We the Animals

by Justin Torres

  Finally, we were silent.

  Ma stood and grabbed his outstretched hand with both of hers and pulled it down and buried it in the space between them.

  "Don't," she said in a voice more steady than we knew. "Don't you dare."

  Big-Dick Truck

  PAPS DROVE OFF to the car dealership, and the three of us staked out in the front lawn all afternoon, snapping the yellow dandelion heads off their stems and streaking them down our arms, painting ourselves in gold, waiting for him to return.

  Our old car had died the night before, on the way back home, after dropping Ma off at work. The engine just quit, right in the middle of the highway, in the rain. Paps had punched and punched the wheel, his fist cry, cursing in English, then Spanish, then just dropping his head into his hands, saying nothing for a long time, rubbing his eyes with his palms, breathing deep. After a while, he fished around and found some plastic shopping bags on the floor of the car. He tied the bags around our heads, and we all got out, very carefully, and walked down the shoulder, soaking up the spray from the tractor-trailers, until finally someone, a woman, pulled over and gave us a ride.

  Once we were inside the woman's car and Paps had thanked her a few times, he turned in his seat and said to us, "Tomorrow. Tomorrow I am going to the dealership, and we're getting a new car."

  We didn't believe him, but the woman did; she thought it was a wonderful idea, and she stretched her neck and peered into the rearview mirror, trying to catch our expression.

  But then in the morning, Ma agreed: we were getting a new car, today.

  Now we were in the front yard, waiting, Manny with a pair of plastic binoculars and Joel up in a tree, lying about how he could see all the way to the dealership. A pickup truck turned the corner, and Manny whispered, "It's him." He said it so softly and clearly that we knew he wasn't jerking us, and we took off running down the block, pulling on each other's sleeves, stumbling, slaphappy.

  When Paps saw us coming, he started celebrating, hooting and hollering, but he had the windows rolled up, so we couldn't hear anything he was saying; we just watched the veins in his neck bulge and his mouth flap open and shut like a puppet. He slowed to a crawl and rolled down the window, and we jogged alongside.

  "Well, boys," he said, "meet the newest member of your family."

  "No way!" we screamed. Some of the neighborhood kids came out to join us. Our father continued to inch toward the house at his snail's pace, a proud smile on his face, and us kids surrounded the truck, jumping up to try to get a look at the interior, like badly trained dogs.

  By the time Paps killed the engine and slid out of the door and onto the gravel driveway, there were at least half a dozen kids examining the truck, climbing into the bed, opening up the glove compartment, running their hands along the leather.

  The truck was cobalt blue, with a bench seat and a skinny, two-foot-long gearshift that came up from the floor. Everything was sleek and new, the thick black rubber of the tires and the sparkling chrome of the bumper. The massive side mirrors jutted outward like elephant ears. There were seven other trucks on our block, and ours was the meanest. Immediately, my brothers and I started bossing the other kids around. "Don't be putting your greasy fingers on the glass," we said. "Only us boys can sit in the driver's seat."

  Ma came out and stood on the stoop, looking tired and pissed. Her eyes were red and her mouth was set, puckering in on itself. She held her boots in one hand, then let them drop in front of her and sat down on the first step.

  "Well, Mami?" Paps asked.

  "How many seats does it have?" she said, picking up a boot and jerking at the laces.

  "It's a truck," Paps mumbled. "It don't got seats, it got a bench."

  Ma smiled at the boot, a mean smile; she didn't look up or look at anything besides that boot. "How many seat belts?"

  The neighborhood kids started to climb down and sneak away, all the excitement receding with them like a tide.

  "Why you gotta be like that?"

  "Me?" Ma said, then she repeated the question, "Me? Me? Me?" Each me was louder and more frantic than the last. "How many fucking kids do you have? How many fucking kids, and a wife, and how much money do you make? How much do you earn, sitting on your ass all day, to pay for this truck? This fucking truck that doesn't even have enough seat belts to protect your family." She spat in the direction of the driveway. "This fucking big-dick truck."

