The Heaven of Animals Read online

  “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 cradle 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 ha
s 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.”

  “No,” I say. I point to my chest. I circle my hand through the air, pantomiming the unraveling. Cam looks surprised, but he nods.

  Cam brings his hands to my face again and yells his hot words into my ear. “On my signal,” he says, but I push him away.

  I don’t wait for a signal. Before I know it, I’m on the ground, my side hugging mud, and I’m digging my nails into the tape. My eye is inches from the alligator’s eye. He blinks without blinking, a thin, clear membrane sliding over his eyeball, back to front. It is a thing to see. It is a knowing wink. I see this and I feel safe.

  The tape is harder to unwrap than it was to wrap. The rain has made it soft, the glue gooey. Every few turns, I lose my grip. Finally, I let the tape coil around my hand like a snake. It unwinds and soon my fist is a ball of dark, sticky fruit. The last of the tape pulls clean from the snout, and I roll away from the alligator. I stand, and Cam pulls me back. He holds me up. The alligator flexes his jaws. His mouth opens wide, then slams shut. And then he’s off, zigzagging toward the water.

  He is swift and strong, and I’m glad it is cold and raining so Cam can’t see the tears streaking my cheeks and won’t know that my shivering is from sobbing. Cam lets go of me and I think I will fall, but instead I am running. Running! And I’m laughing and hollering and leaping. I’m pumping my fist into the air. I’m screaming, “Go! Go!” And, just before the alligator reaches the water, I lunge and my fingertips trace the last ridges and scales of tail whipping their way ahead of me. The sky is alive with lightning, and I see the hulking body, so awkward and graceless on land, slide into the water as it was meant to do. That great body cuts the water, fast and sleek, and the alligator dives out of sight, at home in the world where he belongs, safe in the warm quiet of mud and fish and unseen things that thrive in deep, green darkness.

  . . .

  Cam and I don’t say much on the ride home. The rain has slowed to an even, steady downpour. The truck’s cab has grown cold. Cam holds his hands close to the vents to catch whatever weak streams of heat trickle out. We have done a good thing, Cam says, and I agree, but, I worry, at what cost? We listen to the radio, but the storm has headed north. The reporters have moved on to new cities: Clearwater, Homosassa, Ocala.

  “There was this one time,” Cam says at last. “About five years back. I spoke to Red.”

  This is news to me. This, I know, is no small revelation.

  “I called him,” Cam says. “I called him up, and I said, ‘Dad? I just want you to know that you have a grandson and that his name is Robert and that I think he should know his grandfather.’ And you know what that prick did? He hung up. The only thing Red said to me in twenty years was ‘Hello’ when he picked up the phone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “If he’d even once told me he was sorry, I’d have forgiven him anything. I’d have forgiven him my own murder. He was my father. I would have forgiven everything.”

  He rubs his hands together in that vigorous way of trying to get warm.

  “Do you know why I got all these fucking tattoos?” he says. “To hide the fucking scars from the night Red cut me with a fillet knife, and I’d have forgiven that if he’d just said something, anything, when he answered the phone.”

  Cam doesn’t shake or sob or bang a fist on the dashboard, but, when I look away, I catch his reflection in the window, a knuckle in each eye socket, and I’m suddenly sorry for my impatience, the grudge I’ve carried all afternoon.

  “But you tried,” I say. “At least you won’t spend your life wondering.”

  We sit in silence for a while. The rain on the roof beats a cadence into the cab, and it soothes me.

  “You know, I served with gay guys in the Gulf,” Cam says, and I almost drive the truck off the road. A tire slips over the lip of asphalt, and my side mirror nearly catches a guardrail before I bring the truck back to the center of the lane.

  “Jesus!” Cam says. “I’m just saying, they were okay guys, and if Jack’s gay it’s not the end of the world.”

  “Jack’s confused,” I say. “He isn’t gay.”

  “Well, either he is or he isn’t, and what you think or want or say won’t change it.”

  “Cam,” I say, “all due respect. This doesn’t concern you.”

  “I know,” Cam says. He sits up straighter in his seat, grips the door handle as we pull onto our block. “I’m just saying, it isn’t too late.”

  We pull into the driveway. Cam jumps out of the truck before it’s in park. The yard is a mess of fallen limbs and garbage. Two shutters have been torn from the front of the house. The mailbox is on its side. Otherwise, everything looks all right. I glance down the street and see that my house is still standing.

  When I turn back to Cam’s house, what I see breaks my heart in ten places. I see Cam running across the lawn. I see Bobby, his hands pressed to the big bay window. His face is puffy and red. Cam disappears into the house, and then he is there with the boy, he is there on his knees, and he pulls Bobby to him. He mouths the words “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over, and Bobby collapses into him, buries his head in Cam’s chest, and my friend wraps his son in dragons.

  I watch them. They stay like that for minutes, framed by window and house and the darken
ing sky. I watch, and then I open the shoebox and look inside.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. What I find are letters, over a hundred of them. About a letter a month for roughly ten years, all of them unopened. Each has been dated and stamped RETURN TO SENDER, the last one sent back just a week ago. Each is marked by the same shaky handwriting. Each is addressed to a single recipient, Mr. Cameron Starnes, from a single sender: Red.

  And I know then that there was no phone call, no forgiveness on Cam’s part, that Cam never came close until the monster was safely out of reach.

  I stare at the letters, and I know who it is Cam wants to keep me from becoming.

  I pull out of the driveway. I stop to right Cam’s mailbox, then I tuck the shoebox safely inside. I follow the street to the end of the block. At the stop sign, I pause. I don’t know whether to turn right or left. Finally, I head for the interstate. There’s a spare uniform at the diner, clean and dry, and, if I hurry, I won’t be late for work.

  But I’m not going to work.

  It’s a ten-hour drive to Baton Rouge, but I will make it in eight. I will make it before morning. I will drive north, following the storm. I will drive through the wind and the rain. I will drive all night.

  Amputee

  The first time Brig saw her, he was sure she was Kate. She had Kate’s dark hair, Kate’s eyes, Kate’s taut swimmer’s build. She was not Kate. Kate was long gone. Were Kate here, she wouldn’t look like this girl, or Brig didn’t think she would. Three years change a person, and who, at thirty, could still pull off twenty? Brig couldn’t. His hair was the giveaway, sideburns silvered, the gray spreading like racing stripes over his ears. He needed to dye it. He needed glasses. He needed to lose the gut that had lassoed his middle. Would Kate know him now if she saw him? Would he know her?

  The girl who looked like Kate but was not Kate sat on a curb, her back to a lamppost, hair gauzy beneath the bulb. She wore denim shorts and a red sweatshirt, the pullover kind with the kangaroo pouch in front. There was no moon, but lamps lined the sidewalks and lit up the U of the apartment complex. A pool glowed blue at the horseshoe’s center. It was late, the parking lot crowded with cars.