The Animals: A Novel (10 page)

They leaned against the car then, smoking, silently watching the front of Landrum’s where a bright wash of light flooded across the sidewalk. A couple of men stood and smoked in the glow, their shadows casting out toward the street. Beyond that small oasis there was nothing, as if everything south of the restaurant had dissolved, as if everything outside this tiny pocket of light had faded away and was gone.

There he is, Rick said.

The man had come out of the restaurant now, turning away from them, downhill along the sidewalk. At the sight of him, Rick flicked his cigarette and broke immediately into a run, Nat behind him, soundless but for their feet striking the concrete, their bodies crossing through that light and into the darkness beyond.

The man had not yet reached the next intersection when Rick caught up with him and did not seem to understand they were there even as Rick’s pipe struck him across the back of his legs and he fell to the sidwalk like some cut-string marionette.

Motherfucker, Rick said. You don’t fucking talk to me like that.

Rick moved forward as the man rolled away from him and staggered to his feet again, his legs bent weakly but his hands already up, open-palmed, Rick swinging the pipe back and forth. From where Nat stood the two bodies were backlit by the traffic light at the intersection, their halos red and then green again. Someone in a passing car howled, the sound of it echoing up the street.

You just fucked yourself, the man said.

I doubt that, Rick said. He lunged forward with the pipe, feinted, and then lunged again, and this time the man’s fist whipped out and struck him full in the face. Rick stood there a moment, the pipe still clenched in his fist, and Nat thought that it might already be over. You stupid fuck, Rick said, and in the next instant he was advancing down the street again, walking towards the man and slashing with the pipe, the man dancing backwards and sideways, his body all ropy sinew and muscle, like an older, harder, more tattooed version of Rick himself, and when he stopped and changed direction, flashing forward all at once, Rick’s motion was caught short and their silhouettes became entangled, the light turning red again as their twinned breath steamed the air like a pale cloud.

Nat had been following behind, holding the bat over his shoulder as if a baseball might come shuttling out of the dark toward him. It felt like a scene unfolding in a movie or a television show. And yet it was he who held the baseball bat and it was Rick before him who was caught now in some kind of choke hold. The man leaned back, Rick’s feet nearly off the ground, and in the next moment the pipe tumbled free of Rick’s grip and went ringing off the curb.

When he swung the bat it was without clear direction or thought. He brought it down at an angle and the man saw it at the final instant, turning away from the blow as the bat struck him in the long muscle of his lower back, the impact vibrating into Nat’s clenched hands.

There was a long yowl of pain and Rick stumbled forward out of his grasp. Fuck fuck fuck, the man yelled.

Nat lifted the bat again, the man stumbling in a tight circle but always facing him, his teeth drawn tight in a hissing grimace. He might have swung but then Rick was at his side. Give it to me, he said, and Nat did so, and Rick came forward, holding it above his shoulder.

Yeah go ahead, faggot, the man said. Hit me with the fucking bat again. That’s a fair fight. Come on tough guy.

When Rick swung, the man did not seem to understand at first what was happening, as if he believed that his words would end the fight, that Rick would simply turn and walk away. The bat struck him in the shoulder and this time he went down, sprawling onto the concrete of the sidewalk, his shadow a sharp arrow pointing up toward Nat as the light changed to green once again. And Rick swung and kept on swinging, the man arching, twisting in upon himself, his legs spinning in place as if he was pedaling a bicycle, and the sound he made was a long terrible moan.

Fuck you, Rick shouted, repeating it with each blow. Nat’s own voice had become a long chain of syllables pulling out of him in the adrenaline rush—Whoa whoa whoa—his hands on Rick’s shoulders, pressing him, trying to push him away, but Rick continuing to swing and kick and rage.

Stop, Nat said. The man was coughing and his exhaled breath contained within it a gurgling moan. Stop stop, Nat said. And then: Look at me.

And now Rick looked, looked from the man on the sidewalk to Nat.

That’s enough, Nat said.

