Life and Aluminium Phosphide

A scrub jay landed in a navel orange tree and the dark green leaves wavered under the weight of his dusky blue body. The scrub jay scanned the land for oaks, grasses, lizards, insects, anything.

‘Get,’ Vern said.

The scrub jay dropped from the branch and pecked at the hard dry earth of California’s Central Valley. Rows of orange trees reached out in all directions, their fruit and leaves spattered with the white residue of pesticides. European honeybees descended onto crisp white blossoms who filled the hot morning air with a sweet thick scent. The bees were the only insects, the orange blossoms the only flower, and the thick waxy leaves the only green but for the occasional sprig of grass who had survived the spray. The land was almost free from life unwanted by the people who grew and ate the food. Beyond an earthen embankment there was a river who had been wrested from a riparian jungle and funnelled into a concrete canal. On the embankment there was a mound of sand around a small hole that was the unmistakable entrance to a ground squirrel burrow.

Vern took a pistachio from his pocket and tossed it near the entrance to the burrow. He climbed to the canal's edge, took off his hat, and wiped his forehead with his sleeved arm. Her nose appeared first and then her eyes. She watched for the stillness of the world, ran to the pistachio, and removed the shell with her hands. She stuffed the nut into her cheek and disappeared back into her hole.

‘Little s.o.b,’ Vern said.

Vern reassured himself that it was not unusual for one or two to escape fumigation. There had been no other signs of infestation in Murphy’s grove, no chewed fruit, girdled trunks, or broken irrigation lines. He returned home to collect his supplies.

Vern was stuffing crumpled newspaper into the exits from the main burrow when the ground squirrel who took the pistachio emerged. She admonished him with rapid angry chirps, flicked her tail back and forth, then dived back into the safe folds of the earth. With all the exits blocked, Vern put on yellow rubber gloves, opened the canister, and removed four grape-sized pellets of aluminium phosphide. Aluminium phosphide needs moisture to become gas, but it was late spring, and the ground was dry. For the first time since the Army Corp of Engineers encased the river in concrete, Vern hoped the canal leaked just a little. Without ceremony, he threw the pellets into the burrow and stuffed reams of crumpled paper into the entrance. He removed his rubber gloves, careful to use the edge of the right glove to pull off the left.

After seeing Vern and smelling the familiar sour poison, mother squirrel had run down the long corridor, past the escape routes, pantries, and dead ends, and into the nursery where her five babies lay sleeping. They woke, yawning and reaching their little hands toward her for milk. Mother squirrel could only carry one at a time, so she took the strongest in her mouth and ran down the long corridor built by her ancestors. The tunnel ran along the cool edge of the canal, which at intervals leaked a small supply of fresh water. She took the first escape passage along the thirty-foot tunnel and found it blocked with paper. She put her baby down and clawed and chewed at the paper until the way was clear, and at last, with the frantic movements that define an animal who is prey, she pulled her baby out into the hot and hostile open and left him in the shadow of Vern’s enormous back. The gas came in a thick cloud of foul air. Outside, she dropped her dead daughter and collapsed on the ground, her lungs unable to breathe the air and every organ in her body wrenched with pain. She never returned for the others. 

When the time was up, Vern pulled his right glove on and removed the paper from the main burrow entrance. He peered in the hole and sniffed, satisfied, he tossed the paper in the bucket and unplugged the other holes. Vern poked the mother’s body with his gloved finger, picked her up by the tail, and tossed her limp body a few feet away. A crow glided toward the tableau of life and death with her black wings stark against the clear blue sky. She landed on a power pole, lowered her wings, cocked her head, and squawked.

‘Here you go, here’s another one for you.’

Vern threw the dead baby toward her mother and scooped the living baby into his gloved hand. The baby wriggled and fell, and Vern caught him in his bare left hand. The baby, responding to the warmth of Vern’s skin, suckled on his barren, calloused finger.

Vern was a man in a world of creatures whose lives were abstract and non-essential to his. Nature had no place in agriculture, even the weather was a nuisance. The soil was his to plant in, the fruit was his to pick, the air and water were his to dirty, and this animal was his to kill. The rules that applied to people did not apply to vermin. He could kill thousands of them, he had killed thousands of them, and he could die an upright man. The only problem was that Vern could not kill this particular ground squirrel and he stood frozen in the grips of an alien feeling as the small fuzzy body sucked on his finger with his claws wrapped tight around Vern's knuckle.

