No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  “I feel terrible. I feel like it must bother you,” Susan says to her suddenly, as if she’s been keeping a secret.

  “What must, Susan dear?”

  “It doesn’t bother her,” says Ernest.

  “How do you know?” Susan says.

  “It doesn’t,” he tells the room again, offering up a broad, flat-handed shrug.

  “What’s this now?” Dorlene says.

  Ernest says, “Us watching. People staring. The way it was when you walked in here earlier tonight.”

  “Oh, that.” Dorlene unearths the yolk. The yolk is bright and clean, the shocking fluorescent yellow of farm eggs. “Ooh,” she says, delighted.

  Ernest says, “It doesn’t. It couldn’t. It’s inevitable.”

  “I wonder what the fuck would you know about it,” I say to him. He just looks back at me quizzically, like I’m a shape he can’t make out.

  Dorlene goes on eating. “Well, it is true that I can’t let it bother me. And I am used to it.”

  “Your whole life,” Ernest says.

  “Naturally. And I’m not just anyone.” She shaves off another crescent of egg. “I’m very short, even among the small.”

  I remember something she told me, way back in the car as she chipped away at the clumsy silence. “The seventh-shortest woman in the country,” I say.

  “Person,” says Dorlene. “On record,” she says, and now Fat Susan oohs.

  “No shit,” says Ernest. “How do they know a thing like that?”

  “I said on record.”

  We slip into another lull. Somewhere outside, someone releases a giddy cascade of laughter. Dorlene eats. Ernest taps out an intricate little rhythm on the countertop. I look down Dorlene’s shirt.

  “How short is the shortest person?” Ernest says.

  “Two foot two. She’s barely alive, though.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Forty-three.”

  I pull my eyes out of Dorlene’s top. “Forty-three? What’s wrong with her?”

  Dorlene looks over at Ernest. She lifts her arms into the air. She crosses her wrists. She starts to do a slow slinky spin there on the tile. She keeps her eyes on Ernest until he’s behind her, and then she looks up at me. “Why, David,” she says. “This, of course.”

  A struggling, awful sound burbles out of Susan, pulling all our heads toward her. She’s crying. She holds up a chubby hand, apologizing. “I’ve been drinking,” she explains. She sits there and chokes back the noise, but tears keep coming. “I’m just a mess.”

  Dorlene drops what’s left of the egg into the garbage can bristling with plates. She hands the spoon to me. She hops in place. Her tits bounce. “This is fun. What else, what else?”

  Ernest steps right in, like he’s been making a list. “What was high school like?”

  “Lovely. I was very popular.”

  “Did you date?”

  “I did.”

  “What do you do now?”

  “For dates?”

  Ernest smiles. “No, for work. What do you do for a living?”

  “Oh, I don’t.”

  “You don’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you drive?”

  “Oh goodness, no.”

  Ernest drops his chin and looks at her, almost sternly. “But have you ever?”

  She hesitates, giving him a flinty kind of look back. “I’ve steered. Somebody else had to do the gas, of course. The brakes.”

  I’m still working through the mechanics of that when Ernest says: “Do you menstruate?”

  Fat Susan titters. My stomach lurches.

  “My goodness,” Dorlene breathes. She practically bats her eyes. “Not right now, no.”

  I push away from the counter then. I say I’m going to check the fire. I steer myself outside, where it smells like cold and burning. I make it down to the fire without running into anyone I know, without passing anybody at all, I think. There are people, but I don’t see them. I’m not looking. But when I get down to the fire, there are maybe a half dozen people around it, sitting mostly quiet on the grass or upright chunks of log, and Triti is one of them. I arc toward her.

  The fire’s massive now, a proper bonfire. A handful of torso-sized trunk lengths are propped up in there and torching, along with some scrap lumber and what looks like planks of siding. Someone’s even dragged out a huge and splintering sheet of plywood and propped it upright across the middle of the fire. Green shoots of flame are fluttering out the edge of the plywood here and there, deep in the orange blaze, and not long after I sit Triti begins wondering aloud what we might be inhaling, whether it will cause us or our offspring any disfigurements, and how hilarious such disfigurements might be.

