The Dumbest Animal at the Circus Is Me
Dumb Animals by Alastair Wong
The day the circus came to town, I was on duty mopping up blood so warm that steam wafted through the vast and windowless space. It puddled by the drains like spilt cranberry juice, but there was no deceiving myself about what it was, not with the feathers, the viscera. After two months working the abattoir, watching the chrome machine slit the juddering necks of turkeys was no worse than the violence of, say, a video game. The stench that once made me retch—blood, iron tang, bleach—even that I got used to. It was grim relief focusing outwards onto the birds funneling in single file, shuffling and squawking, knocking free clods of muck stuck to their lizard feet. At least I wasn’t one of them.
I was full of pep because I had a ticket to Miss Butler’s Big Folly. Once a year, it meandered to our shit town and tonight I was going. As a kid, Pa had dragged me along—flimsy attempt at bonding—but laughing at circus tricks was my one half-decent memory of him.
This was the year they found my father in bits by the sea. By that, I mean dead. I’d come home from studying at Oxford to play dutiful son and keep Ma company, who was going to bits herself. I didn’t blame her for clinging to the bottle but I’d been telling her a long time already to relinquish the feckless man, my father.
Our griefs were incompatible—I see that now: angsty teen, sloppy widow. Our pettiness piled up like the unwashed dishes moldering in the sink. She’d toss cans of beans, aiming to bruise my skull. I never retaliated like she wanted me to, like Pa used to. It was the only way she knew how to be.
I started keeping out, staying busy. There weren’t many jobs in town for a teen, but they did exist: pub work, that sort of thing. Truth told, I wanted the abattoir, some perversion about keeping death close, understanding it with what my hubris once considered my big intellect. I was eighteen and a fool. And death was just death, a brute fact, raw and unintelligible.
From a gangway across the abattoir, Skinner’s voice, “My office, chap! Now!” Joe Skinner, the bossman, was a kind of friend. I scrubbed my overalls and hands with soap that sputtered from a bucket with a nozzle. Skinner didn’t like me to show up a mess and come in reeking. Though he would never admit it, I think he was squeamish about blood.
There were rumors about Skinner. That the slaughterhouse was a front for laundering dirty money was more or less an open secret; he ran in half of southwest England’s junk from boats off the grubby pier. He’d come from dirt, same as me, but ever since he’d grafted his way into money, he fancied he was highborn gentry, always swaggering about and calling people chap and blowing his nose into silk handkerchiefs. He wore, invariably, three-piece tweeds, matching hunting cap to boot.
Trudging up the metal staircase, I heard wolf whistles from the men behind me. Each morning they drew straws for the worst job of all. I didn’t. Turkeys are chaotic elements. And while the chrome machine was very efficient, it wasn’t perfect. Rare times it missed, someone had to follow up with a stubby knife. Imagine standing there eight hours, slitting, becoming part-machine yourself. Skinner’s special dispensation had spared me the horror. And I was grateful. Still, whenever I met him, I always carried one of those stubby knives in my pocket. I can’t say why I felt the need. It wasn’t fear exactly, but the boss had secrets more than I was comfortable with.
In his office, Skinner sat cradled in an ergonomic throne, custom padding for his bad back. He sometimes made me rub his shoulders ‘til my thumbs hurt. His hulking desk had taken our biggest lads a full hour to lug up and jimmy in. A candle was burning that smelled tacky like holiday spice, cheap and sweet. The radio was tuned to something classical, but as usual he wasn’t really listening. Though Skinner was only in his forties, his face was already a fist of craggy lines, mouth always slightly gaped like he was about to pose a question. It made me jumpy. But he never asked me much of anything. We just played chess.
The first time we played I thrashed him, which pissed him off. But when I lost on purpose, he slammed the desk so hard the pieces jumped. Since then, he’d given himself permission to look up moves in Advanced Chess Strategy. Fair’s fair, he insisted. And he wasn’t a man to argue with.
Presently he was bragging about his antique board, all ivory, hand carved. Some tripe about it being a steal at auction.
“Isn’t ivory illegal?” I asked.
“Don’t talk about things you know nothing about, chap. How about some shut up.”
As usual, I was winning. He narrowed his eyes and poured two rums. “Try this,” he said, “Cask strength.”
“Rank.” I coughed. “Tastes like fucking glue, that does.”
