Eating the Dog
Scott Indrisek

Pa’s whole division got sent over to India and slowly but surely the cupboards ran out and now we live practically like niggers, and all of this has definitely had a negative effect on Ma, who runs around the house half-naked shouting things and hitting Pa with all the pots and pans that aren’t getting used. Because there’s no food. It’s coming up on November now which means the famous wind from Canada will soon be upon us, tickling our toes and blasting through the window cracks, and since we became broke and all the electrical guy came over and told us Sorry Charlie, and then he pulled the plug. There used to be a law that said you couldn’t turn off the heat in the middle of winter, in case somebody was old or invalid and got sick and died. But they changed that law. So now I am starting to develop this troublesome frostbite-type ordeal that involves both my big toes, mainly the fact that they’ve taken on a bluish tint and I have no feeling left in them at all.

Sis Better is wheezing and coughing per usual on the couch in our shithole basement, her skin ashy and grayish and her kneecaps protruding like two sad baby’s skulls through the ripped knees of her sweatpants, which have the name of her old college alma mater stitched on the right leg. She can’t keep anything down. We tried ketchup mixed with water which is a way of making tomato soup that we learned from one of those public service announcements about poor people, back before Pa’s division got flown over to India and we started living like poor people ourselves, and we used to laugh at those ads while we munched on our beef Wellington in the kitchen and listened to lite jazz™ on the hi-fi system. I think this is called irony. Sis Better waves a hand timidly at me like she’s swatting at a fly while I am over here hunched in the corner scribbling away in the black leatherbound notebook which was a gift from my Aunt three years ago, so that I could write down my reflections and observations while I was away in Europe for that summer. The only thing I wrote down during that whole time was, The Spanish girl leans out the window and hangs her blouse up to dry.

Pa has resorted to getting himself approximately drunk by breathing in deeply all these chemicals and solvents that he’s found tucked into odd corners of the basement, which I don’t think can be very good for his health, but does put him in a sort of beatific and Zen-like state that allows him to suffer Ma’s abuse with grace and kindness. Ma herself is out collecting the tin cans with the other ex-PTO people and the church choir people, which is what she does every Tuesday, and afterwards they hitchhike en masse down to the city, where they attempt to eat their hearts out at the Ponderosa buffet by only paying one buffet price for seven people, a shady tactic that got them booted out of several likeminded establishments much closer to the house. Ma’s like that. She’s a prideful person but still she sticks to her guns. Comes home bloated and belching and sometimes, mercifully, with Tupperware boxes that she’s filled all up with chicken wings and pasta salad and Beef Teriyaki. Me I refuse to touch that shit after an old unrepentant Marxist professor of mine gave us the whole eyeballs-and-asshole speech. But Sis Better has no qualms, and what the hell. We’re starving. Tupperware buffet nights are happy occasions for her. I won’t begrudge joy. It’s a sight: think vicious spittle and unidentified flying animal parts.

*

I entertain. This is part of my job, unofficially, down here in the basement. The lightbulbs have all blown out or gone dead and we’ve got like one lamp left, a nice stainless steel number that used to reside in Pa’s den. I let Sis Better and Sis Lesser plop their bones on the old plaid couch and I train the lamp upwards, against the wall, careful because it gets so damn hot. The light splays on the concrete and makes a nice enough backdrop for shadow puppets. Sis Better is prodding me onward quiet feverishly to enact the entirety of ‘The Odyssey.’ I’m trying. It’s because she was Phi Beta Kappa back in the old days, before we went to shit. She speaks French and can pun in German. Most people think she’s terribly pretentious, but she’s my sister, so. She wasn’t bad looking, either, before she dropped like eighty pounds and became the Somalian that faces me now, cheering on my hand contortions.

Sis Lesser on the other hand is half retarded and I think suffering from some kind of post-traumatic shock syndrome that we don’t talk about. Year back there was a mercury spill in the foundation or something and she came tottering upstairs with like battery-acid caked around her mouth. It makes me sad to think.

