When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  Attack the night.

  I was hungry for things I didn’t know the names of, and the full moon was a strange kind of manna. It emptied you of yourself, and you were relieved.

  Such release—you have no idea. Everything absolved. A world where signs meant nothing, where everything was permitted. The claustrophobic restrictions of life falling like clipped fingernails at your feet.

  I ran the woods, and I was unstoppable. I thought nothing of school deadlines and frowning fathers. I was entire and alone—blissfully alone. There was nothing outside my skin that mattered—except maybe the odor of tree sap and the brittle ice that depended from tree branches. I wanted to go farther. I wanted to run all the way out of town—through the streets of large cities, leaping from the hood of one taxicab to another, laughing and indifferent.

  You could nuzzle your face against the warm world. The undersides of everything. This is how you knew love. There was no ugly. All was beautiful. The bodies, dark or pale, bruised or unspoiled—they were beautiful. The violence was delicious in the way foreign food sometimes is—surprising on the tongue, fresh and sharp. My daytime resentments sloughed away, and I would have gladly merged my life with the lives of others—put my body, all uncovered, against theirs.

  Except that I was afraid. Still afraid of myself. And of the others.

  Later that second night I watched them from a distance. I ran across them, finally, in the middle of town, and I climbed a dumpster to the rooftop of the Sunshine Diner to observe them. There were so many of them, at least thirty, making loud noises in the square.

  They seemed to run in packs, mostly. Like social cliques at school during the daytime. When these packs crossed paths during the full moon, there were fights. Sometimes the fights turned into revelry. Below me I could see some girls, locked into combat on the wide lawn, pulling at each other’s hair, biting, choking, shrieking. But they soon grew tired, and their violence became pathetic, little compulsory slaps as their chests heaved with exhaustion. Even kisses.

  Elsewhere, near the gazebo in the middle of the square, a pale pink knot of breachers, most of whom I knew, were locked together in various manifestations of sexual congress. Girls, boys, it made no difference. You were skin, and they were skin, and you buried yourself in the skin of others as they buried themselves in yours. Some of them cried, and some of them howled—and whether the crying and howling was pain or pleasure, you couldn’t tell, and maybe they couldn’t, either. Such are the ambiguities of primal youth.

  I could name almost everyone I saw—because I was the kind of girl who knew everybody’s name, even though I was allied with none of them. There was Ellie Wilkins, Carl Bodell, Frenchie Lassister, the twins Margot and Marina Anderson, Wally Kemp, Gary Tupper, George Ferris, and also George Dodd. Mildred Gunderson, Marcel Judd, Theo Kaminer. Cameron Mayer, whom most people just called Monkey. Adelaide Warren and Sue Foxworth and Florabel McCarron (who had started breaching so early that she was picked on by the others and had to be hospitalized after her first full moon). John Stonehill, Joel Phelps, Barbara Montgomery. Worth Loomis. Sylvia Hitchcock.

  Rose Lincoln was there, too, looking like a matriarch overseeing the soldiery of her empire. She walked among them, her head held high and regal, her pale body indifferent to the bodies around her.

  Peter Meechum was there, the king to Rose’s queen. He lay atop the gazebo roof, stargazing, while Bessie Laurent nestled against him, her hand moving with a lullaby rhythm between her legs. He paid no attention to her. And that was good, because I was quite sure I loved him—and that I could with very little remorse bite the tongue right out of Bessie Laurent’s mouth. That was the kind of clarity you could have on nights like these. All the fine-tuned complications of the day give way to the big absolutes: love, hate, life, death, good, evil, boy, girl, angel, fiend.

  Blackhat Roy was there, too. He was relegated to the margins.

  I watched them from the safe distance of the diner roof. I watched them, because these were my people. These were the people I had been born to. This was my heritage on true display.

  Then, in the distance, there was the sound of a car engine. Headlights on the horizon.

