Pilar

Our dog Pilar had mastered the art of raiding the table at an early age, and realized that she wanted more out of life. She couldn't leave it up to The Man to classify something as food, restricting herself to what society said was edible. So she broadened her horizons, eating things like balloons and rubber gloves. When brother wouldn't play catch with her, she ate his favorite computer game’s disk. And when she felt like having a snack, she'd eat matchbooks, pinning them between her paws and carefully licking the connected heads like an ice cream cone.

Eventually, she ate 5 ant traps in an afternoon. Mom had bought the traps along with a few other things that Pilar usually ignored, like lightbulbs, and thought that our dog could be trusted with them in the car for a few minutes. Pilar thought otherwise. Whether she consumed the traps in a fit of pique after being kept waiting for too long, or just satisfying her boundless epicurean curiosity, we'll never know. By the time mom got back to the car, the damage was done. The vet said that 3 can put a dog in a coma.

Pilar’s mealtime discipline was bad from the start. As the new dog in a house that hosted up to 7 children, Pilar received a lot of table scraps from fussy eaters desperate to clean their plates. My brother and I ate salad by eating the green stuff, and giving the red stuff to the dog. By the time our parents caught on, it was too late. Pilar had learned that not only was people food as edible as dog food, it was usually tastier. She silently vowed to include it in her diet whenever she could.

Pilar recognized that we could no longer help her, so she began to help herself. Our laps were at eye level, and usually draped with napkins. Napkins that ended up dirty. Like Dune’s sandworms detecting the slightest vibrations made by prey, Pilar sensed the subtle odors made by trace amounts of food. Our miniature Shai Hulud would rustle unseen under the table, visible only briefly as a flash of teeth claiming used napkins to be consumed at her leisure. From then on, napkins were kept out of reach, but I'm still clumsy at dinner. I need time to register that in Pilar's absence, anything placed in my lap will stay there. And I still want to warn friends not to put their napkins where the dog can get them.

As food sources became scarce, Pilar resorted to more drastic measures. She started begging for food, much the same way that pickpockets and muggers roam a city begging for wallets. She started innocently enough, staring at her mark in a mute yet adorably optimistic plea. Then she got impatient. Occasionally, she barked her displeasure. As she realized that food would not be offered, she decided that it must be taken. Her expression melted into calculated resolve as she formulated an attack strategy. And then she waited carefully for the split second of inattention in which she could launch her furry little Schlieffen plan. The instant that guards were down, she was up and on the attack. She would twist her neck to open her mouth horizontally, extending her range further, and moving her lower jaw clear to scrape plates clean with her teeth. From above, she looked like a hairy black pac-man streaking across the plates. She'd grab anything within reach, swallowing smaller items whole, and cramming everything else into her mouth, keeping at it until she was dragged away, chewing triumphantly.

After she chewed through her nylon collar, it was replaced by a chain that jingled merrily as she trotted around the house. It bound her body, but not her spirit. The giddy chiming of her new collar was an alarm, warning everyone to finish eating quickly, before she drew closer. Her black wagging tail, cresting gaily above the far edge of the table as she worked her way around the dining room, looked like nothing so much as a shark's fin prowling for its next meal. It added a sense of adventure to mealtimes.

But not many people recognized the warning signs. My friend Josh was visiting when my mother warned him not to let the dog eat his food. He made the mistake of turning his head towards her to ask for clarification. Mom had served from the left, and at that moment, Pilar came zooming in to remove from the right, ending up eyebrow-deep in food before Josh had any idea that something was wrong.

And so she chewed her way through life with gusto, eating food, household items, and the aforementioned 5 ant traps, which only gave her mild constipation. We tried to figure out the reason behind her miraculous survival after eating them, especially given the vet’s grim pronouncement. Maybe Pilar was impervious to damage of any kind? Maybe the traps were defective? Maybe the vet was thinking of a different, more lethal type of ant trap? Maybe the vet was an idiot. We reviewed all the possibilities carefully, and realized that given the evidence, there was only one conclusion at which any rational person could arrive.

It was pretty cool knowing that I had an indestructible superdog.

Cemetery Work

I needed a summer job when I was in high school, so I worked in a cemetery for a few months. It wasn't much different from any other landscaping job. Kind of like maintaining a golf course, only with more tombstones.

Most of the time was spent mowing the grass. If you were lucky, you got to mow the empty field that they had put aside for future development. That meant long stretches of time spent driving a rider mower in lines so straight that you could catch a quick nap before it was time to turn around and head back the other way. Every now and then you got to menace a groundhog, which would easily outrun the underpowered mowers in a kind of waddling hustle that still managed to express its contempt.

