We the Animals

by Justin Torres

  Manny smeared a thumb's worth of shoe polish under our eyes, then we stepped out quietly through the door and crept along the side of the house, slipping underneath a hedge, army spies. For the past few weeks, we had been at war.

  "He's digging a grave," whispered Joel.

  "Whose grave?" I asked.

  "Nah," whispered Manny, "that there's a trench."

  "That ain't no trench," Joel replied. "That's a grave."

  "But whose grave?"

  "How am I supposed to know? Ma's grave, I guess. Maybe it's your grave."

  "No way," I said. "No way that's my grave."

  Paps kept digging and digging, shovels full of dirt; dirt stuck to the sweat on his back and smudged across his cheeks and forehead. Grunt, heave, hack. The dirt cleaved away in dark, cool cuts. He dug faster and faster, until eventually he tossed the shovel, fell to his knees, and dug with his hands. We crawled closer, unnoticed, until we could see the bobbing shape of his head and shoulders as he scooped and flung dirt from the hole. He dug until he could barely breathe, until he collapsed, wheezing, in the dirt.

  We walked over and stood around the edge and peered down inside.

  "I'll never get out of here," Paps said. The dirt had crumbled down and powdered him brown all over, except for the blood that was seeping from his knuckles and the tips of his fingers, and the red of his mouth, which was busy licking and spitting dirt and breathing hard. I wasn't sure if he meant he couldn't get up out of the hole he had dug, or if he was trying to escape our yard through a tunnel to somewhere else, like China.

  Joel must have thought the same thing, because he asked, "Where you trying to get to?" But Manny only flicked his ear and called him a dipshit.

  "Give your ol' man a hand, why don't ya?"

  We lay down on the grass outside the hole and took hold of his wrists and tugged and tugged, but he didn't budge; instead he pulled us in with him and held us there in his big arms, us laughing and screaming and flailing about. We kicked the walls of the hole, and more dirt rained in, so that everyone was spitting and choking, but no one could get away—he was a strong man, our Paps, and he knew just how to hold on to all three at once.

  When we were finally outside the hole, Paps slapped at himself, dusting the dirt from his clothes. We followed him back into the house, sneaking up and slapping him on the ass, over and over, yelling, "You missed a spot! You missed a spot!" He shook his fist and took a couple of blind swings, but he didn't hit us.

  "Be good," he said. "I'm going to pick your mother up from work." But he must have gotten distracted by something on the way to the brewery, because Ma came home hours later—she had worked through the night, and now it was a little after noon, and she was all alone and drunk and mad as hell.

  "Where is he? Where's the truck?" She looked at each one of us, at our empty faces, then she closed her eyes and leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor. She unlaced her steel-toed boots and hurled them across the room.

  "He dug a trench," Joel said.

  Ma took pains peeling down her white socks. Little bits of white lint stuck to her feet, and she blew them away with long, drawn-out gusts. She focused all of her attention on the process, like she was unwrapping a fragile mummy. She curled and uncurled her toes. Then she began on the buttons of her heavy cotton men's shirt, which had her name embroidered onto a tag on the front.

  "A trench?"

  "Out back."

  "What do you know about trenches?" Ma asked, wrestling with her buttons.

  "Joel thinks it's a grave," I said and felt Joel's fist hit the small of my back.

  Ma stopped and looked at each one of our faces. Her shirttails were pulled out and unbuttoned from the bottom, splitting open toward her heart.

  "Naps," she said, "all of you. Right now."

  We didn't sleep. We lay, the three of us in one bed, fanning ourselves with paper fans, our black polish melting in the sweat. We listened to Ma in the kitchen, opening and closing the cupboards. Joel joked about her painted toenails, their pinkness wrapped up inside those sweat socks and work boots all day.

  "You see how excited she is to come home and see them toes again?" he asked. "She's toe proud. Toe crazy."

  The back door creaked open and we went to the window. We didn't risk leaning out, but we could see Ma clear enough. She was standing at the edge of the hole, smoking and peering down inside. Then she stepped in and disappeared from view; she lay herself down in that hole, and not more than a minute later, the sky cracked, and the rain dropped down—pouring rain, sheets of it sliding down the window like at the car wash.