  Sometimes people came from the outside. Travelers. We were a long way off the main freeway through the state, so it didn’t happen often. But sometimes it did.

  Some of the breachers below scattered by instinct. Others stayed. Blackhat Roy stayed, drawn by curiosity nearer the road, to the base of a granite monument in the shape of an obelisk. Peter stayed, raising himself up on his elbows. Rose Lincoln leaned against a tree trunk and crossed her arms, waiting.

  The car drove once around the square, its windows rolled down. We could hear loud, overlapping voices coming from inside, the voices of teenagers like us.

  Unlike us.

  “This is it? I don’t get it.”

  “I thought you said we were gonna find a liquor store.”

  “This place doesn’t seem so scary. Why’s everybody always warning us about it?”

  “Fucking Mayberry.”

  “Aren’t there supposed to be ghosts or vampires or something? What the fuck?”

  Then they must have spotted the breachers who had made no effort to hide themselves. The car stopped at the edge of the town square, and one of the boys got out and said, “What the hell is this?” and the others also got out and began to laugh and point. “They’re naked!” they said, and, “What are they? Hippies? Is this what we’re not supposed to see? Hippie bullshit?”

  I watched from my perch on the roof. Blackhat Roy, his body covered in soot, moved closer to them. He cocked his head slightly as if considering the visitors.

  It was one thing for the breachers to attack one other. That was accepted. That was the nature of the place. It was our nature. But this was something different. Outsiders, the few we got, were usually left alone. It was a precarious balance that worked out most of the time. On the one hand, breachers normally preferred to roam the dark woods rather than the overly bright downtown streets. On the other hand, most residents from neighboring towns stayed away from us during the full moon out of a superstitious fear of the town’s reputation. But sometimes there were exceptions in both cases—the habits of breachers were broken, and the mythologies of the town were forgotten by the outsiders.

  I might have warned them. I might have called down to them to get back into their car and drive away. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to.

  The five of them were out of the car, some still pointing, some laughing with gaudy, wide mouths, some revolted. That’s when the other breachers emerged from around corners and from the dark of alleyways. They came out, naked all, and surrounded the travelers.

  Two of the five were girls, and they didn’t like what was happening. They got back into the car and begged the three boys to take them home. But the boys continued to laugh. “A town full of retards,” one said.

  “Please!” the girls said from inside the car. “Please come on!”

  But then something strange happened. From my height, I could see that the breachers, led by Peter Meechum, who had hopped down from the gazebo roof, were closing not around the travelers but around one of their own, Blackhat Roy.

  It was a sign of dominance, territoriality. I understood it instinctively. Instead of attacking the interloper, attack one of your own. Put on full display the untamed wildness of your power.

  By the time Roy saw what was happening, it was too late to run. I could see, even from my height, the panic in his eyes. His head turned around, wondering from which direction the first attack would come.

  “It’s gonna hurt, Roy,” I could hear Peter saying. “You know it’s gonna hurt.”

  But then something occurred to Blackhat Roy. Instead of defending himself, he turned on the travelers, the boys laughing and pointing from their car.

  “What do you fucking know about hurt?” he said to the boys. “You and yours. I’m gonna teach you something about hurt.”

  Roy adva
nced on one of the boys, going up close and sniffing his neck as a dog might. Then he said something to him, low in his ear, and I couldn’t hear what it was. But the boy wasn’t laughing anymore, and he was no longer hypnotized by the naked bodies all around him—he just wanted to get away.

  Roy wouldn’t let him. He grabbed the boy and flung him to the ground, then seized him by the arm and dragged him into the middle of the park. The crowd of breachers separated to let him through—Roy was giving them something to be hungry for.

  “Tear him,” Marina Anderson said, breathless, to Blackhat Roy. “Rip him.”

  “Rip him,” the others started to say. “Bleed him.”

  The other two boys tried to run to their friend’s aid, but the breachers fell on them, too, beat them and tore off their clothes and rubbed themselves lewdly against the whimpering boys.

