The Heaven of Animals Read online

  “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 pushes another button, and the picture blips to a single point of white at the center of the screen. The point fades and dies.<
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  “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.

  “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.