We the Animals

by Justin Torres

  Around the corner there was the four-barreled steel Dumpster, and in the Dumpster's shelter hid the eight-nippled stray cat. We dug into our pockets for milk money; Manny had seventy-five cents. Fifteen minutes' walk to the gas station, no one was cold. At the counter we slid the change to the attendant, a Near Eastern man the hue and hulk of our Paps.

  "You could be our father," I said, and Manny and Joel busted up into coughing laughter.

  The man looked at our coins. "You're short."

  We patted pockets, pretended to fish, came up empty. The lights inside cut into our smooth buzz; the counter's veneer had been coin-rubbed raw. This man wasn't nothing like our Paps.

  "Go on, take it," he said. "Get out of here."

  So we ambled back to our stray, grabbing at whatever we found along the shoulder and tossing it into the trees. If something—a rock, a flank of rubber—landed without making a sound, we erupted into cheers. Sometimes we pretended not to have heard the crashing; we cheered on anyway.

  For a milk bowl we used the plastic lid of a five-gallon tub and the milk thinned into a shallow layer. Didn't look like much. Our stray barely raised her muzzle to sniff the air.

  "She'll eat later," Joel said, "when we're gone."

  This was our own Ma's pledge, when we used to worry for her.

  The kittens clawed and pushed in the suckling pile; some seemed to be asleep at the tit; they were ugly, desperate things.

  "How long before them kittens forget they're kin, start fighting and fucking each other?" Manny asked. "How long before they jump the runt?"

  They both sniggered, and they were sniggering at me, the fay, the runt of our litter; we were once those kittens—three thick, three warm. And we blood-fought over a tin can of pet milk. And jump the runt was a trick mean as any they pulled on me.

  "Fuck you," I said. I hadn't drunk half as much as either one of them—I took hesitant swigs or kept my lips closed and only pretended. But still I had drunk enough to be surprised at the sound of my own voice, and at the venom. "And fuck this creeping around. What are we doing out here anyway?"

  "Hey now," said Joel.

  "Chill," said Manny. "You're twisting up your panties."

  They snorted out little chuckles from their noses.

  "I'm tired of this. This is bullshit. This creeping around."

  "Who's creeping?" asked Manny. "I'm just standing here."

  "You're a creep," I said. "Look in the mirror. Can you even see yourself? You're always going on about God. And then the next minute you're talking about hos. As if you know shit about either one—as if God wasn't as disgusted by you as girls are."

  "Oh shit!" said Joel, delighted.

  "What, that makes you happy?"

  "Kind of," Joel replied.

  "Kind of," I mimicked. "You are so fucking ignorant. You embarrass me. Did you know that? That you embarrass me?"

  "You hear that?" Manny said to Joel. "We embarrass him."

  Look at my brothers—their saggy clothes, their eyes circled dark like permanent bruises, their hangdog hungry faces. I felt trapped and hateful and shamed. Secretly, outside of the family, I cultivated a facility with language and a bitter spite. I kept a journal—in it, I sharpened insults against all of them, my folks, my brothers. I turned new eyes to them, a newly caustic gaze. I sensed a keen power of observation in myself, an intelligence, but sour. Both Ma and Paps had held private conversations with me about my potential, about this bookishness that set me apart from my brothers; both encouraged me to apply myself—they hinted that I would have an easier time in this world than they had, than my brothers would ever have, and I hated them for that.

  But the worst was pity.

  "You know what? Forget it," I said. "Never mind."

  They wouldn't abide my pity.

  "You're fucked up," said Joel.

  Manny scooped down and packed a snowball in his bare hands. He took up a branch, pitched the ball to himself, and whipped the air. The snowball exploded, and we all three watched the effect, a little storm within the storm.

  "He's right," Manny said, turning on me in a flush, pointing the branch. "You're fucked up. Admit it."

  He held the branch there, an inch from my nose. "Admit it."

