We the Animals (7 page)

Trash Kites

W
E WALKED FOR MILES,
the three of us, kicking up gravel, dragging sticks behind us. We were sneaking out; we were finding freedom. Above us, naked branches stretched into shadows and the sky deepened, wrapping itself up in a shroud of dark purple. It was getting colder, and Joel and I wondered out loud if maybe we should turn back.

"We're on a good path," Manny said, "we're doing right, we're safe."

We reached an empty field, tossed our backpacks onto the grass, and set up camp. Wind whipped the tips of our ears and stole a plastic bag right out of Manny's hand. He thought it was a sign and fished through our supplies until he pulled out a tight, fat roll of twine and three black plastic bags. We made kites: trash bags on strings. We ran, slipped, the knees of our dungarees all grass stained, we got up, ran, choked ourselves half to death with laughter, but we found speed, and our trash kites soared. We flew for an hour or so, until daylight fully buried itself into night and all the light sank back, except for the stars and a toenail clipping of moon, and the kites disappeared, black on blackness. That's when we let go, and our trash kites really soared—up and away, heavenward, like prayers, our hearts chasing after.

Paps came crunching down the road with his high beams on—our sleeping bags and backpacks and our shielded faces all caught in his searchlight.

"Fuck," Manny said, "we should have slept in the woods." But probably Paps would have hunted us down anyway. He was like that; he knew tricks for tracking down people who didn't want to be found.

Paps assumed it was all Manny's idea because Manny was the oldest and because it was, actually, all Manny's idea. He didn't wait to get home but beat Manny right there in the field, the headlights scaling back the night, casting long wild shadows on the trees, the engine running and the door left wide open, so that the inside of the car was perfectly alit and I could see, from twenty feet away, moths fluttering in and bumping into one another. He beat Manny bad; punched his face, punched his crotch. Manny went crazy, hooting and hollering "Murderer!" over and over.

"Murderer!" he screamed at our father, but no one was dead. He crawled over to where I stood, grabbed my sleeve, looked into my eyes. "Murderer!" he said.

"But who's dead?"

"Me," he said. "Me, I'm dead! And my children."

Manny was always saying all kinds of crazy shit, most of it to me, because Joel had a way of closing himself off from crazy, but I couldn't figure out how to stop from hearing his words and howls, how to look away.

So later that night, back at home, just before dawn, Manny climbed into my bed and woke me up, telling me how he had dreamt of kites—a whole sky full of kites, and he was holding all the strings. He told me how the good kites and wicked kites got all mixed up, how he tried to hold on to the good and let the rest float away, but after a while he couldn't tell them apart.

I didn't say anything. We were on our backs, not touching, but I could tell he was holding himself tight, every little muscle tight. I thought he might cry, or scream. I thought he might climb up on top of me.

"Paps apologized, you know," Manny said, "for using his fists. He told me he was scared, that something serious could have happened to us."

He rolled onto his side and watched my face. I pretended to yawn; I didn't like his eyes on me.

"I used to believe we could escape," he whispered. "I had it all figured out—like when we were in the field today, I was sure that God would grab hold of those kites and lift us up, protect us."

He took my chin and turned my face toward his.

"But now I know," he said, "God's scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me and Joel, we're nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We're on our own."

He wrapped one arm and one leg around me and was silent and still for a stretch of time, and I drifted into sleep. After a while Manny started up again, talking to himself, plotting, saying, "What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to heaven," and as he said the words, the picture formed in my mind: my brothers and me, flailing our arms, rising, the world telescoping away, falling up past the stars, through space and blackness, floating upward, until we were safe as seed wrapped up in the fist of God.

Wasn't No One to Stop This

I
N THE EVENING,
we drew a chalk circle in the street and divided the circle into three sections. We had a blue rubber ball, and we each stood in one of the sections and smacked the ball with our palms, from one to the other, trying to keep the ball alive. With each smack, we imitated our Paps.

