The Heaven of Animals

by David James Poissant

  Hours passed, and the car would not cool down. Then, when the car did cool down, it wouldn’t start, and Dan knew that his problem was that most delicate, most temperamental of instruments: the transmission. Only the smallest part needed to break off and cycle through to make a mess of your machine. At the garage, they called it sudden catastrophic failure. This was their way of saying: Get ready to fork over thousands, you’re fucked.

  In the distance, over vacancies of brown, an honest to God tumbleweed cruised by.

  The car would not be repaired, not with the money he had or in time to reach Jack. He would have to find a new way. Whatever happened, his trip couldn’t end like this, Dan stranded two states away. He’d come too far. He was too close.

  He found the payphone beside the building, a steel box lashed to a cement pole that was planted between two restroom doors. Over the blue-and-white women’s symbol, someone had carved CUNT. Over this, someone had scribbled the crude outline of a dick in black marker. It shot a thin, dark stream up the door.

  To Dan’s surprise, Jack picked up the phone.

  “Marcus says you’ll be here tonight,” Jack said.

  “That’s the plan,” Dan said. “How are you?”

  “Dying,” Jack said, “still.” Jack laughed, but the laugh was thin, almost a croak. Then Dan heard a voice in the background and the rustle of Jack resting the phone in his lap. They argued, and, when Jack returned, he sounded anxious.

  “He wants to know when,” Jack said.

  “Soon,” Dan said.

  “Soon or soon?”

  Dan said nothing. Jack wanted a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep. A phonebook lay open on the ground. He nudged it with the toe of his boot. Its pages stood stiff, wavy in space, as though bronzed.

  On the line, more argument, then Jack yelled, “He’s coming, all right? Go away.” A door slammed, and Jack apologized.

  Across the parking lot, a tan Honda Civic pulled up to the pumps, a 2007, Dan guessed. A girl got out and walked into the station.

  “Things okay there?” Dan said, but Jack didn’t hear or didn’t want to talk about it. What he said next surprised Dan, the past rushing at him like a wall of water over the desert floor.

  “That winter,” Jack said, “in the Florida house. All those sounds coming through the ceiling. You remember?”

  “You couldn’t sleep,” Dan said. “You thought they were monsters.”

  “Remember what you told me?” Jack said. “To make me sleep?”

  “I don’t,” Dan said. He did but wanted to hear his son say it.

  “Angels,” Jack said. “Angels in the attic.”

  He’d meant only to comfort the child. An invention, like the idea of a heaven for animals, a consolation to make easier the death of the family dog.

  Jack’s voice sharpened. “Ten years old, and I believed you. And I wanted to see them. I thought they’d be so beautiful. But I was afraid to go up. Until the noise stopped and the stink started. One night, I got brave. I pulled the cord and climbed the ladder, and you know what I found? Squirrels. Dead fucking squirrels all over the place.”

  Dan remembered it well. He’d poisoned them, then collected the dead into a garbage bag, tails stiff as handles, eyes glazed in a way that filled his dreams for weeks.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean for you to—” But already Jack was speaking again.

  “No,” he said. “What I’m saying is, they’re here, the angels. They weren’t there, but they’re here, now, in this house. I see them. Before I fall asleep, they fill up the ceiling.”

  Dan felt suddenly sick. He wondered whether Marcus had started the morphine, whether a fever had sunk its teeth into Jack’s brain. Before his own father died, he’d claimed a troll crawled out each night from under the hospital bed to gnaw on his toes. The dying suffered delusions, Dan knew this. Still, he was sorry Jack saw things that weren’t there. He wanted Jack still in the world when he arrived, awake and clearheaded. Maybe he was selfish to want it, but, when he knelt at Jack’s side, he wanted his son to know who he was.

  Jack was silent a long time before he said, “Dad?”

  The word had not found his ear in fifteen years, and Dan trembled to hear it.

  “Dad, am I going crazy?”

  “No,” Dan said. “No, you’re just fine.”

  “Then, they’re there, what I see?” Jack’s voice, it had turned to a boy’s.

