Requiem for a Dusky Gopher Frog

A university professor and a student must work together to conceal the death of an endangered frog.

Maybe it’s the short days and long, dark nights, but I’ve noticed that most of my stories and essays recently may have been just slightly on the dark side. So I thought that the first week of the new year would be a good time to post something a little lighter. I hope you enjoy!

“What should we do with the body?” I asked.

I thought it was a fair question, but the kid whirled around and glared at me like I was a monster.

I huffed. “We can’t have somebody walk up and find it. That would defeat the purpose. I have absolutely no intention of paying a thousand dollar fine over a dead frog.”

The kid, nineteen if I was being generous, was dressed like an amateur zookeeper in his khaki shirt and pants, and he seemed on the verge of tears. “You can’t just dump her like yesterday’s trash. Dusky gopher frogs are nearly extinct. There are only a hundred left in the wild.”

“You mean ninety-nine. Or was that not including this one?”

His face flushed.

“Just trying for a little levity. Don’t kill me.” I pushed my lawnmower off my half-finished lawn. “I’m not dumping it in my trash; that would smell terrible. We’ll bury it. But not in my yard. We’ll take it to the pond down the street.”

I stowed the lawnmower in my garage and grabbed a hand spade. Then, wondering what my life was coming to, I shut my garage door and snuck out the side door to bury a frog.

---

---

            “If you used a push mower, you’d be less likely to run over wildlife when you mow.” The kid, who informed me his name was Gideon, hurried along behind me on the path to the neighborhood pond. His red face had faded to a blotchy pink, and his voice was calmer now. “And it’s better for the environment.”

“Do I look like a spring chicken to you?” I pointed to my gray, bobbed hair. “I’m not mowing an entire acre with a push mower.”

“You could move somewhere with a smaller yard,” Gideon said.

“I happen to like my house.”

“It has a lot of space. Do you have a big family?”

This kid was scooting over the line from inquisitive to rude. I raised my chin. “Married to the job.”

“That explains why you can afford a big house.”

“It’s not polite to talk about income,” I said in what I intended to be my Chair-of-the-Anthropology-Department voice. What came out instead sounded less authoritative than petulant.

As we neared the pond, I ducked under the stocky, gnarled arm of a low-hanging Osage orange tree branch that reached across the path. Sweat dripped in rivulets down my spine. The summer heat was so sweltering that I couldn’t tell the difference between a hot flash and the regular weather. “If you’re so torn up about a dead frog, why don’t you pay the Department of the Interior or whoever administers the fine? I would argue that you’re at least as culpable as I am, if not more,” I said.

He shot me a look of mingled panic and disgust. “My internship is unpaid.”

“I thought you said you were working on a grant.”

“I am, but –” Gideon stammered, grasping for words with his mouth flapping open like a fish.

Most students these days couldn’t string together a grammatically correct sentence, yet they expected A’s for minimal effort. Anymore, half my job as department chair was handholding.

Gideon’s fingers tightened on the cardboard box in his hands. “If I lose this summer grant, I could lose my scholarship.”

“I’m sure mommy and daddy will help you out.”

Gideon started walking faster, his eyes boring into the dirt path in front of him.

I quickened my pace, watching the ground as I avoided the goose droppings that dominated the path. “You’re sure your advisor’s not coming back any time soon?”

Gideon shook his head. “Busy all day. That’s why he asked me to come check on Lizzie.”

“Lizzie?” Good grief. These biologists, naming a frog. “Really, it’s Dr. Zimmerman who should be footing the bill for this alleged thousand dollar fine. Thinking he can bring a critically endangered frog to his house and risk his grant –”

“He wanted to give Lizzie around-the-clock care,” Gideon said.

“So he entrusted her welfare to a sophomore? I could have told him that was a bad idea. What did you do, try to hold it? And then the frog made a break for it, right onto my lawn. Am I right?”

Gideon glanced down at the shoe box that now held the frog’s flayed remains, and his chin quivered.

Behind my sunglasses, I rolled my eyes.

The thick, wet squelch of the frog’s body against my lawn mower blades burst again into my memory, but I swatted the thought away like a swarm of gnats. “So what’s your plan? Presumably Zimmerman will notice that his frog is missing.”

“I-I’ll say that she was gone when I got there.”

I rounded the corner toward the shady, algae-thick pond. “Why didn’t you call right away?”

“What?”

“He’s going to ask you that. Your story needs to be consistent.”

“I wanted to search the house first?”

I shrugged. “Not great, but believable.”

Gideon’s shoulders rounded in that perpetual, youthful slouch. “Do you work with Dr. Zimmerman?”

I scoffed, although it unfortunately came out as more of a snort. “You couldn’t pay me enough to set foot inside the Biology building. I’m the chair of the Anthropology department.”

Gideon nodded with a bewildered frown.

“Dr. Eunice Anders,” I added. His expression didn’t change. “You don’t get out of the Biology department much, do you?”

“I took all my pre-req’s in high school. I’ve wanted to be a biologist since I was three.”