“Wasted on you, chap.” He tutted. “Doesn’t know a nice thing.” Next came some crap about becoming a man, the old cliché about putting hair on my chest.
“I’m Cantonese. Chest hair is not my DNA.”
“Oh, he thinks he’s clever.” Skinner often spoke this way, as if to an imaginary audience, before backhanding me playfully on the arm. He paused. He had a bad habit of looming too close when he spoke. “Are you showering? You smell ghastly. I know what you need.” He peered through the blinds, then snapped them shut and swiveled the back of my chair around. I heard the desk drawer slide, then catch. Rummaging. My hand was in my pocket, fiddling with the handle of the stubby knife.
In the mornings, Skinner’s Benz crept in, then out again at night, like an amber-eyed cat, always surveilling. A private man he was. No one knew if there was a wife or kids or even friends.
Skinner never took an interest in his workers, so that first time he called me up from the killing floor all the men fell silent at their stations and tried not to stare.
“You’re all bone,” he said, “nothing to look at.” He pinched my shoulders, my wrists. “So ratty.”
He held his chin. He got a chicken tikka masala ready meal out the mini fridge and put it in the microwave. He watched me scarf it down with a sly smile, asked if I’d like another. I did. I ate slower. Then Skinner began to speak.
“We’re different, you and I,” he said, pacing like a general, “Not like the rest of them.” He swept his arm over his kingdom below. Muttered vagaries about my potential and taking me under his wing.
“That a pun?” I said.
“What?”
“Because wings round here get clipped and butchered?”
“Clever, clever,” he said. Then, slowly, mouth slightly hung, “You wouldn’t be taking the piss, now?”
I shut up. I ate curry.
Just that morning I’d seen Skinner make a grown man cry. Poor sod had drawn short straw. It wasn’t a race thing—he was Cantonese, too. Just bad luck. Skinner was the sort to tell you he didn’t see race then immediately proffer his disquisition on which immigrants from where worked the hardest, before calling himself gypsy scum, and with a grin. But it wasn’t the killing that broke the man. It was Skinner’s words—I saw it—and he didn’t get you by shouting, either. He had quiet ways of making you feel worthless, so that you’d work doggedly to get back his good graces.
I had no time for questions like was Skinner good or bad. He was good enough—kind enough, to me. When you pass your evenings with someone, even the oddest duck like Skinner, it is hard not to develop certain . . . attachments; I pitied him his loneliness and felt sometimes I even cared for him—though not once did I forget his power over me. How a single sharp word from that slurred mouth could make me quake.
“Why me?” I finally asked.
Skinner stopped pacing and turned with a bashful smile, like a toddler offering up his crayon drawing. He’d heard I was at Oxford; he’d studied there himself—so he said—but got kicked out for. . . . He trailed off, then, “what does it matter, chap. It’s been decades.”
So Skinner was lumping us together in his weird genteel fantasy. He’d plucked me out. Me. I was worthy—but of what I couldn’t surmise.
He started pacing again, rattling on. A crying injustice he’d never graduated, etc. He pinched his eyes before chucking a pistol onto the table. I just looked at the thing. And Skinner, doubled over, cackled. “Fancy a hunt?”
Round back of the abattoir were a few acres of woodland where Skinner loosed some lucky turkeys. His prize pheasants. What “hunting” meant for Skinner was running up behind the clueless birds and firing the gun at an angle, like in a gangster movie. I carried his ammo in a drawstring bag, chasing after the good Sir like some kind of golf caddy.
I carried his ammo in a drawstring bag, chasing after the good Sir like some kind of golf caddy.
The wind that morning was biting, I remember, and I breathed frost, covering my pink ears with pink hands to escape the bang of the pistol. He saw me shivering and offered his Italian leather gloves. They’re somewhere in a drawer—I still have them—though the brown dye has bled off and worn in places to suede.
I never saw him land a shot, not one. He would slap his thighs and say things like, “bloody close that time, no? Not a bad bit of sport this.” Understand turkeys are essentially idiot animals—standing targets there. He missed on purpose. There was a mellowness I sometimes caught in his eyes, the same absent look I’d glimpse in my reflection at the end of a day, wiping down the chrome surfaces. He didn’t have it in him to kill—I knew because I had no bloodlust either, not even for a turkey.
