The Heaven of Animals: Stories

by David James Poissant

  On TV, an earthquake shook an elevator still, and Zack delivered Mr. Belding’s baby. The theme music kicked on, and the credits scrolled.

  “Never mind,” Arnie said. “I was only kidding anyway.”

  Except that, right then, Linda scooted across the carpet. She was close to him, then closer. Their knees touched.

  “Just practice?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Promise?” she said.

  He couldn’t speak, could barely catch his breath as her eyes closed, her face scrunched, and her head neared his. He shut his eyes.

  The first kiss was quick, was hardly a kiss at all. Their eyes opened, shut. They tried again.

  . . .

  Get-togethers make her edgy. Those dinners or afternoons when it’s the six of them, Arnie and his wife, she and Frank, the children.

  Charlie and Maddy kicking each other under the kitchen table, and all she can think is that it starts with kicks, then it’s mouths, fingers, and tongues.

  It’s not that she doesn’t like his wife. There’s nothing wrong with Anne except that she’s married to Arnie. Apart from that, Anne’s kind. She’s generous. She makes good pies.

  And Frank and Arnie get along fine. They like the same movies, same sports teams, same beer. Standing in the garage, they’ll smoke cigars and contemplate for hours the finer points of Ping-Pong or the intricacies of a table saw.

  Watching them together, she can’t understand it.

  “Frank’s a good guy,” Arnie will say. “What’s not to like?”

  “But doesn’t it drive you crazy?” she’ll say. “Seeing him? Knowing, when you’re not with me, he is?”

  She wants this to drive him crazy, wants to know that, when they’re apart, Arnie’s at least occasionally overcome with grief. She wants the thought of Frank, of her—of Frank on top of her—to make Arnie want to strangle the man.

  But Arnie only shrugs. “I like knowing you’re with him,” he’ll say. “You’re safe with him. You could do a lot worse.”

  She wants to shake him. It’s been twenty years. They’ve been seeing each other in secret longer than they haven’t. Except, she had her chance. After his father died and before he married Anne, Arnie extended the invitation.

  “Let’s just come out with it,” he said. “Come out, and fuck what people think.”

  She’d offered all the old arguments: Their mothers would disown them. Their friends would freak out. And their jobs, who knew?

  Arnie was patient. “Cousin-fucking,” he said, “is not grounds for termination.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Please,” he said.

  In the end, it was Linda who said, “Never,” and Arnie who moved on.

  Her predicament now is like when Charlie was younger, when they’d play Candy Land or Life. Her son would roll the dice and land on a square that sent him back. “Do-over!” he’d scream. “I want a do-over!” When she didn’t let him roll again, he’d scream and scream. Sometimes he’d holler until his throw-up choked him and he ran, crying, from the room.

  Yes, that was what she needed now, a do-over, the chance to prove Arnie right, to prove they should have been together all along.

  But there’d been a chance, and she couldn’t imagine the day when there would be another.

  . . .

  The trail winds through the woods, and he’s walking fast because he can’t wait to see the bison. He’s trying to remember whether he’s seen one before, seen one anywhere besides in a book or on TV. He doesn’t think he has.

  “Picture it,” he says. “These things side by side with mammoths, with saber-toothed tigers, and they’re what’s left.”

  He’s decided there must be something special about the bison to have cheated history and made it out alive.

  At fifteen, he watched his father use a tire iron to turn his mother’s face into something from a horror movie. She lived, made her son swear he’d never become that man, and he hasn’t. He’s become something else—adulterer, cousin fucker—but his father? No. He’s never hit his wife or wanted to.

  It’s in him, though, whatever made Dad do it. He feels it, the pull toward recklessness, toward wild.

  Sometimes he just wants to he doesn’t even know what.

  His father’s dead. Pulled over for a DUI, he unloaded a revolver into the policeman’s chest. When the other officers arrived, they found him handcuffed to the car. “I done it,” he said. “I done it myself, so there.” This didn’t keep the cops from pummeling his father in the name of their fallen friend, a beating that led to hemorrhaging, then death, a beating that a woman with a camcorder got on tape, start to finish. The lawsuit that tape triggered left Arnie with a cool two million.