  Then Joel was behind me, locking my arms in a full nelson. I tried to shrug him off, but it was no use. They were both drunk; Manny held that damn branch right in front of my face. I imagined the welt of it slamming across the side of my head. And I wanted it.

  "Either you're fucked up, or you're getting fucked up. Which one will it be?"

  Look at us three, look at how they held me there—they didn't want to let me go.

  "Go ahead, Manny, beat me with that stick. See if it makes you feel better." My voice started strong but ended soft, a whisper, a plea. "Just fucking beat me with it."

  Manny pumped two fake swings; I flinched each time. Then he sighed in disgust, and Joel slacked off his grip. The stick dropped.

  "Seriously," Manny said, quieter now, "you're acting fucked up. There is something seriously fucking wrong with you in the head. Let's talk about that."

  But we didn't. We couldn't.

  We let the snow fall on us some more, white piled up on our hair, our heads like miniature mountains, until finally, in silence, we agreed to move into the shelter of the building's eave. Manny distributed a cigarette each to Joel and me, and we went about pulling out the filter. Still no one spoke, but the ritual eased the air between us—the spark of fire, the noisy exhalations, our little clouds of smoke.

  Then, slowly, the jokes and shit talking picked up again, and I waited on the edges, as always, until Manny turned to address me.

  "You know what she said to me the other day?"

  I didn't ask who, because I knew who.

  "She said you were capable of anything."

  "Yep," said Joel, "she said some shit like that to me."

  "She said you were so bright."

  "So bright!"

  "And you know what else? She said you were capable of destroying yourself."

  "The way she talks about you," Joel said, "like you're a fucking crystal vase."

  Manny roped his arm around Joel's neck. "In her mind, we're two of a kind." He pointed at me. "And you, you're—"

  "A fucking golden egg."

  "She wants us to protect you from the other kids."

  Joel laughed. "Right? I told her it ain't like we're all still playing in the same goddamn sandbox, woman."

  "And to protect you from yourself."

  "It ain't like we're little boys."

  "'He's still your little brother,' she says, 'he'll always be your little brother.'"

  Look at me, how I itched to leave that loading dock; how I itched to leave that snowy hour.

  "'Only if he wants to be,' I says."

  "Fucking sacred lamb."

  I held my hands up in front of me, surrender style, and walked backward, keeping my eyes on them, until I reached the building's edge.

  "Where you going, girlie?"

  "Where the fuck you think you're going?"

  I made it to the corner and turned, down the sloping path, away from their taunts. They called out after me, putting an angry question mark at the end of my name. Their voices boomed huge in the dark cold air—like waves pounding me from behind.

  They called and called and cackled, and the trees echoed with their noise.

  Shit, let them bark.

  Maybe it was true. Maybe there was no other boy like me, anywhere.

  LATE NIGHT

  I SLIPPED AWAY and walked the three miles to the bus station. Snow fell gently and swiftly, and when I looked behind me, my tracks were already snow-covered. This was what I'd been up to behind their backs, sleazing around the bus station's men's room. This was the scent they'd picked up.

  I left the road and took a footpath that had been trampled through a hedge. The path led straight to the back of the bus station. If the lot was full enough, I could emerge from the hedge and w
alk between two parked buses to the men's room without anyone's seeing. There was no one to explain any of this to me; I figured out the routine on my own, in small, paranoid steps. For weeks I'd been sneaking to this bus station, lurking, indecisive. I hid in the stalls, peeked through the cracks. At the sink, I washed and washed my hands, unable to return the frank stares in the mirror. I didn't know how to show these men I was ready. The closest I came was with a man who held my chin and tilted my face up to meet his and told me I was a cute kid.

  "You're a cute kid," he had repeated. "Now get the fuck out of here."

  But this night only one bus idled in the lot. The driver inside spotted me and opened the release, and the door made a loud quick fart of pressurized air.

  "New York?"

  I pointed to the station. "I gotta pee."

  "Not in there. Not at this hour."

