We the Animals

by Justin Torres

  Now, Ma held the tears and studied her ugliness. The three of us boys started to back out of the room, but she called for me, said she wanted to talk to me about staying six, but she didn't say much beyond that, just looked and looked in that mirror, turning her jaw at different angles.

  "What did he do to me?" she asked.

  "He punched you in the face," I said, "to loosen up your teeth."

  I jumped at the sound of shattering glass. My brothers' two heads instantly appeared back in the doorway, smiling wide, running their eyes from Ma to me, to the broken pieces of mirror, to the spot on the wall where it had been flung, to Ma, to me.

  Ma's hands were up protecting her cheeks again, and her eyes were shut. When she spoke, she said each word slow and clear.

  "You think it's funny when men beat on your mother?"

  My brothers' smiles dropped to frowns; they disappeared again.

  I went and wrapped myself back up in the curtain, leaned my forehead against the windowpane. The light reflected back and forth from the white sky to the snow; the light caught in the frost on the window. Outside, it was too bright to focus on any one spot. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, and they burned with light, and I thought about going blind, about how everyone said if you looked right up into the sun, full on, and held your gaze, you'd go blind—but when I tried, I could not blind myself.

  Ma sat on the edge of the bed, breathing loud and slow, forgiving me. She called for me to sit on her lap, and I came, and we breathed together. Then Ma started in on my favorite song, about a woman with feathers and oranges, and Jesus Christ walking on the water. My head stretched all the way up to her shoulder, but she rocked me, rocked me, and hummed the words she had forgotten.

  "Promise me," she said, "promise me you'll stay six forever."

  "How?"

  "Simple. You're not seven; you're six plus one. And next year you'll be six plus two. Like that, forever."

  "Why?"

  "When they ask how old you are, and you say 'I'm six plus one, or two, or more,' you'll be telling them that no matter how old you are, you are your Ma's baby boy. And if you stay my baby boy, then I'll always have you, and you won't shy away from me, won't get slick and tough, and I won't have to harden my heart."

  "You stopped loving them when they turned seven?"

  "Don't be simple," Ma said. She brushed my hair back from my forehead. "Loving big boys is different from loving little boys—you've got to meet tough with tough. It makes me tired sometimes, that's all, and you, I don't want you to leave me, I'm not ready."

  Then Ma leaned in and whispered more in my ear, told me more, about why she needed me six. She whispered it all to me, her need so big, no softness anywhere, only Paps and boys turning into Paps. It wasn't just the cooing words, but the damp of her voice, the tinge of pain—it was the warm closeness of her bruises—that sparked me.

  I turned into her, saw the swollen mounds on either side of her face, the muddied purple skin ringed in yellow. Those bruises looked so sensitive, so soft, so capable of hurt, and this thrill, this spark, surged from my gut, spread through my chest, this wicked tingle, down the length of my arms and into my hands. I grabbed hold of both of her cheeks and pulled her toward me for a kiss.

  The pain traveled sharp and fast to her eyes, pain opened up her pupils into big black disks. She ripped her face from mine and shoved me away from her, to the floor. She cussed me and Jesus, and the tears dropped, and I was seven.

  The Lake

  ONE UNBEARABLE NIGHT, in the midst of a heat wave, Paps drove us all to the lake. No one wore anything more than a bathing suit, and Ma had us drape towels over the seatbacks to keep our skin from sticking to the vinyl. We drove the long road in silence, as if we were all together in front of the TV, except what we were listening to and watching was the heat.

  Ma and I didn't know how to swim, so she grabbed onto Paps's back and I grabbed onto hers, and he took us on a little tour, spreading his arms before him and kicking his legs underneath us, our own legs trailing through the water, relaxed and still, our toes curled backward.

  Every once in a while Ma would point out some happening for me to look at, a duck touching down onto the water, his head pulled back on his neck, beating his wings before him, or a water bug with spindly legs that dimpled the lake's surface.

  "Not so far," she would say to Paps, but he'd push on, smooth and slow, and the shore behind would stretch and thin and curve, until it was a wooded crescent impossibly dark and remote.

