When our dog died, my dad told us he would get another dog for the house. My brother Pete had a whole list of names for the new dog; he’d gotten most of them from TV. My mom had to explain to him that Shamwow and Hitler were bad names for dogs, because what if he ran away? She wasn’t about to staple flyers all over the neighborhood that asked if anyone had seen Hitler, with a blurry photo of the dog sniffing at the camera lens on it. Whoever found the dog might kill it just to punish us for being racist.
My dad brought a turkey home anyway, so whatever. It’s penned up in the backyard where we used to chain the dog. There’s a big circle there that’s all dirt, where the dog used to run around, but now it’s starting to fill in with grass again.
When it rains, my dad runs outside and grabs the turkey and hugs it to his chest. One of us, mom or Pete or me, has to hold the kitchen door open for them. The turkey hates being picked up, and thrashes and pecks at my dad and scratches him with his fee
My dad says the turkey will drown if we leave it in the rain.
When Pete was five, my dad let him stick a penny in the light socket behind the TV. “He’ll learn,” was my dad’s reasoning. When Pete was nine and we were starting to get along, I asked him what it felt like. He said he didn’t know, and then shoved his hands down his pants and wiped them on me. Boys are gross.
Mom tried to burn the turkey with a cigarette when it squawked so loud that she spilled a pot of boiling hot soup all over the gas range. She chased it into the TV room yelling “goddamn motherfucker” and jabbing at it with her lit cigarette. Pete and I missed half an episode of Happy Days calming our mom down and shooing the turkey back out into the backyard.
I told my mom that the turkey sorta looked like the drummer from the Beatles, and she told me to shut up, that Ringo Starr was a beautiful man.
We keep the turkey in the backyard because my dad says we’re not zoned to have a turkey, and he doesn’t want any of our neighbors telling the city that we own one. Our neighbors probably hear it all day like we do, so if they wanted to tell on us, they would have by now. People think all turkeys do is gobble, but they’re loud and screechy and kind of gross.
One time, my dad came back inside from cleaning the turkey’s poop and said that it stank like a Civil War hospital. Two days later, he had to talk to Pete’s teacher because Pete told some girl that she smelled like that and it made her cry.
We also can’t keep the turkey in the front yard because we don’t have one. My dad got tired of mowing and trimming it because he’s allergic to grass or something, so he hired some people to dig it up and pour concrete in the hole. He even bought a plastic lawn flamingo to put in the concrete before it hardened. This all happened when mom was helping my uncle move some stuff into storage. When she came back and saw it, she just buried her head in her hands and said “oh my god” over and over again. I don’t know where she went after that, but she said “I can’t even be in the same house with you right now” before driving away again.
Pete and I helped my dad paint our new lawn green two days later, and by then my mom had gotten over it. She even watched us from the living room window, smoking and calling us idiots as we spray-painted in shifts and stained our clothes and hands green.
There’s a picture of me in one of the photo albums in my parents’ bookshelf. I’m standing in the vacant lot up the street from our house with one of mom’s cigarettes in my mouth. My school made me cut my hair off because I had lice, so it’s short and makes me look like a boy.
There’s an old car behind me in the picture, but you can only see part of it. All of its windows are broken and the seats are full of rocks.
My dad took the picture because he thought it would be funny to get a shot of me walking the turkey. The leash wouldn’t fit around its neck, so my dad cut a length of twine off the spool in the kitchen and tied it around the turkey’s neck.
We walked it up to the lot and back, and a few of our neighbors laughed as we passed by with the turkey clucking away on its leash and pecking at the sidewalk none of us can walk barefoot on because we’ll get staph infections if we do. That’s what my teacher says, anyway.
My mom didn’t keep any of the pictures where you could see the turkey, which means she only kept that one picture. She also yanked that cigarette out of my mouth and called me a goddamn idiot.
“Don’t you start smoking these,” she said, putting it back in the pack. “They’ll kill you just like they’re killing me.”
Pete and I used to tease our dog by feeding him hot dogs and then a pickle, which he’d eat it before realizing what it was. He always coughed it up in wet chunks and always gave us a “fuck you” sort of look, but it always worked. Pete used to deal them out like cards and yell “hot dog, hot dog, hot dog, pickle!”
Pete took one of mom’s cigarettes and gave it to the turkey, just to see what it would do. It stood there with the cigarette dangling from its beak and Pete snorted so hard from laughing that I thought he’d gotten air in his brain. I opened the kitchen door and let the chicken walk into the house, and expected my mom to scream at it, and then at us for letting it in.
When that didn’t happen, we walked into the TV room and saw mom sitting next to the turkey, which had climbed up onto the sofa somehow. They both had cigarettes in their mouths. I think my mom was watching some talk show about girls my age having kids.
My dad wants to take a picture of my mom with the turkey, but she won’t let him, not until she can walk barefoot on the front lawn in the summer without burning her feet.