He set the baby down on the ground as though setting down a human child, picked up his bucket, and left. He waited at the unmarked road for a car to pass. Gaudy coloured potato chip packets and spent juice boxes tumbled toward the speeding car before coming to rest again on the dusty roadside. He crossed the road to his red brick house, surrounded on three sides by a hundred and fifty acres of skeletal, leafless orange trees rising out of the ancient sand. Black plastic irrigation pipes lined each neat row, cracked and empty like desiccated veins. He thought he was going to be sick. He leaned against Marta’s fruit stand, and it creaked against his weight. The fruit stand was a husk of dry plywood with a flaking mural of orange trees that Marta had painted with the boys all those years ago when life was full and vibrant, and he was never alone for more than the moments it took to shower, shave, and use the bathroom. The world rang now with emptiness, a hollow wind that swept through the hot, dusty valley. 

Three years before, Marta was almost gone when that year’s frost had come for his crop, a record low that slipped into the town of Idian like a dagger of ice. When Israel came to the hospital to tell Vern the news, he stopped short in the doorway holding his trucker’s hat in his dark brown hands. Marta’s colourful plump boisterousness had been transformed into a silent rise under the starched white hospital blanket.

‘Boss,’ Israel said.

Vern knew just by the look on his face. The frost had ruined the entire harvest.

After the funeral and the frost, Vern carved off the land around his house and sold it to Sunshine Company, who had been begging him to sell for years. They did not want his trees or his land. What they wanted was his water. He paid his workers as though they had brought in the harvest and sent them to work at the Company. All Vern had left was the television in his air-conditioned house and coffee on the front porch, a rhythm broken occasionally by sparse visits from his sons and his ever-thinning circle of old friends.

Since Vern had lost his crop, every December, Murphy hired him to exterminate the ground squirrels in his grove. Murphy believed that he had to look after his own kind, and he knew what happened to men like Vern when they had no work to do. Vern had been exterminating squirrels for decades. He was good at it. At least he had been good at it. Vern would never confess it to anyone, but now that he did not have his own grove to protect from their hungry mouths, he could not bring himself to hate the ground squirrels. His curses had become reflexive, a mere habit formed from a lifetime of hatred. He could see no point in all the death anymore. He felt guilty when he killed them. He felt bad then, leaning against the fruit stand thinking about the defenceless baby ground squirrel he had left orphaned on the ground.

He set the bucket down on the empty shelves of the fruit stand and walked as fast as he could with his six-foot-three frame bent and haggard from a lifetime of work. The baby ground squirrel was laying belly down on the ground with his legs splayed out to the side, sunning himself to stay warm. Two crows were eating his mother and sister, tugging them here and there, and a line of ants marched toward their still pliant flesh. Vern put his knuckles on the sand, and the baby ground squirrel crawled into his palm.

Vern drove amongst the throng of humanity that sped along the freeway through the clear-cut land. Billboards advertised personal injury lawyers, diners, casinos, topless baristas, and Christian radio stations. The hot air mingled with dust, exhaust, and the stink of manure that Vern’s closed windows could not keep out. In the bare fields, cattle clamoured in scraps of shade, their eyes coated with black flies. Vern pulled into the wildlife rescue centre parking lot that was squeezed between a powder coating shop and a self-storage complex. Vern had made the ground squirrel a bed in his wool hat that he stuffed into Marta’s leopard print fanny pack.

‘You okay in there Cowboy?’

Vern opened the bag, and Cowboy wriggled deeper burying his head away from the light. Vern left him in the truck.

‘It’s illegal for you to keep a wild animal,’ Cindy said.

‘For Pete’s sake, I've been slaughtering these critters in the thousands for decades without a blink of an eye from the law. Shoot, they even sell us the stuff to do it with, and you're telling me it's illegal to feed them milk.’

Cindy had her own problems to deal with. She had a Canada goose with fishing wire wrapped around his rubbery legs, a coyote pup who had been kept as a pet until she was dropped on Cindy’s doorstep half-starved, and there were opossums, squirrels, and countless birds who needed to be fed at regular intervals by volunteers who were at that moment working unsupervised.

‘I'm just telling you how it is. All you have to do is bring the squirrel in here, and we’ll look after it and release it back into the wild when it’s appropriate. They’re not pets, and it’s my job to ensure that our wildlife stay wild.’