  In the middle of the lake the water felt blacker and cooler, and Paps swam right into a clump of slimy tar black leaves. Ma and I tried to splash the leaves away from us, but we had to keep one arm holding on, so they ended up curling around in our jetty and sticking to our ribs and thighs like leeches. Paps lifted a fistful into the air, and the leaf clump melted through the cracks in his fingers and disintegrated into speckles in the water, and cigarette-size fish appeared and nibbled at the leaf bits.

  "We've come too far," Ma said. "Take us back."

  "Soon," Paps said.

  Ma started talking about how unnatural it was that Paps knew how to swim, as if he was born up here in this hillbilly country, and not six hours south, in Brooklyn. She said that no one swam in Brooklyn. The most water she ever saw in one place was when one of the men from the block would open up the johnny pump and water would rush and pour forth. She said that she never jumped through the spray like the other kids—too hard and mean and shocking—but instead she liked to stand farther down, where the sidewalk met the street, and let the water pool around her ankles.

  "I had already been married and pushed out three boys before I ever stepped into anything deeper than a puddle," she said.

  Paps didn't say when or where he had learned to swim, but he generally made it his business to learn everything that had to do with survival. He had all the muscles and the will. He was on his way to becoming indestructible.

  "I guess it's opposite with you, isn't it?" Ma called back to me. "You grew up with all these lakes and rivers, and you got two brothers that swim like a couple of goldfish in a bowl—how come you don't swim?"

  She asked the question as if she was meeting me for the first time, as if the circumstances of my life—my fumbling, terrifying attempts at the deep end, the one time at the public pool when I had been dragged out by the high school lifeguard and had puked up pool water onto the grass, seven hundred eyes on me, the din of screams and splashes and whistles momentarily silenced as everyone stopped to ponder my bony weakness, to stare and stare waiting for me to cry, which I did—as if it had only just now occurred to Ma how odd it was that I was here, clinging to her and Paps, and not with my brothers, who had run into the water, dunked each other's heads down, tried to drown each other, then ran back out and disappeared into the trees.

  Of course, it was impossible for me to answer her, to tell the truth, to say I was scared. The only one who ever got to say that in our family was Ma, and most of the time she wasn't even scared, just too lazy to go down into the crawlspace herself, or else she said it to make Paps smile, to get him to tickle and tease her or pull her close, to let him know she was only really scared of being without him. But me, I would have rather let go and slipped quietly down to the lake's black bottom than to admit fear to either one of them.

  But I didn't have to say anything, because Paps answered for me.

  "He's going to learn," he said, "you're both going to learn," and no one spoke after that for a long time. I watched the moon break into shards of light across the lake; I watched dark birds circle and caw, the wind lift the tree branches, the pine trees tip. I felt the lake get colder and I smelled the dead leaves.

  Later, after the incident, Paps drove us home. He sat behind the wheel, still shirtless, his back and neck and even his face a crosshatch of scratches, some only deep red lines and broken skin, some already scabbing, and some still glistening with fresh blood, and I too was all scratched up—for she had panicked, and when
he slipped away she had clawed on top of me. Later, Paps said to her, "How else do you expect to learn?"

  And Ma, who had nearly drowned me, who had screamed and cried and dug her nails down into me, who had been more frenzied and wild than I had ever known her to be, Ma, who was so boiling angry that she had made Manny sit up front with Paps and she had taken the middle back, wrapping her arms around us—Ma replied by reaching across me and opening the door as we sped along. I looked down and saw the pavement rushing and blurring beneath, the shoulder dropping away into a gravel pit. Ma held open that door and asked, "What? You want me to teach him how to fly? Should I teach him how to fly?"

  Then Paps had to pull over and calm her down. The three of us boys jumped out and walked to the edge and took out our dicks and pissed down into the ditch.

  "She really clawed you up like that?" Manny asked.

  "She tried to climb onto my head."

  "What kind of ..." he started to say but didn't finish. He was two years older than Joel and three years older than me. We waited for his judgment, for the other half of his sentence, but he only picked up a rock and hurled it out away from him as far as he could.

