Greg Marshall
Good Bones
Lucas and I had not yet officially begun dogsitting for the summer when one of my family’s golden retrievers was run over by a car. It was a cool June morning, the kind you get in the desert, and Berkeley had been napping in the middle of the street in front of the house. It was the house I’d grown up in and I’ll be the first to admit he should not have been out there. Our street was quiet and suburban, but no street is that quiet and suburban. Anyway, Berkeley wouldn’t have been outside in the first place if the raccoon catcher had not let him out.
It started that spring. My sister Tiffany had been working out in the basement, doing crunches in front of the TV, when she heard scratching, scrambling noises coming from the fireplace. At first, we thought Tiffany was just being a vegan, guiltily dreaming up the ghost of an escaped hamster from childhood, but then Berkeley and our other golden, Mazie, started freaking out anytime they approached the fireplace, barking at its rock façade.
By the time Lucas and I arrived in mid-June with our backpacks and bags, ready to hole up for a DIY writing retreat, my mom had hired a dude who billed himself as a humane raccoon catcher. Dude is the wrong word. Like most of the handy- and not-so-handy men my mom had hired to keep up the house since my dad’s death, this one was chosen primarily for his drug connections.
I’m guessing oxy was his jam because Mom already had a strapping, hair-gel-wearing, sunglasses-on-the-back-of-his-neck guy who fed her abortive weed habit, though it was more of a curiosity than a habit. Mom never actually smoked the thumb-sized blunts she purchased, just hid them in her wig drawer, taking them out every now and then for shock value. She once had me pay him using a blank check while she was in bed recovering from an infusion. It made me feel like a kid again, settling up with the Schwann man, or the guy who mowed our lawn, or my drama teacher—anyone whose exact fee couldn’t be determined beforehand. “So the flowers, plus the topsoil, plus the eighth comes to…”
A squat guy in his fifties, the raccoon catcher was surely the weed dealer’s father-in-law or uncle, recommended as a favor. What people say about dog owners resembling their dogs is also true of raccoon catchers and raccoons: the black-and-gray color scheme (black: shirt, shoes; gray: skin, teeth, hair), the small, dexterous hands. He didn’t have a business card, a catching pole or a pair of gloves, let alone a website or logo, nothing that would have provided even the most basic front of professionalism. His was an outfit run out of his Toyota Sienna. He was just a dude who caught raccoons. My mom called him Daniel Boone.
If he lacked credentials, what the raccoon catcher did have was a theory. His thinking was that a mama raccoon had crawled down the chimney and given birth to her litter in the spring. Now she was periodically crawling out of the chimney to scavenge for food. “That’s when we catch her, humanely,” the raccoon catcher added for emphasis.
We? I thought.
He set traps by the pool shed, under the gazebo, and beneath my bedroom window and here again “set” may be the wrong word, too active a verb for what looked like metal cat carriers with doors that snapped shut if a creature nudged the tripping plate. “Tripping plate, good new vocabulary, Tut,” Lucas said, patting me on the head. They looked impressive enough, these traps, but they may as well have been cardboard boxes for how effective they were proving to be at catching raccoons. “Shouldn’t there be something in these traps?” I asked Lucas, bending over one by the side of the house. “Maybe some bait or something?”
“You want to know what Daniel Boone uses for bait?” Mom asked.
“Turtle shit?” offered my little sister Moe. It seemed like as good a guess as any.
“Oatmeal cookies!” Mom cried.
“It’s true,” said the raccoon catcher. He was standing right there in the yard with us. “My mom makes them.”
The raccoon catcher didn’t like oatmeal cookies and he needed a way of getting rid of them. We had a similar deal with our cleaning lady Stana and the ceramic bowls of potato salad she hauled over each week. They’d sit untouched in the fridge for five, six days, wrapped in cellophane like airport food, until Monday morning, when, anticipating Stana’s arrival, one of us would unceremoniously dump the contents of the ceramic bowl into the garbage can in the driveway or fling them into a bush. Stana would arrive to find the bowl scraped out on the kitchen counter. Thinking the potato salad had been a hit once again, she would return with an even bigger bowl the following week. No one had the heart to tell her not to.
But getting back to raccoons: they loved oatmeal cookies. The mystery was that the mama raccoon was somehow getting to the cookies in the back of the trap without the cage doors springing shut. What the raccoon catcher didn’t know, what I only discovered yesterday on the phone with Mom, was that there was a perfectly logical explanation for the disappearing cookies. Someone in the house loved oatmeal cookies even more than raccoons and that person was my mom. She’d get hungry at night, sneak into the yard, and take the cookies right out of the traps. Mom was beating the mama raccoon to the bait.