Back in Skinner’s office, rum still fizzing on my lips, I heard the drawer click shut again. I nosed my pits, my hair. Back then I had the long, unkempt mane of the death metal vocalists I idolized. Something tickled my scalp then—a barber’s comb and drops of some perfumed oil. Whenever the comb snagged I prepared to wince but instead of tugging it through the snarl, he was gentle.
“Your hair’s a knotted mess,” Skinner sneered. “I couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore. Doesn’t wee baby know how to groom?” For the five minutes he spent combing my hair—I was facing his office clock and counting every tick—he emasculated me. “No one will take you seriously in this life, little brat, if you don’t look sharp. Consider this a lesson.”
A lesson in what? I wondered.
Then he threw me with a casual question, a personal question. What were my plans for the weekend? I wanted to lie, but when someone is doing me a kindness, even one not asked for, lying makes me feel small.
“The circus, they still have those knocking about?” Then, comb hovering, he said, “I’ll tag along, chap, if you don’t mind.”
I was silent. I knew he wasn’t asking. The bastard had a comb in my hair and his thin digits on my scalp.
When he was done, Skinner slipped me a fifty-pound note as usual; he knew about Pa, Ma’s furies, too. That I was saving up to move out. He’d even trusted me with a set of keys to the abattoir so that, when things got bad at home, I could crash on the staff room sofa.
I watched him leave. The way he ambled to his Benz—those casually swinging arms, his lazy, reedy whistling—it was like he was leaving a kindergarten instead of a slaughterhouse.
The striped circus tent was atop a hill. Skinner and I peered at the laughing families filing towards us like ants. The tent’s mouth was a bright portal, out of which came cheesy pop tunes Ma and Pa used to dance to in the kitchen, tunes I was old enough to recognize but not name. I kicked at grass and inhaled. Salt smell, rock smell, brisk and metallic, hit me. And the waves walloped into the bluff. Not a kilometer away was the beach where they found Pa with junk in his veins—bad junk, Ma said—his legs all a tatter, calf bones where his shoulders should’ve been. Forensics knew him by his teeth. He’d either stumbled or flung himself off in a mad stupor. What did it matter. He’d not been home more than a handful of months in the past five years. And I’d not come near the sea since he’d died.
Skinner tossed my cheap ticket away and bought us front row. The circus used to be rammed; now it was at best half full. As a kid, the tent’s ceiling, suspended from thick cables, steel poles, had seemed impossibly tall, but now if I closed one eye, I could measure it in a few palm lengths. Pa used to clap like mad when the trapeze artists flipped, tapping his feet incessantly. Back then my toes didn’t reach the ground, so I fixated on his scruffy trainers, the hole in the mesh where his big toe danced out, his odd socks—one striped, one polka dot. Now I tapped my feet too, attempting to catch Pa’s rhythm, and told Skinner I half fancied a milkshake.
“Still a bloody kid at heart,” he roared. “I know, we’ll spike it with whisky.”
People stole glances at us—small-town celebrity like Skinner, here doing God knows with this Asian kid. I worried about the optics of the situation.
We sat silent, drinking spiked milkshakes through fat straws, slurping horribly, now and then throwing fistfuls of popcorn at our gobs. Eventually I said, “This milkshake is pretty grim.”
“It’s pigswill.” Skinner winked. “I put doubles in them.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
The pit was edged in dark velvet curtains that swallowed the floodlights. Briefly, I saw them parted by a white-gloved stagehand. Behind the velvet was a flash of falling red as the mouth of a caged tiger yawned to catch some scrap of flesh.
Skinner was saying, “No, no. We finish what we start, chap. We don’t waste money. That’s another lesson free if you like—the milkshake was, what, three-eighty bob plus the shots plus tip and because I’m generous, as you well know, as everyone here knows, that makes twenty. A twenty, chap, a twenty, when I was your age what for a twenty I couldn’t buy” . . . etc. Christ how he maundered on, his wrists flapping magisterially.
I was saved from his diatribe by the lights dimming. A spotlight tickled the far edge of the pit. A brass band started wheezing false notes, and sleeveless men beat out a drumroll. The ringmaster in a top hat snuck his chubby face out from behind the curtain. He grinned with his mouth full of cigar, big as a gorilla’s finger. Skinner pointed and said, helpfully, “Show’s about to start.”
