The Pond
by Joel Gordon
“Quotidian” by Michael Moreth
When you buy a house, no one tells you how many animals will die on your property.
Much to our surprise, the man-made pond in the backyard had been full of koi, a dozen mature, orange-spotted fish that the realtor, weeks after we had closed on the house, had insisted were the former owner’s prized possessions. Although we had intended to drain the pond, fill the basin with soil, and grow an heirloom-tomato garden—Brandywines, Green Zebras, Cherokee Purples, the seeds already bought—we were now stuck with koi we didn’t want, koi we didn’t know how to take care of, koi that were less a prized possession than a burden attached to a house that had already caused so much unwanted stress. When they vanished, leaving only a few bloody scraps, sunbaked and pungent, on the lip of the pond, I felt terrible, as if I had wanted this tragedy to occur; but these were hardly the last creatures that would die here.
I asked my wife when she had last gotten a check-up. She said that she had gotten a strep test at the urgent care a few months ago, when our son had brought the infection home from school. But when had she last gotten a check-up? She said that she had visited her OB-GYN a year ago for symptoms of early perimenopause. But not a check-up, I said, not a real check-up, with a full battery of blood work and age-appropriate screenings, the kind I had just scheduled for myself. Did she know that the AMA now recommends colonoscopies for everyone over 45? She said that she still felt sad about the OB-GYN, who had died a few months ago while hiking in Will Rogers State Park. You need a check-up, I insisted, pointing out, once again, that I had just scheduled my own. She said, “We should have sent a card to Dr. Saltzman’s family.”
A bird, not much larger than the koi, floating in the pond, its wing snagged on a line of razor wire the ex-gardener had installed and I hadn’t finished removing. My wife held out a trash bag while I detached the corpse from a metal burr. Later that night, when raccoons scampered above our bedroom, then jumped to the cypress tree, down to the backyard, and into the pond, I told my wife that we had likely found the koi killers. She said, “I don’t think so. Those fish lived for ten years in that pond.” But look at them, I said. The raccoons were back in the water, at the scene of the massacre. My wife, who loved fuzzy animals and true-crime podcasts, knew these creatures had been wrongly accused. “They probably just want the fish food,” she said.
The house started to fill with old furniture, paintings, dishware, and other knickknacks that my wife picked up from estate sales. When we had first moved in, she had helped the realtor arrange a sale at our house, offloading the late owner’s rugs and furniture, and afterwards had developed, in her own word, an “addiction.” Every weekend, she disappeared for a couple hours, drove to Beverly Hills or through one of the nearby canyons, and returned with a car full of once-valuable items bought cheap. She gave me an ornate edition of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales owned by a co-screenwriter of Hud. She placed a ceramic cockatoo, owned by an actress who had appeared in multiple Murder, She Wrote episodes, on our mantle. She went to work seasoning twelve cast-iron pans neglected by a famous game show announcer.
Under the cypress tree: a squirrel, long, limp, and bent like a protruding tongue. While I stood there waving for my wife to come out from the kitchen, our dog Trixie barked at the door, eager to snatch the corpse. This time, my wife shoveled the body while I held out the trash bag. We told the kids to stay with Trixie, to keep the door shut so more flies wouldn’t get in, but eventually all three found their way outside. My daughter, Florence, who had not seen a dead animal in years, at least not since we had found a stray neighborhood cat hit by a car outside of our old apartment, burst into tears. I told her that it was okay to cry, that it was a natural response to the inevitable cycle of life and death, but she shouted, “Why does it look like that?” and ran back inside. My son, Jack, seemed more curious than frightened. He inched closer. I held Trixie, who would have dragged the dead squirrel to whichever corner of the house where she hid the plastic food wrappings and carrot ends purloined from the trash. In bed, later that night, I joked that the raccoons had probably pushed the squirrel out of the tree. My wife showed me an article on her phone about “protecting your koi pond.” The most dangerous predators were not raccoons but herons, especially in Southern California, and the razor wire I had removed from the pond had been the best line of defense against those birds.
