R.J. Bullock
Bob Frog
Summers, my father's office was cool as the clay mud under the big willow at Brown's Pond. The sunburnt farmers who used to lose whole days dozing in his waiting room must have hated his guts, even as they lay stuck to his overstuffed leather chairs in respite from scorching alfalfa that still needed baled and put up in the barn. Out in the waxed tile hallway, the industrial-strength water cooler dared you to stick your face in it. It was ice-pick between the eyes cold. Boy stealing up on that in his Red Ball Jet high tops hand to mouth trying to keep them from squealing on him.
I was "Number 3 Son," is how he used to put it. But this was the 60's and we didn't have Charlie Chan on the squawk box, we had Superman, The Three Stooges and Amos and Andy on the boob tube. The Chan boys must not have had what it took to make the taxing migration from radio to TV land. Seems like if their old man was as smart as everybody said he was, he'd have figured out a way. Probably he was just jealous.
For some reason I was the only one of us five boys who had his sights on the old man's back. Maybe the others had enough sense to know better from the start, or maybe they didn't crave his blood as much, I don't know. But from the beginning, for as long as I can remember, I was all over it. Toy doctor's kits and toy microscopes and stethoscopes, first aid merit badges and Red Cross lifesaving courses and emergency rescue certificates. Trying to get in close with him, but it didn't work like that. My two older brothers, blond-haired and blue-eyed as he was, his original sins, were the real repositories of the hallowed code. I professed to "go into medicine," though consolation prize was the best I'd ever be able to bring him. This would restore a natural advantage in my favor, if only temporarily, but that was all I'd need. It would be a surgical strike, in and out, precision tuned. The eager young man would just have to try harder. The fact remained: if I were to prove truly exceptional, then what was warranted was a bull's eye both minuscule and fleeting, and I might as well get used to it.
In 1950, only a couple of years after he and my raven-haired mother came to town, a red brick medical clinic materialized entirely to his specification, the likes of which no one around there had ever seen. Ah, to be him then, fresh home from the European theater, swooping in on eagle's wings with a doe-eyed bride in his talons, staking out the lines, drawing up the lists, taking names! I've got to hand it to him. He set up shop in virgin territory and went the whole hog: maternity beds, X-ray machine, a lab for his blood work, a pill room for his pills. He had a darkroom to develop his own X-rays and an emergency room to staunch and repair what he could. The nearest hospitals were at the ends of twisting blacktop roads in other counties. Car wrecks, bar fights, sawmill wounds, shotgun blasts, whatever couldn't wait for a proper operating environment, he'd just do it there.
Dad had been a surgeon in the city before he'd come down to McArthur to be the only doctor in the county, forgoing auspicious beginnings and a promising career. He set himself up as the medical be-all to end-all in the poorest county in the state, something like a down-sized version of Albert Schweitzer in the Congo. Only considerable altruism combined with a need to perform unopposed could explain this. It made people suspicious at first. What was he hiding from?
In whatever event, he was elusive and well-camouflaged. I soon realized that I needed to deepen my own protective coloration by slaying them at the high school science fair. The beauty of it was, it also served to provide me with some much-needed distraction from pressing pressures in my frontal lobes. I'd been fishing around in the library for a killer project when one day a citation came to me, by accident really, as I had not been looking for anything cold-blooded, referring to the fact that frogs, principally adult leopard frogs, could be dissected and laid wide open while yet alive. What sort of boy wants to look inside at the trembling lungs and heart of another living creature? Who can stand to look, knowing that the other being's life was the price? I won't say I'm proud, but at the time, anything less seemed cheap and stupid.
It's true, after that kind of wear and tear, they weren't going to be much good for anything else. But I felt very little sense of guilt when the ventilated cardboard box marked "Live Bio Matter" arrived from Wisconsin. Inside, two dozen semi-comatose adult leopard frogs lay packed in damp excelsior. As I remanded them to the salad crisper drawer of the old Hotpoint in our laundry room, I felt stoked with lust and dread. Glory blushed at my name. I set an aggressive schedule of disembowelment: one every other day for the next six weeks. Incineration by our backyard trash barrel would do for disposal of remains.