‘Wild? Where's the wild here?’

‘We have a property we release them on.’

‘So he can just be eaten by a rattler?’

Cindy was tired of people like Vern who, out of nowhere, decided that they, and not her, were qualified to care for wild animals. She knew Vern’s type, his blue jeans, brass belt buckle, and his too-big cowboy hat. She knew that he had not cared about nature his whole life, but suddenly, he had gotten close enough to feel something, and he wanted absolution. She was disgusted by it.

‘Are its eyes open or closed?’

‘Open.’

‘Does it have fur?’

‘Yes ma’am he’s plenty furry.’

At home, Vern opened the jar of powdered milk Cindy had given him. He boiled the water, measured the powder, mixed it well, and let it cool exactly as Cindy had told him to. He drew the milk into the syringe and wedged the rubber nipple onto the tip. Cowboy took hold of the nipple with his hands and sat on his hind legs while he sucked the syringe with a loud smacking. His white-lined, almond eyes were open and furtive, as though his siblings would appear at any moment and push him away. When the syringe was empty, Cowboy’s whiskers, hands, and face were smattered with milk. Vern took Cowboy in his hand, held him over the kitchen sink, and stroked where he thought his genitals would be to make him urinate, just as his mother would have done had Vern not killed her.

That night, Vern slept with the leopard print fanny pack tucked into the arc his body made when he laid on his side because Cindy had said he needed to keep Cowboy warm. At twelve-thirty in the morning, Cowboy clawed his way out of the fanny pack, crawled onto Vern’s shoulder, and chirped until Vern opened his eyes. Vern fed him milk and went back to sleep. At three, Cowboy climbed onto Vern’s pillow and tugged on his short grey ringlets with his mouth. This time Vern awoke with the sticky residue of a nightmare tugging at his conscience and could not sleep for the rest of the morning. He had dreamed that Cowboy fell into a pot of water boiling on the stove, but he had survived, scalded, hairless, and suffering.

Vern soon discovered that Cowboy was old enough to urinate by himself. He lined the fanny pack with paper towels and that afternoon, went to the Idian Market and Taqueria to buy seven microwave dinners and a pack of super sanitary pads.

‘What do you think about lasagne, Boy?’ Vern asked.

Cowboy chewed at the teeth of the zipper that Vern always left slightly open. From behind the register, Claudia eyed the fanny pack.

‘Mira,’ Vern said and leaned forward to show Claudia what was in the fanny pack.

Claudia leaned in to look and put her hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp that she only let out when Vern left.

‘Que raro,’ Claudia said.

‘I think the cheese has slipped clear off that old boy’s cracker,’ George said.

The news of Vern’s disgrace spread through Idian. Everyone agreed it was not unusual for an old man to go soft. Everyone knew the story about Greg, who was famous for shooting feral cats from his porch until he was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. After that, he put out saucers of milk for them instead, but those were cats, and if it had been a cat or a dog, that would be defensible, but a ground squirrel, that was something else. Vern had always loved who he loved no matter the consequences. He had grown up lonely despite having three brothers and two sisters and he was always looking outside for new friends whether they were animals or people. When he asked Marta to marry him his parents quietly disowned him for loving the daughter of Mexican immigrants. They did not argue with him but every year they backed further away and by the time they died, Vern had not seen them in decades. 

When Vern had backed his big white truck out of the parking spot at the wildlife rescue centre, Cindy had written down Vern’s licence plate number. She reported the incident to Don, a Fish and Wildlife officer. Don put it off as long as he could but two weeks later, after six follow-up calls from Cindy, he cracked.

‘Morning Vern.’

‘Don.’

‘How are things?’

Vern had called Sunshine Company on Friday to ask when they were going to remove the dead trees. He offered to do it for them, but the woman on the phone politely reminded him that it was not his land anymore.

‘Besides sitting here on the wrong side of Hades I can’t complain.’

‘News has it that you have a ground squirrel in that thing.’

Vern snorted.

‘Yeah, so what?’

‘You’re not supposed to keep them as pets.’

‘I’m not keeping it as a pet, I’m just looking after it until it’s big enough to get out on its own, I don’t see what the big hoo-ha is.’

Cowboy stuck his nose out of the zipper’s gap until the hole was wide enough for him to reach his arms out. He put his paws on Vern’s chest, stretched, and opened his mouth in a protracted yawn.

‘Cute little guy, isn’t he?’ Don said.

Don held Cowboy in the palm of his hand and stroked him with his thumb until Vern returned with another chipped ceramic mug of coffee. Don set Cowboy down on the cement, and he ran up on their shoulders and between their legs.

‘What’s this all about Vern? Everyone thinks you’re losing it.’

Vern paused and squinted across the road.

‘Hell, what do they know? He needed someone to look after him, the way I figure, I tried to kill him and he survived. Remember old Sadie? She used to look after wild animals all the time before the wildlife rescue place showed up, she’s where everyone took animals they found.’

‘She got into hot water for that too, besides she was never a farmer, people don’t understand how you could look after something that’s been eating your pocketbook up for decades.’

‘Everybody’s got to eat, even a ground squirrel. Shit, I don’t know, maybe I have gone soft.’

Don laughed and took a sip of coffee.

‘You wouldn’t be the first one. I couldn’t do half the stuff I used to do. When I was fresh out of college, I worked for the feds up in Idaho shooting wolves from a helicopter, back then I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Nowadays I wouldn’t have the stomach for it. There’s something about them running through the snow, I don’t know what it is, something untouchable and then, pop,’ Don said.

‘What are you going to tell this Cindy?’

‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell her a rattler got to it or something.’

It was Sunday and Israel arrived in his church clothes to help Vern build an enclosure in Marta’s garden of dead tomato vines and rusted tomato cages. He changed his clothes in the house and made himself a ham and cheese sandwich that oozed with mayonnaise. He ate in front of the television while Vern started work in the yard. By the time Israel returned outside Vern had staked out a square, outlined it with string, and dug a deep hole.

‘It needs to be snake proof and bird proof,’ Vern said.

‘Okay boss,’ Israel said.

‘We should put some plants in here. What plants do you think they like?’

‘I think they eat pretty much everything, isn't that why nobody likes them?’

A few days later, Vern and Israel were drinking beer on the porch, celebrating the completion of the enclosure when Murphy emerged from the rows of orange trees on his ATV. He darted across the road, and into Vern’s gravel driveway. When the cloud of dust settled Vern lifted his white sun spotted hand in a motionless wave. Murphy lit a fat cigar, heaved his body down from the ATV and limped over to the enclosure where Cowboy was chewing on a strawberry.

‘I had to see it to believe it. That’s my ground squirrel isn’t it? Didn’t I pay you to kill it? I sure as hell didn’t pay you to take it home and marry it,’ Murphy said.

‘I killed the mother. No harm done,’ Vern said.

‘No harm done now, but what happens when that thing gets out, well shit, it doesn’t matter anyway, by December it’ll be toast. You have your fun catching rabies while you can.

Murphy left a voicemail for Matthew, the eldest of Vern’s two sons, thinking that he could talk some sense into Vern. It was weeks before he and his brother James could co-ordinate a Sunday afternoon off in between the ceaseless demands of their successful Silicon Valley lifestyles. By the time Matthew and James pulled into Vern's driveway in their matching electric cars, Cowboy had long outgrown his fanny pack and spent most of his time in his enclosure or running around the house, chewing the cables to lamps and anything else he could get his mouth around. Cowboy was in the house sleeping behind a couch cushion when Matthew, James and their wives and children burst through the door unannounced with bags of groceries, and a golden retriever puppy with a big red ribbon tied around her neck. Vern cupped Cowboy in his big hands and held him high up in the air while the puppy jumped up and down and barked at him.

‘I don’t want a dog,’ Vern said.

‘You can’t go on like this Pop, look at you, you have all of Ma’s stuff still, it’s been years now, and then there’s this squirrel thing, the whole town thinks you’ve gone nuts,’ Matthew said.

It was true, even Marta’s car keys were still in the crystal ashtray on the table by the door.

‘He’s not nuts, he’s grieving that’s all. We’ll discuss it over lunch. Pop why don’t you go and put the squirrel in its cage, Miranda is going to lose her mind if that thing goes anywhere near the kids, you know how she is,’ Izzy said.

Vern put Cowboy in his enclosure, knelt in the dirt by the open door, and gently petted the soft brown fur between his ears with his forefinger. Cowboy lifted his mouth to Vern’s finger, but Vern pulled away just in time. Cowboy’s teeth had grown strong and sharp. Cowboy ran into the corner of the cage and back to Vern where he stopped short in a playful pounce. Vern ran his hand along the dirt toward Cowboy and pounced. They went back and forth until Cowboy got tired of the game and disappeared into his freshly dug burrow.

Lunch dragged into dinner time. His grandchildren watched cartoons on the widescreen television, the characters more head than body. Vern could not make sense of the stories, but the children were transfixed, their eyes wide and their mouths open. The puppy bounced around the living room, chewing on a toy that squeaked when she bit it.

James stood by the kitchen window that looked out to the dead orange trees.

‘It’s a real shame we had to let it go like that, after all those years of hard work.’

‘I wasn’t going to be around forever and neither of you two wanted to take it over.’

Miranda raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth, but Izzy cautioned her with a shake of her head. They both knew that Vern and Marta had encouraged the boys to go to college, but only Izzy understood that Vern had expected them to return to run the family business after they graduated. The lure of the city and fast money had been too much for them.

‘Pop, what do you think about moving up to the Bay? We have that little place out the back we’ve been renting out,’ Matthew said.

‘I’ve told you before, this is where I’m going to stay until my dying day. I’ve made my peace with death and now I just have to sit here and wait for him,’ Vern said.

‘Dad, shh,’ Miranda said, her eyes darting to her eight-year-old son on the couch.

‘For Pete’s sake, when I was his age, my Pa had me slaughtering chickens,’ Vern said.

Back then, Vern had known all the chickens by name too, and when it became his job to slice their throats, he apologised to them out loud. His father had heard him once and punished him for it by telling every man they knew, and the men would laugh together until their eyes watered.

Cowboy’s feeding time had come and gone and almost reached the next. Cowboy did not mind though, he was happily chewing through the chicken wire Israel and Vern had buried beneath the cage floor. He loved being outside, the freedom of the dirt, its cold embrace, and the safety of its darkness. Across the flat dry land, the call of ground squirrels came through the orange trees.

‘Alarm, alarm, alarm,’ they said.

He came out of his burrow just enough to listen, not knowing that the hatched metal wire above and around protected him from the prowling hawks and snakes.

Cowboy was all alone, he had no one to help him dig his burrow, collect the food, or look out for predators. He had no one to teach him how to live in a world where there was no prairie, no river, and no oak trees dropping acorns through the fall, but he went on living. Most importantly, he dug. Sometimes he stopped to twitch and watch the sky above, which had turned orange and pink. Sometimes he stopped to sit on his hind legs and survey the land around him, which had become quiet and still. He dug until the earth's surface fell toward him, and rays of pink lit his dusty face. He jumped into the wide-open world just outside the wire of the enclosure and began the work of perfecting the first exit to his burrow.

He was almost six weeks old when Vern found him. Before that, his mother had been preparing him and his siblings for the outside world. One day she had gone in search of a shed rattlesnake skin and found one amongst a pile of lumber. She brought the skin home, smashed it into a paste, and rubbed it into her own fur and the fur of her children. If a rattlesnake had come for her babies, she would have sent a rush of blood to her tail and flicked it back and forth to make the snake think she was a large and frightening animal. She would have kicked sand in its face. She would have done anything to protect her children. If the rattlesnake had bitten her, her body would have fought off the venom with her equally powerful resistance that Cowboy’s little body had yet to gain. If she succeeded in scaring off a rattlesnake who had found her burrow, she would have moved her children to a new place, one by one, just as she had tried to do the day that Vern had saved his life.

Vern pushed his chair back from the table.

‘I have to feed Cowboy.’

‘God, it even has a name,’ James said.

Vern escaped into the setting sun with a plastic container of strawberries, blueberries, almonds, kale, and yams. The heat of the day lingered unabated by the coming night.

‘I’m coming Boy,’ he said.

Vern was a creature on a planet of creatures spinning through a vast and unknowable universe. His feet were planted on a tiny portion of the earth with fruits and vegetables scattered around him. The plastic tub lay on its side. He held a shovel above his head, the wooden handle worn smooth with the oil from human skin and the blade spotted with rust. The rattlesnake would split apart with one blow, he knew this because he had killed so many snakes this way before. He had killed to provide for his family. He had killed to protect his family. He had done everything he had been told a man must do in life. He held a blade spotted with rust over his head. Everything was still, the air, the dead grove, the asphalt road, the rattlesnake, and the half-swallowed ground squirrel. All that moved was Vern’s heart, thumping so hard it hurt.