Animales
For the two years before our mother’s death, we took turns caring for her, camped out one by one, two weeks at a time in the old house where we grew up.
On my shifts, animals came.
Perhaps they were summoned by the ghosts of all the pets buried in the back yard. The grizzled mutt called Puppy til the day he died at 15, the cat named Dog abandoned to Mom’s care when I went off to college. The canines and felines, hamsters and fish and a budgie or two. Star, Pickles, Entelechy, interred in graves marked by children, destined to get lost in the underworld and therefore return, unbidden and shifting in form.
First there were the rats. Still on East Coast time, I would awake in the predawn dark in the room that I once shared with my older sister – barely 8 x 10, how did we manage it? – and hear them in the walls, under the floor. Skittering joyfully, aimlessly, back and forth. Rat Olympics.
As long as they stay on their side, I thought. And then I watched one run across the kitchen floor at 2am, ferrying a pecan from last year’s harvested stash.
I called the rat guy, who shrugged as he plugged a few holes, put out some traps and installed a paper plate on the utility line running across the backyard into the kitchen. “They’re very acrobatic in this neighborhood,” he said.
Then the birds came. Great flocks of parakeets rumored to have bred and multiplied from pet store purchases regretted and set free. Some days at dawn their song from the eucalyptus treetops was terrifying in its synchronized screech.
There were dogs on multiple occasions. The mother-and-son chihuahua pair that appeared on the back walk one morning and stayed until my older sister took her shift and sent them on to a good home with a single mom and multiple kids, all packed into a station wagon like we’d once been. The lost Lab who nestled on the front porch eating the kibble I raced over to 7-Eleven to buy when he first appeared, served in the 20-year-abandoned dog bowl recovered from under the sink. “Bagel used to like that one when he and your sister came to visit from up north,” mom said. One day a couple with a leash appeared at the end of the walk and the lost Lab was found, or at least reclaimed. I left the bowl out there for another few days just in case.
And then there was that 5am when the setting full moon filled the yard with pale light. I set up my office at the kitchen table right next to the screened window, my view the narrow corridor of dirt with combover crabgrass between the neighbor’s cinderblock wall and our siding. I sensed movement and turned to see a white creature moving close to the ground, slow and relentless, past my lookout. Shaped like a reptile with pointed snout, long narrow body, slowly switching tail: An albino alligator strayed from some primordial swamp beneath the sump pump? But no, there was fur, ruffling ever so slightly in the pre-dawn breeze. It moved silently past me, never looking anywhere but ahead, and disappeared into the darkness between the tumbledown side stairs and the gate, overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle, a tunnel for storing the rubbish bins between curbside pickups. The last I saw was the tip of white tail, marking time like a ghostly metronome.
I hesitated just long enough before opening the side door and peering through the gate that whatever it was had long disappeared.
“I don’t know, maybe a possum?” my brother said later. He still lived in this town but over where the new houses are, where there’s the occasional deer and plenty of snakes, all easily identified and avoided.
“Seeing an opossum is a sign that you’re a survivor,” our mother called from her bed in the other room. She’d been exploring her indigenous roots since retirement, and only gave up her volunteer guide gig in the Native American room at the local museum when she broke her hip last year. “They eat rats.”