  From the car, we heard the noises of their arguing, we heard Ma saying over and over, "You let me go. You let me go," and we watched the big trailers haul past, rumbling the car and the ground underneath our feet.

  Then Manny laughed and said, "Shit, I thought she was gonna throw you out of the car."

  And Joel laughed too; he said, "Shit. I thought you were gonna fly."

  When we finally returned to the car, Ma sat up front again, and Paps drove with one hand on the back of her neck. He waited until the perfect moment, until we'd settled into silence and peace and we were thinking ahead to the beds waiting for us at home, and then he turned his head to the side, glancing at me over his shoulder, and asked, all curious and friendly, "So, how'd you like your first flying lesson?" And the whole car erupted in laughter.

  But the incident itself played and played in my mind, and at night, in bed, I could not sleep for remembering. How Paps had slipped away from us, how he looked on as we flailed and struggled, how I needed to escape Ma's clutch and grip, how I let myself slide down and down, and when I opened my eyes what I discovered there: black-green murkiness, an underwater world, terror. I sank down for a long time, disoriented and writhing, and then suddenly I was swimming—kicking my legs and spreading my arms just like Paps had shown me long before, and rising up to the light and exploding into air, and then that first breath, sucking air all the way down into my lungs, and when I looked up the sky had never been so vaulted, so sparkling and magnificent. I remembered the urgency in my parents' voices, Ma wrapped around Paps once again, and both of them calling my name. I swam toward their bobbing mass, and there under the stars, I was wanted. They had never been so happy to see me, they had never looked at me with such intensity and hope, they had never before spoken my name so softly.

  I remembered how Ma burst into tears and Paps celebrated, shouting as if he was a mad scientist and I a marvel of his creation:

  "He's alive!"

  "He's alive!"

  "He's alive!"

  Us Proper

  WHEN WE WERE brothers, when we were all three together, we made a woman. We stacked up on one another's shoulders and wrapped ourselves in Ma's long winter coat. Manny was the bottom, the legs, and Joel was the stomach, and I was the lightest, so I was the woman's head. We used a ladder to keep from tipping over, but Manny's knees buckled under our weight, so we had to lie down on the ground and do it that way; we were a fallen woman who could not get back up, a helpless woman, flat on her back.

  When we were brothers, we were Musketeers.

  "Three for all! And free for all!" we shouted and stabbed at each other with forks.

  We were monsters—Frankenstein, the bride of Frankenstein, the baby of Frankenstein. We fashioned slingshots out of butter knives and rubber bands, crouched under cars, and flung pebbles at white women—we were the Three Bears, taking revenge on Goldilocks for our missing porridge.

  The magic of God is three.

  We were the magic of God.

  Manny was the Father, Joel the Son, and I the Holy Spirit. The Father tied the Son to the basketball post and whipped him with switches while the Son asked, "Why, Paps, why?"

  And the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit hovered and had to watch—there and not there—waiting for a new game.

  When we were three together, we spoke in unison, one voice for all, our cave language.

  "Us hungry," we said to Ma when she finally came through the door.

  "Us burglars," we said to Paps the time he caught us on the roof, getting ready to rappel—and later, when Paps had us on the ground and was laying into Manny, I whispered to Joel, "Us scared," and Joel nodded his chin toward Paps, who was unfastening his belt, and whispered back, "Us fucked."

  When we were three together, we stuck our fingers into each other's eyes and pulled chairs out from underneath. The Stooges were three, the Chipmunks. We pinched our noses and sang Chipmunk Christmas carols. We perfected the human pyramid—not the lazy, kneeling pyramid, but the standing kind. We took turns at being world champions, one paraded on the shoulders of the other two, blowing kisses and shaking fists.

