The Heaven of Animals: Stories

by David James Poissant

  Jason didn’t come to school in August, and by Labor Day he was gone. They packed up and deserted their house, which, I learned later, Jason’s mother had never owned but had been renting for years. What they couldn’t fit in the moving van, they left on the front lawn. All of it vanished overnight: chairs, lamps, a card table, my friend. I heard they went to Seattle, but that was just rumor. They might have gone back to Salt Lake, might have gone anywhere.

  “I think Tanya wanted a fresh start,” my mother said. “I tried to tell her, a new city isn’t a new life, but whatever. Some people you can’t protect from themselves.”

  Sometimes, when it was the two of us, over dinner or during a television commercial, my mother would ask, “What happened that summer, to you boys? You were so close, then it was like you weren’t friends at all.”

  I’d shrug my shoulders.

  “Was there a fight?” she’d ask. “A falling-out?”

  “Not that I can remember,” I’d say, and this would satisfy her, for a while anyway. She’d sigh and shake her head, saying, “Boys.”

  . . .

  I saw Jason once before he moved away. Summer vacation was almost over. A few weeks had passed since I’d run from the house. I’d spent the weeks worrying about what had happened, wondering whether I should tell my mother and whether Jason had told anybody. I wasn’t sure what was done to Jason or what they’d made him do. That secret, I was afraid to keep it, and I was afraid to let it go.

  In the end, I did nothing, save this: One morning, I went to his house. I rang the doorbell, but no one answered. I moved to the side of the house. Jason’s bedroom was on the first floor, and, standing on tiptoes, I could see in through his window. He was lying in bed, propped up on a pillow. The TV had been moved to his room and balanced on a plastic milk crate in one corner.

  I tapped the glass, and Jason came to the window. He was thinner than I remembered, eyes burrowed deep in his head. We stared at each other a minute. I didn’t know what to say. It was Jason who spoke first.

  “You left me,” he said. His voice was different, muffled behind the windowpane, and I had to strain to hear him. “You ran away.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He moved closer to the window. His bangs licked the glass. “You haven’t said anything?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “To anyone? Promise?”

  “I promise,” I said.

  He didn’t smile, but I could tell he was relieved. He returned to the bed. I tried to see what show he was watching, but an open closet door threw a shadow across the screen. I couldn’t be sure the television was even on.

  I never saw Jason again. After that day, he disappeared.

  Later, much later, as a man, I would come across the definition of quicksilver, which means not only fast, but fickle, mercurial, unpredictable.

  In this way, we both lived up to our namesakes.

  The Heaven of Animals

  Dan Lawson had made the trip before. After he discovered that his boy, Jack, was gay and threw him through a family-room window, after Dan’s family left him, after he got sober and worked for years at redeeming himself in the eyes of his son—the language of regret transformed to checks that covered Jack’s college tuition—he’d made the trip. Jack had taken a degree in marine biology, then a position researching ocean life on the Pacific coast. Dan had rented a moving van, and, towing Jack’s car, they’d driven the three long days to California. Now, ten years later, he would make the trip alone.

  That afternoon, Jack had called from La Jolla to say he’d be dead any day now. Someone was with him, but what he really wanted was Dan at his side, and could he maybe come, and soon?

  The phone shook in Dan’s hand like a live fish. His thoughts hurtled toward cancer, the scourge that had ravaged his parents, pushed friends into early graves, and, finally, taken the life of Lynn, his ex-wife and Jack’s mother, a woman who, like her son, had been, if not too good for this world, then too good, certainly, for Dan.

  But the problem wasn’t cancer.

  “I’ve got a pretty bad case of pneumonia,” Jack said. His voice was raspy, unrecognizable. He paused between sentences to catch his breath.

  “I don’t understand,” Dan said. He imagined the worst, and Jack raced to meet him there.

  Jack said, “I’ve got a pretty bad case of AIDS.” He told Dan about the hospitals. He told him about the drugs that had kept him alive for years and might have given him more, many more, had he not waited so long to seek treatment.

  “I’m not the first to think if I ignored it, it would go away,” he said. “I’ve killed men. I know I have. What I’ve done is unforgivable.”

