The Heaven of Animals: Stories Read online

  “What’s he doing here?” Cam asks.

  “Red was the Lizard Man,” I say. “Apparently.”

  We stare at the alligator. The alligator stares back. I consider the cage and wonder whether he can turn around.

  “He looks bored,” Cam says. And it’s true. The alligator looks bored, and sick. The jaws close, and his open eyes are the only thing reminding me he’s alive.

  “We can’t leave him here,” Cam says.

  “We should call someone,” I say. But who would we call? The authorities? Animal control?

  “We can’t,” Cam says. “They’ll kill him.”

  Cam is right. I’ve seen it before, on the news. Some jackass raises a gator. The gator gets loose. It’s been hand-fed and knows no fear of man. The segments always end the same way: Sadly, the alligator had to be destroyed.

  “I don’t see that we have a choice,” I say.

  “We have the pickup,” Cam says.

  My mouth says no, but my eyes must say yes, because before I know what’s happening, we’re in the front yard examining the bed of the truck, Cam measuring the length with his open arms.

  “This won’t work,” I say. Cam ignores me. He pulls a blue tarp from the backseat and unrolls it on the ground beside the truck.

  “He’ll never fit,” I say.

  “He’ll fit. It’ll be close, but he’ll fit.”

  “Cam,” I say. “Wait. Stop.” Cam leans against the truck. He looks right at me. “Say we get the alligator out of the cage and into the truck. Say we manage to do this and keep all of our fingers. Where do we take him? I mean, what the hell, Cam? What the hell do you do with twelve feet of living, breathing alligator? And what about the TV? I thought you wanted to take the TV.”

  “Shit,” he says. “I forgot about the TV.”

  We stare at the truck. I look up. The sky has turned from bright to light blue and the sun has disappeared behind a scatter of clouds. On the ground, one corner of the tarp flaps in the breeze, winking its gold eyelet.

  Cam bows his head, as if in mourning. “Maybe if we stand the set up on its end.”

  “Cam,” I say. “We can take the alligator or we can take the television, but we can’t take both.”

  . . .

  Electric-taping the snout, Cam decides, will be the hard part.

  “All of it’s the hard part,” I say, but Cam’s not listening.

  He finds a T-bone in Red’s refrigerator. It’s spoiled, but the alligator doesn’t seem to mind. Cam sets the steak near the cage, and the alligator waddles out of the pool. He presses his nostrils to the fence. The thick musk of alligator and reek of rotten meat turn my stomach, and I retch.

  “You puke, I kick your ass,” Cam says.

  We’ve raided Red’s garage for supplies. At our feet are bolt cutters, a roll of electric tape, a spool of twine, bungee cords, a dozen two-by-fours, my tarp, and, for no reason I’m immediately able to ascertain, a chainsaw.

  “Protection,” Cam says, nudging the old Sears model with his toe. The chain is rusted and hangs loose from the blade. I imagine Cam starting the chainsaw, the chain snapping, flying, landing far away in the tall grass. I try to picture the struggle between man and beast, Cam pinned under five hundred pounds of alligator, Cam’s head in the gator’s mouth, Cam dragged in circles around the yard, a tangle of limbs and wails. Throughout each scenario, the chainsaw offers little assistance.

  Cam’s hands are sheathed in oven mitts, a compromise he accepted grudgingly when the boxing gloves he found, while offering superior protection, failed to provide him the ability to grip, pick up, or hold.

  “This is stupid,” I say. “Are we really doing this?”

  “We’re doing this,” Cam says. He swats a fly from his face with one oven-mitted hand.

  There is a clatter of chain-link. We turn to see the alligator nudging the fence with his snout. He snorts, eyes the T-bone, opens and shuts his mouth. He really is surprisingly large.

  Cam’s parked the pickup in the backyard. He pulls off his oven mitts, lowers the gate, exposing the wide, bare bed of the truck, and we set to work angling the two-by-fours from gate to grass. We press the planks together, and Cam cinches them tight with the bungee cords. The boards are long, ten or twelve feet, so physics is on our side. We should be able to drag him up the incline.

  We return our attention to the alligator, who is sort of throwing himself against the fence, except that there is nowhere to back up to, no way to build momentum. Above his head, at knee level, is a hand-sized wire door held shut by a combination lock. With each lunge, the lock jumps, then clatters against the door. With each charge, I jump too.

  “He can’t break out,” Cam says. He picks up the bolt cutters.

  “You don’t know that,” I say.

  “If he could, don’t you think he’d have done it by now?” Cam positions the bolt cutters on the loop of lock, bows his legs, and squats. He squeezes, and his face reddens. He grunts, there’s a snap, and the lock falls away, followed by a flash of movement. Cam howls and falls. The alligator’s open jaws stretch halfway through the hole. All I see is teeth.

  “Motherfucker!” Cam yells.

  “You okay?” I say.

  Cam holds up his hands, wiggles ten fingers.

  “Okay,” Cam says. “Okay.” He picks up the T-bone and throws it at the alligator. The steak lands on his snout, hangs there, then slides off.

  “He’s not a dog,” I say. “This isn’t catch.”

  Cam pulls on the oven mitts and slowly reaches for the meat resting in the grass just a few feet beneath all those teeth. Suddenly, the pen looks less sturdy, less like a thing the alligator could never escape.

  The cage shakes, but this time it’s the wind, which has really picked up. I wonder whether it’s storming in St. Petersburg. Cam should be at home with Bobby, and I almost say as much. But his eyes are wild. He’s dead set on doing this.

  Cam says, “I’m going to put the steak into his mouth, and, when I do, I want you to tape the jaws shut.”

  “No way,” I say. “No way am I putting my hand in range of that thing.”

  And then this happens: My son walks out of my memory and into my thoughts, his arm hanging loose at the elbow. The nurse asks what happened, and he looks up, ready to lie for me. There is something beautiful in the pause between this question and the one to come. Then there’s the officer’s hand on my shoulder, the “Would you mind stepping out with me, please?” Oh, I’ve heard it a hundred times. It never leaves me. It is a whisper. It is a prison sentence.

  I want to put the elbow back into the socket myself. I want to turn back time. I want Jack at five or ten. I want him curled in my lap like a dog. I want him writing on the walls with an orange crayon and blaming the angels that live in the attic. I want him before his voice plummeted two octaves, before he learned to stand with a hand on one hip, before he grew confused. I want my boy back.

  “Come on!” Cam shouts. “Don’t puss out on me now. As soon as he bites down, just wrap the tape around it.”

  “Give me your oven mitts,” I say.

  “No!”

  “Give me the mitts and I’ll do it.”

  “But you won’t be able to handle the tape.”

  “Trust me,” I say. “I’ll find a way.”

  We do it. Cam waves the cut of meat at the snout until it smacks teeth. The jaws grab. There’s an unnatural crunch as the T in the T-bone becomes two Is and then a pile of periods. I drape a length of tape over the snout, fasten the ends beneath the jaws, then run my gloved hands up both strands of tape, sealing them. Then I start wrapping like crazy. I wind the roll of tape around and around the jaws. The tape unspools, circling, a flat, black worm. When I step back, the alligator’s jaws are shut and my hands shake.

  “I can’t believe it,” Cam says. “I can’t believe you actually did that shit.”

  . . .

  The alligator’s one heavy son of a bitch. We hold him in a kind of headlock. Our arms crad
le his neck and front legs. Our fingers grip his scaly hide. We sidestep toward the pickup, the alligator’s tail tracing a path through the grass. His back feet scramble and claw at the ground, but he doesn’t writhe or thrash. He is not a healthy alligator. I stop.

  “C’mon,” Cam says. “Almost there.”

  “What are we doing?” I say.

  “We’re putting an alligator into your truck,” he says. “C’mon.”

  “But look at him,” I say. Cam takes in the alligator’s wide, green head, his upturned nostrils and Ping-Pong-ball eyes. He looks up.

  “No,” I say. “Really look.”

  “What?” Cam’s impatient. He shifts his weight, gets a better grip on the gator. “I don’t know what you want me to see.”

  “He’s not even fighting us. He’s too sick. Even if we set him free, how do we know he’ll make it?”

  “We don’t.”

  “No, we don’t. We don’t know where he came from. We don’t know where to take him. And what if Red raised him? How will he survive in the wild? How will he learn to hunt and catch fish and stuff?”

