We the Animals (8 page)

"Bend over my lap."

Wasn't no one to stop this. My brothers. Wasn't no one.

"Daddy, please."

We had seen flesh, but still pictures, women. And, too, we had seen each other's bodies—all of us, me and Manny and Joel, Ma and Paps—we had seen one another beaten, animal bleating in pain, hysterical, and now drugged, and now drunk and glazed, and naked, and joyous, heard high laughter, squeals and tears, and we had seen each other proud, empty proud, spite proud, and also trampled, also despised. We boys, we had always seen so much of them, penniless or flush, in and out of love with us, trying, trying; we had seen them fail, but without understanding, we had taken the failing, taken it wide-eyed, shameless, without any sense of shame.

"This is for—"

Wasn't none of it nothing like this.

"And this is for—"

Wasn't us. Didn't have nothing to do with us.

"Yeah, you like that, don't you."

Why won't you look at me, my brothers, why won't you take my eyes?

Niagara

M
ANNY AND JOEL
were flunking, so when a man paid my father to drive a package up to Niagara Falls, it was me Paps took out of school for two days; it was me he brought along for company. We drove for four hours; Paps didn't say much, just that we were headed east, around Lake Ontario, hugging the shore. We stayed in a dusty motel room, and in the morning Paps took me to see the falls, and there, at the rustling and noisy edge, he hoisted me into the air and folded me across the railing so that my torso was suspended above the thick gushing cords of water and the mist was kissing me all over my neck and face, and when I didn't kick or scream, he leaned me out farther and he put his lips to my ear and he said, "Do you know what would happen if I let you go?"

And I said, "What?"

And he said, "You'd die."

The water was tripping over itself, splashing and hypnotizing, and I tried to fix my mind on a chunk of it, like each little ripple was a life that began far away in a high mountain source and had traveled miles pushing forward until it arrived at this spot before my eyes, and now without hesitation that water-life was hurling itself over the cliff. I wanted my body in all that swiftness; I wanted to feel the slip and pull of the currents and be dashed and pummeled on the rocks below, and I wanted him to let me go and to die.

Later, Paps pulled up to a little museum of curiosities and handed me a five-dollar bill and told me he'd be back in an hour to pick me up.

"What happens when you die?" I asked.

"Nothing happens," he said. "Nothing happens forever."

The museum had wax replicas of freakish heads—people born with two pupils to each eye or forked tongues—and old sepia pictures of Siamese twins and babies with tails. There was a small room with a low ceiling and a bench where a three-minute film was being projected on a loop. The film showed men in barrels, smiling and waving and giving the thumbs-up to the camera as they approached the falls and then disappearing over its sudden edge.
While some of these daredevils miraculously survived,
the narrator droned,
many more met their tragic ends.

Hours passed. A man came by twice and poked his head into my theater and looked at me questioningly. The third time, he came in and sat next to me and asked, "How many times you plan on watching this crap?"

I shrugged my shoulders. He was wearing corduroy pants, and I would have liked to drag my fingernail across his thigh.

"You hiding?"

"I'm just sitting here," I said.

"Yeah, never mind," he said. "I guess you're a bit young for that. What about your folks?"

"My father's coming to get me. He should be here any minute."

The man stood up and looked down at me. The film projected across his shirt and cut him off at the waist, so that he looked like a giant, rising up out of the great Niagara.

"You tell your father to come and see me in the ticket booth when he shows up. I'd like to meet him."

When he left, I stood where he had been, and the waterfall projected across my face and arms. I moved closer to the wall so that the waterfall swallowed me up and I danced. I pretended I was a mer-boy prince and it was my job to try and catch all the men in barrels and save them from their deaths, but when I cupped my hands and reached up, they always slipped through. When they disappeared over the edge, I danced a special underwater dance, so that their souls could go up to heaven. Soon I stopped trying to save them at all because I was consumed in the death dance; spinning on my toes and looking down at my body, the water slipping and rushing over me, I slithered my arms and wiggled my hips against the current.

When I looked up, Paps was in the doorway, watching me. His arms were raised, resting on the top of the door frame, and the light poured in behind him, obscuring his expression from me, but I knew from his silhouetted muscles and close-cropped Afro that it was him, and I knew too that he had been standing there, watching me, for some time. He dragged his hands down the sides of the doorway and then slapped them against his legs.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

Out on the sidewalk, I looked behind us, half expecting the man in the corduroy pants to be running after, but we were alone.

