Puppalicious and Beyond Read online

  “It’s that bad, huh?”

  “Oh yeah, it’s that bad.”

  Eric finally—FINALLY—smiled and swatted me on the behind. He put the earplugs in.

  “Those are kind of sexy,” I said.

  “What?” he yelled.

  Mission accomplished.

  ~~~

  Part One: Creatures Caribe

  ~~~

  Chapter Three: Creepy Crawlies and Things That Go Bump in the Night

  I lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands for six years, and the critters of the Caribbean kinda creeped me out. I didn’t go all nutso about it like Eric did with the frogs, but they left their mark on my psyche.

  Most people envision tropical tranquility when I tell them I met and married my husband on St. Croix, but not everything in paradise is idyllic. Don’t get me wrong: it’s gorgeous, and we loved it. But some of God’s little creations in the U.S.V.I. make you wonder if He is related to Tim Burton. And this coming from a woman who grew up with rattlesnakes, black widows, water moccasins, copperheads, and scorpions in Texas.

  In the water, the animals of the V.I. are lovely. I adore the puffer fish. My eyes devour the vivid colors of the parrot fish. How much more beautiful can something get than the eagle ray? Sure, there are underwater beasts that sting like a jellyfish or bite like a barracuda, but not often. On land, though, on land, you get only the scrubs who can survive in desert-like island conditions. For instance, you have the gungalos.

  Gungalos are large millipedes with glossy red or black exoskeletons that are filled with acid. That’s right, acid. And they propagate like rabbits. Worse than rabbits. Worse than the frogs. During the nearly year-round gungalo season, people have to sweep up gungalos from their floors and patios multiple times a day. Did you catch that? I said floors, as in the floors in your house. Because in the V.I., most people live in open-air settings, meaning their doors and windows remain open more often than not. The gungalos—and other creepers—make themselves right at home. Thus, you won’t just find them on your floor. You’ll find them on your bed and in your shoes, too. If you step on a gungalo, you’ll hear a nasty crunch and then see an ooze the color of the exoskeleton, which is either black or reddish. If you’re barefoot, it stings. The ooze leaves a stain on your foot or the floor for as long as a month. Eric bought his first skateboard from the penny-per-gungalo his parents used to pay him to sweep, bag, and dispose of them.

  Joining the ranks of the proud and the poisonous are the geckos. Geckos are heroes that eat the no-see-ums. No-see-ums are tiny gnats that get their name because, well, you can’t see them. But you know they’ve been there because they leave their calling card: a stinging bite. I spent my first six months on-island in scabby welts from no-see-ums. They feasted on my tenderfoot skin. I still have a scar from a particularly nasty bite. After a while, I guess I developed immunity or a stench they didn’t like, and they left me alone.

  Back to the geckos. Geckos eat insects, but they can get into anything, anywhere. We would find their little lizard poos all over the place, and once during a dinner party we saw their skeletons under the glass top of our dining room table in a hidey-hole we had missed when cleaning. Not appetizing. Our cats loved the geckos. They loved to chase them, to torment them, and to eat them. However, geckos are mildly poisonous when consumed. Our cat Juliet knew this from firsthand experience. You could tell poor kitty had eaten too many geckos when she started to weave around and foam at the mouth. I’ve never known it to be fatal, but I’ve seen a lot of gecko-drunk felines.

  Also poisonous? Centipedes. Evil, evil centipedes. Centipedes still haunt my dreams. In theory, I was familiar with centipedes from pre-island life. But it wasn’t until I moved to St. Croix that I understood what horrible creatures they are. They are Satan in his living form. Don’t believe me? Try waking up to a six-inch black and yellow monster in bed with you, latched on for a nice bite on your neck. Been there, done that. The bite alone is painful enough to get your attention, but it’s what comes next that’s truly demonic: swelling, stinging, nausea, numbness, fever and dizziness. It’s dangerous to small children and people with allergies, who can go into anaphylactic shock. In six years in the islands, I was bitten three times. My husband, in his forty years there, was only bitten twice. Like all the other island pests, we could keep them at bay but not eliminate them completely, even with regular visits from Terminix. Once I was able to kill a large one without mauling its colorful body, so I left it on Eric’s pillow as a surprise. After I peeled him off the ceiling, he said he liked it better when I surprised him with fishnet hose and a garter belt.

