The Heaven of Animals: Stories Read online

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  for Marla

  always

  Contents

  Lizard Man

  Amputee

  100% Cotton

  The End of Aaron

  Refund

  Knockout

  Last of the Great Land Mammals

  What the Wolf Wants

  The Geometry of Despair

  I. Venn Diagram

  II. Wake the Baby

  How to Help Your Husband Die

  Me and James Dean

  Nudists

  The Baby Glows

  The Disappearing Boy

  The Heaven of Animals

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  Lizard Man

  I rattle into the driveway around sunup and Cam’s on my front stoop with his boy, Bobby. Cam stands. He’s a huge man, thick and muscled from a decade of work in construction. Sleeves of green dragons run armpit to wrist. He claims there’s a pair of naked ladies tattooed into all those scales if you look close enough.

  When Crystal left him, Cam got the boy, which tells you what kind of mother Crystal was. Cam’s my last friend. He’s a saint when he’s sober, and he hasn’t touched liquor in ten years.

  He puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder, but Bobby spins from his grip and charges. He meets me at the truck, grabs my leg, and hugs it with his whole body. I head toward Cam. Bobby bounces and laughs with every step.

  We shake hands, but Cam’s expression is no-nonsense.

  “Graveyard again?” he says. My apron, rolled into a tan tube, hangs from my front pocket, and I reek of kitchen grease.

  “Yeah,” I say. I haven’t told Cam how I lost my temper and yelled at a customer, how apparently some people don’t know what over easy means, how my agreement to work the ten-to-six shift is the only thing keeping my electricity on and the water running.

  “Bobby,” Cam says, “go play for a minute, okay?”

  Bobby lets go of my leg and stares at his father, skeptical.

  “Don’t make me tell you twice,” Cam says.

  The boy runs to my mailbox, drops to the lawn, cross-legged, and scowls.

  “Keep going,” Cam says, and slowly, deliberately, Bobby stands and sulks toward their house.

  “What is it?” I say. “What’s wrong?”

  Cam shakes his head. “Red’s dead,” he says.

  Red is Cam’s dad. “Bastard used to beat the fuck out of me,” Cam said one night back when we both drank too much and swapped sad stories. When he turned eighteen, Cam enlisted and left for the first Gulf War. The last time he saw his father, the man was staggering, drunk, across the lawn. “Go then!” he screamed. “Go die for your fucking country!” Bobby never knew he had a grandfather.

  I don’t know whether Cam is upset or relieved, and I don’t know what to say. Cam must see this because he says: “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

  “How’d it happen?” I ask.

  “He was drinking,” Cam says. “Bartender said one minute Red was laughing, the next his face was on the bar. When they went to shake him awake, he was dead.”

  “Wow.” It’s a stupid thing to say, but I’ve been up all night. My hand still grips an invisible steel spatula. I can feel lard under my nails.

  “I need a favor,” Cam says.

  “Anything,” I say. When I was in jail, it was Cam who bailed me out. When my wife and son moved to Baton Rouge, it was Cam who knocked down my door, kicked my ass, threw the contents of my liquor cabinet onto the front lawn, set it on fire, and got me a job at his friend’s diner.

  “I need a ride to Red’s house,” Cam says.

  “Okay,” I say. Cam hasn’t had a car for years. Half the people on our block can’t afford storm shutters, let alone cars, but it’s St. Petersburg, a pedestrian city, and downtown’s only a five-minute walk.

  “Well, don’t say okay yet,” Cam says. “It’s in Lee.”

  “Lee, Florida?”

  Cam nods. Lee is four hours north, one of the last towns you pass on I-75 before you hit Georgia.

  “No problem,” I say, “as long as I’m back before ten tonight.”

  “Another graveyard?” Cam asks.

  I nod.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  . . .

