The Heaven of Animals: Stories (28 page)

“Let me,” I said.

Jason nodded. He settled his bare foot on my lap. The nail flowered from his heel. There was no way to tell how far it went in. I grabbed the end like a syringe, my thumb against the head and two fingers beneath.

I pulled, up and out, fast. The foot rose, then crashed to the floor. Jason screamed. Sunglasses jumped. Stars cursed. A line on the nail revealed the inch that had nested in the flesh. It came out clean. The hole was not wide and there was no blood. Still, I stretched Jason’s sock tight around the heel and tied it in a knot at the ankle like a tourniquet. I pulled the shoe on but left the laces loose.

Jason nodded and stood. He didn’t make a face when his foot touched the floor. He was himself again. Instantly, I was demoted. He was in charge.

“I’m ready,” he said.

I didn’t see it coming, the hand that knocked Jason down. Stunned, Jason stood again, and again he was pushed to the floor. He stayed down. He drew his knees to his chest. Sunglasses drew the knife.

“That’s it?” Sunglasses said. “After all we done for you? You’re out the door without so much as
thank you
?”

“Thank you,” Jason said.

“We did your ass a favor,” Stars said.

“Thank you,” Jason said, his voice grown shaky.

“Favors, favors,” Stars said. He undid the button at his waist, pulled on the zipper, and let his shorts fall to the floor. He wore no underwear. The stars didn’t end at his navel but followed a trail to a tangle of hair and something unfamiliar. What was between his legs was nothing like my own. It hung, swollen, distended, the end purple as a plum.

Jason began to cry softly.

One of the men laughed, and his laughter echoed in the open house. I’m not sure which of them it was, the man laughing, because I was already down the hall. I ran out the front door, down the steps, the driveway, the gravel road. Where were the workers? It was dark out, which didn’t seem possible. It had just been noon. I ran, and I swear the moon rose overhead. The birds turned to crickets. Stars streaked overhead like confetti. The earth turned.

.   .   .

Jason didn’t come to school in August, and by Labor Day he was gone. They packed up and deserted their house, which, I learned later, Jason’s mother had never owned but had been renting for years. What they couldn’t fit in the moving van, they left on the front lawn. All of it vanished overnight: chairs, lamps, a card table, my friend. I heard they went to Seattle, but that was just rumor. They might have gone back to Salt Lake, might have gone anywhere.

“I think Tanya wanted a fresh start,” my mother said. “I tried to tell her, a new city isn’t a new life, but whatever. Some people you can’t protect from themselves.”

Sometimes, when it was the two of us, over dinner or during a television commercial, my mother would ask, “What happened that summer, to you boys? You were so close, then it was like you weren’t friends at all.”

I’d shrug my shoulders.

“Was there a fight?” she’d ask. “A falling-out?”

“Not that I can remember,” I’d say, and this would satisfy her, for a while anyway. She’d sigh and shake her head, saying, “Boys.”

.   .   .

I saw Jason once before he moved away. Summer vacation was almost over. A few weeks had passed since I’d run from the house. I’d spent the weeks worrying about what had happened, wondering whether I should tell my mother and whether Jason had told anybody. I wasn’t sure what was done to Jason or what they’d made him do. That secret, I was afraid to keep it, and I was afraid to let it go.

In the end, I did nothing, save this: One morning, I went to his house. I rang the doorbell, but no one answered. I moved to the side of the house. Jason’s bedroom was on the first floor, and, standing on tiptoes, I could see in through his window. He was lying in bed, propped up on a pillow. The TV had been moved to his room and balanced on a plastic milk crate in one corner.

I tapped the glass, and Jason came to the window. He was thinner than I remembered, eyes burrowed deep in his head. We stared at each other a minute. I didn’t know what to say. It was Jason who spoke first.

“You left me,” he said. His voice was different, muffled behind the windowpane, and I had to strain to hear him. “You ran away.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He moved closer to the window. His bangs licked the glass. “You haven’t said anything?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“To anyone? Promise?”

“I promise,” I said.

He didn’t smile, but I could tell he was relieved. He returned to the bed. I tried to see what show he was watching, but an open closet door threw a shadow across the screen. I couldn’t be sure the television was even on.

