The Heaven of Animals Read online

  He’d been out twice that night, but this was his first time seeing the girl. What he’d hoped to see was the cat, to find it before something else did. The Sonoran Desert was rough on wayward pets. Rattlesnakes and hawks, a scorpion, even a pack of wild pigs—any of these could do Boots in. He’d been careful, so careful, and then the cat was an orange streak out the open door.

  And what to tell the neighbor he hardly knew? Soon as she asked him to watch Boots for the week, Brig should have said he was no cat sitter. But he’d been distracted. A troubling phone call had just come, then the knock on the door, and Brig had said, “Fine, fine.” Because who wasn’t up for the easy work of walking next door once a day? Who couldn’t clean a litter box or operate a can opener and remember to keep a door closed?

  When she got back, he wouldn’t be able to face her. She was too kind and too old. She spoke of the cat the way you speak of a friend. No, the cat had to be found, or else Brig had to move.

  The girl on the sidewalk was smoking a cigarette, and Brig found himself drawn to the ember end. It had been almost a decade since his last smoke. A few months into their marriage, Kate had put her foot down on cigarettes, even the ones after sex. But Kate was gone, the voice in his head a reflex, a false alarm that curbed bad habits through force of memory alone.

  “Bum a cigarette?” he said.

  The girl rose. She let go a puff of smoke, and Brig tasted a familiar, candied mustiness. She pulled a pack from her front pocket, shook a cigarette from the pack, and passed it.

  She said, “In movies, this is how the rape-part starts.”

  Brig stepped back. He threw his hands up.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You look safe. More sloppy than rapey.”

  Brig considered his khakis’ frayed cuffs, the white T-shirt and its constellation of mustard stains. The girl was right to be wary. Before leaving Atlanta, a cursory search of Tucson had turned up the fact that the city was, among other things, one of the country’s most dangerous, right up there with Baltimore, Memphis, and D.C. Rape and gangs, methamphetamines. Border violence—those who wanted in and those who meant, by any means, to keep them out. Corpses were fished routinely from the cactuses. The week before, the body of a child had been found, his chest a crater. Brig learned these things from a buddy at work whose Border Patrol brother regaled him with stories.

  Tucson, he’d further learned, was America’s third hottest city. A dry heat, people said who’d never been, though, at 115 degrees, what difference did it make whether you boiled or baked? First summer in Arizona, his Georgia driver’s license, left in the glove box overnight, had turned wavy, illegible. Another day, a McDonald’s cup fused to the car’s cup holder.

  “Brig,” he said.

  He held out his hand. Instead of shaking, the girl held out a lighter, which he took.

  “Brig,” she said. “Like the ship.”

  “Like the ship.” He got that a lot.

  What he got less, and what was true, was Brig short for Brigham. His parents were Mormon, devout and unrelenting. He’d been baptized at eight, made a deacon at twelve. By fourteen, he’d begun to question everything. He missed meetings, spoke his mind, and left the church before becoming an elder. He hadn’t needed to throw out his LDS friends with his faith, but he had. He’d gone to college, met Kate, married young, then paid the price for marrying young. He still talked to his parents, who tolerated his calls but seldom called him. He hadn’t seen them since the divorce.

  Brig lit the cigarette and inhaled.

  The world slipped. It was like that sound effect, the noise a record player makes in the movies when someone’s said the wrong thing and the crowd goes quiet.

  He coughed. He sat.

  “It’s weed,” she said.

  He nodded, and she sat beside him.

  He coughed some more. He couldn’t remember how long it had been—since before Kate, surely—but he remembered well enough to know this made a joke of what had passed for pot in college. This stuff packed a punch.

  Nearby, something moved—an amber flash. He jumped up but stopped short at the bumper of the closest car. A sandwich wrapper winked in the lamplight, all foil and orange paper.

  He turned. The girl was watching him.

  “You haven’t seen a cat, have you?” he said.

  “I haven’t seen a cat,” she said. “Dog, either. There was this guinea pig. Irascible fellow. Didn’t care for him.”

