When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  “No school today?” I ask.

  “Part-time,” she says. “So what are you doing here?”

  “I’m with my son.”

  “Oh,” she says, looking around. “Which one is he?”

  “He’s over there somewhere.”

  She laughs. Her teeth are amazing. Her hair is tied up in a ponytail. Her skin is healthy and brown.

  “I do ten circuits three times a week,” she says. “Trying to get in shape. I’m getting married in August. My fiancé—he’s why we moved out here, for his job.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Anyway, your husband, Jack, he’s so great with the kids.”

  “Is he?”

  “Such a sweetheart. They all love him. I mean, there are some awful ones, obviously. Like that Nat girl. Impossible. You don’t even know. The nastiest little thing you ever saw. I’m surprised they haven’t expelled her yet. Did you know she left a used tampon in one of the teacher’s desks? I mean, who does that? Revolting.”

  “Maybe she’s looking for someone to beat her up a little,” I offer.

  Helena leans back and looks at me for a moment, then she laughs again with all those white teeth of hers.

  “I like you,” she says. “You’re funny.”

  I smile graciously.

  “I better get back to it,” she says. “Gotta keep up the stride. But promise me we’ll talk again.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  And then she’s off, running loops around our little park. I watch her without looking like I’m watching her. I wonder what she eats. Probably oats and grains, radishes and kale. I imagine she has many recipes for quinoa. I pick at my fingernails. I suppose if you cut her, her blood would shimmer a bright, healthy color.

  * * *

  It was spring. The world had thawed, melted, and dried out. Summer was ahead of me, followed by two more years of high school—followed by what? It was impossible to speculate. They said I was destined for so much.

  I returned to the mine—I did—to visit my friend Death, who had brittle wheat for hair. I wondered, briefly, if I should report her to the authorities. Then I decided not to. Half buried in the earth, her skin dried to papery thinness, she had been there for many, many years. Whoever might have been looking for her once was looking for her no longer.

  I wondered also who she was and if there were some way I could find out. But there was no one I could ask without disclosing what I’d found. And I didn’t want to do that.

  She belonged to me.

  I went to the public library and searched archived newspapers for any clues about who the dead girl used to be. But I had no idea how long she had been there or what she had looked like before she had died. I couldn’t even really tell how old she had been.

  What I did learn was that girls disappear all the time. They just vanish. I wanted to cut out all the newspaper photos of those lost girls and make a collage of them on my wall. But how much of a memorial did my life have to be?

  * * *

  In May Peter began to talk of getting back at Blackhat Roy. “He can’t just come back here like that,” he said. “He can’t just grab whatever he wants. He hasn’t earned it,” he said. “I’m going to stop him,” he said.

  In the afternoons we had sex. I closed my eyes and liked the feeling of the sunlight from the window on my skin. Afterward I felt warm and blanketed, and I pressed myself into his arms. He compared me, in abstract terms, to the world at large. “You’re the best, truest thing I know. You’re not part of all the nonsense. You’re above it.”

  In school, Blackhat Roy seemed to want to tear down to dust all the things that people like Peter spent so much elaborate energy erecting. I began to think of his viciousness and Peter’s benevolence as two tides of the same shifting movement.

  “You know what?” Roy said. “I’ve been watching you. Mostly everyone else looks right past you—like you’re nothing to worry about. Your smallness, they think that’s all you are. But I know different. I’ve tasted you. You’ve got some meanness in you, Lumen Fowler, just waiting to get banged out.”

  He grabbed my arm up near my shoulder, and he squeezed it hard, as though he would drag me to the ground right there in the hall of the school. But then he smiled and let go and walked away. My breath returned, trembling, and for the rest of the day I found my mind was unable to focus.

  And yes, it wasn’t like Peter Meechum at all—not like him, with his concentrated and generous adoration. Roy was something else. Brutal. Unapologetic but also unwaveringly true. You needn’t have worried about social convention around Blackhat Roy. You could drop it all—and sometimes you could almost get the impression, when speaking to him, that you were seeing the world as it actually was.

  And there I was, in the emptying hallway of my school, my chest burning—as though Blackhat Roy had persuaded me to open my mouth and swallow a burning ember, as though he had talked me into it somehow.

  And now I could feel it, the searing in my lungs and my stomach and other places, too.

  * * *

  I walked into the woods. First I went to the lakeshore, where the sun was low on the horizon and dappled the surface. Then I walked to the quarry, where everything was still but the little rivulet running into the mine. It was wider now, with the season and the melt from the mountains above. There was no one around.

  The light grew richer, more full of gold. The sun would set soon. I walked farther, but it was between moons, and I got lost. If I wasn’t nosing my way by instinct through the landscape of the moonlit night, then it seemed I was just wandering.

  For a long time I went around and around, the sun getting closer to setting, until I climbed to the top of a very high ridge to get a better view. But on the other side of that ridge, I discovered an industrial park—low glass-and-metal office buildings with trapezoidal parking lots between them. I had somehow stumbled upon a back route into civilization. What’s more, I recognized the office park. It was in one of those buildings that my father worked.