  Then they came back to the car for the two tearful and screaming girls.

  I watched.

  I was stirred.

  The breezes blew, and I wondered how much awfulness had to be released from one location before you could smell it on the wind.

  The girls had locked themselves in the car, but they didn’t have the key to start the engine. I could hear their muffled shrieks as the breachers stalked around the vehicle, trying all the doors, pressing their hungry faces against the glass. Blackhat Roy slapped a bloody handprint on the windshield. It was impossible to know whose blood it was.

  “Open your eyes,” he called to the girls. “Open your goddamn eyes!”

  The breachers rocked the car back and forth, some climbing up the hood and onto the roof. The girls screamed.

  Finally someone brought a cinder block from the alley and threw it through the windshield. Then it was just a matter of reaching in and dragging the girls out by their fragile, flailing limbs.

  * * *

  In the past, the infrequent attacks on outsiders hadn’t been so bad. They could be explained away, mollified with sympathetic fictions. A troubled local youth gone off his medication. A traumatized girl, escaped from her abusive foster home, taking out on innocents what had been perpetrated on her for years. In the daylight, the breachers could be brought forward to apologize, which they did with all true sincerity. They had not meant it. They were full of regret.

  Truth be told, even during the full moon, breachers could sense the difference between themselves and others. In general, there was no joy in preying on those who did not stink of nature and violence. The outsiders usually came away with maybe a bruise or a busted lip. Maybe not even that. Sometimes just the uneasy fright of witnessing a naked figure running across the road in front of your car and howling at you as it passed.

  The sheriff from the next town over might visit our mayor. There may have been jolly slaps on the back, amicable chuckling, head shaking with regard to the moral abandon of teenagers these days. What was to be done? Mutual shrugs. It was a brutal time we were living in. Sad nods. But the children would survive and be better for it, as the two men had. Reassured stares skyward.

  This time, though, it was different. I had seen it. Had just one breacher been there, or two, they might have made a display of animalistic defiance and run off. But it wasn’t just one breacher, it was a whole pack. Violence, I discovered, could be contagious. It fed off itself until it had lost its purpose. The result was five teenagers mauled in our town square on the day after Christmas.

  The attacks were just too brutal to be ignored. Two of the boys and one of the girls were hospitalized. One of the boys had had his eye gouged out and would have to wear a glass eye for the rest of his life. One of the girls was a cheerleader and had promised her parents and her pastor that she would remain a virgin until the day she married. Someone had to be held responsible.

  So our sheriff questioned some of the breachers. It didn’t even take a whole afternoon. All we needed was a scapegoat, and we had one readily at hand. The next day everybody knew that Blackhat Roy had been held responsible for the crime and would be sent away to live in Chicago with his uncle.

  I hated him. Still, when I thought about him going far away, part of me ached for him.

  On certain days in the spring, in late April, say, it is possible to believe what the animals believe—that horror and beauty are hearty allies, and that when you live in the full roiling of your guts it’s impossible to make distinctions between them.

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, near sunset, Peter Meechum came to me. He came to the front door, rang the bell, and stood there looking mournful and respectable.

  “I came to apologize,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For everything.”

  I wondered about his willingness to apologize for everything in the world. It was the marvelous kind of stuff that martyrs are made of. He stood there, sheepish and strong, and his smile was just on the final edge of regret, ready to break through to whatever passionate gesture was next. Maybe I was still weak to the fact that he seemed interested in me when there were so many other girls whose doorsteps he could be standing on—but it was more than that. He was wound up, kinetic, and you felt that you could either go along with him or be left behind—and I wanted to go with him.

  I invited him in, but he didn’t want to be indoors. Instead we walked, wrapped in our winter coats. I kept my eyes on the shoveled sidewalk, paying close attention to whether or not I stepped on the cracks. I wondered if he would try to take my hand, and I left it dangling just in case—but he seemed morose and inattentive.

