was very, very bad.
It pains me to admit that I conspired by my silence in the deaths of hundreds of croakers that spring. They died in an endless variety of ways, but mostly Eric heaved them—THUMP, or occasionally SPLAT—against the house. Sometimes he aimed high, and more than once we found dead frogs clear on the other side of the house the next morning, or their desiccated bodies on the roof weeks later.
“Maybe I should have let the cops take you after all,” I groused one night as he stomped off. The man seemed by God determined to ensure that I shared his insomnia.
“What?” he said.
“Maybe I should come out and help you after all,” I said, and got out of bed. Ugh.
The calendar pages flipped slowly forward. May passed. It wasn’t seventy degrees anymore. The flowers wilted and the mosquitoes hatched. A faint smell of decay—mold?—permeated the house, but it smelled no better outside. The sun burned everything in its searing gaze, yet still the frogs croaked out their horny croaks and gamboled nightly in sexual abandon.
“They’ll be gone by summer,” I said, certain that they would not. That they would never leave. That my husband would be scribbling REDRUM across our bathroom mirror by August while the frogs croaked on. Because “frogicide” written backward doesn’t spell anything.
And then one day, they stopped. Silence. Sleep. Happiness. Months went by, blissful days leading inevitably toward April. Make the clock move slower, I prayed to God.
January. February. March. We hadn’t heard them yet, but the little fockers would be here soon. Apri-ri-ri-RIBBITTTTTTT. Eric leaped up in bed as if the frogs were in there with him.
“Honey, stop,” I said.
He glared at me. All my man could see was frogs.
I handed him a pair of earplugs that I’d scavenged a few weeks before from his bag of work safety wear. “It’s evolutionary, honey, Darwinian. If our species is to survive, we must adapt.”
He stared at them, foamy yellow plugs on either end of a neon-orange string. I took his hand, placed them in his palm, and gently closed his fingers around them. I tugged him out of bed and led him out into our humid back yard, picking up a candle and matches on the way. I left the outside lights off and the male frogs sang out in carnal frenzy. I felt primal, like I was entering a hedonist temple.
Before the frog Buddha, I knelt with my husband. I handed him the candle and matches, then nudged him when he didn’t respond. “Light it, my love.” He did, a penitent virgin on the altar. He lit the candle. “Now, repeat after me,” I said.
He mumbled assent and I began. “I, Eric, present myself before you, Buddha of the frogs.”
The look he shot me said, “You’re out of your flippin’ gourd,” but I didn’t waver, and he repeated my words.
“I promise to do no harm to any of your frog brothers and sisters, henceforth and forevermore.”
“I’m not saying that,” he said.
“Humor me. We did it your way all last summer,” I said. And honey, I’m voting you off THAT island, I thought.
He complied with the enthusiasm of Morticia Addams.
“As a token of my sincerity, I pledge to you to wear these earplugs, and to install a frog shrine in our bedroom immediately.”
He repeated the oath, then we blew out the candle and tiptoed in perfect solemnity back into our room. There, I pulled two jolly stuffed frogs from a bag and propped them up on a pedestal table by the back window, between Eric and the live frogs.
“You actually went out and bought these in advance?” he asked.
“I knew I had to take matters into my own hands. I love you, and I want our marriage to withstand the test of frogs.”
“It’s that bad, huh?”
“Oh yeah, it’s that bad.”
Eric finally—FINALLY—smiled and swatted me on the behind. He put the earplugs in.
“Those are kind of sexy,” I said.
“What?” he yelled.
Mission accomplished.
~~~
~~~
Chapter Three: Creepy Crawlies and Things That Go Bump in the Night
I lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands for six years, and the critters of the Caribbean kinda creeped me out. I didn’t go all nutso about it like Eric did with the frogs, but they left their mark on my psyche.
Most people envision tropical tranquility when I tell them I met and married my husband on St. Croix, but not everything in paradise is idyllic. Don’t get me wrong: it’s gorgeous, and we loved it. But some of God’s little creations in the U.S.V.I. make you wonder if He is related to Tim Burton. And this coming from a woman who grew up with rattlesnakes, black widows, water moccasins, copperheads, and scorpions in Texas.
In the water, the animals of the V.I. are lovely. I adore the puffer fish. My eyes devour the vivid colors of the parrot fish. How much more beautiful can something get than the eagle ray? Sure, there are underwater beasts that sting like a jellyfish or bite like a barracuda, but not often. On land, though, on land, you get only the scrubs who can survive in desert-like island conditions. For instance, you have the gungalos.
Gungalos are large millipedes with glossy red or black exoskeletons that are filled with acid. That’s right, acid. And they propagate like rabbits. Worse than rabbits. Worse than the frogs. During the nearly year-round gungalo season, people have to sweep up gungalos from their floors and patios multiple times a day. Did you catch that? I said floors, as in the floors in your house. Because in the V.I., most people live in open-air settings, meaning their doors and windows remain open more often than not. The gungalos—and other creepers—make themselves right at home. Thus, you won’t just find them on your floor. You’ll find them on your bed and in your shoes, too. If you step on a gungalo, you’ll hear a nasty crunch and then see an ooze the color of the exoskeleton, which is either black or reddish. If you’re barefoot, it stings. The ooze leaves a stain on your foot or the floor for as long as a month. Eric bought his first skateboard from the penny-per-gungalo his parents used to pay him to sweep, bag, and dispose of them.
Joining the ranks of the proud and the poisonous are the geckos. Geckos are heroes that eat the no-see-ums. No-see-ums are tiny gnats that get their name because, well, you can’t see them. But you know they’ve been there because they leave their calling card: a stinging bite. I spent my first six months on-island in scabby welts from no-see-ums. They feasted on my tenderfoot skin. I still have a scar from a particularly nasty bite. After a while, I guess I developed immunity or a stench they didn’t like, and they left me alone.
Back to the geckos. Geckos eat insects, but they can get into anything, anywhere. We would find their little lizard poos all over the place, and once during a dinner party we saw their skeletons under the glass top of our dining room table in a hidey-hole we had missed when cleaning. Not appetizing. Our cats loved the geckos. They loved to chase them, to torment them, and to eat them. However, geckos are mildly poisonous when consumed. Our cat Juliet knew this from firsthand experience. You could tell poor kitty had eaten too many geckos when she started to weave around and foam at the mouth. I’ve never known it to be fatal, but I’ve seen a lot of gecko-drunk felines.
Also poisonous? Centipedes. Evil, evil centipedes. Centipedes still haunt my dreams. In theory, I was familiar with centipedes from pre-island life. But it wasn’t until I moved to St. Croix that I understood what horrible creatures they are. They are Satan in his living form. Don’t believe me? Try waking up to a six-inch black and yellow monster in bed with you, latched on for a nice bite on your neck. Been there, done that. The bite alone is painful enough to get your attention, but it’s what comes next that’s truly demonic: swelling, stinging, nausea, numbness, fever and dizziness. It’s dangerous to small children and people with allergies, who can go into anaphylactic shock. In six years in the islands, I was bitten three times. My husband, in his forty years there, was only bitten twice. Like all the other island pests, we could keep them at bay but not eliminate them completely, even with regular visits from Terminix. Once I was able to kill a large one without mauling its colorful body, so I left it on Eric’s pillow as a surprise. After I peeled him off the ceiling, he said he liked it better when I surprised him with fishnet hose and a garter belt.
Leaving the poisonous and moving on to the obnoxious, the island toads send me into dry heaves, even actual heaves. My parents battled toads for several years in their house on St. Croix, which was named Whispering Palms1 for the coconut palms lining its ridge. At Whispering Palms, the rooms were connected by exterior covered breezeways that were lined on either side with planter beds. The toads would emerge from the soil at night and stand in stacks upon each other, five deep in some places. From what I could tell, they came out solely to piss my mother off by crapping all over the hallways, but possibly they also emerged to eat and engage in recreational sex. My mother is not a fan of casual sex or toads.
It gets worse. Tap water, in the islands, usually comes from below-house cisterns that are filled by roof catchments. You control your own water quality with additives and filters. Occasionally a homeowner might have a reason to get into the cistern. Eric and I had five separate cistern chambers below Annaly, and a few of them were only accessible by going down a ladder into one chamber and, depending on the water level, walking, swimming, or rafting into another. In the dark. But I digress. So, back to Whispering Palms. My father had to get into their cistern for one reason or another, which he had not done in quite some time. To his horror, he discovered hundreds—possibly thousands—of the breezeway toads, pooping, peeing, fornicating, and God knows what else in the depths below their house, into their bathing and drinking water.
Did you just throw up a little? That’s okay. I did, too.
I like the tree frogs much better than the toads. The tree frogs are native to Puerto Rico and known as “coqui” (ko-kee), because that’s the sound they make (all night long). They are darling little quarter-sized creatures. They are usually green, at least on St. Croix, but I’ve seen them in a range of colors that match their surroundings. They may be cute, but the coqui lullaby becomes water torture after four or five sleepless nights.
And then there are the island sparrows, AKA bats. Initially, they wigged me out. We had, no lie, hundreds living under the eaves at our rainforest house. They would slip out of their attic hideaway at dusk, two or three at a time, to hunt for bugs and to take sips of water out of our swimming pool. After a while, I came to appreciate them for their appetite for mosquitoes, and because it was perfectly lovely to sit on the patio in the evenings and watch them swoop and flutter. Banish your thoughts of bloodthirsty vampire bats—these flying mammals would almost fit in your palm. However, I admit I didn’t like it when they got inside the house. Once there was a bat on the ceiling of our bedroom that I had to chase out with a tennis racket. When I couldn’t get it all the way outside, I managed to trap it under a beach bucket and then gently walk the bucket to the porch, where I released it.
So, I didn’t resort to bagging bats and dumping them on the beach like so many frogs into the bayou, but I do have recurring nightmares of a foot-long centipede stinging me into paralysis in my bed, where I lie immobile, tortured by the cry of the coqui and covered in gungalos and geckos, watching towers of toads poop on my clean floors.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the land critters of the Caribbean make an impression.
1 Prior to realizing they would become his in-laws, my husband dubbed their home Farting Bushes. Tsk, tsk, not nice.
~~~
Chapter Four: Guard Dog in Training
When I first bought Annaly, we had to sic the contractors on it for about six months before it was habitable. That gave me time to prep the family—kids and pets alike—for the radical lifestyle change ahead of us. Cowboy, our yellow labrador, was only one year old. Young Cowboy needed to develop some skills before he could become the alpha guard dog. I had my doubts the big goofball was cut out for the job.
My brother Bruce visited us about halfway through the finish-out. After showing him our progress, the kids and I set out from Annaly toward my favorite place in whole world: the tidal pools. The hike to the tidal pools was rugged. The rainforest terrain of the island’s north coast was steep, and the trail was thick with saw grass in some places. My kids were youngish, too; Susanne was nearly seven and Clark was nine at the time. Cowboy came with us, because he went everywhere Susanne went, except school, and he would have gone there, too, if we’d let him.
