Cats and Dogs (or at least dogs) Who are Dead

Just to prove I do have some experience with dead dogs, here's a novel excerpt. The narrator is Clayton Clevinger, the hero of On Account of Because, an as-yet-unpublished novel. If you're an agent, or sleeping with one, please be in touch if you like this. Thanks in advance.

I saw the boy had a mouthful of braces, which sparkled in the sun when he smiled. He didn’t look more than ten or eleven and he was hunched forward, shoulders raised, as if trying to keep a cloak from falling off. He was both short and scrawny. In Gramper’s war books, I had seen pictures of concentration camp survivors, starving and sexless. This boy would have fit right in, except for one thing.
He wore a black t-shirt with large yellow letters that read “Girls Don’t Poop.”
I laughed out loud, and walked up to him.
“That’s some shirt,” I said admiringly.
“Thanks,” said the boy in a high-pitched voice, smiling what looked like a mouthful of staples, paper clips and tin foil. “Mommy says it all the time, so I had this shirt made up special. My Aunt Margaret hates it, but she’s not the boss of me.”
I tried to take this information in, but couldn’t. How could any woman work that phrase into conversation once, much less all the time? I thought it was weird for even a little kid to call his mother “Mommy.” I’d never used the word, but I knew most kids switched over to “mom” or “my mother” by first grade. I couldn’t sort things out and assumed I had missed some piece of information.
“I’m Clayton,” I said.
“Mommy named me Sebastian, but everyone I know calls me Shiny,” he said.
“Why Shiny?” I asked.
“On account of because it’s my nickname,” he said, as if that answered any questions I might have.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I just looked at the ground.
“Do you go to public school?” asked Shiny, breaking the silence.
“Yeah. Just starting today. I’m new this year. We moved in over the summer. I’m in ninth grade. What grade are you in?”
I expected to hear that Shiny was in fifth or sixth grade.
“I’m in ninth grade, too, but I don’t go to the public school. I go to private.”
Two things surprised me. First, the boy was tiny for his age and, second, my picture of private school students had them in mansions with freshly rolled lawns, not silver trailers with broken lawn gnomes.
“You’re in ninth grade?” I asked.
“Yep. Mommy always said I was proof that good things come in small packages.”
“And you go to private school?”
“Yep.”
“And you call your mother ‘Mommy?’”
“Why wouldn’t I? It’s her name.”
“Her real name is ‘Mommy?’ That’s what it says on her drivers license?” I asked.
“Nope. She doesn’t have a driver’s license any more. It lapsed on account of because she couldn’t get to the DMV. But it is her real name. Mommy’s mother felt so good about being a mother she named Mommy Mommy to make sure she’d know the pleasure of motherhood. I mean, imagine if a woman named Mommy didn’t have kids. Think how confusing that would be.”
“Weird,” I thought, but I didn’t know what to say, so I gestured toward the trailer.
“Is that your house?”
“It’s not a house. It’s a mobile home,” he replied. “It’s not mine, of course. I’m only fifteen. What would I need with a trailer? It belongs to my Aunt Margaret.”
I looked at the tiny silver trailer, grass growing up its side. The screens over the back windows were shredded.
“So you and your mother live with your aunt in the trailer?”
“No, of course not. I live there alone with Aunt Margaret. Well, her and her cats. She loves cats and dresses them up for holidays.”
“How many?” I asked.
“At last count a dozen,” said Shiny. “Of course, three of them are pregnant so that number will go up.”
“You have twelve cats in that little trailer?” I was incredulous.
“Yup,” said Shiny. “They make it real cozy for us.”
Cozy seemed a funny word to describe a dozen cats in a two-bedroom trailer.
“So it’s you and your aunt and her cats?”
“Yup, and I’ll tell you, it feels good to be needed. I mean, she could hardly look after herself in her condition, now could she?”
“Her condition? What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s mad,” he said.
“Mad? What’s she angry about?” I asked.
“Angry about?” he parroted. “Nothing. That’s the problem. She’s entirely too happy for a woman in her condition.”
“But you said she was mad,” I said.
