Toki Wartooth is the name of the rhythm guitarist in the fictional animated death metal band Dethklok on the animated tv show, “Metalocalypse”. The show, which came on Adult Swim in the winter of 2010 in re-runs, was for a time a welcome distraction for me and my pre-teen daughters as we huddled under blankets, near space heaters, in the dark glow of the television late at night during the blizzards of February 2010. The show is funny and dark and bizarre but not anything near as dark as the reality we were actually living in at that time. It was also hysterically funny and light and strange, comic relief when we had no heat, but still had electricity. The propane tanks were empty, which meant no hot water. No cooking fuel. Just space heaters, which we used sparingly because the power had been blinking on and off. In the dark night, the falling snow was illuminated by the moon behind it, reflected back, it made an eerie glow outside in the unnatural early morning hours. We watched it rise, and rise, and rise, and wondered if our front door would be overtaken by the drifts.

That January, my mother and then 89 year old grandmother had called me at work one afternoon, telling me they had a surprise waiting for me at home. I lived in a small house, with failing systems, a bad roof. My daughter was 13, the younger 10 and a half, my son was 3. We were alone in this little house at the end of a cul de sac, where we’d lived for nearly a decade. Our dog, Tita, had died of cancer in 2008. She was a purebred chihuahua from a puppy mill, had never been healthy, had been skittish and not as well taken care of as she should have been. When my eldest daughter was five months old, Tita was a 3 pound puppy I could hold in the palm of my hand. She was a survivor in her own way, but the inbreeding and lack of constant veterinary care that she required, which we could never afford, resulted in breast tumors so huge they finally broke the skin. I had to put her down. I buried her in the back yard of that house, near the corner of the fence, and the next summer, a plume of daisy-looking weeds grew in that spot, sheltering her little grave.

My Mom knew that I needed a sentinel. She found a chihuahua terrier mixed breed at the shelter in West Virginia. He’s brindle, brown and black, with a tiny white star in the top of his muzzle, quick deep brown eyes, a white spot on his chest and on two of his feet. He immediately jumped up into my elderly grandmother’s lap and would not give up his seat until  he was delivered into our home that night they adopted him from the shelter.

When I came home from work and the children met him, he was immediately friendly and protective, and he knew somehow that this was his place, and he would not run away from it. We tossed around names. My eldest daughter is into Anime, among other things. The dog was estimated to be about a year old, give or take. We came upon his name, unanimously, when she and her sister Thea chimed out the name of the rhythm guitarist: “Toki Wartooth”!

Toki. We still have him, two years later. He is an expert escape artist. He’s lightning fast and has never come home with any kind of damage from a skirmish with any other animal. His shots are up to date. He is healthy, sleek, hearty and hale. He could be called Houdini. He escapes on a regular basis, is willful, headstrong, and he knows how to survive. He explores and scouts and has fierce energy that can only be burned in these spurts of exercise. I learned long ago that I cannot chase him. He always came back unharmed at the old house, and he comes back unharmed when he escapes from our new house. I have a padded harness for him, I walk him around the property. He is our sentinel and alarm, but does not bark incessantly the way a lot of smaller breeds do. He only barks at animals that come too close to the house, at strangers, or at danger. He has an uncanny ability to tell friend from foe. He is our mighty Toki Wartooth, 12 pounds of lean muscle. A scrappy survivor, affectionate companion, intelligent and at 3 years old, in his prime.

Blotto

Posted on January 8, 2012 at Daymaresandotherdreams.wordpress.com

© Laura Levesque 2012

Not sleeping as much as I need, but I finished the novel “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett last night. I’m probably the last one jumping on the bus here, but I’ve been busy as all hell. Kathy Wales, if you are out there, I am going to write you a thank you note. And I will return your books, Mom lends them to me, and I confess this one sat in my car for a long time, relegated to the back seat somewhere, or under the driver’s seat, with the glacial build up of crap in my car, created by me and my kids. I lost the jacket. I’m sorry for not taking better care of it. But thank you for lending it, it’s not in bad shape and I will give it back. It will wind its way into your hands through all the various channels of my family.

