The Heaven of Animals: Stories (30 page)

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 that 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.

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.”