  Last year, I threw my son through the family room window. I don’t remember how it happened, not exactly. I remember stepping into the room. I remember seeing Jack, his mouth pressed to the mouth of the other boy, his hands moving fast in the boy’s lap. Then I stood over him in the garden. Lynn ran from the house, screaming. She saw Jack and hit me in the face. She battered my shoulders and my chest. Above us, through the window frame, the other boy stood, staring, shaking, hugging himself with his thin arms. Jack lay on the ground. He didn’t move except for the rise and fall of his chest. The window had broken cleanly and there was no blood, just shards of glass scattered over flowers, but one of Jack’s arms was bent behind his head, as though he’d gone to sleep that way, an elbow for a pillow.

  “Call 911,” Lynn yelled to the boy above.

  “No,” I said. Whatever else I didn’t know in that time and that place, I knew we could never afford an ambulance ride. “I’ll take him.”

  “No!” Lynn cried. “You’ll kill him!”

  “I’m not going to kill him,” I said. “Come here.” I gestured to the boy. He shook his head and stepped back.

  “Please,” I said.

  Tentatively, the boy stepped over the sill’s jagged edge. He planted his feet on the brick ledge of the front wall, then dropped the few feet to the ground. Glass crunched beneath his sneakers.

  “Grab his ankles,” I said. I hooked my hands under Jack’s armpits, and we lifted him. One arm trailed the ground as we walked him to the car. Lynn opened the hatchback. We laid Jack in the back and covered him with a blanket. It seemed like the right thing, what you see on TV.

  A few neighbors had come outside to watch. We ignored them.

  “I’ll need you with me,” I said to the boy. “When we’re done, I’ll take you home.” The boy was wringing the hem of his shirt in both hands. His eyes brimmed with tears. “I won’t hurt you, if that’s what you think.”

  We set off for the hospital, Lynn following in my pickup. The boy sat beside me in the passenger seat, his body pressed to the door, the seatbelt strap clenched in one hand at his waist. With each bump in the road, he turned to look at Jack.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Alan,” he said.

  “How old are you, Alan?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen. Seventeen. And have you ever been with a woman, Alan?”

  Alan looked at me. His face drained of color. His hand tightened on the seatbelt.

  “It’s a simple question, Alan. I’m asking you: Have you been with a woman?”

  “No,” Alan said. “No, sir.”

  “Then how do you know you’re gay?”

  In back, Jack stirred. He moaned, then grew silent. Alan watched him.

  “Look at me, Alan,” I said. “I asked you a question. If you’ve never been with a woman, then how do you know you’re gay?”

  “I don’t know,” Alan said.

  “You mean, you don’t know that you’re gay, or you don’t know how you kno
w?”

  “I don’t know how I know,” Alan said. “I just do.”

  We passed the bakery, the Laundromat, the supermarket, and entered the city limits. In the distance, the silhouette of the helicopter on the hospital’s roof. Behind us, the steady pursuit of the pickup truck.

  “And your parents, do they know about this?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Alan said.

  “And do they approve?”

  “Not really.”

  “No. I bet they don’t, Alan. I’ll bet they do not.”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. Jack hadn’t opened his eyes, but he had a hand to his temple. The other hand, the one attached to the broken arm, lay at his side. The fingers moved, but without purpose, hand spasming from fist to open palm.

  “I just have one more question for you, Alan,” I said.

  Alan looked like he might be sick. He watched the road unfurl before us. He was afraid of me, afraid to look at Jack.

  “What right do you have teaching my son to be gay?”

  “I didn’t!” Alan said. “I’m not!”

  “You’re not? Then what do you call that? Back there? That business on the couch?”

  “Mr. Lawson,” Alan said, and, here, the tone of his voice changed, and I felt as though I were speaking to another man. “With all due respect, sir, Jack came on to me.”

  “Jack is not gay,” I said.

  “He is. I know it. Jack knows it. Your wife knows it. I don’t know how you couldn’t know it. I don’t see how you’ve missed the signals.”