  With that, Paps took one long step toward her and slapped her across the side of her head, but she kept screaming right at him, right up in his face, "Big-dick truck! Big-dick truck!" Her neck and cheeks were flushed red, and she was lost in tears, in rage, shaking her hair loose from her ponytail, pounding Paps on the chest, until finally he clamped a hand across her mouth and pulled her to him with his free arm, pulled her snug up against him and said, "Shush, Mami. Shush."

  She struggled and groaned against his grip, until he started saying, "OK. You win," repeating everything a million times. "You win, you win, you win. I'm here, I hear you, you win," and eventually Ma wore herself out, stopped pulling against him, and her face calmed, one hand massaging the spot where she'd been hit.

  My brothers and I exchanged disappointed glances; we wanted the truck.

  "If she doesn't fit," Manny said, "she doesn't have to ride in it."

  Paps shot us a narrow-eyed, watch-it look.

  "I'm bringing the truck back tomorrow," he announced, holding Ma a little apart from him so he could look into her eyes. "I'll get a fucking minivan if you want, Mami. I'll get you a fat-lady car, is that what you want, to be a fat old lady?"

  We all laughed. Even Ma smiled.

  "But tonight we have a truck, so tonight we'll go for a ride, all right?" he asked. "We'll make it a ride we'll never forget, and after, we'll always talk about the time we had a truck for a day."

  Ma didn't agree right away, but after dinner she went into the bedroom and came back out in her red dress and her gold hoop earrings, and my brothers and I got our plastic guns from the garage and hopped into the back. We didn't have anywhere to go in particular, so we just drove, cutting through the night, smooth as nothing. We drove through the neighborhood, then out of it, down back roads, past cornfields, Ma in the front, nestled up close to Paps, her head on his shoulder, the wind tossing her hair around both of them, and us boys bumping along in the back, aiming our guns up at the stars above and shooting them down, one by one.

  Ducks

  PAPS CAME HOME WITH sleepy eyes and blood-flushed ears and started leaning against Ma, pressing her into the counter, kissing her, pinching her in different places, and Ma, who had been about to leave for the brewery, said, "Stop, stop, stop."

  But he didn't stop; he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her toward the bedroom. She dragged her feet, tried to hold on to the counter, the wall, the door frame, saying, "Stop, baby, I'm serious," her voice lowering, deepening. "Stop." He lifted her feet off the ground and pulled her up the stairs, laughing at her anger. She gripped the banister, and he tugged at her from behind until she let go. He couldn't see her expression, but we could. Her eyes searched, wild and desperate, for something to grab, and for just an instant she looked at us with that same pleading look—she looked to us for help, but we stood there, out of her reach, watching. Then her face flattened and calmed some; she even smiled a sad, halfway smile. What did we see there? Disappointment? Forgiveness? All of this passed in a moment, and only a moment, before Paps kicked the door shut.

  We boys pulled the blankets from our beds and the cushions from the sofa and made a nest in front of the television. We would not sleep upstairs. We fell asleep with the flash of blue across our eyelids and the moans and whispers of late-night advertisements filling our dreams.

  Ma eventually left, worked her graveyard shift, and came home again. She shook us awake, saying, "Get yourselves in that truck, and don't question me. I won't be questioned."

  Ma called it that truck, or your father's truck; Paps had never retu
rned the truck like he had promised, and we knew he never would.

  We drove out to a park where there was a stepped white gazebo and upside-down canoes half submerged in the river. There were swings with black rubber seats, most of them broken and dangling from their chains into the dirt ruts below. There was a wide and patchy lawn sloping up from the water to the road, and there was our truck parked half on the grass and half on the shoulder. There were no children; all the children were in school.

  Inside the bed of the truck were garbage bags stuffed tight with our clothing, the white plastic stretched to a milky translucence and here and there ripped through by the angled edges of letters and envelopes and pictures. Inside the cab was Ma, who had lain across the bench seat and said she needed a nap, pulling her forearm across her eyes to block out the bright day—and all across the lawn was the dew, breaking the sun into specks of light, like a million baby suns clinging to the grass.