  Leaving the poisonous and moving on to the obnoxious, the island toads send me into dry heaves, even actual heaves. My parents battled toads for several years in their house on St. Croix, which was named Whispering Palms1 for the coconut palms lining its ridge. At Whispering Palms, the rooms were connected by exterior covered breezeways that were lined on either side with planter beds. The toads would emerge from the soil at night and stand in stacks upon each other, five deep in some places. From what I could tell, they came out solely to piss my mother off by crapping all over the hallways, but possibly they also emerged to eat and engage in recreational sex. My mother is not a fan of casual sex or toads.

  It gets worse. Tap water, in the islands, usually comes from below-house cisterns that are filled by roof catchments. You control your own water quality with additives and filters. Occasionally a homeowner might have a reason to get into the cistern. Eric and I had five separate cistern chambers below Annaly, and a few of them were only accessible by going down a ladder into one chamber and, depending on the water level, walking, swimming, or rafting into another. In the dark. But I digress. So, back to Whispering Palms. My father had to get into their cistern for one reason or another, which he had not done in quite some time. To his horror, he discovered hundreds—possibly thousands—of the breezeway toads, pooping, peeing, fornicating, and God knows what else in the depths below their house, into their bathing and drinking water.

  Did you just throw up a little? That’s okay. I did, too.

  I like the tree frogs much better than the toads. The tree frogs are native to Puerto Rico and known as “coqui” (ko-kee), because that’s the sound they make (all night long). They are darling little quarter-sized creatures. They are usually green, at least on St. Croix, but I’ve seen them in a range of colors that match their surroundings. They may be cute, but the coqui lullaby becomes water torture after four or five sleepless nights.

  And then there are the island sparrows, AKA bats. Initially, they wigged me out. We had, no lie, hundreds living under the eaves at our rainforest house. They would slip out of their attic hideaway at dusk, two or three at a time, to hunt for bugs and to take sips of water out of our swimming pool. After a while, I came to appreciate them for their appetite for mosquitoes, and because it was perfectly lovely to sit on the patio in the evenings and watch them swoop and flutter. Banish your thoughts of bloodthirsty vampire bats—these flying mammals would almost fit in your palm. However, I admit I didn’t like it when they got inside the house. Once there was a bat on the ceiling of our bedroom that I had to chase out with a tennis racket. When I couldn’t get it all the way outside, I managed to trap it under a beach bucket and then gently walk the bucket to the porch, where I released it.

  So, I didn’t resort to bagging bats and dumping them on the beach like so many frogs into the bayou, but I do have recurring nightmares of a foot-long centipede stinging me into paralysis in my bed, where I lie immobile, tortured by the cry of the coqui and covered in gungalos and geckos, watching towers of toads poop on my clean floors.

  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the land critters of the Caribbean make an impression.

