Short Story - Roadkill

Road Kill

By Ben Bradley

I was driving on Clairmont road towards North Druid Hills. Night had set in; traffic was beginning to die down. A few yards up the road, an adult opossum had made it halfway across four lanes, and was steeling himself for the home stretch.

“Wait,” I whispered to him.

He went for it. I jammed on the brakes, but the truck next to me must not have noticed. The back driver’s side tire snatched the naïve rodent from the pavement, carrying it three full revolutions, whump whump whump, before flying free and landing motionless on the shoulder. He had almost made it.

My mom will tell stories about a cat we had named Fat Cat. When I was a baby, I liked to lie on her, hit her, pull her whiskers, and all other manners of baby sadism. She never ran away from me, resigning to take my abuse. We enjoyed the unspoken baby human-grandma kittie relationship. I’m not sure how much she really understood the situation, but she endured me, and I’m comfortable with calling that love. Fat Cat was killed by the neighbor’s pit bull. I don’t remember either of them.

My mom worked full time as receptionist for my dad, so they sent me to a babysitter’s house during the day. A bunch of kids were there, including the babysitter’s daughter who is the same age as me. She had a little white rabbit. I remember finding myself alone with this rabbit. I was four; maybe five. It sat alone in a wire cage with an opening at the top. I gently lifted it out, loving the velveteen fur between my fingers. I wanted to hold it, to stroke it, to look into its pink eyes, to kiss it, to love it. All it would do is squirm. Its tiny muscles tensed and twitched against the clutch of my hand. It kept kicking with its back legs, tiny toenails digging into my flesh, and there was only panic in its eyes. The pain and rejection angered me. I threw the rabbit back into the cage, but in entering the small opening, one of its feet got caught in the cage, leaving the rabbit dangling upside down. It erupted into a flurry of convulsions, kicking violently, rattling the cage so loudly it was all I could hear. I pushed the rabbit’s foot through the hole, it plopped onto the cage floor and the room was silent. The guilt consumed me. It’s the first time I can pinpoint the deep, painful acknowledgement of damaging another living creature out of petty emotion.
The cats Oliver and Tico were in the room when I was born. My parents evicted Oliver from his basket so that I could have a place to sleep for the first couple nights of my life. Oliver and Tico were brothers. Tico was brown with a sort of deep, raspy voice. He was adventurous and not very friendly. Oliver was black, with a very shrill, very loud voice. He would get lost in the house at night and call out for one of us. It was amazing how loud he could be. It sounded like a little kittie alarm: “Waaooww…waaooww.” One of us would yell back, “In here, kittie.” Eventually he would find us and he’d be OK again.

One morning; I was ten maybe; my mom woke me up to tell me that Tico had died. I saw him on the floor of the basement, right at the bottom of the stairs. He was very still; his fur looked damp; it was stiff and oily to the touch. There was no life in his eyes. He did not look asleep at all, but he did look peaceful. His body made a scratchy sucking sound as my dad peeled him off the cement floor. I don’t know if Oliver got a look at him before he went into the black garbage bag, and finally into the ground in the backyard. I wonder if Oliver knew what had happened.

A car hit Oliver when he was a little kitten. A major injury like that has serious psychological effects on an animal. Aside from sensitive hips, Oliver stayed a baby inside his head. He loved to be held, to be stroked on the white spot between his eyes, to purr, and to drool in his old age. My mom found him in nearly the same spot as Tico. The brothers are buried together, their resting place marked by a small stone angel. Oliver had lived almost twenty-three years.

The first time it happened, I was in the passenger seat. I was riding with a man named Dennis whom I did not particularly like but was stuck with him due to circumstances beyond my control. He was a big man with a big truck, bald with a thick beard, and liked to talk about martial arts and his times as an MP in Vietnam. He was talking about himself when I noticed a squirrel in the road. I warned him, but he didn’t swerve. The bump was tiny, pathetic. Dennis shrugged and said, “What? I’m gonna swerve and wreck my car for that little thing?” I nodded and agreed, but the guilt stirred in my stomach. I found out later that Dennis had owned the pit bull that ate Fat Cat. He also killed the pit bull.

My dad’s side of the family are hunters. The trip to Kentucky was a yearly ritual when my dad was a little younger and lighter in his step. My brother-in-law Donnie is the real life Grizzly Adams. He hunts turkeys with a bow. That’s impressive to hunters, because turkeys are known for their incredible eyesight. The process of killing a turkey with a bow involves covering yourself in camouflage and sitting motionless in the frozen grass for hours, until one appears from the brush, when you must slowly and silently draw your bow, then release the arrow and hope it hits true, piercing the shoulder blade and severing the spinal cord. Donnie and his two sons eat wild turkey, squirrel, raccoon, deer, and wild pig on a regular basis. They keep a freezer of meat for the times when there is very little to hunt. They have four coon dogs who each perform their job ten times better than the average retail clerk.

