The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  It did not end in one of the usual ways. It did not disintegrate or implode or go up in flames. Max and Allison Bloom’s marriage ended in a five-round fight in a ring on their front lawn.

  All morning the vans came and men got out, and by night a ring was erected. All day we spotted flyers: on telephone poles, on windshields, plastered to the windows of the Piggly Wiggly. The flyers advertised the match and the boxers: Max “The Adulterer” Bloom and Allison “Soon to Be Smith” Bloom, a husband-wife lineup. NOT TO BE MISSED! the flyers screamed in red letters.

  And miss it we did not. That evening, we took our seats hesitantly, lined the sidewalk and spilled into the street. The neighborhood buzzed with gossip and talk of what this might do to property values. Bets were made on the fight. Money changed hands. Neighbors, who had not seen each other in months, clasped hands, patted backs, and turned to watch a couple beat each other up.

  Max and Allison faked and jabbed, bobbed and weaved. For a moment, we wondered if this was all in fun, a show, something to bring us together. Then glove hit skin. The first uppercut Allison took made us flinch, but it was she, after all, and not Max who had boxed in college, and so we resigned ourselves to the sight of a man hitting a woman. And Allison got in her share of shots. Jumping around the ring, she let us know whose idea this had been.

  By the end of round three, Max’s front tooth was loose and his nose was a cherry tomato. And before round five, before the final blows that sent them both to the mat, gasping, those of us close enough, those of us with ringside seats, heard the whispered pleas to the trainers in their corners: Max saying “I don’t want this. This isn’t what I want,” and Allison, red gloves gripping her knees, hair slick with sweat, both eyes purpled and swollen shut, Allison saying only “Cut me.”

  Last of the Great

  Land Mammals

  She’s still waiting when Arnie pulls up in the truck, tires spraying gravel. A curve of jaw, the weekend beard, shows through the window tint. He has on flannel, a checkerboard of red and blue.

  She stands and turns. The stump she’d been seated on is smooth, rings blurred by a century of sittings. The sides sag, soft and damp. A spine of yellow mushrooms climbs the trunk like Frisbees someone’s hammered into wood. There’s grit under her nails from where, the last hour, she’s worried the bark.

  She knows Arnie’s behind her before she feels his hands on her waist, before she bends into the abbreviated hug. It’s enough, for now, and they separate.

  “Maddy’s soccer game,” he says. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” she says.

  She’s learned to wait, sometimes for hours. It used to upset her, but it doesn’t upset her anymore. He always shows up. The waiting, that’s just part of it.

  He’s married, and she’s waiting for him not to be. He’ll never not be. She knows this and she doesn’t. She knows it and at the same time thinks: Someday.

  In a heartbeat. That’s what she told him. In a heartbeat, she’d leave the man she married.

  But Arnie won’t leave his daughter, his wife, his house or his yard, his money, his dogs. Far as she can tell, everything is as he likes it—his cake, her too.

  So where does she fit in? What is she to him?

  She is cuff links. She’s a pocket watch. A thing slipped on for special occasions.

  . . .

  Linda looks good. Tight jeans and a shirt he can see her nipples through. And—these are new—boots. They’re leather, the sides fringe-lined. The toes are something. Each comes to the kind of point you could chop wood with.

  Her lips are red, her face done up, but, the look she gives him, it’s like she hasn’t decided if she’s happy he’s here. Some days, he knows there’ll be trouble. Days with no makeup. Days a comb hasn’t touched her hair. Those days, they’ll talk, she’ll cry, and he’ll leave feeling bad. Days like that, they might not even fuck, which is kind of the whole point.

  Those days make him miss the way things started, before sex was a given, when this, all of it, was startling and new, like when he was a boy and he first watched the hand reach in, in Indiana Jones—how the hand left the man’s chest, the heart and the fist around it, pulsing.

  Those first times together: the shock of the body, white, shadowy beneath the sheets. The weight of pearls on the tongue. How she didn’t feel like any girl he’d been with. How, now, she feels nothing like his wife.