As a much younger boy I once stripped off my clothes and lay sprawled naked on the living room carpet. It was just a feeling I had, pure Eros. It seemed so instinctive, I was answering a call, a young stallion rolling in lush grass. When my mother came to the doorway with Lee Burson, who wanted to see if I could play, I didn't try to hide. Her outraged embarrassment caught me completely by surprise. Why couldn't she see that it was okay, that this was just me?
Live frog dissection hinges on a procedure known as pithing. The point of pithing, to pith, is the selective destruction of clustered ganglia at the base of the frog's skull, what we might simply call its brain. With these sensory interpretors knocked out, wild reports from synapses in the extremities fell on deaf ears. Properly pithed, the frog's autonomic systems -- circulation, respiration, digestion -- continue undeterred by catastrophe elsewhere. By pithing, the frog suffers no anxiety of separation, no dysphoria of disbelief.
Pithing a frog seems crude in hindsight. Choosing from among them flattened numbly in the crisper drawer, I might have been picking licorice from a jar at the old witch's candy store. Holding the chosen one with both hands to face the light, left hand palm up the thumb and first two fingers of which would curl into a latch interlacing neck, nose and shoulder blades such that upon pressure a pair of skull bone humps would protrude at the mottled emerald nape, exposing a soft spot like the one on an infant's head. Directly into that naive depression I'd insert the pithing needle, working it forward in spirals, grinding away stubborn ganglia all the way to the hilt.
A soft hand might reach tenderly; jeweled eyes roll back in sublime quicksand. In the early days, a few times, I ground too hard, and by the time I came inside, they'd be gone. But after a handful of procedures, I had gained as deft a feel for it as most people would ever want, with specimens remaining vigorous for 120 to 150 minutes. I could have hung out a shingle.
But revelation, not technical expertise, was the point. I cannot adequately describe the effect of the light that came from the being's insides. I just know that the more I saw, the more I wanted to see. Who was the boy in the Greek fable who fell in love with his reflection in the pool? It all seemed to be right there. And it looked right back at me and recognized me, too. It just knew me.
Behind the the ball diamond there was an old apple orchard gone to seed that stretched down the hill into clumpy cow pasture and the muddy skirts of Brown's Pond. A couple of barely trickling streams lined with long skinny weeds worked their ways down the slope, and a kaleidoscopic plenitude of hopping, plopping, slithering, squirming life teemed these capillaries. We would spend infinite stretches of time in their pursuit, crouched along the edges in complete stillness, on our bellies with stubble poking ribs, suspended in apocalyptic alert. Touch and timing beyond willpower or thought came to you if you were willing to surrender to the stream. You just had to keep at it.
There were only a few rules. You do what it takes not to hurt what you catch. You hold the creature gently, but firmly for its own protection. You have a responsibility to make sure nobody messes with your catch while it's yours, even after you've let it go. And you always let it go near the same place you found it. I don't know where we got these rules, but the universe we inhabited was whole and balanced in their keep.
I was vaguely aware that my experiments were pushing me past the pale of what I naturally knew to be right. Yet there was such magnetism in the conflict! I discovered a dry ache inside that only the energy I got from crossing the line could ease. I was penetrating new boundaries and the rewards were heady. I was doing something most others couldn't, and wouldn't even if they could. I saw myself at the beginning of a journey which would often leave me alone and in danger, but I'd survive by bravery and cunning. In the end, uncommon happiness and honor would embrace me. I did not see the perverse gratification I took from leeching the life of another creature for my own curiosity. My thrall with my brothers' tissue texture and galvanic response as they putrefied did not alarm me. My sisters possessed an array of charms so singularly stunning, mermaids, sphinxes, and minotaur all seemed not only possible, but desirable.
On the day of the fair I awoke to a muffled sound against the window by my desk, erratic flapping and scraping, as if a catbird or mockingbird were tethered there. But I looked and it was nothing. On the way to school there were strips of diamond-studded grass where the sunlight glistened beside corseted dunes of frost in the shadows where it didn't. The air flared my nostrils and I snorted smoke. In seventh period study hall, Debbie May wore a simple cotton blouse with tucks in the waistline. It was the color of pink cantaloupe, thin as onion paper over the translucent outline of her bra. Her dark hair fell from behind her ears to swoop over her chestnut eyes. Her lips nibbled on the fleshy end of her pencil, while she crossed and uncrossed her legs in the cool shade of the tabletop, holding me humming, taking my pulse.
