The Heaven of Animals: Stories

by David James Poissant

  “No,” I say. I point to my chest. I circle my hand through the air, pantomiming the unraveling. Cam looks surprised, but he nods.

  Cam brings his hands to my face again and yells his hot words into my ear. “On my signal,” he says, but I push him away.

  I don’t wait for a signal. Before I know it, I’m on the ground, my side hugging mud, and I’m digging my nails into the tape. My eye is inches from the alligator’s eye. He blinks without blinking, a thin, clear membrane sliding over his eyeball, back to front. It is a thing to see. It is a knowing wink. I see this and I feel safe.

  The tape is harder to unwrap than it was to wrap. The rain has made it soft, the glue gooey. Every few turns, I lose my grip. Finally, I let the tape coil around my hand like a snake. It unwinds and soon my fist is a ball of dark, sticky fruit. The last of the tape pulls clean from the snout, and I roll away from the alligator. I stand, and Cam pulls me back. He holds me up. The alligator flexes his jaws. His mouth opens wide, then slams shut. And then he’s off, zigzagging toward the water.

  He is swift and strong, and I’m glad it is cold and raining so Cam can’t see the tears streaking my cheeks and won’t know that my shivering is from sobbing. Cam lets go of me and I think I will fall, but instead I am running. Running! And I’m laughing and hollering and leaping. I’m pumping my fist into the air. I’m screaming, “Go! Go!” And, just before the alligator reaches the water, I lunge and my fingertips trace the last ridges and scales of tail whipping their way ahead of me. The sky is alive with lightning, and I see the hulking body, so awkward and graceless on land, slide into the water as it was meant to do. That great body cuts the water, fast and sleek, and the alligator dives out of sight, at home in the world where he belongs, safe in the warm quiet of mud and fish and unseen things that thrive in deep, green darkness.

  . . .

  Cam and I don’t say much on the ride home. The rain has slowed to an even, steady downpour. The truck’s cab has grown cold. Cam holds his hands close to the vents to catch whatever weak streams of heat trickle out. We have done a good thing, Cam says, and I agree, but, I worry, at what cost? We listen to the radio, but the storm has headed north. The reporters have moved on to new cities: Clearwater, Homosassa, Ocala.

  “There was this one time,” Cam says at last. “About five years back. I spoke to Red.”

  This is news to me. This, I know, is no small revelation.

  “I called him,” Cam says. “I called him up, and I said, ‘Dad? I just want you to know that you have a grandson and that his name is Robert and that I think he should know his grandfather.’ And you know what that prick did? He hung up. The only thing Red said to me in twenty years was ‘Hello’ when he picked up the phone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “If he’d even once told me he was sorry, I’d have forgiven him anything. I’d have forgiven him my own murder. He was my father. I would have forgiven everything.”

  He rubs his hands together in that vigorous way of trying to get warm.

  “Do you know why I got all these fucking tattoos?” he says. “To hide the fucking scars from the night Red cut me with a fillet knife, and I’d have forgiven that if he’d just said something, anything, when he answered the phone.”

  Cam doesn’t shake or sob or bang a fist on the dashboard, but, when I look away, I catch his reflection in the window, a knuckle in each eye socket, and I’m suddenly sorry for my impatience, the grudge I’ve carried all afternoon.

  “But you tried,” I say. “At least you won’t spend your life wondering.”

  We sit in silence for a while. The rain on the roof beats a cadence into the cab, and it soothes me.

  “You know, I served with gay guys in the Gulf,” Cam says, and I almost drive the truck off the road. A tire slips over the lip of asphalt, and my side mirror nearly catches a guardrail before I bring the truck back to the center of the lane.

  “Jesus!” Cam says. “I’m just saying, they were okay guys, and if Jack’s gay it’s not the end of the world.”

  “Jack’s confused,” I say. “He isn’t gay.”

  “Well, either he is or he isn’t, and what you think or want or say won’t change it.”

  “Cam,” I say, “all due respect. This doesn’t concern you.”

  “I know,” Cam says. He sits up straighter in his seat, grips the door handle as we pull onto our block. “I’m just saying, it isn’t too late.”

  We pull into the driveway. Cam jumps out of the truck before it’s in park. The yard is a mess of fallen limbs and garbage. Two shutters have been torn from the front of the house. The mailbox is on its side. Otherwise, everything looks all right. I glance down the street and see that my house is still standing.

  When I turn back to Cam’s house, what I see breaks my heart in ten places. I see Cam running across the lawn. I see Bobby, his hands pressed to the big bay window. His face is puffy and red. Cam disappears into the house, and then he is there with the boy, he is there on his knees, and he pulls Bobby to him. He mouths the words “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over, and Bobby collapses into him, buries his head in Cam’s chest, and my friend wraps his son in dragons.

  I watch them. They stay like that for minutes, framed by window and house and the darkening sky. I watch, and then I open the shoebox and look inside.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. What I find are letters, over a hundred of them. About a letter a month for roughly ten years, all of them unopened. Each has been dated and stamped RETURN TO SENDER, the last one sent back just a week ago. Each is marked by the same shaky handwriting. Each is addressed to a single recipient, Mr. Cameron Starnes, from a single sender: Red.

  And I know then that there was no phone call, no forgiveness on Cam’s part, that Cam never came close until the monster was safely out of reach.

  I stare at the letters, and I know who it is Cam wants to keep me from becoming.

  I pull out of the driveway. I stop to right Cam’s mailbox, then I tuck the shoebox safely inside. I follow the street to the end of the block. At the stop sign, I pause. I don’t know whether to turn right or left. Finally, I head for the interstate. There’s a spare uniform at the diner, clean and dry, and, if I hurry, I won’t be late for work.

  But I’m not going to work.

  It’s a ten-hour drive to Baton Rouge, but I will make it in eight. I will make it before morning. I will drive north, following the storm. I will drive through the wind and the rain. I will drive all night.

  Amputee

  The first time Brig saw her, he was sure she was Kate. She had Kate’s dark hair, Kate’s eyes, Kate’s taut swimmer’s build. She was not Kate. Kate was long gone. Were Kate here, she wouldn’t look like this girl, or Brig didn’t think she would. Three years change a person, and who, at thirty, could still pull off twenty? Brig couldn’t. His hair was the giveaway, sideburns silvered, the gray spreading like racing stripes over his ears. He needed to dye it. He needed glasses. He needed to lose the gut that had lassoed his middle. Would Kate know him now if she saw him? Would he know her?

  The girl who looked like Kate but was not Kate sat on a curb, her back to a lamppost, hair gauzy beneath the bulb. She wore denim shorts and a red sweatshirt, the pullover kind with the kangaroo pouch in front. There was no moon, but lamps lined the sidewalks and lit up the U of the apartment complex. A pool glowed blue at the horseshoe’s center. It was late, the parking lot crowded with cars.

  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 troublin
g 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.