November 2009:
He was my first. He was big, with a wide neck like an NFL player and a smile that said, “There you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” Victor stared at me as if I had lost my mind, and pointed out that he was losing his hair and was missing several important teeth, but it didn’t matter. I was in love.
“Pay whatever it takes,” I said to Victor. “James Garfield WILL BE MINE.”
It was frightening, both for Victor and myself, this sudden lust I had to possess the dusty, taxidermied wild boar’s head hanging from the cracked wall of the estate sale we’d wandered into.
Victor refused to pay money for something he saw as hideous, but there was something in that toothy smile that screamed, “I AM SO DAMN HAPPY TO SEE YOU,” and when we left without him I was positively bereft. I spent the next week looking at the blank spot on the wall where James Garfield would have smiled at me. Whenever Victor would try to cheer me up with a joke or with videos of people hurting themselves, I would force myself to smile and then sigh, saying, “James Garfield would have loved that.”
Eventually the melancholy got too strong and Victor angrily gave up and drove me back to the estate sale, where he was totally unsurprised to find that James Garfield had not been sold. He’d made me stay in the car, because he said my look of intense longing would affect his ability to negotiate, and offered the guy in charge of the sale twenty-five dollars for him. The man sneered and said that he could just rip out the tusks and sell them on eBay for that, and Victor came back to the car to tell me how negotiations had broken down. “THEY’RE GOING TO DISMEMBER JAMES GARFIELD?” I screamed. “STOP THEM. PAY ANYTHING. HE IS A MEMBER OF OUR FAMILY.” Victor stared at me in bafflement. “I’d do it for you,” I explained. “I’d pay the terrorists anything to get you back.” Victor sighed and laid his head on the steering wheel.
A tense twenty minutes later he came back to the car, lugging the beautiful head of James Garfield like some kinda goddamn American hero. I cried a little, and Hailey clapped her tiny hands in delight. “You will be my best friend,” she said to him as she petted his snout.
Victor looked at both of us like we were mad, and then stared straight ahead as he made me swear this would not be the start of some sort of wild-boar-head collection. “You’re being ridiculous,” I said. “James Garfield is one of a kind.”
When my parents came to visit a few weeks later, my mother shook her head in bewilderment. I’d expected my father to feel at least slightly vindicated that his love of taxidermy hadn’t skipped a generation after all, but he seemed just as baffled as Victor. He peered quizzically at the mangy fur shedding from James Garfield, and told me he could make me a much nicer boar head, if that was what I was into. “No,” I said. “This is it.” I was not a fan of taxidermy and never would be. Having one dead animal in the house is eclectic and artistic. More than one reeks of serial killer. There really is a fine line there.
APRIL 2010:
Half of a squirrel arrived in the mail today. It was the front part, almost down to the belly button, and it was mounted on a tiny wooden plaque.
It was odd. Both because I was not expecting any squirrel parts, and because the squirrel was dressed in full cowboy regalia. He was holding a tiny pistol out, threateningly trained at the viewer (presumably to defend the miniature marked cards in his other tiny hand), and his eyes followed you from room to room, like one of those 3-D pictures of Jesus from the seventies.
“Hey, Victor?” I yelled from the living room. “Did you buy me a half of a squirrel?”
Victor walked out of his office and stopped short as he stared at the tiny bandito pointing a gun at him. “What have you done?” he asked.
“Ruined Christmas?” I guessed. I found it hard to feel guilty about ruining his surprise, though, since the box was addressed to me, but then I saw the note on the package and realized it was actually from a girl who read my blog, and who had agreed that Victor was totally in the wrong last month when he’d refused to buy me the taxidermied squirrel paddling a canoe1 that I’d found in an antique shop.
“Oh, never mind,” I said. “Apparently this half squirrel is a present from someone who understands fine art.”
“You can’t possibly be serious.”
“It would be rude NOT to hang it up,” I explained to Victor. “I will name him Grover Cleveland.” Victor stared at me, wondering how his life choices had taken him here.
“Didn’t you once tell me that more than one dead animal in the house borders on serial-killer territory?” he asked.
“Yes, but this one is wearing a hat,” I explained drily. He couldn’t argue with that kind of logic. No one could.
JANUARY 2011: