Stray
by Michael Compton
One had a Schnauzer. One had a Jack Russell. One had a Malinois, but it looked like a German Shepherd to me. One had a cockapoo, which sounds kind of like a cockaTOO, except it’s a dog and not a bird. One had a Shih Tzu, and all the kids liked to say its name in front of grownups and laugh. One had two Siamese cats, just like in the Disney movie.
Our house didn’t even have a goldfish.
The houses in the new neighborhood were different from the houses in the old neighborhood because they were bigger and had green lawns and nobody parked their cars in the yard and the kids and dogs and cats all mostly stayed inside. The dogs only came out when their owners walked them, or if they got in the car to go to the dog park. If you asked anybody their dog’s name, they always said two names. They’d say, “His name’s Otto. He’s a Schnauzer.” Or, “Her name’s May-lee. She’s a Shih Tzu.”
I never knew the cats’ names. I’d just see them looking out the window. When I asked my mom how that worked with the cats never going outside to do their business she just said, “That’s why I’m a dog person.”
When I asked if she was a dog person why didn’t we have a dog, she said, “Ask your father.”
I knew what “Ask your father” meant, but I asked him anyway. He was in his shop, working. He invents things, but not so much inventions like lightbulbs or telegraphs, because mostly they’re on the computer. Mom says it’s because of one of Dad’s inventions we can afford to live in the new neighborhood. But Dad doesn’t like to be called an inventor. If you call him that he always holds up his finger and says, “I’m an independent researcher. I do research. Sometimes the research has practical applications.”
“Practical applications” means money. That’s what Mom said when I asked her. That didn’t sound right, so I Googled it, but all it said was something about using math to go grocery shopping, so I don’t know.
When I asked Dad why we couldn’t have a dog, he said pet ownership was “unethical.” That means it’s wrong. I asked him if it was wrong like it’s wrong for one person to own another person, and he said that was part of it. Then he put his screen to sleep and took off his glasses, and I knew he was going to say something important.
He said, “People say they love animals, and they think the proof of it is that they keep a carnivore for a pet. Do you know how many horses and cows and pigs have to die every year just so Ms. Abercrombie can take that little Shih Tzu of hers to doggie dress-up parties?”
I shook my head no, thinking Dad was about to give me the exact figure, broken down by species.
“Do you have any idea how many Indonesian fishermen live as slaves just so the Purefoys can feed their cats Fancy Feast? Do you know how many domestic species of bird are on the verge of extinction because this whole country is overrun with cats?”
I shook my head no two more times.
“Show me a vegan with a dog and I’ll show you the lowest hypocrite on Earth.”
I thought about this. We didn’t eat a lot of meat. Once a week in the old neighborhood. A little more now. Mom says meat is important for amino acids. My sister thought she said “mean old acids,” so she didn’t want to eat meat for a while, but we got her straightened out.
“So that means we can’t have a dog?”
“We can HAVE a dog, but we’re not going to GET a dog.”
I tried not to look confused, but not too hard.
“We can have a dog, or a cat, or a bull moose, for all I care, but whatever kind of pet we have, it has to come to us. It has to be a stray, and it has to want to be here. That means we don’t go out and find it. It comes, it stays, and it leaves if it wants to. It has to be the animal’s choice. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
He clicked his screen back to life and squinted at it. “Now, go tell your mother I have another algorithm I want her to look at.”
I told my brother and sister what Dad said, and they agreed it was going to be hard to get a dog or any other kind of pet under those rules.
My sister said maybe a stray dog or cat would come around the house and we could put food out for it. My brother wondered if it would be cheating to put food out. I said I thought it would be cheating if we put the food out first, so a dog or cat would come, but if a dog or cat came first, and then we put the food out, that seemed okay.
“But we don’t ever see strays in this neighborhood,” my brother said. “It’s not like the old neighborhood.”
Then my sister said what about a bird, and we said what ABOUT a bird, and she said a bird might fly in the window, and my brother said that was stupid because it was almost winter and the windows were closed all the time.
“No, I mean fly inTO the window like that bird last Christmas.”
“That bird died,” my brother said.
“No, he didn’t, he got better and flew away,” my sister said.
“Well, if the bird flies away, how does that get us a pet?” I demanded. “Anyway, he died. Dad wrapped him up in a Kroger bag and put him the trash. Mom just told you he flew away so you wouldn’t be sad on Christmas.”
My sister got quiet, but the bird gave my brother ideas. “We could have ANYthing for a pet,” he said. “It could be a snake or a rat or—”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “Those are pests.”
“Lots of people have pet rats.”
“Who?”
“Like…scientists.”
“Those aren’t pets. Anyway, that’s not the kind of rats that get into your house. The rats that get in your house, you put traps out for them.”
“So a snake.”
“Dad says the pet has to come to US. How are you gonna get a snake to start hanging around the house?”
“They’d come to get the rats!” He was being silly. “Then a mongoose might come to get the snake! Who wouldn’t want a pet mongoose?”
“Remember the rabbit?” This was my sister again.
We did remember the rabbit. It was always getting into Mom’s garden at the old house—especially when we would kick away the mothballs she put out to discourage it. So a rabbit. Even if it never came inside the house, it would be nice to have one living in the backyard. Maybe even a whole family of rabbits. And the best thing about it was rabbits don’t even eat meat.
But the weeks went by and no rabbits came. We even put out some carrots by the back fence where Dad wouldn’t see them. Nothing. No stray dogs or cats wandered into the neighborhood, no birds flew into the window, and no snakes came around looking for rats, even though there was a rat for a while that got into the pantry. Or maybe it was a mouse because it was pretty little, but Mom put a trap out and that was the end of our pet rat.
Then a miracle happened. I know Dad says there’s no such things as miracles and Santa Claus, but it really was like a miracle.
There was a big wind one night, and all the leaves, and a bunch of sticks and branches were down from the trees. So the next day, my Mom and me and my brother and sister were in the backyard cleaning up, and I was raking the leaves away from where they were piled up against the wall by the deck, and I knew something was funny when I poked my rake into a big clump of leaves and they grumbled. Kind of like my Granddad used to grumble when Mom poked him for falling asleep at the dinner table. The clump didn’t move, so I poked it again. This time it went “Ip!” and the clump sort of jiggled, so I knew something was there. I tried to rake away some of the leaves, and the clump grumbled again and spun around and looked at me with two big, black eyes. That’s when I made a sound, and it must have been something like “Ip!” and I almost fell over because I backed away so fast. The clump yawned, and then it shook itself the way a dog does after it’s had a bath, and leaves and twigs and bits of dirt went flying and I saw it was a dog and I yelled, “It’s a dog! Mom! Come look!”
Mom and my brother and sister came running over to see. They were excited at first, but when they got a good look they sort of froze, and Mom told my brother, “Go get your father.”
“What is it?” my sister said.
“It’s a dog,” I said.
“What kind of dog?”
“How should I know?” I said, and I held my hand down near the dog’s snout so he could smell me.
“Don’t do that,” Mom said.
“It’s okay,” I said. The dog shot out a thin, blue tongue at my hand and sort of flicked it a couple of times, like it was trying to see what I tasted like.
“I don’t think that’s a dog,” Mom said.
I giggled, because the dog’s tongue tickled against my hand.
Dad came back with my brother, and the first thing he said was, “What is THAT?”
“I found him under the leaves!” I said.
I thought Dad was going to say what he usually said about not giving a direct answer to a direct question, but instead he adjusted his glasses and leaned down for a better look. Then he jumped back with his hand to his nose, and I thought for a second the dog bit him.
“Don’t pet it!” He yelled. I wasn’t even touching it.
My sister wanted to know why it was so dirty. I told her it was because he was a stray and strays were always dirty and hungry and I kind of hinted we should give him some food. I heard Mom ask Dad if he thought it had “the mange” and Dad said he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell for all the spit, only he didn’t say “spit,” and we giggled, and Mom told him to watch his language.
Dad was looking at the dog like he’d never seen one before, so I looked at it, too. It wasn’t very big, maybe like the Gibson’s cockapoo. I think it was brown, but that might have just been the dirt and all the dead leaves that were stuck to it. I couldn’t tell if it had a tail. I couldn’t really tell if it even had legs, but it was standing up. It was kind of like a stray we saw one time in the old neighborhood that had so much fur that was matted together that it looked like a pile of dirty rags. The dog was so creepy-looking nobody would go near it, but it kept hanging around until Dad finally picked it up and took it to the groomer and they gave it a bath and cut its hair and they even found out it had a collar with a name on it, and when they called the number an old lady came to get it and paid the bill, and we never heard anything else about it until we got a Christmas card from the lady with a picture of the dog in it. His name was Max, and he was a Cocker Spaniel with wavy golden curls that Mom said looked like Shirley Temple. The lady said getting Max back after he got lost was the best Christmas present she ever had, even though when we took him in it was September.
I thought if we gave our new stray a bath he might look something like Max, so I asked Dad if we could take him to the groomer, but Dad said just to get the washtub from the shed, we’d do it ourselves. I got the tub, but that’s when it started raining, and Dad said we’d have to do it tomorrow, which was Saturday.
It started pouring pretty hard, and I wanted to know how the dog was going to stay out of the rain. Dad said to toss a couple of hotdogs under the deck, and he’d probably go under there and stay. I got the hotdogs, but when I tossed them under the deck the dog just looked at me. I kept pointing and telling him “Go get ’em, boy!” but he didn’t go. I finally ran back inside, and I was so wet from the rain Mom told me to take off all my clothes right there, and she got me a towel and some underwear and my pajamas, even though it was only four-thirty in the afternoon. The dog just sat there outside the glass door looking in.
“He’s gonna drown!” my sister said. It was really raining.
Dad looked at Mom, and she stared at him and shook her head real slow, which I know means, “Whatever you think you’re going to say, you better not say it,” because she does that to me sometimes. Dad said to my sister, “It’s all right, Sweetie. He’s been through worse than this.”
Mom told my brother to close the curtains. “As long as he sees us, he won’t go under the deck,” she said.
It seemed like an okay plan, but every time I checked on him he was still on the deck. He was just sort of poking around, and every so often he looked back at the house and said, “Ip!” Dad told me to get away from the glass, because the dog would see me and never go away, and I was thinking maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, because I didn’t want him to go away.
“He looks different,” I said. Some of the leaves that were stuck to him had washed away, and I even thought I saw a tail.
Dad came to the glass to look. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe we lucked out on that bath.”
It rained all night. After it got dark I didn’t see the dog on the deck any more, but a couple of times when the rain eased up I thought I heard “Ip!” outside my bedroom window.
It was barely even light the next morning when we heard my sister screaming in the backyard. We all ran outside, and she was yelling, “Mommy! Daddy! Mommy! Daddy!” and pointing at something. It was the dog. He looked like he was all swollen up, and there were still lots of leaves and sticks stuck to him, but when I got closer it looked like the leaves and sticks were IN him, sort of, because I could see where they were poking out of his skin, but I could see where they were poking INSIDE his skin, too.
Dad said, “My God!” and Mom called my sister “Baby,” and told her to come away from the dog. When my sister ran to Mom the dog tried to follow, but he couldn’t move. That’s when I saw it wasn’t his skin the leaves and things were stuck to, it was the stuff around the skin. It was like he was trapped in this big blob of goo, sort of like the slime on those game shows for kids, except it was clear. It was all over him, and some of it was spread out around him on the ground, just like somebody’d dropped a giant water balloon full of goo on his head. It was even around his eyes, and his nose was barely poking out, and you almost couldn’t hear him going “Ip! Ip! Ip!”
My brother asked if he was going to die, and instead of answering a direct question with a direct answer, Dad told me to get the hose. “And crank the faucet all the way open.”
Dad turned the hose on full blast. I thought it might hurt the dog, but it seemed like he liked it. He got real frisky, trying the catch the water in his mouth and closing his eyes and putting his face right in the stream. Bits of the goo flew off with every blast, and pretty soon the dog was rolling around and shaking it off like mud. Mom brought out the dish liquid and squirted him with it, and the goo came off faster. Whatever the stuff was, after we got the dog clean it took almost an hour to wash it out of the grass. Dad scooped up a sample and took it to his shop to run some tests.
“I think we’ll call him Ferdinand.” That’s what Mom said while we were sitting on the deck watching my brother and sister try to get him to chase a stick. He didn’t seem to get the idea of chasing the stick, but he liked chasing my brother and sister in circles around the yard. He had stubby little legs and sort of humped along like a caterpillar, but he was pretty fast, and if you tried to catch him he jumped straight in the air like there were springs on his feet.
I didn’t think it was fair for Mom to decide what to call him just on her own, especially since I was the one that really found him, but I knew if I complained she’d just shrug like she always did and say, “That’s life in a dictatorship.” So instead I asked why she wanted to call him that.
“Ferdinand,” she said, “is a name for magical dragons from faraway lands.”
When Mom said things like that, Dad would always say Mom was a poet in another life. But he was still in his shop, so I said, “But he’s not a dragon. He’s a dog.”
“Is he?” she said. She twinkled at me and sucked the straw in her glass of lemonade until it made a gurgling sound.
That’s when Dad came out. He had his tablet in his hand and was scrolling through pictures of animals. “Gotta be a marsupial of some kind.”
I asked him if that meant Ferdinand was like a possum.
“Who’s Ferdinand?”
Mom pointed.
Dad shook his head like the name was a fly that landed on him. “Look here,” he said. “Doesn’t that look a little like it?”
Mom and me looked at the picture. “You think he’s a wombat?” she said.
“No, I said he LOOKS like a wombat.”
Mom said she thought he was a little too green to be a wombat and that he looked more to her like a Tasmanian devil, but Dad said if he was too green to be a wombat he was certainly too green to be a Tasmanian devil, and anyway he wasn’t really green, that was just the color of his veins showing through his skin. When his fur grew in, Dad said, he’d be more “wombat-like.” I was pretty sure Ferdinand was just a dog, but now that Dad said that about a marsupial I had to admit he did look a little like a possum. Dad said he really didn’t think Ferdinand was any of those things, because the tail wasn’t right. The tail was thin like a possum’s tail, but it was long and twitchy like a cat’s.
“And the eyes,” he said. “They’re more like a lemur’s.”
My brother and sister were laughing out in the yard, and we saw Ferdinand bouncing up and down like a pogo stick.
“You know what springs straight up in the air like that?” Mom said. “An armadillo.”
I knew he wasn’t an armadillo, even though he did like to curl up in a ball sometimes, because he didn’t have a shell and his skin was soft and velvety. He never really did grow any fur, just kind of a soft green-gray fuzz with bristly orange patches on his back that made you itch if you touched them.
Dad didn’t want Ferdinand in the house, so Mom and me and my brother built a doghouse for him. Mom drew up the plans and bought the wood, and she even cut most of the boards, but my brother and me were the ones that nailed it together and painted it. It didn’t look like a regular doghouse. Mom said it was a “shed” design, because it had a flat, slanted roof instead of a pointed roof like a regular house. I’m glad we made it that way, because it turned out Ferdinand liked to lie on top of the house whenever the sun was out, and the flat roof made it easier for him to stretch out. Dad said maybe we should have called him Snoopy.
Ferdinand seemed pretty happy in the backyard, but I wanted to take him for walks like the neighbors did with their dogs. He took to the leash right away, which Dad said was weird. He didn’t pull hard or try to slip his collar or get wrapped up around sign posts. He’d just walk right along with me, and I didn’t think I even needed a leash for him, but Dad said it was the law and if the neighbors ever saw Ferdinand off the leash they’d have a “conniption.”
I don’t know how bad a conniption was, but it couldn’t have been much worse than what happened with the first lady in the neighborhood that saw Ferdinand. She was at her mailbox when we walked past her house, and I guess we kind of surprised her, because when she looked up from her mail and saw Ferdinand she screamed and ran straight into her house. She even dropped her mail. I guess she must have called the police, too, because later a squad car came by while Mom was out washing the car and they asked her if she’d seen a boy walking around with a pet baboon.
That one lady didn’t have pets, so I wondered if maybe she just wasn’t used to animals, but the other neighbors weren’t much better. Some of them, when they were walking their dogs, would come up to Ferdinand and me all friendly-looking and talking nice, but then they’d get these weird expressions on their faces, and they’d sort of stare, and they’d start asking a lot of questions about Ferdinand’s “breed” or his “pedigree.” Their dogs didn’t much like Ferdinand, either. They’d get excited and sniff him all over, but then they’d back away and lay their ears back, and if they growled sometimes Ferdinand would nip them with his tail. That always freaked them out, because they never saw it coming. After that, the neighbors would usually cross the street when they saw us.
All the kids in the neighborhood wanted to play with Ferdinand at first, but after some of them got rashes from petting him too much, their parents made them stay away. Some kids even started throwing rocks at us and calling us freaks. When I told Dad about it, he just said, “So what else is new?” Mom got mad, though, and it sort of started an argument. She said she was going to confront the kids’ parents, but Dad said she’d just make it worse.
Ferdinand was the best pet anybody ever had. He never barked. He “Ipped” a lot, but it wasn’t loud. He purred when he slept, and if he was hungry he did something Mom called “mewling.” We didn’t have to buy any special food for him. He ate pretty much everything but green vegetables. He liked raisins. His favorite food, though, was stuff he caught in the backyard, like grubs and beetles and stuff. Mom really liked it that he ate pests that were always trying to eat her garden. One time he even caught a mole.
He was clean, too, which was kind of funny since he was so dirty and smelly when we found him. He could lick himself all over, like a cat, except instead of his tongue he used his tail. Sometimes his tail would keep licking even after he went to sleep. After he groomed, his fur would shine in the light, and it had a nice smell, like Mom’s sage plant. While we were at school and Dad was locked away in his shop Mom would let Ferdinand come in the house to keep her company after she finished her data compilations. Dad was worried about Ferdinand pooping, but the truth is, nobody ever saw Ferdinand poop. We found little black pebbles in the backyard that Dad took to his shop to analyze, but we never saw them in the house. Even Dad had to admit Ferdinand was the perfect pet, and pretty soon he spent more time inside than outside.
I wanted to take Ferdinand to school for show-and-tell, but Mom and Dad thought that was a really, really, really bad idea. They were right, but I didn’t know that until after. Usually, show-and-tell just meant everybody brought some expensive new piece of junk bought by their parents, or some expensive old piece of junk handed down by their grandparents. But sometimes kids brought pets, like a lizard, or snake, or one time even a tarantula, so I didn’t think Ferdinand would be a problem. But this was kind of a different show-and-tell, because the theme was “Gratitude,” on account of it was Thanksgiving. My new school was kind of a religious school, even though they let in kids like us that weren’t the religion, so everybody was bringing in things like the Bible, or a picture of Jesus, or a copy of the Constitution, or stuff about their family. One kid even brought his Mom, which some kids kind of laughed about, but the teacher, she loved it. I was the only one who brought a pet, but nobody knew it until I got up to show, because I had Ferdinand in the cardboard box he liked to sleep in.
When he jumped out, everybody kind of went “Whoa!” and they all crowded around to see. Everybody but the teacher. She started acting kind of nervous, and she told everybody to get back to their seats. One kid asked what was he, and I knew not to say a dog, because that always meant a lot more questions, so I said, “What do YOU think he is?”
Then some kid in the back yelled, “Chupacabra!” and everybody laughed, and they sort of started yelling the name out, and it got really loud, and somebody must have done something that startled Ferdinand, because he sprang straight up in the air like he does, and then they really screamed, including the teacher, and Ferdinand was trying to crawl under her desk, and she fell out of her chair and started kicking her legs trying to get away from him, and then Ferdinand did that thing he does when he gets really upset, and everybody started coughing and holding their noses, and one kid even passed out and had to be rushed to the emergency room.
So I got in trouble. When Mom and Dad came to get me at the Principal’s office they were really mad at first, but when the Principal started telling them what happened I could tell Mom was trying not to laugh, and as soon as Dad heard the word “chupacabra” he wasn’t much interested in the rest of it.
“Chupacabra!” That was my Dad. “Somebody said he was a chupacabra?” The Principal said yes, but that wasn’t important, and Dad said to Mom he’d never even thought of that, and he pulled out his phone to look up some images. The Principal wanted to talk about me being suspended, but Dad kept interrupting every time he found an interesting image of a chupacabra, and he asked if there was anybody on staff who knew cryptobiology. It seemed like the Principal got frustrated, and he said he had another appointment, so we left. When we got home I asked Mom if I was suspended, and she said she didn’t really know, and she asked Dad if he thought “chupacabra” was code for suspension, but he didn’t hear, because he was already headed for his shop. When he came out for dinner he had a book in his hand, and he sort of shook it in the air, and he said “No way he’s a chupacabra!” Mom said, “Of course not. He’s obviously the Mothman.” Dad said, “Ha-ha,” but it wasn’t like he was really laughing.
The funny thing was, Mom was kind of right.
That was around the time Dad built the microwave tower in the backyard. It was for some research he was doing. The neighbors didn’t like it, which Dad said he figured they wouldn’t, but he didn’t expect it to be “a whole thing.” A bunch of neighbors came around to watch him build it, but when they asked what it was, Dad said it was a teleporter. He didn’t laugh when he said it, so they didn’t either. Then somebody said something about an addition, and somebody else said something about a permit, but Dad said it wasn’t an addition, because it wasn’t attached to anything, and it didn’t have a foundation, so he didn’t need a permit. Then he said he was just kidding about the teleporter, he was really building a jungle gym for us kids.
The reason they couldn’t figure out what it was is because Dad didn’t build the tower straight up in the air, he built it sideways on the ground. He said it was just good engineering, but Mom said it was sneaky engineering. Dad said he “resented the implication,” and Mom said, if he wasn’t being sneaky, then why was he pouring the footings after dark, and Dad said, “That’s not sneaky engineering, that’s sneaky concrete pouring.”
The next day, Dad used an engineering trick to pop the tower up on its footings. A neighbor in his pajamas saw it and said he was calling the City Inspector, but by the time the Inspector got there we already had the transmitters mounted and the electrical rigged. The Inspector said we’d have to take the tower down, and Dad said he’d be happy to once he finished his experiment, and the Inspector said he’d get a court order, and the neighbor said he’d call a meeting of the Home Owners Association, and Dad said to Mom, “Next time, we’re moving to the country.”
Like Mom says, “That’s when things got hairy.” The neighbors always acted weird around us, but now we were getting dirty looks, and somebody kept stealing our morning paper, and one time I saw some people at the grocery store pointing at us and talking, and it seems like every day I heard Mom complaining to Dad that somebody had thrown some spit in our yard again, only she didn’t say “spit,” and she really meant litter. A bunch of people from the Homeowners Association came to have a “friendly talk,” but it didn’t turn out to be too friendly, just a lot of yelling.
Everybody was complaining that the tower was jamming their cell phones, but Dad said that was ridiculous, because he was operating on a different frequency from any consumer electronics. When the reporters showed up, Dad wouldn’t talk to them, so Mom went on camera to explain the experiment. She was really good, too. She put on her glasses that she usually only wears for reading and made her voice kind of low and scrunched her eyebrows together like when she’s mad. When we saw her on the news the reporter was acting really serious and asking questions like he understood what she was talking about, but it was all just a bunch of stuff she made up. We were all laughing, especially Mom, but Dad said it wouldn’t be so funny when she started getting turned down for research grants.
Mom didn’t think it was so funny either when a man jumped our backyard fence with a chainsaw. He wasn’t able to do too much damage, because Dad slowed him down with a paintball gun until the police came. The man was so covered with paint they didn’t want to put him in the back of their car until Mom gave them a plastic tarp to wrap him in. “Now THAT was funny,” Dad said, but Mom told him he needed to finish his work before things got out of hand. Dad didn’t seem too worried until two men in dark suits with badges in their wallets showed up one day and gave Dad a letter. Mom said, “FCC?” I think it was some kind of code. Dad just nodded and said, “Looks like we’ve got a deadline.”
But the worst thing that happened was when Ferdinand got shot. He was outside under the deck, mewling so soft we almost didn’t hear him. When we got him out his back and side were oozing all over, and he looked like somebody had stabbed him about fifty times with a big nail or something. Dad looked at him and said, “BB gun.” His face got red like I’d never seen before, and he picked up Ferdinand and brought him in the house, and Mom got the tweezers and alcohol and bandages, and it took us all night to pick the BBs out and patch him up.
Dad worked for two days straight to finish his work, while the rest of us stayed with Ferdinand, changing his bandages and feeding him bugs and worms and things we dug up in the backyard. On the third day, Ferdinand was gone. His bandages were on the floor in the kitchen and there was a little streak of ooze on the floor. At first we thought somebody must have broken in and kidnapped him, but then I remembered I left the glass door cracked to let in some fresh air after Ferdinand let loose one of his stink bombs. We noticed after dinner that his tail started oozing this sticky white stuff that was getting tangled up in his bandages, but when we tried to clean it off him he made his grumbling sound and did what Mom calls “cutting the mustard.” It was the only time he ever did anything bad in the house. We found some ooze on the edges of the door and a hole in the screen where Ferdinand must have chewed his way through. We couldn’t find him anywhere in the backyard, and we looked for hours all over the neighborhood. When it got dark we finally had to give up, and everybody was so sad nobody wanted any supper or could hardly go to sleep.
The next morning we heard Dad yelling from the backyard. He was up in the tower taking down the transmitters. That’s when he found it. It was the shape of a football, only about twice as long, white and just a little sparkly, like cotton candy, and it was hanging from the highest crosspiece of the tower, just under where the transmitters were mounted. “It’s a cocoon!” Dad yelled. “Ferdinand’s made a cocoon!”
We all took turns climbing up and looking at it. You couldn’t really see through it, but it was a little darker under the white, and you could tell he was in there. Dad told us not to touch it, but I couldn’t help it. It was soft, like a pillow, and just a little warm. I sort of petted it, as gentle as I could, and I guess I was up there kind of a long time, because Dad told me to come down. I didn’t say anything, just turned my face away so nobody could see and Dad said, “That’s okay, Son, just take your time.”
After I came down Dad said it was probably best if we didn’t bother Ferdinand any more, to just let him “do his thing.” Mom wondered if Ferdinand wouldn’t be safer if we brought him down and kept him inside where it was warm, but Dad said Ferdinand chose to be at the top of the tower, and as far as he was concerned he could stay there. When the two men in the dark suits came around again to see if Dad took down the transmitters they asked wasn’t he going to take down the tower, too, but Dad said he’d go to jail before he took down a single board of it. One of them said Dad could string Christmas lights on it if he wanted to, just don’t put up any more transmitters. Dad said maybe he WOULD put Christmas lights on it. The other one said something about they were the FCC not the HOA, and they “could give a chuck,” only he didn’t say “chuck.”
Dad didn’t put up any lights for Christmas, except when the neighbors kept complaining about the tower, he did put a big star at the top. Mom thought that was pretty funny, and she said the funniest thing about it was the neighbors were mad about the star but they were confused because it was a SIX-POINTED star. That was when the FCC men came around again to investigate why everybody’s phones went out. They didn’t find anything, and Dad was really surprised to hear about it, but he kept looking at Mom and she made the exact same face she made that time she put sugar in the salt shaker. It turned out the problem with the phones was a virus that only let people call 911. Every other call went to Correct Time. The virus only lasted a few days and then it went away. Everybody was sure it was Dad that did it, but Mom was the one, whenever she saw a neighbor on the street, would ask did they have the correct time.
That’s when we decided to move. We found a place in the country, and we’ve got ten acres and a barn with a cow and some ducks and chickens and we even have a cat that hangs around and he’s pretty friendly if you don’t try to pet him. We go to public school again, and that’s pretty good, because the country kids don’t try to be fancy and they like to do stuff outdoors and everybody’s got different kinds of animals like horses and goats and pigs and one family even has llamas. Mom says she might like to raise llamas, or maybe ostriches.
We thought the place in the country would be great for Ferdinand, but he had other plans. It was a few weeks before we moved, the first day it really got warm. We already moved everything in Dad’s shop and most of the stuff in the house to the new place, but Mom said we needed to stay to finish out the school year. Really, we weren’t hardly even going anymore, because all the important stuff we learned was at home anyway, so we knew the real reason was we were waiting for Ferdinand. We were out in the backyard grilling steaks when we heard a kind of rustling up in the tower. We all looked up, and that’s when, like Mom says, “Ferdinand emerged from his cocoon, a great, wingéd thing.” I like how she says “wingéd” with two syllables.
Dad kind of freaked out when Ferdinand swooped down and snatched a steak off the grill, but Mom said it would be all right, he was just hungry after his long nap and she hoped he didn’t burn himself. When Ferdinand finished his steak he sort of fluttered back down and perched on the rail of the deck. He stood on his hind legs, and he had wings that spread out like a bat’s but were colored like a butterfly’s. He was pretty, but kind of scary, too, with claws on his feet and horns on his head, but the same kind of smiling mouth and big, dark eyes. We all petted him, and his fur was soft and warm and didn’t make us itch like it used to. His tail was still kind of tricky, though.
Ferdinand wasn’t as friendly as he used to be, but in a way he was even better, because it was like he was watching over us. He perched up in the trees during the day, and he called out a warning if anybody ever came around to bother us, which nobody did any more. He didn’t “Ip!” like he used to. He cooed like a dove when he came down to see us, but when he was up in the sky he made a sound like “SCREEEE-AWWWW!” that made your hair stand up the first time you heard it. He never came in the house again. We still threw table scraps out for him, but mostly he found his own food. At night he circled the neighborhood like a giant hawk, and you could see him when the moon was out, a black shadow up in the stars. The way the neighbors used to complain about all the possums and raccoons and squirrels that got into the trashcans and bird feeders, you’d think they would’ve appreciated Ferdinand, but they liked him even less than before.
When we moved, Ferdinand didn’t follow us to the new place. Dad put a tracker on him, and we traced him all the way down into Nicaragua before we lost the signal. That was a year later. The day we left, and we were packing up the last of our stuff in the van, it was like Ferdinand knew what was happening, because he circled around and around over the house, watching over us. “Keeping the riff-raff away,” Mom said.
It was Sunday morning. All the neighbors were sleeping in, I guess, and there wasn’t a car, or a kid, or a dog on the street, and not even a bird anywhere I could see. Dad said “Saddle up!” and my brother called “Shotgun!” like he always does and got in behind Dad, because Mom told him that was the shotgun seat. I boosted my sister up so she could sit in the middle, but I waited for Mom before I got in. She stood with the passenger door open and her foot on the step and she looked up in the sky and shouted, “Lean, Ferdinand! ‘Lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies!’” I think that’s from a book. She blew Ferdinand a kiss, and he circled one more time, and he let out a “SCREEE-AWWWW!” and then he shot straight south and disappeared like a jet into the clouds.
Mom climbed into her seat, and I pulled the door shut, and Dad squeezed her hand and put the van in gear and nobody said anything for a minute. The streets were empty, like a ghost town or something, and Mom said, “Think our neighbors will miss us?”
Dad looked at her, and he kind of smiled back at me and my brother and sister, and then he looked in the rear-view mirror, back at our house, I guess. He never did take down the tower, even after Ferdinand quit using it, and I could see it poking up above the roof.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Dad said. “But they’re ham sure never going to forget us.”
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Michael Compton is the author of the meta-mystery novel Gumshoe and co-writer of the 2011 movie thriller Carjacked and the science fiction saga Inferno 2033. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in Mystery Weekly, African American Review, and The Baltimore Review, among others. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with his wife, Sherry, and a houseful of stray dogs and cats.