  1 Prior to realizing they would become his in-laws, my husband dubbed their home Farting Bushes. Tsk, tsk, not nice.

  ~~~

  Chapter Four: Guard Dog in Training

  When I first bought Annaly, we had to sic the con
tractors on it for about six months before it was habitable. That gave me time to prep the family—kids and pets alike—for the radical lifestyle change ahead of us. Cowboy, our yellow labrador, was only one year old. Young Cowboy needed to develop some skills before he could become the alpha guard dog. I had my doubts the big goofball was cut out for the job.

  My brother Bruce visited us about halfway through the finish-out. After showing him our progress, the kids and I set out from Annaly toward my favorite place in whole world: the tidal pools. The hike to the tidal pools was rugged. The rainforest terrain of the island’s north coast was steep, and the trail was thick with saw grass in some places. My kids were youngish, too; Susanne was nearly seven and Clark was nine at the time. Cowboy came with us, because he went everywhere Susanne went, except school, and he would have gone there, too, if we’d let him.

  It took us an hour to reach the pools, where we picnicked before our swim. We all got a belly laugh out of watching Cowboy follow Susanne through the water at first. He was a powerful swimmer, as you would expect for a labrador. Oh, to have the slightly webbed toes and buoyancy of a lab. We realized, though, that he might drown her in his urgent need to be near her, so with our coaching she got behind Cowboy and held onto his collar. He dragged her around the pools as if she was weightless, and I swear he was smiling.

  Then Clark and Susanne decided to jump into the water from the low rock cliffs around the pool. It was a great idea, in theory. First Clark climbed up and jumped. That went fine. Then it was Susanne’s turn.

  Susanne climbed the slippery, steep rocks. This didn’t bother me until Cowboy, who weighed twice as much as Susanne, noticed where she’d gone. He dug his toenails into the rock and somehow hauled his one hundred and ten pounds out of the water by his front legs. He scrambled up the rocks like a drunken mountain goat. Susanne stood poised for her jump as he closed in on her fast.

  “Jump, Susanne, jump NOW,” I screamed. The collision between dog and small girl wasn’t going to be pretty, and there was no way I could get to her in time.

  She looked back at the barreling figure of Cowboy and for once in her young life didn’t ask, “Why, Mommy?” She leaped into the water a few seconds before Cowboy reached the spot on which she had been standing. He whined, he moaned, he thrashed his head side to side. Susanne surfaced, laughing.

  “Swim to me as fast as you can, honey, as fast as you can,” I urged, trying not to panic. Now I was picturing his body, claws first, landing on her head.

  Susanne had joined the swim team at the age of five, and she put all that training to good use at the right moment. She shot toward me as Cowboy swan-dived off the rock face. He landed with four legs splayed in a furry cannonball. His splash propelled Susanne the last few feet to me.

  Not to be deterred from the object of his adoration, he swung his giant muzzle back and forth until he locked eyes on her. He engaged his powerful dog paddle.

  “Now, darlin’, you know what to do.” And she did.

  Susanne waited until Cowboy was three feet away, then she dove under water, coming up behind him. She grabbed his collar.

  “Good boy,” she yelled.

  My pulse, which had triple-timed during the last forty-five seconds, slowed down as dog dragged daughter around the tide pool. Clark splashed in the shallows, oblivious to the drama. Bruce had appeared by my side without me noticing until now. We exchanged a long look.

  “That dog is a little protective,” he said.

  “I knew he was crazy about her, but that was more than I expected,” I said.

  “Again!” Susanne yelled.

  “No, ma’am!” I yelled back.

  On the hike back out, Cowboy ratcheted up his attention to Susanne and kept station off her flank like a sheepdog. If one of us got between dog and girl, he simply shoved us back out of the way, no matter how steep or narrow the path. We passed some other hikers and he emitted a low rumble as they passed his girl. It was a long hike, and we were all pretty tired. Several times, Susanne stopped for an ugly mood swing, but Cowboy would herd her back into forward motion.

  “Good boy,” I said, and patted his head. He didn’t take his golden eyes off Susanne to acknowledge my praise. It looked like the guard dog was almost ready for life in the rainforest.

  ~~~

  Chapter Five: Ghosties, ghoulies, and long-leggedy beasties

  I may not believe in zombies, sparkly vampires, or Bigfoot, but I do believe in something. I know there’s more out there than my eyes can see or my outer ear can hear. I feel it sometimes. I sense it. Do you? There’s an energy around us, inhabiting an invisible dimension.

  Some people never sense it. Others have what I think of as an extrareceptive ear, a greater capacity to relate to the energy around us, like the energies from living people, from animals, or even from formerly living people. From a million unseen, unheard sources, some that we can’t name, but we know exist.