  “You know where I’ve been all morning?” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Church.”

  “Oh.”

  “It used to make me feel better,” he went on, “but it doesn’t anymore. I forgot how to be good.”

  “You didn’t forget.”

  “All the things I’ve done. The way I’ve behaved. Do you ever feel like you’re two entirely different people? I mean, there’s the person you know you should be, the person you want to be, the person everybody else would like you to be. And you can be that person most of the time. It’s work. I mean, it’s hard—but you can do it. But then there’s this other person who does awful things. The sun goes down, the moon comes up—and suddenly you’re watching yourself do ugly things. Like you’re complacent, at a distance, just watching the happenings of your body as if you had nothing at all to do with them. Do you ever feel that?”

  I was silent for a moment. But he didn’t give me a chance to answer before he continued.

  “No. You wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Maybe I would,” I asserted.

  “No, you wouldn’t. You don’t understand.”

  “I do. I promise.”

  His smile was generous, but he didn’t believe me. I wanted to be something in his mournful life—a comfort or a remedy. Simple fancies, but my chest ached with them.

  “Listen,” I said. We stopped, and I got in front of him to look up into his eyes. I put my hand on his chest to reassure him. I wanted him to feel the truth of what I was saying. I wanted to press it directly into his heart as though it were soft clay. I could feel the confession spilling out of me, and there was no stopping it. “Listen,” I said again, “sometimes…I don’t know…sometimes I hate myself. Especially lately. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who I am anymore—what I am. My dad, he doesn’t know I go out at nights. I can’t tell him. I’m not a breacher like other people, I don’t think. I can’t be. I don’t want to be. But I don’t know. My mom, she used to make dolls—except now I don’t know if she really did. I wish I could make dolls. I wish I were the girl who made dolls instead of the girl who—”

  He put his arms around me. “Shh,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  He held me and stroked my hair for a few moments until I calmed down. Then, when he let me go and looked me in the face, his expression had changed completely. His mood had transformed—he was elated. Had I done that to him? Did I have that kind of power?

/>   “Come on,” he said, taking my hand. “I want to show you something.”

  He pulled me into the middle of the street.

  “Wait,” I said. “We’re going to get run over.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He let go of my hand, took me by the shoulders, and turned me around so my back was to him. He put his head over my right shoulder, and I could feel his breath on my cheek.

  “Look down there,” he said, and I looked at the row of houses and the purple sunset beyond.

  “What?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “You have to look harder.”

  Just then the street lamps came on overhead with a little click and a buzz. Consecutive pools of light appeared in a bracelet of illumination that fronted all the houses, each of which domiciled any number of lives and dramas and passions and catastrophes. There it was, the way the street arrowed on to the horizon, the way the housefronts glowed rich, organic sepia into the night, the way the parceled land shivered with the deep harmonics of order and structure. I looked, and what I saw was the story of the place, the crystalline symmetry of the houses on their identical plots of land, the swooping curve of the curb and the wispy fans of the sprinklers that came on in the summer with timed precision. I saw the bones and the blood of the town, the infrastructure of copper pipes and PVC and electrical conduits and sump pumps and telephone wires suspended in elegant laurels overhead. I saw everything it took to make this one street, and I saw that street multiplied into a neighborhood and that neighborhood multiplied into a town and that town multiplied into a city and a country and a whole world.

  I saw it. He made me see it, and I saw it.

  “Think about it,” he said. “People built this. There used to be nothing here, and now there’s this. And the people who built it, were they pure? It doesn’t matter. Whatever they were, they overcame it to make something bigger than themselves. Look harder. It’s beautiful.”

  It’s become popular for people to talk about suburban dread, the cardboard sprawl that cheapens life, reduces life down to lawn ornaments, manicured shrubs, televisions with extra-large screens, quaint and degraded notions of family life. It’s easy to say that life should be grander, more meaningful, heartier—like a meat stew.