  We were the Three Billy Goats Gruff crossing the bridge; we were the trolls that lived under the bridge. But after we learned about sex—after Ma sat us down on the carpet and opened the encyclopedia to "Reproductive Systems," after she showed us cross-section diagrams of penises and vaginas and explained how they fit, after all that—we played a new game. No one had explained sex to Ma when she was a kid—not the nuns at school and not her own mother. So when she asked Paps, "Can't I get pregnant from this?" Paps had lied; he had laughed and asked, "This?" And then there was Manny, all up in Ma's stomach, growing, heart ticking like a bomb (Ma's words, heart ticking like a bomb), and her only fourteen years old, and Paps only sixteen, both in the ninth grade, and then both dropping out. Ma had to convince Paps to do the right thing, which was to take her on a bus to Texas and marry her. She told us how she was eight months fat by then, and Paps was dark and Afroed. The two of them were so Brooklyn and baby faced and mixed up that the politest thing people could think to do was stare, and the world is full of people who ain't polite—but it had to be Texas, Ma explained, on account of Ma's being too young to marry in New York. So then they were married, so then came Joel, so then came me. All three born in Ma's teenage years ("my teenage years," Ma repeated, as if that meant something to us)—after we learned about all that, we were no longer Three Billy Goats Gruff crossing the bridge, we were no longer the three trolls that lived under the bridge.

  After that, we played a new game where the trolls tricked sex on the goats and we were the babies—half gruff, half troll.

  We walked out, all three together, far from the house, to the drugstore. We planted ourselves on the concrete and held out fistfuls of change and asked strangers to buy us troll things—cigarettes or beers or whiskeys—but no one would. They told us to scram, or they said things like "Whiskeys? Shit, y'all are just babies."

  "Troll babies!" we screamed. "Gruff babies!"

  When a pregnant woman waddled up, Manny shot to his feet, pointing his finger and shouting, "Hey, lady, you got a bomb in there?"

  We kicked our sneakers against the concrete and howled. Joel threw the change up in the air, and it rained down silver jingles. We laughed and laughed, saying, "A bomb! Oh God, a bomb!"

  The lady didn't walk away; she tilted her head, curious, rubbing her palms slowly all over her belly, waiting for us to calm, before saying, "This? This is a baby. This is my baby."

  Her eyes were wet, black-hole eyes—no fear there, no disgust, no pity—she was wide open, this lady. She was drinking us in.

  When she said "Stand up," we did just that. Same with "Come here."

  She squatted a little and took our wrists, one at a time, and placed them on her belly.

&
nbsp; "You just gotta wait," she said—but we didn't have to wait for long.

  "Hot damn!" said Joel. "It's trying to get out!"

  "Does it got a daddy?"

  "All babies got daddies."

  "He trick you?"

  "Trick me?"

  "How old are you?"

  "Mind your p's and q's."

  "You fourteen?"

  "Fourteen? God, no."

  "Does it hurt?"

  "Some. It'll hurt real bad when they take him out."

  "It'll hurt your vagina."

  "Don't you all know how to be proper?"

  We looked at our sneakers. Manny swept up the change from the ground and pressed it into her hand.

  "Here," he said, "give this to your baby. Tell him it's from us."

  "Us who?"

  "Us three."

  "Us brothers."

  "Us Musketeers."

  "Us tricks."

  And after that—after we left that lady holding our small fortune and tinkling it around in her palm—we raced home, pulled Ma down onto the sofa, and lifted her shirt, kissing and blowing raspberries onto her belly—so thin and tight now, no room for us—asking, "Us hurt you?" knowing that we had lived there once, in Ma's belly, before we were three together, before we were brothers.

  And Ma? She didn't question, she just let herself be pulled down, flat on her back, laughing; she just gave in, our Ma, raising her arms above her head, surrender style; she just gave herself up.

  Lina

  PAPS DISAPPEARED for a while, and Ma stopped showing up for work, stopped eating, stopped cooking for us, stopped flushing cigarette butts down the toilet, and let them pile up instead, inside of empty bottles and in teacups; wet cigarette butts clogged the drain of the sink. She stopped sleeping in her bed and took to the couch instead, or the floor, or sometimes she slept at the kitchen table, with her head in one arm and the other arm dangling down toward the linoleum, where little heaps of cigarette butts and empty packs and ash piled up around her.