The book got knocked loose, like a tooth, when I slammed into a buck on November 18, 2011. I was doing 60 mph on Route 7. The date is significant because, along with it being my first kill after all my years here among the hunters in Virginia, it was the first time I had to give Thea and Caleb over to their dad since he got out of jail. Dad had to take them the next morning and drop them at their other grandmother’s house, early. It’s about twenty miles from Winchester Virginia to Charles Town West Virginia, where we bought a house, 3/4 of a mile from my parents and grandmother, who have lived here for over ten years now after following me, 3 year old Alex, and five month old Althea out to this area from Baltimore.  The night I hit the deer, I was on part of this well-worn commute that’s a major artery through an area that’s getting bigger and more developed all the time, but still has stretches of rural farmland. There were no lights anywhere, and the night was dead dark. I was in one of those places. At 8pm, I was on my way home after a long work-week, after having run the kids up to spend the night with my folks, so they wouldn’t have to crawl out of bed so early the next day.

I don’t remember the phase of the moon. But the buck was in my headlights, as I am a left-lane driver, and a habitual speeder, though I don’t travel near as fast as I did at one time. Full on impact at 60 mph is still pretty damn fast. I saw a flash of his body for just a split-second before the car slammed into him. I hadn’t thought about hitting one before, in all these years. My car is a 2007 Nissan Versa. Small 4 door sedan, not really big enough for a family of five. First car I ever bought new, all kinds of negative equity rolled into the note still from the van my ex would not refinance, that came back to me, even though I didn’t want it, after the divorce. Credit union was good enough to let me roll the 6K of negative equity into that car note on the Versa. My first Nissan.

That little car saved me. I had a low impact crash twelve years ago in a mid-90′s Ford Taurus. I was sitting still in traffic, looking over my shoulder, impatient to gun into the left lane, which had started to move, and the guy in the SUV in front of me stopped short. I didn’t see his brake lights. Airbag went off in my face, sprained my right wrist, the seat belt bruised me so badly. And that was at low impact, slow speed. I had liability only. The guy was mad about his bumper, but he was an older man, maybe mid forties. When airbags deploy, there’s powder in them and this burning feeling that gets in your eyes and lungs, and the steering column on that Taurus was angled to catch me right in the face when it went off. I was stunned, had to sit on the side of the busy road in the little strip of grass, police came, I refused the ambulance. We were broke and I didn’t have full coverage. The guy I hit said something about being in the car auto parts business, and once I was on my feet, he got kinda pissed that I didn’t have my insurance card on hand. I even tracked him down later, via the accident report, and mailed him a note with the policy number, but he never filed. He had seen what happened when my then-husband came to pick me up.

The collision happened within two miles of our house. He watched John’s reaction when he saw what had happened: anger at me for doing damage to a car we couldn’t afford to fix. Didn’t really care if I was hurt or scared or anything else, and I must have acted like a doe in headlights after that knock in the face, so intertwined with the pathology of my toxic marriage, I wanted out of there, and fast. John was cussing and yelling at me as we drove away. First thing I did when I got home was do a bong hit. Numb it down, dive deeper into myself, survive the pain by pretending it didn’t hurt. Not the physical injuries, which were minor. That cop and that guy I hit saw it when John came to get me, and I suspect that is why the man never filed a claim against me even though I had rear-ended him.

So, having just delivered my children to their first visit with their father, who had gone to jail because I said no, stop, this is enough, I can’t do it anymore, please please please let me go, just let me go, and he hung onto me and my life and our kids like a pit bull on the arm of a tree. Futility. Destruction. Loss. I got away. I got away, and I got those girls away too. And my baby boy, who didn’t even know, doesn’t remember anything, who is so smart and so loving now that he’s five and in school but still small and cute, not watching his daddy act like that, not watching his mamma play into it, not seeing the sickness- even though it was cancer, of the terminal variety. I said no, and I said stop, and I took him to court and learned how to lawyer, how to testify, how to tell on him. Straight and calm. He’ll never, ever forgive me for making him a felon. He had just served the better part of six months, and when I hit that buck, I was coming home after giving my almost teen girl and my little boy to my parents, to deliver to their daddy.