“Yes, I did. You’re quite right about that. She is mad, but not that kind of mad. She’s mad in the old sense of the word. She suffers from a rare form of mental illness that causes her to be happy all the time. Imagine being always happy, no matter what. She watches the news and sees a hurricane destroy some little town, and all she says is, ‘I’ll bet they rebuild it even nicer than before’ or ‘Well, at least now the Red Cross will have a chance to do their best.’ If she lost her leg, she’d say, ‘Well, at least I’ve got one good leg. Some people don’t have that.’ It’s horrible being so happy, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“I guess,” I said.
“When I think of the fun I’ve had being angry at people or being disappointed by situations or just cursing life in general, and know Aunt Margaret never knows the pleasures of anger, it makes me so sad inside. And then when I’m enjoying being sad and sorry for myself, I get angry my poor aunt never ever ever gets to curl up in a blanket of sorrow and throw herself a good old fashioned pity party. It’s just awful, really.
“Like halitosis or intestinal distress,” he continued, “her illness is even harder on those around her than on my aunt. Seeing that poor thing so happy, day after day, just breaks my heart. She’s been to psychiatrists and psychologists and phrenologists and even a paleontologist, but there’s nothing they can do.
“While the rest of us enjoy a broad pallet of emotions--anger, fear, sorrow--poor Aunt Margaret is stuck with cheerful, heedless, lighthearted and content. Imagine if your only emotional forecast was chipper today, chirpy tomorrow with a one hundred percent chance of can’t complain for the weekend.
As Shiny talked, it was nearly impossible to get a word in edgewise, not that I was any great conversationalist. His words flowed, like some force of nature, and he didn’t appear to expect any interruptions.
“My grandparents are dead,” Shiny continued, “so poor Aunt Margaret has what’s called an ‘orphan disease.’ The big drug companies are willing to spend millions of dollars on antidepressants, but not one penny on depressants, which is what the poor woman desperately needs.
“The doctors have tried everything from daily screenings of war atrocities to listening to sad music to oral readings about good love gone bad, but there’s nothing to be done.
“And, of course, there’s also the pronoia, which would drive anyone crazy.”
“Pronoia?” I said. “I don’t think I know that word.”
“Not many people do,” replied Shiny. “And they should be thankful about that. I wish I’d never heard of it.
“You’ve probably heard of its opposite, ‘paranoia,’ which is perfectly healthy. In a world like ours, it just makes sense to watch your back and assume that people are out to get you. Instead of fearing that everyone wants to hurt her, though, Aunt Margaret lives with a sneaking suspicion people are working together in a secret conspiracy to make her happy. Aunt Margaret, if I let her, would hug everyone she meets and thank them for their hard work. The authorities would have to lock her up.
“Think of it, Clayton—that was your name, wasn’t it? —Clayton? You probably know from math class that when you multiply two negative numbers together you get a positive number. What they don’t tell you is that when the positives start multiplying, as they have for Aunt Margaret, it’s a very negative situation for everyone. That’s why it’s good for her what happened to Mommy, even though it’s bad for me.”
“What happened to your mother?” I asked. “And what about your father?”
“Well, to begin with,” said Shiny, “I never knew my dad, or anything about him, not even his name. All I know is that he hated his father, whose first name was Sebastian, and that’s why Mommy named me that. He wasn’t ever really even Mommy’s boyfriend, just a come and go kind of guy, if you know what I mean. Mommy always says that life is a sexually transmitted disease, and that I’m one of its most gorgeous symptoms.
“Mommy is about the most beautiful woman I ever saw. She has a gap between her front top teeth that she can stick two Popsicle sticks in. I don’t know if you know it, but all the prettiest women have gaps between their teeth. You could look it up.”
I wondered what reference book I’d use to track down this information.
“Mommy’s nose is nice and big, with a part up at the top that looks like it’s been broken, but it never was. I don’t know about you, but I like a woman’s nose to be clear that it’s a nose instead of a button. A nose should be proud, not trying to hide itself.
“And her hair? Talk about pretty. Not all thick and covering up her head like most women. Instead her hair is thinning, so you can see parts of her skull. I’ll tell you, men always go crazy for her.
“Mommy never bought into the whole world of responsibility, you know, all that make sure there’s dinner and that the electric bill gets paid and that the clothes are clean,” he said. “We moved a lot when I was little. Sometimes we’d move twice in a month. Mainly in Florida, but not the Florida they always show on TV, with everybody in bathing suits and running on the beach. I lived in Florida until I was twelve, and I never saw the ocean, just a lot of two-room apartments without pools. Mommy was kind of a free spirit, and didn’t like to feel pinned down.