  “They’re there,” Dan said. His throat ached.

  “And they won’t leave?”

  “They won’t leave.”

  “Good,” Jack said. “I don’t want them to leave.”

  “They won’t,” Dan said, “I’ll make sure of it.” And he hoped he was not mistaken. Because the angels, if they went away, would be his fault. He’d brought them into the world, into his son’s imagination, yet he couldn’t control what became of them. And, should they vanish, what then? What chance then at Jack’s forgiveness?

  “Promise not to tell Marcus,” Jack said.

  Dan promised, and the promise warmed him with what the other man didn’t know. Dan was trusted. Whatever the other man was to Jack, he wasn’t his father, wasn’t the one in whom the son placed his confidence at the end. He promised again, but Jack had already said goodbye, his words cut off with a click.

  Time. The enemy had always been time. He walked past the Honda, dust-covered, waiting, and saw the thing he’d hoped for. He didn’t want to do it, but he had no choice, could think of no other way. Buses, taxis, these took money. Hitchhiking wasn’t new to him, but the travel was unpredictable, slow. He hurried to his car. He’d packed one bag. He pulled it from the backseat and walked, calm as he could, to the Honda. Beside the car, hoses hung from their pump, a trio of elephant trunks, wrinkled, their middles cinched by metal rings. And, through the open window, a rabbit’s foot. It dangled like life from the chain, the chain from the key, the key snug in the ignition, a gift. Dan opened the door to California.

  . . .

  Except that he’d forgotten about the checkpoint.

  He’d been sailing along, the car handling like a dream. He didn’t have to fight the wheel to stay in his lane. He didn’t have to squint past a bug-cluttered windshield. He’d driven the other so long, he’d forgotten what a car felt like less than ten years old, sixty thousand miles on the odometer.

  And then the building was upon him, low on the horizon, its tower screaming several stories into the sky. It straddled the interstate, an upturned tuning fork. The station was there to weed out illegals, but Dan didn’t doubt that stolen cars rode the Border Patrol bandwidth. And how quickly were tags called in? He’d had the car an hour. He could see no other roads, no way out. To turn here, make an about-face across the highway, guaranteed a cop on your ass in seconds. No choice but to kamikaze right into the thing.

  The checkpoint was concrete, the roof blue, solar-paneled on either side of the watchtower. From the tower hung a huge and old-fashioned-looking searchlight. Along the building’s front, red lights pulsed and signs ordered motorists to come to a complete stop. Ahead, orange cones funneled vehicles into two lanes. At the end of each lane, men in brown uniforms and black sunglasses either waved you on or directed you to the side of the road where more men in uniforms and sunglasses waited to interrogate you or peek into your trunk.

  Cars took one lane, trucks another. He followed the car ahead of him, an eighties station wagon with whitewalls and wood paneling. His heart hammered in his chest. Then, without warning, everything went sideways. His last thought: So this is what it’s like, passing out.

  He woke to the rap at his window and rolled it down. He saw himself reflected in the sunglasses of the man. He tried not to appear frightened. The man was his age, his face like cracked leather. The hint of a mustache traced his upper lip, a few days’ growth.

  “Sir?” t
he man said. Beyond, cars pulled around them and rejoined the line ahead. Above, the sky shone, sun-bright and dizzying.

  “Sir, are you all right?”

  Dan felt hot all over. A bead of sweat rolled into one eye, but he didn’t move to wipe it. The steering wheel, his hands fixed to it—he was sure if he let go he’d be out again.

  “Please put your vehicle in park, step out of the car, and come with me.”

  Dan followed the patrolman to a door on the side of the building. The door read NO ENTRY / NO ENTRAR.

  The room was small, crowded with shelves full of folders and books bound by black spirals. The uniformed man sat in the only chair. He reached into a large cooler on the floor and handed Dan a bottle of water. He gestured toward the cooler, and Dan sat. He drank. The water and the room were warm. He drained the bottle and was offered another. He wasn’t thirsty, but the drinking bought him time. He tried to think up answers to the questions that would come next—his daughter’s car, married, different last name, business trip—but the possibilities were endless, and he quickly lost track of the story he meant to tell. In one corner, an electric fan buzzed. The breeze didn’t make a dent in the heat.