The doctor instructed me to give up red meat, stop drinking alcohol, exercise sixty minutes per day, and take the occasional Vitamin D supplement. I asked him what would happen if I didn’t follow his instructions. He took out his phone and typed in a few numbers gleaned from my chart. “At your age and weight,” he said, “and with your medical history, you have a roughly seven percent chance of heart attack or stroke in the next fifteen years.” I nodded, pretending this was a real danger, as if I needed to change my life for a measly seven percent chance of heart attack or stroke. Seven percent hardly seemed worth going through with the appointment and getting my blood drawn, let alone changing my entire diet, and what about the nearly three hundred dollars I dropped every month on life insurance premiums? The term would expire in fewer than fifteen years. On the way home, I picked up In-N-Out and a bottle of gin.
A second bird near the neighbor’s fence line, still on our property though not close to any second-floor windows; a striking bird, with reddish collar feathers and sharp triangular tail feathers; a bird that I would have been thrilled to see alive when I finally sat on a deck chair, following a long day of work, and sipped a cold beer while scrolling through social media, maybe even posting a picture of the bird with the caption, “Meeting the new neighbors!”
I asked why she had wanted the faded print of an English fox hunt, which now went up on our living room wall next to the black-and-white photos for which she had paid a small fortune when we had lived together in the apartment, low-salaried but child- and mortgage-less. “I like it,” she said of the kitschy painting, “and the man who owned it directed more movies than anyone else during the silent era.” I had never heard of him. Were the movies good? “He made nine hundred! And another forty after sound came in!” But, I said, if they weren’t any good, why— “The woman running the sale told me she was just going to throw everything away.”
A second squirrel, this one a baby, not quite dead yet. My wife ran outside to wrap it in a dish towel, take it into the garage, and nurse it back to health with an eyedropper of milk and a small dish of cat food. When she came back in, I asked if we really need to take responsibility for another animal. Early in our relationship, she had brought home a kitten, Zazie. I had complained that she should have put more thought into the adoption, that I was careful about spreading my devotion, that as soon as I let myself love this creature, to care for this creature, to commit so much of myself to this creature’s maintenance, I would also be setting myself up for the heartache of losing that creature. When you have children, I had told her, you expect them to outlive you, but when you have a pet, the loan is on more unfavorable terms. “I’m not adopting the squirrel,” my wife said now. “I just don’t want Florence to see it die in front of her.” I walked back inside, slamming the door, shouting to no one that more flies were getting in.
I couldn’t believe that herons had swooped down and lifted out a dozen or more large koi just because I had taken up the razor wire. If this were true, I would have seen another heron in our yard, or at least flying over the house, in the weeks since then. Not wanting to challenge my wife’s affection for the animals, I looked up humane ways to keep raccoons off our property. The animals appeared to use the cypress tree to access the back yard from our roof and a second tree, on the other side of the house, to access the roof from the front yard. I knew that my wife would not want the cypress tree cut down—the former owner and her husband, who had built the house and died on the property fifty years later, had planted it themselves—but this second tree, the one on the other side of the house, seemed expendable. Based on my description of the tree, the size and location, I got an estimate: $10,000. I started researching shotguns instead.
They took turns bottle-feeding the injured baby squirrel with formula overnighted to our house from a company our vet knew. I started work on the tomato garden—my belated house-warming gift to my wife. While I removed water lettuce and threw it into a nearby trash can, I heard yapping from the back door. My daughter had been trying to slip outside but Trixie leapt over her foot and was now running toward the garage. By the time I caught up to her, Florence not far behind, the dog had grabbed the baby squirrel and was shaking its lifeless body.
Florence continued to have trouble sleeping, and my wife slept in her bed all but two days out of the week. This left me alone in the master bedroom, waiting for raccoons to scamper down past the window, expecting Zazie, now twenty, arthritic and senile, to yowl for attention a couple hours before sunrise. Why had we let the kids see the dead squirrels? Kids should be aware of death—read about it in books, watch it portrayed on screen, hear about it second-hand—but they shouldn’t see it. One after another, the carefully sustained practical jokes that make up parenthood had been revealed. A corpulent man depositing gifts every December 24th. A fairy confiscating fallen teeth from under pillows. Platitudes about heaven or karma or how we can’t know what we don’t know. For years, we had faked this occult knowledge, but now Florence had started to understand the joke. And it was keeping her up at night.