  The sex is great, don’t get him wrong, but this. In some ways, it’s his favorite part, the meeting place, the place they go before. Any place will do—bus station, museum, shopping mall. His favorites, though, are places with animals. The zoo, the game ranch, the aquarium in Newport with its loggerheads and moray eels, the tube that steers you through the tank of sharks.

  Tentacles, fur, these put him in the mood. Four legs: Good. He can’t explain it, would never tell her. But, then, you could fill a book with things he’s not telling people these days.

  Their rule: Each month, somewhere new. And there are only so many animal hot spots in Ohio. Even considering the tristate, it’s like a riddle: How close to Cincinnati can you stay before you run out of menageries?

  This one, the state park in Kentucky, came like providence. Maddy’s birthday party, a sleepover, and one of her friends brought along a stuffed buffalo. He’d been, like, “Hey, that’s some buffalo,” and the child said, “Bison,” and he said, “Nice bison, then.” She let him examine the tag, which read BIG BONE LICK. A joke, he thought, porn-perfect. But then he was online, looking it up, and there it was: Big Bone Lick State Park. Which was when he learned that lick wasn’t just something you did with your tongue. It could also mean salt spring or exposed mineral deposit, the kind frequented by animals. In this case, lick translated to basin full of bones. Here was a place the last of the great North American land mammals had come, ten thousand years ago, to lick their last. Here they had come to taste some salt, slip into a tar pit, and die.

  “Romantic,” Linda had said. Her voice on the phone always sounded pinched and distant.

  “And, get this,” he said. “Bison. They have a herd of bison!”

  “Aren’t they mean?” she said, and he said, “No, no. You’re thinking bulls. Bison are gentle giants. They’re like manatees, but on land.”

  “Manatees,” she said.

  “Equivalently,” he said.

  He promised to take her wherever she wanted afterward, which, he knew, meant somewhere fancy.

  Now, the two of them beside his truck and her in these boots, her saying nothing, he’s not sure what kind of day it will be. And this, the not being sure, it’s enough to make him want to hop back in the truck. Because he can’t stand the thought of it, another sobbing, face-in-the-pillow day—and, lately, there have been more and more—another round of If you love me, leave her.

  But, then, he hasn’t given Linda a chance. He owes her that much.

  “Nice boots,” he says.

  Linda looks down. “No place like home,” she says. She gives the heels a click.

  He waits. What she says next could make or break the day.

  And, then, she is smiling, she’s moving, she’s saying, “Come on,” working those boots across the gravel lot, walking like she knows where she’s going.

  . . .

  She hates the expression. How come no “kissing sisters”? Why no “fucking uncles”?

  They can’t be the only ones. But, if it’s so widespread, so common there’s a name for it, how come she’s never met anyone like them?

  . . .

  What he calls fucking, she calls making love. And where they fuck/make love depends on who picks.

  He likes motels, stucco-walled and neon-bright. Places they bolt the TVs to bureaus and telephones to tables. Places they don’t bother asking, “Smoking or non?” Places that make you pay cash up-front.

  It’s not that he can’t afford nice
things, far from it. It’s the chaos of a place he loves, the mismatched furniture and threadbare sheets, the coffeemaker someone’s used and not cleaned out, the art—if that’s the word for it—all those seagulls and beachscapes in cheap pastels. A place like that, he can relax, because in no way does it remind him of home—home’s white walls and careful rooms and the maid keeping everything clean, clean, clean.

  His favorite motel room, the one about which Linda said, “Never again,” boasted a watercolor of a blue heron. The usual, except that someone had pried the frame loose and returned the picture, corners curling, to the wall. The hook poked through the canvas like some profane, silver tail sprung from the heron’s head.

  That room had a sink that ran hot water but not cold. The water came in staccato bursts, rousing from Linda the kind of profanity that he thought might liven things up in bed. They tried it, but, really, it wasn’t Linda’s style, and the dirty talk left them feeling even weirder than usual.

