
Soft Animal by Allie Spikes
We got Turbo when I was nine years old—he was my twenty-first dog. Half coyote, he was the only one equipped to live to old age on our seven-acre corner in the middle of Kansas nowhere.
On a Sunday afternoon, my mom and sister and I walked along the sun-beaten dirt road stretching eastward from my childhood home. We meandered between the wind-blown green of a tasseled cornfield and the red-tipped stalks of milo as Turbo rolled in the great-maggot belly of a doe carcass in the ditch.
Some say dogs roll in carcasses because it’s like showing off a new pair of leather boots. A gold chain and a bottle of Les Infusions de Prada Rose. Others say dogs do this to communicate something more functional, like, smell that? There’s something interesting over here in my corner. When Turbo rolled in the belly rot, mucus-crusted eyes, bloody blunt wounds of prairie animals, or if he’d been sprayed by a skunk, my older sister and I would trick him into getting close to us. Then we’d haul him to the red-handled hydrant by the horse pen with a load of Hunt’s tomato sauce for a bath.
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Recently in a family group text, I drafted an index of all the dead pets we could remember. The consensus: 33 dogs, 10 (if not 20) cats, 4 ducks, 3 sheep, 2 rabbits, 2 hermit crabs, 2 chickens, a gaggle of hamsters, a guinea pig, a steer, a buckskin quarter horse—all dead—and one Izzie the Iguana who met his maker in a microwave blasting on high. With only six children, I guess my parents felt they needed something to care for.
Many of our animals were acquired by mom, who on a whim snuck a handful of us kids into dad’s green Chevy pickup as the sun sunk below the westward rolling horizon. We drove twenty miles down a dirt road to buy two sheep from Madelyn Zabel’s barnyard zoo where my little brother swore he saw monkeys swinging from the trees. Mom would coach us kids—don’t tell your dad we used his pickup—though of course the scratches from the hooves from this particular trip gave us away, as did the two new fluffy white sheep in our backyard.
An arguably self-imposed-hostage homemaker, mom was unpredictable. I say “self-imposed” because dad complains that she never went to work. I say “hostage” because more than anything, she wanted an education and a career. In a nuclear-blue streak of will, mom would wash all of the clothes in the house, build half an oak dining table, procure a horse, and throw an electric fence up around a three-acre plot with one post-hole digger and whatever unlucky sucker she dragged out there by an ear—all of this in the space of two days while plotting, clench-jawed, to make a Broadway singer out of one of us kids and to make rollerblading the new family hobby.
Dad’s general job with the animals, as I understood it, was to get rid of them. One week, we got a black steer we named Romeo—an asshole who tried to kick the teeth out of anyone who got close. I already had a little black lamb named BamBam, so my older sister was assigned the steer. Mom bought us fancy cowgirl shirts with matching boots, bolo ties, and Rocky Mountain jeans. We were ready-made champs who’d never shown animals and knew nothing of the competitive world of 4H. I was out-of-doors averse and tended to fall over dead if asked to do any heavy lifting. My parents’ impatience with family life seemed to be the barometer for the prognosis of any particular animal.
One Sunday over dinner, dad, 6’ 2”, mustachioed, and red-headed with a temper to match, filled our plates with steak. As he delivered the last of the meat onto our plates and we began to eat, he announced, with a scrunched-up nose and grin, that we were eating Romeo for dinner.
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In an uncharacteristic departure from mammalian companionship, mom once bought an iguana we named Izzie. For me, the mini dinosaur, perched on a branch in its glass room, was something to stare at in the afternoon and something to avoid in the dark. No one thought to slit the sides of his taut belly before they put him on the microwave plate and tucked his tail in to close the door. I’m guessing they didn’t sing him to death with a lullaby beyond the hum of the microwave, which only played a few measures before the water in Izzie’s body turned to gas, expanding his bright green belly until the tender underside of his scales burst. My brother Matt was only five and looked on as our eleven-year-old neighbor pulled the microwave door open to reveal what looked like a Pollack painting inside.
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Though half coyote, Turbo didn’t live a life unscathed. He was bitten by rattlesnakes, hit by a few cars, and grazed by several semi-trucks. Every once in a while, someone would knock on our front door and confess that they’d run over our dog. But shortly afterward, Turbo would trot up the circle drive, tongue hanging in glee, and lie down in the sun next to the stunted willow in our yard. We joked that he was always trying to commit suicide but was just the worst at it. My parents and I watched Turbo chase semis from our front porch like we watched hail-green clouds circle together above our house in a bobbing twister tail.