The things we saw that night were as follows: four riders on tiny motorcycles going 360 round a globe-shaped cage, no helmets; two contortionists pretzeled in glass boxes; a thickset man firing himself out of a cannon, pink helmet this time; a jilted woman in a pinstripe suit throwing knives at an alleged former lover crucified on plywood and spinning; a magician who, when the spotlight fell on me and Skinner, embarrassed us by manifesting a king of hearts into my pocket. It was entertaining, sure, but the tent had lost its childlike mystery. Such a ludicrous place. But what profundity did I expect to find? I was at the fucking circus.
When the tigers strutted out, I felt Skinner grip the bench. Three tigers. They didn’t seem real, motionless on plinths, waiting for the beastmaster to issue a command. When he finally blew his whistle, they strutted on hind legs, jumped through rings of fire. That heat was real, no mistake. But the tigers you could have convinced me were animatronic, their eyes so cold, like cogs were clinking behind their skulls.
Skinner snapped his fingers and pointed. “That’s fucked, chap. Who said anything about animals.”
“It was on the flyer.” I blinked at him, then added, “It’s a circus.”
“What’s next, a giraffe?”
“Sure, or an elephant.”
People stared. He was nearly shouting, “Consider an elephant, on the road and in a tiny box.”
“Skinner, you own an abattoir.”
“Thanks,” he sneered. “I nearly forgot. Thing is, some animals belong in cages, others don’t.”
“It’s what, fifty turkeys to a tiger, sixty? Relax.”
“Higher-order animals. Try a million turkeys.” Then, “What’s that look? I’m a hypocrite, is it?” He leaned close his ugly mug. I saw every black pore.
I wished I’d come alone. Not because of the lecture, but for the realization that I already knew him, this ridiculous man, better than Pa.
Pa’s favorite act was up, one of the only times I’d seen my old man ecstatic. I held Skinner down by the wrist. Lunchbox the black German Shepherd come to save the day. So beautiful she looked like a toy. But the way she moped on stage, lethargic and disaffected, her black ears down-hung, made people tense all the way to the back benches. Feisty the clown was laughing raucously to compensate, making crazy eyes at the ringmaster. Lunchbox was supposed to steal Feisty’s wig and give him the run around in a slapstick farce. The ringmaster puffed a fat cloud and boomed, “Not to worry, ladies and gentlemen. Lunchbox is having a minor strop. She hasn’t had her treat.”
Feisty led Lunchbox reluctantly behind the curtain.
People muttered.
Skinner sighed and stood, picking lint from his trousers. “That’s it, chap. I’m done.”
“Don’t ruin this for me,” I hissed. “This is a well-run establishment.” I pointed vaguely at the dented steel poles, the bit of roof patched with tape.
“That dog,” said Skinner, “is for sure getting abused, whipped, boxed behind both ears. What else.”
I yanked him down. “You’re a nutcase if you think that. Sit, you nutter. Sit.”
He shook me off.
“Leave then. Abandon me too.”
He glanced at me pityingly. It was unbearable. I shoved him. “Why’s a grown man like you always hanging around a ratty kid for anyway?”
“Leave off it, chap.”
“You’re lonely.” I stared Skinner down. “They whisper about you. Your men do. How you’re too pussy to kill. They say you’re a nonce. I’d wager you’re a nonce, too—so why haven’t you wandered your fat hands over me? That’s all this is to you, isn’t it? Buttering me up.” I shouldn’t have said it: he had nice, slim hands actually.
“I’ve been fair to you.”
“You want your own little doll to comb, is that it? Well, comb me. Comb away. I’ll be your little whatever if you teach me to be like you, to make so much fucking money that people hush and stare at their shoes when I enter a room.” I was slurring my words, tapping my feet.
He set his milkshake down and turned to go.
“No, stay. Skinner, stay, it’s alright. I get lonely too.” I hated to be begging. “The dog’ll be alright, you’ll see. If you just stay to the end, you’ll see.” I grabbed at his belt, his belt loops.
He slapped my hand away and paused. “I’m sorry about your Pa, really I am.”
Feelings barged through me then, nameless and dirty. I wanted to hit him. But he was gone already, a tweed silhouette shuffling through the benches. “You think we’re alike,” I shouted after him, “but I’ll never end up like you. As if you went to Oxford, such obvious shit.”
Every eye was on Skinner.