  For years, Jack said, he’d suspected and been afraid to act until Marcus, a friend, had guessed and made him get tested. “The body’s bad at keeping secrets,” Jack said. “This disease, it tattoos its name on you in bruises.”

  He had traced the illness back to his high school history teacher. He’d been eighteen, impressionable, and the man had taught him everything but responsibility. Now, fifteen years later, the disease had run its course.

  The line was quiet, and Dan fought to fill up the silence. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Three days a week, Jack said, Marcus collapsed his wheelchair into the back of his car, drove him the half hour to San Diego, and wheeled him into a hospital where a technician waited to ease a needle between his ribs and pull pints of fluid from his lungs. But Jack had had enough of that. He would keep going only if Dan would come, after which he looked forward to drowning quietly in his sleep. He apologized for the morbidity of the confession, but not its directness.

  Dan couldn’t speak. He felt untethered. He held on to the phone, tight, as though to let go might cause him to float away.

  Jack said, “I understand that I’m asking you to come to terms in minutes with something I’ve been coming to terms with for years.”

  That word, years. Dan winced to hear it. He brought a hand to his forehead, which was damp.

  Not so long ago, he’d helped Jack set up his office and move into the house in La Jolla. Impossible that a decade could pass, like that, without visit or invitation.

  Jack was silent for so long, Dan worried the line had gone dead.

  “I’m here,” Jack said.

  How extraordinary to think that—together, crossing the country—the virus had been with them even then, that already it had made a nest in Jack’s guts without their knowing. How long, then, had Jack known? How long had he known and said nothing? And, if he had said, would Dan have moved to be near him? What did fathers do?

  He would have tried harder, that at least.

  “I have to go,” Jack said, and, before Dan could protest, he was gone.

  That night, Dan left his house and crossed the highway and walked down to the familiar shoreline. He watched the still, cold waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Two men sat on the beach. One chopped up a bonito for bait. The silver fish came apart in fat, red chunks, and the sand bloomed pink beneath it. The other man baited three-pronged, baseball-sized hooks with the flesh and cast the bait as far as he could into the surf. The men had rigged four poles in stands in the sand.

  Jack was no fisherman. Dan had taken him once, but the boy had cried at the first catch. He worried over the fish’s welfare, the silver hook caught in the jaw. Standing beside the livewell, looking in, he’d wept until Dan dipped a hand in, caught the fish by its middle, and returned it to the water.

  Jack would grow up that way, sensitive, in love with the world above water and below. Later, those rare times they spoke on the phone, their conversations circled back, inevitably, to Jack’s work, his study of an endangered species or his latest tide pool discovery. Jack’s favorites were the seals that watched him work. He spoke of them often, their playfulness, their curiosity, how, on a hot day, they blanketed the rocks and basked. Like marble, he’d said once, like stones curled over stones. And, from his chair, elbows propped on a kitchen tab
le twenty-five hundred miles away, Dan had seen them, the animals and the rocks, the sight startling him, like a drawer flung open to an intimacy of spoons.

  On the beach, a fishing rod bowed. Dan moved closer. The man with the rod dug his heels in the sand. The line unraveled in a whir. The second man hurried across the beach, pulling in the other lines. “Black tip?” the man called.

  “Bigger,” the other said. The spinner screamed as the shark pulled more and more line. If it didn’t tire, Dan knew, the line would run out and release, the shark swimming away, a mile of filament tracing its wake.

  But the line did not run out. The hum subsided into the steady crank of the reel.

  Dan imagined the men landing a ten-foot bull shark, the beast silvered by moonlight, thrashing the sand.

  He didn’t stay to see it. Instead, he walked down the beach to a bar and ordered a scotch, neat. He stared at the tumbler a long time. The drink would be his first in . . . forever, since the day he’d stood, drunk and disbelieving, in the glassy flowerbed over the body of his son, Lynn screaming for the other boy to call 911.