  He loves the money, though, secretly, he’d trade it all to have been there, to have said, “Hand me a baton,” to have shaken the other men’s bloody hands clean at the end.

  His father is dead. Not so the mighty bison.

  Survival.

  “An animal like that has dignity,” he says.

  He throws a hand up to the woods around him, as though, any second now, a bison might come lumbering through the trees.

  “An animal like that demands respect!”

  And he sees she’s no longer at his side. Linda’s seated on the footpath ten yards back, her hands at her ankle.

  “These boots,” she says.

  He kneels before her and takes her feet into his lap.

  “My little Cinderella,” he says. He pulls off one boot, then the other.

  Her feet are swollen, red.

  “Boots like these,” he says, “you have to break them in.”

  He lifts one foot and rubs the heel between his palms. The toes curl like shrimp. He wants to fit the foot into his mouth.

  He says, “I wonder if their hooves ever hurt.”

  “What?”

  “The bison,” he says. “Their hooves.”

  She groans. “You and your fucking bisons.”

  “The plural of bison,” he says, “is bison.”

  It could end any number of ways.

  They could be caught. Unlikely, but it could happen. The thing about sleeping with your cousin is that you’d have to try hard to get caught. People see you in public, they think: How nice that family gets along so well.

  There’s pregnancy to consider—that accidental henchman. Linda’s not the type to get rid of it, so they’d be stuck with who knows what. Some three-eyed monster. Some tangle of however many limbs.

  But Linda’s on the pill. She doesn’t want another kid, not his and not Frank’s. If she wanted to trap him, that’s not how she’d do it.

  How would she do it? An announcement, maybe. Linda, at dinner, standing before his wife and daughter, her husband and son, saying, “Since we were fourteen, Arnie and I have been in love,” after which Frank would punch him in the nose, the kids would cry, and Anne would leave him.

  And he can’t have that. He loves Linda, but he loves Anne too. And he loves Maddy most of all. Seeing her today, working the ball up and down the field, blasting it from grass to sky, past the goalie’s gloves and into the net, he knows he couldn’t stand it, a divorce, anything that meant weeks off and on.

  No, the way things are, it will have to do. There was a time. Now, though, once, twice a month with Linda—it’s enough.

  Her feet are hot in his hands. He’s rubbing, rubbing.

  “Carry me,” she says, and he does. He expects the weight he feels at parades or amusement parks, Maddy on his back. But Linda’s heavier, too heavy. Before long, his knees hurt.

  They follow a trail of yellow, bison-shaped markers. Sunlight struggles through the canopy and the day grows sticky. Still, he presses on, past pines that threaten to swallow the path, branches closing in on either side, a labyrinth of needle-thickened limbs.

  . . .

  Through the trees, she sees the bison, sees them even before Arnie steps into the clearing. No other visitors have braved the heat or the hike
, and they’re alone. A chain-link fence cuts the clearing in half. It rises nine, ten feet high. From the fence hang signs. They read: NO TRESPASSING and KEEP OUT. The animals can be aggressive, the signs warn.

  Beyond the fence, the bison loom like cows on steroids. She counts twelve. The largest has horns like cornucopias. The rest have less dramatic horns. Even the little calf who weaves among the bent necks, among the mouths that graze like the mouths of cattle, has horns. The calf butts a bison across its flank. The larger animal flicks its tail.

  Their hair is brown and black, matted and patchy, and she wonders how they can stand the heat. Not far from the bison is a gleaming, silver trough, but the water seems a small consolation. She imagines the animals shaved, like dogs in summer, and wonders how much of their bulk is muscle, how much hair.

  Arnie moves toward the fence. She’s still on his back. Her feet throb. She carries her boots under one arm.

  The boots were a gift, sweet and stupid, from Frank. She only wore them so that, when Arnie asked, she could say, “Birthday present,” and he’d feel bad. But Arnie never asked, just as he never remembers her birthday. A week has passed, a week without a gift, a card, a message on her phone.