  “I’m joking,” she said when Brig said nothing, and it was like she’d thrown a cup of cool water in his face.

  Her name was Liliana. Friends called her Lily, and he could too. She was a junior.

  “High school?” Brig was floored. The girl looked twenty-two, twenty easy.

  “Seventeen,” she said. She should have been at prom as we speak, but bad grades had gotten her grounded.

  “Prom’s overrated,” he said.

  “You’re just saying that,” she said.

  But he wasn’t. He meant it, and he said it again, meaning it even more. His own prom date, Heather Something, had been a bore. Half the night, she’d stood in one corner with her gossipy girlfriends. She’d only dance slow songs. And, after all of it—the limo, the dinner, the corsage, and the tux—she pushed his hand away when he tried to anything but kiss her.

  “You’re what?” Lily said. “Twenty-five?”

  He was five past that, but he liked her thinking he was young. “Twenty-four,” he said.

  What did he do, she asked, and he admitted that he repped for a drug company.

  “Mostly, I try to convince doctors that our allergy medication beats the competitors’.”

  “Does it?”

  “Nope.”

  He sucked at sales, and his boss hated him for it. Doctors wouldn’t see him or take his freebies. Receptionists, eyeing the drug-stuffed suitcase, pulled their blinds at his approach. His territory extended from Phoenix to Tucson, as far east as Benson, as far west as the state line. His returns were among the company’s lowest, his take among the lowest too. Most months, he didn’t even commission out. But he didn’t care. The job got him out of his apartment, out seeing the Arizona he’d come to see: deserts and canyons, boulders balanced on boulders like in the Road Runner and Coyote cartoons. Even, once, a real roadrunner, its legs a whirling, oval blur.

  Brig pulled on the cigarette and held the smoke in. He hadn’t lost the hang of it.

  “Married?” Lily asked.

  He shook his head. He did not say divorced, then wondered why he hadn’t. That fact was one he kept only from women on first dates. But this girl was half his age, or nearly. He wasn’t up to what it looked like. He didn’t think he was. Then, thinking it, he wondered if that was what he was up to. Was that even legal? Seventeen? He knew eighteen was fine—or, not fine but legal, or whatever. But what about girls who looked twenty? Wasn’t there a clause or something, some new law?

  Since Kate, he’d had three dates in three years, and he was starting to think there was something wrong with him. Getting out more, he might have met more women. But he was always on the road, in faraway towns and hotels, and, when he wasn’t, he liked his apartment: the familiar couch, the friendly TV, PBS with its informative documentaries that made him feel dumb for all he didn’t know, then smart, later, when he could rattle off a dozen facts concerning the masonry of sixteenth-century European castles or the characteristics of Asian versus African elephants.

  Lily’s nose was small, a pistachio, and now she wriggled it, bunny-like. She dropped her spent joint, crushed it with her heel, and quickly, one-handedly, lit another. He couldn’t figure it. The cigarettes weren’t hand-rolled. They were manufactured, filtered, stamped with a name he didn’t know. But there was definitely pot in there. Had she tapped the tobacco out of each cigarette and snuck the pot in? That seemed like more work than it was worth.

 
A car appeared in the parking lot, taking a corner too fast. He hid the joint behind his back. The car pulled past, and he took another hit.

  “Here you are,” Lily said, “past midnight, alone in a darkened parking lot with a seventeen-year-old girl, and it’s the pot you’re worried about?” She watched him. Her nose did the wriggle-thing again. The bulb flickered overhead. “You’re a funny guy.”

  Brig’s cigarette was down to the filter, and he let it drop to the blacktop.

  “I want to show you something,” Lily said. She flicked her joint across the parking lot. It sailed, a meteor, and touched down on the hood of a car, where it smoldered and rolled.

  “That’s my car,” Brig said.

  The girl got to her feet, apologizing.

  “Kidding,” he said.

  She watched him a minute.

  “You’re all right,” she said.

  She watched him a minute more, then she said, “Come on.”

