He’d hoped to learn, in time, to take Jack as he was, to not have to cut phone calls short, afraid of what he might hear, or who—a voice in the background or a man on the line, listening in.
He’d hoped to learn, in time, been certain there was time, always more time.
He drove on, past billboard-strewn Baton Rouge, across a wing of the Mississippi wide as memory, through Lafayette, past green fields and black swamps, and on, and on, toward Texas.
. . .
Late in the day, he reached the rest stop outside Lake Charles. They’d taken their first break here. Jack stepped out of the van, stretched, and his spine marked his shirt like links in a chain. The hem lifted, and Jack’s back was as dark as his arms. His was the skin of a man who spent his days not under cars, but on boats and knee-deep in waterways, bent to net specimens. Dan felt something at the sight of it, a pain, dull and deep, and another seeing the hairs—light, feathery—that traversed the hollow where back met waist. The fall from the window had broken Jack’s arm, and the hairs had come out of the cast curly, elbow to wrist, a living nest.
Dan counted his cash. The first trip, business had been better, gas cheaper. He’d have to be careful. He had no savings to fall back on—nothing but the house and the car, both so far gone as to be of no real value. He bought two bags of chips from a vending machine, ate them leaning against the car, then found a phone booth, the old-fashioned kind with windows and a door that closed.
The man named Marcus answered the phone.
“How is he?” Dan asked.
“He’s sleeping,” Marcus said, and his voice was like hot gravel pressed to a fresh road. “Today wasn’t terrible. But every day is different. Each day’s a surprise.”
Dan asked whether he was in a lot of pain, and Marcus said that he was.
“But he won’t show it,” he said. “He’s being brave. He won’t take the morphine.”
Dan understood what Marcus meant, that Jack was waiting for him, that Jack needed him there faster, needed him now.
And how would Jack look when he saw him? He pictured a skeleton, bones draped in bedsheets, eyes swollen in their sockets, yellow as yolks.
“Make sure he eats,” Dan said, and Marcus said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Food means nothing. We’re way past food.”
The man on the phone was not on Dan’s side. He was dangerous, but he was all Dan had. He was the one keeping Jack alive, and so Dan would have to be careful.
“Just tell me when you’ll be here and how I can reach you,” Marcus said.
Dan promised to be there in two days. He would call along the way, whenever he stopped, wherever he found a payphone.
He thought Marcus was coughing before he knew he was laughing.
“Hello to the twenty-first century,” Marcus said. “Cell phones and airplanes. These are not new things.” And then Dan heard a screech, and then a recorded voice. The voice asked him to deposit more money. He patted his pockets for coins, then hung up.
Back behind the wheel, he considered pulling away, driving all night and the rest of the following day. He had come nine hundred miles. He still had far to go. He’d need caffeine, lots of it, or he could try to score a few turnarounds at a truck stop. He shut his eyes. The headrest was warm on his neck. He could almost see Jack beyond the windshield, stretching, stretching, his fingers tangled in sunlight, ready for takeoff.
. . .
Raindrops came through the open window and pelted his shoulder. It was early, still dark. Dan rolled up the window, then ran through the rain to the restrooms. He stood beneath an overhang, watching the water come down. He dreaded the day ahead, the monotony of the road, the tiny gas stations and blank faces of the men and women who worked the registers. And he was afraid. He feared that his tires, leather-smooth, would run off the road. He feared that the wipers, which rattled and slapped even in light rain, would seize and leave him blind in the downpour. And the one true fear, what all the other fears suggested: that he might not reach Jack in time.
Today, he would have to drive faster, go farther, and he did, until the silver smolder of the diner on the hill compelled him to exit. No cars filled the spaces in front of the diner, but a blue neon sign in the window glowed OPEN.
The diner was smaller than he remembered. They’d stopped here the first night, before finding a place to sleep. A gas station, long boarded up, stood in the adjacent lot. The vast absence of anything else extended as far as he could see.
Inside, Dan took a seat at the counter. Across the empty diner was the booth where they’d sat, Jack stacking sugar packets into towers until the food came. When they left, Jack said he’d forgotten something and ran back in. Then, through the window, Dan watched his son add a few bills to the tip he’d left, an embarrassment that made him feel cheap, accused. He wished Jack had just come out and said it. But Jack was not his father’s son. Given discretion and confrontation, Jack would always choose discretion. Between these, Dan imagined a third way to be, but neither of them had ever been good at in-between, each already too much himself.
Through an opening in the wall, Dan could see into the kitchen. A man in a paper hat stood at the grill. He pressed bacon with a steel spatula. Before he’d learned cars, Dan had done this work. He came home nights stinking of lard and lemon-scented cleaner. Now, most days, he smelled of grease and gasoline, which was okay. Garage smells didn’t bother him the way the restaurant had, how the food stink clung to your clothes, how it combed itself into your hair.
“Annie will be with you in a minute,” the man said, without looking up.
Dan pulled a yellow menu from a greasy rack fastened to the laminate countertop. The menu was the kind with pictures in place of descriptions. Grainy photographs advertised the Hungry Man Breakfast, the Lumberjack Special, and the Ultimate Combo. The Ultimate Combo was pancakes, toast, potatoes, eggs, and a mess of meats. He was hungry enough to eat it all.