  "Why not?"

  The driver ignored me, kept his eyes on the falling flakes. He wore the uniform, blue polyester slacks, a blue wool cardigan with the bus logo embroidered onto a pocket. A middle-aged man thick all over, down to his fingers, one of which he aimed at the windscreen. "Was scheduled to leave an hour ago, but the snow put a stop to that. Some snow this is, though, beautiful."

  A blizzard. The air was warm; the flakes were wet and puffed and sticking; they cut in smooth, relentless, gentle diagonals to the ground. My brothers will lose themselves tonight; they'll search for me in the whiteness; they'll drown.

  "Is the building closed?"

  "Sent everybody waiting for New York on home. You want to go to New York, you come back in the morning. I'll take you there myself."

  "No, sir."

  "You got to pee so bad you come on up here."

  The door sealed behind me, and I stopped on the top step, daring a look into the driver's eyes. He was done pretending. My heart raced; I looked all around for the door's release, but I could not figure it out.

  "The bathroom's back there?"

  The driver stood up from his seat. I held there for him, still. I wanted this.

  Cold thick fingers wormed past my waistband; I held still. "You want me to make you," the driver said. "I'll make you. I'll make you."

  And I was made.

  I trudged back in the predawn. The winter sky was clouded over, all pink gloom. I wanted to look at myself as he had; I wanted to see my black curls peeking out from under my ski cap. What did he make of my thin chest? What did he make of my too-wide smile? He had blasted the heat, but the cold clung and hovered at the back of the bus. The cold gathered in the tips of those fingers, so everywhere he touched me was a dull stab of surprise. I wanted to stand before a mirror and look and look at myself. I opened my mouth and stretched my voice over the buzz of passing cars.

  "He made me!" I screamed.

  "I'm made!"

  DEEP NIGHT

  THEY WERE GATHERED in the front room, and the air reeked of grief. The force of their eight eyes pushed me backward toward the door; never had I been looked at with such ferocity. Everything easy between me and my brothers and my mother and my father was lost.

  My brothers were still in their jackets, their hair slick with wet, Paps was dressed and shaven, and Ma looked up at me with mascara tiger-striped down her face, raw eyes, hands in her hair—how many times had I seen her like this? She spoke, but I didn't catch what she was saying because on her lap sat, impossibly, my journal.

  In bold and explicit language I had written fantasies about the men I met at the bus station, about what I wanted done to me. I had written a catalog of imagined perversions, a violent pornography with myself at the center, with myself obliterated. And now there it was on my mother's lap.

  For a moment my thoughts and fears dimmed to black, my vision blurred—an avalanche began, my gut dropped, my sex dropped, my knees gave way, and I fell onto them, hard.

  I knelt, just inside the door, and when I spoke to Ma my voice was calm and assured.

  "I'll kill you," I said.

  Paps lunged, and my brothers, for the first time in their lives, restrained him. But that restraint shifted before my eyes into an embrace; somehow, at the same time that they were keeping him back, they were supporting him, holding Paps upright, preventing him from sliding to the floor himself, and in that moment I realized that not just Ma, but each and every one of them had read the fantasies and delusions, the truth I had written in my little private book.

  Two hours later, I am packed into the car and taken to the psych ward of the general hospital, where I will be turned over to the state and institutionalized. Even later, I will come to doubt whether I ever really believed such a book would not be found—maybe my words were all for them, that they might discover themselves, and discover me.

  But before all that, before being strapped to a gurney, before the sedation, before the neutered hostility of the nurses and doctors, let us look at me kneeling on the living room floor: my soft curly black hair, days unwashed; my skin marked with acne, but still burning a youthful glow; my arms extended on either side of me, palms up; my slender fingers, the fingers of a piano man, Ma said; my chin lifted, my eyes on my family, who froze before me like a bronze sculpture of sorrow. Paps had his arms around my brothers' shoulders; he leaned into them, and they kept one hand each on his broad chest; they had grown as tall as he; their bodies were whittled-down versions of his own, our common face; and Ma had risen from her seat; she too had moved over to calm Paps, to place a hand on his chest, to lend her support. Each was radiant, gorgeous. How they posed for me. This was our last time all five in a room together. I could have risen; I believe they would have embraced me.

