Dog War (15 page)
Precious had stumbled into the mistress’s bedroom and found her staring morosely at the ceiling.
“I’m thinking about the wildebeest migration, Precious. This month they’re dying by the thousands. Drought. Disease. Predators. Barbed wire. Poachers. They fall off cliffs. They drown in rivers. They die in wildfires. Believe me, you would not want to be a wildebeest this month.”
Not having the foggiest idea what a wildebeest was, Precious’s first impulse was to declare that she was proud to be Jamaican and let it go at that, but instincts told her that such an answer would not satisfy. Fumbling for words, she decided to-seek the anchorage of scripture. “God will provide, mum,” she said.
“God!” the mistress shrieked. “Who do you think made the wildebeest migrate? Do you think any free, sensible wildebeest would want to trek hundreds of miles across the African plains in the blazing sun to be eaten, broiled, drowned, scavenged, and torn from limb to limb? Who do you think gave the wildebeest this insane obsession to trek hundreds of miles to its death? God is not an animal lover! God would not be welcome in the ASPCA!”
With a curt “Come with me,” the mistress marched stupefied Precious into the sun room, where she put on a video on the wildebeest migration and forced her to watch.
Once she saw that the mistress had been fretting herself over nothing but a big-headed, horned African mule, Precious was unaffected by the program, which showed wildebeest falling prey to disease, flood, lions, wild dogs, alligators, hyenas, and leopards. However, as she watched with an occasional fatalistic shrug, she felt a stab of resentment at having Africa so blatantly thrown up in her face. She cared no more about ugly wildebeest than she did about unruly Africa, and she resented the implication that just because her skin was brown, between her and that dark continent ran an invisible umbilical cord.
“Now what do you think of your God?” the mistress challenged when the video was over.
Precious balked, mansion or no mansion, flung caution to the wind, and replied sharply, “God don’t have nothing to do with wildebeest. My God business only with souls. And nothing with horn on him head have a soul.”
“Why, you’re nothing but a meat-eater!” the mistress spat with venom.
“I am a Jamaican Christian, mum.”
“It’s the same thing!”
“Not all we Jamaican Christians eat meat, mum!” Precious maintained stoutly. “I know a parson in St. Elizabeth who eat only rice and peas.”
But the mistress was gone and the unfinished argument left wriggling on mansion floor among the trimmings of marble, crystal, and brocade, while wildebeest migration tape rewound on the VCR with a nonsectarian whir.
The mistress had never in her life met a denser and more obdurate mind than was encased in the cranium of this galling Jamaican maid, and she was determined to liberate it of narrowness, cultural imbecility, and human-centered vanity—or so she angrily announced to Mannish that morning. Once she had worked such liberation, she would exact delicious vengeance by firing the Jamaican. Nothing else would appease her unbounded rage.
Mannish suavely reminded the mistress that Riccardo loved Precious so much as to have claimed her within one day, an unheard of endorsement. The mistress paced agitatedly and said yes, yes, she knew all that and she respected Riccardo’s-judgment, but being in daily contact with a hardened meat-eater was driving her nuts. She had never before met such a wasted mind. It had been stewed in superstition, saturated fat, bogus theology, and rioting free radicals. Inadequacies of nutrition, education, and threadbare culture had conspired to destroy and lay waste its every cell. Membranes had been plucked and stripped bare by ignorance, neurons flayed by repeated religious homilies. Inside that cranium slushed nothing but cholesterol, goo, and petroleum jelly.
“Plus, Riccardo could be wrong! Have you thought of that?”
“He was right about IBM,” Mannish inserted smoothly.
The mistress looked sorely oppressed.
The next day after this conversation, Mannish warned Precious that she was upsetting the mistress with her stubbornness. “You are driving the mistress mad, is what I am trying to say.”
“She driving me mad, too! Have de nerve to come show me tape ’bout wildebeest migration and Africa! What those things have to do with me, anyway? I am a Jamaican Christian!”
Mannish sighed and said he understood, and that the mistress missed the point altogether about the wildebeest herd, which was nothing more than a parking lot for souls who wanted to reincarnate on the hoof rather than come back as humans and face such modern dilemmas as drive-by shooting and runaway inflation.
