The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (13 page)

When the dogs were brought indoors, Per Hans Leif protested. “What if the dogs shit, how will the house be sold?”

“The dogs have already shat,” the queen said with coldness. “They'll rest quietly in one of the back bedrooms.”

“Then at least put them in Mothball's room—it already smells like shit.” All were too drunk to maintain interest in this issue. The queen took the dogs away. The children sat around the coffee table and drew panties on the naked women in Grandfather's nudity magazines, unearthed from the basement.

“What I don't understand,” the queen's wife protested to the room, “is why I have to be a ghost. I am no ghost. I'm like one of these ladies, you know, who is bigger than the picture. I am no ghost. I have never been some flimsy thing to shake sticks at. Look at me. Look at this!”

The cook had a hand at his back. It was the queen's hand, and it slipped around his waist. Before the cook could shift away, he was pulled close to his cousin, so close he could feel a hot, damp armpit wetting his pant leg, the thick ungainly waistline of the queen pressing against his thigh.

“Some group,” the queen said. “Some fucking group we got here.”

The cook nodded.

“So,” the queen said, “I'm going to need you to repeat your eulogy from earlier.”

“Why?”

“Because I liked it. It was warmhearted.”

The cook said nothing.

“I need warmhearted, Able. You see what I'm doing here as queen. You see that I need some warmheartedness to round out the treachery.”

“Maybe you should just scale back on the treachery.”

“That's a thought,” the queen said. “But do you know what I'm thinking?”

“I don't care about you.”

“I'm thinking about how much sweeter you used to be when you were younger.”

The cook expected the dogs to be there when he stepped into his grandmother's bedroom. He put his knee through the bedroom doorway first. And, as he expected, he felt a bony face against his knee. He shoved the dog backwards, into the room, closing the door behind.

He went to the bed, sat down. The dogs thrust their faces into his lap. They were happy dogs. He petted them for a short time. The cook listened to his family guffaw and chortle as they sprawled about the grandmother's living room. He could hear the queen through the door requesting a jester to juggle something, wine glasses it would seem, and when the shattering of glass shortly followed, the house quaked with lusty amusement. With his stiletto knife, the cook cut a deep line across one dog's
pretty throat. The dying was silent, mostly clean, and without evident suffering. Eyes rolled. The mandible dropped. What stung the cook was the sight of the other two dogs backing away. They studied the dying dog and cowered into the corner, whining softly, or at such a removed and lofty pitch they might have been in another room of the house, perhaps another house altogether.

In the third act, the queen had some doubts. These were doubts he claimed he could never utter to his most trusted lords and confidantes, doubts about his decision to disembowel his own parents. “It is trying,” the queen contended, “to have to willingly disembowel one's parents.”

He weighed his heart as such, feigned torment over his dilemmas, and when the servant entered the stage, the queen wheeled and ordered the immediate death of his parents—he could delay the dirty thing no longer, he barked, lest it burden his conscience further and all of Swedish Castle see his doubts.

The Pedersons nodded, and the Leifs examined the dead grandmother's carpeting. No one was following. The servant, the youngest cousin of the
cook, departed without a word to her script, and the queen leaned like a fop on the piano.

I'm at a loss here. I'm at my wit's end. I'm trying to understand where you are, but I don't even have a guess at this point. Where do you take eleven children in the middle of the night? Anyway, it's almost three o'clock your time. I have done something I shouldn't have. Call.

Surprising everyone, the king (the cook's older sister) opened the fourth act with a sudden announcement that would, she claimed, “spare the queen his mortal doubts.” The king revealed a secret she'd just heard: the princess was illegitimately with child. “Therefore,” the king announced, “the princess would be the more fitting substitute for a disemboweling, if in fact the queen felt he could no longer go through with the disemboweling of his own parents.” The princess was being played by the servant's newborn, Lily, seven weeks old.

The sobbing was excessive. Upon seeing the butchery in the grandmother's bedroom, the queen
stepped outside of himself and wept. He had thrown jewelry and both bedside lamps across the room. One of the dogs had been kicked and injured and had fled beneath the bed; the other was thrown into an adjacent bathroom, locked in there by one of the Pederson men, who had pulled the thing's collar from his son's fist.

It surprised the cook to see this dog's muzzle stained dark with blood; it had evidently stuck its nose into the dead dog. It was the consensus of the room, then, that one of the dogs—maybe both of them—had slain the other. The queen sobbed, He knew it, he knew it, he knew it! He knew this would happen one day!

All was silent. The queen's brother, the blacksmith of Swedish Castle, had his socked foot on the dog's smooth, gray pelvis and was moving it thoughtfully, as though trying to rouse it.