“Hm.”

“My plan is to get my PhD and then help to clone and resurrect the gastric-brooding frog.”

“This ground is pretty soft here.” I poked at the dirt with my foot, hoping that the kid would clue into my polite disinterest.

“There were two species of gastric-brooding frog that both went extinct in the eighties. The female frog ate her eggs, which then developed from tadpoles to frogs inside her stomach. When they were fully developed, she regurgitated them.”

“That is the most disgusting thing I’ve heard all morning, even considering the sound that thing –” I gestured to the shoe box, which was starting to seep on the bottom, “made on my lawnmower.”

His face a shade paler, Gideon laid down the soggy shoe box and started digging into the wet earth with my hand spade. “She’ll like being buried here. It’s close to the water.”

“My intention exactly, to please the dead frog.” I folded my arms and waited while Gideon scratched a shoebox-sized hole in the dirt.

Sitting back on his heels, he wiped his streaming forehead with the back of his hand, leaving behind a thick smudge of dirt. “Do you think that’s deep enough?”

“You’re the biologist. How deep does it have to be so that it won’t smell?”

He glanced down at his hole, then gently placed the shoe box into its place. Standing, with wet soil staining his knees, he said, “I think we should say a few words.”

“Were you one of those kids that held funerals for your goldfish?”

“You’re the anthropologist. Isn’t there something about burial rites that makes humans unique from other animals?”

“When they bury other humans, yes. You’re burying a frog.”

“We’re burying a frog.” Gideon folded his hands and cleared his throat. “This frog, by the name of Lizzie, a member of Lithobates sevosus, also known as the St. Tammany gopher frog, the Mississippi gopher frog, and the dusky gopher frog, is laid to rest after an unfortunate incident involving a lawn mower operated by Dr. Eunice Anders –”

“Thanks,” I snipped.

“– and due to the negligence of myself, Gideon Burns, under whose care she was placed.”

Gideon went quiet, and I glanced up. His face was tight, and the ludicrous funeral seemed about to descend into tears.

But something about Gideon’s dirt-smudged face tugged at me. I picked up the spade from where he’d left it on the ground and dropped a shovelful onto the top of the cardboard box. “Requiescat in pace, Lizzie.”

I held out the spade to Gideon.

He took it, his face sober. He scooped up a glob of damp dirt and scattered it over the top of the cardboard coffin. “Lizzie was a good frog, and she will be sorely missed.”

---

On the walk back to my house, Gideon’s words spewed like a fountain, aimed more at himself than me. “He’ll be upset, of course, but if it’s not directly my fault – if I say the terrarium was open when I got there – then I’ll get to keep my scholarship. That’s reasonable, right?”

“I find it hard to believe that the school could take away your scholarship over a frog.”

“It’s critically endangered. This grant to study Lizzie and keep her alive was worth more than my tuition for all four years.”

“It sounds like you’re saving them money, then,” I said. “But I guess if there’s anyone I could believe would destroy a student’s career over a frog, it would be Zimmerman. You know, when I put in a privacy fence, he actually came out to my lawn with a tape measure and measured down to the centimeter to make sure that I wasn’t infringing on his property. And he would walk the line between our properties, scolding the workers if they stepped onto his side.”

“He’s very particular.”

The sun melted on us like hot butter as we walked. After a quiet moment, I said, “You know, he wasn’t really a saint.”

“Dr. Zimmerman never struck me as a saint.”

“No, not him. St. Tammany. You said Lizzie was a St. Tammany gopher frog. Tammany was a Native American chief in the seventeenth century. Unofficial ‘Patron Saint of America.’”

Gideon gave a pensive nod.

We were almost back to my street when Gideon spoke again. “I’ve heard that his son is the opposite.”

“I don’t think much is known about Tammany’s son.”

“No, Dr. Zimmerman’s. I heard he never went to college, and now he works at a coffee shop and smokes a lot of weed.”

“I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near a university either if I’d had Zimmerman for a father.” I shook my head. “Another reason I never had kids. I’d screw them up. Also, they’re sticky. And expensive.”

Gideon cocked his head at me. “Professors make decent money for raising a family.”

“Didn’t your parents teach you it’s rude to talk about money?”

“You’re the one who said kids were expensive,” Gideon said. “I have five siblings. Including me, that was eight people in a three-bedroom house.”

Eight people in three bedrooms? One of my guest bedrooms was a home office, and the other was stuffed with cardboard boxes that didn’t fit in my storage closet. “That sounds miserable.”

Gideon cocked his head at me, with an odd expression on his face that rankled me.

I looked away, grateful for my sunglasses.

We turned the corner onto my street, and I glanced up to see if I’d remembered to close my garage door when we left. Then my stomach tightened.

Zimmerman, his brown collared shirt stained with sweat where it stuck to his slightly protruding belly, stood just at the end of his property, where his front lawn turned into my front lawn. His eyes were white and panicked.

His gaze latched onto Gideon, who stopped in his tracks.