"This is for raising your voice—"

"And this is for embarrassing me in public—"

"And this is for doing something—"

"And this is for doing nothing—"

"And this—"

There was the gutter, which caught the ball when we missed, and there were cars that came fast around the bend, then slowed upon seeing us. We stood to the side of the road and looked hard at the drivers through the glass as they passed. If there were kids in the cars, we showed them our tongues or our middle fingers. We had nylon fall jackets, windbreakers with collapsible hoods that rolled up and zipped into the neck like a parachute. We had our blue ball and our anger and the evening sky moving into twilight and the peaks of the roofs against that darkening sky, the antennae, the telephone cables, and somewhere we had a crow calling.

Manny said, "There's white magic and there's black magic," and we believed him.

Lately, Manny was always trying to explain to Joel and me about God. He led us out into the woods and had us hunt for mushrooms, poisonous mushrooms, put on earth by God to work his black magic. There were white mushrooms with oily black undersides and flat, rippled mushrooms clinging to rotted-out logs, and mushrooms that puffed out a yellow smoke of spores when squeezed, but none of them contained God's black magic, and then the last of the light was gone, and all was dark.

We were cold, but we wouldn't go home yet. There had been other children earlier; they kept separate from us, but we heard them playing in the street, and we heard as they were called inside one by one for supper. I was afraid of the dark, but no one knew; I'd never spoken the fear. I was afraid of black magic; I was afraid of poison—and when Manny and Joel decided to see who could throw the rubber ball hard enough to break the window of the Grices' camper, which had been parked in the same spot for as long as we could remember, two wheels holding up the back and the front supported by a stack of grayed lumber—I was afraid we'd be punished, but I kept my mouth shut.

The ball thudded against the glass and rolled back toward where we crouched at the edge of the woods. A light flicked on in a back room of the house.

"They can't see shit out here, they can't see us."

We waited, and after a short time the light shut.

"Use a rock this time," Joel said to Manny.

"Let's just wait a minute, or else they'll get suspicious."

We crouched in the dirt and smelled the air. With the backs of our hands, we rubbed life into the tips of our noses. We sucked back snot. After a while Joel mumbled, "It's fucking cold," because someone had to say the obvious so that the other two could ignore him, and in this way we knew that no one wanted to go home. A while after that, Manny said, "White magic is like rabbits in hats and shit, card tricks, whatever."

The earth was hard and cool where we crouched, just damp enough to stick to our knees and the balls of our hands. The dirt squeezed up shut in the winter and softened in the summer, and autumn dirt was my favorite dirt, like cooled black coffee grinds. Black magic.

"Black magic is voodoo, snake-charming, poison," Manny said. "You could kill someone with black magic."

Manny threw the rock, and then we were running, at the full speed of terror, along the edge of the woods, running, running, running, falling down and catching our breath, with the sound of the shattering glass playing over and over in our minds, the sound of permanence, the delightful, shocking sound of damage done.

We turned back and watched the Grices' house to see if we were being followed, and sure enough the Grices' son, the headbanger, appeared—two years older than Manny and stick thin. He walked down the middle of the street, swinging a flashlight at his side. When he came to the spot where we had drawn our chalk circle, he stopped and ran his light along the circle's outside edge. He raised the light higher in the air so he could see the drawing in its entirety. Then he kept walking down the road toward the dead end where we crouched at the woods' edge.

"Boys," he sang, "boyyyys."

Manny got up and walked to the log that marked the end of the road and sat, so that the headbanger would see Manny when he arrived—see that Manny wasn't hiding. Joel and I followed, swiping the dirt from our knees and rubbing our palms.

"Three dogs on a log," the boy said and swept the light back and forth across us. We shielded our eyes. The Dead End sign glowed yellow in the flashlight's reflection, and the headbanger held the light there and laughed.

"Everything's different in the dark," he said, then switched off the light and joined us on the log, dogged with us.