  The three of us boys trampled around the park, keeping one eye on the truck. We found a sapling bordered by a chicken-wire fence, and we bent the tree to the ground until it snapped into shreds near the base of the trunk—the yellow flesh was moist inside the bark, and sad. Two of us ganged up on the other, then one suddenly switched allegiance and a new brother was bullied and ostracized, then another betrayal, another. We spent the long hours of morning and early afternoon this way, talking nothing but dares and putdowns, saying "Oh, yeah?" and cursing. We didn't talk about what might happen next; we were tough guys, and brave.

  On the seesaw, Joel held me hostage in the air.

  "Let me go," I said.

  "Girl, I ain't never gonna let you go," said Joel—but then he did. He jumped off and sent me crashing. My tailbone bucked and vibrated and tried to explode. Still, I got on again, saying, "Promise you won't do it this time?"

  And he promised.

  And again.

  And again.

  We made our way along the river's edge, pushing through the brambles. There was a spot up ahead where the highway bridged the water, and we decided to climb the embankment. The dirt was loose and steep, and there wasn't much to grab on to, but we made our way up, me in the middle, getting pushed from behind by Joel and pulled by Manny once he made it to the top. We walked on the side of the big four-lane road, single file, halfway across the bridge, then we sat so that our feet dangled over the edge and our arms rested on the guardrail. We could feel the air on the back of our necks as the cars whizzed and hummed past. People honked and yelled out of windows to get off the road, and one lady pulled over into the weeds on the other side of the overpass, hollering that this was no place for little boys to sit. We ignored her, but she walked shakily over and offered to drive us wherever we needed to be. We refused politely, looking down at our feet, but she kept insisting that she could not, in good conscience, leave us there, until finally Manny stood and said, "Listen, bitch," and picked up a chunk of pavement, and then Joel and I followed suit, saying "Bitchy-bitch," picking up whatever debris we could find. The lady walked backward to her van.

  After we got back to the park and checked to see that Ma was still sleeping in the truck, Joel asked, "The fuck we doing here?" But the question barely registered, spoken, as it was, so softly, and stupid to ask in the first place.

  We tipped a canoe upright, tied it to a tree, and climbed in. We fell asleep listening to the soft lap of the water and feeling the dull push of the afternoon sun on our faces. We woke later to the tap of pretzels hitting the fiberglass bottom of the canoe and plunking into the river around us. The sun was gone and the sky was bleeding pink. Ducks paddled over and silently picked the pretzel bits out of the water. Ma, on a bench, smiled at us and laughed.

  "I thought you were kidnapped!" she yelled, digging in her purse and tossing more pretzels our way. We flapped our elbows and quacked, and she tried to land the pretzels in our mouths, but she was no good at feeding us.

  "Onward!" Ma said, and we followed her back to the truck, clattering on about our day, tattling on each other for all the mean things that had been said and fighting over who got to sit near the window. We peeked into her purse; it was half full with beer pretzels, and we asked where she got them from.

  "Your mother," she said, "is a pretty crafty woman."

  It was odd to hear her say your mother, and for a while I allowed myself to believe that we had a different mother, who tried to help Ma, who filled Ma's purse with snacks.

  In the truck, not moving, the four of us crunched the pretzels into dry wads, forcing them down even after our mouths had dried. It was the only food we'd had all day.

  "Spain," Ma said, "I've always wanted to go to Spain. We could do that."

  I was pretty sure you couldn't drive to Spain, but I couldn't be positive, so when Ma talked about the bullfights and how all the kids would look like us, with brown curls, tan and skinny, and when she talked about cobblestone streets and the life we would build selling bread from wicker baskets in the market, I thought anything was possible. We listened, adding what we could, and made a life.

  Dusk settled down, we hadn't driven anywhere, all the lights were off in the truck, and darkness deepened the spaces between us. Ma talked and talked about Spain; she came up with a name for the little dog we would adopt, a dog that would follow us home from school, because in Spain dogs were everywhere, nipping at ankles and begging for crumbs.