  "It's like she did that," Manny whispered.

  "Did what?"

  "Made it rain."

  "Shut up."

  "That hole's magic."

  We went to the bathroom and grabbed two towels off the floor, then sat at the kitchen table and waited until Ma came in, streaked with mud, her hair wet and webbed across her forehead. She plopped her clothes onto the linoleum. She wasn't crying, and she wasn't angry to see us up out of bed. She took the towels and covered herself, and we followed her into the living room, where she sighed and fell down onto the couch. We got more towels and swiped at the leftover mud and wet. When we ran out, we used paper napkins until she was as clean and dry as we could get her, then we covered her with a blanket.

  "Does he think I'll just take this?" she asked, but she wasn't asking us.

  Sitting on the floor in front of the couch, with our knees held to our chests, we dared each other to go out into the hole. The rain had tapered off, a summer storm, but it would still be wet, and in our imagination the hole had filled up with worms and maggots and drowned moles. We had decided not to let Paps near her, not today—we had plastic guns and camo, we were Ma's militia—so we could go out to the hole only one at a time.

  Manny was first. He came back mud slicked like Ma, but we didn't move to help him clean up.

  "That's a magic hole," he said, smiling. He shook like a dog and sprinkled us with filth. Joel, of course, didn't believe Manny's magic-hole bullshit, but he spent a long time out there, longer than Manny, and when he came back, his clothes were dry.

  "What'd you take your clothes off or something?" Manny asked.

  "Sure I did."

  "And?"

  Joel shrugged. "Could be. Could be magic. We'll see."

  I was squeamish about mud, and even though the day was muggy and hot, I thought the mud in the hole would be cold, and I was squeamish about that as well, and worms—I could see one worm, and I knew there would be more. I took off my clothes like Joel had, all of them, and once I was naked there was nothing for it but to climb in.

  It was a grave. It was my grave. Paps had dug my grave. Those were my first thoughts, and when I was fully horizontal, half submerged in puddle muck, stories about people being buried alive rushed into my mind—avalanches, mudslides, suffocation—but I had a wish, and so I stayed to wish it. I could see a squarish patch of sky, framed by the walls of the hole, and that sky calmed me some, the clouds, the blue; it would not rain again today. I felt a great distance from the house, from Ma on the couch and my brothers and Paps. The clouds seemed to move faster than I had ever known them to, and if I concentrated, if I let go enough, an understanding would blur inside of me and I could trick my body into feeling that it was moving and the clouds were still—and then I was certain that I was moving, and the hole was magic. I closed my eyes and stayed quiet and motionless but felt movement, sometimes sinking, sometimes floating away, or stretching or shrinking. I allowed myself to lose all bearings, and a long, long time passed before I wished my wish.

  What pulled me out was their laughter. All four of them, Ma and Manny and Joel and Paps, growing up out of the mud above me and swaying with laughter, like trees. My brothers grabbed each other's shoulders and shook and pointed, weeping with laughter, saying, "Look at him, just look at him! Just look at that baby!"

  And Ma was saying that it was OK, that I could come out no
w. "You come on out of that trench," she was saying.

  And Paps was leaning down and reaching to help me up; he was telling me that the war was over.

  Trash Kites

  WE WALKED FOR MILES, the three of us, kicking up gravel, dragging sticks behind us. We were sneaking out; we were finding freedom. Above us, naked branches stretched into shadows and the sky deepened, wrapping itself up in a shroud of dark purple. It was getting colder, and Joel and I wondered out loud if maybe we should turn back.

  "We're on a good path," Manny said, "we're doing right, we're safe."

  We reached an empty field, tossed our backpacks onto the grass, and set up camp. Wind whipped the tips of our ears and stole a plastic bag right out of Manny's hand. He thought it was a sign and fished through our supplies until he pulled out a tight, fat roll of twine and three black plastic bags. We made kites: trash bags on strings. We ran, slipped, the knees of our dungarees all grass stained, we got up, ran, choked ourselves half to death with laughter, but we found speed, and our trash kites soared. We flew for an hour or so, until daylight fully buried itself into night and all the light sank back, except for the stars and a toenail clipping of moon, and the kites disappeared, black on blackness. That's when we let go, and our trash kites really soared—up and away, heavenward, like prayers, our hearts chasing after.