  I tried to imagine what signals, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t recall a thing that would have signaled that I’d wind up here, delivering my son to the hospital with a concussion and a broken arm. What signal might have foretold that, following this day, after two months in a motel and two months in prison, my wife of twenty years would divorce me because, as she put it, I was full of hate?

  I pulled up to the emergency room’s entryway, and Alan helped me pull Jack from the car. A nurse with a wheelchair ran out to meet us. We settled Jack into the chair, and she wheeled him away.

  I pulled the car into a parking spot and walked back to the entrance. Alan stood on the curb where I’d left him.

  “Where’s Lynn?” I said.

  “Inside,” Alan said. “Jack’s awake.”

  “All right, I’m going in. I suggest you get out of here.”

  “But, you said you’d drive me home.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I changed my mind.”

  Alan stared at me, dumbfounded. His hands groped the air.

  “Hey,” I said, “I got a signal for you.” I gave him a hitchhiker’s thumbs-up and cast it over my shoulder as I entered the hospital.

  . . .

  I wake, and Cam’s making his way down back roads, their surfaces cratered with potholes.

  “Rise and shine,” he says, “and welcome to Lee.”

  It’s nearly noon. The sun is bright and the cab is hot. I wipe gunk from my eyes and drool from the corner of my mouth. Cam watches the road with one eye and studies directions he’s scrawled in black ink on the back of a cereal box. He’s never seen the house where his father spent his last years.

  We turn onto a dirt road. The truck lurches into and then out of an enormous, waterlogged hole. Pines line the road. Their needles shiver as we go by. We pass turn after turn, but only half of the roads are marked. Every few miles, we pass a driveway, the house deep in trees and out of sight. It’s a haunted place, and I’m already ready to leave.

  Cam says, “I don’t know where the fuck we are.”

  We drive some more. I think about Bobby home alone, how Cam gave him six VHS tapes. “By the time you watch all of these,” he said, “I’ll be back.” Then he put in the first movie, something Disney, and we left.

  “He’ll be fine,” Cam said. “He’ll never even know we’re gone.”

  “We could bring him with us,” I said, but Cam refused.

  “There’s no telling what we’ll find there,” he said.

  Ahead, a child stands by the side of the road. Cam slows the truck to a halt and rolls down the window. The girl steps forward. She looks over her shoulder, then back at us. She’s barefoot and her face is smeared with dirt. She wears a brown dress and a green bow in her hair. A string is looped around her wrist, and from the end of the string floats a blue balloon.

  “Hi there,” Cam says. He leans out the window, hand extended, but the child doesn’t take it. Instead, she stares at his arms, the coiled dragons. She steps back.

  “You’re scaring her,” I say.

  Cam frowns at me, but he returns his head to the cab and his hand to the wheel. He gives the girl his warmest smile.

  “Do you know where we could find Cherry Road?” he says.

  “Sure,” the girl says.

  She pumps her arm, and the balloon bobs in response.

  “It’s that way,” she says, pointing in the direction from which we’ve come.

  “About how far?” Cam asks.

  “Not the next road, but the next. It’s a dead end. There’s just the one house.” Her wrist flails, and the balloon thunks her fist.

  Cam checks the cereal box. “That’s the one,” he says.

  “Oh,” the girl says, and for a moment she is silent. “You’re going to visit the Lizard Man. I seen him. I seen him once.”

  Cam looks at me. I shrug. We look at the girl.

  “Well, thank you,” Cam says. The girl gives the balloon a good shake. Cam turns the truck around, and the girl waves goodbye.

  “Cute kid,” I say.

  We turn onto Cherry.

  “Creepy little fucker,” Cam says.

  . . .

  The house is hidden in pines and the yard is overgrown with knee-high weeds. Tire tracks mark where the driveway used to be. Plastic flamingos dot the yard, their curved beaks peeking out of the weeds, wire legs rusted, bodies bleached a light pink.

