Lenz kills the Nucks' dog (pp. 578–580)
on his fifth Xmas Eve, in Waltham MA, his Pop had taken the hydrant-sized little Brucie Green aside and given him, to give his beloved Mama for Xmas, a gaily Gauguin-colored can of Polynesian Mauna Loa-brand macadamia nuts
Context
The father-wound at the center of the Green catastrophe is a gift routed through the son. Mr. Green — a professional designer of practical-joke supplies — hands five-year-old Brucie a booby-trapped can of macadamia nuts "to give his beloved Mama for Xmas," so that when she opens the child's lovingly over-wrapped present the spring-snake leaps out and stops her heart, and the father howls "with bitterly professional practical-gag mirth and clunks over and slaps little Bruce on the back" as she dies. The father uses his own son as the delivery system for the gag that kills the mother, turning the boy's love into the instrument of matricide without the boy ever understanding what he carried upstairs. It's the theme's predatory pole at its most refracted: not a father who harms the son directly but one whose trade makes the son the unwitting hand of the family's destruction.