  “Frog hands,” I suggest.

  “Elbow face,” she says.

  “Uncool. Beaver hands.”

  “You already said hands. And anyway, I’m not sure I’m getting that. Would your hands have buckteeth?”

  “Beaver-tail hands,” I clarify.

  “Thumb gigantism,” she says.

  I look at my thumbs. I think I’ll say Dorlenery next, but something stops me. I can see Ernest’s head through the kitchen window, small and black and sleek. “That’s hands, too,” I tell Triti.

  We watch the fire. I’m feeling sludgy and wide, something in the neighborhood of—but not—happy. I put what’s left of my cup of wine down between my feet. Triti doesn’t drink, of course, and while she doesn’t exactly disapprove—not exactly—there’s a point you can get to where she starts to think of you as like a toddler, or a tottering pile of breakables. I don’t need that at all.

  “Sorry about earlier,” she says. “The Dorlene.”

  “The Dorlene,” I say.

  “I get confused sometimes. Like things aren’t real. Dorlene isn’t helping much.”

  I nod. I feel a puckering sadness for Dorlene that I’m not sure anyone’s earned. Maybe this was what Fat Susan was crying about.

  Triti waves a hand. “Plus I’m not sure this place helps.”

  One of the kids, a burly guy who wants to be seen, staggers up to the fire with a massive log between his hands. He’s bent sideways, holding the log upright like it’s a stack of dishes. He bends with his knees and lays the log against the fire. The pile shifts but holds, and a massive argument of sparks flies up and away. Somebody claps.

  “Yeah, this place,” I say to Triti. “How is this place?”

  “Oh, you know. Peachy.”

  “Are you—?” Sick of it, I’m about to say, but the question starts to feel cruel. “Do you miss town?”

  “Mmm—I miss the bus. The bus was fun.” She tilts stiffly toward me. “I liked how the whole bus leans over for crippled people.”

  She holds her imitation, stressing it. And this is the comfort I’m talking about. It’s easy to let it rise. I reach for another swallow of wine. “You don’t even have to be crippled. You could just be old and fat. I worry that one day the bus will kneel prematurely for me.”

  She straightens. “I don’t think you need to worry about that for a while. You should worry about how many people with TB are on the bus at any given time.”

  I swirl a finger at her. “I get it. You don’t miss the bus. You miss hating the bus.”

  She looks into the fire a while. Her face is alive, her eyes as dark as a dog’s. “Well, there’s a lot of coughing on the bus. Maybe you think I miss caution?”

  “Sure. Anyway—on the bus—it’s not TB you have to worry about, it’s schizophrenia.”

  “I always wore my headphones.”

  “That’s just prophylactic.”

  “You’re trying to out-clever me.”

  “I thought that’s what you wanted from me.”

  She chops out a laugh. Not a funny laugh. She chews her lip. “Yeah, I’ll put you on my list of people to out-wile.”

  “Ah, yeah, the list of people to out-wile. That’s also the short list of people you respect.”

&nbs
p; “That’s the list you think you’re on?”

  A shadow comes over us, and the heat of the fire gets shut down. Tom is there, twinkling.

  “You’re blocking the heat,” Triti tells him.

  “I doubt that,” says Tom.

  “It’s factual.”

  “I just came to say I’m leaving.” We both just nod. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asks Triti.

  “I’ll be here.” She says it like it’s a job.

  “You good?” Tom says to me.

  “Good.” He stands there. I know he’s thinking what else he ought to tell Triti before he leaves, something to resolidify the illusion that he owns the place and she just lives here. It’s the way he always colors his departure. We wait through it. “If you have trouble getting people out of here tonight,” he says finally, “just call me. Some of these kids, I mean.” He grins and drops a dismissive wave at me, like I’m the future. “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, and I don’t foresee any problems,” says Triti.

  He stands there a minute longer anyway, looking off and nodding, and then starts in on some other tedious stuff—people he needs to call, a furnace check for winter, something about the dog. Triti says okay, got it, fine.