"Well, hiya, fellas. How you fellas doin'?"

He knew it was us who had just broken the window on that old camper—that much was obvious—and there was an odd humor in his voice. The headbanger had been sniffing around us lately, trying to joke with us; we didn't know why; could be nothing more than we were the only ones near his age who were still out well past supper, could be something meaner. He came from up north, he claimed, from Texas, from California. Blond-white hair fell long and stringy down his back but was cut short at the sides and front. He was always pulling at his crotch and telling as many lies as he could cram into a sentence. This type of boy was everywhere around us, but mostly we kept separate, us three half-breeds in our world, and the white-trash boys in theirs. We had been as warned against them as they had against us, and besides, we didn't need them; we had each other for games and hunts and scraps. We still ran thick; Manny up front, making rules, and Joel to break all of them, and me keeping the peace as best I could, which sometimes meant nothing more than falling down to my knees and covering my head with my arms and letting them swing and cuss until they got tired, or bored, or remorseful. They called me a faggot, a pest, left me black and blue, but they were gentler with me than they were with each other. And everyone in the neighborhood knew: they'd bleed for me, my brothers, had bled for me.

And then this headbanger swooped in with his "Hiya, fellas" and tore us open, thinned what was thick.

And not even from our block, just moseying up the street with one hand stuffed into his pocket, pulling on his crotch from inside his dungarees. "I said, 'Hiya, fellas,' can't you talk?"

And Manny, "What you want?"

And Joel, "Yeah, what you want anyway?"

And this headbanger, "I want to show you something. I got something good to show and nobody to show it to."

"You talking about black magic?" Joel asked.

"Shut up, Joel," said Manny.

I waited for Manny to tell the headbanger to get the hell off our log, off our block; I waited for Manny to turn back to us, to turn his back fully on the headbanger, call him a clown, then turn to us and say, "OK, this is what's up for tonight, you listening?"

But Manny kept his head forward.

"What you got?" he asked the headbanger.

And Joel, "Yeah, what you got, anyway?"

The headbanger stood and clicked on the flashlight and said, "Come here."

We followed him to the road, and he raised the flashlight high on our sectioned chalk circle as he had before, so that all of it was illuminated.

"You know what this means?"

There were the crickets and the lights in the windows of all the houses. We were cold. I put my thumb in my mouth and tasted the dirt.

"Peace," the headbanger said, "this here's a sign of peace."

Manny laughed, a knowing puff of air through his nose, then he bent his head back, raised his gaze from the pavement to the stars, right up into God's eyes. Lately, Manny looked out, looked up, looked into everyone and everything, not just us.

And then this headbanger said, "I got something else to show you. Something good. Better."

"That right?" Manny asked.

And so we followed him home.

In the front room, the headbanger's father smoked, washed in blue from the light of the television, one hand tucked into his armpit.

"They know what time it is?" he said to the headbanger as we filed into the house and past the television, our shadows sliding over him.

"They know."

In the kitchen, I rubbed my hands all over the table, which was smooth and lacquered and cool. The headbanger set out plastic cups of pop for us, and Manny and Joel drank in a too-fast way that made me nervous, gasping for breath between gulps. The father shut the television, and the noise of the crickets rushed in. The headbanger squinted and listened, not for the crickets, but for the father, for his next move. We knew that squint; what stunned us was the way the headbanger was moving his lips—wild, without voice. He was animal-eyed and white-haired and he stunned us. Without his voice, the headbanger told us not to move, or he prayed, or he cursed his father, a black magic voodoo curse, or he did all of those things at once, just by moving his lips, this kid.

We listened to the father stomp up the stairs and into the bedroom. A door slammed shut, and then another TV started up. I fumbled my cup, and the pop ran to the slit in the middle of the table and made a noise as it fell, exactly like someone pissing on the floor.