“One tradition she had, though, was she would always subscribe to the newspaper wherever we lived. We’d get the Crestview News Leader when we were there, then the Branford News for a while, then the Palatka Daily News or the Citrus County Chronicle, all depending on where we lived. She never read them. She just liked having them in the house. I think it showed her that we were real people, getting the newspaper.
“As soon as we’d get to a new town in her big old white truck, she’d call the newspaper and set us up with a subscription. It was also a tradition for Mommy to use a fake name for her subscriptions, usually some minor TV or movie actress, whose name you’d think sounded kind of familiar, but not really. It could be Regina King or Rita Wilson or Amy Acker. That’s what our life was like, moving and getting the newspaper. Mommy may not have read any of them, but when I was little I used to like taking a ballpoint and drawing horns and beards on people. By the time I was eight, I was reading most of the paper each morning, just because it was something to do.
“We had a tradition of piling up newspapers in the corner of whatever kitchen we were in. Sometimes the pile would get taller than me, but usually we moved before that happened. Like I said, Mommy likes to move a lot. Moving is a tradition for her.”
“So did your mother have a hard time keeping a job or something?” I asked, thinking of Pops’ long-running problems.
“Oh, no, Mommy could have kept any job she had. She’d just get bored. Sometimes she’d get a job cashiering at the Piggly Wiggly or taking tickets at a movie theater. Lots of different jobs. What she likes best, though, is just sitting around the house, waiting for something to happen. Then Jack happened.”
“Jack?” I asked.
“He was the love of her life. She met him at a Bingo game and she won twenty dollars that night, so that’s why she fell in love with him. He made her feel lucky and special, kind of like getting the newspaper. Maybe they’d even have gotten married if it weren’t for Stella.”
“Stella was his wife?” I asked.
“No, Mommy could have handled that. She’s had lots of married boyfriends. Stella was Jack’s dog. Jack loved that little Chihuahua like she was his daughter. She’d sit on his lap at meal times, and he’d feed her right off his plate. Even though Mommy knew that Jack loved her, too, it was the too part she couldn’t stand. Mommy wanted Jack to love her more than, not just too. When he’d be drinking, he’d joke about how he didn’t know which he’d choose between the two of them. That hurt Mommy’s feelings. Still, if it hadn’t been for me and Chinese food, Mommy probably would have married Jack and he’d be my stepfather today.”
“Shiny,” I said, “I‘m confused here. Stella is a dog. Jack and your mom were friends. You and Chinese food? What does that have to do with it?”
“When I was younger, you see, I was crazy about Chinese food, especially egg rolls. I’d beg Mommy to take me out for Chinese. One Saturday afternoon, when Jack was at work, she got lucky at bingo again and won fifty bucks, and as soon as she came in the door, I was all over her, asking for Chinese food. Whenever Mommy was happy and feeling lucky she liked to spread the love, so she said okay. We got into her truck and we drove across town and parked a couple of blocks from the restaurant.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what?”
“Why did you park a couple of blocks away from the restaurant instead of at the restaurant?”
“It was a tradition. Mommy loves traditions. We ordered a pupu platter and Mommy had five or six of those colored drinks with the umbrellas. It was nice. Until the fortune cookies.”
“Fortune cookies?”
“Yup. We had this other tradition where I would choose her fortune cookie and she would choose mine. My fortune was nothing to remember, but when Mommy opened hers, she got a faraway look in her eyes and a smile on her face.”
“What did it say?” I asked.
“It said, ‘Stop ignoring your destiny. Remove the obstacle.’ So, of course, right then and there, Mommy knew what she had to do.”
“Of course,” I replied, having no idea where this story was going.
“We left that restaurant without paying. That was another tradition we had. Mommy said only rich people pay for restaurant food. We ran the two blocks to the truck and Mommy reached up under her skirt and took off her panty hose.”
“Why?” I asked, feeling more confused with each new piece of information.
“On account of because she was going to need them for Stella.”
“Why would she need them? I thought Stella is a dog.”
“Was. She’s dead now.”
“I see,” I said blindly.
