Totem

I went for a drive one afternoon. I went to a Flea Market and bought my wife a knit cap embroidered with The Virgen de Quadalupe on it, I stopped in at a cemetery and read headstones--imagining families and the way death coiled through and struck each of them. A train roared by.

I dreaded going home, I dreaded the outcome, I hated the smell, the sound, the results of what my mom had been reduced to. On my way back, I followed roads I didn't know well, but ended up around the bend from an old house I had lived in with four friends for a summer during college. I continued up the road, confident of my location and the way home. A few hours away from the house, separated from the droning sounds of death and the dolling out of meds had given me the necessary resolve to face it all again.

Just then, a jack rabbit darted out from my left. I heard and felt what could have been a softball hurled full force at the lower grill of the car. I had slowed, waited for the second report of rear wheel crushing grotesquely over bone. I was clenched in readiness for the broken mass of fur to roll in and out of the rear-view. When it didn't, I pulled over, stepped out of the car and took a wide sweeping arc around the open drivers door. Clearly I had hit a rabbit, and clearly it hadn't reappeared. I seriously hoped it wasn't lodged somehow in the front of car. It was. It's head had broken through the lower grill and was stuck, a hind leg was broken clean and bloody. It was flinching chaotically, the broken foot dangling from a thin piece of tissue and helicoptering around erratically with each spastic flailing.

It was at this point, I stepped back a few steps from the car and raised my arms to the sky, I asked (audibly), "What are you trying to tell me?" I bent over and assessed the situation, which wasn't particularly rosy, I might add; bloody rabbit caught by its head in a small hard opening, won't come out without pulling head off rabbits body, not advisable to drive home like this.

Reaching in I broke the grill piece away from the rabbit and pulled the long animal free. I carried it to the side of the road and laid it in some low weeds running alongside a vineyard. It was moving the way I imagined someone might actually move while dreaming they are running. It was scared, it's large brown eye staring up at me--it's head strangely motionless. My attempts to comfort it, to pet it only made it more frightened.

I imagined crushing it under my shoe, but realized both the inhumanity and ineffectiveness of that route. Nevertheless, I knew I had to do something soon. I rose back up to my feet after stroking its whiskered cheek and a farmer called out, "You all right over there?" I said, "No, actually my mom is at home dying of cancer and I just hit a rabbit, it's suffering here." He asked if he could get me a gun. I said yes get me a gun and immediately knew that a gun wasn't going to do it. Looking into my hands, I imagined mustering all my strength in the swiftest move and rehearsed it in my mind...delaying the actual act. I had never strangled anything. For a moment I played out the scenario of taking it to the vet. I slid a hand under its neck and interlaced the fingers of my other hand around it. I squeezed and turned its neck. It took too long. I watched its eye, I watched its pupil contract a bit then slowly walk its blackness out to the edges. In that blackened eye, that slack mouth dabbed in blood, I saw my mom dying that night.

I popped the trunk latch from inside the still open car door and carried the rabbit around, laying her inside. Streaks of dark dried blood had stained my fingers, they appeared out of place against the posh leather and wood dashboard of my moms car. Back home, I carried it in by its ears and through the backdoor to put my backpack down. My step-father looked over the paper he was reading and paused. I lifted the rabbit up to my chin level and made a look that must have conveyed, "You're not going to believe this." I turned and went outside to the cabinet where my parents keep tools and gardening things. I grabbed a shovel and pushed threw the fence to the back yard, the rabbit was long and would have dragged on the ground had I not held it up. Past the pool, I opened the gate leading out to the levy, out where mom, dad and I grew vegetables, out by the pool pump, out where I had my fort. Years before, we had planted a redwood seedling, it now towers above the power lines. In its dark rich loam I dug. After I had laid the rabbit in the hole, braced the broken leg and smoothed its ears down, my step father emerged through the gate and gestured for the shovel. We didn't speak. He wanted to be a part of the burial. The understanding, the symbolism was implied. When my stepfather had covered the animal, he tamped down the soil with the back of the shovel. We collected fallen twigs, snapped them into a cross and pushed it into the topsoil. We had concluded that the rabbit was unequivocally Christian.

We stood. our eyes red and wet with tears and glanced over the fence together--we stared across the yard to my moms window, its shutters closed. From the backyard, the window looked as it always had, but the world behind the trailing rose and white shutters was completely different. My mom was going to die in that house, in that room,behind those shutters.

My head seemed to be shaking from side to side on its own...the picture was stunning, completely surreal...what had been a week of intense and repeated tragedy was bordering on the comically insane. I needed to go check on my mom.