“That’s just too weird about the disappearing cookies,” Mom told the raccoon catcher, probably wiping a crumb from her bottom lip.
I for one wasn’t convinced there were raccoons in the chimney. To the extent I could imagine them, I fell back on a lifetime of Disney movies. The mama raccoon would have knitting needles and spectacles and her yawning babies—they’re called kits, I looked it up—would curl up on old catcher’s mitts to listen to her stories. On stormy nights, they’d hear the howling wind outside and know they were safe. Maybe they’d make friends with a bat up there, too, or a twitching squirrel, and all live together merrily.
The raccoon catcher came mornings and afternoons to check the traps, the screech of his brakes and rattle of his tailpipe announcing his arrival. He caught zilch in his first week and all he released was one galivanting golden retriever. I say galivanting, but if running away was really on Berk’s mind he might have gotten farther than the warm asphalt of the street before collapsing in slumber. It would be the last good, unmedicated sleep our dog would have for a while.
I witnessed Berkeley getting hit. I had walked into my mom’s room and was shouting something to her while she got ready in the bathroom. The room had a nice view of Mount Olympus and an even better view of our driveway and street, where Berkeley was snoozing.
I had just registered this fact when a car rounded the corner. The accident didn’t look like much at first. The driver wasn’t speeding, and when she struck Berkeley it was in the way you might come upon an unexpected speedbump. I’m not sure how she missed his head. Berkeley instantly sprang awake and took to his feet like something had bitten him, his eyes wild. “Berkeley’s been hit by a car!” I shouted.
He managed to hobble a few steps in the direction of home before collapsing on a patch of grass.
“What?” Mom shouted back from the bathroom. With the sink still running, she charged naked into the bedroom, took in the scene unfolding out her window, and started howling. I ran to my room to pull on my tennis shoes, using my shaking finger as a shoehorn. Putting on shoes has never been my strong suit. Lucas was sitting up in my bed. “Why is your mom screaming like that?” he asked, his hairy shoulders poking above the covers. I gasped out what had happened. “Jesus,” he said. “I thought you’d had a heart attack. I thought you were dead.”
Berkeley shivered under my hand when I touched him. He was panting, his sides working up and down. I guess he was in shock. He’d just been shaved for the summer. His coat was light gold except where it was covered in skid marks. You could see where the tire tread had stripped away fur in three-inch gashes on his left side. I told him that he was a good boy and that I loved him. I figured he was probably going to die.
The neighbor lady who’d rolled over Berkeley hastily pulled her car into her driveway so it wasn’t blocking the street and ran over to me in tears, letting out a little sob. “What should I do?” She was wearing sunglasses, but I could see the distress in her eyes, a mix of remorse and fear. We could still hear Mom screaming from the bedroom.
We didn’t know this woman well—she was Mormon and we weren’t. This was Salt Lake at its most cookie-cutter and even if we had the biggest house on the block we’d always been considered outsiders. It didn’t help that this lady and her family had moved into the house across the street only a few years earlier, after my dad died. Whatever store of goodwill the neighbor lady may have otherwise had for the oatmeal-cookie-loving widow haunting the yard next door in her nightgown, not to mention the homosexual son lurching behind her, had long since been drained away when Berkeley started tearing up the garden she’d planted in her front yard. I didn’t have much sympathy. Who plants a garden in a front yard?
What I’m saying is that all I knew about this neighbor lady was that she did not like our dog. I’d seen her yelling at him. Now she had run him over.
“You should go,” I told her, trying to keep my voice even. “I think it would be best if you weren’t here when my mom comes out of the house.”
To her credit, the neighbor lady hung around and did what she could to help. Moe ran into the house to get a beach towel and, one way or another, we were able to wedge it under Berkeley. Taking sides, we hoisted him from the grass onto the driveway and into the back of my mom’s SUV, my bad leg rigid under me. He was too stunned even to whimper.
I rode in back with Berkeley, telling him to stay with us. I wonder if it sounded like I was giving him a command, hoping for once he’d obey. “Stay, Berkeley! Stay!”
Lucas hopped out of the car once we got to the vet and a minute later a woman in scrubs burst through the door pulling a doggie wagon.
My family packed into the patient waiting room while Berkeley was in triage. The veterinary clinic resembled a human hospital to such an extent that the dog smell was disconcerting and the feline eye chart on the wall, made up of mice of various sizes, felt genuinely surreal. We hadn’t all been in such close quarters since the night of my dad’s emergency tracheotomy, when we’d piled into one curtained-off exam room in the ER where Dad was flat on his back on a gurney, red-eyed and stoned out of his mind with a tube down his throat. I was probably not the only member of my family suffering a flashback.
