She came stumbling down the hall towards the kitchen for her mid-slumber sip of water.

“Honey, get in here—you’ve to got see this!”

“No.”

“No, really, come look at this on tv.”

“Before I take a step that way, you tell me what you’re watching.”

“It’s a special on PBS…on African insects.”

“Hmm…what was I thinking, trying to sleep, missing out on something like that.” Cynicism aside, she came into the living room, squinted, focused on the tv. She stood, watching, then crossed her arms over her nightgown and tilted her head towards her shoulders, unimpressed. “Looks like a bunch of pole cats that just pulled themselves out of someone’s still.”

My father sighed, looked at her, patted the empty couch cushion next to him, and then looked back at the tv. “This is fascinating, Betty, come sit and watch this with us.”

“No, I think I’ve had my fill of fascinating bugs for the evening—unless there’s going to be some sort of test on this later, I’m going back to bed.” And with that, she headed back down the hall, back towards her bedroom, where there was nothing but dark walls and silence, far more interesting in comparison. My brother and I, however, we were stuck in the living room with our father, watching bugs on tv. It was a family prison, of sorts, that living room with one tv and a father who controlled what we watched. And mostly, what we watched was PBS.

But eventually we grew to like those shows, especially when we discovered that watching them gave us the knowledge, or at least the appearance of knowledge, so that we could spout off some pretty obscure animal trivia at just the right time. After all, when you’re a kid and you can reference the mating habits of an African dung beetle and the width of the neighbor’s ass all in one sentence, shit, you know you’re cool.

And so, like everything else in the Coyle household, it became a competition, a family battle in one-upmanship as to who could cite the most interesting but least-known animal, er, facts. We were a family of drunken fisherman, spinning barely-credible tales about animals that likely didn’t exist, but damn it was fun.

The only problem, though, was that I was the youngest, the idealist in a family of, um, folks otherwise inclined, and I therefore missed the most basic of rules, that what you said didn’t exactly have to be true. You could just make shit up, as long as you said it with authority. Yeah, I didn’t catch that part, so instead, I spent hours, days, in fact, an entire summer, reading the encyclopedia, destroying any guise I might have had for being a halfway normal kid, my head buried mid-way through the B’s of Funk and Wagnall’s finest.

It wasn’t all for naught, I suppose, because I can still take your lunch money in a round of barroom trivia, but it never gave me that edge I needed against the Coyle clan. I did have my day, however, but it didn’t come from anything I’d learned through reading. And it wasn’t quite the day I’d hoped for either.

We’d moved to Chiefland by then, and it was a hot summer day, one that I’d so erroneously decided would be better spent riding around with my father than sitting on the dock watching for alligators. The air conditioning had gone out in his car so we’d ridden around rural Florida with our windows down, my pre-pubescent sweaty legs stuck to the hot, vinyl car seat. The only solace I’d found came from the crackling in the speakers, AM radio that faded in and out, allowing me the occasional opportunity to hear a decent song, but only when my father was out of the car; otherwise we were listening to his station, to folks talk, talk, talking.

He stopped the car again so he could run in and see someone, talk to someone about something, and a victim of the heat and the frustration of constantly having to tune and re-tune the barely tunable radio, he leaned back through the window after getting out and closing the car door. “Look, I was decent enough to leave you the car keys so you could listen to something, so damn, you should be decent enough not to keep flipping all over the dial. And in case you don’t understand what I’m saying, let me make this clear: leave the fucking radio alone. It won’t do you one bit of harm to listen to that station instead of whatever shit it is you think you’re going to find anyway,” and with that, my father bristled across the parking lot, apparently unaware or just not caring about what a cruel bastard he was.

I turned off the radio for a while, eased myself down in the seat, and waited. And waited. And waited. But when my father didn’t come back in what I considered a reasonable amount of time, when I’d grown tired of the game of timing how long it would take for a bead of sweat to run from my belly down to the vinyl seat, I figured that I had no choice. So I reached over, tilted the keys inside the ignition switch just enough to turn on the radio, sighed deeply, and listened.

I heard a man’s voice, a funny-talking man, a man from far off, obviously, maybe even a foreigner. He was hard to understand, even though he was speaking kind of slowly, but between his accent and the crackles of the radio, I was able to figure out he was talking about desert animals. And then he said something that, to this day, I’m sure I heard clearly: “When a camel sees another camel, a dead camel, it, too, will die.” He said it with an accent that lent authority to whatever he said about animals from far-off places. And the second I heard it, I was struck. I stopped thinking about the heat, the sweat, the battles over the radio selection, because I knew I had finally garnered that bit of animal trivia that would absolutely wow my family.

I kept it my little secret for a few days, waiting for just the right time to impress the Coyles. And the opportunity came a few nights later when, sitting at the table, while the rest of us were finishing our meal, my father launched into a speech about the Bedouin lifestyle. What a perfect segue.

“Did you know that if a camel sees a dead camel, it’ll die?” I said it, fully expecting all conversation to stop, for knives and forks to drop to the plates, for all heads to turn to look at me, and that’s exactly what happened. What I didn’t expect was the raucous laughter.

“So you’re telling me that, if I’m on a camel, and we’re crossing the desert, and we happen upon the carcass of another camel, that I’m finishing my journey in my Keds?” Yes, and out broke another round of…laughter.

I didn’t know how to answer, especially with my fairly-limited knowledge of the nomadic way of life, but damn, I knew what I’d heard. So I didn’t back down. “I don’t know why they die,” I insisted, “but they do…maybe they have weak hearts or something, or they just die of grief.” And yes, more laughter ensued.

And the laughter continued for months. Each of them had said stupid things too, but they forgot those things. And the things I’d said? They remembered them, oh did they remember them. And they never hesitated to quote them, book, chapter, and verse. Fuckers.

Like when we were driving down the road, and my brother said, “Hey Ann—have you finished your cheeseburger?”

I figured he was angling in on my leftovers, but he was the sneaky sort who usually wasn’t so direct, typically opting for just punching me and grabbing my food when I dropped it. So I turned my back to him, and clutched my burger with both hands before I answered. “No. Why?”

“Well, you either better swallow it all now or at least hide it.”

“Why? I just started eating it…”

“Why? Are you kidding me? Because we’re coming up on Luther White’s cow pasture and if cows are anything like camels, Dad’s gonna owe Luther for a whole bunch of cattle if they look up and see you eating a burger. There’ll be cows dropping all over…” He prattled on and on, but I couldn’t hear him….for all the laughter.

That was a long time ago, I know, but one night recently, I hit Google, determined, with my sole mission being one of my own redemption, albeit a few decades too late. So I typed in “camel” and “dead” and a few variations of such and, wouldn’t you know, I came upon a news story that would’ve absolutely trumped any and all animal trivia that any of those other Coyles could’ve ever said. And if I’d referenced it at the dinner table that night, it would’ve made my dad so proud.

And it was, indeed, about a camel.

And a death.

I read with great enthusiasm about a woman who’d received, as an anniversary present from her loving husband, a camel. And that woman is now dead—because her camel, I’m not sure if it was one hump or two, loved her. I mean, she died because her camel loved her…that her death was caused when she was crushed to death, being subjected to…how do I say this…the amorous advances of that very pet camel. Again, I didn’t see if it was one hump or two.