We ate at a counter with spinning vinyl stools. We both had hot dogs; Paps broke his in half and stuffed an entire half into his mouth, then turned to look at me—his eyes wide and his cheeks bulging. I didn't laugh; he had left me there, alone, for too long.

It was dark by the time we got on the road. We drove all night. Paps said he was exhausted and it was my job to keep him awake. He kept yawning and yawning, and I stared up at his profile, watching his eyelid grow heavy and droop and finally close, then I'd grab his arm and shake him, and he'd say, "What? What happened?"

We didn't speak. I knew he was in a faraway world, half dreaming. When we pulled off the highway and onto the road that would bring us home, he said, "Yeah, it's a funny thing." He said it out of nowhere, as if we had been in conversation the entire time.

"I stood in that doorway, watching you dance, and you know what I was thinking?" He paused, but I didn't answer or turn to look at him; instead I closed my eyes.

"I was thinking how pretty you were," he said. "Now, isn't that an odd thing for a father to think about his son? But that's what it was. I was standing there, watching you dance and twirl and move like that, and I was thinking to myself,
Goddamn, I got me a pretty one.
"

The Night I Am Made

T
HEY GREW UP
wiry, long-torsoed, and lean. Their kneecaps, their muscles, bulged like knots on a rope. Broad foreheads and strong ridges along the brow announced their resemblance. Their cheeks hollowed, their lips barely covered their teeth and gums, as if the jaw and the skull inside wanted out.

They hunched and they skulked. They jittered. They scratched.

Out on the loading dock, in the lamplight, they watched the night. They watched their breath chill before them and float out into the cold dark. They stood hoodless in the snow, pinching the cotton filters from their cigarettes. They talked about breaking and entering. They loved to say about a thing that it was laced—their night, their drugs. Later, one of them will smash his face into the locker-room mirror over a girl, another will slice up his arms. They'll flunk. They'll roll one car after another into a ditch. Later they'll truck in all manner of pornography. Soon they'll drop out. At work, they'll fall in with all the other boys like them, boys with punched-out teeth, bad breath, easy winks. They'll skunk around in basement apartments with grown men who keep pet snakes in glass aquariums. Later still, they'll realize that those boys are actually nothing like them at all. Who knows this mutt life, this race mixing? Who knows Paps? All these other boys, the white trash out here, they have legacies, decades upon decades of poverty and violence and bloodlines they can trace like a scar; and these are their creeks, their hills, their goodness. Their grandfathers poured the cement of this loading dock. And downstate, in Brooklyn, the Puerto Ricans have language, they have
language.

Later, they'll see, ain't no other boys as pitiless, as new, as orphaned.

But out on that loading dock, they looked into the future and saw otherwise.

They felt proud to be the kind of boys they were—boys who spat in public, boys who kept their gaze on the floor or fixed on a space above your head, boys who looked you in the eye only to size you up or scare you off. When they bit the chapped skin from their lower lips, when they chewed up the web between thumb and pointer, when they scratched inside their ears with house keys, they were looking at memories, proud memories, blood memories, or else they were dreaming about their wild futures. Out on that loading dock they chanted,
Nah, man, Get out of here with that shit, Fuck that, Let me tell you how it was, Let me tell you how it's gonna be.

They weren't scared, or dispossessed, or fragile. They were possible. Soon they'd be sailing right over them ditches. Soon they'd be handling that cash. They'd decide. They'd forge themselves consequential. They'd sing the mixed breed.

And me now. Look at me. See me there with them, in the snow—both inside and outside their understanding. See how I made them uneasy. They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent. They believed I would know a world larger than their own. They hated me for my good grades, for my white ways. All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud.

Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still.

MIDNIGHT

W
E FINISHED OFF
the liquor, hopped down from the dock, and Manny tossed the empty bottle Hail Mary into the line of trees. We didn't hear it come down, we didn't hear a single rustle or thud—and we reveled in the joy of this silent miracle. Manny invented a black hole; Joel suggested that the bottle landed perfectly in a raccoon's yawning mouth; I just razzed,
That's the stupidest bullshit I ever heard.
We stepped into our shadows and the echoes of our laughter, headed nowhere. The alcohol warmed our bellies; the snowflakes thickened the air before us.

Around the corner there was the four-barreled steel Dumpster, and in the Dumpster's shelter hid the eight-nippled stray cat. We dug into our pockets for milk money; Manny had seventy-five cents. Fifteen minutes' walk to the gas station, no one was cold. At the counter we slid the change to the attendant, a Near Eastern man the hue and hulk of our Paps.