Donnie’s oldest son, Daniel, is my oldest nephew, second in line of eight nieces and nephews. Daniel and I are four years apart in age. I used to love deer hunting season because that meant playtime with Daniel while the men went wandering into the woods. We got to shoot the guns, play with the animals, run around in the tobacco fields, and be rowdy kids.

There was one year that I had decided I was old enough to go hunting. My dad let me use the .410 shotgun, a peashooter in comparison to his 30.06 elephant killer. I also brought my paintball gun, a Christmas present from last year.

The neighbor had cows. Daniel shot paintballs at them, leaving yellow splatters across their broad, splotched hides. I’d never seen a cow run before. Walking around the farm, I also found a small yellow and green turtle. I named the turtle Tommy because what the hell else are you supposed to name a turtle? It wasn’t very social-minded but I kept it anyway, held it, played with its little flipper hands, stroked its soft, waxy shell, and every once in a while he would poke his head out to check the status of his abduction. I would leave him on the ground in front of the door at night and spend the first few minutes of the morning looking for him. He never got more than ten or twenty feet. I liked him because he never hurt anybody and never complained.

Deer hunting morning starts at four, which is a bad time for a kid of maybe twelve or thirteen. It was early enough for me to change my mind about hunting, but my dad insisted. The men enjoyed a breakfast of toast and fried eggs mixed with pig brains. Apparently, this was part of the ritual. I enjoyed a breakfast of toast.

The walk into the woods was long and dark and cold. The climb into the deer stand hurt my frosty hands. All of my hunting gear felt twice as heavy. I was miserable. We sat there for three hours without a sound. Finally, my dad touched my shoulder, and pointed through a clearing. Two does stood in a cow pasture, right out in the open. They were way out of range for me; I would have had to prop up the shotgun like a mortar to hope to hit one; so my dad took aim. BLAM! The shot rang through my ears. One of the deer dropped like a stone. The other doe didn’t run, but instead stood perfectly still. She glanced down at her fallen companion, then bent her neck up and looked right at us. I know she couldn’t have seen me, but our eyes connected nonetheless. BLAM! The ringing in my ear exploded in an ugly cacophony, and the second deer fell on top of the first.

They were huge does. My dad had to call in Donnie’s truck to get them home. My dad loves to tell that story.

The dressing of the deer goes hand in hand with the killing. A gutted deer carcass, ribs and sternum exposed, hooves hanging limp, fleshy tongue dangling between its contorted black lips, strung up upside down from the barn ceiling is a familiar image in my memory. The skins would be taken outside to stretch and dry, and eventually become extremely cozy rugs. Donnie was in charge of the dressing. One time, he slipped with his knife and sliced into the meat of his hand. Human blood mixed with animal blood. Wayne, another brother-in-law, insisted on calling an ambulance but Donnie demanded a needle and thread. Wayne ran to the house and returned with the requested items. Donnie said, “OK Wayne, you’re gonna have to sew me up,” and that’s exactly what Wayne did. Donnie didn’t flinch once.

Daniel’s tough too, but he wasn’t old enough to hunt deer, even though he really wanted to. Upon returning from the woods, I found out that he had conducted his own hunting expedition. What I found was the turtle, lying in pieces. The shell was cracked into four pieces. His stringy, yellow entrails had spilled into the grass. His head and neck were extended, completely unembarrassed and unafraid. A tiny pointed tongue poked from his beaked mouth. I asked Daniel about it, and he told me that he had set the turtle up on a post and shot him down with a shotgun. I hated my nephew then, and I wanted to ask him why, but that was hunting country, and we all wanted to be tough hunters like Donnie. It hurt so much that I felt violence tense up in my fists. At the same time, I knew it wasn’t justified, and if it was, nobody else would understand. That was my first and last hunting experience.

The only other big game hunting in which I was involved was completely unintentional. I was driving down Densley Drive, one small road in an intricate network comprising a quiet suburban neighborhood. Suddenly, a gigantic brown wing fanned across my windshield. I heard a muffled thump on the roof, then, looking through the rearview mirror, saw an owl tumble down the back of my car and flop into the grass. I felt like I had been the climax to an adventure I never knew had begun.

Once, I witnessed a squirrel commit suicide. I was driving through the parking lot at my mom’s apartment complex, and there he was, scuttling around in the parking spaces, foraging, looking nervous, doing what squirrels do. He turned my way as I approached, as if to consider crossing. I slowed down to give him his chance, but he seemed content to sit and watch me drive by. As I passed him, though, he suddenly bolted underneath my car and squish, my back tire flattened him like a furry sourdough. He didn’t exactly pull the trigger, but that’s a voluntary death if I’ve ever seen one. I felt bad for a little while, but decided he must have been traumatized as a child.