Ears still ringing I walked home after school anxious to begin my dissections. A curious thing: on my way to my room with my first frog in hand, I slipped at the top of the stairs and fell forward onto the landing, losing my grip on him. He was cold and easy to catch, but I remember my main concern was to grab him up quickly so that he'd not have to suffer the coarse, scratchy carpet against his tender belly.
Once in my room with him, I pushed the door closed with my foot, and immediately heard a knock at my window, three quick taps of a single knuckle, first finger, right hand. My own startled reflection in the corner of the black window above my desk stared back at me. I thought, "What?" and waited. But that was it.
Getting on with the pithing, it went very well, I thought. My touch for the channel of gristle that housed the cranial ganglia had grown deft, intimate, trusting. One by one and before I knew it, I was finished with all four -- in a crisp hour and a half, rather than the usual two. I stood back from my desk and scanned the soiree of skin and muscle, bone and gut. A very decent layout, I had to admit. Muscular System (totally flayed) and Internal Organs (chest cavity wide open) were the most radically revealing examples I had ever achieved. Nervous and Skeletal, the most technically challenging of the four, emerged from the procedure tight as new drums, unsparing and provocative. Let the judging begin!
Which it did, like a brush fire in the corner of my eye. Muscular System was lying back in his tray, holding his arm up like a tiny baby, fleshy thumb strumming thin air. "Ah, a loose pin!" I thought, and leaned over to correct it. While sticking the pin decisively into the black wax beneath him, I noted a squeaking sound like the sneeze of a kitten, but muffled and smaller. Swiveling to my right, my gaze ran smack into Internal Organ's chest cavity agape as he strained to heave himself onto his side. Still anchored at one wrist and ankle, he contorted in lewd black and white, insides dangling like tree roots from a cliff. The ceiling light in my room began to sputter and back off, jaundiced, as if the globe around it were an old python's eyeball, pine pitch grainy. I squeezed eyelids of sandpaper over eyes of glass. If you look down into an empty shoe, it's mostly darkness; if you twist the shoe to shed more light, the darkness makes an eerie slant like a moan or a scream.
Now Nervous System was railing against the shirt-pins in his wrists and ankles. I'd detached the primary tendons at Skeletal System's biceps and glutes, so there was no locomotion coming from him. But the woven striates atop his rib cage and collar bone undulated like pink maggots. Muscular had made it onto all fours and was lurching forward, while Internal Organs hung stymied on an invisible high wire, anchored this way by the same eviscerate yearning that propelled him. It all seemed impossible, yet sublimely orchestrated.
The four silver and black dissecting trays on my desk took the air of shallow graves on Judgment Day. My specimens were coming back to bear witness! I didn't want to look at them anymore, but I couldn't stop. Facing my accusers, I could see again the delicate whiteness of their throats that trembled at the tip of my scalpel. Had they begged or bribed, would I have held back? Had they offered me so much more of their pleasure than I could merely see, and I said yes, would I have even then been able to stop myself? My specimens' testimony was riveting -- the courage it had to take for them to come forward! As their voices rose in chorus, the sense of impending revelation, of utter enlightenment, was excruciating. My own skin began to crackle and singe with what was at hand. Scathing as it was, I felt a sense of pride to be the chosen object of their outcry. As I hung in the balance, I felt a quiet calm, certain that the verdict about to be rendered would be impeccable. And when I heard it, I knew it was true as anything in a shadow puppet world can be, as right as rain, and as good as gold. I stood convicted of an obscenity that no rite, smoke or balm of my bastardized Catholicism could cleanse.
My dissecting kit was still open on the desk, the pithing needle, two scalpels, a long tweezers, a cuticle scissors and a forceps, all high quality hypoallergenic surgical steel, strapped by black rubber to the black velvet case. My tools of pure abstraction gleamed diabolically, artifacts from the Spanish Inquisition perfectly preserved, scarlet crust dried along stainless shafts.