It took us an hour to reach the pools, where we picnicked before our swim. We all got a belly laugh out of watching Cowboy follow Susanne through the water at first. He was a powerful swimmer, as you would expect for a labrador. Oh, to have the slightly webbed toes and buoyancy of a lab. We realized, though, that he might drown her in his urgent need to be near her, so with our coaching she got behind Cowboy and held onto his collar. He dragged her around the pools as if she was weightless, and I swear he was smiling.
Then Clark and Susanne decided to jump into the water from the low rock cliffs around the pool. It was a great idea, in theory. First Clark climbed up and jumped. That went fine. Then it was Susanne’s turn.
Susanne climbed the slippery, steep rocks. This didn’t bother me until Cowboy, who weighed twice as much as Susanne, noticed where she’d gone. He dug his toenails into the rock and somehow hauled his one hundred and ten pounds out of the water by his front legs. He scrambled up the rocks like a drunken mountain goat. Susanne stood poised for her jump as he closed in on her fast.
“Jump, Susanne, jump NOW,” I screamed. The collision between dog and small girl wasn’t going to be pretty, and there was no way I could get to her in time.
She looked back at the barreling figure of Cowboy and for once in her young life didn’t ask, “Why, Mommy?” She leaped into the water a few seconds before Cowboy reached the spot on which she had been standing. He whined, he moaned, he thrashed his head side to side. Susanne surfaced, laughing.
“Swim to me as fast as you can, honey, as fast as you can,” I urged, trying not to panic. Now I was picturing his body, claws first, landing on her head.
Susanne had joined the swim team at the age of five, and she put all that training to good use at the right moment. She shot toward me as Cowboy swan-dived off the rock face. He landed with four legs splayed in a furry cannonball. His splash propelled Susanne the last few feet to me.
Not to be deterred from the object of his adoration, he swung his giant muzzle back and forth until he locked eyes on her. He engaged his powerful dog paddle.
“Now, darlin’, you know what to do.” And she did.
Susanne waited until Cowboy was three feet away, then she dove under water, coming up behind him. She grabbed his collar.
“Good boy,” she yelled.
My pulse, which had triple-timed during the last forty-five seconds, slowed down as dog dragged daughter around the tide pool. Clark splashed in the shallows, oblivious to the drama. Bruce had appeared by my side without me noticing until now. We exchanged a long look.
“That dog is a little protective,” he said.
“I knew he was crazy about her, but that was more than I expected,” I said.
“Again!” Susanne yelled.
“No, ma’am!” I yelled back.
On the hike back out, Cowboy ratcheted up his attention to Susanne and kept station off her flank like a sheepdog. If one of us got between dog and girl, he simply shoved us back out of the way, no matter how steep or narrow the path. We passed some other hikers and he emitted a low rumble as they passed his girl. It was a long hike, and we were all pretty tired. Several times, Susanne stopped for an ugly mood swing, but Cowboy would herd her back into forward motion.
“Good boy,” I said, and patted his head. He didn’t take his golden eyes off Susanne to acknowledge my praise. It looked like the guard dog was almost ready for life in the rainforest.
~~~
Chapter Five: Ghosties, ghoulies, and long-leggedy beasties
I may not believe in zombies, sparkly vampires, or Bigfoot, but I do believe in something. I know there’s more out there than my eyes can see or my outer ear can hear. I feel it sometimes. I sense it. Do you? There’s an energy around us, inhabiting an invisible dimension.
Some people never sense it. Others have what I think of as an extrareceptive ear, a greater capacity to relate to the energy around us, like the energies from living people, from animals, or even from formerly living people. From a million unseen, unheard sources, some that we can’t name, but we know exist.
Culture plays a role. In some parts of the world, kids are raised to believe, and so they listen more openly. Eric grew up in the Caribbean, where jumbies—ghosts, spirits—were an accepted and expected part of life. Santería, voodoo, and other tropical-clime practices exist for a reason. People in the islands look for ways to communicate with and harness the power of spirits. Eric has this receptivity, this special ear, and he really freaked me out at first when he sensed the presence of something that wasn’t actually living among us, like he did immediately at Annaly.
I’ve got some sort of this sensitivity. I could feel the jumbie at Annaly, too. But I’m a bit more of an empath. You know, like Deanna Troi in the purple jumpsuit on Star Trek: Next Generation. That kind of empath. Whether chemically or by my thoughts, when I’m with someone in person, I can get all the way through to them, and I receive much more in terms of energy and connection from them than most other people do.
Yeah, yeah, I know. You think this is crap. But it isn’t. People understand and relate to me, latch onto me, grab hold of the energy I put toward them. It makes me a heck of an investigator, executive coach, and public speaker—things I do in my day job—but I don’t always want to go there. It takes a lot out of me. And when I knowingly open my channel, people that are too needy can almost incapacitate me. I’ve learned to protect myself, protect my resources.
The closer I am emotionally to a person, the more powerful this force can be. I can connect from longer distances with those to whom I am closest. And of course, the more the other person is in touch with the unseen, the greater the energy we can pass between us. I think my husband’s similarity to me in this regard was one of the things that drew us together originally, back when we were co-workers and there was no twinkle of forever in our eyes yet.
Eric was once in a horrific bike wreck while I was ten miles away, cooking dinner up at Annaly. Suddenly I was hit by a blunt force of traumatic energy that sent me down on my knees with my hand around my throat. I grabbed my car keys and mobile phone off the counter without so much as my purse or an idea of where I was heading. I drove at breakneck speed toward town. Fifteen minutes later, when I was out of the rainforest and back into cell reception, my phone rang. It was Eric. He had hit a car head-on and was refusing medical treatment. He had woken with no memory of who he was but kept saying he needed Pamela. And I had heard him.
If humans have this much energy to tap into the unseen with each other, doesn’t it stand to reason that we can sense, feel, and hear the other unseen energies around us? I believe all of this energy is interconnected and constant, that some auras are just so powerful that through their force and circumstances, they can’t easily be erased. It’s not like I think there are bajillions of undead spirits clamoring for me to hear them, but I know some spirits outlast their physical bodies. They’re out there. I know they are. Just because I can’t see them to name them doesn’t make their presence less tangible.
And how do you explain some people’s greater intuition about things—spatial relations and connections to the energy emanating from objects? I am attuned, but my inner ear works best on living (and maybe formerly living) things. Eric is attuned, as is his son. My daughter Susanne is, too, but she has an inner ear that functions differently than mine. Suz has a tremendous relationship to animals and objects. She is a Dog Whisperer with the soul of a cat.
She has another skill that is stranger, though: Susanne knows where things are. The first few times she knew without looking where I had left, for instance, the camera (“In the upstairs closet on the top right shelf, Mom”—the “duh” was implied), I attributed it to nosiness. Surely she had just pawed through the closet and run across it? But we noticed she knew immediately where things were when we asked, and her only explanation for it was “I just know.” She keeps a good visual inventory of her surroundings. For instance, she goes through my drawers almost daily and will announce at dinner, “So, you got new panties, I see,” apropos of nothing. It transcends observation (and nosiness), though, into the realm of the relational energy stored in objects. If we lose something, we ask her. If it’s findable, she knows where it is. If she says it’s gone, she’s right, and we give it up as truly lost.
Thus, with this belief in the unseen, I write. And they, whatever it is they are, make their way into my stories. My nonfiction is full of it. Okay, that came out wrong, but you get my point. My fiction is, too. Most of my fiction is grounded in memory, anyway. What is fiction, after all, but life reimagined? Life, only more interesting. Life, with the answer to “what if?” If you’ve read my nonfiction, you’ll recognize my fictional characters like old friends you’ve never met, and I’m going to introduce you to them in this book.
So it’s not just the animals that vie for center stage in the theater of my words. It’s also the jumbies. And let’s meet one now, in an excerpt from my novel Discovering Katie.
~~~
Excerpt from the novel Discovering Katie:
I guess you could say I chose to drown the sorrow of my unrequited love in a hundred and ten acres of bush and six thousand square feet of partly-finished house in a tropical island rainforest.
Her name was Annalise, or rather, Estate Annalise. A crook had begun to build her years before and abandoned her, half-complete, when the Feds invited him to spend time in one of their correctional institutions. Word has it that he told his friends he was going to visit his mother. The next thing you know, his picture was on the cover of the San Juan Star. “St. Marcos Man Convicted as Drug Kingpin,” the headline blared. This explained his boat, plane, and houses on several islands; just another Caribbean success story, so to speak.
Annalise, the house he built and left, was a jumbie house. A jumbie, in West Indian folk magic like voodoo or Santeria, is a ghost or spirit.
Completely bonkers, right? Only it wasn’t.
I discovered Annalise while I was on a trip to St. Marcos. My name is Katie Connell—a good Irish Catholic name for a Baptist girl from Texas—and I have the red hair, pale skin, volatile temper, and family history of alcoholism you’d expect. I ran to St. Marcos to spend two weeks at a spa there as a form of self-rehabilitation. AA may work for most people, but I don’t do group activities very well. Besides, I’d merely been drinking too much for too long a time; I was not an alcoholic.
The only thing I wanted from St. Marcos was serenity, and to prove to my brother Collin that I could give up Bloody Marys for two whole weeks. Finding Annalise was an accident. Or maybe it was fate.
So, there I was on St. Marcos, at a resort that promised a wide variety of island adventures for the guests that weren’t into the chichi spa services. Guests like me. I laced up my boots and set out for a guided hike in the rainforest led by Rashidi Johns. It sounded like the kind of “take me away from myself” adventure I needed.
Rashidi was a botanist by education, an entrepreneur by nature, and a Rastafarian by faith. His neatly-tied dreadlocks hung all the way to his waist. He was lean from his vegetarian life, but strong. The female hikers found him exotic and appreciated his dark physique. Due to his popularity, the group I joined for the morning hike was sizable.
Rashidi walked through the tittering throng, checking us for appropriate clothing, footwear, sunscreen, bug spray, hats, and hydration. He sent a few women back for supplies, and one or two he delicately queried about their constitutions and health.
“The rainforest on St. Marcos is one of the most beautiful places in the world, but it is rugged, ladies, and it be harsh.” His calypso accent was thick, but understandable. “There may be some of you that would enjoy it more with a drivin’ tour. These hills are steep. The sun is brutal. There are centipedes as long as me foot.” Someone laughed. “I not jokin’ you, ladies. You will see beautiful trees, blossoms and vines, but dey can reach out with their t’orns and stickers and tear your soft skin. They grow t’ick togedder, so at times I will be using this,” he patted the machete strung across his hip, “to clear a path for us to get t’rough. You ain’t going to make me sad if you decide this hike is not for you. I can only carry one of you out if you get hurt or fall to our tropical heat, so leave now if you gonna be leavin’.”
