This Offbeat Life
New Economy Cooking
Backpacking by Bus

Boniface, Plastic Joseph, and a Big Dead Dog:
A Love Story (Part I)

not by Dave McBee

It's not just that they love each other (that much is rather obvious). And it's not even that Lucy allowed him to put that... hideous, putrid thing into the trunk of her car for the several hour drive back to Seattle. No, the clincher was when they stopped at the carcass the second time, on the trip back down the beach, where Ricky took one more wistful gaze at the toothy grin surrounded by gore and stench, and she told him, "Look, I know you want this thing. I want it as much as you do. Let's figure out a way to bring it home."

Relating this to co-workers and supposed friends, Ricky was told (by the most tactful of us) that, "She sounds like a keeper!" Others (less tactful) simply congratulated him on finding another of his kind, or said, "Sounds like a match made in...wherever it is you came from."

Having decided to commit this potential slew of felonies (more on that later), they dragged the carcass over to a flat rock, where they managed to separate the head from the rest of the body by banging through the vertebrae with the blunt end of a stick. She cut through the remaining hide and tendons with her knife (Ricky discovered that she packs a bigger knife than he does and she keeps it sharper - but he'll adapt). They deftly maneuvered the head into a Ziploc bag, and eventually got the damned thing home. I will never accept a cheese sandwich prepared by either of them, just to be on the safe side.

It all sounds so much like the caption of another Far Side cartoon:

'On opposite sides of the rotting and noisome corpse, their eyes met, their scalpels crossed hesitantly...'

Boniface Makes New Friends

Wanting to break down the remaining tissues, and lacking any sort of back yard, they opted, for the first couple weeks, for sticking the head in a bucket of water and hanging it by a rope from their kitchen window. Dogs and raccoons have established an attentive vigil, but it's well beyond their reach.

After one evening out, Ricky stuck his head and torso out the window to check up on Boniface (as they'd chosen to name it), looked sharply to the right, where he saw a five foot tall plastic Jesus glowing serenely in his neighbor's window. ''Look, it's Jesus!" he exclaimed to the rest of us.

Yeah. Right. Sure,'' Lucy snorted, having already figured him out as the bullshit agent chief of the neighborhood, at least.

"No, really, it's Jesus!," he assured her.

Skeptical, she sidled up to the window, leaned way out and looked to the right. And started laughing so hard she... had to change her pants. It's precisely because of stuff like that which she has not allowed me to use either of their names in this story.

As Lucy careened toward the bathroom, we heard a voice out in the courtyard; it was Jessie, who lives above the window where the biblical apparition sat, calling out, "It's not Jesus, it's Joseph!"

''How would YOU know? It's right below you!"

''He was with me last night."

Surely, they live in an interesting building, one where a animal head rotting in a bucket hanging out a window might be accepted without question.

Roadkill Collection

A useful book on collecting and preparing mammal bones is Skulls and Bones, by Glenn Searfoss. It gives great insight into the physiology and comparative skeletal structures of North American mammals, and offers lots of practical information for the beginning bone collector.

In addition to outlining basic techniques and listing materials needed, the book also informs the reader of the real dangers inherent to this pursuit, including but not limited to: becoming roadkill yourself while spatulating (?) earlier roadkill off the pavement; becoming secondary bykill of a large predator returning to what may look like a stinky carcass to you but is simply cached lunch to said predator; and virulent and potentially deadly delights such as septicemia (blood poisoning), botulism, and anthrax.

Dead Cat Squared, or Martha Stewart would be sooo proud!

Having allowed Boniface to soak and hopefully rot for a couple weeks, Ricky decided to drain off the...stock...for a look, and see if he could trim off any tissue. Donning appropriate gear, he rummaged through his kitchen drawers for utensils or gadgets that fell into the categories of both being potentially useful and being discardable, as one would never want to use such tools for anything else. Spying the tomato corer, he quipped prophetically, "Gee, this might be handy for scooping out brains!"

Ricky reeled in his bucket of gore, grabbed tools, and headed for the laundry room (figuring that late night would offer the safety of seclusion).

He found that most of the tissue was still snugly attached, but he did manage to disconnect the top vertebra, the atlas, from the skull, opening the foramen magnum and releasing a horrific stench beyond compare. I was there to get pictures, but was sadly too busy gagging at the utility sink to take any shots. And I thought dead whales smelled rank!

When Lucy returned from the store with new sharp utility knives and Lysol disinfectant spray (her foresight may be the only reason they made it past this critical juncture without being evicted), Ricky's first words, hissed through clenched teeth, were, "Get the bandanna! Get the bandanna!", as his had slipped from his face as he was digging about inside the cranium with the tomato corer.

(We have since submitted our newfound use for said tomato corer to MarthaStewartLiving.com, and are anxiously awaiting culinary validation and heaps of praise. We realistically, are not holding our breaths.)

Not one of us will be able to look at raspberry yogurt ever again.

Getting to drop the excised rotting stuff, along with the tools and cutting surfaces, into the apartment building's dumpster strangely thrilled Rick: "That'll keep 'em out of there!", he chortled, referring to the small - time criminals who regularly peruse local dumpsters looking for canceled checks and other financial information with which to commit acts of fraud. By the next day, said dumpster was not something you could willingly walk up to, let alone open. It smelled like dead cat, squared.

New friends!

Our happy, if deviant, couple consulted a local biologist for advice on how best to continue the process. The biologist told of the difficulties of keeping a colony of dermestid beetles happy, working, and CONTAINED, and warned against the temptation of adding bleach to the soak, something that can be used with larger bones, as the delicate bones, particularly those of the head of a small or juvenile animal can simply fall apart or even dissolve in such a caustic solution. The biologist recommended that they continue as they were doing, warning them that the process could take a couple months and result in unforgivable hatred from all neighbors within half a mile. The biologist offered her back yard as a charnel house, where the remains would have plenty of company, including the bones of a very large hound named Horatio (names may have been changed to protect those of tarnishable reputation), and the skull of a penguin (name, as yet, undetermined). By press time, Boniface will have joined this outfit, though he will dearly miss Joseph.

The biologist also felt obliged to bring up the fact that, by collecting the remains of a marine mammal, Ricky and Lucy had violated at least three federal laws that she knew of. Informing her of the jurisdiction of the land from which they scored the treasure, the biologist added, "There's two more!" She advised discretion, and moving a lot.

Author Dave McBee disappeared last month, too. The entire Get Lost Magazine staff is certain aliens abducted him. The probing part is still a matter of speculation.