  She took his hand and her touch was electric. He couldn’t remember, just then, the last time he’d felt another person’s touch. His head buzzed. His lungs were two balloons lifting into night. And then she was pulling him across the lot, down the sidewalk, past lampposts, to the pool.

  . . .

  The last time he’d seen Kate, he’d been behind the steering wheel of a U-Haul truck into which he’d loaded what was left of his possessions. The things they’d shared—the house, the furniture, the car—all of it was Kate’s or in Kate’s name. She’d been the breadwinner, director of a home for the elderly and infirm. Daily, she put her little stamp of humanity on the world, and the work made her happy. She’d been patient, waiting for Brig to find fulfillment—her word—in work of his own. But Brig didn’t find work fulfilling. Work was work. What Brig found fulfilling was a Whopper, a six-pack, and HBO, the well-acted shows that were almost-but-not-quite pornography. You couldn’t watch porn and still feel good about yourself, but HBO walked the tightrope, and, afterward, you felt sophisticated, horny without feeling guilty.

  He’d tried, on multiple occasions, to explain this to Kate. “That’s not happiness,” Kate would say. “That’s depression.” And Brig would shrug and pull another Dorito from the bag. He liked the napalm glaze the chips left on his fingers, liked sucking them clean when the last chip was gone.

  In five years, he’d cycled through half a dozen jobs, but nothing stuck. Some he lost and some he quit.

  “Say you could be anything?” Kate asked.

  “Astronaut,” he said, because it was like saying movie star, like saying President of the United States, a job he definitely wouldn’t want. Even astronaut—he didn’t think he’d care for it, the zero gravity and food in tubes, the sleeping-standing-up.

  “I give up,” Kate said.

  He thought she meant her role as his career counselor, but she meant the marriage, meant him. “You’re too unhappy,” she said.

  Brig argued that he’d never been happy, at least not as long as she’d known him, and Kate admitted she knew this, she’d known, but that he used to be better at faking it. “I liked it better when you would pretend.”

  “What?” he said. “So I can’t be myself?”

  “Honestly, Brig, what does that even mean?”

  He didn’t know. He only knew what he’d thought, which was that Kate could be happy enough for the both of them. But a couple couldn’t keep on like that, one person content, the other whatever he was. There was balance to account for, harmony. Without it, they were just two people sharing the same cutlery.

  The morning he left Atlanta, the sun beat down on the roof of the cab and hot air came in through the open window. The truck had A/C, but no radio, and it was going to be a long drive west. Kate stood in the driveway, frowning at him. But, then, she’d been frowning at him for years. Perhaps he’d given in too easily. Could her declaration have been an experiment, a test to see what he was willing to fight for, and what he wasn’t? Perhaps if he said no, got his act together, refused to leave . . .

  But, then, he was already in the truck, belongings boxed, emergency brake disengaged. The thought of undoing, after all of this—it seemed like so much work.

  Kate reached a hand into the cab. She squeezed his shoulder the way you would an aging aunt’s. She asked where to, and he told her. He had some experience in pharmaceuticals, and, because Arizona was where old people went to die, he figured he’d find work fast. He had three thousand dollars—a gift from Kate—to live on until then. He’d seen pictures, the city ringed by mountains, monsoons in summer and the blooms they left in their wake. Saguaros huddled like hat racks on the ridges. The desert was not the moonscape people thought it was. It was brown, but it was also sage and green, sand busy with the footprints of animals. And he would see it all. He would see and he would sell, and he would do his best to put Kate out of his mind.

  If this was a test, he thought, then let it be hers. Let him back down the driveway. Let him call her bluff.

  But all that happened was that Brig drove away. In the rearview, Kate waved, then turned, her back to him before he’d made the first bend in the road.

  . . .

  A chain-link fence circled the pool. Lily produced a key from her front pocket, fitted it, and the gate swung wide.

  “Travis has a crush on me,” she said. Travis was their unit’s maintenance man. Blue-jeaned and droopy, Travis could often be seen skimming the pool or sawing the dead limbs from tall palms. Too early Sunday mornings, he pushed a mower down a Mohawk of grass five feet from Brig’s door.