  On the street, the lampposts blinked on their orange bulbs. The green numbers of the digital clock came to life. A car passed now and then, but overall it was a very quiet road and then suddenly very dark. The lampposts were T-shaped, and they loomed like palm trees, and the circles of light they projected were like small lonesome islands.

  The sea of dark reminded me of something Paps was always saying, "Easier to sink than swim." He loved saying that.

  The talk slowed, and there were pauses when each of us detached from the others; maybe we were thinking about food or trying to figure out if we were afraid, and if we were, then what we were afraid of, or maybe we were thinking about Paps. Ma tried to keep talking, tried to keep all of it—the silence and hunger and the idea of Paps—at bay, but she was running out of words.

  "Honestly," she finally asked, "what should we do?"

  She waited.

  "We can go home, but we don't have to. We don't ever have to go home again. We can leave him. We can do that. But I need you to tell me what to do."

  No one spoke. I tried to listen to faraway noises and guess what they were—animals, satellites. The up-close noises were easy, Ma choking on words, the croak in her throat, the controlled breathing of my brothers.

  "Jesus!" Ma whispered. "Say something! You think this is easy?"

  "Something," Joel said, and Manny reached across the seat and punched him.

  Ma flipped the ignition, and the engine jumped to life. We drove back the way we came, and eventually we pulled into the driveway, home again. We had been terrified she might actually take us away from him this time but also thrilled with the wild possibility of change. Now, at the sight of our house, when it was safe to feel let down, we did. I could feel the bitterness in my brothers' silence; I wondered if Ma felt it too.

  "I bet you're hungry," she said. We wouldn't allow ourselves to answer her; we wouldn't allow ourselves to be hungry.

  Without another word, she got out and went around to the back to get our bags. A lamp was on in the living room, but the shades were drawn. Ma slammed the door of the truck bed and Paps appeared in the window, parting the curtains and cupping his hand over his eyes and leaning against the glass. The light inside the house was warm and fell around Paps and spilled outside onto the grass, and when Ma opened the door she disappeared in light.

  We boys stayed in the truck a bit longer, then we got out and walked away from the house, into the street.

  "I thought something was actually going to happen," Joel said. "I thought we were going somewhere."

  "We should have killed that fucking woman," said Manny. "Taken
her keys and driven off."

  "Which woman?" I asked, but no one answered me.

  "Hell yeah," Joel said. "We should have smashed her fucking skull open. We should have scooped out her brain and fed pieces to the ducks."

  "Which woman?"

  "Will you listen to this baby?" Joel said to Manny. "Which woman? We only seen two women all day, that woman on the bridge and Ma. Unless he's counting himself."

  Manny laughed. "It don't matter who, the point's the same. Them ducks wouldn't eat no brains."

  "Sure they would. Why not, if they were hungry enough?"

  I tried not to listen. I wondered if someone would come along and bandage the tree we had snapped, a park ranger or some kind of doctor who knew about veins and roots, someone who could put it back together.

  "They'd get sick. They'd die."

  "Did you look at them nasty things? Looked like some hungry-ass ducks to me."

  Manny stopped at the lamppost, turned to square off. He had his arms crossed and his head cocked to one side—so Joel crossed his own arms and cocked his head right back.

  "I'm telling you," Manny said, "them ducks are too smart to eat them bitches' brains."

  Trench

  WE WOKE TO THE sound of Paps digging out back, his grunt, his heave, his shovel hack. We pushed open the upstairs window and leaned out into the early morning sky, sleepy and confused, still in our underwear, our skin one shade of deep summer brown. If Paps had looked up, we would have appeared to him like a three-torsoed beast, but he didn't look up, and we didn't call down to him.

  For the past few weeks we had been dressing in oversize camouflage from a box of hand-me-downs Ma had brought home from work. Someone had died, someone army. We cut the sleeves and the length from the shirts; we wore cargo shorts as pants. We fastened everything with green canvas belts and sliding army buckles. There were caps and bandannas and exactly three olive-mesh tank tops that shrank in on themselves and were meant to be worn tight but draped on us, the shoulder holes opening down to our waists. The mesh shirts were our favorite, like wearing nothing at all.