coypu
Coypu
by chris.
Frames licked the sides of the pictures sitting in their bellies and as he walked between
them the hardwood floors creaked and moaned under his weight, throwing a full orgasm into
the air when he hit the right spots. White spotlights were centered on each hanging along
the wall, three per painting. He thought about the spotlights throwing sparks onto the
works. Would they ignite? They’d have to have lacquer or some kind of flammable something
on them to be sure. Would a few sparks ignite it? Probably. Maybe. He took a matchbook
from his pocket and stood a foot from the nearest painting. He slid the match across the
grit paper wrapped around the matchbook and it flared and sparked, then calmed and waited.
He held it close to the painting. Nothing, it just left a black residue on the paint.
But maybe this one didn’t have any lacquer or flammable something on it. Of course not.
An artist is poor. No, a good artist is poor. Yes. He can’t afford any lacquer or
flammable something. Poor as a rat. And definitely dirty as one, with paint streaking
all parts of his body. And you could see everything because he’d be naked. He’d have to
be. Yes. Naked, dirty, skinny because all he could eat was cadmium red from the tube and
wash it down with paint thinner.
The match began burning his finger and he blew it out, then spit on it, the wad of saliva
wrapping around the withered burnt match making it hiss, then dropped it on the floor. He
turned around and walked back down the hall, the floor moaning for him not to leave, and
pressed the button for the elevator.
“What floor?” There was already someone in the elevator, anxiously waiting to press
whatever button he was called to press. He didn’t work there, he was just a sad man.
He shook his head. “No, never mind. I’ll take the stairs.”
He reached the bottom of the building and opened the door to the first floor. There
was a teenager in a museum uniform waiting to open the door for guests. Next to him was a
clear donation bin. Clear donation bins. He looked inside it as he walked toward the door.
Why clear? A few wadded up dollar bills sat on top a mound of pennies, which probably didn’t
amount to more than five dollars. Maybe so someone could see the meager earnings the museum
had to deal with. But what if it were full of bills? People would probably be less inclined
to stuff any more money into the bin, thinking they had enough already, too much possibly.
With all that money can’t they hire someone to stop the fluorescent lights in the bathroom
from incessantly buzzing? Whoever ran the museum must know people would think like this.
Maybe they take most of the money out when it gets too full so they look like a struggling
art museum just trying to make it in the world.
When he got to the clear donation bin and the door opener he kept his wallet in his
pocket. He wanted to tell the teen this, to tell him that he wasn’t going to be one of the
stupid suckers today, sorry. The teen swung the door open and smiled.
“Have a good day sir.” He held the door behind his back with both hands and squared
off.
“Yeah.” He looked like a movie theatre usher in the uniform. The teen nodded at him
as he walked out and kept smiling. Always the smile. Why was he still smiling like that?
He’d already gone by the clear donation bin. He considered going back and putting a big wad
of lint in it, but when he turned around the door was already closed and the teen was smiling
and waving at him. The smile was too creepy to reenter the building just for spite.
His house was a little less than a mile away. He walked. His house was a brown duplex
that looked depressing as the inside of an abandoned asylum. He made that comment to a girl on
their first date. They had already gone out to eat, and they were walking toward his door when
he said it. In truth it didn’t actually look like an asylum (what does an asylum look like?)
but the building was old and worn and full of ghosts. Thick dark brown trim lined the corners
of the once white walls. They were now yellowed and smudged with dirt and cracks climbed their
way up from the foundation to the roof.
“Have you ever been in an asylum?” she asked him.
He laughed and looked at her, but she kept a completely straight face and stared up at him with
her arms crossed, her purse hanging from her shoulder.
“I don’t have to answer that,” he said.
“I’m serious. Have you ever been in an asylum?”
He sighed and looked at his neighbor’s porch. His neighbor caught and killed nutria around local
rivers for a living. When he caught them he nailed them by their tail to his porch banister and
every time he finished nailing up his catch he screamed, “Coypu!” When there was no more room
for any more nutria in what his neighbor called the hot season he’d take the oldest ones and lay
them in his back yard. He’d gotten used to the stench.
“I’m serious too. I don’t have to answer that.”
She slowed down. “You’re really creeping me out. Please, just tell me. Seriously.”
They never entered his house, and she didn’t want to be in his car. She asked him to go in
and call a cab for her.
“Why don’t you come in and call a cab?” he asked her.
Her eyes and mouth opened wide. “Oh, yeah. Right. I’m going to go into your house. You’re
out of your mind. What the hell is that smell?” She looked around. It was too dark to see
the nutria next door. They all hung there upside down with a nail in their tail, forelegs
hanging down to the ground and hind legs splayed awkwardly to either side. A line of blood
from wherever the bullet hole was, usually the head, dried and clung to the fur and some dripped
to the ground. She should smell them in July.
“Fine, I’ll call you a cab.”
“Thank you,” she said, and pivoted on her foot and walked to the curb.
He watched from the window as her taxi pulled away. He wasn’t really surprised, or hurt. He
couldn’t seem to conduct himself correctly on dates. He was even somewhat relieved. His
neighbor would be home in an hour or two with the night’s nutria. He always nailed them up as
soon as he got home, which was always in the middle of the night because nutria only come out
at night. But yes, he was relieved; he hadn’t been into his neighbor’s house for several
nights, mostly due to circumstances out of his control.
He got a butter knife out of his kitchen drawer and went outside through the sliding glass
door in the back as quietly as possible. His neighbor didn’t have a car so he could never
really be sure whether or not he was at home, unless, of course, lights or the television
were on inside. But tonight the house was dark.