I never saw Jason again. After that day, he disappeared.

Later, much later, as a man, I would come across the definition of
quicksilver,
which means not only
fast,
but
fickle, mercurial, unpredictable.

In this way, we both lived up to our namesakes.

The Heaven of Animals

D
an Lawson had made the trip before. After he discovered that his boy, Jack, was gay and threw him through a family-room window, after Dan’s family left him, after he got sober and worked for years at redeeming himself in the eyes of his son—the language of regret transformed to checks that covered Jack’s college tuition—he’d made the trip. Jack had taken a degree in marine biology, then a position researching ocean life on the Pacific coast. Dan had rented a moving van, and, towing Jack’s car, they’d driven the three long days to California. Now, ten years later, he would make the trip alone.

That afternoon, Jack had called from La Jolla to say he’d be dead any day now. Someone was with him, but what he really wanted was Dan at his side, and could he maybe come, and soon?

The phone shook in Dan’s hand like a live fish. His thoughts hurtled toward cancer, the scourge that had ravaged his parents, pushed friends into early graves, and, finally, taken the life of Lynn, his ex-wife and Jack’s mother, a woman who, like her son, had been, if not too good for this world, then too good, certainly, for Dan.

But the problem wasn’t cancer.

“I’ve got a pretty bad case of pneumonia,” Jack said. His voice was raspy, unrecognizable. He paused between sentences to catch his breath.

“I don’t understand,” Dan said. He imagined the worst, and Jack raced to meet him there.

Jack said, “I’ve got a pretty bad case of AIDS.” He told Dan about the hospitals. He told him about the drugs that had kept him alive for years and might have given him more, many more, had he not waited so long to seek treatment.

“I’m not the first to think if I ignored it, it would go away,” he said. “I’ve killed men. I know I have. What I’ve done is unforgivable.”

For years, Jack said, he’d suspected and been afraid to act until Marcus, a friend, had guessed and made him get tested. “The body’s bad at keeping secrets,” Jack said. “This disease, it tattoos its name on you in bruises.”

He had traced the illness back to his high school history teacher. He’d been eighteen, impressionable, and the man had taught him everything but responsibility. Now, fifteen years later, the disease had run its course.

The line was quiet, and Dan fought to fill up the silence. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Three days a week, Jack said, Marcus collapsed his wheelchair into the back of his car, drove him the half hour to San Diego, and wheeled him into a hospital where a technician waited to ease a needle between his ribs and pull pints of fluid from his lungs. But Jack had had enough of that. He would keep going only if Dan would come, after which he looked forward to drowning quietly in his sleep. He apologized for the morbidity of the confession, but not its directness.

Dan couldn’t speak. He felt untethered. He held on to the phone, tight, as though to let go might cause him to float away.

Jack said, “I understand that I’m asking you to come to terms in minutes with something I’ve been coming to terms with for years.”

That word,
years
. Dan winced to hear it. He brought a hand to his forehead, which was damp.

Not so long ago, he’d helped Jack set up his office and move into the house in La Jolla. Impossible that a decade could pass,
like that,
without visit or invitation.

Jack was silent for so long, Dan worried the line had gone dead.

“I’m here,” Jack said.

How extraordinary to think that—together, crossing the country—the virus had been with them even then, that already it had made a nest in Jack’s guts without their knowing. How long, then, had Jack known? How long had he known and said nothing? And, if he had said, would Dan have moved to be near him? What did fathers
do
?

He would have tried harder, that at least.

“I have to go,” Jack said, and, before Dan could protest, he was gone.

That night, Dan left his house and crossed the highway and walked down to the familiar shoreline. He watched the still, cold waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Two men sat on the beach. One chopped up a bonito for bait. The silver fish came apart in fat, red chunks, and the sand bloomed pink beneath it. The other man baited three-pronged, baseball-sized hooks with the flesh and cast the bait as far as he could into the surf. The men had rigged four poles in stands in the sand.

Jack was no fisherman. Dan had taken him once, but the boy had cried at the first catch. He worried over the fish’s welfare, the silver hook caught in the jaw. Standing beside the livewell, looking in, he’d wept until Dan dipped a hand in, caught the fish by its middle, and returned it to the water.