Pa can’t fucking stand my shadow puppets and he says that I should be out in the backyards stealing tomatoes or at the very least scrounging through the garbage, but this is useless and he knows it. There’s nothing left. There were things worth taking for about a week. I came back with a case of Snicker’s bars and one of those Ab-Roller machines they sell on television. Suitable combination, when you think of it, but all Pa did was chastise me and lecture for like three hours about what awful shit corn syrup is and what it does to the human body. He’s convinced that I’m just not looking hard enough, as if there’s some organic vegetarian co-operative lying in wait out there beyond the train tracks, or any other fucking store that hasn’t been looted and licked clean. I’ve searched. There’s no point in leaving the basement anymore. We’ve still got a few pounds of canned tuna, and after that we can eat the roof beams for all I care.

I do my Sam the Chicken routine for Sis Lesser, and she goes predictably wild. Sis Better’s mouth is a wide chasm of pretentious boredom. Today she wants me to do the collected works of Tennessee Williams. I give her the evil eye as I make Sam the Chicken saunter down the main street of El Polloville. The thing about Sis Better is that she doesn’t realize the importance of human life except for her own. I guess a lot of people are this way, if they’re honest with themselves, but for my own sake I try to help out and sooth the lot of the less fortunate. Sis Better just flutters her eyelids and sighs incomprehensibly in French. I twist Sam’s face into a caricature of disgust.

—The roof’s leaking, Pa says. He’s crouched in the corner with a plastic bag and a rusty can of WD-40. —I’m getting the hell out of here for about two hours. Be the man of the basement while I’m gone.

When Pa goes out it’s normally with his one and only friend Brynn, another ex-IT guy, and they drink whiskey and grow belligerent, and eventually start prowling the streets for dotheads and turban jockeys, of which there are none, since the past year they got scared and either moved back home or stay hidden in their apartments with the shades drawn, and then Pa comes back a total mess, a really scummy degenerate shell of himself, just like desiccated and drooling, and he passes out on the cement floor like three feet from his own damn bed. In the morning he makes up stories about nonexistent dotheads that Brynn and him beat up and left for dead in some alley somewhere, serves them right, and then Ma starts berating Pa about tolerance and understanding, which doesn’t even matter because she knows he’s full of shit to begin with. He’s acting out, she’d tell us. Your Pa is coming to terms with his inner child. And so on.

What I want to know is: what happens when the cleaning solvents run out?

*

—More pathos and less raw physicality, Sis Better drones. I want to see the anguish on his face. And the way you’re doing Lady Macbeth makes her look like a bloated cow.

—I’m trying, for Christ’s sake. Like I’m a professional. I mean really.

—You’re all I have. Certain expectations need to be fulfilled.

I can see marks on Sis Better’s ribcage that look like the smudged fingerprints of ghosts. She’s dying, I think. She’ll never keep up. She’s not fit for gathering cans or pilfering garbage depots. Slotted for extinction she is, like the wooly mammoth and the dodo bird.

Pa is muttering to himself in the corner: chinks wops spics heebs faggots kiwis japs niggers towelheads nucks wops lesbos spades goatfuckers. And so on.

Around and around the apartment our two cats, Black and Grey, keep chasing each other. They’ll outlive us all. They disappear behind the walls and return sated, mouths slick with mouse blood.

—Tomorrow I want to see The Vagina Monologues, Sis Better says. And none of your misogynistic whining about it, either. If we’re going to be cooped up in this leaky basement we can at least broaden our horizons and get a bit of fucking culture.

—I’m going to work now, so everyone quiet up, Ma says, wiping her hands on an apron she’s wearing for some reason and making to walk toward her study, so-called, which is really just a 5 by 5 squat of concrete walled off with curtain rods. Ma’s been working on a romance novel—explication being that she’s read so many, so why fricken not—the bulk of which is a stack of yellowy paper that occasionally tumbles and blows round the basement in a draft. She says that it’s a typical period piece, set in like the 1800s in England, with all heaving bosoms and sweat-slick pecs (that’s my guess), but there’s also an element of mystery and intrigue to it, in good amounts, for suspense. She also claims that it’s autobiographical, in parts, to which Sis Better will make as if to hoot in laughter with lungs not quiet up to the heroic task.