I might have turned my back on it all right there. There might have been some atonement in giving myself up to the suffering I had caused. But it was so hard to hold my mind still over all that. I had to do something, and so I took up the pithing needle and plunged it repeatedly into Muscular System's cranium, with all the finesse of a drunk with a darning needle. It took too many repetitions over too long a time, but finally things became quiet and still.
Internal Organs leaned against the side of his dissecting tray observing, a rueful Daniel Webster clung to the jury box, chest cavity heaving like a house on fire. One eye as bulging as the other was flat, he held his sheer ground and demanded that I answer the question. But no words came.
Instead, I forced him onto his back, pressing his chest and shoulders to the board with my left thumb and forefinger. His badly tangled insides fell roughly into place, as if they had a pact that no matter what, they would stick together. I lay the scalpel to his collarbone and pushed directly through to the board, then turned him 90 degrees clockwise, and ripped out through his gullet and bottom lip. With an ooze of topaz and red, Internal Organs gave up his wanton resistance. As I repositioned him on the board with undue care, it began to seem possible that things could go back to their places and be all right again.
I turned to those who were left. My eyes brimmed and burned like they were bleeding. I could just see that Nervous and Skeletal both had managed to make it up on all fours. They seemed to have decided to disdain tragedy and keep to the ancient way. Just sitting Zazen. No explaining. No mind.
"Bob, honey, it's getting time to go, why don't you come down and have a bowl of ... ," my mother was saying as she came through the door. Her eyes clamped like electromagnets onto the profanity at my hands. When she didn't look right back to me I realized that something was lost forever.
"I'm not..." I started to say, "I need... if I could just..." I tried. But there was nothing. Finally, she lifted her face. It was as if my nose had rotted off and she was the one who had to tell me.
"I couldn't do it," I said in a croaking voice. A wave rose through me and a great upheaval crest in my throat. But it was only tears, just tears wrung from my gut like blood out of a dishrag.
What a relief to rest my forehead on my mother's shoulder and sob. I could feel with my cheek where the bra strap was pressing into her flesh. What a crime. I knew that she'd already forgiven me, that she'd take the whole curse onto herself if she could. We sat there for a moment and then I heard her say, "Bob, we have to do something here, don't we?"
Your brakes are shot and you're barreling down on a "Bridged Closed" sign in the fog. You try to slam it into reverse but the gears are stripped and they just clatter like windup false teeth.
"Bob, I have to call your father," she said and moved for the door. "He's going to have to take care of this."
"Mom, wait, no wait, I've got it under control now, please!" But she had already crossed the landing and was dialing the phone in their bedroom. Nothing short of slamming her down on the floor would stop her now.
I imagined myself adrift on a scorched sea with a tidal wave of molten lava lurching over me. I could see from the crest of the wave to the helpless boy below. The second before I exploded I opened my eyes and looked up. My fingers were tearing loose from the lip of the wave, itself coming apart like wet paper in my hands. The difference between that wave and me, myself and that boy, disappeared in the yawning lava. Let the undertow have all it wants, to do whatever it wants with it. I give up. There's nothing else I can do. There never was.
After however long, I heard the front door open, curt steps on the stairs, a brusque knock. The overhead in the center of my ceiling flared on like a lamp over an operating table. He was in the room.
First, silence and gravity. Then, a low "What's the problem, son?" as if the words hurt to say. He injected more silence like a local anesthetic.
"I...I pithed them the same way I always have, but somehow they just like...I couldn't do it," I choked off.
"Do what?" he had to say, squinting his eyes and lowering his head as if he were shooting skeet. He still had on his white doctor's tunic, unsnapped at the neck. He pursed his lips, looked away from me, let his head frown toward the floor. After another silence, he brushed his closed hand over his nose, and proceeded to my desk.
One by one he took each of my specimens and made sure they were dead. He re-set the pins that held their legs in place. Then he stood and said, "Is that all?"
I nodded my head.
"Stand up," he said.