  This was clearly a sign, and I clambered down the opposite side of the ridge and went in search of the meaning of things.

  When I found my father’s building, I realized the sun was just at the right angle in the sky to show me the insides of the place. I could see him there in his office, bent over his desk, examining some complex paper chart against a spreadsheet on his computer screen. The last time I had visited his office was many years ago when I was too sick to go to school. I must have been eight years old, and he had sat me in the break room with coloring books, and everyone was very nice and seemed to want to talk to me all day.

  It would be different now, I thought. His colleagues, they would not know what to say to me now that I had grown into a young woman. People fear those curious interstitial creatures who are neither children nor adults.

  So I did not go inside. Instead I sat on the low curb, feeling the coldness of concrete, and watched my father work. I felt alien in that place, watching as the sun went down and the workers began looking at me as they came out of the offices and climbed into their cars. I could smell the oily exhaust of their engines coming alive. I could hear the lonely sound of tires poppling against the surface of the parking lot.

  Finally my father came out and saw me. He asked me what I was doing there, and I told him I was waiting for him. He asked how long I had been there, and I told him an hour. He asked what I had been doing—just sitting and watching? Sitting and watching, I replied.

  “Sometimes, Daughter,” he said, “you are unfathomable.”

  I liked it when he called me Daughter, and he put his arm over my shoulder, and we walked together toward his car, and for a sliver of a moment I remembered what it was like before things went bad, and I wondered if it would ever be like that again.

  * * *

  That was the same time that Blackhat Roy Ruggle began parking in front of our house. He had a car now, an old Camaro, once red but now a faded, patchy orange, and it was sitting silent
near the woods across the street when I was going to bed that night. I stopped cold when I saw it from my bedroom. I could see the silhouette of Roy’s head, backlit by the street lamps, through the rear window. Cigarette smoke rose from the driver’s window, and as I watched, his arm reached out and flicked ashes onto the tarmac.

  This was the first time. There were others. I meant to confront him, to march out to his car and tell him he did not scare me—but whenever I approached, the Camaro growled to life and sped away.

  Sometimes in the morning I found a collection of cigarette butts on the street or a smashed soda cup, the plastic straw twisted into anxious knots. Sometimes I could hear the distinctive sound of his engine pass by without stopping, a high-pitched rumble while approaching and a lower-pitched one departing. I knew this was called the Doppler effect, and in my imagination, I pictured explaining the phenomenon to him, sitting in the passenger seat of the Camaro, maybe drawing a diagram in ballpoint pen on the back of a paper fast-food bag, and him—the all-at-once light in his eyes as he understood—smiling. Sometimes I turned off the light in my bedroom and watched him through a slit in the curtains. He could not have seen me, but he seemed to be looking right at me.

  There was nothing I could tell from his dark form.

  Maybe he was angry and plotting revenge over something I had done.

  Maybe he was sad, like the rest of us.

  * * *

  My father wondered where I was going those afternoons and evenings. He did not ask about it directly. It was not his way. Instead he said things like, “Boy, you’ve been keeping late hours,” or “Do you think you’ll be home for dinner?”

  The house was quieter in those days. We were too aware of each other—like two guarded animals circling each other on a solitary hill. We had sniffed out all the shifts that had occurred in both our lives, and we were keen to them. It wasn’t anger or discomfort or fear—just a heightened sensitivity to certain silent currents that seemed to ebb and flow through the house.

  We didn’t avoid each other. In fact, more frequently than I had in the past, I did my homework downstairs, spread out on the floor, while my father read the newspaper and drank Earl Grey tea. But I was distracted. I couldn’t help but be watchful, listening for the fluttering sound of the newspaper pages turning, the sound of his teacup clattering against the saucer as he lifted it and set it down, the sound of his hand running across the scruffy line of his chin while he read.

  Sometimes I would listen at the door to his office when he went in there to talk to Margot Simons on the telephone. I couldn’t hear particular words, but I didn’t need them—I was listening for cadences, certain lilts and tones that might speak to who he really was when I wasn’t around to discomfit him.

  * * *

  There’s something else I remember—from a long time before that. When I close my eyes, I can see it still.

  My father, he looks the same as ever in my mind, no variations. That magisterial jawline, that long face, those rough hands.

  In my memory, he sits on the edge of the couch, and I am caught between his knees. I have a splinter in my finger, and he has fetched the tweezers from the medicine cabinet. He has a monocular magnifying glass wedged magically in his eye—I don’t know how he does it. I can’t get it to stay in my eye when I try. He switches back and forth between two instruments: the tweezers and the blade of his pocketknife.

  I writhe in panic, but his knees tighten around me. They hold my little body still. I am pressed between the muscly levers of his legs, and I am safe.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “It won’t hurt at all. You won’t feel a thing. I promise.”

  He pinches my finger tight.

  “Ow,” I say.

  “Oh, come on,” he says. “That doesn’t hurt.”

  He tells me it doesn’t hurt, and I believe him, and so it doesn’t hurt. He instructs my body on what to feel. And I am relieved, because I relish instruction. How does one know what to make of the world if one is not told?

  The vise of his legs, crushing with absolute control my wild little body.