  Paps came crunching down the road with his high beams on—our sleeping bags and backpacks and our shielded faces all caught in his searchlight.

  "Fuck," Manny said, "we should have slept in the woods." But probably Paps would have hunted us down anyway. He was like that; he knew tricks for tracking down people who didn't want to be found.

  Paps assumed it was all Manny's idea because Manny was the oldest and because it was, actually, all Manny's idea. He didn't wait to get home but beat Manny right there in the field, the headlights scaling back the night, casting long wild shadows on the trees, the engine running and the door left wide open, so that the inside of the car was perfectly alit and I could see, from twenty feet away, moths fluttering in and bumping into one another. He beat Manny bad; punched his face, punched his crotch. Manny went crazy, hooting and hollering "Murderer!" over and over.

  "Murderer!" he screamed at our father, but no one was dead. He crawled over to where I stood, grabbed my sleeve, looked into my eyes. "Murderer!" he said.

  "But who's dead?"

  "Me," he said. "Me, I'm dead! And my children."

  Manny was always saying all kinds of crazy shit, most of it to me, because Joel had a way of closing himself off from crazy, but I couldn't figure out how to stop from hearing his words and howls, how to look away.

  So later that night, back at home, just before dawn, Manny climbed into my bed and woke me up, telling me how he had dreamt of kites—a whole sky full of kites, and he was holding all the strings. He told me how the good kites and wicked kites got all mixed up, how he tried to hold on to the good and let the rest float away, but after a while he couldn't tell them apart.

  I didn't say anything. We were on our backs, not touching, but I could tell he was holding himself tight, every little muscle tight. I thought he might cry, or scream. I thought he might climb up on top of me.

  "Paps apologized, you know," Manny said, "for using his fists. He told me he was scared, that something serious could have happened to us."

  He rolled onto his side and watched my face. I pretended to yawn; I didn't like his eyes on me.

  "I used to believe we could escape," he whispered. "I had it all figured out—like when we were in the field today, I was sure that God would grab hold of those kites and lift us up, protect us."

  He took my chin and turned my face toward his.

  "But now I know," he said, "God's scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me and Joel, we're nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We're on our own."

  He wrapped one arm and one leg around me and was silent and still for a stretch of time, and I drifted into sleep. After a while Manny started up again, talking to himself, plotting, saying, "What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to heaven," and as he said the words, the picture formed in my mind: my brothers and me, flailing our arms, rising, the world telescoping away, falling up past the stars, through space and blackness, floating upward, until we were safe as seed wrapped up in the fist of God.

  Wasn't No One to Stop This

  IN THE EVENING, we drew a chalk circle in the street and divided the circle into three sections. We had a blue rubber ball, and we each stood in one of the sections and smacked the ball with our palms, from one to the other, trying to keep the ball alive. With each smack, we imitated our Paps.

  "This is for raising your voice—"

  "And this is for embarrassing me in public—"

  "And this is for doing something—"

  "And this is for doing nothing—"

  "And this—"

  There was the gutter, which caught the ball when we missed, and there were cars that came fast around the bend, then slowed upon seeing us. We stood to the side of the road and looked hard at the drivers through the glass as they passed. If there were kids in the cars, we showed them our tongues or our middle fingers. We had nylon fall jackets, windbreakers with collapsible hoods that rolled up and zipped into the neck like a parachute. We had our blue ball and our anger and the evening sky moving into twilight and the peaks of the roofs against that darkening sky, the antennae, the telephone cables, and somewhere we had a crow calling.

  Manny said, "There's white magic and there's black magic," and we believed him.

  Lately, Manny was always trying to explain to Joel and me about God. He led us out into the woods and had us hunt for mushrooms, poisonous mushrooms, put on earth by God to work his black magic. There were white mushrooms with oily black undersides and flat, rippled mushrooms clinging to rotted-out logs, and mushrooms that puffed out a yellow smoke of spores when squeezed, but none of them contained God's black magic, and then the last of the light was gone, and all was dark.