Briefly, he turned, his expression too dark to make out, but the pressure of that look was like hands on my neck. I sipped my milkshake. Coughed. It was atrocious.
My skin pricked when Lunchbox returned. Skinner had planted black ideas, and I couldn’t repress his intuition that some cruelty had passed behind the velvet threshold—hard to say what I noticed, some ruffling in her fur maybe, indications of hard-handling. I winced. It might sound strange but working at the abattoir had given me a sixth sense. Maybe anyone who works closely with animals, whether on the side of angels or devils, becomes attuned to their suffering. In any case, Lunchbox was performing now—if you could call it that. Something about her movements was off, the way she darted around somehow both sluggish and manic; tugging at Feisty’s size-twenty shoe, it came off begrudgingly, and she panted with such miserable effort afterwards, the shoe dangling from her mouth by the laces as she more limped than loped away, dropping it in to the side with evident uninterest.
Easy as that, it was gone. My one good memory of Pa. Now it was just Lunchbox whimpering at the edges of this dirty ring. And for the final trick, a disappearing act.
After the show I loitered out front, rocking on my toes, not wanting to go home and risk one of Ma’s sullen spells. Skinner’s Benz was gone, and the prospect of trekking back made me queasy. Coastline all the way, liquor hot in my belly, nothing but dark and dizzying thoughts to occupy me. I slumped. Slowly roused myself to leave. Couldn’t. I needed to see it for myself.
Seizing my spell of bravery—or madness—I darted behind the tent, looked skittishly over my shoulders. It was dark but for the neon sign above: Miss Butler’s Big Folly. Most of the letters were flickering or busted. I slipped beneath the barricade.
Voices bantered over a campfire, the insistent hum of generators. I crept forward. It had rained the night before and mud squelched into my trainers as every flickering shadow cranked my heart another notch. I trudged on. When I tripped over the guy lines of a tent I turned on my phone light—to hell with stealth. I heard panting in one direction and went. A large cage covered in tarp. The fabric squeaked when I parted it a few inches. My light fell on three sets of eyes, stripes and mottled patterns shifting in the dark. I shut my eyes and inhaled, bit my lip to stop from screaming. When I opened them again, the tigers had backed away, lowered their heads. Slowly, I moved off again into the labyrinth of caravans and cages.
“Lunchbox. Eat!” a voice hissed.
I edged closer. Feisty, wigless, shaved head, was leaning against a trailer in his civvies—an Adidas shell suit—martini in hand and face paint intact, though smeared red around the mouth as though he’d been backhanded. Lunchbox was clipped to a tire hub, shoulders pinched, nosing her dish. It seems odd to say but it was only then that I realized Lunchbox was an animal. Before she’d been as unreal as a celebrity. How much bigger she was up close, all bulk and rippling muscle.
“Is she hurt?” I said.
Feisty stared at me. “You. You were in that crowd tonight.” If he was surprised, he didn’t let it show. He sipped martini.
“I asked what’s wrong.” At least she wasn’t caged.
“She’s getting old is what,” said Feisty, “I can’t hardly get her to eat nothing.”
“What’ll happen to her?”
“You slow? Use your imagination.”
“You’re hurting her, admit it.”
Feisty laughed. “What are you, an activist? Fuck off. I love this dog.”
Lunchbox whined as if in agreement and coiled herself protectively around his leg. He leant down and booped her nose. That should’ve been the end of it. But seeing them like that was somehow worse.
Come, lad. Come have a drink with Feisty. You’re shaking.
“I want to speak to Miss Butler,” I said.
“Who?”
“The proprietor. Proprietress.”
Feisty laughed again. “Miss Butler doesn’t exist.”
“Who runs this loony bin?”
“Clive does.” He paused. “I’m Clive.”
I slipped the stubby knife from my pocket and heard my ragged breathing. “Give her up. Give me Lunchbox.” Even as I said it, I saw the terrible path I was on. I saw it and could not stop. It was their intimacy I couldn’t stand. I wanted to trample it.
Feisty eyed me, then pressed himself into the knife and tutted. “I see some nonsense on the road, real nonsense and real violence too. But this—you won’t shank me. Not with this bitty knife.” He knocked it to the grass, gave two quick slaps to my face. “Come, lad. Come have a drink with Feisty. You’re shaking.”
