Jujubee + Bonbon Forever

Originally published in Promethean Vol. 49 (Spring 2022)

I bumped a table by the backdoor too brusquely and a pair of wine glasses teetering on its edge fell, shattered, and announced an otherwise perfect, silent entrance. Four heads spun in time to watch me stumble and try to catch them. Thirteen more turned as the fragile goblets burst on the kitchen tile. Everybody rose. They moved toward me in small, tipsy, inefficient steps. I thought if I kept still enough they might pass me by and spill into the yard, but they circled up instead. Everybody touched my arms, back, and face. They scratched at the houndstooth pattern of my twill coat.

“This is new, I can tell,” said Uncle Geoff. “That’s very nice.”

 “He’s not moisturizing,” Aunt Ellen told mom. They each rubbed at the dry ridges on their faces, Ellen her cheeks, mom her forehead, warnings of my wrinkled future. Ellen pinched my chin and said, “But still a beauty.”

“This haircut! Honestly brilliant,” said Shy.

“Sorry about the glass,” I said to my cousin Sammy.

“You didn’t miss it yet, we’re still on this pregame stuff,” said Sammy. He swept the debris aside with two kicks of his boots and dragged me deeper into the fray.

Expectations for Sammy’s new place were low. In these tough times... had become the catch-all slogan for coping with collapse, and I saw Sammy as its very embodiment. He’d lost his job in the city and moved back to the suburbs’ edge, renting at 37 and still alone. When I saw the pregame show playing on an 80” TV with surround sound in a space that could have comfortably fit four different living room setups in each corner, I had to work to keep my jaw off the floor. This beast of a Samsung sat roughly in the center, crowded by a mismatched collection of wooden chairs both plain and ornate, ten metal folding chairs, and two luxe yellow recliners. The space was otherwise undecorated.

Cords draped out the back of an IKEA-wood TV stand and coalesced into a braided tail. Against one wall, many various sizes of foil trays and takeout containers were lined up and stacked. The room stank like buffalo sauce, cheesy pizza, heating oil, Shy’s potato salad with the chili mayo, dad’s incredible crispy fried chicken, sweat, and cigarettes.

 I was encouraged by the smells all competing for my attention, but I still feared I wouldn’t be able to relate with these people anymore. I smiled back at seventeen grinning faces. I could feel the desperation underneath, even if they wouldn’t cop to it.

Sammy had been laid off from his teaching gig.

Shy had been laid off from her salon.

Uncle Geoff had been laid off from the newspaper.

Jess, Paige, Ian, and Damon, all cooks and waiters, lost their jobs.

Sloane, Alison, Niki, and each of dad’s siblings – Aunt Ellen, Uncle Wes, Aunt Paula, Uncle Billy – I don’t know what they’d been doing, but they weren’t doing it anymore.

Mom’s corporation had downsized months ago.

Dad never stood a chance—if nobody’s buying, there’s nothing to sell.

Only Christopher, Ellen’s hospice nurse boyfriend, was working. There’d always be something left for him.

I wasn’t ashamed to have maintained employment, but I was one of the last. I held tight to a lowly desk job at a corporate law firm that seemed like it could’ve evaporated at any moment, when actually I’d just gotten a raise and a holiday bonus. I was even starting to look for a bigger apartment, upgrade from a studio to a one-bedroom. I didn’t plan to mention any of that.

“Happy Christmas, kid, we are so glad you could make it back,” said Uncle Wes, as he climbed into one of the recliners.

“Uncle Wes come on, let your long-lost nephew have the nice seat,” said Sammy.

Before I could object, Wes grumbled and retracted the footstand. Sammy grabbed me by the shoulders to push me into the chair. Velvet. Soft prickling against my skin immediately made me want to puke.

“Like sitting in a dream, right?” said Sammy. Bile knocking at my tonsils. “Let me get you a drink, stay right there.”

I peeled myself from the recliner and allowed Uncle Wes to reclaim it.

“Where’s dad?” I asked mom.

“He’s upstairs, he’s shaving,” she said.

“Now? Here?”

“Said he got itchy.”

“He told me he’d be too busy here to get me from the bus. Cab was like thirty bucks.”

“He’d been cooking all morning,” she said. I checked my watch to confirm it was after 4PM. “You know it takes him a lot of effort.”

A daytime fireworks display on the TV stole everyone’s attention. Sparks spelled out the word AMERICA in faint red. The message crackled with pride. A titanic boom graced the sky with a huge blue USA. A third blast in white couldn’t be read.

