We the Animals
Authors: Justin Torres
Table of Contents
Copyright © 2011 by Justin Torres
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Torres, Justin, date.
We the animals : a novel / Justin Torres.
p. cm.
ISBN
978-0-547-57672-5
1. Family—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Upstate New York
(N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3620.
O
5897
W
42 2011
813'.6—dc22 2011009159
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Printed in the United States of America
DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents are the product of
the author's imagination.
For my mother, my brothers, and my father
and for Owen
Now a boy is of all wild beasts the most difficult
to manage. For by how much the more he has
the fountain of prudence not yet fitted up, he be-
comes crafty and keen, and the most insolent of
wild beasts. On this account it is necessary to bind
him, as it were, with many chains.
—Plato,
The Laws
We Wanted More
W
E WANTED MORE.
We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.
When it was cold, we fought over blankets until the cloth tore down the middle. When it was really cold, when our breath came out in frosty clouds, Manny crawled into bed with Joel and me.
"Body heat," he said.
"Body heat," we agreed.
We wanted more flesh, more blood, more warmth.
When we fought, we fought with boots and garage tools, snapping pliers—we grabbed at whatever was nearest and we hurled it through the air; we wanted more broken dishes, more shattered glass. We wanted more crashes.
And when our Paps came home, we got spankings. Our little round butt cheeks were tore up: red, raw, leather-whipped. We knew there was something on the other side of pain, on the other side of the sting. Prickly heat radiated upward from our thighs and backsides, fire consumed our brains, but we knew that there was something more, someplace our Paps was taking us with all this. We knew, because he was meticulous, because he was precise, because he took his time. He was awakening us; he was leading us somewhere beyond burning and ripping, and you couldn't get there in a hurry.
And when our father was gone, we wanted to
be
fathers. We hunted animals. We drudged through the muck of the crick, chasing down bullfrogs and water snakes. We plucked the baby robins from their nest. We liked to feel the beat of tiny hearts, the struggle of tiny wings. We brought their tiny animal faces close to ours.
"Who's your daddy?" we said, then we laughed and tossed them into a shoebox.
Always more, always hungrily scratching for more. But there were times, quiet moments, when our mother was sleeping, when she hadn't slept in two days, and any noise, any stair creak, any shut door, any stifled laugh, any voice at all, might wake her, those still, crystal mornings, when we wanted to protect her, this confused goose of a woman, this stumbler, this gusher, with her backaches and headaches and her tired, tired ways, this uprooted Brooklyn creature, this tough talker, always with tears when she told us she loved us, her mixed-up love, her needy love, her warmth, those mornings when sunlight found the cracks in our blinds and laid itself down in crisp strips on our carpet, those quiet mornings when we'd fix ourselves oatmeal and sprawl onto our stomachs with crayons and paper, with glass marbles that we were careful not to rattle, when our mother was sleeping, when the air did not smell like sweat or breath or mold, when the air was still and light, those mornings when silence was our secret game and our gift and our sole accomplishment—we wanted less: less weight, less work, less noise, less father, less muscles and skin and hair. We wanted nothing, just this, just this.
Never-Never Time
W
E ALL THREE
sat at the kitchen table in our raincoats, and Joel smashed tomatoes with a small rubber mallet. We had seen it on TV: a man with an untamed mustache and a mallet slaughtering vegetables, and people in clear plastic ponchos soaking up the mess, having the time of their lives. We aimed to smile like that. We felt the pop and smack of tomato guts exploding; the guts dripped down the walls and landed on our cheeks and foreheads and congealed in our hair. When we ran out of tomatoes, we went into the bathroom and pulled out tubes of our mother's lotions from under the sink. We took off our raincoats and positioned ourselves so that when the mallet slammed down and forced out the white cream, it would get everywhere, the creases of our shut-tight eyes and the folds of our ears.
Our mother came into the kitchen, pulling her robe shut and rubbing her eyes, saying, "Man oh man, what time is it?" We told her it was eight-fifteen, and she said fuck, still keeping her eyes closed, just rubbing them harder, and then she said fuck again, louder, and picked up the teakettle and slammed it down on the stove and screamed, "Why aren't you in school?"
It was eight-fifteen at night, and besides, it was a Sunday, but no one told Ma that. She worked graveyard shifts at the brewery up the hill from our house, and sometimes she got confused. She would wake randomly, mixed up, mistaking one day for another, one hour for the next, order us to brush our teeth and get into PJs and lie in bed in the middle of the day; or when we came into the kitchen in the morning, half asleep, she'd be pulling a meat loaf out of the oven, saying, "What is wrong with you boys? I been calling and calling for dinner."
We had learned not to correct her or try to pull her out of the confusion; it only made things worse. Once, before we'd known better, Joel refused to go to the neighbors and ask for a stick of butter. It was nearly midnight and she was baking a cake for Manny.
"Ma, you're crazy," Joel said. "Everyone's sleeping, and it's not even his birthday."
She studied the clock for a good while, shook her head quickly back and forth, and then focused on Joel; she bored deep in his eyes as if she was looking past his eyeballs, into the lower part of his brain. Her mascara was all smudged and her hair was stiff and thick, curling black around her face and matted down in the back. She looked like a raccoon caught digging in the trash: surprised, dangerous.