“Then we drove to Jack’s place and Mommy and I went in and poor little Stella was sitting on an easy chair. This little Chihuahua was looking like she was just getting ready to turn on the television.
“Mommy went into the kitchen and got some doggy treats and put them down at the toe of one leg of the panty hose. In case Stella got hungry. Then Mommy told me to hold the thigh as wide open as I could and she snatched up Stella and shoved her, nose first, into the panty hose.
“Once she got Stella all the way in, Mommy told me to tie off the crotch with a double knot. Of course there was no way that little dog could have turned herself around in the panty hose, but Mommy wanted to make sure we did the job right. She was a stickler for that kind of thing.”
“She shoved a dog into tights? Why?” I asked.
“On account of because that was how she wanted to do it. Once Mommy had Stella in the panty hose, she lifted that sack of dog over her shoulder and left Jack’s apartment, like Santa Claus in reverse.
“Course, a Chihuahua is a yapper, so once we got her in the truck, Mommy took some duct tape and started trying to wrap Stella’s snout through the panty hose. The problem was, Stella didn’t really want her snout wrapped, and the tape wasn’t on her nose, it was on the hose, so Stella kept on backing and backing up toward the thigh and Mommy kept on wrapping and wrapping until finally Stella couldn’t back up any more.
“By the time Mommy was done, she’d used up so much duct tape that she’d made herself a stick out of the panty hose. When she held the staff of duct tape with the little ball of dog at the end, if Stella had been painted red, Mommy would have been holding an old-time thermometer.”
“So you’re in her truck in her boyfriend’s driveway,” I said, “with a duct-taped set of panty hose containing a ball of dog at the end of it. What exactly, was her plan next?”
“Like I told you, Mommy was never much for plans. She just kind of liked to let the fur fly and see what happened. So I can’t tell you about her plan or even if she had one. But I can tell you what she did, and that’s she drove us home and carried Stella inside, with the stick on her shoulder and Stella hanging down on her back. She looked like a hobo in one of those old movies.
“She went straight into the bathroom—she always did like the bathroom—and she left the door open. I followed her and watched as Mommy started the water in the tub, but she didn’t bother checking the temperature with the back of her hand. Just turned both faucets on full. Didn’t put in any bath salts, either, and Mommy was very particular about her baths. Used to take a bath two, maybe three times a week.
“Stella was really quiet, just a whimper or two, on account of because her nose was finally taped up, and she wasn’t moving that much anyway, ‘cause there wasn’t much space. I thought maybe she was going to take a nap, but Mommy’s lawyer said at trial she was probably already dead.”
“Her lawyer said she killed the dog?” I asked. “Why did she have a lawyer and why wasn’t he trying to prove she didn’t kill the dog?”
“Everybody knew she killed the dog,” replied Shiny. “People don’t go to prison just for killing a dog, Clayton.”
“Prison?” I asked.
“Yup. The thing was, the story gets kind of weird now.”
“Really?” I murmured, wondering what adjective Shiny would have used to describe the story so far.
“You see, once the water was about half way up the tub, Mommy held on to the duct tape handle and used poor Stella like a plunger. Just held her under water and kept pushing. After a couple of minutes, Mommy pulled the panty hose and duct tape stick out of the water, and using both hands pointed the dog at me.
“’Sebastian,’ she said, ‘this is what love leads to.’”
A dead dog on a stick, I thought.
“With the way Mommy was holding her, Stella looked kind of like a marshmallow that’s ready to fall off the end of your stick into the fire. Except, of course, she was brown, not white.
“Mommy carried the Stella-cicle into the kitchen. I followed and we both sat down at the kitchen table. Mommy leaned forward and put all her weight on the stick, so that Stella, or what used to be Stella, dripped water all over the floor.”
“’It’s time to think,’ Mommy said.
“I didn’t know what to do, so I tried to think with her, but it was kind of hard, ‘cause I couldn’t stop watching Stella puddle up our floor like a dog mop.”
“After about five minutes, Mommy looked at me and said, ‘Sebastian, don’t ever fall in love with a person who likes dogs. Things get way too complicated.’ Then she got up and turned the oven on to about three hundred fifty degrees and started unwrapping Stella.”
“Shiny, I’m starting to get confused again,” I said. “Why the oven? Why the unwrapping? Why not just leave the dog wrapped up and throw it in a dumpster?”
