We the Animals (5 page)

Night Watch

P
APS FOUND A NIGHT
job, and since Ma still worked graveyards at the brewery, where there was no place to hide little boys, weeknights we went to work with Paps and slept on the floor, in front of the vending machines. Paps was the security guard, the night watch.

One night I woke sweating and twisted inside my sleeping bag. I kicked free and stood looking down on my brothers, their faces painted orange from the light coming through the window, and their shadowed jack-o'-lantern eyes. I walked over to the desk where Paps sat watching a little television monitor, leaning back in his chair, holding both cigarette and beer bottle slack-armed and low to the floor.

I asked if it was almost time to go home.

Paps did his dog growl, he snapped his teeth, but then he set his bottle down and pulled me onto his lap anyway. I rested my face against his chest, and he ran his hand down along my spine from the base of my skull to my lower back; he kept doing that.

"I like sleeping in a bed," I said.

"Me too," Paps said. "Me too."

From his lap, I could see outside the window. A few feet away, on the brick wall of the next building, a single orange bulb was locked inside a metal mesh box.

"Why is that light in a cage?" I asked.

"Same reason you cage a bird," Paps said.

"What's that mean?"

"So it don't fly away."

"Can you unlock it?"

"What do you think?"

After some time, Paps shut the little TV on the desk.

"I think the noise woke you up," he whispered close to my ear, and I nodded approvingly. I could feel the muscles in his chest, and underneath, his heart working. I fell asleep.

The next time I woke, I was still in Paps's arms, but he was shaking me awake and setting me down and saying, "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

He stepped over to where Manny and Joel were sleeping and prodded them with the tip of his boot.

"Up," he said. "Hurry."

My brothers groaned and tried to roll away from him.

"Get a move on," Paps hollered. "We're late!"

Before they were even fully standing, Paps was already on his knees gathering up the bedding, yanking so wildly that Joel got tangled and fell back down. We busted up laughing until Paps smacked Manny openhanded across the face and Manny yelped; then we were silent.

"Take your brothers out to the car and get under the covers and stay there until I come out." He shook Manny back and forth by one arm. "
Entiendes?
"

When we got outside, the morning man was there, Paps's replacement—taller than Paps, and white. He blew into a Styrofoam cup, and the cup billowed its own steam back at him. When he spotted the three of us, he stopped blowing and set the cup on a low wall that separated the sidewalk from the building's narrow yard.

Left to right, right to left, his gaze, cold and curious, touched down on each of our faces, our heaps of blankets, even our little rubber snow boots. No one spoke; only Manny shifted slightly to cover his cheek with a blanket. Then Paps came out and broke the spell, pushing past us on the stairs and extending his hand to the other man, shaking it once and firm, saying "Morning" loud and direct in his face.

"These yours?"

"That's what she keeps telling me."

The man lowered himself to his haunches. He frowned.

"Well, at least you're only half as ugly looking as your Daddy is."

We were half as ugly, half as dark, half as wild. Adults were always leaning in and explaining that we must have inherited this from Ma and that from Paps. We all three kept our eyes above the man, on Paps, who was still standing. He flashed us a look that was impossible to interpret, but serious, so serious.

"What's all this?" the man asked, tugging at a corner of my sleeping bag.

I looked at Joel standing next to me; Joel looked at Manny.

"Listen, man," Paps said. "Let's you and I have a talk."

"Your Daddy got you sleeping on the floor?"

"I said let's you and I have a talk."

The man rose up to his full height.

"Talk?"

Paps reached in his pocket, pulled out the car keys, and rested them on top of Manny's bundle. "Get your brothers settled in the car," he said quietly, "and don't drop anything."

Turning back to the man, Paps said, "What? You can talk to my kids, but not to me?"

In the car, we squished into the front, kneeling on the passenger seat, leaning our elbows on the dashboard, and cupping our faces in our hands. We peered out the windshield to the steps, where Paps and the other man smoked and gestured back and forth, Paps aiming a finger at the man, or at us in the car, or up at the sky, and the man mostly holding his hands, palms out, up by his chest and pushing the air away from him. Steam and smoke rose from their mouths, and the coffee cup sat untouched on the low wall.

"How much you wanna bet Paps slugs him?" Manny asked.

"Look at that man," Joel said. "That man don't want a fight."

"He fell asleep," I said.

"Who?"

"Paps. He fell asleep."

Joel and Manny quit jostling for the best position and studied Paps more closely.

"So it's not our fault?" Joel asked.

"Some," Manny said. "Some's always ours."

Paps walked over to the man's coffee cup and smacked it, swinging wild, like he was trying to fly it out of the lot. We watched the brown liquid jump up in an arc and splatter on the pavement. The man narrowed his eyes at Paps, shook his head, and spat on the ground, walking away from him, into the building.

By the time Paps opened the car door, Manny and Joel had already hustled into the back and buckled up, trying to shrink to invisible, but Paps turned in his seat, grabbed hold of Manny's hair, and said, "Keys!"

Manny handed him the keys.

"When I say move, you move, you understand me?"