One day, I found a yellow stain in the spot where Zazie usually slept. I didn’t point it out right away to my wife. Instead, I took the sheets downstairs and washed them twice, with bleach, in hot water. When a trace of yellow remained, I just turned the sheets so that the stain would not be visible from the bottom corner of the bed. A day later, I saw another yellow spot where Zazie slept. By the time my wife and I were together, after dinner, washing the dishes, she had already seen a couple more pee spots on the sheets, along with a turd outside of the little box. I suggested we take Zazie to the vet. My wife started to cry. No vet; they would just put her to sleep.
#
The smell must have been there for days, but neither of us had mentioned it, likely because I was avoiding taking out the kitchen trash and she was avoiding the dishes that had been accumulating since our Tuesday “spaghetti bolognese night.” We can’t have that smell in here, I finally said, asking if she ever wondered what would happen if Social Services walked through the door today and saw how we lived—the dishes, the piles of laundry, the swarms of flies, even a few maggots under the trash bin. Not that they would be able to walk very far inside, I added, without tripping over the headboard that had been sitting in the front hall for weeks. “It was Tony Shalhoub’s headboard,” my wife explained, as if that excused the clutter. Tony Shalhoub’s still alive, I pointed out. “Living people have estate sales, too,” she said. “Maybe the smell is coming from the trash?” But when I finally removed the trash and she finished the dishes, the smell only got worse. Within days, the first floor was uninhabitable. The gardeners, coming around the back the following Monday to fetch the bin for yard clippings, hunted down the smell to the crawl space under the guest bedroom, where a rat had died next to the water heater.
During the final days of the school year, Jack’s teacher took me aside when I arrived to pick him up and showed me a stack of papers with my son’s “free drawing” assignments. Dead squirrels? I asked, amused by the cartoon Xs over their little eyes. “Dead baby squirrels,” the teacher said. “I’ll give you our school therapist’s contact information.”
One night, Zazie got up to drink water and use the litter box four or five times. She yowled for attention. She rubbed against my shoulder and insisted on pets. The next night, she stopped moving completely. She lay stretched out, her soft tufts of belly fur exposed. I thought of the baby squirrel. My wife sat with her for most of the weekend as I arranged for a vet who would make a house call and put Zazie down. She died in my wife’s arms. Jack spent a few minutes with her, but got up quickly to leave, uncertain of his obligation. Florence wouldn’t come into the room at all. Before the vet had even injected Zazie, I had thrown out the old sheets.
In June, my wife took the kids to her parents’ house for the summer. The trip had been planned long ago, but originally for two weeks rather than two months. I asked if this was because I had refused delivery of a dresser once owned by a recently deceased Tonight Show producer. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m just trying to take a break from that house, from thinking about Zazie. And the kids need time with their grandparents.” I started working outside again, hoping to drain the pond in time for next year’s tomato season. I didn’t want my family to leave for such a long trip, but my wife insisted that the vacation had nothing to do with me, that I could join them if I got a week off from work later in the summer. She said that she owed her parents a visit, especially after all their help fixing my credit problems before we had bought the house, nearly $80,000 loaned to us so I could pay off Sallie Mae, Visa, and the IRS. She said that Florence had been having trouble sleeping here and often felt more comfortable at my in-laws’, where she liked sleeping in my wife’s childhood bedroom.
Between clumps of water lettuce, I saw a silver glint, like a dropped coin twirling to the bottom. Although I had intended to use the garden hose to siphon out water, drain the pond, and start scooping out the mud that had accumulated at the bottom, I now left the hose on the ledge and started pulling away the water lettuce, chasing the silver glint to the other end of the pond before getting a clear look at this miraculous survivor. What had it been eating? Where had it managed to hide from the heron massacre a few months ago, or from the raccoons since then? I didn’t even care that its presence would keep us from growing tomatoes for another year. I nearly cried when I saw that swift, healthy-looking koi. I wanted to build a shrine to it.
A rattlesnake, clearly run over, its middle third torn open, exposing a brittle ribcage, the skin around the gash rippled with ash gray tread marks. I suspected that it had remained alive just long enough to slink the five or so feet up to my driveway, where it had died.