  Arnie stops before a brown and yellow state park placard. The placard is titled ADAM’S HAREM. It seems the bison, all but one, are female, and they all belong to Adam. He is the herd’s “alpha male.”

  “Now, that’s what I’m talking about,” Arnie says. He says it singsongy, joking. He laughs. Her body lifts as he leans forward, snorts and stamps a foot.

  “Put me down,” she says before adding, “please.”

  She’s thirty-four years old. In fifty, sixty years, she’ll be dead, and everything reminds her of this fact but him. With Arnie, she imagines she might live forever.

  And what would it look like, to be with him at last?

  It would look like Christmas morning:

  Arnie curls beside her before the fire. His huge, brick house—now theirs—yawns around them. The hearth is lined with four cocoa-stained mugs. The floor is carpeted in torn wrapping and tissue paper. Outside, Charlie fits a carrot into a snowman’s face while Maddy buttons his chest with charcoal briquettes.

  And where have the spouses gone? What’s become of Frank and Anne?

  She doesn’t like to think it, but maybe they’re dead. A messy business, but over with so quickly. The kind of cancer that ravages the body and you’re gone almost before you know you’re sick.

  Or else they’ve moved away, left her and Arnie with the children and run off to Mexico together. Even now, they’re drinking daiquiris. No hard feelings.

  And the children? The children are happy. They’re well-adjusted. They never miss their other parents, never miss the way things used to be.

  Arnie pulls her to his chest. His body keeps her warm. They watch the fire and wait for the New Year.

  That’s the dream.

  Then, there’s how it would be, and she’s not so naive she doesn’t know the difference.

  Arnie would lose the house, that’s a given. He’d lose half of everything, and so would she. The spouses would be bitter. The family friends would side with Frank and with Anne.

  At best, they’d share custody. And what if Arnie only got Maddy two weekends a month? Already, she can picture Anne, vindictive. She’d show up late with Maddy Friday nights, arrive early on Sundays with someplace to be, Arnie fighting Anne for every hour.

  It’s her he’d blame, not Anne. “Your fault, Linda,” he’d say. “Your fault my girl’s good as gone.”

  In bed, Arnie’s body would grow familiar as Frank’s, and what then? What becomes of clandestine sex translated to the everyday?

  In the end, resentment. And would Arnie take his father’s lead? Would he drink or disappear days at a time? Would he raise a tire iron to her face?

  The bison hide their faces in the grass. They eat and eat.

  Arnie shrugs her from his shoulders the way one does a coat.

  Her feet touch the ground, and now she’s shaking because, oh God, all this time, and what has she been waiting for?

  She sits. Her breath catches with the pain of pulling on the boots. And Arnie above, watching her with wonder, saying, “What is it? What on earth?”

  If she could put it into words, she’d tell him that their two-decade experiment has reached an end. He’d ask: Why now? And she’d have to shake her head, unsure, understanding only that what’s come before is gone and what she wants can’t be. The future, the past—both are impossible.

  Arnie seems to sense it, the approach of something that will arrive irrevocable. He seems to want to keep her from saying it.

  “I’ll take you anywhere,” he says. “That place you like, the place with the robes.”

  For a moment, it’s almost enough. She pictures herself in bed, Arnie beside her. She’s in her robe, and he’s in his. It’s enough to make her take his hand, to let him lift her to her feet. But, with his touch, the moment is gone.

  She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t collapse into his arms.

  He’d called the bison gentle, and she wonders whether he believes this or whether it’s the kind of thing he knows she likes to hear.

  But they aren’t gentle. All the signs say so.

  She climbs the fence, and before he can follow she’s across the field. The bison quit their grazing. Their heads lift. The calf tucks itself between two members of the herd.

  She picks a bison and moves to it. She doesn’t know whether age determines size in bison, but, if it does, she guesses this one’s a scraggly teenager. Its head rears back. A blue tag marked “11” hugs one horn.