Avoiding the groundhog holes was vastly preferable to weaving around floral arrangements and those mini flags that members of the armed services get. You would have to steer the mower as close to them as you could, stopping every few feet to reach out and move one of them onto the grass that you had just cut. Then, at the end of the row you'd turn and mow the grass that you had just cleared of obstacles, stopping again every few feet to pick up the displaced items and put them back into their original positions. It was tedious and awkward, and since the front of the mower was much wider than the back, it was tricky to ride close enough to pick things up without getting so close that they got destroyed by the mower.

It was particularly rough with the little flags. The older ones had gotten yanked out of the ground and shoved back in so often that their stands were permanently bent. Over time, the bends got so severe that the holders angled out over the ground, with the flags almost touching the grass. You had to make wide detours to avoid clipping them, since it would have been a serious insult to the generations of brave men and women who gave their lives for our country if one of those drooping flags was accidentally sucked into one of the mowers. As weak as the mowers were, the flags were mass-produced and cheap, fixed to their posts with the most tenuous of bonds. It didn't take much suction to rip a flag clean off its mounting and send it flying through the whirling blades, to emerge out the other side as so much red, white, and blue confetti. So thank god it never happened, which is why no one needs to check the trash dump behind the machine shop to see if I tried to hide the evidence out there.

The machine shop was in the back of the cemetery, hidden in a bunch of trees behind the mausoleum. It was where we kept the digging equipment. Everyone pictures gravedigging work to be two guys with shovels working by lantern light under a full moon, like the science of body disposal reached its apex back in the fourteen hundreds. But trying to excavate almost 150 cubic feet of dirt unassisted is hard goddamn work. And just like any other business, there's a constant pressure to do things bigger, cheaper, and faster to make them more profitable. That's why the backhoe and the dump truck are the modern gravedigger's accessories, and the only time that people actually use picks and shovels is when they need to widen a hole but don't want to crack open a burial vault by mistake.

Burial vaults went into all the graves in the cemetery. They were thick concrete shells that were fitted over the caskets, supposedly to keep the earth from settling as the contents deteriorated. I was comforted by them. While the cemetery would be ground zero in the event of a zombie attack, I knew that the vaults would keep the undead in their place. And if zombies are able to punch through solid concrete before burrowing through six feet of packed earth, using nothing but their bare hands and a seething hatred for the living, then you don't need to look for a hiding place. Because there isn't one to be found.

But that was no reason to get complacent, and I always kept a weather eye open for the first signs of a zombie uprising. The job was pretty low-stress, but I had absolutely no desire to stay there after dark. And neither did anyone else that I worked with. I don't know where people got the idea that cemetery work is done at night. We just worked normal hours, from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, and didn't hang around at the end of the day. The only person crazy enough to do that was the guy who lived there.

As you can imagine, it's difficult to find a tenant for a house that's in a cemetery, which is why this particular house was leased out rent-free. Anyone could live there, as long as they could do two things. They'd have to mow their "front lawn" (the strip of grass between the house and the fence), and they'd have to ignore the fact that at any moment they could have their souls turned inside out or ripped to shreds by supernatural horrors from beyond the grave. The tenants got a place to stay, and the cemetery had someone on-site after hours if vandals or punk kids broke in and started screwing around.

The only time we ever saw the bodies is when other people came in and started messing with them. Like the time that somebody broke into one of the private crypts and left an arm in the bushes. The rest of the time, the job was just putting big boxes into bigger boxes and then dumping a lot of dirt onto them. When it comes to corpse exposure, cemetery work is probably the least unnerving of all the death services industries.

We never saw the bodies, and we never saw the mourners. Like shoe-cobbling elves, we did our work unseen, getting the blue-and-white pavilion ready for the service before disappearing back to the machine shop. We set up chairs, and did our part to make the grave look less like the yawning chasm of infinity that waits to swallow us all. This was accomplished with sheets of artificial grass, like those you find on mini golf courses, draped down the sides of the pit to disguise the bare soil. The steel sling that lowered the casket was placed on top of them, to keep them from slipping out of place. With the dirt from the excavation carted away in the dump truck, it looked like the grave was a natural formation that had always been there, and hadn't been slashed from the earth just that morning or the day before. Once everything was in place, we kept out of sight until the service was over and everyone was gone. Then we'd clean it all up, and fill in the hole.