  Cam shrugs, shakes his head.

  “So, why?” I ask. “Why are we doing this?”

  Cam locks eyes with me. After a minute, I look away. My arms are weak with the weight of alligator. My legs quiver. We shuffle forward.

  . . .

  I didn’t give Jack the chance to lie. I admitted guilt to second-degree battery and kept everyone out of court. I got four months and served two, plus fines, plus community service. Had that been the end of it, I’d have gotten off easy. Instead, I lost my family.

  The last time I saw Jack, he stood beside his mother’s car showing Alan his new driver’s license. They leaned like girls against the hood but laughed like men at something on the license: a typo. Weight: 1500. I watched them from the doorway. Jack kept his distance, flinched if I came close.

  Alan had helped me load the furniture. With each piece, I thought of Jack’s body. How it hung between us that afternoon, how it swayed, how much like a game wherein you and a friend grab another boy by ankles and wrists and throw him off a dock and into a lake.

  Everything Jack and Lynn owned we’d packed into a U-Haul. I wasn’t meant to know where they were going. I wasn’t meant to see them again, but I’d found maps and directions in a pile of Lynn’s things and written down the address of their new place in Baton Rouge. I could forgive Lynn not wanting to see me, but taking my son away was a thing I could not abide.

  I decided I would go there one day, a day that seems more distant with each passing afternoon. And what would Jack do when he opened the door? In my dreams, it was always Jack who opened the door. I would spread my arms in invitation. I would say what I had not said.

  But, that afternoon, it was Alan who sent Jack to me. Lynn waited in the U-Haul, ready to go. Alan gestured in my direction. He and Jack argued in hushed voices. And finally, remarkably, Jack moved toward me. I did not leave the doorway, and Jack stopped just short of the stoop.

  What can I tell you about my son? He had been a beautiful boy, and, standing before me, I saw that he had become something different: a man I did not understand. His T-shirt was too tight for him, and the hem rode just above his navel. A trail of brown hair led from there and disappeared behind a silver belt buckle. His fingernails were painted black. The cast had come off, and his right arm was a nest of curly, dark hair.

  I wanted to say, I want to understand you.

  I wanted to say, I will do whatever it takes to earn your trust.

  I wanted to say, I love you, but I had never said it, not to Jack—yes, I am one of those men—and I could not bear the thought of speaking these words to my son for the first time and not hearing them spoken in return.

  Instead, I said nothing.

  Jack held out his hand, and we shook like strangers.

  I still feel it, the infinity of Jack’s handshake: the nod of pressed palms, flesh of my flesh.

  . . .

  The rain arrives in sheets and the windshield wipers can hardly keep up. I drive. Cam sits beside me. He’s placed the shoebox on the seat between us. His arm rests protectively against the lid. The alligator slides around with the two-by-fours in the back. We fastened the tarp over the bed of the truck to conceal our cargo, but we didn’t pull it tight. Now, the tarp sags with water, threatening to smother the animal underneath.

  Cam flips on the radio, and we catch snippets of the weather before the speakers turn to static.

  “. . . upgraded to a tropical storm . . . usually signals the formation of a hurricane . . . storm will pick up speed as it makes its way across the gulf . . . expected to come ashore as far north as the panhandle . . . far south as St. Petersburg . . .”

  Cam turns the radio off. We watch rain pelt the windshield, the black flash of wipers pushing water.

  I don’t ask whether Bobby is afraid of storms. As a boy, I’d been frightened, but not Jack. During storms, Jack had stood at the window and watched as branches skittered down the street and power lines unraveled onto sidewalks. He smiled and stared until Lynn pulled him away from the glass and we moved to the bathroom with our blankets and flashlights. It was only then, huddled in the dark, that Jack sometimes cried.

  “We should go back,” I say. “The power could be out.”

  “Bobby’s a tough kid,” Cam says. “He’ll be fine.”

  “Cam,” I say.

  “In case you’ve forgotten,” he says, “there’s a fucking alligator in the back of your truck.”

  I say nothing. Whatever happens is Cam’s responsibility. This, I tell myself, is not your fault.

  Thunder shakes the truck. Not far ahead, a cell tower ignites with lightning. A shower of sparks waterfalls onto the highway. Cars and trucks are dusted with fire. Everyone drives on.