"You could be our father," I said, and Manny and Joel busted up into coughing laughter.

The man looked at our coins. "You're short."

We patted pockets, pretended to fish, came up empty. The lights inside cut into our smooth buzz; the counter's veneer had been coin-rubbed raw. This man wasn't nothing like our Paps.

"Go on, take it," he said. "Get out of here."

So we ambled back to our stray, grabbing at whatever we found along the shoulder and tossing it into the trees. If something—a rock, a flank of rubber—landed without making a sound, we erupted into cheers. Sometimes we pretended not to have heard the crashing; we cheered on anyway.

For a milk bowl we used the plastic lid of a five-gallon tub and the milk thinned into a shallow layer. Didn't look like much. Our stray barely raised her muzzle to sniff the air.

"She'll eat later," Joel said, "when we're gone."

This was our own Ma's pledge, when we used to worry for her.

The kittens clawed and pushed in the suckling pile; some seemed to be asleep at the tit; they were ugly, desperate things.

"How long before them kittens forget they're kin, start fighting and fucking each other?" Manny asked. "How long before they jump the runt?"

They both sniggered, and they were sniggering at me, the fay, the runt of our litter; we were once those kittens—three thick, three warm. And we blood-fought over a tin can of pet milk. And jump the runt was a trick mean as any they pulled on me.

"Fuck you," I said. I hadn't drunk half as much as either one of them—I took hesitant swigs or kept my lips closed and only pretended. But still I had drunk enough to be surprised at the sound of my own voice, and at the venom. "And fuck this creeping around. What are we doing out here anyway?"

"Hey now," said Joel.

"Chill," said Manny. "You're twisting up your panties."

They snorted out little chuckles from their noses.

"I'm tired of this. This is bullshit. This creeping around."

"Who's creeping?" asked Manny. "I'm just standing here."

"You're a creep," I said. "Look in the mirror. Can you even see yourself? You're always going on about God. And then the next minute you're talking about hos. As if you know shit about either one—as if God wasn't as disgusted by you as girls are."

"Oh shit!" said Joel, delighted.

"What, that makes you happy?"

"Kind of," Joel replied.

"Kind of," I mimicked. "You are so fucking ignorant. You embarrass me. Did you know that? That you embarrass me?"

"You hear that?" Manny said to Joel. "We embarrass him."

Look at my brothers—their saggy clothes, their eyes circled dark like permanent bruises, their hangdog hungry faces. I felt trapped and hateful and shamed. Secretly, outside of the family, I cultivated a facility with language and a bitter spite. I kept a journal—in it, I sharpened insults against all of them, my folks, my brothers. I turned new eyes to them, a newly caustic gaze. I sensed a keen power of observation in myself, an intelligence, but sour. Both Ma and Paps had held private conversations with me about my potential, about this bookishness that set me apart from my brothers; both encouraged me to apply myself—they hinted that I would have an easier time in this world than they had, than my brothers would ever have, and I hated them for that.

But the worst was pity.

"You know what? Forget it," I said. "Never mind."

They wouldn't abide my pity.

"You're fucked up," said Joel.

Manny scooped down and packed a snowball in his bare hands. He took up a branch, pitched the ball to himself, and whipped the air. The snowball exploded, and we all three watched the effect, a little storm within the storm.

"He's right," Manny said, turning on me in a flush, pointing the branch. "You're fucked up. Admit it."

He held the branch there, an inch from my nose. "Admit it."

Then Joel was behind me, locking my arms in a full nelson. I tried to shrug him off, but it was no use. They were both drunk; Manny held that damn branch right in front of my face. I imagined the welt of it slamming across the side of my head. And I wanted it.

"Either you're fucked up, or you're getting fucked up. Which one will it be?"

Look at us three, look at how they held me there—they didn't want to let me go.

"Go ahead, Manny, beat me with that stick. See if it makes you feel better." My voice started strong but ended soft, a whisper, a plea. "Just fucking beat me with it."

Manny pumped two fake swings; I flinched each time. Then he sighed in disgust, and Joel slacked off his grip. The stick dropped.

"Seriously," Manny said, quieter now, "you're acting fucked up. There is something seriously fucking wrong with you in the head. Let's talk about
that.
"

But we didn't. We couldn't.

We let the snow fall on us some more, white piled up on our hair, our heads like miniature mountains, until finally, in silence, we agreed to move into the shelter of the building's eave. Manny distributed a cigarette each to Joel and me, and we went about pulling out the filter. Still no one spoke, but the ritual eased the air between us—the spark of fire, the noisy exhalations, our little clouds of smoke.

