I felt like Laura Ingalls when she was shooing away locusts from the wheat crop, except that my wheat crop was a dead dog and I didn’t have a sunbonnet. I finally came inside and called my mom, and she was very understanding and supportive. She is, however, also a realist, and she suggested that maybe I should leave the house for a few days and just let Barnaby Jones have some sort of accidental Tibetan sky burial. My mom is the worst atheist ever. Also, it’s possible that she was less pro–Tibetan-sky-burial and more just unsettled to learn that I own my own machete. It’s like my mom has never even met me.
She had a point, though. It was the circle of life, but I wasn’t okay with Barnaby Jones being an appetizer at that circle. I was also afraid that Hailey would see all the vultures pull Barnaby from his grave. She was already peering at the enormous birds suspiciously, and had asked why they were there. “They’re . . . praying,” I replied, saying the first thing that came to mind. “They’re praying and having a funeral for Barnaby.” Luckily, this made perfect sense to a six-year-old raised on illogical Disney movies.
I called Victor again. “Barnaby Jones Pickles was actually killed by a shark.”
“What?” he choked out.
“Just kidding. But he is rising from the grave.”
“I’m working here,” he whispered, voice strained. “Are you drunk right now?”
“I have never been more sober—or more in need of a drink—in my entire life.” Then Victor hung up to get back to work, and I considered throwing all of our house cats outside to chase off the vultures, but I was afraid that they’d either get lost, since they’d never been outside before, or that the vultures would simply see them as an easier snack, pick them up, and carry them off. Not only would that be very depressing, but I was also keenly aware that if I accidentally killed all of our pets in a single weekend Victor would never leave me alone again, and would probably take to hiding the machete. Instead I decided to just draw all the curtains and pretend that this was totally not happening.
Day 3:
“Holy fuck,” I thought to myself. “This is totally happening.”
There were now a dozen vultures hovering around Barnaby’s grave and knocking off stones. I called a million (a million = fourteen) places to get someone to come disinter my dog—who was already partially disinterred by the horrible vultures that I’d been attacking with a machete—but no one would come, because it was the weekend. Apparently people need to have their dogs’ corpses disinterred only Monday through Friday. Then I found a guy on the “services” part of Craigslist who claimed on his listing that he would “do absolutely any job for the right price,” but when I looked up his e-mail address on the Internet I found that he also ran ads for people looking for prostitutes, so basically he’s a pimp, and it felt weird to invite a pimp over when it was just me and Hailey, and this was when I screamed in my head, “WHY IS VICTOR NOT HOME YET?”
I called him again. “Barnaby Jones was actually killed by a horde of . . . I don’t know. I don’t even have the strength to make shit up. But I found a pimp who’ll come dig him up.” Then Victor pointed out that the pimp was probably referring less to jobs that involved digging up dead animals, and more to jobs that involve hands and blow, and I said, “I can’t pay him in cocaine. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO GET COCAINE.” And then Victor told me to just go stay at a hotel, and that he’d take care of everything when he came back in a few days. I was half tempted, but I told Victor that I already felt bad enough for not being there for Barnaby when he’d died, and I was damned if I was going to desert him while he was being eaten. Victor told me to calm down, because I sounded like I was hyperventilating. I pointed out that I was just out of breath because I was outside, swinging the machete at the vultures.