  His deepest grief. His greatest shame. An act for which no conceivable penance existed. With the last tuition bill covered and Jack tucked away, far from his father as he could get, Dan had recognized that the thing he wanted most in the world was a thing he’d never have, and so he’d given up hope for forgiveness. A friend had suggested that perhaps Dan was already forgiven. That, by taking his money, begging his father’s help, the boy had relented. Weren’t these concessions of something like love? The idea was almost as believable as it was untrue. For Jack hadn’t asked out of love. He’d asked out of necessity. The calls for help, when they came, were frantic. Jack had gotten into college but couldn’t pay. He’d found work, but his ride had fallen through and he had to be in California by week’s end. Dan was a last resort, always. He’d known this. He’d known and not cared, just as he knew that a decade of Christmas cards and the occasional phone call from California were born of nothing greater than a son’s sense of obligation to his father.

  Tonight, though. Tonight presented something new—a chance, final, but full with possibility. And just because forgiveness was a thing he didn’t deserve, that didn’t make it a thing not worth chasing. Only the entirety of a country lay between them. He couldn’t get back the lost years, but he could cross the country.

  From a payphone at the bar, he called his son. “Of course I’ll come. I’ll leave in the morning, first thing,” he said, and Jack thanked him and hung up.

  Dan returned to the counter, paid, and passed the tumbler, still full, to the man on the stool beside him before walking up the beach and back home.

  Near sunup he fell, at last, to sleep.

  . . .

  And woke late. He cursed himself, then cursed himself again when the car wouldn’t start. The car was old and prone to breakdowns. It overheated. It stalled. It threw belts the way a dog shakes off water.

  He checked the starter, then, relieved, moved to the shed. He pulled a battery down from its shelf. The battery was new, stolen from the garage. The job had never paid well, but the work was easy. He changed oil mostly, a simple service for which people handed over startling sums in the name of clean hands. The garage kept poor track of inventory, and, over the years, he’d lifted parts and merchandise to the tune of several thousand dollars.

  He’d called Steve that morning to say he’d be gone awhile, maybe weeks. “Not if you want a job when you get back,” Steve said, and Dan said that Steve could go fuck himself. He wouldn’t sit around St. Pete’s rotating tires while his boy lay dying on the other side of the country.

  He wasn’t really mad at Steve. Steve hadn’t known he had a son. Few people did. Already, he felt the hand on his shoulder, Steve’s apology upon his return. For days, the men would work in respectful silence, then, gradually, at break or in the pit, the jokes would sneak back in, the elbow nudges, talk of women and how best to get them into bed. Steve would be the last to forget. He might say, “If you ever want to talk about it,” and both men would understand that those were just words.

  Midmorning, the car cranked and Dan left town. In his trunk, he carried oil filters, belts, another battery, talismans against any force that might impede his progress. By noon, he’d traded I-75 for I-10, the interstate that would carry him west, a straight shot through six states, until, north of Tucson, he took I-8. He’d follow the signs to San Diego, then head north to La Jolla. He wouldn’t need a map. He knew the drive as though he’d made it not a decade, but a day, before.

  . . .

  The bridge was rust-colored and seemed to shudder beneath him. Beyond the bridge, a sign announced the state line, and the sun sank into the highway. He was suspended: Below him, the Pearl River churned, muddy as chocolate milk. Above, the sky squatted, pink and orange, the color pulled east across the blue, as though smudged by a thumb.

  He crossed the water and pulled his car to the side of the road. He had not stopped in hours, and his sides ached with soda. He followed a path through tall grass and down a steep embankment to the water’s edge. Cars flew overhead. Trucks roared. He unzipped and pissed into the Pearl. The current surprised him, the water rushing by, filmy, its surface like burnt plastic.

  Downstream, a boy sat beneath the bridge, watching him. Embarrassed, Dan zipped up and walked over. The boy was young, seven or eight, his face black, his mouth drawn in a frown. He sat on an overturned plastic bucket and held a cane pole in his hands. A line ran from the tip of the pole to the water. A blue length of nylon ran from a loop at the boy’s ankle and into the river. At the end of the blue line, the silver sides of a few small fish spun in the current. The boy wore dirty jeans, cuffed at the knee, and a torn white T-shirt. Across its front, in tall black letters, the shirt read: THE END IS NEAR.

  “Sir,” the boy said, “you just peed on my fish.”