No one said anything.

He let go of Manny and turned to me, gripping my chin and digging his fingers into my cheek. "Understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

We drove home in silence, each one of us sliding fingers into the condensation on our windows. Close to home, Manny had the nerve to ask, "You gonna get fired?"

Paps laughed—one quick, nasty bark of a laugh.

Manny tried again.

"What'd that man say to you, anyway?"

"What do you think?"

Paps punched the ceiling. The noise jolted us to attention, and we braced ourselves for worse, but nothing followed.

"Man, that's what he always says—'What do you think?'" Manny said in a too-loud mocking voice, but Paps didn't seem to hear; he just drove.

"Yeah," I said. "That's what he said last night. About the light."

"What light?"

"The light in the cage outside the window. I asked if he could unlock it, and he said, 'What do you think?'"

Joel considered this like a real thinker, one hand tucked up in his armpit and the other pinching his chin. "What
do
you think?" he asked.

"That's not the point," Manny said.

"I bet he could unlock it," Joel said to the two of us. Grabbing the back of his seat and leaning forward, he said to Paps, "I bet you could unlock that light. Couldn't you?"

Paps cleared his throat and swallowed hard, but he didn't speak.

"Sure he could," I said, leaning in with Joel. "Sure you could, Paps, couldn't you?"

"Course he could," said Manny, joining us. "Nobody's saying you couldn't unlock it, Paps. Nobody's saying
that.
"

Paps started making odd, wheezy, gasping noises. He slammed the dashboard with his palm, then closed his fist and really started thumping with force, but slow and steady, as if he was beating down a nail. Eventually, he fell into a three-beat rhythm, more like beating a drum, keeping time to some music only he heard. He wiped snot from his nose and water from his eyes, but went on pounding. Thump. Thump. Thump.

"He crying?" Joel whispered.

"What, with his fist?"

It didn't seem much like crying, seemed like something else, meaner than crying; steadier, too, but not one of us had ever actually seen him cry, so we couldn't know for sure—and Paps, he didn't say a word about it, just the thump, thump, thump, for miles. When we thought he would stop, he didn't; when we thought he would speak or scream or cuss, he was silent. His breathing calmed some, but the water and snot kept coming, and the wheeze, and the gasp.

After a while the pounding, so spooky at first, was just there, and a while after that, Joel started smacking his own fist against the window, in time with Paps.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Then it was Manny against his window, matching the beat. Paps didn't turn back or acknowledge us at all; he just kept up his pounding, so I pounded on the hard plastic armrest in the middle, and it felt like we were building something, a tribe—us four together, us four angry and giddy and thump-crazy, together.

Once we turned onto our street, we tried out little three-word chants to the beat of our pounding.

"No More Work!" said Manny.

"No More Floor!" I said.

"No! More! Coffee Cups!" yelled Joel, and we all bust up laughing; even Paps spat out a little laugh of surprise.

We rolled all over the back seat, slapping our thighs, trying to chant "No More Coffee Cups" but choking on the words, we were laughing so hard, until Manny said, "Stop, stop. I can't anymore. I'm crying."

Joel responded by pounding out "No More Crying!" on the window. And soon we were all pounding it out.

"No More Crying! No More Crying!"

All the way down the street and into the driveway, we chanted, up the front steps and into the house, where Ma had already arrived and undressed for sleep and came now to the bedroom door in her bra and underwear, rubbing her eyes, asking what in hell was going on; we chanted and pounded the walls, we pounded the coffee table in front of the couch, where Paps had slumped and covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. "No More Crying! No More Crying!"

Ma tried to holler over the noise; she kept asking what in hell was going on, calling on Paps by his first name to tell her what in hell was going on, sitting by him, putting the back of her hand to his forehead, and then to us saying, "He's just tired, he's just tired is all," and then looking at him, "You're just tired, baby, aren't you?"

Paps kept his palms over his eyes; he spoke like that.

"We're never gonna escape this," Paps said. "Never."

We didn't know who he was talking to, but it hushed us. Our thumps softened to taps against the tabletop; we still chanted, but it was almost a whisper now and no fun.

"You talking about escaping?" Ma asked.

"Nobody," Paps said. "Not us. Not them. Nobody's ever escaping this." He raised his head and swept his arm out in front of him. "
This.
"

Finally, we were silent.

Ma stood and grabbed his outstretched hand with both of hers and pulled it down and buried it in the space between them.

"Don't," she said in a voice more steady than we knew. "Don't you dare."

Big-Dick Truck

P
APS DROVE OFF
to the car dealership, and the three of us staked out in the front lawn all afternoon, snapping the yellow dandelion heads off their stems and streaking them down our arms, painting ourselves in gold, waiting for him to return.

Our old car had died the night before, on the way back home, after dropping Ma off at work. The engine just quit, right in the middle of the highway, in the rain. Paps had punched and punched the wheel, his fist cry, cursing in English, then Spanish, then just dropping his head into his hands, saying nothing for a long time, rubbing his eyes with his palms, breathing deep. After a while, he fished around and found some plastic shopping bags on the floor of the car. He tied the bags around our heads, and we all got out, very carefully, and walked down the shoulder, soaking up the spray from the tractor-trailers, until finally someone, a woman, pulled over and gave us a ride.