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When I was in kindergarten, our German shepherd, Samson, was shot and killed then placed on our front porch one night. He’d been given to us by my uncle because we lived on a farm, and Sampson’d be happier there than in the middle of Phoenix. On my way to the bus the next morning, I had to hop over Samson’s soft mound of body, a bloody bullet wound in his flour-white fur. When I got on the bus, the other kids were gawking and shrieked, “is your dog dead?” I looked away, “no, that’s not my dog.”
Many of our dogs were shot. Sometime after Samson, after we’d acquired a couple of rat terriers, my parents decided we needed a high-powered German Shepard. We picked her up on the way home from my brother’s baseball game in a town 80 miles away. Or maybe it was a football game—a flash of Molly’s puppy breath and the November-cold cement of the garage floor on my stocking feet streaks through my memory when I think of her. Either way, by the end of the week, Molly had dropped dead from a heart aneurism. My parents called up the seller and demanded a second dog from the same litter. Molly II was rowdy and immediately attacked our rat terrier. Mom screamed at my sister, “Elizabeth, get out there and pull her off before she kills Squeaker!” Dog training wasn’t really part of our vocabulary, so Dad took Molly II out back with his twelve-gauge and shot her next to our green fifteen-foot, steel-beam swing set, which was welded to withstand tornados.
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After the first couple of shootings, it seemed so normal. I never fully understood Mom’s heartache over Tisha, the little pekapoo my parents had early in their marriage. I’ve heard the story repeated so many times: Dad’s mom visited our house and said there was a bad smell in the laundry room. She blamed the dog and put in a call to her husband at work. Dad’s dad walked down the hall to Dad’s office, who called Mom and broke the news that Tisha’d need to be shot. Then he did it. Dad came home from work, took the little pekapoo outside, and shot her.
Given my own experience with pheasant hunting and coyote shooting, it’s difficult to imagine shooting a pekapoo at close range with a shotgun—the little dog would surely wiggle and run, and you’d be stuck waving your gun about like Mr. McGregor, errantly shooting out windows, a gaping hole in a bag of grain, a branch clean off a tree. I have to assume Dad knocked Tisha out first or tied her tightly to something, though I don’t want to ask. Mom always told this story shaking her head side to side, laughing like one does, refusing to cry, a kind of surrender to a particular script—so I was always somewhat amused by this story growing up. I remember audibly chuckling.
I don’t think Dad has a story about this, that is, Mom never told the story in front of him, so I never heard a rebuttal. If asked, I sort of think he’d argue something like what my brother, eager to defend dad, said to me recently, “Tisha was mean as hell!”
Since my parents divorced nineteen years ago, Mom has retold the Tisha story with more urgency, even desperation. Last summer, when she was visiting me in the Seattle area, she told me again about Tisha over a box of Rainier cherries and a card game at my dining room table. My children had gone to bed, my arthritic pekingese-terrier mix, blu, curled at their feet as the rain pattered on our roof. I heard the story differently this time. I imagined myself mourning the death of a dog like Tisha, lying in bed each night next to my husband who’d killed her. Something unhinged as her story unfolded over our bowl of mauled cherry pits, and a glimmer of the betrayal she’d been trying to expose to me for thirty years surfaced like a parking-lot puddle’s rainbow slick. She cried over it like it was the first time she’d allowed herself to touch this fevered grief.
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Flies flock to corpses too. They do that thing where they vomit onto their food to make it easily digestible—to smoothie it so they can suck it up with their straw mouths. Or they lay their eggs in the carrion. But for dogs, the filth is neither a source of food nor an incubator for their young. Their motivation is slippery, but it’s generally agreed upon that dogs wallow in the bloated, stinking ooze because they’re compelled to do so for the good of the pack.