One portly older woman, who was already sweating profusely and sporting beet-red cheeks, opted out. The rest of us fell in line whispering and shuffle-footed behind Rashidi as he continued his commentary.
The scenery was gorgeous, and like nothing I had ever seen. We hiked up a steep, winding path. The trees were tall, with the leaves clustered like a canopy over our heads. At ground level was bush, sparse on the cleared path, but thick up to its edge. As best as I can explain it, bush is whatever grows near the ground: bushes, ferns with giant leaves, weeds, flowers, small trees, and grasses. Rashidi described it all, but I didn’t hear most of it. I was concentrating on the challenge of breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, and on keeping my mind free of him. Of Nick.
The incline winded me, and I scowled at the memories and effect of my recent debauched lifestyle. The burning in my lungs began to feel good; it burned out the bush in me and cleared a path for me to find my way.
We had been hiking for nearly two hours when Rashidi gave us a hydration break and announced that we were nearing the turnaround point, which would be a special treat: a modern ruin. He explained that a bad man, a thief and a thug, had built a beautiful mansion in paradise, named her Annalise, and then left her forsaken and half-complete. No one had ever finished her and the rainforest had moved fast to claim her. Wild horses roamed her halls, colonies of bats filled her eaves, and who knows what lived below her in the depths of her cisterns. We would eat our lunch there, then turn back for the—much easier, he promised—hike down.
When the forest parted to reveal Annalise, we all drew in a breath. She was amazing: tall, austere, and a bit frightening. Our group grew tense. What woman doesn’t love going to an open house? And here we were, visiting a mysterious mansion with a romantic history in a tropical rainforest. Ooo la la.
Graceful, flamboyant trees and grand pillars marked the entrance to her gateless drive. On each side of the overgrown road were tropical fruit trees of every description, and the fragrance was pungent, the air drunk with fermenting mangos and ripening guava, subtly undercut by the aroma of bay leaves. It was a surreal orchard, its orphaned fruit unpicked, the air heavy and still, bees and insects the only thing stirring besides our band of turistas. Overhead, the trees’ branches met in the middle of the road and were covered in vines with trailing pink flowers. The sun shone through the canopy in narrow beams and lit our dim path.
We climbed up Annalise’s ten uneven front steps and entered through what should have been imposing double doors. We came first into a great room with thirty-five-foot ceilings. My skin prickled, each hair standing to salute Annalise. We gazed up in wonder at her intricate tongue-in-groove cypress ceiling with mahogany beams, her improbable stone fireplace here in the tropics.
We explored her three stories, room after room unfolding as we discussed what each was to have been. Balcony floors with no railings jutted from two sides of the house. A giant concrete pool hovered partway out of the ground. How could someone put in so much work, build something magnificent, create such hope, and leave her to rot?
Gradually, ughs replaced the oohs as we discovered that we had to step over horse manure and bat guano in every room. Dead gungalos by the thousands crunched under our feet. One woman put her hand on a wall and ended up with dung between her fingers and gunked into her ostentatious diamond ring, which for some inexplicable reason she’d worn on a rainforest hike. Annalise was not for the faint of heart, and I suppressed my urge to run for a broom. What she could have been was so clear; what she might still be was staggering. I could see it. I could feel it.
And zing, something hit me hard, just coursed through my head and lungs. A cold, hard, lonely place filled with crap. It was like looking in the mirror. No, it was more than that. It was like someone had whispered it in my ear. It felt personal to me that she was abandoned. Even her name resonated inside me: Annalise. Unbelievably, I had a connection on my Treo, and I Googled the origin of the name—Hebrew for grace, favor. For some reason, reading those words hurt me. Annalise and I could both use some grace. An overpowering urge to make things right by myself and by this house rose up in me. I didn’t see the irrationality of it; I saw the possibility of mutual redemption. Lost in this feeling, I saved the realtor’s name and number from the faded sign by the door into my contacts. It didn’t hurt to type it into my memo app, I told myself.
Rashidi’s voice broke through my reverie. “Ms. Katie, are you comin’ wit’ us? It gets dark up here at night, you know.”
I laughed and started after the group, excitement bubbling up in me from the inside and spilling over in that forgotten sound of joy. I had energy now and a spring in my step. The group was chattering as we hiked out, but I didn’t hear a word. My washing-machine mind was churning again, but instead of Nick, this time it was Annalise spinning through it. It was like she was calling out to me that we were the same, that we could save each other, and my mind answered with a cautious maybe, a tentative “we’ll see.” I stopped to look back each time she came into view, further and further in the distance.
She was defiantly beautiful and strong, soaring over a sea of green treetops, and behind her, the ocean, which looked like the sky. A view of the world turned upside down. I shivered.
Rashidi dropped back a half-dozen paces from the group and spoke softly to me. “So, you like the house? I see you talkin’ to her spirit.”
Did this man take me for a crazy person? Or had my lips moved? If I was talking to her, and I was not sure that I had been, I wasn’t about to affirm my insanity to a stranger. “Talking to her spirit? What, you mean the spirit of the pooping horse?” I said.
“You make like I crazy, but what that make you? You the one hear the house talkin’ to you,” he said matter-of-factly. “What she say?”
Instead of answering him, I asked, “Why do you say she’s got a spirit? What do you mean, like a ghost?”
Rashidi’s speech became more colloquial, his accent thickened, and his eyes sparkled. “Nah, she ain’t got no ghost, she is the spirit. She a beautiful woman, abandoned by a man. How does most beautiful womens act when they scorned? She lonely, and she full of spite.” He grinned. “She lookin’ for a new lover. But most folk too scared of her to take her on. When she don’t like someone, she a mean one. She been known to drop a bad man when he come for no good, hit him with a rock from nowhere, or send centipedes to bite him. When she do like somebody, well, some people say she talk to them. Like she talk to you, Ms. Katie.”
This made sense to me in a way I could not explain. It wasn’t like I was ever going to have to see Rashidi again, so what the heck, I would tell him what I had heard.
“She said we are soulmates.” I turned and smiled straight on at him. “In so many words.
He didn’t bat an eye. “Yah, I t’ought so. Annalise talk to me sometimes, but today I feel her vibrations, and she talkin’ to you. Powerful t’ing. You gonna go back and talk to her again?”
“Ummmm, maybe,” I said.
“Let me know if you need a hand. Good to have someone with you what knows the way aroun’.”
“I might take you up on that.”
He nodded and caught up with the group, exhorting them to “Breathe in the scent of the flowers, ladies, glory in the beauty of the forest, because we are almost back to civilization, and you may never come this way again.”
But I knew that I would.
~~~
Chapter Seven: Giving Me Hives
Above: Bees dem, at Annaly.
After a few productive fits and starts, work ground to a halt at Annaly. This was not the first time I had experienced a work stoppage out there. Work had stopped before when my container arrived from Miami without my construction supplies. Work ceased temporarily when I fired my first general contractor. Work jammed up when my new workers decided to take a long Fourth of July weekend. In fact, it seemed that there was a lot more work stoppage than work startage up at Annaly.
This time, though, the work stopped because of bees. Yes, bees. Bees as in four very big hives of angry African bees, hives that were affixed overnight to windows, a doorway, and the garage ceiling.
I did what one normally does when infested by raging bees: flipped out. Then I called a specialist. Possibly I am using the word specialist liberally here, but I did call someone who said that for seven hundred dollars he would rid me of my bee problem. How? I figured don’t ask/don’t tell was the way to go.
Two days later, I dragged my parents, kids, Cowboy, and our new rottweiler Callia (a rescue from the animal shelter) out to Annaly, where we were excited to see that the bee handler had earned his pay. We were bee-free. Being beeless meant work could resume on the house, or at least that it would require a new reason for work to continue not to occur on the house.
While we were there, we were greeted by the welcome wagon—five preteen Cruzan boys toting machetes and BB guns who came up out of the bush to say hello. They entertained us with stories of riding their horses and playing hide-and-seek in the house (which they promised not to do any more), and picking mangoes in the valley I now called my own.
Then an old local guy, whose name I still can’t pronounce, rode up on his horse. ’He had toothless gums and well-worn fatigues, and he offered to teach my kids to ride. We agreed that in exchange, he could continue harvesting and selling mangoes from the trees on Annaly’s grounds.
I hoped the new neighbors, while not exactly the boy-next-door type, would compensate for the bee trauma. Annaly was testing my mettle, surely, but so far I’d stood my ground.
~~~
Chapter Eight: Hi Ho Silver, Away!
Jeb, may he rest in peace, was the best dog in the world, or at least on the island of St. Croix. We only had him half the time, as we shared custody with my parents. We hadn’t always done that; Jeb used to be solely their dog. He had to start staying with us when my parents were off-island, because he kept leaving Whispering Palms to go on walkabout à la Crocodile Dundee. He would visit neighbors from one end of the island to the other, and eventually someone would drop him at the vet, who was quite adamant that the walkabouts must stop. Cruzans are not great drivers, and Jeb preferred to travel down the center of the roadways.
At our house, Jeb became Cowboy’s love object. Cowboy, at one year of age and a mere shadow of his future self, already outweighed Jeb by thirty pounds. It was a serious case of tough love. Imagine Cowboy standing at the back door of the house when he would spy Jeb standing fifteen feet away. With one leap, Cowboy would land on Jeb for the Power Hump, a move reminiscent of Tonto mounting his horse from the back by vaulting on. Cowboy would crush Jeb to the floor and they would skid another five feet together and slam into the far wall. Even the impact would not dislodge Cowboy. No wonder Jeb went on walkabout.
Jeb, if he could have talked, would have told you how very happy he was every time my parents came back to St. Croix and rescued him from Cowboy. I hope his sudden and inexplicable death at the age of eight was in no part caused by Cowboy’s love.
We miss that dog, all of us do, especially Cowboy.
~~~
Chapter Nine: Rats, and I don’t mean darn.
The creatures of the field should remain in the field, and not come into my house. Since we moved in (a whole two weeks ago), I have had a problem with rats and mice at Annaly. Well, bats, geckos, frogs, gungalos, and centipedes, too, but for now, I’ll stick to the rodent issue.
The rats are brazen. If food is left on a counter, they will come out and t’ief it2 right in front of me. I knew we had rats hiding in the chimney because I’d seen one scamper up there to safety. I bought poisons, traps, and sticky paper, but was too squeamish to use them. Hold that thought.
While I may consider myself the butt-kicking Amazon of the Cruzan rainforest, even I am not about to spend the night alone in Wuthering Heights without a generator or any flashlights. So one night when I had exactly this issue, a perfect storm of unpreparedness if you will, Sasha, Valerie, and baby Marcia came over. Sasha and Valerie are both bahn’yah3 Cruzans, so I thought they could help me with my rat issues, but they were drinking red wine. Red wine and rat traps don’t mix. So we sat up chatting until the wee hours in the great room under the clothesline I had rigged around the four-story-high scaffolding since the drier wasn’t working yet. The laundry blew like flags in the night breeze from the open windows.
