Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [71]
But then Dennis, as he is prone to do, had a brilliant idea. “Why don’t we just get a trash can with a lid.”
Well . . . yeah? Why didn’t we?
The next afternoon we bought a small canister designed to hold wood stove pellets. It was smaller than a typical trash can, but it was sturdy. The lid fit snuggly. It was perfect.
We set the can in the barn, tucked against the wall, right near the door. And for a while, this solution seemed to be perfect.
Each time Bentley relieved himself on the driveway, we simply collected the mess in a baggie and tossed it in the trash can.
The opossum, finding nothing of interest on the floor of the barn, did not make another appearance.
I felt really good, positive, and nature-friendly.
For a month.
As adults, Easter morning means little to us. In fact, I don’t think we’ve exchanged baskets or hunted for eggs in all the years we’ve been together. For us, Easter is just another day. But on the Easter Sunday one month after we bought our poo can, we did wake up early. Because there was a little girl screaming in our backyard.
“Mommy!”
“What the fuck?” Dennis said.
I don’t think either of us had ever heard a little girl scream, except on television. If you don’t actually have a little girl, to suddenly hear one screaming in your own backyard is shocking.
“Mommy! Hurry!”
We both climbed out of bed and walked across the hall into the guest bedroom. Here, we peered like perverts out the window overlooking the backyard. We were crouched down low, so nobody would see us. And just beyond our yard, in the field that abuts the riverfront, we saw a little girl. She was dressed in a pretty blue dress, bordered in white ribbon. She wore a white hat. In one hand, she held a basket, overflowing with green, artificial Easter grass. In her other hand, she held a plastic bag of dog shit.
She screamed for her mother again. “I thought it was an egg!” she cried.
And then Dennis said, “Oh no, look at that. Look over to her left. And there,” he pointed, “to her right, over by that tree.”
The field was filled with plastic bags. Because it was morning, the sun hit the plastic at an angle and the bags actually appeared to sparkle, like treasures. What little girl wouldn’t see one of the sparkly bags and then run toward it? Only to discover that it contained not candy or perhaps gems, but turds.
More bags littered our own backyard. And when I pressed my face against the window, I could just make out the front of the barn. And I could just see the trash can turned over on its side. There was no lid.
“We should have killed it,” Dennis said that evening. We’d spent the afternoon on our own nasty little Easter Egg hunt.
“Yeah, we should have,” I said. Because I felt pretty certain that sometimes, you really do have to kill. It’s the American way.
CUNNILINGUSVILLE
L
ast weekend, Dennis and I drove to Lancaster County, in southeastern Pennsylvania, otherwise known as Amish country. Ironically, it turns out that the Amish happen to live in towns with names like Blue Ball and Intercourse.
And these people forbid zippers?
I thought Dennis was joking when he read the names from the map. “What?” I asked, “No Fist Fucking? Check the map again.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “There should be a Fist Fucking, Pennsylvania. And it should be in Gang Bang County.”
Had the Amish moved to towns with these names, or had the Amish named the towns after they arrived? It seemed important to know.
The one thing we did know was that neither Blue Ball nor Intercourse was anything like they were when the Amish first arrived. Because while there were still hints of nature—the occasional farm, a gently rolling pasture or two—most of these towns had been developed into strip malls and superstores. So at any given intersection, you might see Banana Republic and Adidas factory outlet stores. And just across