“It’s BLESS!” said Paige.

“That doesn’t make sense,” said my cousin Niki. “It’s just AMERICA again.”

“Oh, you don’t know,” Paige dismissed her sister.

My mom had tears in her eyes. “Feeling patriotic today?” I asked.

“Well it is a beautiful day, isn’t it?” she said.

My dad had a way of walking that announced his arrival nearly as violently as my smashed glass. Heavier than a simple stomp, he put his full weight into each step to inject them with jackhammer force. He looked like a pissed-off marcher angry he’d missed the parade. I couldn’t say how he hadn’t blown out both knees by now.

He came downstairs so aggressively Sammy yelled out, “Jesus!”

“Who the hell left this door open?” dad said. “Where are the dogs?” He slammed into the kitchen, mudroom, dining room, guest room, closets, he nearly busted through the hardwood.

“What dogs?” I said.

“Your dad got dogs,” said Damon.

“He brought them today,” said mom.

“How many dogs?” I asked.

“Just two,” she said. “Pretty big, though.”

“New pets? I can’t believe you’re okay with that.”

Mom raised her eyebrows and smiled.

“Aw, they’re sweeties, though. You see ‘em yet, Uncle Trent?” asked Niki.

“They’re gone!” said dad. His voice peaked in a boyish way I’d never heard before.

“I didn’t know about the dogs,” I said, in lieu of apologizing for not closing the door.

He put on shoes and left without a word, or his coat. I looked to the rest of the family to get a read on this behavior and found them all lacing up shoes and zipping up jackets and suddenly we were eighteen strong, walking a quarter-mile into the woods behind Sammy’s place after dad’s new dogs, Jujubee and Bonbon. Everybody was yelling. Among all the bare trees, dead grasses, and dry, crumpled leaves, I couldn’t see anything like an animal trail. Seemed like they were all mad with me, save for Sammy, walking beside me.

Ahead of us, Mom draped a heavy red blanket across dad’s broad back.

“I didn’t see your coat,” she told him.

“What, you didn’t chip ‘em, Trent?” Sammy said.

“They’re brand new dogs!” said dad.

“And? I chip everything, doesn’t matter when I got it or whatever.”

“I just didn’t get around to it yet, okay!” Dad charged forward. Mom followed.

“You’re still doing that, Sammy? Trackers in everything?” I asked.

“Never stopped. There’s not much left, but I still have it all.”

Cousin Sammy was obsessed with cataloging everything he ever owned. His puffy goose down jacket probably had a tracker glued in a pocket; his old black boots might’ve each had one in the sole, or hidden under the tongue. They were tiny, a fraction of a pinky nail, undetectably concealed within his furniture frames, DVD cases, book bindings, electronics. I had no idea what that all cost, but the information was worth it for him. When he had to sell off a ton of stuff, he kept all the tracking chips in. Only one item had totally disappeared, the Korg synthesizer he’d never quite learned to play. “I don’t understand, it must have been destroyed,” he told me, “which is a shame. That one I was definitely gonna buy back...”

Thankfully, Sammy wasn’t like his dad, who had been a prominent collector of 78RPM records, totally devoted day-and-night to hunting down the rarest singles ever pressed to shellac, to the disquieting detriment of his relationship with his family. He once missed Thanksgiving so he could beat another collector to a flea market in Virginia.

Uncle Charley’s prize piece was Paramount 13125, King Solomon Hill’s “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” b/w “Times Has Done Got Hard,” from 1932. Charley’s was only the second known copy of this apparently legendary piece of American blues history. Some fellow collectors were suspicious, though, and when enough confronted Charley, via several scathing posts on niche collector message boards, he finally admitted he’d worked up phony labels. He hadn’t even tried to get its potential $2500+ value, he just sought the status of being one of the guys who nabbed it.

He passed away two years ago from some heart thing, still disgraced within the community. Sammy left a chair open for him at the table.

Sammy didn’t maintain a collection of any specific type of item. He just craved ownership. Nobody else in my life felt so strongly about their stuff. If he ever visited, my cousin would’ve been shocked to see my home was about as empty as his new place. To me a thing was just a thing, not a measure of personality.

“There was this other weird situation, this is really interesting—” he said, before my mom broke in. She stepped out in front of us from behind a tree and startled me. Her hair was the color of the gnarled trunks, but her eyes were red, like nothing else.

