Yesterday morning I saw an anole on the trunk of a chinaberry tree. She saw me before I saw her, and she followed me with her eyes, not unkindly, not suspiciously. I put the bead between the sights, and the sights around her head. I pulled the trigger. She curled up as though I'd thrown her into fire. The front half of her head and one eye were gone; her clever feet still clung to the tree. She flashed black.
I took her by the tail and carried her to the table where Puck waited in his nest. I laid the body down. It marched slowly in a tight, perfect circle. I separated her parts, all of which continued their movements alone, out of step. Puck gobbled it all.
I prowl around with a gun again, like I did when I was nine, and I learn the needfulness of death again, which I knew before and forgot. The amount of death which goes into making even one life is vast. And what about me? How much death has gone into my life? In a moral universe, this can make you a little crazy. When I lived in an urban situation, all I consumed arrived abstracted and stylized to suit my taste; the red of any meat was stage blood, packaged in black styrofoam for class, and as long as I went vegetarian, I could forget that anything anywhere ever has to die.
Now I am always on the hunt for Puck's next meal, and I remember what I thought of as my own childish brutality in a different light. I remember that I got a gun for my ninth birthday, and after safety instructions, my father's only rule was that whatever I killed I would have to eat. Life is sacred, and must not be wasted, but death itself is no enemy of life.
When I was a kid, my parents warned us to "look out" for dangerous animals, especially snakes. But I rarely looked for animals with the intensity and attention I now do. I creep around in the brush. I turn over a stone, collect some grubs. I stand up and search the branches. My eyes meet those of a long, golden snake just above my head, observing. It shivers when it knows that I see it, too, and slowly withdraws, backwards, slipping its coils over itself in loose knots, and then it's gone. My hands are shaking. I turn around to leave, and nearly run into a second snake who watches me from behind. They have watched me all this time, and I think that all my "looking out" did nothing; it was by their forbearance that I made it to adulthood at all.
Back at the picnic table, our little roadrunner is bursting with feathers like slow fireworks. My grandpa tells us a story. Years ago, one of his neighbors asked him a favor. Kill every roadrunner he saw, and bring them back to him. He believed that roadrunner meat cured cancer. Did it? we ask. He doesn't know. The man eventually died anyway.
The next day, I find a spiky brown mesquite lizard. I duck under a branch and stand up inches from its back. It is already watching me, cautious but confident in its own strength. It has a spiny brow and golden eyes. I killed one just like it when my dad was working on the rig. I wanted the electric blue skin of its belly. But when I cut the skin away, the blue faded to gray, so I threw the whole thing to my peacock, who choked it down spines, guilt, and all. We both wait, perfectly still. There is a black crystal where its tail was. A close call. We watch each other for a long time. He is so close to me that I have to step back to raise the gun.
At first I buried the heads of these creatures at the corner of the house with some vague prayer. Now I break up the skulls, remove the teeth, and feed them to Puck with the rest. I am conflicted about this. Whose rules do I follow, mine or theirs, the human way, bowing to a constructed sacred, or their way, which is all entirely sacred, or not sacred at all? Could I be in that order even if I wanted to? Am I already in that order without knowing it? I love these creatures. They are beautiful and full of power. I try to thank them, or ask their permission, but one gets caught midway, somewhere between the need to honor the sacred and the absurdity of apology in a sinless realm. A snake would not apologize for biting me, nor would I think to ask for it.
If there is a sin, maybe it would be waste. But I de-legged a grasshopper, set it on the table, and before I could open the cage to feed it to Puck, a spider had pounced on it and dragged it away. I feel hot, breathless.
This world is so intimate. My coming to each living creature to take its life is so intimate. I am the cause. I am not the end. I am an alchemist, but the magic is in the matter. It is like making love, and my heart trembles the same. I love them each as I love myself, knowing that there are no records kept against me but this one which I carry in my person, deep as the place I carry my life, rooted near the box where I keep the parts to make new life, and the record reads death, theirs now, my own later. I love them because I will meet them again in some mysterious form they will have taken, and they will have the honor of coming for me, sudden, unrecognizable, and ready with a crushing love.
At night my mother calls. The tenth rattlesnake shot, this one under the front steps of the house. A terrible stench erupted after the shot. They dragged it out with a hoe; the snake in its death throes squeezed from the blast-wound a putrid, crushed jackrabbit. Death nested in death like a matryoska doll. I tell them again and again to get out of there. My cousin brings home a kitten whose mother was killed by a dog. He bottlefeeds it. All the grandchildren staying over sleep together on a pallet in the living room, and the kitten sleeps there with us, mewing softly every few hours. In the morning it's stiff, the fur already matted. We bury it. The dogs dig it up. We bury it again. Another of my cousins rescues a tiny killdee from one of the dogs. It cries that call for the ocean. It sprints on its wave-running legs, and collapses. Blood drops from its beak. My grandma receives a phone call. One of our distant relatives, a twelve-year-old boy, was killed when a four-wheeler turned over on him.
All these deaths crowding closer... and how many deaths did I see in all the time I lived in the city? In two years, three: two pigeons, the other our cat Gideon. It is a lying world, a contrivance. I see more death in a day here.
I believe in God more than ever, God in the snake. You can look out all you want, but you might as well look for, because she is already there, and by her forbearance you live. You don't see her unless you look for her, and even though you look, you are afraid to see, and when you see, your heart jumps and you are at a loss, because she was always waiting for you. God is dangerous. Trust supposes a good thing will happen for your benefit, or a bad thing will happen, but still for your benefit. No one imagines trusting a snake; it is sacred; the benefit will come, because there is no waste, but the records are not kept. No one knows to whom the benefit will go. The snake floats above me in the tree, its wise, perturbed face cradled in the air, rocking, tipping me this way and that where I stand.
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