The usual scampering on the roof woke me up. I heard the crackling of cypress branches, followed by clomps of raccoon paws above my head. This time, though, downstairs, on the side of our house beneath the master bedroom’s window, I also heard the crackling of someone or –thing on dry leaves. I looked outside but it was too dark to see anything. I went downstairs, into the guest bedroom beneath mine, and stood at the window, listening to what sounded like a quiet snarl, like something monstrous trying to catch its breath. A low growl. I thought that maybe a coyote had chased the raccoons to our house and up the cypress tree. Even Trixie seemed stunned. For once, she didn’t bark at the intruder. The next day, my wife called and said that someone on Nextdoor had posted about a mountain lion coming down from the canyon walking along a street two blocks from our house. I heard it! I told her, though she remained skeptical. “Probably a coyote,” she said. When we got off the phone, I went outside and checked to make sure the fish was still alive. I locked all of the gates around our house. I barely slept that night.
#
I found dead flies everywhere, in every room, in the weeks after my family left. When I saw one alive, it would seem listless, waiting on the kitchen window, resigned to the swatter. Even the maggots were stillborn, looking like grains of rice spilled under the trash bin.
I couldn’t send it in a text or tell it in a voice message. I wanted to hear them reacting to news of the miracle fish, which I had already named Purgatorius, in honor of our oldest primate ancestor. I would explain to the kids, especially Jack, who already read books on biology and evolution, that the Purgatorius was probably the missing link between humans and the world of the dinosaurs, the lone mammal survivor of the asteroid that had destroyed much of life on Earth. When my wife finally answered the phone, she said that the kids had gone for their annual check-up, and they had stopped for pizza on the way home. You got them a doctor near your parents’ house? I asked. “Why not?” she answered. We chatted about the kids’ health, how Jack might need glasses, how Florence was sleeping peacefully through the night, by herself, in her own bed. What about a check-up for her? I asked. Could she also arrange that near her parents’ house? “What an idea,” she said, her tone that of a half-heartedly raised middle finger. Only after we hung up did I realize that I had forgotten to mention Purgatorius, the miracle fish, so I sent a picture instead, a cropped close-up attached to a text: GUESS WHO?
When I spotted the woman behind my car, I turned around, walked back to the house, and locked the door. Not that this woman—a homeless woman who spent most of her time outside the corner donut shop, chatting to no one, playing with her white maltipoo, earning scorn from the worst Nextdoor posters—threatened me in any way. I just hadn’t expected to see her hiding behind my car, holding her dog carrier to her chest, weeping into the crook of her arm. An hour later, when I confirmed that she had left, I realized that I hadn’t seen a dog inside the carrier. Nor did I see one the next day, when the woman returned to her spot outside the donut shop. I refused to consider the less-terrifying possibilities, such as the dog simply running away from the woman. I could only think, This is where things come to die.
I bought the plywood, stacks of plywood, more than enough for seven traps. I bought rolls of metal mesh, boxes of nails in every size, and a new hammer because I couldn’t find our old toolbox in the hall closet, which had been stuffed full of items once owned by marginal celebrities. I tossed the bundle into the backyard, next to the pond, and brought up the video on my phone that explained how to make the trap. A man and his two young children all worked together to build a long, skinny box in which the raccoon would step on a pressure point near the food, triggering one of the two doors. All three of them wore camouflage-patterned sweatshirts and Detroit Tigers baseball caps. The second door, at the other end of the box, would be used to release the animal into the wild later. Maybe thirty seconds into the video, I realized that this family had table saws and power drills and even a nail gun. I hadn’t even bought wood glue. I closed the video and searched for “simple DIY raccoon traps.”
I sat next to the pond, trying to read Hawthorne, but couldn’t finish a single paragraph. I kept leaning over to confirm Purgatorius was still swimming under the murky surface. After an hour, I heard the dog, still inside the house, barking at the window that looked onto our front lawn. Fearing the worst—a daytime coyote raid, another homeless woman with another terminal maltipoo—I unlatched the side gate and walked up to the front of the house, seeing an old couple standing just inside the gate. Perhaps they had wandered in from the nursing homes down near Ventura. Excuse me? I called out. The woman, holding up her phone, as if getting ready to film the encounter, apologized. Is there something I can do for you? I asked. “Oh, no,” the woman said, “we saw the raccoons up there. I wanted a picture for our granddaughter. So adorable…” No, I told her. Not adorable. I told them to leave. I told them that this was my house, my property, and they had no right to trespass. “Now wait a minute,” the man started, but I cut him off: My property! My house! Go die somewhere else!