  I don’t know where we’re headed, but Cam says we’re close.

  Cam, I think, after this, I owe you nothing. Once this is over, we’re even.

  “If it’s work you’re worried about,” Cam says, “I’ll talk to Mickey. I’ll tell him about Red. He’ll understand if you’re a little late.”

  “It’s not Mickey I’m worried about,” I say. I don’t say, Mickey can kiss my ass. I don’t say, You and Mickey can go to hell.

  “Look,” Cam says, “I know why you’re pulling the graveyard shift. Mickey told me about the customer you yelled at. But this is different. This he’ll understand.”

  I recognize the ache at the back of my throat immediately. The second I’m alone, it will take a miracle to keep a bottle out of my hand.

  “Take this exit,” Cam says. “At the bottom, turn right.”

  I guide the truck down the ramp toward Grove Street. The water in back sloshes forward and unfloods the tarp. Alligator feet scratch for purchase on the truck bed’s corrugated plastic lining.

  “Where are you taking us?” I ask.

  “Havenbrook,” he says. I wait for Cam to say he’s kidding. But Cam isn’t kidding.

  . . .

  The largest of the lakes cradles the seventeenth green. Cam’s seen gators there before, big bastards who come onshore to sun themselves and scare off golfers. I’ve never golfed in my life, and neither has he, but Cam led the team that patched the clubhouse roof after last year’s hurricane. He remembers the five-digit code, and it still works. The security gate slides open, and we head down the paved drive reserved for maintenance.

  No one’s on the course. Fallen limbs litter the greens. An abandoned white cart lies turned on its side where the golf cart path rounds the fifteenth hole.

  Lightning streaks the sky. The rain has turned the windshield to water, and sudden gusts of wind jostle the truck from every direction. I fight the wheel to stay on the asphalt. Even Cam is wide-eyed, his fingers buried in the seat cushions. The shoebox bounces between us.

  We reach the lake, but the shore is half a football field away. The green is soggy, thick with water, and already the lake is flooding its banks. The first
tire that leaves the road, I know, will sink into the mud, and we’ll never get the truck out.

  “I can’t drive out there,” I tell Cam. I have to yell over the wind and rain, the deafening thunder. It’s like the world is pulling apart. “This is the closest I can get us.”

  Cam says something I can’t hear, then he’s out of the truck, the door slamming behind him. I jump out, and the wet cold slaps me. Within seconds, I’m drenched, my clothes heavy. All I hear is the wind. I move as if underwater.

  As soon as Cam gets the tarp off, the storm catches it, and it billows into the sky like a flaming blue parachute, up into the trees overhead. It tangles itself into the branches, and then there is only the smack smack of the tarp’s uncaught corners pummeled by gusts.

  Cam screams at me. His teeth flash in bursts of lightning, but his words are choked by wind. I tap my ear, and he nods. He motions toward the alligator. We approach it slowly. I expect the animal to charge, but he lies motionless. I check the jaws. They’re still wrapped. This, I realize, will be our last challenge. If he gets away from us before we remove the tape, he’s doomed.

  I’m wondering which of us will climb into the bed of the truck when the gator starts scuttling forward. We leap out of the way as hundreds of pounds of reptile spill from the truck and onto the green. The gate cracks under the weight and swings loose like a trapdoor in midair, hinges busted. Then the alligator is free on the grass. We don’t move, and neither does he.

  Cam approaches me. He makes a megaphone of his cupped hands and mouth and leans in close to my ear. His hot breath on my face is startling in all that fierce cold and rain.

  “I think he’s stunned,” Cam yells. “We’ve got to get the tape off, now.”

  I nod. I’m exhausted and anxious, and I know there’s no way we’ll be able to lug the alligator to the water’s edge. I wonder whether he’ll make it, if he’ll find his way to the water, or if the fall from the truck was the final blow, if tomorrow the groundskeepers will find a gator carcass fifty yards from the lake. It would make the St. Petersburg Times front page. A giant alligator killed in the hurricane. Officials would be baffled.

  “I want you to straddle his neck,” Cam yells. “Keep his head pressed to the ground. I’ll try to get the tape off.”