The vet was a friendly woman with furry eyebrows and sunglasses in her hair. Her cheeks were red and she spoke breathlessly, like she’d just come from running laps outside. I couldn’t help thinking of her, too, as her animal doppelganger, a sweet collie fussing with her sunglasses. Berkeley had dislocated his front left elbow and was on a morphine drip. His right paw was torn and his road rash needed to be debrided, but he was going to be OK.
My friend Iris’ wedding rehearsal was that afternoon. My job was to walk her mom down the aisle. I was honored to have been given such a significant role and I tried not to let the bad news slip, but of course I did, my polite smile dropping like a guillotine when Iris’ friend asked how I was doing. It was almost funny: Iris was allergic to dogs and started sneezing, puffing on her inhaler and popping Claritin after the first ten minutes of hanging out in our basement. Lucas and I had showered and changed since the accident, but we’d still managed to pick up our share of golden dog hair on our sportscoats on the way out the door.
Berkeley came home from the vet the day Iris got married, his injury dressed like some kind of wedding present. On his front left leg he wore a bright yellow cast covered in green dog bones and a bootie to protect his tender paw. I’d had brief interludes in casts as a boy, some to stretch my hamstrings as I slept and others after leg surgeries. I always liked those itchy interludes, liked pretending I was a normal boy who’d done a flip off the trampoline and broken a bone rather than what I was: a kid with cerebral palsy. A kid who would limp for the rest of his life. My parents would wrap my cast in a trash bag so it wouldn’t get wet and let me go on the water rides at our local amusement park. One of my earliest memories is being lifted from couch to couch, a capricious princeling waving around a backscratcher with a tiny wooden hand.
Now a dog leg was returning the favor.
My family cleared out after Iris’ wedding. We toasted the happy couple, drank, danced, took pictures—and then my mom and sisters left on a three-week trip to New York. Moe was doing a dance intensive at a ballet studio in Midtown. That had been the whole point of Lucas and me flying in from Austin for the long visit in the first place. We were going to hold down the fort while the rest of my family was on vacation.
“The fort” was a rambling redbrick McMansion with a pool, hot tub, tennis court and gazebo. I hesitate to say “McMansion.” The house wasn’t fancy but it was large and, most mansion-like of all, its ruin added to its cluttered charm. My brother called it a museum of the nineties since it was filled with fat TVs, DVD/VCR players, a broken treadmill and dusty pinball machines, not to mention wolf spiders, two dogs and a cat, Brighton, who had only recently survived two weeks trapped in the pool shed. We’d thought she’d simply run away until Stana opened the shed and Brighton came shooting out from among the pool toys and lawn furniture.
Brighton’s accidental imprisonment was symptomatic of a growing sense of disarray. The house was far too big for Mom, or anyone, to manage on her own. “It has good bones,” we’d say, though they were getting hard to see among the stacked boxes.
My mom was only living in a few rooms in the house. Only the basement, my mom’s decorating masterpiece, remained pretty much unchanged from when we were kids. I call the style French Country, but I’m not sure if that’s a real thing. The basement was filled with baskets of pinecones and potpourri. Daddy’s Long Legs dolls perched on distressed cabinets beside whimsical bird houses covered in fake vines. My sister Tiffany’s girlhood horse collection toppled atop a dresser.
Family photos taken on vacations hung on walls covered in homey, out-of-date wallpaper. In these pictures, we rode along gorgeous mountain passes on horseback and crested whitewater rapids. Before we were tragic, we were fun. I wanted Lucas to see that. What I liked about the photos is that they only told the story of my upper half: that I’d gotten up on water skis but not that Tiffany had been in the water to hoist me aloft like an ice dancing partner; that I’d liked riding the horse in the snapshot, Pimples, but not that my dangling right foot, when I couldn’t maneuver it into the stirrup, had gotten caught in a tree stump and I’d twisted my ankle.
“Twisting your ankle while riding a horse,” Lucas said. “Impressive.”
The problem was that we now had a slobbering, tail-wagging tragedy on our hands, a ninety-pound dog that could barely stand. The vet had restricted Berkeley’s activity to little more than choking down painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs. We had to keep his cast dry and clean and bring him in to have it checked every few days. The vet had attached a drain to Berkeley’s leg. Depending on how damaged his collateral ligaments were, surgery was going to be necessary. Best case scenario, Berkeley would be in the cast for the entire time Lucas and I were dogsitting.
