The Animals: A Novel (12 page)

TWO YEARS
later, in the fall of 1978, you are perched on the edge of the tattered lime green sofa in your trailer’s tiny living room, Rick beside you, your mother in her recliner, while on the static-snowed screen of the television Marlin Perkins wrestles an anaconda in a muddy pool. Coils and coils of slick tan and black scales and muddy water. A moment of black hair. Hands frothing the surface. And when Stan Brock’s head once again appears, the coils are wrapped around his face, across his mouth, his jaw, and he struggles to pull them away. Marlin pulls at the beast’s head, his teeth clenched, gripping the great snake’s jaws between his fists, the rippling body wrapping around his legs even as it drags Stan yet again under the surface.

You are frozen, watching the screen. All three of you are. Your mother has offered a constant flow of words during the program, but even she is silent now, prone in the recliner. There is, for the moment, not even the sound of their breathing. As if the air itself has been sucked clean of the trailer and is gone. You are sixteen years old but
Wild Kingdom
is still a show that you do not miss, no matter what, and although Rick sometimes complains about your devotion to it, he manages to be there every Sunday night, arriving just when the opening credits begin and remaining until well after the show has ended.

On the screen, Marlin looks tired and perhaps even a little afraid. His characteristic khaki safari outfit is soaked through and his white hair is swept back from his face by the flow of the churning water around him, the beast’s head gripped in his hands, its mouth snapping the air. Then he is on his back, his face just above water, one leg out of the water and completely wrapped in the snake’s thick, crushing coils. Perhaps he will drown. Perhaps he will drown right now on national television and the snake will pull him down its endless throat.

And it is just in that moment when there is a knock at the door.

It’s open, your mother calls.

The door swings open and when there is no further sound, you look up briefly from the television. The man there hesitates before stepping inside. Betty, he says. Then he looks at you and at Rick and nods.

You nod briefly in response, not knowing what else to say or do. The man is the sheriff, not a deputy but the sheriff himself, in his full uniform, khaki and stripes and badge shining in the light from the television.

Oh, she says. I didn’t know it was you, Jimmy. I look terrible. She throws herself forward once, twice, and finally the giant chair swings itself into an upright position, the footrest tucking back into its base with a springy clang.

I’ll need to talk with you for a minute, the sheriff says.

In your memory of this night, the door will be open and a strange white light will run through it, into the trailer from the street. The sheriff will be in silhouette: a dark shape cut into that flood. A halo. A wash. A river.

Your mother is standing now and the sheriff looks across to where you and Rick sit on the sofa. Maybe you’d better send the boys to their room for a minute, the sheriff says.

What’s the matter, Jimmy?

The sheriff does not answer and after a moment your mother says, You and Ricky go on back to your room.

You complain briefly, since the show has not yet ended, although you see now that Marlin Perkins is free of the snake and they are bagging it in a huge burlap sack, but there is something in the sheriff’s presence that is unnerving and so you rise and tell Rick to come on and the two of you wander back to the bedroom you share with your brother.

What’s that all about? Rick says.

I have no idea. You flop onto the mattress for a moment and then reach down to slide your box of comic books out from the gap under the bed.

That was awesome with the snake, Rick says.

Yeah it was.

Hoo man, that guy’s a lot stronger than he looks.

I thought it was gonna get him, you say. For a minute.

He looked pretty wore out.

You pull a comic from the box and as you do so a sound comes from the front of the trailer. A weird high keening. You look up at Rick and he at you. A chill passes through you, starting in your center and radiating out in all directions at once, like a ripple in a pool of still water.

You call out into the front of the trailer: Mom? The comic next to you on the bed is called
Chamber of Darkness
. An old man caught up under the arm of some creature. Maybe a werewolf. Something else. The sound again. For the briefest instant, it feels as if it has come from the comic book. That keening. A sob.

When you enter the kitchen you find your mother in the arms of the sheriff. You’ll be OK, he is saying softly. Then you see that your mother is weeping.

Mom? you say again.

Oh god, she says. Then, between sobs: You have to tell him, Jimmy. I can’t do it. You have to tell him. Her voice is high-pitched, strained, frightening, and she does not lift her head from the sheriff’s shoulder.

OK, the sheriff says. I can do that. Let’s sit you down.

He steers her away from you, toward the sofa, and tilts her into it as if she would have been unable to sit on her own. You have no memory of your mother ever sitting on the sofa so the image of her there is incongruous. The recliner is empty. You almost tell the sheriff that the sofa is not her place but he has turned to you, and to Rick, and stands there for a long moment, looking at you both before he reaches out and lays a broad, heavy hand on your shoulder.

Listen, Nathaniel, he says. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Do you know that?

What happened? The sheriff’s face is liquid. Already you know that whatever it is, it will be terrible.

The sheriff clears his throat. So something really bad happened tonight, and you’re gonna have to be strong for your mom. You hear me?

You nod. Tears streak your face.

Your brother, Bill … well, look, he was in a bad accident. And he didn’t make it.

Didn’t make what?

He died, Nathaniel. Bill’s dead.

The sheriff’s eyes are wet too and his face warps and wobbles through your own tears. Everything flowing. Everything coming to pieces.

You’re gonna have to be strong for your mom, the sheriff says.

Bill’s … ? you begin, but of course you cannot finish the statement.