Once we were inside the woman's car and Paps had thanked her a few times, he turned in his seat and said to us, "Tomorrow. Tomorrow I am going to the dealership, and we're getting a new car."

We didn't believe him, but the woman did; she thought it was a wonderful idea, and she stretched her neck and peered into the rearview mirror, trying to catch our expression.

But then in the morning, Ma agreed: we
were
getting a new car, today.

Now we were in the front yard, waiting, Manny with a pair of plastic binoculars and Joel up in a tree, lying about how he could see all the way to the dealership. A pickup truck turned the corner, and Manny whispered, "It's him." He said it so softly and clearly that we knew he wasn't jerking us, and we took off running down the block, pulling on each other's sleeves, stumbling, slaphappy.

When Paps saw us coming, he started celebrating, hooting and hollering, but he had the windows rolled up, so we couldn't hear anything he was saying; we just watched the veins in his neck bulge and his mouth flap open and shut like a puppet. He slowed to a crawl and rolled down the window, and we jogged alongside.

"Well, boys," he said, "meet the newest member of your family."

"No way!" we screamed. Some of the neighborhood kids came out to join us. Our father continued to inch toward the house at his snail's pace, a proud smile on his face, and us kids surrounded the truck, jumping up to try to get a look at the interior, like badly trained dogs.

By the time Paps killed the engine and slid out of the door and onto the gravel driveway, there were at least half a dozen kids examining the truck, climbing into the bed, opening up the glove compartment, running their hands along the leather.

The truck was cobalt blue, with a bench seat and a skinny, two-foot-long gearshift that came up from the floor. Everything was sleek and new, the thick black rubber of the tires and the sparkling chrome of the bumper. The massive side mirrors jutted outward like elephant ears. There were seven other trucks on our block, and ours was the meanest. Immediately, my brothers and I started bossing the other kids around. "Don't be putting your greasy fingers on the glass," we said. "Only us boys can sit in the driver's seat."

Ma came out and stood on the stoop, looking tired and pissed. Her eyes were red and her mouth was set, puckering in on itself. She held her boots in one hand, then let them drop in front of her and sat down on the first step.

"Well, Mami?" Paps asked.

"How many seats does it have?" she said, picking up a boot and jerking at the laces.

"It's a truck," Paps mumbled. "It don't got seats, it got a bench."

Ma smiled at the boot, a mean smile; she didn't look up or look at anything besides that boot. "How many seat belts?"

The neighborhood kids started to climb down and sneak away, all the excitement receding with them like a tide.

"Why you gotta be like that?"

"Me?" Ma said, then she repeated the question, "Me? Me?
Me?
" Each
me
was louder and more frantic than the last. "How many fucking kids do you have? How many fucking kids, and a wife, and how much money do you make? How much do you earn, sitting on your ass all day, to pay for this truck? This fucking truck that doesn't even have enough seat belts to protect your family." She spat in the direction of the driveway. "This fucking big-dick truck."

With that, Paps took one long step toward her and slapped her across the side of her head, but she kept screaming right at him, right up in his face, "Big-dick truck! Big-dick truck!" Her neck and cheeks were flushed red, and she was lost in tears, in rage, shaking her hair loose from her ponytail, pounding Paps on the chest, until finally he clamped a hand across her mouth and pulled her to him with his free arm, pulled her snug up against him and said, "Shush, Mami. Shush."

She struggled and groaned against his grip, until he started saying, "OK. You win," repeating everything a million times. "You win, you win, you win. I'm here, I hear you, you win," and eventually Ma wore herself out, stopped pulling against him, and her face calmed, one hand massaging the spot where she'd been hit.

My brothers and I exchanged disappointed glances; we wanted the truck.

"If she doesn't fit," Manny said, "she doesn't have to ride in it."

Paps shot us a narrow-eyed, watch-it look.

"I'm bringing the truck back tomorrow," he announced, holding Ma a little apart from him so he could look into her eyes. "I'll get a fucking minivan if you want, Mami. I'll get you a fat-lady car, is that what you want, to be a fat old lady?"

We all laughed. Even Ma smiled.

"But tonight we have a truck, so tonight we'll go for a ride, all right?" he asked. "We'll make it a ride we'll never forget, and after, we'll always talk about the time we had a truck for a day."

Ma didn't agree right away, but after dinner she went into the bedroom and came back out in her red dress and her gold hoop earrings, and my brothers and I got our plastic guns from the garage and hopped into the back. We didn't have anywhere to go in particular, so we just drove, cutting through the night, smooth as nothing. We drove through the neighborhood, then out of it, down back roads, past cornfields, Ma in the front, nestled up close to Paps, her head on his shoulder, the wind tossing her hair around both of them, and us boys bumping along in the back, aiming our guns up at the stars above and shooting them down, one by one.