  He gives us a last low look, spinning his keys around his finger. “Okay,” he says, and he starts his slow turn away. He says, “Take it easy,” spreading his words through the turn, fanning them like he’s a sprinkler, leaving us to say nothing or say it to his back. “That’s a nice fire somebody made,” he comments as he passes the blaze, and he disappears around the far side. We hear him talking up the slope, saying fuck you to someone up there and laughing.

  “How much has he had to drink?” Triti asks.

  “Jesus Christ,” I say.

  Triti reaches between her legs and picks a finger of bark from her stump, tosses it into the fire. It skitters down into the bed of coals, catching at once. For some reason—as we both watch it go—my mind jumps back to smoking that first cigarette with Dorlene down at the car, the way we each lasted as long as the other. If that was a gesture we were both making, I’m lost trying to figure who had to work harder at it. But the more the time goes quiet now, here by the fire, the more I decide maybe that’s the story of everything.

  The bark’s become an orange husk by the time either of us decides to talk. I say, “So you’re staying for another winter?”

  Triti shrugs. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Dave.”

  “Well you seem like you do.”

  “I don’t know to whom.”

  “To everyone.”

  “Well, everyone is stupid.”

  “Winter was awesome out here,” I say. “I remember that. All that snow, everywhere. It was like a fortress out here.”

  “Out here,” she says. “Why is it always out? Maybe you’re out.”

  “I probably am,” I say. I try to drink the last of my wine, but I’ve gauged it badly in the cup—I take a two-swallow swig and I’m still not done. I feel her eyes.

  She says, “I wonder sometimes if you’ll ever come visit.”

  I swirl the last wine, watch it stain the white sides and fall. “I’m visiting now.” Another slug of bark goes into the fire, cartwheeling. “I don’t know, Triti,” I say. “It’s hard out here even now.” I wave my hands through the air, gesturing at the house, the lawn, the sky. “All this you.”

  “There’s going to be me wherever I go.”

  More quiet. After a few minutes Triti straightens herself and puts her hair up. For a moment she is all mindless, perfect grace: balletic arms, sure strong hands, bent neck newly bare and long, her face as simple and clean and old as girlhood itself. All of this lit by firelight. The pink in her hair glints red. And god I just about die. Because let me tell you, if there’s a sight that’ll kill you more sweetly than a beautiful young woman putting up her hair, I don’t want to know what it is. I swear to myself that if I could go the rest of my life witnessing only this womanly act and no other, I would be all right.

  Triti props her hands into the stump beside her hips. Her eyes are sad and long. She gives me a squat smile, all lips. “I miss you,” she says. “I don’t know if you know that, but you ought to. I’m not saying I even want you here, but I want you to know that I liked how things were, and I’m sad they’re not anymore.”

  I chew on it. My heart pounds. “How things were,” I say.

  “Yes.” Her jaw goes strong. “Certain things. Not all of it. I know you understand me.”

  I nod and stare into the burning pile, watching a highway of flame feather over a gridwork of cracks on a gray, deepfire log. “I don’t even know,” I say, “what to miss or how to miss it. Relative to what, you know? It seems like…seems to me like everything is always absent.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s either everything or you.” This sinks into me slow, like a welcome knife, deep and true, and right then I swear I’m so in love with her I feel like I could get to my feet and take us both unflinching into the fire.

  But I don’t even rise, and neither does she. The fire exhales its great long breath and throws glitter at the stars, and we let the burn of it draw our fronts while the cold erases our backs, and we look at each other now and then in nothing but that light. We don’t even start to speak. People talk around us instead, quiet and dear. We let them make words that don’t reach us.