Precious stared at him. “De wildebeest, a parking lot? What is de matter with you, eh? Where you get dese ideas from? Souls are not cars and draycarts! Souls don’t need a parking. And if dey needed a parking, de Lord will park dem in heavenly garage, not in some big-headed ole African mule.”
“That is one way to look at life, heaven, and wildebeest. There are others ways, also.”
“But I have no fear about Mistress Lucy, for my Jesus will subdue her. Empires, monarchs, and kingdoms must bow down, and so will this American millionaire with a jet plane.”
“Why must you insist that she bow down? If she wishes to remain upright, permit her to remain upright. You are too strict with this business of bowing down.”
“She must bow because she is human, not God. And all must bow to God.”
The factotum sighed. “Soon now she will leave and take the beastly dog with her. Then we will have a holiday. We can eat hamburger and steak every night. It is so little to ask for life in a wonderful mansion.”
Precious admitted that she was fast reaching the stage where beans and cheese and yogurt and salad greens and sprouts were maddening her brain. Last night she had almost taken a bus to buy a hamburger. “I’m at de point where, so help me, even a wildebeest look tasty.”
Peering over his shoulder with a nervous shudder, Mannish shushed her savagely.
Now that the mistress was in residence the mansion glittered and rang regularly with fêtes and parties, which Precious came to relish. She delighted in the crunch of limousines cruising up the gravel driveway and her ear had become so sensitive that it could distinguish authentic Rolls Royce crunch from the bogus crunch of upstart Mercedes-Benz, frowzy Acura, to say nothing of slum-dwelling Cadillac.
Many of these fêtes and gala functions were hosted by the mistress in the honor of needy animals. There was a benefit for elephants; a ball for the white rhinoceros; a concert for the California condor; a rock and roll party for the snail darter; a dinner for the monarch butterfly and various formal teas and assorted soirées for alligators, lions, Bengal tigers, cheetahs, and hyenas. Precious learned to cook what the mistress termed “cruelty-free” dishes, vegetarian meals such as melon soup, ravioli stuffed with ratatouille, meatless black bean stew, carrot and asparagus mousse, and tofu ice cream.
At these functions there was no leather worn, no pigskin, fur, silk, or animal pelt or skin of any kind. Shoes were made of synthetic materials or rubber and guests regularly attended with their pets. Some Rovers and Fidos sported sweaters and vests, and Precious saw at least one Fifiadorned with a diamond choker. Weaving in and out of the assembled guests, serving cocktails and snacks, Precious overheard many highbrow conversations that she remembered long afterwards.
She overheard arguments over whether animal experimenters deserved to be shot, hanged, or parboiled; and one memorable dispute about whether vintage Rolls Royces should remain cowed or be decowed. Those who clung to the opinion that the Rolls Royce with its leather upholstery should remain cowed argued vehemently that since the cow was already dead and stripped of its hide for the upholstery, it would be a further waste to decow the Rolls by removing the leather and giving it a decent Christian burial as proposed by the decowing side.
Others just as passionately countered that they simply could not ride around in a Rolls Royce with a clear conscience knowing that the automobile seats had cost innocent cows their lives.
“I decowed my Rolls the day after I bought it,” Precious overheard an earnest gray-haired gentleman say primly to a matronly lady. “I had the leather stripped off and replaced with synthetic fabric. I could never drive around knowing that my back was touching an animal corpse!”
“But the cow is already dead!” the matron cried. “At least you give the cow a posthumous reason for dying by not decowing the seats. Otherwise, why did the cow die?”
“Let’s ask the meat-eater,” the dignified man suggested, using the nickname the company had dubbed Precious, who had been unofficially adopted as a mock mascot of the movement and was winding her way through the crowd carrying a salver of bite-sized raw vegetables.
Precious rather enjoyed this attention from such an elegant throng and made no attempt to dodge or repudiate her meateating reputation. When asked for her opinion on various ethical questions, she always delivered brisk judgments in a categorical tone. Here and now, for example, she declared that she thought decowing of Rolls Royces a criminal waste. If the cow was already dead and turned into a car seat, she thought it futility itself to try to turn the car seat back into a cow. As far as she could see, the decowing movement had been cooked up by grave-diggers to drum up business by encouraging wholesale burial of Rolls Royce seats. The debaters listened and pursed their lips after she had uttered this opinion and drifted out of sight, and one of them remarked that for a meat-eater whose brain had been corroded by animal fat she was surprisingly sensible.
