I started smelling it on Wednesday, at first in quick bursts when the wind blew: The sour, thick stench of death somewhere in the yard. I was down by the driveway gate, putting a trash bag in the bin, and I noticed it and thought ew, something smells dead and got on with my business.
The next day, I smelled it again. I was on the deck, watering plants, and it hit me like a cartoon frying pan. “Something is definitely dead,” I told my husband when I came back inside. He agreed enthusiastically, as he had been smelling it too. And then we set about our speculation game, wild guesses without any clues, about which kind of living creature had perished and where. A mouse, a cat, a squirrel? A snake? A lizard?
On Friday I noticed a deflated mylar balloon in the overgrown flowerbed in the back yard. It was a big round yellow smiley face, attached to a long ribbon. Richard said he figured it had floated over from the neighbor’s yard. They’d had a party out in the yard the previous weekend. But my mind instantly went to a true-crime plot. A deflated happy face balloon and the stink of death. Was there a lost, dead toddler under our deck? Were we being framed for kidnapping and murder?
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My sister kept a pair of old, beat-up Keds in the stairwell to the loft at my parents’ house. One time she got the shoes out and slipped a foot inside and felt something wet and squishy. It was a dead mouse. We had been smelling that thing for days, and didn’t know where the smell was coming from.
We were amazed such a big smell could come from such a small animal.
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I had the day off of work on Friday so I had the entire afternoon to obsess about where the smell was coming from. It was hot and muggy and the smell had settled over the entire yard. It was clear that its epicenter was somewhere around the deck, near the ramp that leads from the deck to the back gate. Every time I went outside to look around for the few seconds I could stand it, the smell seemed worse. I noticed dozens of blow flies alighting on the boards lining the ramp and realized it had to be there, under the ramp. But I couldn’t see anything. And I wasn’t really about to get down there and start digging around, either. Every time I went outside, the mosquitoes made quick work of my flesh.
I marveled at how our dog hadn’t yet rolled in the thing or even located it, and pretty much the instant I uttered a positive sentiment about that fact, it changed. Sandy immediately, the next time she went out, pinpointed a spot near where the blow flies were swarming. But she didn’t get a chance to get after it before I coaxed her back inside. She had caught the smell, though, got the sickness, and she spent the rest of the afternoon whining and harassing me so I would let her back out so she could hunt the smell’s source. I relented, figuring delusionally that she deserved a pee break, and I instantly regretted it. She went under the deck and went after that spot and by the time I summoned her back up, she smelled of death and I had to haul her out into the front yard and soap her up and spray her with the hose. She did not like that, but she deserved it.
Richard came home and was still in his work clothes and, after seeing his wet dog and his crazed wife and smelling the foul air, he was understandably overcome with the desire to kick the problem’s ass. So, without any fanfare or mental preparation or signing any kind of waiver, he crawled underneath the deck to look around. And he finally saw it, wedged up as far as it could fit between the ramp and the ground.
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The first time I ever saw the house we would eventually live in, it was dark out. Richard drove me over to take a peek at it, and as we topped the hill of the driveway, our headlights came to rest on quite the scene: Dozens upon dozens of feral cats, scattering every which way from their makeshift home in a big carport (known in our house since that moment as “the cat barn”) built to house an RV owned by the previous occupant.
After the sale was final and we started moving in and ripping up carpet and painting, Richard was visited by the children of the former owners of the house, the only family that had ever lived there. They begged him to continue feeding the cats. Apparently they had been coming to the house, even though no one lived there and it was being sold to settle the estate, and leaving food for the army of stray cats.
Richard, who had two big cat-eating dogs, did not agree to continue feeding the stray cats and made clear that he didn’t want them to continue doing so either.
After we moved in and the dogs had the run of the back yard, the cat population shrank dramatically. We did see two cats, though, occasionally slinking through the neighborhood at any and all hours of the day. There was a grey one I nicknamed General Lee in some self-referential, meta joke about my problematic and wayward Southern heritage, and a black one who always seemed to be lurking in a ditch. We called that one Ditchcat.
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Richard emerged from under the deck and showed me a picture he had snapped while on his belly beneath the deck. Sure enough, it was a damned cat wedged under there. A big black one. Ditchcat.
“I have to get it out,” he said. I wasn’t so sure. Couldn’t we just let it decompose naturally, go back to the earth, even if it meant we never used the back yard ever again?
My husband, who is an ass kicker, was having none of that. He got a big shovel and a trash can and some bags and his post-hole digger and went about nudging and pulling the cat out of its final resting place. He felt bad that the only way he could get a good grip was using the post-hole digger to grab the cat’s head. It seemed disrespectful.
He used a big stick to turn the cat over onto the shovel and realized with horror at just how bloated and distended the animal’s belly was. It had been sitting out there in the heat, ballooning up, getting ready to pop. I begged him to go get something to protect his face and hands in case the worst possible thing — a cat-gut explosion — happened.
But a cat-gut explosion did not happen. Richard shoveled the poor thing into the trash can and then we worked together to double, then triple, bag it to try to cut down on the smell. We placed the triple-bagged cat inside a box and ran back inside the house to scrub off the top layer of our skin.
The next day we went outside and the smell was still so strong apparently one of our neighbors had wandered up our walkway to check on us, according to another neighbor who has her finger on the pulse of the neighborhood. We quadruple- and quintuple-bagged the cat and put it in our trash can and despaired about what to do.
“Trash pickup isn’t until Tuesday,” Richard said. “That’s more than 72 hours that this thing is going to sit in here and fester.” He thought we should put it in the trunk and take it somewhere. A landfill. Throw it into the ocean, maybe.
“That thing is not going in my trunk,” I told him. “Even if there are seventeen bags around it, my car will smell like death for the rest of my life. The resale value will plummet!”
We stood there in the driveway, our nostrils flaring with every burst of stink that moved with the wind. It occurred to me that there were dead things of all sizes, all around us, at all times, whether or not we knew it. I thought about that tiny mouse in my sister’s shoe and how the whole house had smelled because of something smaller than my palm.
How did the whole world, every corner of it, not stink of death at all times?
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On Monday, Richard added another bag and sealed it tight, then wheeled the trash can to the curb. The smell was still intoxicatingly awful. It didn’t matter how many layers we put between that dead cat and the world.
When Richard came back up the hill, I was waiting for him in the car. We were going out to get sushi.
“Wouldn’t it be hilarious if some drunk driver careened down our street overnight and hit our trash can and sent that thing sailing through the air only to splatter in our front yard?”
He laughed, thank God.