Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

strawberries, and a dozen or so chickens, each and every one of them, to hear her tell it, “an absolute raging asshole.” The first time she said this I laughed, as I’d always thought that word was reserved for males. The same goes for “dick,” which she uses for females all the time-this raccoon, for example, that sometimes gets into our garbage cans. “Can you believe the nerve of that dick?” she’ll say to me, her nose pressed flat against the dining room window. Then she’ll bark, “Hey, asshole, go trash somebody else’s fucking yard.”

I attribute my wife’s language to the fact that she’s one-quarter spaniel. She says she’s only an eighth, but, come on, the ears say it all. That and her mouth.

Still, though, I can’t help but love her-forgave her even after she cheated. “They are too your children,” she’d said, referring to her last litter, a party of four that looked no more like me than that dick of a raccoon. I knew they were fathered by the English bull terrier across the street, but what are you going to do? Everyone’s entitled to one mistake, aren’t they?

I’d like to tell you that I hated this terrier right from the start, that I’d never, for one moment, trusted him. But what would that say about my wife and me, that our tastes are that dissimilar? If you want to know the truth about it, I actually hadn’t given the guy much thought. His ugliness I’d noticed, sure-those creepy little eyes. His stupidity was evident as well, but I can’t say I’d fashioned a formal “opinion.” At least not until this puppy business.

The litter was born, and not one week later the bull terrier bit a kid in the face, practically tore it right off, as a matter of fact. It was the little blond girl who lived in the house next door to him. I was in the backseat of the car, just pulling into the driveway, when the ambulance arrived, and, man, was that ever a scene. The parents were beside themselves.

“Oh well,” my wife yawned when I told her about it later that afternoon. “It’s not like they can’t have more children.”

I said, “Come again?”

She said, “That’s the way they feel about us, so why should we be any different?”

“So we need to stoop to their level?” I said. As for the bull terrier, my wife admitted that he was a hothead. She said he had a lousy sense of humor, but she never quite denounced him the way I needed her to. After he was trundled away and put down, she spent the day sulking. “A headache,” she said to the kids. “Mommy has a sick headache.” She claimed to have one the following day as well. On and on for a week, and all the while she had her eye on the house across the street, the place where her boyfriend had lived.

It wasn’t long afterward that the little girl came home from the hospital, her head cocooned in bandages. There were holes for her to look through, and others for her nose and mouth, all of them gunked up with their corresponding fluids: tears, snot, drool. Even if you hated children, you had to feel sorry for her. At least I thought you had to. My wife, though, I could see that she blamed this girl, thinking that were it not for her, the bull terrier would still be alive.

I figured she’d get over him eventually, and in the meantime I’d just settle back and be patient. It helped when our owner put an ad in the paper and got rid of those godforsaken puppies. Oh sure, I cried, but it was more for my wife than for myself. I don’t care what you hear about stepparenting, it’s just not the same when they’re somebody else’s kids. Don’t get me wrong-I wish them the best. I just don’t feel the need to see them again.

Now that it was just the two of us, I hoped that things would return to normal. It was then that our owner took my wife in for a hysterectomy. She was out cold for the operation, saw nothing, felt nothing, went to sleep fertile and woke up a shell, her uterus and whatever else was in there, gone.

I told her that as far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter in the least. To this she growled, “Oh, I’m sure it doesn’t. I’m sure you’re just fine with it.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

“You’re thinking that this will keep me from cheating on you again. Or that if I do at least nothing will come of it.”

It was like she was blaming me for the hysterectomy. I said, “Baby, don’t do this.”

She didn’t talk to me for three days after that. What was going through her mind is anyone’s guess. Me, though, I kept thinking about this Weimaraner I met once at the dog run. He had one of those owners who’d get on all fours and try to communicate with him, not just barking but lying on his back, acting submissive and so forth. There are quite a few people like that at the dog run-nuts is what they are-but this guy really took the cake. One morning last fall he went to the hospital and had his tonsils taken out. They weren’t raw or swollen or anything, he just wanted them. “In a jar,” he supposedly told the doctor. “And don’t trim off the fat.”

At the end of the day, he returned home, cut the tonsils into pieces with a steak knife, and hand-fed them to this Weimaraner, like, “Here, boy, I love you so much, I want you to have a part of me.”

“And?” I said.

“It was a lot like chicken,” the Weimaraner told me. So that’s what I wondered during the time my wife and I weren’t talking. What did her hysterectomy taste like? It was crazy, I know, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Did my thoughts bespeak an urge toward cannibalism? Or did the flesh in question-the fact that it was her uterus-reduce this to a normal sexual fantasy? I would’ve liked to have discussed it, but the way things stood, I thought it best to keep my mouth shut.

It was right about then, my wife wanting her boyfriend back and me entertaining these insane, dark thoughts, that the bandaged girl reappeared. It seemed there were some complications, an infection or something, and she had to go back to the hospital. We saw her through the living room window, just briefly, getting into the car with her parents. “Little Miss Priss,” my wife muttered-the first words out of her mouth in what felt like forever. Then she limped into the den and lay down in front of the TV. This is her way of being alone, as I hate the television. The programs are beside the point. It’s the machine itself I can’t bear. It stinks to high heaven, so I always stop at the doorway and park myself just this side of the carpet.

“That’s right, Mr. Snob,” my wife said. She always calls me that when we disagree about something, whether it’s a chew toy or the smell of an electrical appliance. “I guess I’m just not as well-bred as you,” she’ll say. And it’s true. She’s not. It’s also true that she’s the one forever bringing it up. It’s her own insecurity talking, the tragic self-hatred of a mixed-breed country girl, so I try to let it slide.

My wife mentions my bloodline when she’s ticked off, of course, and then again whenever I get sent out on a stud call, which is not the same as cheating, I don’t care what you hear. Infidelity involves a choice, while this is arranged by forces beyond my control. “These females don’t want me any more than I want them,” I tell my wife. “It’s not an affair, it’s work. It’s my job, for God’s sake.”

She says that if it’s a paycheck I’m after, I could just as easily lug around a blind person. “Or better yet, sniff out contraband, you and that selective nose that hates the TV but loves the smell of a book.”

“Not all books,” I tell her. And it’s true. I can’t stand thrillers.

It was in the midst of our difficulties, my wife’s stitches still tender, that I was sent to service a female a few hours west of our home. Normally it’s just “hello/good-bye,” but the land is beautiful in that part of the world. It’s wooded, with lots of hills, so rather than waiting for me to finish, my owner decided to drop me off and spend the rest of the day nosing around in his car. The act itself-it’s hard to think of it as sex-lasted no more than a minute. Then this female and I got to talking. She’s pure Irish setter, just like me, so we had that in common. Both of us had hookworms when we were young, and both of us, very coincidentally, love the taste and texture of candles. “As long as they’re not scented,” she said.

“The worst are those cheap vanilla candles,” I offered.

She agreed, adding that the “cheap” part was redundant. “All vanilla-scented candles are cheap.”

I told her about a cinnamon-scented candle I’d once chewed on as a puppy, and as she howled her sympathetic disgust, I thought of my wife and of how we would have sounded to her ears. “Arrogant,” she’d have called us. “Noses so high in the air you can’t smell your own farts.” This for the crime of preferring one thing over another.

“You know what else I hate?” I said to the female. “I hate air fresheners, coconut being the worst.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I think a pretty good case could be built against wild cherry.”

“Oh my God, wild cherry!” I said, and I hunched my shoulders, pretending to barf.

From air fresheners, we wandered on to padded toilet seats, novelty mailboxes, and Labradoodles. She’d just