  “We see this all the time,” the man said. Dan nodded. He wondered whether the cuffs would be metal, or whether they’d use the restraints he’d seen on TV, plastic ones that sounded like zippers fastening the wrists. Prison wouldn’t be new to him. He’d done two months after Jack. He had not asked the boy to lie for him, and Jack hadn’t. In the emergency room, the nurse asked what happened. Jack only shook his head, and Dan was led to a small, well-lit room. An hour later, an officer escorted him from the hospital and into his cruiser. Dan in the backseat, a metal screen between them, the cop said, “It’s fuckers like you give dads a bad name. If you’re not knocking the kid around, you’re hitting the wife.”

  Dan had never hit Lynn, or Jack before that. But he didn’t argue. The whiskey was wearing off, and he could see the trouble he was in. He’d been on a bender, a week or two by then, and the sight of it, stepping into the room, Jack’s face pressed to the face of the other boy, it had sent hot sparks up his spine. He’d regretted the reflex, regretted it before Jack went through the window, regretted it seeing his son still in air. He would have gone back, if he could, stopped time and stepped forward—the child suspended, aloft—would have cradled him, flown with him, dropped with him, broken the fall.

  Dan sucked the water down.

  “Everyday occurrence around here.” The patrolman patted the cooler’s side. “Reason we keep these around,” he said, and Dan realized that the man didn’t mean stolen cars but heatstroke, dehydration.

  “One for the road,” the patrolman said. He passed him another bottle. “You got A/C?”

  “I do,” Dan said.

  “Use it.”

  Dan tried not to appear in a hurry. He cracked the new bottle and took a long pull. Air bubbled up in chugs. He lowered the bottle, balanced it on his knee. Finally, he held the bottle skyward, as though to offer a toast.

  The gesture sent the patrolman to the door, and Dan followed the man into the heat. He nodded when he was told to drive safe, then pulled ahead to rejoin the line. At the checkpoint, they were no longer stopping cars. Everyone was waved through. He drove slow until the station disappeared from the rearview, then his foot hit the accelerator.

  Sun sinking, the weight of what he’d done settled on him. Tracking him down would be easy. They had only to run the plates or the VIN from the car he’d left at the Amoco. Already, his name and face had likely joined a list of the wanted. His one chance: No way would they guess his direction. Back home, they’d have him, but that was all right. What he wanted, his investment in what was left of Jack’s life, he’d have before heading home. Let them have him then. Locks, and throw away the key. So long as he saw his son, so long as he got a chance at goodbye, he’d allow it: the trip back, and whatever came after.

  . . .

  Arizona loomed, a succession of boulder piles, of rocks that reached up and up, like arms, their shadows bent over the interstate, a playful, haunted geography. Catastrophe took only one rock to dislodge from its perch. Everywhere, signs warned of it, as though the driver could do anything in the face of bad luck.

  He hit Benson past nightfall and recognized the exit he’d been looking for. He followed the signs to the parking lot and approached the motel. The building leaned, gingerbread-colored, one gust of wind away from falling over. A billboard boasted: BENSON INN: HOME OF TED, WORLD’S LARGEST GILA MONSTER!

  A Gila monster really had been there, and it had been big. Black and pink in its beadwork, its face more toad than lizard, the animal had lain curled like a question mark on a slab of slate behind an aquarium’s glass walls. Its tail was a tube, its jaw the curve of a soda can.

  “Venomous,” Jack said.

  “I thought that was just snakes,” Dan said, and Jack shook his head. Then, he surprised Dan. He moved to the desk and asked for a double. “To save money,” Jack said. Dan nodded, but this was big, was about more than just money. They spent the night each in his own bed, each turned toward his wall, not a word past goodnight—but they were together, and Dan was awake a long time listening to the in-and-out of his boy’s breath. Sometimes the breathing caught, followed by a thick, mucusy cough. Jack would stir, sigh, then fall back to sleep, and Dan would fight the urge to turn and look.