“It’s a lot of food,” she said.
Annie was short and wide around the middle. She wore a blue-and-white getup and an apron, as though she belonged not here, but in a diner from Dan’s youth. Her hair, blond, then brown where the roots reached out, was brushed forward in a stiff wave over her forehead. The rest fell in curls that settled on her shoulders. The bridge of her nose was wide, but her skin was smooth and unblemished, her mouth small and red. Her eyes were blue pools, and her face narrowed from a high forehead to a point of chin, like an egg balanced on its tapered end. Jack had shown him that, how to balance an egg, how it wasn’t something you could do only on the equinox the way people said.
She set a napkin in front of him, then weighted it with silverware. “Coffee?”
“Please,” he said. He could order the enormous meal, but a meal took time. Jack would never know, but that thought, the not knowing, brought Dan no comfort.
“And toast,” he said.
“Just toast?” Annie asked.
He nodded. Her features, in spite of them, or because of them, their strange assemblage, all of them added up to something he didn’t want to admit.
Her eyes didn’t leave his, and how much time had passed since he’d been with a woman? But she was no woman. She was no older than Jack the day Dan had found him in the other boy’s arms. Children, all of them.
He looked away. He coughed. He pressed his longing into a ball, returned his menu to the rack with a slap, and, with this act, jettisoned his desire—that small, round ache—into the universe.
“Just toast,” Annie called to the man in the paper hat.
The man grunted and shook his head.
Annie produced a mug from under the counter and filled it with coffee from a plastic-handled pot. She watched him with an intensity he missed from the years before he married. The way he looked now, his face, people gave him room in a crowd. Maybe it was the missing tooth. Maybe it was the scar th
at ran eyebrow to ear, or the sky that filled up an absence of earlobe. Souvenirs of his drinking days and of the fights and dares that accompanied those days. But, returning the coffeepot to its warmer, offering him a plate of toast, Annie didn’t look afraid.
She smiled. “Anything else?”
“No,” he said. “Thank you.”
She tore a ticket from her pad and tucked it under his mug, then turned and busied herself with the coffeemaker. Her apron strings were tied in a bow at eye level. He tried not to stare. He ate quickly, guzzled his coffee, and left a five on the counter. He’d hit the bathroom, and then he’d be gone.
But, standing at the urinal, he wasn’t alone long. He smelled her first, soda and maple syrup. The door opened behind him. It shut. A hand brushed his waist and took hold of him. He stiffened even as the last of the piss left him, and then she was pumping. The handle of her jaw found his shoulder, and he felt her heat, her apron-front warm against the back of his pants, all of it happening fast, familiar as bad TV, practiced as pornography.
“Wait,” he said, but she did not stop. Her hand found his hair, his head pulled back, teeth like bee stings down his neck. He spun, and she fell away.
He found her on the floor, face hidden by hair, her apron a twisted, knotted thing. She was trembling.
He didn’t have time for this. He knelt and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Are you all right?” he said.
The slap came hard. “Fuck you!” She screamed it. “Fucking pervert!”
Dan stood. He zipped up and buttoned the front of his pants.
“Molester!”
A crash echoed from the kitchen, and Dan knew what came next. Already he felt the policeman’s hand on his head, the firm push into the back of the car. And how to explain this to Jack? His absence, it would be unforgivable as the window. It would be worse.
The screams kept coming. She kicked and squirmed.
“If I miss this,” he said, but he didn’t bother with the rest. He’d fought many men, knocked some unconscious, fucked up his fist with the snap of another man’s nose. He’d never so much as pushed a woman. This girl, though—he could see himself doing things. Her foot caught his shin, and, right then, he wanted to take her head between his hands and lift her from the floor, wanted to squeeze until the screaming stopped.
“Heaven help you,” he said. “Heaven help you if I don’t make it out of here.”
His words, and the thing that thickened his words, turned Annie’s shouts to whimpers. Wide-eyed, she watched him.
Dan moved away from the door. He felt sorry for the guy, but he knew what this looked like, knew no explanation would suffice. He planted his feet. He’d get one chance at this.
The door flew open, and he threw the punch with everything he had in him. His arm was a rocket. It was a battering ram hammering the castle door. Splinters. His fist found face, something cracked, and the man was down. Annie didn’t scream. She didn’t move. The cook was out, his paper hat crumpled beneath him.
He stepped over the body. He didn’t look back at Annie. He moved quickly from the restaurant and into the rain. In the rearview mirror, though, pulling away, he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of the girl’s face at the window, mouth open, and he couldn’t tell which it was, whether she cursed him or called him back.
. . .
Texas was a bastard, the road unraveling in a graphite blanket of forever. Blue sky had strangled the rain, and now steam rose in waves from the asphalt, the landscape blurred in a chemical spill of browns and reds. He passed derricks that bobbed like birds drilling the earth for food. He passed something dead and fly-covered on the side of the road, belly full of wings where buzzards crouched, heads burrowed in the carcass.