  Brig imagined Lily flirting, then following the man to his shadowy utility shed. He reminded himself that Travis was twice her age. But, then, so was he.

  Picturing Lily wasn’t hard: her on top, surprising Brig with her sexual prowess. He could see her completely comfortable at the breakfast table, sun coming up, her confession that she hadn’t been grounded for grades, but for sneaking out nights.

  Brig was considering all of this, what he might want and what that made him, when, quietly, and without warning, Lily took off her arm.

  There was a snap, followed by a little click, and the limb unhinged at the shoulder. Click, just like that. The arm slipped through the red skin of her sleeve and out the hole where the hand had been.

  “If it bothers you,” she said, “I can put it back. I just can’t get it wet.”

  Brig shut his eyes. The pot had been good, but not that good. He opened his eyes.

  Her sleeve hung empty at her side. In her right hand she held her left. The arm dangled, a parenthesis unyoked from the pair. Its color matched the shade of her face exactly.

  “Catch,” she said, and then the arm was airborne and coming at him. He braced for something solid, but what he caught was light as a baseball bat. It was one piece, bent slightly at the elbow. From a distance, the hand had looked real. As he held it, though, the fingers revealed themselves to be plastic—sculpted, lined and veined to look real as anything in one of those creepy museums stuffed with wax celebrities. A pair of buckled straps hung loose from the arm’s shoulder end.

  “Starter arm,” Lily said. “The good one bends, and I can pick stuff up with it, but people see the pinchers and they freak.”

  Brig wondered—he couldn’t help it—whether the arm made her more likely to be the girl who put out, or whether it made her less. He wondered where this left him. He wondered what he wanted, whether he wanted her still, whether he wanted her more. His parents would say damnation awaited anyone who messed around before marriage, would say that their son, divorced at twenty-seven, could never have sex again without rolling the dice on his soul. Mormons didn’t teach hell, not exactly, but that hadn’t kept Brig’s father from threatening it. Brig didn’t believe in hell, and he was scared of hell. He was scared of a hell in which he didn’t believe.

  He held the arm in both hands and watched the wind unsmooth
the surface of the pool.

  “Yep,” Lily said. “You’re one of those.”

  “One of what?”

  “The don’t-lookers,” she said. “There’re those who look and those who don’t. And then there’re those who look too much. Like: Look, I’m so comfortable, I can stare right at it. That kind of looking.”

  Brig looked. He forced his gaze on the sleeve where the arm had been.

  “I’ll tell you when it’s been too much,” Lily said.

  She smiled and pulled off her sweatshirt. Pool shadow slithered over her abdomen. A gecko rode her hip, red and orange. A blue bra pushed up her breasts and partly hid what looked like a holster. Her shoulder, where the arm went in, dissolved into a knob of flesh like the licked end of an ice cream cone.

  She slid the holster out from beneath the bra, draped it over a deck chair, and then she made her way to him. She reached, and, for a moment, both of their hands were on the arm. A current ran the arm’s length, electric longing down his body and back up. He let go. She propped the prosthesis in a chair. She undid her shorts and let them drop to the pool deck, then stepped out of them.

  Even in the looking away, Brig couldn’t help noticing the shaved legs, the blue panties and black curl beneath. His eyes wound up back on the shoulder, that trinity of collarbone and neck and the gradual slope into nothing.

  “Here’s the short version,” she said. “My parents are missionaries. They brought me with them to Brazil. We were hiking, I fell, and a fer-de-lance went up my sleeve. It’s a snake, a viper. The doctor said I was lucky to lose just my arm. This was three years back.”

  “God,” he said. “Your parents must feel terrible.”

  “Not really. Dad says all things work together for the good of the Kingdom.”

  If there was a kingdom, Brig had been left out of it. He wanted to say as much, to tell her that this kingdom business was what you said when you didn’t want your daughter blaming you for Brazil, except, here she stood, one-arm-happy, and Brig had the strongest sensation that it wasn’t his place to say.