We all played slumber party in the master bedroom, Marcia in her playpen, the three of us grown-ups sardined in the king-size bed. About five a.m., I heard a thrum like a guitar chord. I roused Valerie. “Do you hear that? It sounds like something is playing with Clark’s guitar.”
Valerie said, “No, that’s a mouse in the refrigerator something-or-other.”
How the heck she knew that, lying somewhat drunk in a bed all the way across the big echo-y house, is beyond me. I went to look. Sure enough, she was right. Great.
I left Sasha and Marcia asleep and made Valerie come with me to the kitchen. I briefly considered going outside to get the dogs—Cowboy, Callia, and my new baby German shepherd, Little Bear—but I realized this was a job for a cat. I posted Juliet4 at the top of the pantry, and we pulled the back top panel off the fridge to let the rodent free while she mewled in interest. We congratulated each other and returned to bed, assuming Juliet would be successful. But one should never assume, right?
The next night, after we had returned from a “lovely” dinner at Blue Moon on the West End during which Clark had ugly mood swings and Susanne fell asleep, I straightened up the kitchen. I went to the pantry to put up a box of Cheez-Its, and found myself face-to-face with the granddaddy of all bush rats. I handled this well, thank you very much: I screamed my lungs out. Then, I took Juliet back into the kitchen for a second try. I put her up top, grabbed a box of Kraft Shells & Cheese, and shooed the rat out. Juliet didn’t move. I threw the macaroni box. It stunned the rat in midair, and I whacked it again with a box of Duncan Hines brownie mix when it hit the ground.
“El raton es muerto!” I yelled. I don’t normally speak Spanish and have no idea where this came from.
My joy was short-lived; I had to clean up the mess, and boy was I nauseous at this point. Plus I had remembered that where there’s one rat, there’s a rat family. In the chimney, no less. Project Burn ‘Em Out would commence that weekend if the cats didn’t start making an impact5.
2 Yo, non-Cruzans, that means steal it.
3 Born here.
4 Our new Cruzan kitty.
5 After the addition of one more cat (Tiger), the felines stepped up to the plate and the rodents went back to the fields—no need for fires.
~~~
Excerpt from the novel Leaving Annalise, sequel to Discovering Kate:
It started with the chows.6
“Kate,” Ms. Ruthie called through the open kitchen window to me from the driveway. She always called me Kate, never Katie. “Come. There’s some big dogs outside.”
On St. Marcos, one did not say, “Come here, please,” one simply commanded, “Come.” It sounded rude to those from off-island at first, but you quickly got used to it. I appreciated the economy of expression.
Looking out the kitchen window, I saw a couple of large chows sniffing around the empty bowls we had fed our dogs from earlier. Ours as in mine, Annalise’s, and Ruthie’s.
Now that she had my attention, Ruthie continued. “I don’t like them dogs. Chows mean. They could hurt Thomas bad. They could hurt any of us.” Ruthie was the temporary nanny to Thomas, the toddler visiting for the summer with his Uncle Nick. The Nick I was coming to think of as my Nick, here on the island where I had escaped his memory, only to have the real Nick show up and reclaim me a year later. I hadn’t resisted nearly as hard as I had planned.
“Where’d they come from? I’ve never noticed them before,” I replied.
She chuptzed. “Those boys growing ganja across the road near the old Rasta shanty. They bring the dogs dem this week. Guard dogs.”
This took me by surprise, but I didn’t question her, as it made perfect sense.
That night I said, “Nick, you realize this is your fault?”
“How is it my fault?” he asked as he snuggled in tight behind me in bed.
“My life had no crossover with the criminal element until I met you. Now I have the son of a drug dealer living in the house, and our neighbors have set up a marijuana production facility across the road.” Thomas’s father was serving time in a Texas prison for selling drugs. Nice.
“Believe me, I’d like to send all the criminals back to wherever they came from,” he said. Then he bit the back of my neck in exactly the right way to end the conversation.
Over the next two days, the chows visited more frequently, agitating our six dogs: no mayhem, just growls and posturing.
On the third day, Ms. Ruthie called out to me from the driveway again. “Come. Dogs dem harassing Thomas.” And in this case, the tone of her “come” said “urgent, come quickly.”
Outside, Ruthie pointed to the end of the driveway. The pack of big chows stood with their tails erect and the dogs were clustered in front of them, all of them growling. Thomas sat on the ground behind our dogs, playing with one of his trucks and talking earnestly to my German shepherd, Oso. I couldn’t understand anything he said, but Oso usually seemed to speak his language. Today the chows had Oso’s full attention.
As the danger to Thomas dawned on me, I felt an unexpected rage build in me. I was a beast. I wanted to rush those chows and kill them with my bare hands.
“Shoo!” I yelled, to little effect. I was an ineffective beast.
Something clanged to the ground behind me, a gift from another angry beast. “Thanks, Annalise,” I said. I grabbed the heavy shovel that had appeared where none had been before.
I advanced on the dogs with my weapon raised, yelling in my deepest voice, “Get out of here! Go! Go now!” The chows backed away, but in no hurry. They seemed more annoyed than scared.
Then the largest chow snarled and lunged at me. Oso met its lunge in a blur of tan and black fur and gnashing teeth. I scooped up Thomas, who was clutching his truck in a death grip. I ran for the house with Ruthie on my heels. All the dogs joined Oso in a deafening melee. Nick pounded into the kitchen.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Our dogs, the chows, a fight,” I panted.
Nick sprinted outside, screaming at the dogs, but by the time he got there, the chows had run back toward the shanty. Our dogs stalked around on stiff legs, itching for more of a fight. After a few minutes, they calmed down and licked their wounds. None of them had sustained grave injuries. Oso was hurt the worst.
“Good dog, Oso,” I said, and stroked his head as he followed Nick into the bathroom for some minor TLC.
In the quiet that followed, Thomas resumed his game on the kitchen floor, singing to himself. The blood rushed out of my head and I had to sit on a stool and press my face against the cool granite countertop.
Ms. Ruthie placed an icy cold rag on the side of my face. Angel.
Nick and Oso rejoined us. I sat up and moved the cold cloth to my forehead. Nick smoothed the back of my disheveled hair. We discussed options.
“Should we call the police?” Nick asked.
I’d been on-island long enough to know this was a dangerous idea. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t be too hard for them to figure out who tattled on them, and we would be sitting ducks up here if they decided to retaliate. Maybe the animal shelter would pick them up?”
Nick mulled this over. “If they could catch them. And, following your line of reasoning, that might be too obviously linked to us as well.” He snapped his fingers. “But what if we could borrow a few of the shelter’s cages and trap the dogs here?” He motioned out the window. “They look like they’re starving. If we baited the traps, maybe with hot dogs or bacon or something, they’d be in there in a flash. And then we could take them down to the shelter ourselves, one at a time. As far as the bad guys would know, the dogs would simply be disappearing, one by one, with no explanation, and they’d probably think they ran off or died.”
Ms. Ruthie and I liked that idea, so we went with it. It only took five days and five trips to the animal shelter to get rid of the dogs. The chows showed surprising docility once caged, but I still let Nick handle all the close work.
Our plan had an unexpected benefit: the drug farmers disappeared, too. Losing their dogs seemed to make them skittish. We high-fived and resumed normal operations. I found a yellow sticky on the mirror that night: “Smile, beautiful. We busted up a drug farm together. How amazing is that?” I smiled.
But that night, we heard mournful howling and distressed barking from the direction of the farm.
“I need to check that out,” Nick decided. He put on black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, grabbed a flashlight and the machete. “If I’m not back in an hour, call Rashidi,” he instructed me.
“This seems like a crummy idea, Nick.”
He grinned at me and walked backwards toward the door, saying in his best St. Marcos accent, “Me ain’t ’fraid of dem atall,” and disappeared into the night.
Sitting on the front steps, I watched his flashlight bob along in the distant bush. The barking rose to a fever pitch, and then abruptly stopped. This was nerve-wracking. I bit my lip. Only thirty-five minutes had passed. Should I call Rashidi? I leaned against the porch column with my face against its cool stones. No, I would stick to the plan. I hated being the damsel left behind.
Nick reappeared at forty-seven minutes. I didn’t see him until he was almost to the house. He waved to me, but headed straight to the garage. I jumped up and loped after him. When I reached the garage, he was scooping dog food into bags and filling gallon jugs with water.
He turned to me, his face red and fierce. “Those assholes left two dogs up there chained to trees to guard the bathtubs they were using as marijuana pots. The dogs are nothing but spinal columns, twig legs, and giant heads, and they have scuba weights strapped to their collars. The bastards took out all their plants, but they left the dogs to die.”
My stomach clenched. “Oh my God, that’s awful.”
“I didn’t get too near them in case they still had the energy to attack. I’m going to take them some food and water.”
“Why don’t you set them free? Those poor dogs.”
“I don’t want to give the assholes any reason to feel threatened. I’d like to leave the dogs in place for a few more days, in case they come back. I can take supplies out there every night. If the farmers don’t come back, I’ll cut the dogs loose.”
He was already striding off with his arms full. “I’m coming with you!” I said.
“No, stay here with Thomas. Everything’s OK. I’ll be back soon.”
I stayed, growing angrier about the dogs by the second. Nick returned faster this time. The dogs had been so eager for the water and food that they overcame their distrust of him and slunk forward on their bellies to accept it.
Each night for three more nights, he repeated his mission. We saw no sign of the thugs. On the fourth night, he took bolt cutters and set the dogs free. One of them rocketed away into the night. The other followed Nick back to our house.
“He’s so skinny!” I said.
“He’s put on several pounds in the last few days. You should have seen him before,” Nick replied.
“His head looks huge on his skeleton body. What kind of dog is he supposed to be?”
“He’s a pit bull cross. I call him Big Head.” He patted said head. His voice had taken on a paternal tone.
Uh oh. “Nick, you know we can’t keep this dog. He’s been abused, he’s sick—we can’t trust him around Thomas.”
Nick cast his eyes down. “I know. I just feel so bad for him.”
I did, too, but it was clear what needed to be done. Big Head joined the chows at the shelter the next day. Now there were no predators—human or canine—to contend with across the street.
6 This excerpt is a perfect example of a fictional story ripped from our real life.
~~~
Chapter Eleven: Ménage à Tortoise
Above: Count ‘em: One, two, t'ree turtles.
One of the most awesome parts of living in the islands is getting out on the water. Owning a boat? A pain in the rear. Having friends with boats? Perfect. Eric and I joined our friends for a boat ride one Sunday after we were engaged, and off in the distance as we passed Judith’s Fancy on the north shore, we saw a floater. None of us could decide what it was. A log? A lost canoe?
We pulled closer. Nope, not a log or canoe. Three turtles, as in ménage à tortoise. This gives love a bad name, but it made for a hell of a picture.