  Eventually, I don’t know how much later—the fire a whole new pet—Triti does rise. She gets to her feet and makes her excuses to the group at large, just a few hangers-on now. She includes me. She talks about getting to bed. A sprinkling of friendly good-nights sprout from the quiet circle around the fire. I straighten, and I think we touch eyes a last time, and maybe I mumble a parting something. She walks away, becomes a rumor, footsteps and murmurings. A few moments later she appears as a silhouette on the back step, distant and flat, and I watch her up the stairs and in, and once she’s gone I do get up, I do, because this is how I’m choosing to hear myself talk now: stand, balance, step, step—the long grass thick as hands in the dark. I walk straight down the lawn, headed away from the house. I have no idea where Dorlene is or even could be, or what I owe her. No one’s told me enough.

  I leave the heat and then the light of the fire. I pass beneath the softly buzzing sodium light beside the dwindling cars, into the shadow of the corncrib. I remember Lord Jim, wonder if he has been released yet. I peer through the slits, picturing a shapeless heaving patch of clouded moon, dirty and ragged and quiet. “Jim,” I call out, circling. “Lord Jim.” I stumble and drop my empty cup into the weeds, where it alights like a leaf on water.

  The heavy crib door is wedged shut. I yank it open with a sound like an ax being sunk into wood. The sodium light’s haze slices and drapes through here like bones, a violence of black and yellow, shadows and lines, steps and dividers. In the daytime, up in the loft, the slotted walls let the sun in soft, and haydust lays stripes in the air, but in this dark, this light, all the depth has been rubbed clean and the shadows are long and mad, and I can’t tell what’s floor what’s wall what’s pit. I sway in the door, my voice going out and not coming back. I listen for movement, look for sliding shadows. “Hello,” I say. “Anyone.”

  A station wagon crunches by, going out the back way. Beyond, voices and car doors float and bark. I head deeper into the property. I go straight through the tall grass, up over my waist.

  Almost right away—that’s how it feels—I come to the drinking trough, its low shape surprising me there against the earth, oval and still. Stars float in the black water, a great and vivid swath of them, dim and clear. I’ve wandered out into Tom’s mown pathway, into the exact steps, maybe, I took before. Dorlene and I were right here, me on my knees, her up into me like a lover.

  I go down again. I shift until I’m precisely where I feel I was earlier and I hold out my hands, embracing the space before me and bending over, trying to gather to myself again the sensation of Dorlene’s smallness in my arms. I feel I could
almost do it, she was so close to nothing. And as I try to get it back, my body decides to teach me again the only right answer to this moment, or to that one. The same swollen push announces itself, rude and heavy, the crease of my jeans cutting into me painfully. I unbutton my pants, releasing myself. A sigh escapes me, too, but there’s nothing around, no one, and so I bring my knees together and let my pants fall, the cool air prickling the skin of my ass. I lift up my shirtfront and pin it under my chin. I draw myself taut with my off hand. I go after it, right there up against the side of the trough. It won’t be long. I could set the air on fire. I try to be quiet. I breathe through my teeth. It takes no time at all, of course it doesn’t, I’m so heavy there, and when the relief of the certainty arrives, it draws me down into the smallest nugget of thought I know how to have. I lose my balance and I catch myself on the edge of the trough, my hand slipping between two of the rotten boards, into a mess of cobwebs. I heave and heave, not caring, emptying myself. I lean there still while I catch my breath real quiet, while I squeeze and finger myself clean. I wipe both hands on the ground. Talk drifts down from the house, from the pool of cars, but I am in the dark. Even right in front of me, right down on this ground, I can’t see my stuff at all, the strings that must be laid out here in this growing grass.

  I stand and tuck myself back into my pants, still too thick to be comfortable, but somehow I like the confinement, the way I’m leaking, the way none of this feels like me. I breathe and breathe. I let the coolness calm me back to life. I ought to find Dorlene now, figure out where she’s going, see what she needs. A couch, a hotel.

  I go deeper along the mown path. The slumped shape of the collapsing barn—elegant and sad in the daytime—rises across the sky, an accident in the dark. I stoop and dig through the grass until I find a stone. I heave it. It clicks and natters through the wreckage. I imagine the size of the stone—or the number of pebbles—that would be needed to bring the crumpled barn all the way to its belly. I think of the dust and ruckus it would raise.