“Burns, where have you been?” Zimmerman’s face purpled. “You should have called me the moment you saw Lizzie was missing. Where is she? Did you find her?”

Gideon’s words seemed to catch in his mouth, but after a moment he pushed them out. “I thought you were busy all day.”

“I forgot my lunchbox.” Zimmerman puffed up like an angry balloon, all of his anxious wrath funneled toward Gideon. “You haven’t found her, then? Do you know what the university had to do, what I had to do, to get that grant?” A tiny fleck of spit shot out from his mouth. “I should have dropped you from the team when you mixed up the tests in June. What did you try to do, hold her?” He gestured at me like a background prop. “And what are you doing here?”

I gave a sarcastic wave. “Nice to see you too, neighbor.”

I looked at Gideon. His eyes were wide; he chewed on his lip and squeezed his hands together. I jerked my head toward Zimmerman, willing the words into Gideon’s head. The door was open. She was gone when I got here this morning.

Gideon glanced back at me. His voice, when it did come, was too loud, like a screech in a quiet room. “Lizzie’s dead.”

Zimmerman’s neck bulged over the collar of his shirt. He closed his eyes. His hands stiffened, and his shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell, as he sucked noisy breaths of air into his lungs.

He opened his eyes, and his gaze landed like acid on Gideon.

Words flew from my mouth before my brain had a chance to catch up with them. “Did you know there’s a thousand dollar fine for killing a dusky gopher frog?”

“Of course I know that,” Zimmerman snapped.

“I’m sure you have all the necessary documentation to make sure this frog is allowed off university property and into your home,” I said, raising my voice before Zimmerman could interrupt. “Of course you do. But even if you do have all that paperwork absolutely watertight, with all your i’s dotted and your t’s crossed, what do you think the foundation funding your grant would think about you, the professor responsible for this research, taking a critically endangered frog off-campus and then losing it? And not only losing it, but allowing it to be flayed by a lawnmower.”

“Flayed?” Zimmerman’s purple face puffed up like a balloon as he sputtered. “By a –”

“Yes, a lawnmower. My lawnmower. Because you took Lizzie off-campus and brought her to your home. You can try to blame it on a student, but when push comes to shove, it’s your home and your grant, Zimmerman.”

“And your lawnmower!” Little raging bubbles of spit formed at the edges of Zimmerman’s mouth, and he stomped onto my half-mowed lawn. “You can’t push this off on me.”

“A thousand dollar fine. I’ll split it with you, fifty-fifty, if –” I glared straight at Zimmerman’s wide, furious face. “If you act like the professional I suspect you can be, and you take responsibility for this amphibian. But if I hear that you’ve blamed this whole mess on an unpaid intern, then I will go to your department chair and the university president. I will go to your frog foundation or wherever it is that you biologists get your money, and I will raise the biggest stink you’ve ever seen. So if you’re planning to take punitive measures against this student, then you’d better have all of your ducks in a row. You’d better have every shred of paperwork necessary to ensure that you were legally entitled to bring that frog to your home, because if even one signature is missing in that paper trail, I will personally see to it that you and your biology department do not hear the end of it for a very, very long time.”

The low drone of a weed-whacker down the street was the only sound that poked into the electric silence. A blue vein strained against the leathery skin at Zimmerman’s neck. Gideon’s eyes were more white than brown as his gaze shot back and forth between his advisor and myself. Zimmerman and I would have been nose-to-nose, our proverbial horns locked, had I not inherited my father’s miniature build. Nose-to-sternum was more accurate.

Finally, a growl emanated from somewhere deep in Zimmerman’s throat.

I cupped my ear with my hand. “Would you mind repeating that?”

Zimmerman’s neck vein bulged larger. “I said, Fine.”

Gideon’s panicked expression shifted to something like tentative hope, and I suppressed a smirk.

“Great. You reach out to your frog foundation and tell them there’s been an accident, or that the frog died of natural selection for stupidity, or whatever you need to say to get this thing handled. We’ll each cut a check for five hundred, and we’ll call it even. And you and Gideon can forget this ever happened and try to save a different, hopefully smarter, dusky gopher frog.” I raised my eyebrows, realizing too late that Zimmerman probably couldn’t see my withering glare through my sunglasses. “Now get off my lawn.”

Zimmerman looked down at his feet, several inches on the wrong side of our property line, and stumbled back. “Burns, take the rest of the day off,” he grumbled. He shot a quick glance at me. “I’ll see you at the lab tomorrow.”

Zimmerman turned and slunk back across his lawn toward his house.

The look on Gideon Burns’ face was an expression I’d never received from any student before. “Dr. Anders, I don’t know how to –”

“Save it,” I said.

Gideon wasn’t such a bad kid. It might just be possible that some of the other students I saw on a daily basis weren’t all so terrible either. Maybe, come August, I’d try keeping an eye out for the good ones.

The latent fighter in me thrummed with victory, and my efforts at keeping my face dour were futile. “It was worth it to tell that biology tyrant to get off my lawn.”