Enough is enough, I told her. I had finally done the responsible thing—the blood work, the colonoscopy, the lectures about my diet—so when did she plan to have her check-up? What were the odds that she, who ate and drank exactly what I ate and drank, was in perfect health? “It’s none of your business,” she said. “Stop telling me to go to the doctor.” I pointed out that we had reached middle age together and now if we wanted to grow even older as a couple, we needed to take care of each other. She looked to the edge of the FaceTime frame, toward where the kids were presumably off-screen and listening to our conversation. Isn’t that the whole point of this? I asked. “You’ve never tried to control me like this before,” she said, “please don’t start now.” This isn’t control, I said, it’s marriage. I expected her to do the same thing for me. “Well, don’t,” she said. “We’re both grown-ups. Can’t we just take care of ourselves?”
I spent most of the afternoon with Purgatorius, keeping Trixie away, on the likely chance she would jump in the water and claim another trophy. Later, the familiar stomping on the roof woke me up. I didn’t wait to see the creatures scaling down to our balcony or leaping onto the cypress tree. I grabbed my phone, clicked on the flashlight, and ran downstairs. Outside, sitting by the pond, I scanned the dark backyard with the light. After what might have been several hours, I awoke to the rustling of dried leaves and saw the raccoon clinging to the bottom of the cypress tree, its eyes reflected red in my flashlight. It loped away. To protect the last fish, I needed to stay out here, sleeping in the deckchair for however long it took. In the morning, Trixie remained at the door, inside, barking in the direction of the pond. I opened my eyes and saw an oil-slick hump of fur rising above the water’s surface, its face and paws submerged. Start with the smallest animals, I thought. Start with the flies, the fish, the squirrels, and work your way up. I couldn’t imagine lifting this thing out with the pool skimmer, let alone anything larger. I would have to call the Department of Sanitation’s roadkill service. It’s okay! I called to Trixie. I swear it’ll be okay! While imagining how and why this animal had died in my backyard pond, I saw the fish food scattered over the water’s surface and imagined it waiting until I had fallen asleep, jumping off the brick ledge, and slipping as it tried to find its footing beneath the water lettuce. And just as I started to worry about Purgatorius, my miracle fish, I saw a flash of silver inches from the dead animal as Purgatorius rose to the surface and grabbed, in its pulsating little mouth, the food that this poor raccoon had been trying to steal when it had drowned.
There are knots growing on the largest of the four cypress trees that stand in a single-file line between our garage and the back of our house. This was the tree that the raccoons used as an egress to the roof, which, until one of them drowned in our pond, they had used as a latrine. I searched online for information about these knots, roughly the size and shape of very large cinnamon rolls, and the most reliable sources hinted that the knots signaled the beginning of the end for cypress trees. Maybe the years of drought had finally taken their toll. Maybe we hadn’t cared for the trees properly. Maybe this is just the place where everything comes to die. I sit in the backyard with my family—my daughter laughing as she kicks a soccer ball away from the dog, my son poking at a video game on his iPad, my wife trimming back herbs in the clay pots she now uses for gardening, now that we have decided, for Purgatorious’s sake, not to drain the pond. I know that I will do nothing for the cypress trees. A professional would likely diagnose the malady and charge us $10,000 to cut it down. I watch the three members of my family going about their individual tasks and I look down to see the blood pulsing on my wrist. I can’t match the pulse to the rhythm of my heart. My breath catches. What will be the next thing that dies?
Joel Gordon lives in Los Angeles, where in addition to writing fiction he works as an attorney. He has recently completed a novel about the folk-rock scene in 1960s L.A.
Michael Moreth is a recovering Chicagoan living in the rural, micropolitan City of Sterling, the Paris of Northwest Illinois.