Continued–a bit–from: Dr. Phil has Nothing to Do With Processed Meat
From then on, after the night of Jack, I began killing animals. They showed up, or I stumbled upon them, wounded. I would come across a bird fallen from its nest, bare naked and gasping for the branches above, squinting through dry-eye mucous to the treetops for the rough nest hewn from the endless flights of mother and father bird carrying twigs and bread twisties, but doomed to lay naked like a plucked chicken on the scorching pavement of a center stripe amidst the roar of 18-wheeled trucks. Not that dramatic, really, but I still found them.
I found one baby grackle with fire ants rummaging its plumage. The mother squawked above, but didn’t look directly at it. I picked the poor little thing up with a Lacrosse stickādidn’t want to touch itāand flung it hard into a brick wall. “At least it flew,” I told my friends.
I found a dove a month or so later that had been attacked by a cat, or something that ravaged its wing until it was a limp mass of blood feathers. The dove still cooed as it twirled on its feet in circles. I thought about merely dropping the big stone on it, but thought better and accelerated it into a full and controlled smash on its head.
As I rounded a bend one day soon after, instead of turning sharply, a bouncing squirrel tail caught my eye. But it wasn’t attached to a chattering squirrel affixed to the rough bark of the Oak trees that dotted the South Austin landscape. It was merely wagging for a semi-flattened pelt that lay writhing in the street, just after a premiumĀ radial had rolled it. By the way, “Don’t go cheap on tiresā¦.they’re carrying ya,” is what all the old timers always tell me.
So I never have cheap tires. But I think the cheap ones, they’d to the trick I was about to do anyway. I stopped my Subaru Outback, backed up a bit, took aim and floored it with the intent of running my radials right over the cranium of that poor squirrel. I did pretty good, too, I think. I backed up to survey the killing. Did something move? Or was it just the breeze on the tufts of hair whisping up from the carcass? I decided I’d better make sure, so I backed up farther, took aim again and floored it. It was just a little bump, really, but that’s all it took to know that I hit the little fucker again. And when I say fucker, I mean in a good way, a way that ends its suffering. As if “fucker” adds conclusion and certainty from the supreme being driving the Subaru and cancelling out this little rodent’s time on our earth. I didn’t want to kill a squirrel. I just wanted to kill a suffering squirrel, to know that I was competent enough to do so.
I backed up again and all was well. The squirrel was certainly dead, certain to be merely a stain by mid afternoon. Then I looked left. Three firemen, and they were men, gorgeous, mind you, were sitting out on lawn chairs at a fire station watching my proceedings. They were holding beverages, probably just diet Cokes, as they were dressed in deep duty blue T-shirts and pants, watching me roll back and forth over this hapless little creature. I smiled and moved on.
(On to On Cows?)