The afternoon brought with it the kind of heat that clogs your head and slows your thinking. He adjusted the air-conditioning to half-blast, afraid for the car and the overheating that could leave him thirty miles or more between gas stations. The radio was fuzz, and he drove long stretches without passing another car or truck. He was all over the road. He fought sleep. On this stretch, he and Jack had traded seats often and talked to keep each other awake.
He wondered whether Jack had made the fish up.
“I won’t go back,” Jack had said. “I mean, the project was funded, and I was in the Amazon, so I can’t complain. But, Jesus, the number of things down there that can kill you. They have these eels, enough volts to knock down a grown man. They have stingrays, of course, and caimans, plus the catfish.”
“How big?” Dan asked.
“Big enough that children go missing.”
He pictured it, whiskers thick as garden hoses, the mouth pried open and the body inside.
“How about piranhas?”
“Well, sure.” Jack smiled. He laced his fingers across his lap. “Really, though, their reputation overwhelms them. File them under ‘Misunderstood.’ They’re like sharks. No open wound, you’ve probably got nothing to worry about.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dan said, “next time I visit the Amazon.”
Jack nodded. He was waiting to talk. Dan knew Jack didn’t hear half of what he said, and he didn’t care. A week before, he wouldn’t have believed he’d be crossing the country with his son at his side.
“What trumps them all,” Jack said, “is this parasitic fish, an inch long. What it does is it slips between the gills of a bigger fish and eats its host from the inside out. Only, these fish, sometimes they swim into people—ears, anus, whatever orifice they find first. This guy I know, Toby, the thing wriggled up his dick and ate the urethra.”
Later, Dan would blame the heat. But it was the fish, the idea, that forced him to the side of the road to dry-heave out the open door. In the van, Jack howled and slapped the dash.
All those years, and Dan couldn’t shake it. At times, the thought snuck up on him, scaring him with its forcefulness, and he felt the fish inside him, not eating, but struggling to rip free.
Out his window, Dan watched distant mountains rise and fall. I-10 hugged the border with Mexico, and beyond this invisible line, the mountains scraped the sky for miles. The day was ending, and the land beneath him unflattened, road surrendering to dips and bends, channels of orange and red rock. Scarred cliffs marked the places dynamite had met the mountains and made way for the road. The rock rose in walls around him, earth—millions of years of it—etched in ribbons of sediment.
Another hundred miles, and he’d put Texas behind him. He drove on, fighting the fish the whole way. The sensation, when it came, rose, gut to throat, twisting, an ember in a fire, then lifting like ash.
. . .
New Mexico welcomed Dan into exhaustion. Night had come. He drove until he could no longer keep awake for the next exit, then pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road. The desert lay beyond, a wide-open expanse of sand and sage, and he drove into it. He navigated past a boulder, past a clump of prickly pear, hands like paddles in the headlights, and brought the car to rest behind a tower of rocks where he hoped he wouldn’t be bothered. He drained his last jug of water. He had a bag of beef jerky from an earlier stop, and he finished that too. At a BP, he’d meant to call Jack but found the payphone’s receiver missing, the cord frayed as though chewed through by an animal. He would have to wait until morning.
He wanted sleep, but the heat and the car were suffocating, so he climbed onto the roof. He imagined the morning, snakes in his boots, and left them on. But his shirt he pulled off for a pillow. He lay back and let his legs hang over the windshield, heels on the hood. Above him, stars spilled out of a white rip in the night. A coyote called and was answered by another. A breeze swept his chest like the palm of a hand.
His eyes burned. He was going to make it. Against all odds—the car, the rain, the fight at the diner that might have left him in jail—he would reach his boy. Gulf coast to Pacific in three
days.
Son, he thought, stay. Stay and wait for me.
. . .
The morning was an orange, peeled and held fast in a fist, pulpy and hot. Dan cursed again and kicked a tire. The car should not have broken down. He’d tended to it the whole trip, monitoring fluid levels, topping off the gas tank, keeping the air low and the coolant full. It should not have broken down, but it had.
He’d woken at first light, freezing, and hit the road. At a gas station, he’d stocked up on food and water, changed his clothes in the bathroom, and driven on. The day warmed. The earth around him turned brown. The bushes were scorched, the landscape flat, calm like the surface of a sea. Ahead, the asphalt split the sea, an unbending avenue of black.
Half of New Mexico was behind him when the car first steamed and shook. An exit came into view. He took it and pulled into an Amoco station in time for the car to gasp and die with an unceremonious shudder. He waited an hour to add coolant and still the tank blew like a geyser when the cap came off. Antifreeze gushed green, bubbled and puddled on the ground where the thirsty air licked the pavement dry in seconds. An old man stood at the window inside the Amoco. He shook his head, and Dan hated him. He knew what the man was thinking, but Dan knew all about cars, knew this car better than any he’d owned. He just hadn’t known what heat was, not really. His trip with Jack had been in May. But this was July, and one of the hottest summers on record, or so said the people on the radio. A few locals looked on from the shade of the awning that overhung the gas pumps.
“You let it cool down?” a boy called.
Dan shot him a look that could cleave meat. The boy looked away.
The Heaven of Animals Page 24