  “I didn’t see you,” Dan said. “I’m sorry.”

  The boy watched him, then the water. Dan didn’t know where they stood, whether the boy had accepted his apology. The river rolled by.

  “Here,” he said. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and a five-dollar bill from the wallet. The boy scrunched up his face.

  “Man,” he said, “what do I look like to you?”

  Dan shook his head. He returned the money and the wallet to his pocket. The shoreline held a rind of foam. He nudged the foam with his tan work boot’s toe. A chunk let go and floated away.

  And then the boy was up. The pole’s tip disappeared into the water. He turned the pole in his hands, winding the line around the cane. Something large splashed at the water’s edge, a flash of gills.

  The fish followed the cane up and out of the water and landed, flopping, on the bank. The boy straddled the fish, pulled the hook from its mouth, then stood and held it out. It was a bass, a largemouth, five or six pounds, big and gleaming. Its dorsal fin unfolded, webbed, against the sky, and its stomach hung, white and distended, between the boy’s hands. It was a beautiful catch.

  Dan reached forward. He meant only to trace the fish’s side, to run a finger along the signature pinstripe, eye to tail—to feel the cool, smooth slime. But at his hand’s approach, the boy pulled the fish back. Without a word, he dropped it into the river. The fish hit the surface with a terrific smack and was gone.

  The boy waded into the water, and the river made wishbones around his ankles. His small catches darted, pulling futilely at their tether. He bent and let the current run over his hands, then dried his palms on the seat of his pants.

  “Why?” Dan asked.

  “Sow,” he said. “Belly full of eggs.”

  Dan stared at the boy, his worn clothes, his gaunt face. Ribs hugged his stomach on either side.

  Dan said, “But you’re fishing for food.”

  “I throw her back now, next year there’ll be more fish to catch.”

  The boy returned to the shore, knelt, and unfastened the stringer from his leg. He righted his
bucket and dropped the line of fish into it. A few flapped their protest against the bucket’s dry bottom. The boy stood and, with bucket and pole, made his way up the hill toward the highway. Dan followed. He wished suddenly that Jack could meet this kid. He would have admired the boy, his sense of—what was it—ecology? No, it was more than that, a kind of animal morality. He still couldn’t believe it. The boy had thrown the fish back.

  “What does it mean?” he asked. “Your shirt?”

  The boy walked on but stopped at the top of the hill. Behind him, cars raced into Louisiana.

  “The end is near,” Dan said. “What does that mean?”

  The boy looked confused. “It means what it says,” he said.

  “You mean, like biblically. Like the apocalypse?”

  The boy shrugged. “I seen Him,” he said. “Sometimes, when I’m under the bridge, I look up and He’s coming over the water, walking just like you or me.”

  Dan waited for more. He watched the river, but he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t imagine a man, anybody, crossing the water, not the way he could when he closed his eyes and saw Jack’s seals.

  When he turned, the boy was already up the road. Dan watched until he was a speck against the sun. Then the sun dipped below the horizon, and the boy followed.

  . . .

  Passing through Baton Rouge, Dan thought of the night when, miraculously, Jack was a voice on the phone. It had been five years, and Jack was finished at LSU. He had his degree and, now, a job. His voice was no longer a boy’s, and Dan’s heart broke to hear it.

  They met at a restaurant near campus. Jack did not hug him, but stepped forward and shook his hand. Dan had braced himself for anything. He’d expected someone meek, effeminate, the teenage Jack, who, for a time, Dan had forgotten how to love. But this Jack was tall and muscled, with a tanned face and copper-colored arms. He had a good, strong chin that reminded Dan of his own. He wore a sensible haircut.

  Still, some things set Jack apart. Not the way he talked or dressed, not exactly, but a hiccup in his step, or the way his arms hung at his sides, or his habit of bringing one hand to his face when he spoke. He ordered a meal off the menu that would have been Dan’s last choice, and, in conversation, used words at whose meanings Dan could only guess. He was changed—Dan couldn’t say whether for the better—and their trip began like a foot, the truck’s cramped cab a new boot, the men pressed like toes, close, each too close to the other.