"Leave it," the headbanger said, opening the basement door and summoning us over with a curled finger.

We made the headbanger switch on the fluorescent light and go down the stairs in front of us. We took three steps, then bent, looked all over for traps, weapons, other kids. We took three more steps, paused. Manny said, "You sleep down here?"

"Upstairs."

"Shit smells."

"It's a basement, what do you want? You fellas chicken-shit or something? Ain't you never been in a basement?"

"Sure I have," Manny said.

"We all have," said Joel. "Together. The three of us. Plenty of times."

But the headbanger wasn't listening; he had moved to a chest and was pulling out a blanket.

Three steel posts held up the floor of the house above. The ceiling was striped with rolls of insulation nailed to the underside of the floor with a nail gun, and one long strip had unpeeled itself, or been torn down, and now kissed the basement's dirt floor. The tuft of fiberglass was thick and pink and exposed. The headbanger led us to a corner room, sectioned off by three flaking wooden shutters. A gap between two of the shutters functioned as a doorway, and for the door there was a bed sheet patterned with winged helmets.

Inside this room sat an old console television and a VCR.

"I'm getting a couch," the headbanger said as he unfurled a ratty tiger-shaped throw onto the floor. Dust flew up and hung in the dank air, and we fanned our hands in front of our noses and coughed. From the hind waistband of his dungarees, hidden under his shirt, the headbanger produced a black plastic rectangle, a VCR tape, and displayed the tape with both hands in front of him, like a steering wheel. The title had been inked out with black marker.

"This is it," he said, "this is what I wanted to show you."

The tape began, the image rolled a few times over the screen, then settled and sharpened. A white kid, a teenager, was on a bed, turning the pages of a book. There was a knock on the door, and an older man entered; he called him Dad.

"Dad," he said, "what do you want?"

"I want to know how come you haven't done the dishes like I told you."

One time, months ago, at the public pool, a mother, talking distractedly to her daughter, who was probably five or six, took a left instead of a right, and walked into the men's changing room, where my brothers, my father, myself, and other men and boys were showering, changing, clothed and naked. The mother had flushed and covered her daughter's eyes, instinctively; she had put both hands over her daughter's face and hustled her from the locker room. And the men—who never looked at nor spoke to each other outside their own kin—the men had suddenly looked around from one to the next, and after a pause, they had all erupted in laughter.

"
My goodness
," the mother had said, just before grabbing the girl and shielding her eyes. "
My goodness.
" I remembered that.

And the TV, "Aw shucks, Daddy, leave me alone!"

And the TV, "Don't you talk back to me."

We sat on the tiger, each of us holding our knees in the crooks of our elbows—sucker-punched, hypnotized. There was the musty smell, the dirt underneath. There was the headbanger, who had been whistling, claiming, "You never seen a tape like this, I'll bet you never"—now gone quiet, mouth breathing. A film of sweat seeped over my palms, and with the sweat came heat and nausea. There was white magic and there was black magic.

And the TV, "Aw, I didn't mean nothing by it!"

Our Paps didn't truck in pornography; he had told us so and told the truth; if he had dirty tapes or pictures, we would have found them. Once, at a garage sale, we had come across a cardboard box with Adults Only scrawled across. The old man had laughed at us from his lawn chair. "You go on ahead," he had said, "but you see a lady stop by to have a look at my dishes, you just step on away from that box."

We had seen flesh, women, sex parts, and sex acts, but only in still pictures. This man, this teenager, they were alive, or had been once—in this sparse room, just a bed, sheets, a book, one continuous shot, no angles, no cutting away, like a home movie.

"You're going to learn your lesson, young man."

My goodness,
the mother had said, in the locker room, as if her goodness was a special treat stolen out of her hands by a naughty bird.

"Pull down your underwear."

I had seen mothers cover the ears of their children when someone was cussing or when the mothers needed to cuss themselves. And I had seen a woman cover a child's ears when another spoke against God.