When I was ten, the first time Pa left us, before he became a wavering voice on the phone begging for money, he stole our dog. A sleepy little Maltese mutt with puffy red eyes whose white hair Ma had cut into curtains around its face, its furry mouth always wet with slobber, redolent of something half-drowned. Cute thing. He’d objected to getting a dog in the first place—Pa that is—for the expense, and particularly for a dog like that. Girlish, he called it. He would’ve had a Great Dane. But Ma was defiant.
Pa was the one who named him Dumbo, for those big, stupid impossibly soft ears. And among our miserable histories, these days with Dumbo were our finest. For a time he brought real gladness to our bungalow, despite his pee all over, his white fur dusting our only nice woollens. He yapped shamelessly for love in a way that embarrassed me. Pa had been clean a full year and things were going a little too well. The dog became his new fixation. He taught him tricks, walked him to exhaustion so Ma and him didn’t have to work things through. And when one day he—surprise, surprise—relapsed and took Dumbo with him, so too went the happy days, or what passed for them. I blamed that dog for years.
When Feisty returned with my martini I blurted, “I’ll buy her. I’ve money.”
Feisty held his eyes like he was putting the balls back into their sockets. “That’s more mental than you pulling a knife.” He fidgeted for his olive with white-painted fingers.
The clown wanted eight-hundred pounds. I haggled him to four-fifty. He looked inconsolable when we shook on it. But it could have been the makeup.
“Shall I teach you her attack command?” he said.
“Christ,” I said, “is it a dog or a sleeper agent?”
“It’s a joke. I’m a clown. Clowns tell jokes.” The makeup again impeded interpretation.
“The point is to put this life behind her.” I spat for added drama. “No commands.”
“Hail to the new saint,” he said glumly. “I’m not saying you’ll need it, but if she does misbehave, what you say is . . . .” He whispered in my ear, “red.”
I left through the empty circus tent, Lunchbox padding beside. It was a dream of mine, once, to stand there in the ring. I smelt the trickle of leftover gunpowder. No floodlights hot on my face, everything was dark and still. I saw the circus for what it was: a dying sideshow. When I exited, Lunchbox started barking something awful. The shock knocked me to my bony arse. She tugged backwards. I crawled to her and let her lick at my palms and gnaw my fingers, managed to coax her outside.
To the left were waves, the beach, stars barely lighting the way—the place where those sorry newlyweds out for a morning stroll had found my father’s bloated body. Lunchbox, frightened and obstinate, was trailing dead weight. I felt like a slaver yanking her leash, people shooting us dirty looks.
At the twenty-four-hour petrol station, I clipped Lunchbox to a bike stand. Under the sickly bright halogens, debating between dry and wet kibble, adrenaline weaning, I had a passing hope that someone might steal her. She’d cost most all the money Skinner had given me. But fuck the money. Fuck the dog, too. Because where the hell would I take her? Ma would throttle me if I brought Lunchbox home; she’d swear I was spiting her, reminding her of Pa like that. I should have done it anyway, held fast to my decision, grown a spine. I was soaked and I was filthy.
Outside, I tore open four kinds of dog food but couldn’t get Lunchbox to swallow more than a nibble. If a dog could express hauteur, she was doing so. She flicked her nose up, growled and bared her teeth when I nudged her with my shoe. Her canines were huge and cartoonish and frightening.
At the far end of the parking lot, the abattoir’s roof glowed a rusted orange. I worked the padlock, shouldered the gate and hummed going in so I wouldn’t feel so lonesome. When empty, like the circus, the place became more grotesque, the implication of death thick around us.
I unleashed Lunchbox in the staff room; she stalked around, sniffing at furniture. But when I tried to corral her into the corner shower, she went berserk, sprinting in circles, twisting away from my hands. She bit me. Without thinking, I shouted, “red.” Lunchbox froze. I picked her up like a garden gnome and put her in the shower. The way she sat on her heels was uncanny, letting the water hit her, ears fallen, unmoving. I promised never to utter the command again. Naked together in the shower, I squeezed her against my chest, felt her trembling skin and tufts of wet fur against my slowly warming hands. Her heartbeat, finding it, made me feel somehow sorry for myself. We fell asleep curled together on the sofa. It was unhappily cold when turkeys weren’t bleeding heat.
Bleak morning light through the windows, my headache crunchy like boots compacting snow. I rolled over expecting Lunchbox, but the sofa was empty, door ajar. I swore.