"I hate my life," she said.
That made Joel cry, and Manny punched him hard on the back of the head.
"Nice one, asswipe," he hissed. "It was going to be my fucking birthday."
After that, we went along with whatever she came up with; we lived in dreamtime. Some nights Ma piled us into the car and drove out to the grocery store, the laundromat, the bank. We stood behind her, giggling, when she pulled at the locked doors, or when she shook the heavy security grating and cursed.
She gasped now, finally noticing the tomato and lotion streaking down our faces. She opened her eyes wide and then squinted. She called us to her side and gently ran a finger across each of our cheeks, cutting through the grease and sludge. She gasped again.
"That's what you looked like when you slid out of me," she whispered. "Just like that."
We all groaned, but she kept on talking about it, about how slimy we were coming out, about how Manny was born with a full head of hair and it shocked her. The first thing she did with each one of us was to count our fingers and toes. "I wanted to make sure they hadn't left any in there," she said and sent us into a fit of pretend barfing noises.
"Do it to me."
"What?" we asked.
"Make me born."
"We're out of tomatoes," Manny said.
"Use ketchup."
We gave her my raincoat because it was the cleanest, and we warned her no matter what not to open her eyes until we said it was OK. She got down on her knees and rested her chin on the table. Joel raised the mallet above his head, and Manny squared the neck of the ketchup bottle between her eyes.
"On the count of three," we said, and we each took a number—my number was last. We all took the deepest, longest breath we could, sucking the air through our teeth. Everyone had his face all clenched up, his hands squeezed into fists. We sucked in a little more air, and our chests swelled. The room felt like a balloon must, when you're blowing and blowing and blowing, right before it pops.
"Three!"
And the mallet swung through the air. Our mother yelped and slid to the floor and stayed there, her eyes wide open and ketchup everywhere, looking like she had been shot in the back of the head.
"It's a mom!" we screamed. "Congratulations!" We ran to the cupboards and pulled out the biggest pots and heaviest ladles and clanged them as loud as we could, dancing around our mother's body, shouting, "Happy Birthday! ... Happy New Year! ... It's zero o'clock! ... It's never-never time! ... It's the time of your life!"
Heritage
W
HEN WE
got home from school, Paps crowded the kitchen, cooking and listening to music and feeling fine. He whiffed the steam coming off a pot, then clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly. His eyes were wet and sparkled with giddy life. He turned up the volume on the stereo and it was mambo, it was Tito Puente.
"Watch out," he said and spun, with grace, on one slippered foot, his bathrobe twirling out around him. In his fist was a glistening, greasy metal spatula, which he pumped in the air to the beat of the bongo drums.
We stood there in the entranceway to the kitchen, laughing, eager to join in, but waiting for our cue. Paps staked staccato steps across the linoleum to where we stood and whipped us onto the dance floor, grabbing our wimpy arms and jerking us behind him. We rolled our tiny clenched fists in front of us and snapped our hips to the trumpet blasts. One by one he took us by our hands and slid us between his legs, and we popped up on the other side. Then we wiggled around the kitchen, following behind him in a line, like baby geese.
There were hot things on the stove, pork chops frying in their own fat, and Spanish rice foaming up and rattling the lid. The air was thick with steam and spice and noise, and the one little window above the sink was fogged over.
Paps turned the stereo even louder, so loud that if we screamed, no one would have heard, so loud that Paps felt far away and hard to get to, even though he was right there in front of us. Then Paps grabbed a can of beer from the fridge, and our eyes followed the path of the can to his lips. We took in the empties stacked up on the counter behind him, then we looked at each other. Manny rolled his eyes and kept dancing, and so we got in line and kept dancing too, except now Manny was Papa Goose, it was him we were following.
"Now shake it like you're rich," Paps shouted, his powerful voice booming out over the music. We danced on tiptoes, sticking up our noses and poking the air above us with our pinkies.
"You ain't rich," Paps said. "Now shake it like you're poor."
We got low on our knees, clenched our fists, and stretched our arms out on our sides; we shook our shoulders and threw our heads back, wild and loose and free.
"You ain't poor neither. Now shake it like you're white."
We moved like robots, stiff and angled, not even smiling. Joel was the most convincing; we'd seen him practicing in his room.
"You ain't white," Paps shouted. "Now shake it like a Puerto Rican."
There was a pause as we gathered ourselves. Then we mamboed as best we could, trying to be smooth and serious and to feel the beat in our feet and beyond the beat to feel the rhythm. Paps watched us for a while, leaning against the counter and taking long draws from his beer.
"Mutts," he said. "You ain't white and you ain't Puerto Rican. Watch how a purebred dances, watch how we dance in the ghetto." Every word was shouted over the music, so it was hard to tell if he was mad or just making fun.
He danced, and we tried to see what separated him from us. He pursed his lips and kept one hand on his stomach. His elbow was bent, his back was straight, but somehow there was looseness and freedom and confidence in every move. We tried to watch his feet, but something about the way they twisted and stepped over each other, something about the line of his torso, kept pulling our eyes up to his face, to his broad nose and dark, half-shut eyes and his pursed lips, which snarled and smiled both.
"This is your heritage," he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Paps, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still stepping and snapping perfectly in time.