  The roof of the house is littered with pine needles and piles of shingles where someone abandoned a roofing project. The porch has buckled and the siding is rotten, the planks loose. I press a fingernail to the soft wood and it slides in.

  Our mission is unclear. There’s no body to ID or papers to sign. There’s nothing to inherit, and there will be no funeral. But I know why we’re here. This is how Cam will say goodbye.

  The front door is locked but gives with two kicks. “Right here,” Cam says. He taps the wood a foot above the lock before slamming the heel of his boot through the door.

  Inside, the house waits for its owner’s return. The hallway light is on. The A/C unit shakes in the window over the kitchen sink. Tan wallpaper curls away from the cabinets like birch bark, exposing thin ribbons of yellow glue on the walls.

  We hear voices. Cam puts a hand to my chest and a finger to his lips. He brings a hand to his waist and feels for a gun that isn’t there. Neither of us moves for a full minute, then Cam laughs.

  “Fuck!” he says. “That’s a TV.” He hoots. He runs a hand through his hair. “About scared the shit out of me.”

  We move to the main room. It, too, is in disarray, the lampshades thick with dust, a coffee table awash in a sea of newspapers and unopened mail. There is an old and scary-looking couch, its arms held to its sides with duct tape. A spring pokes through the cushion, ripe with tetanus.

  The exception here is the television. It is beautiful. It is six feet of wide-screen glory. “Look at that picture,” I say, and Cam and I step back to take it in. The TV’s tuned to the Military Channel, some cable extravagance. B-24 bombers streak the sky in black and white, propellers the size of my head. On top of the set sits a bottle of Windex and a filthy washcloth along with several many-buttoned remotes. Cam grabs one, fondles it, holds down a button, and the sound swells. The drone of plane engines and firefight tears through the room from one speaker to another. I jump. Cam grins.

  “We’re taking it,” he says. “We are so taking this shit.”

  He p
ushes another button, and the picture blips to a single point of white at the center of the screen. The point fades and dies.

  “No!” Cam says. “No!”

  “What did you do?” I say.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know!”

  Cam shakes the remote, picks up another, punches more buttons, picks up a third, presses its buttons. The television hums, and the picture shimmers back to life.

  “Ahhh,” Cam says. We sit, careful to avoid the spring. While we watch, the beaches at Normandy are stormed, two bombs are dropped, and the war is won. We’re halfway into Vietnam when Cam says, “I’m going to check out his room.” It’s not an invitation.

  Cam’s gone for half an hour. When he returns, he looks terrible. The color is gone from his face and his eyes are red-rimmed. He carries a shoebox under one arm. I don’t ask, and he doesn’t offer.

  “Let’s load up the set and get out of here,” he says. “I’ll pull the truck around.”

  I hear a glass door slide open, then shut, behind me. I hear something like a scream. Then the door slides open again. I turn around to see Cam. If he looked bad before, now he looks downright awful.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “Big,” Cam says. “In the backyard.”

  “What? What’s big in the backyard?”

  “Big. Fucking. Alligator.”

  . . .

  It is a big fucking alligator. I’ve seen alligators before, in movies, at zoos, but never this big and never so close. We stare at him. We don’t know it’s a him, but we decide it’s a him. He is big. It’s insane.

  It’s also the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. In the backyard is a makeshift cage, an oval of chain-link with a chicken-wire roof. Inside, the alligator straddles an old kiddie pool. The pool’s cracked plastic lip strains with the alligator’s weight. His middle fills the pool, belly sunk in a few inches of syrupy brown water, his legs hanging out. His tail, the span of a man, curls against a length of chain-link.

  When he sees us, the alligator hisses, and his front feet paddle the air. His jaws open to yellow teeth and a throat the color of a turkey skin pulled inside out. Everywhere there are flies and gnats. They fly into his open mouth and land on his teeth. Others swarm open sores along his back.