  Instead, I behaved like an animal.

  I tried to rip the skin from their faces, and when I couldn't, I tried to rip the skin from my own.

  They held me down on the ground; I bucked and spat and screamed my throat raw. I cursed them: we were, all of us, sons of whores, mongrels, our mother fucked a beast. They held me, pinned. At first they defended themselves, cursed me, slapped my face, but the wilder I became, the more they retreated into their love for me. Each of them. I chased them down into that love and challenged it—you morons, you sick fucks, I bet you liked reading it, I bet it excited you. I let the spit fly, nostrils wide—my body spasmed in their grip. My voice spiraled up into coughing hysteria.

  I said and did animal, unforgivable things.

  What else, but to take me to the zoo?

  DAWN

  LOOK, A FATHER gently lowers his son, fully clothed, into a tub filling with bathwater. The bathroom is small, no window to the outside, stale air. A mother stands in the doorway like a silent movie actress—she has eight fingers in her mouth and she trembles all over. The father turns to her, places his hands on her wrists, and lowers her arms to her sides, all the while whispering in her ear. The mother takes a deep breath and nods, nods.

  Then the father eases her out into the hallway and shuts the door. He licks two fingers and reaches up, unscrewing one of the bulbs in the two-bulb fixture over the mirror.

  "I always thought that this bathroom was way too bright."

  The boy's chin begins to chatter.

  "Mijo," he says. "My son. You need a bath."

  Watch the father rummage through the cabinet below the small tin sink, looking for a washcloth. He runs the water in the sink until it steams. He whistles. Soap, cloth, steam, foam. He whistles.

  Look at the son, lulled by the sounds of him, the ritual: whistle, water, suds, and splash. Now the father lathers the cloth. Now the son can only wait.

  "How long's it been since you had a bath?"

  The boy turns his head halfway away from him, stares up at a peeling tongue of paint dangling down from the ceiling.

  "How long's it been since I gave you a bath?"

  The boy closes his eyes. Listen to the slur, the tired confusion in the boy's voice as he asks, "Please, Paps, please. Leave me alone to wash myself."

  "Hush," says the father. "Hush. Ain't nobody going to leave y
ou alone. Not when you're all worked up like this."

  "I'm an adult," the boy says. "I got rights."

  "Everybody's got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don't got is power."

  Down the hall, the mother opens her son's bedroom door and flicks on the light. Look how she steadies herself against the doorjamb. She whispers aloud to no one, enters.

  Inside, the mother runs her hand over the surface of the boy's desk. From the high shelf of the closet she pulls down a canvas duffle bag. All the dresser drawers are empty, so she picks the clothes up off the floor, snaps them straight, and folds them, neat and slow. One by one they go, down into the bag.

  Look. The snow is stacked two feet high on the roof of the house. Somewhere beyond the snow clouds, the sun rises. The light is stronger every minute. In the driveway, two brothers have started the truck's engine; now they hunch inside the cab. The exhaust billows from the tailpipe and hovers; there is very little wind. No bird song greets the sunrise. Inside, the boys hold their hands in front of the heating vents; they pass a cigarette back and forth in silence. The older boy flicks the knob for the wipers, but they won't respond. The boys look out the windshield onto the gray underlayer of snow. The younger boy stubs the cigarette into the ashtray.

  "Well?"

  Look. The father lays down the rag, crosses the room, and undresses his son. Cupping and lifting the back of the boy's head with one hand, he tugs his shirt up from his waist and exposes the boy's chest. He lays him back down, lifts his arms, and pulls the wet shirt the rest of the way off. Then he wrestles down the soaking jeans and fishes out one ankle, then the next.