Then, slowly, the jokes and shit talking picked up again, and I waited on the edges, as always, until Manny turned to address me.

"You know what she said to me the other day?"

I didn't ask who, because I knew who.

"She said you were capable of anything."

"Yep," said Joel, "she said some shit like that to me."

"She said you were so bright."

"So bright!"

"And you know what else? She said you were capable of destroying yourself."

"The way she talks about you," Joel said, "like you're a fucking crystal vase."

Manny roped his arm around Joel's neck. "In her mind, we're two of a kind." He pointed at me. "And you, you're—"

"A fucking golden egg."

"She wants us to protect you from the other kids."

Joel laughed. "Right? I told her it ain't like we're all still playing in the same goddamn sandbox, woman."

"And to protect you from yourself."

"It ain't like we're little boys."

"'He's still your little brother,' she says, 'he'll always be your little brother.'"

Look at me, how I itched to leave that loading dock; how I itched to leave that snowy hour.

"'Only if he wants to be,' I says."

"Fucking sacred lamb."

I held my hands up in front of me, surrender style, and walked backward, keeping my eyes on them, until I reached the building's edge.

"Where you going, girlie?"

"Where the fuck you think you're going?"

I made it to the corner and turned, down the sloping path, away from their taunts. They called out after me, putting an angry question mark at the end of my name. Their voices boomed huge in the dark cold air—like waves pounding me from behind.

They called and called and cackled, and the trees echoed with their noise.

Shit, let them bark.

Maybe it was true. Maybe there was no other boy like me, anywhere.

LATE NIGHT

I
SLIPPED AWAY
and walked the three miles to the bus station. Snow fell gently and swiftly, and when I looked behind me, my tracks were already snow-covered. This was what I'd been up to behind their backs, sleazing around the bus station's men's room. This was the scent they'd picked up.

I left the road and took a footpath that had been trampled through a hedge. The path led straight to the back of the bus station. If the lot was full enough, I could emerge from the hedge and walk between two parked buses to the men's room without anyone's seeing. There was no one to explain any of this to me; I figured out the routine on my own, in small, paranoid steps. For weeks I'd been sneaking to this bus station, lurking, indecisive. I hid in the stalls, peeked through the cracks. At the sink, I washed and washed my hands, unable to return the frank stares in the mirror. I didn't know how to show these men I was ready. The closest I came was with a man who held my chin and tilted my face up to meet his and told me I was a cute kid.

"You're a cute kid," he had repeated. "Now get the fuck out of here."

But this night only one bus idled in the lot. The driver inside spotted me and opened the release, and the door made a loud quick fart of pressurized air.

"New York?"

I pointed to the station. "I gotta pee."

"Not in there. Not at this hour."

"Why not?"

The driver ignored me, kept his eyes on the falling flakes. He wore the uniform, blue polyester slacks, a blue wool cardigan with the bus logo embroidered onto a pocket. A middle-aged man thick all over, down to his fingers, one of which he aimed at the windscreen. "Was scheduled to leave an hour ago, but the snow put a stop to that. Some snow this is, though, beautiful."

A blizzard. The air was warm; the flakes were wet and puffed and sticking; they cut in smooth, relentless, gentle diagonals to the ground. My brothers will lose themselves tonight; they'll search for me in the whiteness; they'll drown.

"Is the building closed?"

"Sent everybody waiting for New York on home. You want to go to New York, you come back in the morning. I'll take you there myself."

"No, sir."

"You got to pee so bad you come on up here."

The door sealed behind me, and I stopped on the top step, daring a look into the driver's eyes. He was done pretending. My heart raced; I looked all around for the door's release, but I could not figure it out.

"The bathroom's back there?"

The driver stood up from his seat. I held there for him, still. I wanted this.

Cold thick fingers wormed past my waistband; I held still. "You want me to make you," the driver said. "I'll make you. I'll make you."

And I was made.

I trudged back in the predawn. The winter sky was clouded over, all pink gloom. I wanted to look at myself as he had; I wanted to see my black curls peeking out from under my ski cap. What did he make of my thin chest? What did he make of my too-wide smile? He had blasted the heat, but the cold clung and hovered at the back of the bus. The cold gathered in the tips of those fingers, so everywhere he touched me was a dull stab of surprise. I wanted to stand before a mirror and look and look at myself. I opened my mouth and stretched my voice over the buzz of passing cars.