*

Today Pa started to get sober, in that he stayed clean for like an hour, and rutted around the back of the basement looking for something. He came back with a few pieces of wood and some nails and a hammer. We looked at him like he was crazy. He hung a sheet from the ceiling in the corner and set to work and through the sheet we could see his outline hammering away like he was murdering something.

Pa says enough’s enough and he’s going to become a carpenter, just like Jesus H. Christ himself. He pulls the curtain aside and I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a lopsided chair there, four legs and all.

—Feast your eyes on this shit, Pa said. We’ll make millions. Everybody’s gotta sit their ass down on something. Supply and demand. Economics. Simple.

—Maybe tonight, Sis Better snorts, you could invent the wheel.

—Fuck off with your Yalie bullshit. Worst money I ever spent, that place.

—Hammering and yammering, Sis Better blurts.

*

Jesus Christ Superstar is ill-received. Sis Lesser starts crying until Sam the Chicken returns to snuggle her pert little nose. At the moment I’m boycotting all theatrical requests emanating from Sis Better, who’ll probably be dead soon, and hopefully if there’s an afterlife will regret the stubborn attitude she’s cultivated during these, our apocalypse days in the basement. Or maybe not. In any case we should be bonding together as a family in our misery, because that’s what’s supposed to happen in these kind of circumstances, but for some reason everyone is splitting apart instead, measuring out their own concrete corners of solitude, scouring empty pots or searching for bleach, rubber cement, anything.

Pa goes out more often and defeats armies of dotheads. By his reckoning the city streets are nothing but mountains of mangled dotheads, mounds of unwrapped turbans, cracked Sahib ribs... The bartender has agreed to extend Pa’s credit, which they both laugh about. All industry grinds to a halt and it’ll only be a few more weeks before shipments stop coming and our city becomes a dry spot, parched and lonely.

Gypsy caravans dot the horizon. Hunchbacked families slug their belongings in garbage bags, trailed by confused dogs, wending their way through the shelled wreckage of parks, ice cream stands, baseball fields. Brynn, the ex-IT guy, stops over to the basement to tell Pa that his wife Suzette is taking off with or without him, and he’d rather it be with him, so he just wants to say goodbye, and being a kind and merciful man he brings a care package for Pa, all the Brynn families surplus solvents and cleaners stacked neat in a cardboard box. Pa’s near tears he’s so grateful. Sis Better yawns and it’s like the air is being squeezed out of a broken bellows. The cats scurry, healthy and fat, bearing secrets coded in silent cat-language.

—Fine, Pa says after Brynn leaves. Be a coward. Go back to the city. Live in a beehive with the niggers and the spics. Clean floors with your tongue. Punch elevator buttons. Turn into an ape. Lose your pride.

—Your racism is getting tiresome, Sis Better says.

—Fuck off with that Yalie bullshit, Pa says.

—Guys, I say.

They glare at me like I’m a spastic.

*

I try, I really do. My hands get cramped, carpal-tunneled. I do Death of a Salesman. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Hamlet. Facsimiles of ancient Chaplin movies. Die Hard, parts one and two. The Passion of the Christ. Some experimental futurist stuff that leaves Sis Better gawk-eyed and Sis Lesser stunned. A whole Fellini retrospective. I do World War II but find my fingers inadequate. I replace the lamp’s lightbulb when it burns out. There’s part of me that thinks the shadows of my hands will scorch themselves into the cool grey brick of the basement wall. I do Brecht and Beckett. Angels in America and RENT, with the A.I.D.S. bits toned down on account of Sis Lesser.

I try, but everyone still wants more. I feel arthritic. Every now and then someone knocks on the basement door and we shut up. Ma’s gone quiet. I do slapstick and romantic comedy.

Pa curls up in the corner, asleep and cursing the furniture.

© 2006 Scott Indrisek