Out in the brisk air, I yawned and windmilled my arms, did jumping jacks to get going the blood. The sickly-looking sun rose pale over the trees. What an ugly morning to make plans.
Everything was oddly quiet. Turning the corner toward the turkey pen, I saw, spattered on the gravel, a trail of familiar cranberry. A leaden feeling stole through me. Then panic. I was not a body but a heart, going, going. Feathers, squiggles of snot-like viscera, turkeys dead by the dozens, part-eaten, parts missing, mauled. The dog, the brute of a fucking dog, lay snoozing in the midst of its carnage.
Then I heard, quiet at first, an unmistakable whistling. It grew louder, stopped. “Hang about, chap, I’m a trifle bit confused.”
I turned. Skinner was holding his chin. He did a pirouette of disbelief that would have been funny if it wasn’t monstrous. “Why the fuck,” he said, “is there a dog in my abattoir?”
We’d woken Lunchbox up. She yawned and began rifling through a turkey.
“Hang about. Hang about. Is that the—no, it isn’t—the mutt from the circus?”
“I can explain. There’s a meat and potatoes explanation.”
“No thanks.”
“Sorry?”
“Just don’t care to hear you out is all.” He scratched at his beard, then clapped his hands. He said, “You’ll kill it for me, thanks.”
“You’re kidding.” I tried lightening my voice. “Where’s the moralist from last night?”
“Oh, that. Tigers are apex predators see, but dogs—dogs are hardly better than turkeys, chap.” He paused, considered. “Not that they deserve to be abused. No animal does. But your hound seems to have done some abusing itself, seems to have played with its food here. Let’s see. . . .” He started snapping his fingers slowly, rhythmically, calculating something. “Well if we’re using your logic from last night. A dozen turkeys to a dog seems the right . . .”—he kept snapping his fingers—“yes, about the right price.”
“You can afford the turkeys.”
“I can afford all the turkeys in the world. But it’s not about the money, is it. There’s a principle here. A lesson.”
“You can’t take revenge on a fucking dog, Skinner. Fuck off with your lessons.” My voice croaked. “It doesn’t know better.”
“If it doesn’t know better, well then it won’t mind dying.” Skinner spoke liltingly. “Hmm, chap, should I revenge myself on you instead?”
“If I embarrassed you or said the wrong thing last night, I’m sorry. I’d been drinking many drinks. I didn’t—”
Skinner hushed my lips with a finger, rested it there. “This is a time for listening. You listening?”
Slowly, I nodded.
“Good. Everything you said last night doesn’t matter. The dog, actually, doesn’t matter. All that matters now is what you’re going to do for me. And you’ll do this little errand because it’s something I want to have happen. It’s simple as.” Skinner’s thin, fidgety digits crept into my hair, and he pulled himself close. “You’ll pump it with this until that dumb animal falls like an oak. Understand?”
I blinked.
His stubbly chin was on my shoulder, our chests pressed together. His soft voice worked my ear. “I’m somebody who if I want to see something happen in the world, it happens. That was true yesterday and it’ll be true today, too. Wouldn’t you agree?”
When had his pistol slithered into my palm? It looked unreal, the steel gleam and utter heft of it.
I could have walked away, taken Lunchbox with me. There were many things I might have done. But I couldn’t disappoint Skinner. Rather, it didn’t occur to me as possible. And I was thinking of myself too, of the practicalities. My bursary at Oxford provided accommodation, but not with a dog. And I could never afford independent housing, not to mention all the doggy accoutrements, the constant feeding. This was what I told myself. Slough it all off then. The turkeys. The dog. Skinner. Ma. Pa. I wanted rid of all these rotten creatures. Clean sheets, a fresh year.
I never did use the stubby knife. But that day I took up Skinner’s gun.
My malevolence was palpable to Lunchbox, who strained at her lead and wailed. No help was coming, poor girl. It was woods for twenty minutes in any direction. In my hand was a shovel, in my pocket the pistol. Silver birches, caught in light, flanked us either side; a gust swayed their branches. I was looking for a pretty spot to bury her, going in circles, anything to put off my cruel labor. Lunchbox collapsed on her front and chundered garbled turkey bits. I crouched, had my hand deep in the ruff of her collar, smelt her musk and waited patiently until she seemed well enough to go on.