  She’s close, now, and Arnie’s calling her name, yelling in a way that lets her know he knows just what kind of violence these animals are capable of.

  She lays a hand on the bison’s coat, and a shiver ripples its side. One eye, wet and wide, bobs in its socket. The nose, snot-slick, expels air with a tremendous snort.

  Arnie rattles the fence, begging her back, and the other bison break away, bodies curving, tails twitching. They move across the field with a sound like a dozen bowling balls launched down a dozen lanes, the balls rolling and rolling, picking up speed and no pins in sight.

  But her bison doesn’t budge. It snorts and snorts. The eye rolls, hypnotized.

  Arnie is climbing the fence, so she climbs too, and it’s just like childhood, like summer camp, when she and a friend left their cabin in the night and rode the camp horses bareback. The bison’s pelt twists in her hands, and she’s up and over and aloft, the animal warm and trembling beneath her.

  And now Arnie is over the fence, and now he is waving, sprinting, screaming her name, his face otherworldly, his voice a siren, and she’s never seen him move so fast, and she is not afraid.

  She kicks. She kicks again. She kicks once more, and, at last, the great beast charges. It ignores Arnie, moves right past him. It moves away from the fence, away from the other bison, in the direction of the open, uncomprehending field.

  And, for a few glorious moments, just like that, she rides.

  What the Wolf Wants

  So, it’s the middle of the night and there’s this wolf at my window. He stands like a man on his back legs. His hindquarters bulge, all muscly and stuff. He’s so silver he’d almost be blue in the moonlight, were there moonlight. But this is the suburbs, so, instead, he’s almost blue in the lamplight, the streetlights, back porch security lights, light from the flicker of across-the-street TVs, the radiant glow spilling out of downtown. A lot of artificial illumination round these parts, is what I’m getting at.

  Delusions aren’t new to me. This last year, I haven’t been getting much sleep. But, the longer I stare at the wolf, the more I realize he’s no delusion—this one’s real.

  He’s not a werewolf, not exactly. There’s nothing mannish about him. No human hands or face. No pants. His balls hang immodestly between his knees. They swing in the breeze like something, like balls.

&nbs
p; I shouldn’t open the window, but I do, and he climbs in. I’m in just boxers, but his balls are out, plus, he’s a wolf, so what does he care? I slide my feet into moccasins. They’re my favorite, a gift from Tyler, leather with fur lining.

  The wolf follows me to the kitchen, seats himself in my Rooms-to-Go Dynasty Collection dining room chair at my Rooms-to-Go Dynasty Collection dining room table. I want to put down a towel, something to get those balls off the chair’s imitation maple laminate surface, but the look on the wolf’s face tells me I’d best keep my hands away from his testicles.

  “Coffee?” I say.

  The wolf nods and does that thing dogs do, that bob of head, curl of lip, that almost-smile. His teeth gleam.

  Wolves like instant. I learned this somewhere, Wikipedia, I think. I’d been out of instant since the eighties, but just last week stocked up on Starbucks, their new line, VIA. They won’t call it instant, but instant’s what it is.

  I pour the coffee into a shallow bowl for him to lap from. I set the bowl on the table before the wolf. He blows on it to cool it down. He does this, and I think of my mother, how she taught us, me and my brother, to cool soup by blowing on it. It never worked, just like kissed cuts never hurt less. The first sip still scalded, but we pretended—me, Tyler, Mom. We drank our soup, pretending we could taste it, pretending our mouths weren’t on fire.

  The wolf does not pretend. The first sip burns. He lifts his head and howls. It’s so loud, I cover my ears. He growls, and for the first time I wonder about the welfare of a man with a wolf in his house. My body parts, I like all of them.

  The wolf watches me.

  A toe’s not the end of the world, I think. I could lose a toe. I bend to unslipper one foot.

  “Yes,” the wolf says. Here, I should be surprised, should be, like, “Oh, oh my God, it’s a talking wolf, ahhhhh!”

  But I’m not surprised, not really. Because why else would he be here, if not to talk, if not to ask a question or offer me wolfly counsel?