“Jesus! Where’d you come from?” I said.

“It wouldn’t kill you guys to try a little harder to look for Trent’s dogs, okay?” she said.

“Mom,” I said. When dad acted strange or foolish, there was a look she and I shared to make sure we were still on the same side. Here, I was alone.

She said, “Please. Your father’s been having a bad time.”

“Everybody has!”

“Not everybody.”

“Mom,” I said again. I touched her arm. “He didn’t even say hello to me this time.”

“Why don’t you cut him some slack, Gabe?”

“Why’s it always on me?”

She walked off to join the choir of her nieces, nephews, and in-laws singing, “Juuuuuuuu-juuuuu-beeeee! Bonbon! Bonbon!”

I wanted to say something to her like, Nice sweatpants, because it sounded mean but vague. It matched the broadness of my frustration with her and my father, not to mention everyone else, including these two mutts. I figured a wide net of ill-defined irritations, cast evenly on all sides, ought to be enough to warrant an early exit: everybody would win.

“This is dumb, man, I don’t even know what they look like,” I said to Sammy.

“Well, they’re the only loose dogs you’re gonna find here today,” he said. “But, one’s yellow, the other is black with white patches. Honestly I forget which is which. Both big-ish.”

Christopher sidled up on my left. He’d grabbed some fallen limb to use as a walking stick. “Gabe, how’s it been pal?”

“Good, good. Keeping busy.”

“That’s really great. Hey, so, I saw you and your mom talking, and I know you—well, listen, I don’t think I’m telling tales to say, your mom’s had a really hard year.”

I sighed at him. I knew what was coming, the reminder to respect my good fortunes.

He continued. “We’ve actually gotten close lately, she’s over at your aunt and I’s a few times a week for lunch. I’ve been looking into if I might be able to get her in at the hospice to help, ten or twelve hours a week. You should call her more.”

“I know, Christopher,” I said.

“Please, Gabe, ‘Uncle Chris.’ It’s been like fifteen years!” Christopher looked to Sammy for support and recognition of his avuncularity, but Sammy had become absorbed in a particularly handsome sunset nearing the horizon. He crouched to take a photo through the naked oaks and hickories, then turned to grab a selfie with it.

“I’m just saying,” said Christopher, “let up on them sometimes. You’re like me, Gabe, you’re a lucky one here. And I know you know that, because I know you’re smart.”

“Well if they want things easier, maybe they shouldn’t be fucking around with new dogs right now! I’m not sending them money every month for new dogs,” I seethed. Christopher’s eyes dropped. “What, that never came up? You thought they were still running on savings?”

He sucked his cheeks. “Unemployment’s a curse in the USA. But they’re getting by, and they’re still allowed to do what they want. So are you.” Christopher snapped the top button of his coat and straightened his spine. “We’re all damn grownups here,” he said, as he trudged forward.

Sammy slapped me on the back. He showed me the picture on his phone of him and the sun. “Nice right?” he said. I said I guessed it was. He kept swiping through photos but I looked upward, at the wispy clouds constantly blocking and unleashing the sun. No birdsongs or animal chatter, only my family whistling and yelling dog-names.

“Oh! So I was saying, it’s really interesting—” Sammy grabbed my arm to snap me back into his conversation. “I sold a bunch of old college books along with everything else, and back in like, August, this one guy bought five or six of them, all like Philosophy 101, Kant, Kierkegaard, all that shit.”

“You took philosophy?”

“Man I was a philosophy major.”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” I said. I don’t think he believed me but he moved on.

“My tracker map had a handful of marks all the way over in Saudi Arabia, and it turned out to be those books. I had the guy’s first name so I do some searching and find this article from the Times about a student up at the college, originally from Saudi Arabia, who got arrested on a hit-and-run in September, and the woman he hit actually died—and it was this guy! The lawyer for her family said the kid’s a flight risk, but the judge set bail anyway. Somebody wired money, he makes bail, and poof. Gone. They can see him posting on Instagram and shit, they know where he is, but there’s no extradition between us and the Saudis. This lawyer said something like, ‘Nobody can touch him, he enjoys the protection of the Kingdom.’” Sammy exhaled and smiled at the sun as it dipped out of sight. “Wild. ‘Protection of the Kingdom.’ I can’t even imagine it.”

“Yeah, interesting.”

So he was pro-monarchy? He liked feeling connected with a killer? I might’ve found something so morbid cool years ago, but now it left a sour taste in my throat.