  Culture plays a role. In some parts of the world, kids are raised to believe, and so they listen more openly. Eric grew up in the Caribbean, where jumbies—ghosts, spirits—were an accepted and expected part of life. Santería, voodoo, and other tropical-clime practices exist for a reason. People in the islands look for ways to communicate with and harness the power of spirits. Eric has this receptivity, this special ear, and he really freaked me out at first when he sensed the presence of something that wasn’t actually living among us, like he did immediately at Annaly.

  I’ve got some sort of this sensitivity. I could feel the jumbie at Annaly, too. But I’m a bit more of an empath. You know, like Deanna Troi in the purple jumpsuit on Star Trek: Next Generation. That kind of empath. Whether chemically or by my thoughts, when I’m with someone in person, I can get all the way through to them, and I receive much more in terms of energy and connection from them than most other people do.

  Yeah, yeah, I know. You think this is crap. But it isn’t. People understand and relate to me, latch onto me, grab hold of the energy I put toward them. It makes me a heck of an investigator, executive coach, and public speaker—things I do in my day job—but I don’t always want to go there. It takes a lot out of me. And when I knowingly open my channel, people that are too needy can almost incapacitate me. I’ve learned to protect myself, protect my resources.

  The closer I am emotionally to a person, the more powerful this force can be. I can connect from longer distances with those to whom I am closest. And of course, the more the other person is in touch with the unseen, the greater the energy we can pass between us. I think my husband’s similarity to me in this regard was one of the things that drew us together originally, back when we were co-workers and there was no twinkle of forever in our eyes yet.

  Eric was once in a horrific bike wreck while I was ten miles away, cooking dinner up at Annaly. Suddenly I was hit by a blunt force of traumatic energy that sent me down on my knees with my hand around my throat. I grabbed my car keys and mobile phone off the counter without so much as my purse or an idea of where I was heading. I drove at breakneck speed toward town. Fifteen minutes later, when I was out of the rainforest and back into cell reception, my phone rang. It was Eric. He had hit a car head-on and was refusing medical treatment. He had woken with no memory of who he was but kept saying he needed Pamela. And I had heard him.

  If humans have this much energy to tap into the unseen with each other, doesn’t it stand to reason that we can sense, feel, and hear the other unseen energies around us? I believe all of this energy is interconnected and constant, that some auras are just so powerful that through their force and circumstances, they can’t easily be erased. It’s not like I think there are bajillions of undead spirits clamoring for me to hear them, but I know some spirits outlast their physical bodies. They’re out there. I know they are. Just because I can’t see them to name them doesn’t make their presence less tangible.

  And how do you explain some people’s greater intuition about things—spatial relations and connections to the energy emanating f
rom objects? I am attuned, but my inner ear works best on living (and maybe formerly living) things. Eric is attuned, as is his son. My daughter Susanne is, too, but she has an inner ear that functions differently than mine. Suz has a tremendous relationship to animals and objects. She is a Dog Whisperer with the soul of a cat.

  She has another skill that is stranger, though: Susanne knows where things are. The first few times she knew without looking where I had left, for instance, the camera (“In the upstairs closet on the top right shelf, Mom”—the “duh” was implied), I attributed it to nosiness. Surely she had just pawed through the closet and run across it? But we noticed she knew immediately where things were when we asked, and her only explanation for it was “I just know.” She keeps a good visual inventory of her surroundings. For instance, she goes through my drawers almost daily and will announce at dinner, “So, you got new panties, I see,” apropos of nothing. It transcends observation (and nosiness), though, into the realm of the relational energy stored in objects. If we lose something, we ask her. If it’s findable, she knows where it is. If she says it’s gone, she’s right, and we give it up as truly lost.

  Thus, with this belief in the unseen, I write. And they, whatever it is they are, make their way into my stories. My nonfiction is full of it. Okay, that came out wrong, but you get my point. My fiction is, too. Most of my fiction is grounded in memory, anyway. What is fiction, after all, but life reimagined? Life, only more interesting. Life, with the answer to “what if?” If you’ve read my nonfiction, you’ll recognize my fictional characters like old friends you’ve never met, and I’m going to introduce you to them in this book.