Jack would grow up that way, sensitive, in love with the world above water and below. Later, those rare times they spoke on the phone, their conversations circled back, inevitably, to Jack’s work, his study of an endangered species or his latest tide pool discovery. Jack’s favorites were the seals that watched him work. He spoke of them often, their playfulness, their curiosity, how, on a hot day, they blanketed the rocks and basked.
Like marble,
he’d said once,
like stones curled over stones
. And, from his chair, elbows propped on a kitchen table twenty-five hundred miles away, Dan had seen them, the animals and the rocks, the sight startling him, like a drawer flung open to an intimacy of spoons.

On the beach, a fishing rod bowed. Dan moved closer. The man with the rod dug his heels in the sand. The line unraveled in a
whir
. The second man hurried across the beach, pulling in the other lines. “Black tip?” the man called.

“Bigger,” the other said. The spinner screamed as the shark pulled more and more line. If it didn’t tire, Dan knew, the line would run out and release, the shark swimming away, a mile of filament tracing its wake.

But the line did not run out. The hum subsided into the steady crank of the reel.

Dan imagined the men landing a ten-foot bull shark, the beast silvered by moonlight, thrashing the sand.

He didn’t stay to see it. Instead, he walked down the beach to a bar and ordered a scotch, neat. He stared at the tumbler a long time. The drink would be his first in . . . forever, since the day he’d stood, drunk and disbelieving, in the glassy flowerbed over the body of his son, Lynn screaming for the other boy to call 911.

His deepest grief. His greatest shame. An act for which no conceivable penance existed. With the last tuition bill covered and Jack tucked away, far from his father as he could get, Dan had recognized that the thing he wanted most in the world was a thing he’d never have, and so he’d given up hope for forgiveness. A friend had suggested that perhaps Dan was already forgiven. That, by taking his money, begging his father’s help, the boy had relented. Weren’t these concessions of something like love? The idea was almost as believable as it was untrue. For Jack hadn’t asked out of love. He’d asked out of necessity. The calls for help, when they came, were frantic. Jack had gotten into college but couldn’t pay. He’d found work, but his ride had fallen through and he had to be in California by week’s end. Dan was a last resort, always. He’d known this. He’d known and not cared, just as he knew that a decade of Christmas cards and the occasional phone call from California were born of nothing greater than a son’s sense of obligation to his father.

Tonight, though. Tonight presented something new—a chance, final, but full with possibility. And just because forgiveness was a thing he didn’t deserve, that didn’t make it a thing not worth chasing. Only the entirety of a country lay between them. He couldn’t get back the lost years, but he could cross the country.

From a payphone at the bar, he called his son. “Of course I’ll come. I’ll leave in the morning, first thing,” he said, and Jack thanked him and hung up.

Dan returned to the counter, paid, and passed the tumbler, still full, to the man on the stool beside him before walking up the beach and back home.

Near sunup he fell, at last, to sleep.

.   .   .

And woke late. He cursed himself, then cursed himself again when the car wouldn’t start. The car was old and prone to breakdowns. It overheated. It stalled. It threw belts the way a dog shakes off water.

He checked the starter, then, relieved, moved to the shed. He pulled a battery down from its shelf. The battery was new, stolen from the garage. The job had never paid well, but the work was easy. He changed oil mostly, a simple service for which people handed over startling sums in the name of clean hands. The garage kept poor track of inventory, and, over the years, he’d lifted parts and merchandise to the tune of several thousand dollars.

He’d called Steve that morning to say he’d be gone awhile, maybe weeks. “Not if you want a job when you get back,” Steve said, and Dan said that Steve could go fuck himself. He wouldn’t sit around St. Pete’s rotating tires while his boy lay dying on the other side of the country.

He wasn’t really mad at Steve. Steve hadn’t known he had a son. Few people did. Already, he felt the hand on his shoulder, Steve’s apology upon his return. For days, the men would work in respectful silence, then, gradually, at break or in the pit, the jokes would sneak back in, the elbow nudges, talk of women and how best to get them into bed. Steve would be the last to forget. He might say, “If you ever want to talk about it,” and both men would understand that those were just words.