Pretty much every kid had some kind of animal or series of animals to grow up with, to love, to train, to consequently be trained, to connect with. Mine was Pearl, a German shepherd-collie mix. She had thick, black fur with brown facial markings and a freckled belly. We separated her from her molasses-colored sister at a very young age; but I think we were plenty of family for her. Still, I wonder if Pearl ever thought about her sister.

Pearl’s natural herding instinct made her a good babysitter. She used to chase my baby nieces and nephews around the backyard, nipping at their heels in a frantic attempt to keep them corralled. Sometimes she wanted to herd people that had no interest in being herded, like the housekeeper at that hotel in Savannah, or the kicker for the high school football team. One time, there was a pickup soccer game going on at the field behind my school, and Pearl decided she wanted to play too. She yanked herself free from my clutches and ran straight for the ball. Some of the young players kicked her in the ribs. Maybe they thought it was in self-defense, but she just wanted to play.

Pearl was one of those big, beautiful creatures that everybody took the wrong way. Nobody realized that her giant, gaping maw filled with glinting sharp teeth was really just a smile. At heart, she was really a peacekeeper. Whenever I was in an argument with my parents, she would jump in the middle and start barking. She always avoided conflict, even with smaller dogs. My mom’s friend Debbie has a little gray Scottie named Zoe. She seemed to take a special interest in abusing Pearl’s gentle nature. One time, my mom returned to the living room after leaving them alone for a few minutes. They found Pearl lying down in the corner, facing the wall. Zoe stood guard a few feet away. It was like she had put Pearl in time-out for acting out of line. Luckily, Pearl saw Zoe as “fellow dog” and not “tasty morsel.”

I’ve heard that chocolate is bad for dogs. My dad and I once came home to a mangled box of Tagalongs on the kitchen floor, and a very guilty-looking Pearl lying in the corner (sometimes she put herself in time-out). My dad called the Vet in a panic. They instructed him to make her swallow hydrogen peroxide to induce vomiting. My dad filled a large syringe and I held Pearl’s jaws open as he squirted it down her gullet. Pearl had a confused look on her face through these proceedings. Once we were done, she let out a large belch, and that was all that ever came of it. Health problems never arose until many years later. She earned her nickname “the garbage disposal.”

I’ve been very lucky to have had the chance to travel to a few interesting places in my life. An English seabird took a dump on my dad’s head, which was quite satisfying for me because it ruined the stupid hat my dad insisted on wearing as we walked the streets. A monkey lived right outside our hotel room in Costa Rica, and he graciously accepted my bananas when I walked out from our patio door to see him. In Denali, Alaska, I found a rabbit’s foot while kicking through the tundra. No body; just a foot, severed neatly above the ankle. It seemed extra lucky to find a rabbit’s foot without a keychain attached to it. Unfortunately, good luck for me probably meant very bad luck for the rabbit.

Of course, I grew up through all of this, had both positive and negative experiences in fairly equal proportions. Human relationships came and went, some enduring, some falling away like sweater lint. As I was getting ready to go off to college, it was obvious that Pearl was becoming an old woman. She was a big girl; her body was thick and solid like a whiskey barrel. It was a lot to carry around for so many years. Slowly, her legs became weaker and weaker, to the point where we began letting her out through the front door because there were too many steps to get up and down from the porch. Eventually, my dad and I built a ramp to set out front because even three steps became too many. Sometimes I would come home and she would get up to come see me, but she would fall under her own weight. Sometimes she would just lie and whimper. Even doing nothing was painful. My beloved belly strokes only made it worse. One of her back legs had swollen to nearly twice its normal size. We knew it was time.

My dad wanted me to take her to be put down. I told him I couldn’t do it. He wanted me to have the experience, I guess. My parents argued. I laid with Pearl on the floor, stroked her face, whispered promises into her ear. I wondered if she knew. I wondered if she could remember being happy. My mind flooded with memories. I told her I loved her. I told her goodbye. I left; I can’t remember where I went or how long I stayed away; but when I returned, she was gone. I was relieved, and I hated myself for chickening out. I was afraid to see her on the doctor’s table, to see the needle sink into her flesh, to see her eyes close for the last time. I didn’t want that to be my last memory of her, for it to be burned into my brain as clearly as all the rest. I hope she forgave me for being a coward.

Dr. Jordan said that Pearl had the biggest leg tumor she’d ever seen. I’m glad my parents let Pearl’s life run its course rather than muddle it with surgeries, bills, late nights, crying, frustration. Pearl had just turned thirteen. I’m not sad about her death because it was a natural death, and it was a beautiful life, and that’s all that matters.


THE END.