  Linda likes nice places. She likes resorts, bed-and-breakfasts, places where the rates aren’t tacked to billboards that overhang the highway. Linda likes wherever there’s wallpaper or white china or rugs so plush the fibers reach between your toes to tickle the tops of your feet.

  Her favorite’s a golf resort and spa they frequent in Indiana, the one by the riverboat casino. Neither of them golfs or gambles, nor have they seen the inside of the spa. They stay in, mostly, watch TV, order room service, drink wine, and do what they came to do.

  The suites come with bathrobes, his and hers. Soon as they arrive, she puts hers on. She takes it off for sex, sometimes not even then. He never changes into his. Before they go, she returns hers to the closet. The robe hangs next to his, and always she seems sad to leave them there, suspended, their middles cinched by belts.

  . . .

  Today, they begin with the museum, one room and a winding hallway that details the park’s two-century history. Before it was a park, she reads, Big Bone Lick was a dig site. Before that, it was a stop on Lewis and Clark’s cross-country expedition. Mostly, the museum is dusty skulls in glass cases. The bones are mammoth and mastodon and giant sloth. The cases gleam, bright with track lighting, greasy with fingerprints, and she can’t help thinking what Windex and paper towels could do for the place.

  She stops before one of the displays. A bone, coffee-brown and long as a broom handle, fills the case. She thinks of Charlie on Halloween night, bounding across the kitchen, singing the song he’d brought home from school: “The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone . . .”

  Arnie leans in. “Big bone,” he says, his voice a cartoon caveman’s. He steps closer, their shoulders touching, then she feels it, her neck, his tongue. “Big bone lick.”

  She moves out of reach, looks to be sure no one’s seen.

  “Christ,” she says, and Arnie laughs, like it’s a game.

  The corridor dead-ends in a gift shop, T-shirts and park paraphernalia mostly. A wire carousel of postcards creaks at her touch. A shelf of shot glasses announce: LICK THIS! She wonders how long the park resisted before getting in on the joke.

  Arnie moves to a bin of stuffed animals and pulls out a bison, brown with gray horns. He carries it to the register, where a woman waits in a green state park shirt. Glasses hang from her neck on a cord of tanned leather. She buffs her fingernails with an emery board.

  “These,” he says. He holds up the bison. “Where can I find them?”

  The woman is older, tired-looking. She gives Arnie a look that seems to say she’d be polite if only they paid her more. She gestures toward the gift shop bin, then returns her attention to her nails.

  “No,” he says. “The real ones. You know, the kind that snort and eat grass?” He gallops the stuffed animal over the countertop, a bison pantomime.

  The woman sighs. She lays down her file, blows on the nails of her right hand, then pulls a paper map from a rack beside the register. She unfolds the map, points, refolds the map, slides it toward—but not quite to—Arnie, then picks up her file and begins work on the left hand.

  Arnie leaves the bison on the counter. He turns, and now he’s moving toward Linda, grinning, goofy-looking in his enthusiasm.

  “Oh give me a home . . .” he sings, and the excitement must be contagious, because, suddenly, she feels it too, a thrill, and, forgiving his carelessness—because, really, what are the chances that, way out here, they’ll see someone they know?—she lets him take her hand.

  . . .

  Practice.

  That’s what he called it the first time. Because what else can you call it when you’re horny and fourteen and trying to get your cousin to kiss you? Linda was fourteen too, both of them too old never to have been kissed.

  “It’s not like it counts,” he said. “You still get to have your first kiss. It’s just practice so that, when the first kiss comes, you don’t mess it up.”

  Linda’s expression advertised her skepticism.

  They’d spent the afternoon at the public pool and now lounged in damp swimsuits in front of the television, their skin pimply with air-conditioning. As kids, they’d run through the sprinklers with their shirts off while, on the back porch, their fathers sipped scotch. But those days were over. Her parents weren’t home, and he hadn’t seen Linda shirtless in a decade. The summer had filled in the blank of her bathing suit, and, just to catch a glimpse, just to kiss her, the idea was almost more than he could bear.

  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 fr
eak 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.