Fragile Beasts (2 page)

I
hope he was drunk. I guess it’s probably not the best thing for a kid to wish when his dad was out driving, but I don’t care. If he was drunk, he was either happy or mad; he was either singing along with the country-western station while thinking about beer-commercial-caliber women and Klint’s future, or he was scowling into the black night muttering about the latest injustice life had dealt him; but either way he wouldn’t have realized what was coming.

People are finally starting to leave. I can hear their low voices outside my window and the crunch of gravel beneath their tires as they pull out of our driveway and away from the side of the road.

Red and blue lights flash on my wall for an instant as the state trooper starts up his cruiser. He told me earlier if Dad had been wearing his seat belt he might have lived, which to me was like saying if he’d been a foot taller he might have been a better basketball player.

He wouldn’t tell me if he was drunk or not. He said it didn’t matter, and I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs, “It’s the
only
thing that matters!” but I knew everyone in the room would look at me like I was crazy. Crazy with grief, they’d say, when all I am is sensible.

A creaking footstep stops outside my bedroom, and I close my eyes so whoever looks in on me will think I’m asleep.

The door opens. It shuts. The footsteps walk away.

I keep my eyes closed not because I’m tired but because everything in my room reminds me of Dad. We didn’t have a lot in common; about the only interests we shared were hot wings and Klint. Most of the stuff I own I have in spite of him: my books, my four-foot-high erector set model of the Eiffel Tower I built when I was eight and never dismantled, my art supplies and sketch pads, all my drawings and paintings in various stages of completeness
scattered everywhere, all the cool rocks, bird feathers, dead bugs, dried leaves, bones, and pieces of broken glass I’ve collected on my treks through the woods that Dad called my “nature crap,” and my set of Van Gogh playing cards I got on a seventh-grade field trip to the Carnegie Art Museum in Pittsburgh. Everything in this room belonged to a kid with a dad, and those things are still here and he isn’t. I had a dad this morning. I had a dad four hours ago.

How can someone be gone just like that?

He had plans. This is the thing I can’t stop thinking about. They weren’t big plans. Nothing ambitious or complicated or admirable. Definitely not anything that could ever be considered a goal. His needs were simple, and his desires even simpler.

Take today for instance. After Klint and I started off to Hamilton’s farm for their annual September barbecue, we knew he planned to drive to the Rayne Drop Inn for Wing Night. He was going to tie one on with a couple of his buddies and eat greasy chicken drenched in hot sauce. He’d shoot some pool and hope to pick up a woman, but he’d never succeed at it. He planned to drive off into the inky black country darkness in his truck with the new chrome deer antlers mounted on the grill, confident in his ability to get safely to where he was going despite his inability to remember where he was going and why he had left the place he was leaving. He planned to sleep until noon the next day and watch the Steelers game. Then he’d go to a job he hated on Monday because it paid the bills. But, most important of all, he planned on living.

What’s the point of even making plans if they can be erased in an instant? What’s the point of even getting up in the morning?

I pull my knees up against my chest and try to make myself into a little ball. My jeans smell like dirt and a smoky wood fire, and my hands smell like the hot dog I roasted for Shelby Jack just a couple hours ago.

I pull my T-shirt up to my nose to see if any of Shelby’s scent rubbed off on me. She always smells good. I don’t know if it’s from a soap she uses or a shampoo or perfume or maybe it’s just the way she smells naturally. I can’t describe it because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s purely her.

Talk about having plans. I had plans for tonight, too. Sitting next to her on a log, our shoulders touching, the fire so hot in front of us and the night air so cold on our backs. Her laughing and smiling and smelling Shelbylicious.

It took everything in my power not to reach out and touch her hair. Not
because I’m a sex fiend or disrespectful to women or anything like that. My fingers are drawn to it the same way they’re drawn to the velvety noses on the Hamilton dairy cows.

It’s long, shiny, and dark and in the firelight, parts of it have a reddish glow like there might be a coal smoldering underneath it.

I was planning on kissing her and finally touching her hair. I’d fantasized about it for a while. Then I decided to make it a goal, something I could work toward, something I was definitely going to do or else feel like a loser.

I didn’t even care that she had a thing for Klint. All the girls around here are nuts over Klint. They’re always parading around in front of him in tight jeans and short skirts, pretending to stumble in the hall at school so they can bump up against him at his locker, calling their friends to find out if they’ve heard whether he’s going to show up at so-and-so’s party or whether he’ll be at the football game on Friday or which night he’s going to the Laurel County Fair. (And it’s always been the same night his entire life: Monster Truck Night.) They can try all they want. They don’t know what I know or if they did know, they’d think I was exaggerating.

People say the reason priests don’t have sex is because they’re married to the church. Klint’s married to baseball.