While not the end of the world, this development was far from ideal given my wonky right leg and atrocious balance. Walking the dogs was easy enough when they were healthy. They pretty much walked themselves, ravenously leaping into the car on their own, drooling, wheezing as I fended them off with a flying elbow, and then doing the same in reverse when we arrived at our destination: storming out of the car, dashing around, squatting, lifting legs, and circling back to me.
Growing up with a limp, I hated that story of the little boy with the leg brace adopting a lame dog. Shouldn’t he have wanted a bounding service dog, a purebred retriever that could order him Big Macs with a bark and shoot hoops by bouncing the ball off his nose? I had yellow hair and a retriever-like smile, but now my dog and I would truly resemble each other. We’d both be gimps.
Getting Berkeley up to go to the bathroom was a feat. Lucas and I had to loop a sling under him and each take a side, hefting him up and out between us like an overstuffed beach bag and carrying him out the door and to the lawn three or four gazebo steps at a time. And despite our best efforts in those first days, Berkeley wasn’t getting better. He was moving and eating less, barely keeping down his doggie aspirin. He didn’t go to the bathroom when we hauled him down to the lawn. Instead, we woke each morning to flies rubbing their evil little hands atop multiple poops in the sunroom, pee all over the hardwood floors.
This wasn’t what Lucas had signed up for, caring for a gimpy family dog with his gimpy boyfriend while everyone else was out having a great time. Lucas taught English and history at an all-girls middle school. He deserved a real vacation with his time off. Sitting on the gazebo one morning, I started crying, telling him I’d buy him a plane ticket back to Texas if that’s what he wanted. This was our third summer together, which is a long time but not so long a time it would have been weird if we’d broken up. Lucas didn’t take me up on my offer, though he must have considered it. Any sane person would have.
We fell into a routine. Lucas would drive to Starbucks while I was cleaning up Berkeley’s messes in the sunroom and then we’d spend the morning writing at the kitchen table, Berkeley lying at our feet. When we otherwise might have been taking long walks on a stretch of closed road in a national forest near my house, putting dandelions in our hair, we were instead searching Berkeley’s mouth with our fingers to make sure he’d swallowed his Rimadyl.
We weren’t housebound, exactly, but we didn’t drink more than a glass of wine or stay out late in case Berkeley needed us. It was a good thing, too, because Lucas and I came upstairs after bingeing Mad Men late one night to find Berkeley lying in his usual spot in the kitchen, his head in a pool of blood. We couldn’t tell where all of it was coming from, so we got him onto a blanket and lugged him off to an emergency clinic out near the airport. We had smartphones back then, but we didn’t trust them. Lucas pulled up directions on his laptop, wrote them out on a sheet of notebook paper, and off we went into the night in a family car covered in Moe’s dance stickers. I still managed to get us lost. With Berkeley bleeding in the back, we rumbled over train tracks and by smokestacks.
The pet ER could have been a car dealership. It was sandwiched between a Discovery Inn and a Best Western, and it had eye-catching orange trim and a giant No Parking Zone in front. We waited for hours in the lobby. At first, the vet on call suspected a nosebleed but then he determined that Berkeley had bitten his tongue during the accident and it had un-clotted and started to gush. “It’s a good thing you brought him in,” the vet said. “If you hadn’t, he would have bled out overnight.”
Berkeley was stitched up early that morning and we were able to bring him home. I put paper towels over the blood in the kitchen, adding it to my list of messes to clean, and we went to bed. Berkeley had a check-up with his regular vet a few hours later. “This is weird,” she said, pushing her sunglasses into her hair. “I can’t find the drain we put in his leg. He must have chewed it out. Did you chew out your drain, Berk?” Berkeley gave the vet’s hand a single lick, wagging his tail like a kid trying to play it cool while fighting back a boner.
The missing drain wasn’t the worst of our problems. In spite of doing little more than lying on a towel all day, Berkeley’s elbow had once again become dislocated. Surgery was the only option.
In a small patient exam room, a hot blond surgeon met with us. He recommended stabilizing Berkeley’s joint and replacing his torn collateral ligaments. I asked Lucas what he remembers about that meeting and Lucas said, “He was hot and he wanted to do the surgery.” The only other detail I managed to catch was that it cost eight thousand dollars.
I called my mom and put her on speakerphone. It wasn’t the price tag of the surgery that gave us pause as much as the excruciating recovery. My dad had been on a respirator for almost a year. We weren’t keen on once again prolonging the suffering of someone we loved. Still, the should-we-put-our-dog-to-sleep conversation is a tough one to have over speakerphone, the sound of Manhattan traffic booming in the background as a hot puppy surgeon looks on. In the end, we decided to go with surgery. Berkeley was only seven. He had a lot of good years ahead of him. Plus, again, hot surgeon.