  Inside, Dan found the lobby as he’d left it, as old and worn-out-looking as the woman who worked the front desk. The skin of her face hung in folds, and her chin begged plucking. Her hair, done up in gray waves, was wispy, thin as spider’s silk. A tag fastened to her shirtfront read MARGARET in red, raised print. He thought it was her, the woman who’d placed the key in his hand a decade before, but this seemed impossible, the kind of trick that comes when memory and hope collide. A row of incandescent bulbs flickered and hummed overhead. Paperback books crowded the counter. Dust coated the wide leaves of plastic plants in clay pots.

  The woman named Margaret watched him a long time before she said, “Yes?”

  “I’m here for Ted,” he said. It was the wrong thing to say.

  “We’re no zoo,” she said. “You want to see Ted, you have to stay the night.”

  He asked how much. Margaret sized him up, then looked past him to the car in the parking lot.

  “Fifty,” she said.

  He opened his wallet. Five twenties lined the pocket. It was all the money he had left.

  He offered forty. Margaret took the money and jerked her thumb at a cardboard box behind the counter. The box sat on a low table. Its corners had been reinforced with duct tape, and a pillowcase, sky blue with white stitching, lay draped where a lid should have been. He stepped past the counter and pulled the pillowcase away.

  Inside, a lizard stretched from one corner of the box to the other. The creature was scaly and green, rib-thin. A ridge of black teeth traced its back like on a child’s construction-paper cutout of a dragon. The sides of the box were crazy with claw marks, the bottom nothing but sand and a head of broccoli, wilted and gray.

  This was not Ted. This was not even a Gila monster.

  “This is an iguana,” Dan said. He turned to face Margaret. She frowned, shrugged, scratched her side.

  “What happened to Ted?”

  “Park Service got him,” she said. “I’m here thirty years and no one says a word. Next thing I know, this lady tells me I need a permit. Says Gila monsters are on the list. Not the endangered species list, but, get this, the list that comes before that list. Threatened, she called it. She called Ted threatened and took him away. Said she’d see me shut down, but it was all hot air.”

  He waited for more, but Margaret seemed to have reached the end of the story.

  “Smoking or non?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry?” He couldn’t understand it. The Gila monster, it should
have been there to tell Jack about. “I saw Ted,” he would say, and Jack, remembering, would laugh. “Remember the fish you told me about?” he’d say. “Remember the diner, the sugar packets, how you covered the table with pink and blue towers? I stopped there, too. And this boy I met by the Pearl River, I’ve got to tell you about him.” He needed this, needed Ted there at the bottom of the box. But Ted wasn’t there.

  Something had gotten fucked up. Something had gotten tremendously fucked up this time around, and here he stood, stolen car in the parking lot and the wrong fucking animal at the bottom of the box.

  “Your room,” Margaret said. “You want smoking?”

  The aquarium was cardboard, and the cover, when it fell away, had revealed nothing, no monster, only this green pet-store reject.

  “Sir?” She’d almost yelled it. Her fingers drummed the desk.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant to stay.”

  The woman scowled. “Well, don’t think you’re getting your money back.”

  “Keep the money,” he said. “Just let me use your phone.”

  She eyed him, suspicious, then shrugged. “Dial nine to get out,” she said, gesturing toward a tan phone on a corner table.

  The earpiece, when it touched his face, was sticky, warm as though it had just left someone’s ear. A square blinked red beside the buttons. He dialed nine, then Jack’s number.

  Marcus answered, and Dan made no excuses.

  “I’ll be there by morning,” he said. “Please put Jack on the phone.”

  “Just be patient with him,” Marcus said. “It’s been a bad day.”

  But he didn’t know what Marcus meant. Jack sounded terrific, the best he’d been since the first call came.

  “They drained the left today,” he said. “It’s great—I can breathe.”

  He waited for Jack to ask where he was. He was prepared to tell everything, to exaggerate or lie, whatever it took, only don’t let Jack be mad at him. Except, Jack didn’t ask. If he remembered Dan’s promise to be there that night, he didn’t mention it.