  We were cold, but we wouldn't go home yet. There had been other children earlier; they kept separate from us, but we heard them playing in the street, and we heard as they were called inside one by one for supper. I was afraid of the dark, but no one knew; I'd never spoken the fear. I was afraid of black magic; I was afraid of poison—and when Manny and Joel decided to see who could throw the rubber ball hard enough to break the window of the Grices' camper, which had been parked in the same spot for as long as we could remember, two wheels holding up the back and the front supported by a stack of grayed lumber—I was afraid we'd be punished, but I kept my mouth shut.

  The ball thudded against the glass and rolled back toward where we crouched at the edge of the woods. A light flicked on in a back room of the house.

  "They can't see shit out here, they can't see us."

  We waited, and after a short time the light shut.

  "Use a rock this time," Joel said to Manny.

  "Let's just wait a minute, or else they'll get suspicious."

  We crouched in the dirt and smelled the air. With the backs of our hands, we rubbed life into the tips of our noses. We sucked back snot. After a while Joel mumbled, "It's fucking cold," because someone had to say the obvious so that the other two could ignore him, and in this way we knew that no one wanted to go home. A while after that, Manny said, "White magic is like rabbits in hats and shit, card tricks, whatever."

  The earth was hard and cool where we crouched, just damp enough to stick to our knees and the balls of our hands. The dirt squeezed up shut in the winter and softened in the summer, and autumn dirt was my favorite dirt, like cooled black coffee grinds. Black magic.

  "Black magic is voodoo, snake-charming, poison," Manny said. "You could kill someone with black magic."

  Manny threw the rock, and then we were running, at the full speed of terror, along the edge of the
woods, running, running, running, falling down and catching our breath, with the sound of the shattering glass playing over and over in our minds, the sound of permanence, the delightful, shocking sound of damage done.

  We turned back and watched the Grices' house to see if we were being followed, and sure enough the Grices' son, the headbanger, appeared—two years older than Manny and stick thin. He walked down the middle of the street, swinging a flashlight at his side. When he came to the spot where we had drawn our chalk circle, he stopped and ran his light along the circle's outside edge. He raised the light higher in the air so he could see the drawing in its entirety. Then he kept walking down the road toward the dead end where we crouched at the woods' edge.

  "Boys," he sang, "boyyyys."

  Manny got up and walked to the log that marked the end of the road and sat, so that the headbanger would see Manny when he arrived—see that Manny wasn't hiding. Joel and I followed, swiping the dirt from our knees and rubbing our palms.

  "Three dogs on a log," the boy said and swept the light back and forth across us. We shielded our eyes. The Dead End sign glowed yellow in the flashlight's reflection, and the headbanger held the light there and laughed.

  "Everything's different in the dark," he said, then switched off the light and joined us on the log, dogged with us.

  "Well, hiya, fellas. How you fellas doin'?"

  He knew it was us who had just broken the window on that old camper—that much was obvious—and there was an odd humor in his voice. The headbanger had been sniffing around us lately, trying to joke with us; we didn't know why; could be nothing more than we were the only ones near his age who were still out well past supper, could be something meaner. He came from up north, he claimed, from Texas, from California. Blond-white hair fell long and stringy down his back but was cut short at the sides and front. He was always pulling at his crotch and telling as many lies as he could cram into a sentence. This type of boy was everywhere around us, but mostly we kept separate, us three half-breeds in our world, and the white-trash boys in theirs. We had been as warned against them as they had against us, and besides, we didn't need them; we had each other for games and hunts and scraps. We still ran thick; Manny up front, making rules, and Joel to break all of them, and me keeping the peace as best I could, which sometimes meant nothing more than falling down to my knees and covering my head with my arms and letting them swing and cuss until they got tired, or bored, or remorseful. They called me a faggot, a pest, left me black and blue, but they were gentler with me than they were with each other. And everyone in the neighborhood knew: they'd bleed for me, my brothers, had bled for me.