~~~
One week, for one whole glorious week, we had an actual pig up at Annaly. An unplanned pig. An unplanned pig is kind of like an unplanned pregnancy. It’s big and undeniable, and it’s totally undignified. Kind of like our lives. The pig showed up as an evictee from the refinery’s housing camp, in need of a home. We moved him in, named him Chester, and we loved him.
Chester weighed about forty-five pounds, or approximately the same as our smallest guard mutt, Jake the Snake. Jake was actually a cockermation, not a snake7. He got his name from Jake Plummer, the erstwhile quarterback of the Arizona Cardinals. I thought maybe Chester and Jake could hang, be pals, be running buddies.
Jake thought not. Jake may have shunned Chester, but Callia, our rottweiler, took an instant liking to him. Kind of in the way she liked porterhouse steak.
“Leave him alone, Callia,” I commanded, over and over, as Callia chased Chester and nipped at the back of his neck.
I participated in my first-ever triathlon that weekend. Clark and Susanne showed up with posters that read, “Go Mom,” in tiny letters. It wasn’t their fault it was hardly legible—the words just wouldn’t fit around their giant drawing of Chester, bright white with gorgeous black spots.
Chester spent a happy week eating our table scraps. Since we had no garbage disposal, Chester’s popularity rating soared, as far as I was concerned. I hated composting. Pig feeding, though? I could do that. He let me scratch his rough back and smooth down his wiry hair while he snorted and ate.
On day seven of our Chester era, I went out to feed the dogs, who now numbered six—along with Jake, Eric had brought his boxer Layla and his German shepherd Karma. Yes, oh my. For six days, Chester had trotted behind the dogs, eager to be in on any eating opportunity. For six days, I had giggled at his cloppety steps and his farty snorts that were forced out each time a hoof hit the ground.
Today, no Chester.
“Chester? Here, piggy piggy piggy. Come on, Chester,” I called, unperturbed at first. Maybe he was scavenging for mangoes or soursop. He’d probably show up with a buzz from the fermented fruit.
No Chester.
“Eric, I can’t find Chester,” I called into the house.
A few moments later, Eric emerged from the house dressed for work. We exchanged a smooch.
“Chester hasn’t shown up,” I explained. “I was about to look for him.”
“I’m sorry, babe,” he said. “Do you need my help?”
“No, go on to work. I’ll look for him after I take the kids to school.”
“I’ll take the kids. No need for you to make a trip out.”
“Thanks, love.”
I went back into the house to gather the children. Five minutes later I had them in Eric’s little Toyota truck, Clark holding a loaded toothbrush in one hand and a glass of water in the other. “Use that thing,” I said, pointing at the toothbrush.
Clark nodded. I blew a kiss. And they were off.
Dread began to constrict my chest and my throat. To put off the hunt for Chester, I did my normal morning routine, loading the dishwasher, gathering laundry, and booting up my computer for work. The view from my office over Mango Valley and into the ruins of an old sugar mill beat Eric’s view over the back parking lot of a 500,000-barrel-per-day oil refinery.
Finally, I could avoid the issue no longer. I put on my hiking boots and some jeans. I loaded a small bucket with breakfast scraps. I called to Cowboy and set off to find our pig. Only fifteen minutes later, my fears were confirmed. I saw the small white mound, crumpled underneath one of the big mango trees behind the house.
“Oh, Chester,” I said as I knelt beside him.
Eric loved pigs, had always wanted a pig. I was pretty fond of pigs myself and spent many happy times feeding them at my grandparents’ farm in Stephenville, Texas, years ago. I was especially fond of this pig, though. How quickly love sneaks up on you.
I placed my hand on his side. He was cold and firm. I combed over his body, looking for a clue to the cause of death. The only thing out of the ordinary was a pair of puncture marks in his back. I didn’t have Callia with me to measure the span between her canines, but I didn’t really want that level of certainty. An image formed in my mind of her dragging Chester to the ground and breaking his back with the weight of her body. I forced the image out. If she had killed him, why had she left him alone? Why hadn’t she, well, eaten him?
I used the top of my right forearm to wipe away my tears and stood up. I placed the bucket near Chester’s head and walked back into the house. Knowing how he died wouldn’t bring the cheery little pig back.
Later, we buried him under his favorite mango tree. Chester would always have a place at Annaly, in paradise.
7 Female Dalmatian mother, male cocker spaniel father. A fantabulous mix!
~~~
Chapter Thirteen: Every dog has its day.
This is a story about Layla, sweet Layla the boxer who has the misfortune to look like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. It’s the story of how she returned to us from the dead.
When Layla moved into Annaly, she was only about six months old. St. Croix, unfortunately, has an underground dogfighting community. As a female boxer, she was a sought-after sort of dog on the island—a young bitch who could mother fighting pups. We came home one day to discover she was gone, had simply vanished. We put fliers up all over the island offering a reward for her return, but we had no luck. After a few weeks, we sadly accepted the reality that she would not ever be coming back.
Four months later, we got a call from the animal shelter. “I think someone brought in your female boxer, that one from your flier last summer, but we can’t be sure. She’s pretty far gone, and we’re planning to put her down. Do you want to come in and see her before we do?”
Did we?!? Eric and I jumped in my big Chevy Silverado truck and practically flew over the giant tire-eating potholes on our way down out of the rainforest and into town. When we came to an abrupt, breathless halt twenty minutes later, Eric turned to me.
“Why don’t you wait in the car, just in case?” He cupped my cheek in his hand.
“Yes,” I said. The woman from the shelter had warned us that Layla—if this was Layla—was not only barely recognizable, but that her skin was practically hairless and weeping with open sores. Still, I felt weak for staying behind.
Eric went off to view the dog. I could see him from the back. He crouched in front of a mobile kennel, reached out his hand, and I saw a long pink tongue, but could make out nothing else in the dark opening where the dog lay. Then Eric turned back toward me and I saw the tears on his face.
It was Layla. I got out of the car, crying and feeling nauseous. I walked over and stood beside him. I would not have recognized her. Eric barely had. But she recognized him, and with what little strength she had remaining, she had lifted her head, whimpered, and reached for him with her funny, oversized tongue that looked like the vintage Rolling Stones posters.
Thirty minutes later, we had transported Layla to our veterinarian against the advice of the shelter. Layla, we were now told, had mange, an easily treated condition that she was born with, unbeknownst to us, because it doesn’t become symptomatic until a dog begins to mature. We surmised that it had raged out of control until she had been dumped in the road in the center of the island and left for dead. Some goodhearted soul had braved her oozing sores to bring her to the shelter, even knowing it might be hopeless for her. We decided to let our vet make the call. If he thought he could save her, we would let him try.
Dr. Hess did believe he could, and he did save her.
It took many weeks of intensive treatment at his clinic to get her well enough to come home. We visited her daily and tried not to look at the receipts when they ran our credit card. Layla had never wowed us with her beauty, but now she was scary ugly, a skinny, hairless, pink-skinned waif who still had silver-dollar-sized open wounds when we brought her home six weeks later.
When the time came to move to the states, Layla flew ahead to live with Eric’s oldest daughter in Auburn. But Layla was soon kicked out of Marie’s apartment complex, and she moved to Texas, where she has lived with us ever since.
Layla lives the good life now. She is Cowboy’s devoted partner and companion, and the two of them behave like an old married couple. She hasn’t gotten much prettier, and she is very, very afraid of men, especially men with dark skin. But she has for the most part overcome four months of hell and two months of pain to become a loving and normal dog.
Layla. Survivor of violent kidnapping, abuse, and neglect. Left for dead. Our muscley little protector who likes you to whisper sweet nothings into her oversized ears as you pet them.
I think there is a special place in hell for people who hurt children and animals, and I hope her abusers find their way to it. And I also believe there is a place in heaven for people who give their time and love to those who can’t take care of themselves. We will always be grateful to the kind person who rescued Layla, all those years ago.
~~~
Chapter Fourteen: The Gimpy Chicken
When Eric and I left St. Croix, we not only had a big jumbie house to sell and six dogs and two cats in need of homes, but a chain of GNC stores and triathlon shops on two islands to deal with, too. Alas, try as we might, the stores would not be sold; they met their fate in bankruptcy proceedings a year later. In the here-and-now that was then, we spent two miserable rainy weekends laying the stores on St. Thomas to rest.
The first weekend, we took the ferry over. Actually, I’m being generous and disingenuous in calling it the ferry, because it never went by any other name at our house than the Vomit Comet. And indeed, vomit I did. Vomit, vomit, and more vomit. Tiny Susanne ended up asleep alone inside the ferry, while Eric held me around the waist to keep me from going overboard along with my lunch.
The second weekend, you couldn’t have gotten me on the Vomit Comet if you dragged me behind a Wild West stagecoach. And if you had been able to get me on, Eric would have dragged me back off again. The experience hadn’t exactly lit him up with happy, either. Instead, we took the seaplane.
The seaplane takes off from the bay in Christiansted and lands in the bay of Charlotte Amalie. It’s a fun experience, if you block out the fact that Eric’s father lost an eye, a leg, and nearly his life in a seaplane crash during takeoff from Christiansted less than twenty years before. I blocked it out. The choice between death and two hours barfing aboard the Vomit Comet was an easy one.
For three days we disassembled and fire-sold the remains of the St. Thomas stores. It was a grim affair. We were exhausted and heartbroken, but we thanked God for our time together, anyway. And we cried a little. It could have gone so differently. Less greed and theft, more oversight, fewer customers shaving off pennies in the short run by shopping online, and the stores might have made it.
The time came to depart Charlotte Amalie to go back to St. Croix. We sat pressed together on a bench in the open-air departure lounge, our heads back against the wall, our fingers entwined. Gradually, I became aware of a new entrant to the lounge. It was a scraggly, limping chicken, begging for food, traveler by traveler. His feathers were oily, the tuft on his head askew. He fit in well, even as he was so decidedly odd.
“Check out the gimpy chicken,” I said to Eric.
The chicken hobbled over to the next passenger and peered up at him through a half-closed eye with his head cocked. No success.
“I see him,” Eric said, chuckling.
The chicken scratched the ground and pecked at nothing, then tried his gambit on the next person. The little old West Indian lady dropped him a spoonful of rice and peas from her Styrofoam container. He gobbled it up, then she shooed him away. He retreated six inches, then continued his march down the row of people.
I put on my really bad Cruzan accent. “Feed a hungry chicken, meh son. Put food in de mouts of me chirrun dem.”
Eric shook his head at my accent. A lifelong Cruzan, his accent was real, although most of the time he yanked like a continental. “Isn’t it appropriate, as we are here closing these stores that failed in part because of the culture of these islands—everybody thinking they’re owed something, entitled to be given something by someone else—that the chicken is here looking for a handout, too?”
The chicken finished working the line and disappeared around the corner.
