Shoo Fly!

By CG Fewston

The first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close and I’m reading about dead animals at an outdoor café in Ho Chi Minh City, once named Saigon. The cool December night is too early for sleep. So I sit surrounded by Vietnamese patrons drinking iced coffees, steady palm trees, outside my lackadaisical apartment building. I’m drinking iced-bottles of ninety-cent Heineken and reading from Literature and Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture. Some of the stories include: Walt Whitman’s “I Think I Could Turn and Live with the Animals”; Rita Dove’s “Crab-Boil”; Barry Lopez’s “Apologia”; and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Creatures on My Mind.” Haunting images of road kills, upturned beetles, and animals that “do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins” – neither do I. Does that make me an animal? From these images come my own. I can remember several dead animals.

Once it had been a crystal-sharp spring day in Texas, the kind in March when the days run cool before the heat tears at you in the following months, when my pastor pulled the trigger to the twelve-gage. Just after lunch on a Tuesday he had waded into a knee-deep pond, bordered by several large trees on a hill, out on my father’s ranch. In the murky water the preacher of an Assembly of God church joined alongside a German shepherd pup, no more than a year; the lower part of its jaw had been kicked off by one of our five horses, Jedi, a solid white mare with a strong temperament. Twilight had retreated into the pond to soak its dismantled and searing jaw. And there the dog and the preacher were poised on the edge of baptism. I didn’t witness the event; I, calm, was up at the house alongside my wailing older sister who had been the one to find her dog. I had waded into the pond, attempted to pull the animal free, thinking it was stuck in the mud, and found the grotesque sight of dismemberment. I immediately ran to the house, not knowing what else to do, my father being out of the city, and called the pastor of my church. My sister’s screams tear through me still and reverberate more than the shotgun blast across the wide open plains. Whitman was right; Animals don’t bow to deities, except the ones in human form. I swallow some beer to kill the thought.

Two foreigner families flop down at an adjacent table. The two males have electric mosquito swatters which they swing like tennis rackets and zap the flying predators. One teenage boy curls down into the curvature of the straw chair and begins to play a hand-held computer game.

Another time, up the road from my boyhood ranch with a misnomer of Pine Creek since only two pine trees, both having been planted by my father, guarded the front gate. Another ranch dog, also my sisters, but then again every animal belonged to her and to the wild, she is wild herself. Cyrano, an adult dog with the spirit of a playful child, liked to chase trucks more than horses. When I arrived home from a college class near lunch, I found the dog lying in a ditch, spotted him as I drove by, cursed and prayed and turned my Chevy around and got out and stepped into the grassy roadside, a peaceful sort of place to die when I think of it, I saw fish-eyes as blue as dead blue can be, gray and white fur whimpering innocence against the old-aged death. Cyrano had always been a silly, free-loving companion, but in the lifeless eyes, open yet shut, a form of wisdom preceded the kind of knowledge the living has. The animal aged into an old man before my very eyes.

Zap! Zap! The men are electrocuting mosquitoes and all manners of miniscule flying creatures. Sometimes they swing and hit directly over their dinner of beefsteak, fried eggs, white rice, and fresh bread. Around me I can see the blood-suckers flitter, arranging their landing or an attack. The beer is icy in my throat. Drown the images of death if I can. Zap!

One death precedes them all. After middle school and just before baseball practice, across from East Elementary School, in a vacant lot behind a baseball field used only for night games, I found myself enamored with a riot of my fellow teammates, a mob, chasing frantically a treeless squirrel. It had been caught out in the open and it fled for its life. The darting squirrel made mad dashes to one sapling to the next, too small to climb, or the next one not high enough to escape the taunting sticks of the blood-thirsty gang. Forlornly, my foresight of the squirrel’s last defensive maneuver penetrated me and forced me into absolute action. As the brown-furred creature rounded a trunk the size of a man’s thigh I did not hesitate like all the other boys and stare up into the leafy branches. No. I was a hunter, mad with the mob’s lust pumping my veins into a mindless hunger for victory. With a Gatorade glass bottle in hand, I alone rounded the tree trunk and spied, in a swift instant, a frozen, caught squirrel clinging to the base of the tree; its demise. Its two eyes, much like mine, were the deepest black, heaving its frail chest for its last time, a breath to escape, and it accepted, or it was forced to resign its choice, its defeat as the glass shattered accurately and violently across its head. Dead in an instant. The living squirrel only moments before had, by the gracelessness of my pitching arm, a strike, became a carcass to be carried off by the savages toward the pitch. Each individual was lost to the fallen, but one. As the team scrambled and screamed hysterics madly away with their trophy, I froze in my tracks; a breeze hit my face as the sun drifted behind two immense clouds, and stared down at my two adult-like hands. I had brought death to a living creature for the first time simply because it had been in my power, in my ability, to do so. Even now, as it did then, the thought baffles me. No reason but the relevance of control.

And just as I write this sentence, notebook in my lap of khaki shorts and a Liquidly black pen in my right hand, I lean down and slap a happy mosquito sucking on my bare shin. My blood, or its blood, smears. What does it matter anyway? I kill another, and then another. More blood, real splotches of life, stains my hands.