I’m sorry, the sheriff says.

There is no ground beneath you. Everything is water sucking into dry sand. You are in a muddy pond and there is a snake around your body and it is pulling you under. You are in a muddy pond and there is no television crew to help pull you from its depths.

THEY WILL
tell you later that he was drunk, coming back from a bonfire party out in the mountains by the gravel pits, and simply slid off the road, the truck’s velocity well over seventy miles per hour. When the sheriff leaves your trailer, your mother disappears into her bedroom. You think she will return but she does not and you sit on the sofa in the silent trailer and think about the new knowledge that you have no brother, that you will never see your brother again.

Three days later you stand on the cut lawn at the funeral in the shiny black shoes you have borrowed from a neighbor, the toes of which, even in your memory, are covered in thin bright blades of wet grass. You cannot imagine that your brother is in that box, is going under the ground, even though at fifteen you are certainly old enough to understand. Your mother weeps with drunken abandon. You look at her momentarily, then back to the casket. You try to speak but no words will come and the tears that fall are frantic and endless. The feeling of liquidity has not ceased, as if all that dead sea has risen around you and you stand on the rough sand of its lowest depths.

Afterward you and Rick crouch in the dirt, huddling in the shadow of the trailer.

Shit, Rick says.

You look up at him and are surprised to see your friend’s eyes similarly wrapped in tears. He’s my brother, you say. What are you crying about?

I can miss him too, Rick says. He was your brother but he was still a friend of mine.

Get out of here, you say.

What?

Just get the hell out of here.

Rick looks at you, his eyes still wet with tears. Man, he says, but he turns and walks away, crossing into the sunlight between the trailers and disappearing from sight.

You sit in the shade of the steps, the wood worn and gray and splintering everywhere as if in the process of unraveling filament by filament. In the murmur of voices between the trailers, you think you can hear your brother’s voice. They are barbequing some ribs out there, drinking beer, your brother’s friends gathered in small clumps, occasionally laughing softly at some story that you cannot hear. Your mother is inside the trailer somewhere, perhaps with a friend, Rick’s mother or someone else. You have hardly seen her in the days since the sheriff came. She has appeared only briefly to turn from her bedroom door into the bathroom, saying nothing, the door closing and then opening again as she returns to her room and the door once again closes. All the while you stand mute and baffled in the living room, trying to say something but finding no words.

That is the winter when you first begin breaking into houses. It begins when you knock on the door of Mark Matthews’s house, a tiny boxlike structure covered in peeling light-blue paint, and there is no answer and somehow you decide to go around to the back door and knock there and when there is still no answer you open it and enter. Hello? Hello? Rick calls. You walk through the house quickly, moving through each room, not really sure what you are looking for once you are inside and not really intending to look for anything either, because you have not yet decided why you went inside the house at all.

You both know Mark Matthews so you do not feel like you are somewhere you should not be even though you both know that what you are doing is forbidden, perhaps even a crime, whether you know the occupant or not. And yet being there without Mark Matthews makes the whole home seem foreign somehow. A bowl of fake plastic grapes on the kitchen table. A console television. A small bronze cannon by the fireplace. A few magazines stacked on the floor next to the sofa. You make two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread and you and Rick sit at the kitchen table and eat them, listening all the while for the sound of a car from the front of the house. From the street outside comes the sound of a passing pickup truck and for a moment you are sure it is your brother’s, but of course there is no possibility of such an occurrence and in the seconds afterward you are nearly crushed by an inexpressible wave of grief.

You take a small necklace from Mark’s mother’s chest of drawers and Rick takes a shining green ring. They are souvenirs of a sort, a reminder of what was, for you, a strange electricity that seemed to temporarily fill the huge vacancy that still rides in your chest.

Then there are other houses, no longer people you know but the houses, the homes, of strangers. When the back door of the first house you try is locked, Rick breaks the knob off with a brick and presses the door open. Neither of you take anything this time, although you will begin taking small items from each home you enter, mostly jewelry and cash, but that first time you only move through the small dingy rooms before passing once more through the rear door and into the fenced square of the backyard. From a few yards over—each a square of dead grass mottled with frozen dirt—a neighbor’s dog barks at you lethargically. Beyond it, the flat plain of the desert floor is slowly erased by a faint pale drift of new snow.

What you learn over the course of that winter is that the worlds people draw for themselves are different. Sometimes the details of those lives are told in cheap scratched frames that stand upon countertops or hang from bent nails upon the walls, photographs that are sometimes of people you recognize—a teacher at the high school or the man who makes hamburgers at the Pak-Out or the woman who works at the bank—and the collection of those memories seems to transpire in the air all around you. The teacher on a beach somewhere with a woman so beautiful that the two of you have trouble pulling yourselves away. The man who owns the Pak-Out as a boy no older than you are, fishing pole in hand, the familiar stretch of the river you know as Catfish Bend curling behind him. In such moments it feels as if the structure of each home is made entirely of gauze and you have entered those enclosures as if entering into a dream. The thin and spectral webs of spiders. Of root and fungus. Intersecting bubbles on the still surface of a pond. You know now that what world you occupy is in the process of dissolving. As if you are dreaming and are dreaming within that dream so that it matters not whether you sleep or wake, for there is no world in which your brother is not dead.