“I’ll bet when he went around the corner, he took off that fake leg, combed his feathers, and walked off home, hale and hearty. The end of his shift,” I said.
And we laughed and then laughed some more, a sad sound that turned into something like real happiness as it went on, and we saluted the little bird as we walked to our plane and left our bitterness mostly behind.
~~~
Chapter Fifteen: A Lot Like Cannibals
Excerpt from the novel Leaving Annalise:
It was time to go. Nick and I developed a “this and no more” final work list for Annalise. We retained a real estate agent. We printed fliers and an ad for an estate sale, and Nick ran them into town. I packed the things we would take and laid out the things that we would sell. I tried to book travel off-island, but the airport remained closed. Ten days before, a Category 4 hurricane had damaged the airport, although it hadn’t so much as nicked Annalise’s fortress.
I emailed Nick from my phone about the travel roadblock—or airblock, rather—but I stayed calm. We knew that getting back to Texas was not going to be simple. “We may need to find a boat ride out of here. The storm damaged the terminal, and American won’t resume flights until it’s repaired, which could be months.”
“We can try to hire a boat captain here,” Nick emailed back.
I was feeding the dogs while I emailed him, and I noticed something seemed off. I did a head count. Our big rottweiler wasn’t there. She didn’t often miss a meal.
I sent Nick a text. “Have you seen Sheila? She didn’t come in for food.”
“Nope. Not since yesterday. Smile, Katie: Ole Sheila must have a boyfriend somewhere.”
I smiled.
I set back to work. We knew our plan was ambitious. We had one more day to prepare for the estate sale, then the sale day itself. On the very next day, we would leave St. Marcos, somehow, any way we could. Nick wanted me to go back to the states with him so we could raise his orphaned nephew, Thomas, who was waiting for us in Corpus Christi with Nick’s parents. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. Wasn’t it?
Later, neither Nick nor I could find any boat captains on St. Marcos willing to leave their homes and families. In the states, people jump at the chance to make extra money. There, everyone was aghast at the idea of working during the post-hurricane bonus holiday.
I tried some of the smaller airlines that flew from island to island. The damaged terminal might not have affected them as much as it had the major airlines. And it really didn’t matter where we flew to, as long as we could eventually get somewhere to catch a connecting flight to the states. By the third airline, I had found our ride. LIAT, an airline locals describe as “Leave Islands Any Time,” would be doing just that, starting the next day. I booked us on a flight to Aruba with Oso where we could make connections to the states. As I hung up, the agent said, “Mind your dog don’t weigh no more than a hunner pound with he kennel.” We hung up.
“All set,” I called from the kitchen to Nick in the garage. “You don’t think Oso and his kennel are over one hundred pounds, do you?”
Nick walked into the kitchen. “About one-fifteen, I’d say. Why?”
My heart sunk from diaphragm to belly-button level. Much further and it was going to drop out in my lap. “Oh, no! He’s over the weight limit to fly.”
Nick shook his head. “No way we’re leaving Oso. Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle this one.”
“Really?” I asked, grateful to cross one thing off my daunting to-do list.
“No problem,” he said, and swatted my behind. I swatted his back.
All the next day we focused on preparing for our sale. It boggled my mind how much I had accumulated on St. Marcos in just over a year. Everything we sold left one less thing to ship to the states or to “walk off”8 from Annalise. Whatever we didn’t sell, we would leave with the house for the buyer to deal with—when we found one.
Really, we were worried less about all of that and more about Sheila. Out of our six dogs, Oso was the only pet, but we loved the rest of the pack, too, and took good care of them. Oso would come to the states with us, though. The others would stay to guard Annalise. I ran Oso into the vet for a travel clearance check, since the airlines would not transport him into the continental U.S. without a letter testifying to his good health. While I was there, I put up a lost-dog notice for Sheila with my friend Ava’s phone number on it. She would house-sit Annalise and care for the remaining dogs until Annalise sold.
We had announced in the St. Marcos Daily Source that our sale would begin at eight in the morning. Cars lined up at our gate at seven and started honking. We knew the people of St. Marcos loved nothing more than a good estate sale, but this was too much. We ignored them as we did our last-minute preparations and slammed down some local King’s coffee.
It was another typically beautiful day, and I steeled myself for it. I was leaving Annalise of my own volition, but not without great sadness. The sight of my things spread out on the driveway made our departure feel real. I hated parting with the baby toys and high chair that I’d bought for Thomas just four months ago at someone else’s estate sale. Nick stepped on a squeaky stuffed animal just then and let out a yelp. I laughed, because what else could I do?
At 7:45, we took pity on the early birds and opened the gate, ignoring their comments and long drawn-out chuptzes. The posturing and haggling began at once. I did not enjoy this, but here Nick was my polar opposite. So I played Wal-Mart greeter and handled merchandise security while Nick played the used car salesman.
“How much you want for the pitcher, meh son?” a steely-haired West Indian man asked.
“Fifty,” Nick said firmly.
“Whaaaaat?” More chuptzing. “I give you thirty, and you still be taking food out the mouths of me children dem.”
“Forty-five,” Nick responded.
Muttering, mild cursing, more chuptzing. “You thiefing me and no lie. I give you thirty-five, and that’s as high as I go.”
“Forty, and that’s the final price.” Nick said, and turned to walk away to another customer. As the old gentleman nodded and picked up the framed print, Nick called out to me, “Forty for this picture, Katie,” and I hustled over to take the money and be sure that art was all that he loaded into the car.
As I rang him out, I realized things weren’t going so well with Nick and the next customer. I looked up and my heart sank. The customer was an electrician that Junior—the contractor I’d fired long ago—had brought in to work on the house; the same electrician who did such a poor job that we had refused to pay his full bill. Call me crazy, but when you turn on the light, it shouldn’t run the garbage disposal, too. He was now giving Nick a bit of a rash, proclaiming for all within earshot to hear that we were leaving the island without paying him the rest of the money we owed him. But he wasn’t able to maintain the threat for long.
The growl that emanated from Oso’s throat was so menacing, I was afraid of him myself. He’d stepped into Sheila’s alpha dog role without hesitation. The electrician made haste to depart, with Oso as his escort.
“Good dog, Oso,” I said as he trotted back to me. I praised and petted him, to his delight and the jealous consternation of his canine companions.
The sale went on for hours, with friends and acquaintances showing up off and on during the morning. By midday it had become an impromptu pool party, and we finally shut the gate and counted our money.
“Eighteen thousand dollars. Not bad at all,” I said.
“That’s great! I expected half that,” Nick replied.
“How about we use our guests to help us clean out the refrigerator?” I suggested.
“You’re good-looking and you’re smart, too,” he said, which I took for a yes.
We carried a smorgasbord down to the pool. Some of the people who had celebrated our wedding with us in this same place a month before were now gathered here again. It was bittersweet.
Ms. Ruthie showed up to say goodbye. “You tell that boy I love him,” she said sternly, and turned away to hide the sadness on her face. She embraced both of us and marched back to her car in her dignified way. I swallowed the huge lump in my throat.
“Ms. Katie,” called out one of the children, “What’s wrong with that big dog over there?”
Nick and I turned and ran to where the child was pointing. Poor Sheila was staggering around the yard with her face and neck so swollen that they squeezed her eyes shut.
Our neighbor Paul came up behind us. “Looks like your dog got into a swarm of those African bees. That happened to one of our dogs, too. He lived for a few days, but he didn’t make it.”
I remembered the giant hives that had appeared overnight on Annalise and had cost a pretty penny to have removed. The rainforest found the weakness in everyone, sooner or later. Nick helped Sheila lie down in the soft dirt by the driveway. He shooed the other dogs away. “I don’t think Sheila’s going to be with us much longer either.”
We stroked Sheila behind her ears and offered her some water, but she wouldn’t take it. Our mood grew somber and it spread to our friends, who packed up and began to take their leave. The goodbyes felt anticlimactic and mechanical, but I did my best, and then sat back down with Sheila.
I felt a chill and shivered. Sometimes I forgot what a tough place St. Marcos could be. But it wasn’t that recognition that made me tremble; it was the contrast between how safe we had all felt up at Annalise until now and the timing of this tragedy with Sheila as we left. I didn’t know what to make of it.
“She’s stopped breathing,” Nick said. “Looks like the old girl wanted to come home and say goodbye.”
We put our foreheads together and breathed deeply. After a few moments of silence, we carried Sheila away from the house and found a good resting spot for her under a shady mango tree. We covered her body with branches and returned slowly to the house, walking with our hands clasped white-knuckled, each lost in our thoughts.
Over the next few hours, I cleaned up the aftermath from our estate sale to the sounds of the Dixie Chicks’ mournful album Home. I played it over and over like a wake for Sheila, like a wake for our life here. It was not the only mournful element in my day. Annalise felt like a teenage girl with her sulk on.
“I’m going to miss you, Annalise. I’m really, really sorry about this,” I said aloud.
The house remained still, silent, and morose. Well, if she was going to pout, there was nothing I could do about it. You’re doing the right thing, I reminded myself for the zillionth time.
Nick walked in from the garage and some of the fog of melancholy lifted.
“Hi, love. Did you feed the dogs yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he replied.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I want to do it one more time.” I walked toward the side door.
“Wait.” Nick’s tone stopped me short. “Don’t go outside yet.”
“What’s outside, Nick?” I asked.
“Trust me. It’s nothing, and I’ll take care of it.”
“Which is it: nothing, or something you’ll take care of?”
Nick looked back and forth from me to the door—one Scylla and the other Charybdis—and spoke. “The dogs found Sheila.”
“What do you mean, ‘found her?’” I probed.
“Well, the dogs think they’re in the Fiji Islands instead of the West Indies.”
It took me a moment, but when understanding dawned, it dawned like a blinding strobe light. “They’re eating Sheila?” My lunch of turkey and Swiss sandwich churned with the mango in my stomach.
“Past tense. She’s pretty far gone. I’m sorry, Katie.”
I knew from experience that the prickly feeling in my face meant the pale between my freckles had turned to pasty. I sank onto a barstool and put my head in my hands. Nick sat beside me. We held onto each other for several quiet moments.
“Are you going to bury her?” I asked into his chest.
“We sold the shovel this morning,” he replied.
He was right. “Five dollah? That’s criminal,” the man who bought it had said as he fished the money out of his wallet.
For some reason, that’s what brought on my tears. “But we can’t just leave her there,” I protested, chagrined to hear the tremor in my voice. More softly, I added, “Or what’s left of her.”
“I’ll cover her up so nothing else can get at her,” Nick promised as he stroked my hair.
Mollified, I wiped my eyes and nodded. Nick went out to deal with Sheila and the cannibals. Annalise remained still and quiet. Some help you are, I thought.
I fought against the mental image of Oso and the other dogs over Sheila’s body; it was too horrifying. Sheila had mothered Oso when I first got him. I flinched as I heard a thud and a crack outside. Nick must have dropped something over Sheila; rocks or bricks, maybe.