He got to the sliding glass door. The locks on them weren’t really locks. Anyone with a
flashlight and a thin blade could unlock them. He had done it so many times he could do it
in the dark. He wedged the knife between the sliding door and the wall, right below the lock,
and pushed up. The lock popped open and he slipped the knife into his pocket and slid the door
open very slowly, carefully, quiet as cancer. He was always cautious, all his moves deliberate.
He achieved this by pretending that his neighbor really was at home, asleep in his bed. If he
did anything that made a noise that he himself could hear he stopped it, or did it more slowly.
The door opened into the kitchen. He stepped inside and listened. His neighbor always snored,
he could hear him through the thin duplex wall each night. There was no snoring, nor was
anything turned on in the house except the refrigerator, whose generator clicked on every five
or ten minutes.
The kitchen light couldn’t be seen from the road; there was a wall and door between the back
of the house and the front. He flipped on the switch, turned around to face the kitchen, and
said, “Shit.” For a second he thought he had just said it in his mind and was debating whether
or not he should say it again to make sure.
“You’re damn right, ‘shit,’” his neighbor said. He was sitting at the kitchen table, slouched
down in one of the plastic lime green chairs. “What the hell are you doing in my house?”
Four nutria sat in front of him on the table with their mouths hanging open and blood dribbling
onto the cracked and peeling lime green table. His pistol with an attached silencer sat next
to a bottle of polish and a greasy red rag. The weapon shined with its new triple coat of polish,
applied liberally every night.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?” he repeated.
“I wasn’t going to steal anything,” he said.
“Then what the hell do you want here?”
“Just time. I mean,” he shifted his weight onto his left leg. “I just wanted to…” his eyes
flashed down, then back up to his neighbor. “To look around.”
“I know you’ve been in here before.” He leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “I’ve
seen you leaving. Would have followed you, but I wanted to figure out what the hell you were
doing. Searched my house up and down looking for something you might have taken. But I don’t
have nothing worth taking. ”
“No, I’m not a thief…”
“A crazy son of a bitch is what you are.”
“I’m not a thief. I never stole nor meant to steal from you.”
“Then what the hell are you in here for?”
“I get tired of my house sometimes. Just want to…see how someone else lives.”
His neighbor leaned forward resting an elbow on the table and putting his other hand on his
hip, hooking his thumb into his belt loop. “You’re a psycho, you know that? Have you got your
dead momma laying in your bed too?”
“My mother lives in Florida.”
He pointed his thick, calloused finger at him. “Don’t get cocky with me, you little bastard.”
He paused, thought for a moment, then waved his hand in the air and put his arm back on the table.
“Hell, get cocky. I’ve already decided what I’m going to do with you.”
He shifted his weight onto his other leg and waited. Was he supposed to ask him what now? Or
was it implied? If it was he didn’t really know where to go from there.
“Eh? What’s wrong? No more cock left in you?” He grinned.
“I guess not.”
His neighbor stood up, picking up the pistol as he did. The tip of the attached silencer dragged
along the table until it dropped off the end and the gun hung in his hand. “I kill nutria at
night,” he said. “The silencer,” he made a motion with the gun and looked down at it, then back
up at him, “is because I respect the people around me, my neighbors. It don’t pay much (why I
have a day job, of course), but I do it for my neighbors. See all the respect flying out of my
little heart for my neighbors?”
“Yeah,” he smiled. “I guess that’s a real nice thing you do.” He briefly wondered what his day
job was. He always presumed the whole nutria thing was his life.
“It is, it is. These rodents aren’t pure evil, but they’re a nuisance. Kind of like what the
Devil’s minion’s minions might be like. Just cause a little mischief, don’t do too much terrible
harm, but in the end we don’t really need them.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“So I get rid of them for my neighbors. But you sneak into your neighbor’s house. You might not
be doing no harm, but you sure aren’t doing no good. It’s no good for me to have you just coming
into my house when I’m out trying to be a good citizen. Can you see that?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose I can.”
“So we’ve reached an understanding?”
“Yeah, we have.”
His neighbor raised the gun to his chest and shot three times. He fell back through the open
sliding door and landed half on the patio and half in the kitchen. The tray that the door slid
along dug into the small of his back. He tried to force air into his lungs, but it kept getting
harder and harder. With each breath blood gurgled into and out of his chest through the holes,
then soaked into his shirt. He didn’t know what happened after that.
He pulled the body out into his back yard. Countless nutria skeletons were scattered around them
and crunched underneath them while the fresher ones made squishing noises. He pulled by the arms,
the head hanging back and mouth open, hair dragging through the grass and corpses. He stopped
in the middle of the yard and dropped the hands. The body fell with the head still back, so he
picked it up, aimed the face toward the sky, and dropped it so that the neck sat straight.
He picked up the four fresh nutria off the kitchen table by their tails and carried them to the
front of the house with a flashlight and hammer. He inspected the already hanging rodents on
the railing and finally pulled the nails out of four tails of the rodents that looked the most
decayed. They dropped to the ground and he nailed the fresh ones in their place and screamed,
“Coypu!” He picked the old ones up by their tails. The thing about nutria is no animal wants
to eat the tail. It’s full of disease and feces (more so than the rest of their filthy bodies)
and doesn’t really contain anything worth consuming. But it is the only logical means of picking
them up. It runs straight back from the spine, and it’s part of the spine; it doesn’t disconnect.
The rest of the body grows off of the spine, so if you want to get most of the animal’s body the
best bet is to pick it up by its tail and hope that the rest of it has stayed connected so you
don’t have bits of nutria falling everywhere.
He took the four old carcasses through the house out the back and laid them down carefully next
to the carcass too big to nail to the railing, went inside, turned out the light in the kitchen,
and went to bed.
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