"Dick..." my mom's voice quavered from the shadow.
He went on. "Now what you do is clean up and make yourself presentable. Then you take your science project to the fair."
He might as well have jabbed my scrotum with a six-battery cattle prod.
"Aw, Dad, it's messed up, it's late -- I don't think..." I started.
"I didn't hear anyone ask for your opinion. You can be there in ten minutes once you get over standing around here making excuses." He leveled his eyes into mine like a rifle. You don't pull the trigger, you just squeeze it off with your breath.
I just wanted out. He could leave or I could. But he wasn't quite finished.
"Robert..."
"Yeah."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Yes, sir," I said.
"I can see how you'd be disappointed in yourself. Next time, best not to start something you can't finish." I saw him straightening up at the stern of a weathered row boat under a full moon, having just heft a weighted bundle into the middle of the pond. Already the silt was settling around me. Yes, I understood. Dad stared at my surface a few more seconds, till the bubbles stopped and the glass smoothed black. Then he turned and slid by my mother, back into the mist.
"Bob, I'm sorry..." she said and started toward me.
"You're the one who had to call him," I said in a low-throated growl. "I tried to tell you...." It was my intent to stare at her hard enough to break the skin. To see me slice her like that, with his eyes, she might've clawed them out right there and I swear I wouldn't have blamed her.
At the high school gym all the contestants, judges and spectators were already in their places, the judging underway. But there was still time. Muted olive sleeves of arms that appeared to know what they were doing arranged the four trays on the Formica cafeteria table with a sheet of paper taped to it that said, "51 -- Anatomy of Frog." The arms kept doing what they were supposed to until there was no more to do, and then they stopped and hung at my sides, a pair of boiled claws. I remember feeling utterly soaked, a scarecrow in a corn field at the monsoons. Every time the gym doors opened, a pallor backed up in my throat. Debbie May and Pennie Price were there, and I could see them pointing at what I'd done, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. It was like I was way back in a frozen cave and they were out at the mouth gesturing for me, but I couldn't get to them, and they were swept away.
The judges approached me smiling waxily, but it was their tinny timbres that betrayed them. I caught them swapping knowing looks as they mouthed admiration for my work with repulsion all over their faces. In order to even respond to their questions I had to fix my eyes in the spaces between their heads, which they held at curious swiveling angles like praying mantises. Though my answers were comprehensive, they continued to hold me in their gazes for prolonged silences, waiting for what they knew would never come. One of the mantis heads pivoted slightly, mandibles scissoring, apparently a sign to the others. I was afraid that if I moved suddenly, they would all fly in my face. Needless to say, I was taken aback to hear my name called as the Junior High winner. In the picture they took for the paper, I'm standing by the table with my leopard frogs' remains propped up in their trays, as if peering forth from hospital beds, my prized patients. I remember the flashbulb going off as I was thinking that I knew something garish about Debbie May that nobody else there ever would. I look like I was grinning, but there wasn't anything funny about it.
Once they declared the fair over, I cleared my area quickly, slipping my frogs' trays into plain brown paper bags from Howell's Market. Mom helped me get things out to the car, which I was glad for, but I didn't have anything extra for her on the ride home. I took the brown bags directly from the car to the garbage barrel in the alley and offered what was left in them to the charred mouth for the last time. It was too dark down in the barrel to see the grim tableau, but you can imagine.
Next morning I woke up early, threw some water in my face, and took the Hotpoint crisper drawer with the four surviving leopards in it down to Brown's Pond. Squatting on the slick clay overhang under the willow, I could hear the muck sucking at my tennis shoes as I leaned to hold the crisper drawer down in the algae and let it swirl full of mustard brown pond water. I held my body weight over the water with my left hand locked on a low branch above my head. The triceps in that arm trembled with contractions. It took a good three or four human heartbeats for the realization to arrive. The guy in front nudged an arm and then kicked, found it pleasing and kicked again, then disappeared. Same for the next and the next, silt whorling behind them in whips of smoke. The only one left paused at the porcelain lip of the pan as if to say, "There's just one more thing..." -- but instead simply slipped from the ledge like a star.
©2003 by R.J. Bullock