I tried to be rational: these were island dogs, and it wasn’t as if they’d killed her to eat her. She just happened to be available. But no matter how I tried to spin it for myself, at the end of the day, they ate their friend.
What an unsettling way to end our time on St. Marcos.
8 Be carried away by a thief.
~~~
~~~
Chapter Sixteen: It’s De Islans, Mon It’s De Islans, Mon
It came time to move to Houston, and Cowboy and his kennel, it turned out, were over the weight limit to fly on the only large commercial plane leaving the island. To Clark and Susanne’s horror, we started to search for a new island home for Cowboy. Our search was fruitless, though, and when it became clear that this was not going to be the solution, we put Cowboy on a diet.
Eric felt so bad about starving him that he put all six dogs on a diet, but that plan backfired. Cowboy ate as much as he wanted out of the other dogs’ bowls before he let them have any. He didn’t lose any weight, but all the rest of the dogs got a little gaunt. In addition to dieting and adoption, we looked into different transportation options. There weren’t many viable alternatives for either dogs or people, and those that we did find, like the private plane that would transport him to the mainland where he could hop a bus or train, were prohibitively expensive. Clark, Susanne, and I finally had to leave for Houston; Eric and Cowboy stayed on the island.
A few months later, it was time for Eric to leave, too. He called to tell us that while he was going to try his best, Cowboy was still too big to fly, although Karma would sail through baggage with no problems. Layla was already in the states with Marie. Little Bear had died when he was less than a year old, the victim of a second round of African bee stings, to which he was highly allergic. Callia had happily moved in with a good friend of ours. We had a contingency plan for Cowboy, if he couldn’t make it: he could continue guarding Annaly with Jake for the house sitters while we kept looking for an adoptive family.
The day before his departure, Eric visited the airport and certain key airport and airline officials. He toted a wallet full of hundred-dollar bills, and left those he visited more well-off than he found them. Hey, remember, it’s de islands, mon. People were shockingly more eager to transport Cowboy after that visit, but Eric still had to make it through the ticket agent and the baggage handlers the next day.
With his kennel, Cowboy weighed in at a whopping 135 pounds. The weight limit was 100. There was absolutely no pretending the scale was wrong, and it was unlikely that someone would conclude, “Oh, he’s close enough, just send him through!” Cowboy was thirty-five percent over the weight limit. Even a casual heft of the corner of his kennel made it obvious that there was way too much dog in there.
Eric brought his wallet to the ticket counter and set some of its contents on top of the kennel when it was placed on the
. Cowboy lost a few pounds in that transaction, Eric reclaimed his wallet, and Cowboy sailed through to baggage, “No problem, mon.”
But in the baggage area, things went awry.
“No way, mon, dis dog not weigh no hunner pounds!” Eric heard the baggage handler shout. “Dis not my jawb to lift he.”
In vain, Eric begged, pleaded, explained, and bribed. Not a single person was swayed by his description of his sobbing, brokenhearted children.
“Was de problem ovuh hee-yah?” another baggage handler inquired.
Eric turned towards a familiar voice and looked into the face of a schoolmate from his St. Dunstan’s days. Eric hailed him up, and they reminisced about old times for a few moments. Then Eric launched into the tale of woe with his old chum. And just like that, Cowboy made it onto the plane. When Eric told us the news, Clark actually cried.
Eric, Cowboy, and Karma arrived well after midnight that night in Houston. Cowboy did not seem to lose any weight on the trip, nor did he display an appropriate amount of gratitude to Eric. As a new stepdad, though, Eric had forever secured his place in the hearts of Cowboy’s fan club.
~~~
Chapter Seventeen: The Bird Man
Not everything our beloveds do makes sense. Hello, remember Eric’s frog obsession? And so it is that my husband has been a fan of the Arizona Cardinals for over forty years. How, one would rightly ask, could something like this happen to a young boy from the Virgin Islands? Some say he was born the patron saint of lost causes, but it’s actually much simpler than that: he was brainwashed.
Eric spent a lot of time in his earliest years with his Hungarian grandmother, who married an Italian named Cardinale. The family changed their name to Cardinal. They embraced their name and decorated their home with cardinals. Young Eric began his life-long obsession with football surrounded by cardinals, at the knee of a Cardinal. He turned on the TV and saw the Cardinals in their beautiful scarlet uniforms, and could have drawn no other conclusion than the one he did—the Cardinals were HIS team!
He has stood by them in bad times and in more bad times. He has borne ridicule most men could scarce endure. Through it all, he has held his head high. The highlight of 2006 was our trip to Phoenix for the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association’s annual meeting, because we got to go to Eric’s first home Cardinals game—in their new stadium, no less. They lost, of course, to the Kansas City Chiefs. One thing that we’re never at a loss for is what to give Eric for birthdays and Christmas. Our bedroom is even painted Cardinal red.
When we moved to Houston, we bought a house in a neighborhood with excellent public schools. Eric and I believe there is a hand guiding us in life, and it turned out that the mascot for our children’s new high school was none other than a cardinal.
Despite his lifelong obsession, Eric had never seen an actual live cardinal bird until we moved to Houston. Growing up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, he’d caught glimpses of them on TV, and he pictured them as red, fierce . . . and large.
One day while unpacking in our new house, I saw a male cardinal through the window. Nonchalantly, I called out to my sweetie, “Hey, Eric, there’s a cardinal in our bird feeder.”
Eric, whose physique looks like you would expect it to after twenty years of triathlon and cycling, pounded into the living room like a rhino instead of his usual cheetah self, wearing an expectant grin and not much else.
“WHERE IS IT?” he asked.
Lost for words, I pointed out our front window and prayed the elderly woman next door was not walking past our house.
“It’s awfully small.”
(That was Eric that said that, not the elderly neighbor.)
He was crestfallen. The mighty cardinal was a tiny slip of a bird.
But he stayed faithful, and to this day, the Cardinals are a big presence in our lives. As I look out the window into our front yard, I see the most beautiful (obnoxious) cardinal pinwheel in the flower bed, erected originally just to embarrass the kids. It worked great! It embarrassed me, too, and I’m sure it made the neighbors wildly jealous.
Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die.
Yes, cardinals.
~~~
Chapter Eighteen: The Ninjanator
Our we-moved-the-kids-away-from-paradise-guilt gift that first year in the states was a black mini lop-eared bunny. Because we didn’t have enough pets already, right?
The kids named him Ninja. Ninja used the litter box and walked on a leash. Well, that’s not totally true. He fought like a demon on a leash, but he did use the litter box when and how he felt like it, meaning he used it to launch litter all over the game room.
Ninja bonded with me while the kids were at school. He preferred females and was not crazy about Eric. What he preferred about females was their chests, as in “a conveniently soft place in which to sink one’s razor-sharp bunny teeth.”
Between protecting Ninja from the dogs and cat and dabbing Neosporin on our bite marks, I started to question the rabbit-purchase decision. What was that old saying? Marry in haste and repent at leisure? Yeah. I think it applies to buying rabbits, too.
~~~
Chapter Nineteen: Homicide: 22 Unnamed Victims
We are sad to report that twenty-two fish lost their lives to chlorine poisoning in a Houston backyard pond when a male resident of the household left water running into the pond. The bodies were discovered at about 2:00 p.m. by a traumatized resident, who first noticed something fishy when she saw a river rushing behind her bedroom’s glass doors and up onto the deck. She will remain anonymous out of concern for her personal safety.
Upon investigation, the witness discovered a lake had formed in the backyard behind the music room. When she sought the source of the flooding, she came upon the grisly sight of twenty-two koi and goldfish belly-up in the lowest of the three ponds, with water spilling over the sides of said pond. She turned the water off and made efforts to revive the fish, but those efforts proved unsuccessful.
Among the casualties were a black “googly-eyed” fish and a two fat calico fantail goldfish. Their bodies were removed with a cat litter scoop and respectfully disposed of in a plastic Kroger bag. A brief memorial service was conducted before the fish were solemnly laid to their final rest via deposit into the dumpster.
All household residents expressed shock, horror, and grief.
“Those fish grew up in our pond. They trusted us. They were part of our family. Did you know he killed one of our cats one time, too?” said Liz Hutchins.
“Huh, what fish?” asked Clark Jackson.
“Can we go to Petco on Saturday and get some more fish? How many can we get? How much can I spend? Can I bring a friend?” queried Susanne Jackson.
“I heard he emptied a black garbage bag of frogs into the bayou. I have to question what that was all about now,” exclaimed Pamela Hutchins. “And there goes this month’s water bill!”
Representatives for resident Eric Hutchins advised that he will be invoking his Fifth Amendment right to make no comment. They also wish to remind everyone that Eric was the hero that saved Cowboy.
Authorities stated that this is an ongoing investigation, but would not comment on whether the case of the dead cat has been reopened.
No charges have been filed at this time. Residents are advised to attend closely to their pets in the future, and to exercise caution when leaving them in the care of the adult male of the household.
~~~
Chapter Twenty: Family Killing Spree Continues
Check out the email that Eric the animal killer sent to our sensitive children about our beautiful family cat, Juliet. Here’s her picture in (slightly) better days:
Foreshadowing, though? Those are Eric’s hands around her throat.
Here’s Eric’s email:
——Original Message——
From: Eric
To: Susanne
Cc: Clark; Pamela; Liz
Subject: Ju Ju
Check out this picture of Juu Juu
We joke around about what a pain Juliet is, but we never really mean it. We all, especially Susanne, love our pets, and Eric sent this picture directly to her. This was a tragedy. I hope that someday they can all forgive Eric, and that Susanne will forgive me for marrying him. Or at least that they don’t sock us with the bill for therapy. Or turn out just like him. I was hoping nobody would call Child Protective Services or the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, when—
Wait a second. There's a noise coming from the living room.
Oops. False alarm! Here’s JuJu, unharmed.
Still, a sick joke to pull on the kids.
But then again, his sense of humor is what I love about him most. And, with therapy, the kids will recover.
~~~
When Juliet went missing one day, Susanne was distraught. The rest of us? Well, we felt bad for Susanne. Juliet drives us a little bonkers.
Juliet is very jealous of Ninja, and that may be why she bolted. That or because Eric locked her in the downstairs bathroom overnight when Grandma visited. Maybe both.
Juliet is a beautiful cat, but a bit needy and emotionally erratic. We hope she found a lovely home with no rabbits or grandparents. Maybe Eric’s email to the kids was foreshadowing after all?
~~~
Chapter Twenty-two: The Ninjcompoop
Above: Ninja watching TV from underneath the coffee table
Ninja, AKA Buns of Steel, AKA Bunnicula the bloodsucking bunny, soon began to hang out under our coffee table and make dashes out around the living room and up and over furniture and people. He seemed to especially enjoy watching football and was really sad when the Jags and Cowboys lost. He was bummed there were no professional football teams named after his kind—the Hares, the Bunnies, the Rabbits, even the Bucks. He showed some partiality toward Tampa Bay Buccaneers—possibly because of the name?