“How do you have so much time to do all this research?” I asked.

“It’s Google, man, it’s not that time consuming.”

“But I know you have other stuff to worry about,” I told him.

Sammy bobbed his head and said, “I’m not worried dude,” and left to catch up with my other cousins. Dad was further ahead, forty or fifty yards away. He stood alone in a clearing. The red blanket over his shoulders soaked in the final rays of winter daylight. He raised his arms and waved everyone off. I heard him call out, “Back to the house.”

Everybody turned. They now faced me. I turned, too, to lead the quiet, woeful retreat. I was ruminating on my hunger, and my disbelief that I had spent so long pursuing animals I might now never meet, as a rustling clump of leaves spooked me. I kicked the pile and a squirrel skittered up a tree trunk. It took a moment to turn a black eye on me. I stuck my tongue out.

There was more crunching and huffing behind me, and I spun in time to see a mass of blond fuzz rushing toward me. The dog tackled me and barked into my face, oddly high for its enormous size. I screamed. It must’ve weighed sixty-five, or even seventy-five to a hundred pounds.

“Bonbon!” I heard my dad shout from the rear of the pack. He ran to us, and the rest of the family picked up from a shuffle to a jog.

Bonbon’s assault lasted only a few seconds but I was certain this animal could and would kill me. Its softball-sized paws and sharp claws on my chest, dripping teeth at my neck, awful breath in my mouth. This hound with the great horrible fangs and slimy tongue, kicking dirt all over my nice clothes, was poorly trained by my parents, if it was trained at all. I was hyperventilating. In my final moments, I wished I hadn’t used the rest of my vacation days for this. I swung a desperate fist at Bonbon and connected with a broad flank, then punched again at its tender abdomen, flabbier than I would’ve guessed. I kicked my legs out and the dog slipped off. Bonbon hopped away, crooning, and escaped again, first at a lope, but then it bolted, darting between trees, looking smaller than it had seemed while it was crushing the breath from me.

“Goddammit Gabriel, she’s like ten years old! You might have hurt her!” said dad. He took off after Bonbon.

“Trent!” my mom said. “Gabe, why didn’t you just hold on to her? She’s so playful, she’s practically a kitten!”

“Not kitten-sized!” I said. For a moment, she was at a loss for words. She clasped her hands behind her head, looked at me on the ground, then at the army of cousins, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers. She told them to keep heading back, while she kept on with dad. Everyone objected, but she silenced them with a single, stern, “Go.”

The family stepped over and around and beyond me.

“Moves pretty good for an old girl...” I muttered as they went. Someone kicked leaves my way for sure, Shy and Ian were doing muttering of their own, Jess and Uncle Geoff shook their heads vigorously, Sammy consoled Aunt Ellen, who seemed on the verge of tears for some reason. When they were far enough away, I hoisted myself up and walked – limped, actually – back to the house.

A black dog was waiting at the top of the porch steps. They all took turns petting Jujubee as they walked inside the house. I heard Aunt Ellen say, “We’ll get your sister back, buddy.” Meanwhile, I had a scratch on my cheek, a sore leg and shoulder, messed up jeans, and no consolation. From the other side of the dog, Christopher said, “They sure do make it hard for you,” then went inside to see how much of the game we’d missed before I could ask if he meant pets or my parents.

I sat beside Jujubee but we didn’t touch. I watched his curly pink tongue flop around. His face twitched every time I jingled my keys or shifted. He was grey above the ears, like I had been since my twenties. Probably he wished there were more rodents to chase, or rabbits, or deer. He looked like a hunting dog, or what I figured hunting dogs ought to look like. After a few minutes, I softly touched the nape of Jujubee’s neck. He didn’t flinch.

“You should maybe get out of here for real though,” I told him. “You just won’t find what you need around here. And people are only ever taking care of themselves. Nobody’s here to protect you. Not really.”

Jujubee pulled away, sniffed my hand, then stepped off the porch to sit on the concrete.

I checked Uber and the nearest cab was over a half-hour away. I texted my mom: Any luck? Something exciting happened on the TV and the family erupted in cheer. As I crossed the threshold to join them, dad’s chicken found my nose. I hovered over to it and plated a few pieces, perfectly greasy and seasoned with lemon and pepper and paprika and thyme and something else he refused to reveal. I decided I’d go back out for Bonbon, but first, a drumstick.