“On account of because that would be cruel to Jack, and Mommy loved Jack,” Shiny said with a hurt tone. “Mommy didn’t want Jack to spend the rest of his days thinking Stella might have run away from him. She said she wanted him to get closure, so that his love for Mommy could grow and grow
“Mommy said we were going to take Stella back to Jack’s street and leave her there for Jack to find. We were going to run over Stella’s body three or four times, so Jack would think a car had hit Stella. Problem was, no matter how happy he might be to find Stella and no matter how sad he might be that she was dead, he’d still have to notice she was dripping wet. Mommy said that grief might cover up a lot, but not the smell of a dead wet dog. Jack would get suspicious.
“So Mommy had to dry Stella off. She’d never had to dry a dead dog before. She’d only done one thing with dead animals. That’s why she turned on the oven. There was a problem, though.”
“Hard to believe there could be any more problems, Shiny,” I said.
“Well, there was. See, Mommy thought that after thirty minutes at three-hundred-fifty degrees, Stella would be all dried out. That’s where Mommy figured wrong, on account of because after half an hour in a closed oven, Stella was starting to cook, and smell like she needed to be basted, but she was still as wet as when she’d been lying on the kitchen floor.
“Mommy didn’t know what to do, on account of because the smell of roasting dog meat was starting to spread through the kitchen. She was kind of spooked, so she turned the broiler on and sat back, thinking that broiling with the door open might work. Next thing you know, smoke and flames are pouring out of the oven and filling the kitchen. Seems Stella had caught on fire instead of drying off.
“Mommy grabbed a couple of oven mitts with pictures of peacocks on them. Then she picked Stella up by the tail and yanked her out of the oven. Now she was standing in the middle of the room, holding a burning Chihuahua by the tail, kind of spinning herself like one of those hammer throwers in the Olympics.”
“I wanted to help, so I opened the kitchen window, to let some of the smoke out. Mommy told me to shut it, on account of because she didn’t want the neighbors to know. Then she spun one last time, and Stella’s tail came off in Mommy’s hand. Stella’s burning body flew into the corner of the kitchen, right beside our pile of newspapers, Mommy still holding on to her tail.”
“Well, if you didn’t know, newspapers are pretty good for starting fires and a burning dog beside a pile of newspapers turns into a big fire pretty quickly. Mommy started crying that she didn’t know what to do. She went to the fridge and opened a beer. With the beer and Stella’s tail in one hand, she grabbed me with the other hand and pulled me out of the apartment.
“She didn’t try to put out the fire?” I asked.
“Nope. On account of because it was just an apartment and I think Mommy figured that if Stella’s body burned up that maybe she’d get away with what she’d done. Unfortunately for her, some nosy neighbors smelled smoke and the fire department was there in about five minutes.
“They went right into the kitchen and sprayed down the fire and Stella was all burned, but she was still recognizable as a dog, a very dead dog. Mommy was going to try to talk her way out of things, but the fireman who was talking with her noticed Stella’s little tail, still grasped firmly in Mommy’s hand.
“When Mommy got arrested, I went into foster care with a nice family. I lived on a farm and everything. I even got to be a ward of the state on account of because they didn’t know where my father was and they had to sort things out. That’s how I got these,” here Shiny smiled broadly and pointed to his braces which had red, white and blue bands.
“They’re a gift from the people of Florida, kind of a going away present. Of course, now that they’re on and I’m in New Hampshire I won’t be able to get them off for at least three years.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“On account of because Mommy went to trial last June. Her lawyer convinced her to plead guilty to animal cruelty and arson and she’s doing three to five at Jefferson Correctional Facility. It’s a very nice place from the brochures and Mommy writes me every week.
“Mommy told me on the day she went away that soon I’d be going to stay with my Aunt Margaret here in New Hampshire, but first I’d be with a foster family. She told me that while she was in prison I was to do everything Aunt Margaret told me to do. I was to treat her like she was Mommy herself. I was even to call her ‘Mom,’ but not ‘Mommy,’ ‘cause I only have one Mommy.
“She also said that once she was out, we’d never have anything to do with dogs again.
“So that’s how I ended up here in Oxford,“ concluded Shiny.
“And you moved here in June?” I asked.
“Yup.”