~~~
Chapter Twenty-three: At least the dog feels great.
The preparations for Eric’s business trips to India are intense. He has to get his visa, work out “in-country”9 travel plans to several cities, make decisions about security, and go to the doctor for shots and prescription medications. One of the prescriptions he always gets is Cipro, a powerful antibiotic.
A few days before Eric left one time, Karma came down with what looked like a foot infection. Since our vet bills tend to be scandalous, Eric decided he would take matters into his own hands. He diligently researched the issue on the internet and learned that an appropriate dose of Cipro could treat the condition. (Kids, don’t try this at home.)
So he gave Karma the Cipro . . . or at least, what he thought was the Cipro. Actually, he accidentally gave her the anti-diarrheal medicine first. Her feet weren’t any better, but she did have really solid poop. Then he figured out the error and switched her to the real Cipro.
Off Eric went to India. His flight from Newark to Mumbai was sixteen hours long. About halfway through his flight, two of our three at-home kids came down with the flu. Eric happened to come down with it at the same time, somewhere over the Atlantic. He got to Mumbai at about ten p.m. and waited through long lines in immigration in a posture of near-death with no medications available, but then his kindly driver took him to get the Indian facsimile of Pepto-Bismol—called, I kid you not, VOMISTOP—and Theraflu. He finally arrived at his hotel nearly twenty-four hours after he started, and sick as a dog, so to speak.
Two long days of high-stakes meetings, travel by planes, trains, and automobile across India, and three sleepless nights later in Jamnagar, he finally got to visit a doctor. He was staying in a refinery compound of seven hundred houses and one large guest “house,” a giant spa-like structure with marble, fountains, a restaurant, a workout facility, and the coup d’état, a twenty-four-hour clinic with a real doctor. The doctor was free, the prescription cost only $1.99. The medication: Cipro.
I am pleased to report that both Eric and the dog recovered just fine.
9 Domestic transportation from one place to another while in the foreign country, India in this instance.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-four: The Prodigal Cat
When Juliet returned home after two weeks on the lam, Susanne was tearfully happy; the other four of us groaned. After her sabbatical in the wilderness of the Meyerland10 subdivision of Houston, Juliet was even more emotionally unbalanced than usual. She meowed constantly and refused to be alone in a room by herself—God forbid in the house by herself. If we tried to leave, she yowled and launched herself at us, hanging onto our clothes by every claw on all four feet. The first time she tried this with Eric, he met her midsection with the sole of his foot, so she pestered the rest of us more11 to make up for it. At least she was willing to pay for this togetherness with affection; our newfound snuggle-kitty used to not let anyone hold her.
Ninja ignored her, and vice versa. It looked like we were back to being a five-mammalian-pet family. I’d count the non-mammals, too, but oops—all the fish are dead.
10 An area mostly populated by old Jewish people. Not exactly Wild Kingdom.
11 It could be that Eric’s popular demonstration of “spin the kitty” on her back on the tile floor also has something to do with her willingness to give him a wide berth.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-five: Urban Jungle
So maybe Meyerland wasn’t Wild Kingdom, but it wasn’t the animal-less concrete morass I had feared when we moved here. Not only because of our abundance of domestic animal life, either. There was wildlife as well. Our multi-ponded rainforest-esque backyard attracted wilderness refugees galore.
We had the frogs, of course, Lord help us we had the frogs. But it wasn’t just them. Our first summer we kept seeing turtles in the grass bayous that ran along South Rice, about where it turned into Rutherglenn12. We assisted one in relocating into our back yard. That didn’t last, because the turtle didn’t appreciate the loving attentions of Karma, Layla, and Cowboy. We also saw big nutria13 in the bayous, but I vetoed any attempts to relocate them.
From our breakfast table, we watched the antics of squirrels desperate to breach the ramparts of the bird feeder in our Gone With The Wind-like front yard trees. Occasionally we ate breakfast in our great room instead so we could see the backyard version, this time played out over our ponds. We went through a series of supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeders. If you’ve ever gone through this exercise, you know there ain’t no such thing. However, we found one that almost worked. It had a domed hood of clear plastic over a smallish feeder that dangled about 18 inches below the dome. The squirrels would stage assaults for hours, getting braver, smarter, and more pissed off as time wore on. Ultimately, several squirrels managed daring leaps from side branches and acrobatic maneuvers down the dome and under it to clutch the feeder in triumph. Their joy was short-lived, however. When they would finish eating, to a man the squirrels would jump straight up toward the nearest limb. Oops. Plastic dome. Squirrel in pond. Squirrel frantically swimming. Squirrel rapidly exiting, looking like an embarrassed long skinny drowned rat. Never did we see a repeat attempt by a squirrel after the dome-to-water dunking.
Besides the squirrels (and an occasional rat), the animals we saw most frequently were birds, an astounding variety of birds. We saw cranes, egrets, and other bayou fowl. I loved the ringed kingfisher, in his dress whites and bow tie. Cardinals, robins, blue jays, and red-headed woodpeckers entertained us. Red-tailed hawks chased smaller, frantic birds through our yard and their prey would crash into our windows. Time to look away, kids. Once a hawk stunned a dove, which fell into our pond. It was still alive, so we carried it into our game room and wrapped it in a towel, leaving it on the ping pong table. Yes, we shut the doors to keep the dogs and cat out. When the dove revived, it revived with a vengeance and it took a full family effort to herd it back outside through the wide-open double French doors. Eric cleaned up the mess it left behind.
At night, the power lines behind our house were a mammalian superhighway. We could only see their silhouettes, but identified them by their shapes as possums, rats, and raccoons. Sometimes we’d hear them on the balcony outside Liz’s room, scritching and scratching. A time or two we heard them up in the attic and inside the walls. Thank God they found their own way out ’without help from Lone Star Rodent Removal. (At least I didn’t smell the evidence if they did not.)
For a home office goddess like myself, the view is one of the perks. And as a girl raised on Ranger Rick, I couldn’t have asked more of Meyerland.
12 I will not digress here into a diatribe against the naming conventions of Houston streets, other than to say it is the norm for streets to suddenly change names for no apparent reason.
13 Large swamp rodents that look like giant rats, but with rounder bodies. Say it with me: ewwwwww.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-six: Good Karma or Bad Karma?
When we were living at Annaly, isolated in the rainforest on St. Croix, six large dogs and two cats (and one short-lived pig) made perfect sense for security and pest control. However, when we moved to the house in Houston with a normal-sized backyard, we had to downsize our pet population. You will recall that we took three dogs and one cat14 to Texas. The total dog weight was still close to three hundred pounds, though. Count up the pounds with me: Cowboy, a mutant yellow lab the size of a pony, weighed 125 pounds; Layla, a sweet boxer and Cowboy’s “girl,” weighed 65; and Karma, a clingy German shepherd obsessed with Eric, weighed 85.15 Yowza.
That first summer, the dog poop got insane. I cannot adequately convey the horror of standing amidst fly-covered piles of poop on our deck while cooking steaks at the grill. Imagine a Cambodian minefield, and you might get close. Even with the kids picking up two to three times a week, it is bad when you have nearly three hundred pounds of pup. We knew that three big dogs were too many and one had to go. That one, we decided, was Karma, since Layla is Marie’s dog, and Cowboy is Layla’s boyfriend and Susanne’s bestie.
For her swan song, Karma came down with a serious case of hereditary mange. It normally occurs in a dog’s first year of life, if at all, but whaddya gonna do, she got it at two. It had to be cured before she could be outsourced. The mange started with swollen bloody feet and turned into hairless, weepy patches all over her body. We kept Karma in the house for nearly two weeks—which is worse than it sounds, as she was never housebroken. She’d lived up at Annaly as an outside guard dog, after all.
We initialized a regimen: wash her feet in hydrogen peroxide, goop her up with Neosporin, and dope her up with Benadryl. But it didn’t cure her, and the stench from her wounds and her bathroom habits finally forced us to kick her back outside and take her to the vet, which, I kid you not, cost close to a thousand dollars by the time we were through. All of this just to get rid of her. The vet kept ordering tests without our permission that we didn’t want [to pay for], and on the day of her third treatment, Karma vomited, so they gave her a seventy-dollar shot in case it was an allergic reaction—even though she hadn’t been allergic to the treatment the first two times. We felt robbed.
Layla had also had serious hereditary mange, you may recall. Sadly, it appears the two breeds most susceptible to autoimmune disorders are, according to our very well-paid vet, boxers and German shepherds. The vet asked if we by any chance had a rottweiler, too, as those are the third most susceptible. Bullet dodged: we had one—Callia—until we left St. Croix.
As we were dealing with Karma’s mange in Texas, a year after we’d left St. Croix, Annaly was finally under contract. That left us looking for homes for two dogs, not just Karma: Jake16 was the last dog standing at Annaly and was in need of a forever home. He got lucky and was adopted (hopefully permanently) by our house sitters.
Encouraged by our success, we advertised Karma online in Houston. This nice young couple with a puppy came and got her that day at about 5:30. They really loved her; it was so great. By 9:30 they’d left a message asking to bring her back, and when we woke up the next morning she was in our driveway in her kennel, looking tired and embarrassed. Poor Karma. Apparently, she whined at night. Shocking that a dog would do that on the first night in a new place. So, we tried again.
One day later, a very large older woman came to visit Karma, and it was love at first sight for both of them. Karma was singing opera for her within five minutes, which is one of her happy tricks. The woman wanted Karma for companionship and protection. I repeated “she is not house trained” over and over, and the woman swore that was OK, she would take care of her. She said she had a big walk-in shower to bathe her in, which is great because Karma loves water. I crossed my fingers and loaded Karma in the truck, but I knew it would be OK. (Yep, I could feel the good karma.)
Don’t tell anyone, but I cried a little when she was gone.
14 It will surprise no one who is familiar with Eric’s track record with cats that Eric “gave Tiger away to a really good home”—which is grownup talk for “foisted her on a six-year-old kid playing in his family’s front yard, then drove away like a bat out of hell.” Just kidding.
15 Eric’s daughter Marie called her Karmela, as she seemed to want to be Eric’s wife, too.
16 I would love to say Jake did a fine job as a guard dog for us that last year, except that we got robbed to the tune of $50,000 on his watch, so I think I’ll just say instead that he enjoyed his time there and didn’t tear the place up too much. Hrmph.
~~~
Chapter Twenty-seven: Home Office Mates
Dogs, dem.
Juliet shared an office with the dogs and me in Houston. Of course, she did not permit herself to be photographed in the same frame as them. She wanted me to point out that Ninja does not have the honor of sharing office space with the rest of us. Juliet may be a cat, but she can be a real bitch.
~~~