Skinner didn’t want to watch the dog die, no. He just needed to know I’d kill for him. So he’d stayed behind, suddenly not in the mood to play hunting.
I leashed her to a tree, a nice tree, big and solid and bare. She writhed when I held the pistol to her temple. The last thing I wanted was to shoot more than once, to witness Lunchbox prone and wheezing. So I broke my word and said “red,” my teeth chattering something horrid. And then she was statue again. Her muscles tense with readiness, fighting not to sprint. My knees buckled, the wet earth on my palms. A dog trying not to whine sounds nearly human.
I unleashed her. She didn’t run. I didn’t deserve such loyalty. She didn’t move until I fired into the head of a nearby turkey, which, dazed, spun comically on its legs, then slumped. The bang resounded and the birds skittered from their branches. Finally, she ran. A second shot did the turkey in. I imagined Skinner hearing the pistol’s report, nodding, then whistling with his lips pursed over a cool glass of rum.
What did it mean for a thing to die? I understood it intellectually but until I dug that hole and held that turkey to my chest, steam rising into frosted air, I did not truly know. I thought of Pa, of the funeral I’d missed. My shoulders soon felt stabbed from digging, and I’d yet to shovel dirt back over the bird. The sordid affair took over an hour. An hour of avoiding the animal’s stupid, stupid eyes. By the end, my shirt and arms and face were grimed with blood. The sight of me would nauseate Skinner—I looked a horror—but he would know my loyalty and my atrocity. Then all was quiet walking back without Lunchbox, as though the wood itself, all the roots and insects, were diverting around me for shame of what I’d done.
I quit the abattoir and found work as a dishwasher. And things with Ma improved. I was patient and vulnerable and we cried.
Skinner would text from time to time, but I never replied.
Drop in for a quick game, chap.
Was it not enough money?
It’s boring when you’re not here.
You’re making a big mistake, chap.
We’re partners, aren’t we?
I miss you. I’m sorry.
Please.
I returned to Oxford nearly a year later to begin again. Eight dazzling weeks streamed by and, briefly, life was a candy apple, glazed bright gold.
Then, after term ended, I came home. I had to. Ma begged me, and I’d no money to stay on. Besides, there was someone I had finally resolved to see.
I donned my cheap suit and bought supermarket flowers wrapped in tacky film. It was brisk but sunny; lovely as a day can be for peeping your old man’s grave. I passed my primary school and, taking the long way to avoid the abattoir, passed the animal shelter. Not a hundred meters gone, I doubled back.
The shelter was a squat, rundown place, really a converted house. Inside was painted like a nursery—baby blue, smiling animal murals. I kept my head down and mumbled hello to the girl at the front desk.
Out back was a drab garden, weeds coming through the cracked pavestones. Everywhere, animal smell. Cages lined the back wall, filled with pets in various states of daze and abandonment.
There she was. Much thinner, all rib. Her ears twitched and she pressed her muzzle so hard to the wire, I thought she might get at me. She wouldn’t quit barking.
“She likes you.” The girl from the front desk was behind me. She had large, fanatical eyes. I felt ambushed.
“She hates my guts, you mean.”
“She has a great personality, can do all kinds of tricks.” The girl sounded desperate.
I let the silence hang.
“I’ll let her out so you can meet her.”
“Don’t.” I stepped back. “I’m not a dog person—really, I’m not. I was just passing.”
“What’s with the flowers?” she said.
I looked at them. They crinkled. Drooping carnations, frilly edges browning. “I’m late,” I said, patting my tie stupidly. “What happens to the dog?”
The girl smiled, but it only resembled a smile.
“What happens?” I said. I could guess, but I wanted her to say it. I deserved every detail.
About the Artist: Faye Wei Wei’s ethereal, poetic paintings feature symbolic reveries and mythical iconography. On her large-scale canvases, the artist combines pastel hues with muted earth tones to render a unique feminine symbology she derives from folklore and art history. The results are dreamlike, exploring psychological terrain as well as broader social concerns: Wei Wei is interested in the performances of gender and love. She received her BA from the Slade School of Fine Art and has exhibited in London, New York, Los Angeles, Athens, Vienna, Shanghai, and Antwerp, among other cities. In 2019, Wei Wei was awarded a commission by the British Council in Hong Kong, in collaboration with the auction house Phillips. Her work has been purchased for collections in London. She is currently at the Yale School of Art for an MFA in Painting.