Berk spent the night in the hospital but was back at home the next day, back to pooping in the sunroom, his tail wagging, his head in an enormous white cone. The bright yellow cast with bones was gone. In its place, his straightened left leg was wrapped in an Ace bandage that almost matched his fur, jutting out like a child’s crutch. He was on so many painkillers he probably didn’t feel much. His leg would be out of commission for the rest of our stay, but he was finally on the mend, the worst behind us at last. He’d never chase a raccoon again, but he could still sit in front of the fireplace raising hell.
For the rest of our stay that summer, the house remained as disordered and illogical as a dog’s dream on Rimadyl. A dream where you can smell the enemy but not see it. A dream where you can tree the enemy but never bring it down. A dream in which your leg is not your leg.
Berkeley may have been on the mend, but Daniel Boone still had a job to do. We could have fired him for letting Berkeley out but it felt too late to be angry and we wondered if Moe, half-asleep and drunk on dancer dreams of her own, might have been the culprit after all.
The raccoon catcher still came over to check on his traps, still found nothing. “She’s stopped eating the oatmeal cookies,” he said, sniffing his fingers. “Hasn’t had a crumb in weeks.” I’d come into the sunroom to clean up Berkeley’s poop and peer out the back door to see him climbing a ladder to the roof, just his baggy jeans and black Payless shoes visible.
Inspecting the fireplace one afternoon in early July, the raccoon catcher explained that it was his acute sense of smell that set him apart from the competition. He didn’t just have a nose for raccoons. He had a nose for everything. “I can smell orange juice in the fridge even if the lid is on. And when it’s my daughter’s time of the month, I can smell that too. Blindfolded!”
Lucas raised his eyebrows at me. We’d picked a bad day to stop using condoms.
It hadn’t been a premeditated move. We’d just run out and not bothered to stop hooking up. Lifting a lame dog down flights of stairs, cleaning up pet disasters, keeping Berkeley calm during the neighborhood’s Fourth of July fireworks—this was what intimacy was made of. Playing house for three weeks and counting had helped foster the feeling that in dog sickness and health we were stuck together and would stay that way.
We didn’t take the whole raccoon situation too seriously until the basement started to smell rotten, worse than a sunroom full of Berkeley’s morning poops. The fantasy of a cute raccoon family sheltering in our chimney fell apart once we realized they were wasting away in there. The mama raccoon had abandoned her kits. Now there were orphans.
We’d called ourselves that after Dad died, usually within earshot of Mom. “We’re all that’s left!” we’d say, as if we were the ones who’d been abandoned in a chimney and left to starve. It felt good saying it: our little announcement to the world not just that we’d lost a parent but that we’d suffered and that our suffering made us better than everyone else. Of course, we swiped away the bounty of evidence that contradicted our neglect: the bedrooms packed with swimming ribbons and lefty golf clubs, the school flyers and good report cards taped to the kitchen cupboards, the living parent. “Did you think your dad would live forever?” Lucas once asked me. The answer, to my surprise, was yes.
“We gotta get them out fast or they’ll get stuck in there in this heat,” the raccoon catcher explained, “same way food sticks to a hot pan.” He spoke slowly but there was a glint in his eye.
Daniel Boone went out to his truck and returned with a painter’s tarp to lay in and around the fireplace, like he was planning to hack apart a body. An industrial vacuum came next. When he opened the flue the stench was overpowering. “Oh yeah, I can see them up there,” the raccoon catcher said. He told Lucas to man the vacuum’s on/off switch and wiggled into the chimney on his back, small hand holding tight to chugging nozzle.
The raccoon catcher emerged a minute later with a snarling kit carcass attached to the end of his vacuum. A few white maggots fell from its midsection. The man my mom called Daniel Boone scooted to the edge of the fireplace and held the baby raccoon over the cardboard box I’d brought out from the freezer room, where my mom stored off-season Wise Men and iced-over porkchops. He held it there in my mom’s French Country basement, in our crumbling old house, and did nothing else. He was a raccoon catcher up to exactly what he was supposed to be up to, right down to the smile that snagged on his dull teeth.
You never know when your childhood is going to end, when your mom and her oatmeal cookies will run out for good, but at the point you’re being vacuumed from a chimney, you can probably call it.
I signaled for Lucas to hit the off switch and the kit fell from the nozzle and plopped unremarkably into the box, the sound of the vacuum dying away. This cycle repeated—the raccoon catcher ducking into the chimney and coming back out—until there were half a dozen motherless baby raccoons in the box, frozen and snarling and finally home.