  He unpinches my fingers. He tells me the splinter is out. It does not hurt.

  His legs release me, and I feel suddenly light—too light, as though I might spin off into the sky like a rogue balloon lost to the thinness of ether.

  * * *

  My husband is a good father. When our son gets hurt, Jack is the person he runs to by instinct. I watch the two of them—the way Jack puts his two big hands on the boy’s shoulders, creating pacts among males.

  When Marcus’s teacher calls home to talk about his biting problem, Jack takes the call. He expresses grave concern. He is apologetic and thankful for the opportunity for social correction. When he gets off the phone, he turns to me, reproaching.

  “She says she’s spoken with you about Marcus’s problems in school?”

  “I guess she did,” I say. “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember? Ann…”

  He shakes his head and walks out. He has a talk with Marcus later, sitting the boy next to him on the couch. They discuss acceptable modes of expression, ways for Marcus to communicate what’s inside of him without hurting others. After it’s over, Jack lifts the boy and hugs him tight. I watch from the dining room.

  I am concerned that Jack is making our boy too soft. So later that night, after everyone is asleep, I creep into the boy’s bedroom and speak rhymes from my own childhood over his slumbering form.

  Mary’s gone a-breaching,

  ho-la-lay, ho-la-la.

  Mary’s gone a-breaching,

  ho-la-lay, ho-la-la.

  Mary’s gone, and she lost her head.

  What might she do with her body instead?

  They scored her flesh, and they broke her bones.

  Now who will she be if she makes it back home?

  Mary’s gone a-breaching,

  ho-la-lay, ho-la-la.

  My husband would not like it if he heard, so I have no choice but to sing my songs to my boy in his sleep. I see his eyes shifting wildly under his lids, and I wonder what animal dreams he’s having.

  When I go back to bed, Jack wakes briefly.

  “Everything all right?” he asks, half asleep.

  “You’re a good father,” I say.

  He throws an arm over me and gives me a squeeze. Soon he is asleep again, and I gaze at the stars through the bedroom window.

  * * *

  I dreamed of the restless dead. Everyone I knew, walking down the street as if in a trance. I ran among them, trying to get their attention, but their eyes were lost to some unknown distance. I tried to speak to them, but they did not respond. I screamed in their ears—my voice was hoarse. Everything was so quiet. I was even deaf to the shuffle of their feet. The only sound was the trickle of water over stone. I looked around to find the source of the sound, but there was nothing to be seen. I closed my eyes and listened harder, trying to recognize it because it sounded so familiar. And then I knew. It was the rivulet that led into the abandoned mine, miles away in the woods. Standing there among the silent zombies of everyone I knew, I could hear it. I could hear the sound of that tiny waterfall, the baby stream of melted ice. What does it mean for something to be inside your skull and miles distant at the same time? I didn’t like it. I swallowed, and there was dread in my throat.

  When I woke, light was flickering against the wall of my bedroom. I rose and went to the window and saw that the street lamp outside was dying. It stuttered on and off, strobing the street with black and shadowed light.

  Parked beneath the street lamp was the faded Camaro, and inside it I could see Blackhat Roy staring right at me, as though he had expected me to come to the window at that very moment.

  I froze in place.

  While I watched, he brought a hand up in front of his face, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth into the meaty heel of his palm. His head lashed back and forth as though he were a coyote trying to tear away a piece of flesh
from its fallen prey—and I could see his face go red from the effort. Finally he stopped and held his hand before his tearing eyes. Then he extended his arm out the car window and held it up for me to see. He had bitten through the skin, and blood ran from the wounds down his wrist and dripped onto the street. In the flickering light, the blood looked black as crude leaked from the earth.

  There we were, insomniacs on a moonless night, a pestilent little Rapunzel in her cotton nightdress and her barbarous prince, calling to her with his blood.

  * * *

  We were in the living room watching a Glenn Ford movie, Blackboard Jungle, when Margot Simons inadvertently revealed to me a great secret.

  She was huddled against my father, and even though there was room for me on the couch with them, I sat cross-legged in the easy chair. The movie is about a rough urban high school, and Margot Simons kept making sly, joking comments to me through the whole thing—about how this school wasn’t nearly as wild as our own. I smiled politely in response.

  Then, at the end of the film, when the credits rolled, she said, “Huh, that’s funny.”

  “What?” asked my father.

  She pointed at the name of the writer whose book the movie was based upon: Evan Hunter.

  “Mr. Hunter from school,” she said. “His first name is Evan, too.”

  I thought about all the possible meanings of this connection. I didn’t much believe in coincidence. In my experience, harmonies existed everywhere if you were willing to hear them.

  You sometimes want answers, and you sometimes go looking for them.

  The next day I went to the auditorium after school, even though I knew it was a play rehearsal day. I sat in the back row and watched.

  Peter found me there and tried to get me to leave with him, but I wouldn’t.

  “What do you want to stay here for?” he said. “You’re not even in the play. You’ve got nothing to do with it.”

  Mr. Hunter could see me talking with Peter, and our eyes met while he directed the students on stage and I shooed Peter away.