That doesn’t mean he loves baseball. I think the love has already gone out of it for him the same way love seems to go out of most marriages. But it doesn’t seem to matter to him. He’s committed for better or worse, in sickness and in health, ’til death do him and second base part.

I had been ready to make my move on Shelby. I had roasted a perfect hot dog for her: golden, charred just a little, the skin starting to split, and the juices leaking out. I asked her if she wanted me to get her a bun and she said no, she wanted to eat it off the stick. I told her that’s my favorite way to eat it, too, and she gave me a funny look and said, “I know, Kyle. I’ve known you forever.”

I liked the way she said it. I liked that it was true.

I was about to tell her I thought the fire was getting too hot and ask her if she’d like to take a walk, but then Bill came driving up to the barn and got out of his truck, crying.

I get up off my bed and head to my window to look for Mr. B. I know there’s no chance he’ll come around with all this commotion going on, but I’d like to see him.

Something in the carpet catches my eye, and I stop to pick it up. This used to be my little sister’s room, and every once in a while I find some tiny sparkly reminder of her. It’s usually a bead from a jewelry-making kit, or a sequin from her dress-up clothes, or a dried dab of glitter glue.

This time it’s a little silver high-heeled Barbie doll shoe.

I stick it in my pocket and continue on to the window. I push open the screen and lean out and try to make my mind a blank.

I know I’m not doing the things I’m supposed to be doing.

I haven’t prayed for Dad’s soul yet. I haven’t even thought about heaven and, if it exists, if he’s up there lying on a couch made of clouds drinking from a solid gold beer cozy shooting the shit with Roberto Clemente. Or if it’s the kind of heaven where he wouldn’t care about beer and baseball and couches anymore and he’d just float around being blissful. I haven’t tried to comfort myself by believing that either one could be true and that someday I’ll see him again when I die.

I haven’t cried yet.

Klint did. He bawled like a baby. I couldn’t watch him. I walked away because I knew if I stayed, I’d start crying, too, but I would have been crying because my brother was crying, not because my dad was dead, and that seemed wrong.

I haven’t let myself really think about what happened. I haven’t asked myself all the important questions, like once he missed the curve and lost control, did he know he was going to die? When his truck started somersaulting down over the mountain, did he have time to understand what was happening? Was he scared? Was he sad? Did he think about us? Was he worried about what would happen to us? Did his life flash before his eyes like it’s supposed to? Did he see a movie in his mind where he was a little kid getting tucked into bed by Grandma Bev, and then he was a young man marrying Mom, and then he was a proud father watching Klint get his first Little League MVP trophy?

Did it hurt? The state trooper said he died instantly. Died instantly after having his neck broken. What about before he died instantly? What about while his neck was being broken?

What if terror, pain, and loneliness were the last things he felt, and now there will never be a chance for him to feel anything else?

I haven’t asked myself any of those questions yet.

All I can think about are his plans. He had a lot of plans but no goals. He
and Mom used to fight about that, but they used to fight about a lot of things so I never placed more importance on that particular topic than any other. Maybe I should have.

I remember when I started sixth grade three years ago, our new teachers gave us one of those getting-to-know-you forms to take home and fill out. It asked things like: What’s your favorite subject? and Do you have any special concerns about integrating into a larger student population? One of the questions was: What are your goals for middle school?

I was reading that question out loud to Mom while I was sitting at the kitchen table and she was trying to tear open a bag of frozen french fries without breaking a nail and without letting the ash from the end of her cigarette fall onto the counter—a feat I always regarded as a skill—when Dad and Klint came through the back door. Dad was all smiles, which meant Klint had a good night in the cage.

Dad had heard the question and he grinned at me and rubbed his knuckles on the top of my head as he passed by on his way to the fridge for a beer and said, “Goals are what you score in hockey.”

Mom had resorted to trying to tear the bag open with her teeth. I saw her give him a nasty look over the top of the bright red Ore-Ida bag before she took it out of her mouth long enough to tell him that just because he was a loser without any goals didn’t mean he should try and make his kids losers, too.

He slammed the refrigerator door hard enough to make the dishes in the cupboards rattle. Mom made a motion like she was going to throw the bag of frozen fries at him, but she thought better of it and put it back between her lips and he walked back outside.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. My parents were always loud and violent with each other, even when they weren’t fighting.

Sometimes they were loudly and violently in love and Dad would chase Mom around the house roaring about what a lucky man he was, and he would catch her and she would squeal and shriek as he smacked her butt or planted loud sloppy kisses on her neck, and Klint and I would watch gratefully as they went out to the bars to continue celebrating Dad’s good fortune before returning home a few hours before dawn and waking us up with thuds as they stumbled through the house on the way to their bedroom. The rest of the time they were loudly and violently not in love with each other: Mom throwing things and screaming at Dad that he was a loser who couldn’t get it up, and
Dad kicking furniture and telling her she was a lazy slut whose tits were starting to sag.