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When I was little, I’d sit on dad’s lap and steer. He’d set his pick-up on cruise, lean back, tell me to turn right at the black and yellow sunflower-state highway sign, and nap, while I drove through rows of sun-stricken wheat. Hay sheds with hundreds of bales stacked against a stormy-afternooned June, the shoulder of the highway littered with cold, collared farm dogs. I hollered to Patty Loveless about lyin’ cheaters, cold with lovin’ hearts. Every once in a while, dad would reach out, rough-knuckled, eyes still closed, and take a swig of Diet Coke with salted peanuts sunk in the bottom. He’d crank up the volume at the chorus, and I could see his closed-eyed smile and our matching noses in the rear-view mirror as I bellowed the lyrics, dropping every g.
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Turbo was too skittish to come in the house, so dad brought home a bright orange hog warmer for him to sleep on in the garage. One frigid afternoon, Turbo walked up to dad on the front porch with porcupine quills sticking out of his swollen snout, like a seamstress’s oiled tomato pin cushion. Dad lured him closer and spoke to him in a soothing, sing-song voice as he carefully removed the quills with needle-nose pliers.
Porcupine quills have microscopic, backward-facing barbs. This increases both the ease of impalement and the difficulty of removal. When Turbo sat still and wide-eyed for another few minutes, Dad pried his mouth open to find the inflamed pink bud of an engorged saguaro, turned inside out. The porcupine had rammed dozens of quills into the back of Turbo’s throat.
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When I was in fifth grade, Mom took me to a friend’s farm to pick out my own pup—a red heeler runt named Small Fry. But I didn’t love the preciousness attached to that name and changed it to Bear. Bear was smart and obedient and the first dog that was really mine. She was dark red with a black-tipped stripe down her back and was named for her tough but chunky teddy bear face. I had a part-time job after school—a pre-teen babysitter with braces and a strawberry ponytail. My seat bumped up and down as my boss drove us in a red Rodeo down the long dirt road that led to my house. Locusts surrounded us in summer dusk chanting between combed crop rows. On the mound of a dusty raised intersection, in a red heap of devoted heeler, lay Bear. She’d been hit by a car. “Is that your dog?” my boss asked. I looked away, “no, that’s not my dog.”
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When my parents divorced, Turbo was thought of as a fixture of the house, of our seven-acre corner, more than a pet. Only semi-tame but a fixture nonetheless. He’d survived the longest. In allegiance to Mom, after she moved the six of us kids down to Texas, and once my mandated visitation to Dad’s ended, I never went back to that house, the seven acres, or to Turbo.
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Dad’s most recent dog, Cheeto, a tiny black and fawn chihuahua, was the kind of dog that was prioritized over cookouts, remodels, children, and grandchildren. Since I reconnected with Dad four years ago, his new home has been heavily ornamented by dog ramps—one up to the front door, one up to each ottoman and to Cheeto’s favorite chair. There were pallets made of fuzzy KU blankets nested throughout the living room, in the basement, in Dad’s bedroom. Cheeto had a special place in the front seat of Dad’s car. In our group text, Dad would send videos to my siblings and me: here’s Cheeto under the Christmas tree, walking around Kansas City, in the park, the yard, the living room.
Cheeto died a few months ago at the age of 18. When my kids bring Cheeto up in conversation, dad goes dark and retreats, averts his eyes—the corners of his mouth turn downward. Local businesses honored Cheeto on marquees, and the woman who sells Dad his cars said if reincarnation were really a thing, she’d want to come back as one of Dad’s dogs “on account of how well they’re treated.”
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Turbo never curled up on my bed or shared a melting ice cream cone with me. He never pushed his wet nose up through the crook of my arm to be pet—he was half wild. But he lived his whole life on the Kansas grasslands and somehow, survived my childhood. One day in his old age, when I was in my twenties, Turbo limped away and came back the next spring as sunflowers.
Years later, when I found out Turbo was gone, I thought of the red-handled hydrant by the horse pen and how I’d pour salty, crackle-shined tomato sauce evenly over his body, onto his stout, polka-dotted, maggot-ridden front legs, massaging him like I was expecting a savory-fire lather. In the locust-prairie evening, I’d burrowed my fingers through his thick undercoat down to his white-pink skin. I imagine coating each and every slimy hair with scarlet sauce before rinsing him clean, down to the warm kernel of his soft animal.
Allie Spikes is a former managing editor of Bellingham Review and currently serves as prose/poetry editor at Psaltery & Lyre. Her essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, River Teeth, Bellingham Review, Literary Mama, and Dialogue.
Refreshing, fun, and filled with “light” at a time when there is darkness all around. M’s Spikes is officially my new favorite!