During these meetings Precious also got to see some of the videotape commercials made for the animal rights movement to discourage meat-eating, the wearing of hides and pelts, and the upholstering of sofas and car seats with sheepskin and leather. One commercial made with funds provided by the mistress showed a man with mouth agape about to chomp into a hamburger when suddenly the patty was transmogrified into a miniature cow which raised one slice of the bun off his bloody head, begged the diner’s pardon, and said politely, “Excuse me, you may think I’m a Big Mac, but in fact, I’m actually the corpse of a dead animal.”
The cow then respectfully narrated the story of its short and violent life, beginning with memories of idyllic calfhood on the ranch when he cavorted in the company of his protective bull father and doting heifer mother; romped with his brother and sister cows, all of whom had since been slaughtered; loved to breathe the clean air of the mountain pastures and frolic among blossoming meadows. He told of the day when he was herded into a cramped truck and unceremoniously dumped into a slaughter yard in the company of his two sisters and a brother, all of whom milled around anxiously wondering what fate lay in store for them. With somber music playing in the background, the cow choked up as it related how he saw a man pole-axe his favorite sister and tried desperately to intervene but was himself set upon by butchers and felled by savage clubbing; how his carcass was dismembered and hung on a rotating belt, passing cutting stations where men and women with knives and saws reduced him from a recognizable life form to a bloody miscellany of chops, roasts, steaks, loins, stew meat, and hamburger, until he wound up in his present sorry state, smashed into a hapless patty, charred and grilled, slabbed between bun slices, and crowned with a corona of chopped onions and relish.
“Go ahead,” the cow gulped with a sob of sorrow and resignation, crawling back between the buns and lowering the lid atop his pole-axed head, “bite me! Enjoy your supper. Have a nice life. Mine is over, because of you.”
When the lights came back on, the audience applauded wildly and called rapturously for the mistress to come forward and take a bow.
Mistress Lucy curtsied and made a fiery speech vowing to see that commercial run on television even if she had to personally buy a station just for that purpose. Everyone roared approval and many in the audience jumped to their feet and begged her to run for governor. Just then Precious re-entered bearing a tray of cocktails, and a man in the back of the-room cried, in goodnatured raillery, “Boo the Jamaican meat-eater!” and a rush of taunting boos and jeers, more drunken than spiteful, crackled through the room.
Riccardo, trotting in her wake, snapped at one man who blasted a raucous Bronx-cheer at her temple as Precious walked past serving drinks with stoical dignity in the storm of pagan scoffing.
“Dog,” Precious scolded over her shoulder, “you is not me husband or me watchman! If face need boxing, I will box it! I-don’t need no dog to bite foot over me!”
Nevertheless, the heedless dog still lunged at the man and gave him an impertinent and unauthorized nip in Precious’s name.
A few days after this party Precious accompanied Mistress Lucy on a visit to the animal graveyard where Barbarosa, the mistress’s last dog, was buried. Precious sat in the front seat of the Rolls, wrestling with Riccardo in her lap, who kept trying to spear his nose deep into her crotch. After one particularly ugly spasm, during which she clamped her hand over the dog’s muzzle and aimed its probing nose at Mannish’s batty flattened out against the decowed upholstery, muttering inwardly to herself,
You want to smell something, smell a Coolie batty!
the mistress asked to have her pet. With a sigh of gratitude, Precious handed over Riccardo, who burrowed into the mistress’s lap, sniffing swinishly.
The cemetery itself made Precious shudder like she had laid eyes on wicked Babylon, for she saw the hand of grotesque mockery everywhere in the lush and rolling lawns grinning with memorial to
Rover
, cenotaph to
Fido
, gravestone to
Spot
, mausoleum to
Spike
. Some of the memorials had the statue of a leaping dog on the roof, with the name of the buried dog engraved in marble. Others sported statuary of fawning dog, fetching dog, barking dog, romping dog, all petrified in the death-grip of burial stone. The mistress trotted determinedly down a footpath until she came to the memorial to Barbarosa, an imposing block of rectangular stone with the usual masonry dog romping on its top.