The airbag did not punch me in the face this time, and it didn’t hurt me hardly at all. Neither did the seat belt. The deer did not roll into my windshield. It ran off into the field on the other side of the road, before it dropped. It took a while for the Clarke County deputy to find me. I was clear, the first thing I did was look in the rear view to make sure no one was going to slam into me, and to see if other drivers were swerving around a deer carcass. They are everywhere on the side of the road out here this time of year, in all manners of ugly, broken, bloated death. The car was still running, lights still on, I scraped the gravel as I eased it onto the shoulder of the median. Carefully. A hundred yards ahead, there was a big drainage ditch in the center median, and I could have flipped and rolled down there, but I did not. My back with its herniated disk felt okay, my arms were okay, even though the force of that impact broke the steering wheel, instead of the bones in my arms. The car crumpled just like it was designed to do, it protected me. The county deputy found the buck, handed me my front license plate from somewhere out of the middle of the highway, helped me get out of harms way from the cars flying down the mountain and into Winchester.

First call I made after 911 was to my parents, told them calm and clear I was okay, help was on its way. Then I called my husband. His name is John too. He had to come out a long way to find me, in the rattling pickup we borrowed from my dad. The state trooper filed the accident report, drew a picture, did the paperwork in the frozen black night. This time I had full coverage, the car was towed, eventually fixed. The state trooper called my husband to his vehicle, he told me later, to verify that he was not my ex husband. Because of the protective order. Because my ex was blazed and crazy in rage chasing me, and could have very well run me off the road if he had the chance, and I didn’t spend so much time and effort and build up a steely resolve to fight in court for protection under the law. I had done that. I had been strong enough to withstand it. The deer didn’t hurt me, not even a little.

My husband, John, could not be a more different man than the one who came before him. He helped me, stood up for me, from the very first time he came to my house and saw what was happening. He knew immediately how I was being hunted- with ruthless cruelty, by a man who was unwinding, diving deeper into his own sickness, losing the only ballast in his life, which was me. I didn’t even know I had stopped breathing. It was as if my trachea was crushed, so firmly was my ex’s invisible hand clamped around my throat, it had rendered me mute for a decade, cut off the oxygen supply to my soul. John, this man I had met and made love to came into our prison with his knives, that very first night, cut the hole in my throat, shoved in the tube and made me breathe again. Made me strong enough to fight, and he has stood beside me through countless court hearings, trials, appeals, accusations, and finally, my ex’s conviction and sentencing. He also has changed, himself, in ways he couldn’t have fathomed: learning to become a father when that was the very last thing he ever thought he would do in his long life of adventure and danger and searching.

We moved into a new house over Christmas. My mother, an artist, a social worker, made gifts for me this year. Out of cardboard, she made a fake mounted deer head, to commemorate my first kill. He had cardboard antlers and a red nose. On the little plaque, she wrote: Blotto, R.I.P. November 2011. Some people don’t think it’s funny when I tell them, some smile and get the joke. Mom understands it deeply. Blotto hangs on the wall above the mantle in our basement, over our new fireplace, in the house of a family who had grown up here and gone and sold it to us after their momma finally passed away. And I smile whenever I look at him.

*This is what replaced my front license plate, now that I have had the car repaired, and am a resident of West Virginia. My friend and fellow poet, Jose Padua, was surprised when I told him I put this on my car. He told me I was bold to take the Gadsen Flag back from the Tea Party. But, I didn’t do that. The Gadsen’s history pre-dates the Revolutionary War. Ben Franklin made the first image of the snake, cut into thirteen segments, and marked with the original initials of the first 13 colonies. The caption was Unite or Die. This image doesn’t belong to the Tea Party. It belongs to every immigrant who ever made their home in this land, and to every Native American who ever stood their ground to defend their home. It belongs to all of us.