Rick nodded and then looked back at the man one last time. The man did not move at all now, his shape curled into a tight ball, the tattoos that encircled his left arm seeming to dance up and down that path of flesh.

Don’t let us see you again, motherfucker, Rick said.

The street seemed to have flooded somehow, seemed to be underwater, as if he was pressed up against a curved glass wall. An aquarium. A bubble. And yet everything clear and bright and clean and you are a fish the color of silver night, moving through it, moving up through the stones, through a current you cannot even feel.

After a few steps they were both jogging up the hill and when they reached the car again they were panting and Rick’s grin was a bright white arc floating in the black air.

Christ almighty, Rick said, did you see how he fell?

The adrenaline that coursed through Nat’s body was like electricity. Like fire. He could not feel if he was smiling or not.

Don’t let anyone fuck with you, Rick said. That’s one thing I learned inside. That goes for you too. Fucking Atari thieves can go fuck themselves.

Yeah, Nat said. He thought of Mike. Of the Atari they no longer owned. Then he thought of the muddy watering hole. The water buffalo. The little birds that rode upon their shoulders.

Goddamn, Rick said, there’s nothing like a good fight to make you feel better about the world.

That’s the truth, Nat said, although he had no idea what either of them were saying at all.

5

NOT A SINGLE TREE IN ALL THOSE ENDLESS MILES, NOT EVEN
on the flanks of the mountains that rise above the desert floor in all directions, the road coming down from the west, descending Golconda Summit in a slow curve before slipping into a straight black line that shoots across the shadscale without deviation like the trace of a gunshot. It seems impossible that anyone would live in a place like this, a place without trees, but along the ruler line of the highway stand occasional homes that crouch in the dry and colorless dust as if hunching against the desert wind that blasts down the slope of that summit and into the flats. Whether those homes are abandoned or occupied it is impossible to tell.

When the town appears it is as if someone has taken a collection of such homes and gathered them into a grid a few miles wide. Humboldt and Broad and Main and Reese and Scott, across them the graph of numbered streets at the far edge of which rests a line of trailers and the blocky turquoise-painted Laundromat. The school is nearby, as are the three ponds, an area familiar to every child in the town as it becomes, with the start of Little League baseball season each year, a congregating point for bicycles and motorbikes, children and teens swooping and yelling and reeling everywhere. To the north, a short few blocks, is Front Street and along its length run Lemaire’s, the Quick, the Pak-Out, the Happy Ox, known to all as the Queer Steer, and two weather-beaten casinos, their flat fronts situated side by side: the Owl Club and the Nevada Club. A few blocks east of the casinos sits the Shell station, its sign suspended atop two white poles high in the air, the lightbulbs illuminating the S perpetually burned out so that the message it sends in bright yellow letters across miles and miles of desert is an invitation to hell.

For a long time there is only the anonymity of quiet movement: paint-stripped cars adrift on dusty streets, a few sweating figures on the sidewalks in front of the casinos. But then there you are: a boy come racing through the afternoon light in an undulating swoop between lines of boxlike homes, the fences of which guard patches of yellow grass. It is the dead center of the hot summer of 1974 and you sit on the handlebars of a bicycle piloted by your brother and you are smiling.

Your father has been in the ground four years and your brother—seventeen now—has become your entire world. On the hottest days he takes you down to the river near the iron shape of the Black Bridge and you build forts from the willow branches and swim and catch frogs and fish. A few weeks ago the two of you rode inner tubes from that bridge to the next, a journey of only a few miles stretched into a day so long and glorious that you will remember it ever after as the one perfect day of all your life. Today he has ridden you on the handlebars of his bicycle to the corner store, Lemaire’s. He bought you a candy bar as he picked up two packs of cigarettes, one for your mother and one for himself, and now you are riding back across town, again on the handlebars, your brother taking a long, looping route, up and down streets lined with the worn and beaten homes of kids you know from school and the empty shell of what was once the town’s only movie theater. You miss being in that giant dark room with your brother beside you. It did not even matter what film was playing.
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
.
Robin Hood.
One time he took you to see a movie called
Magnum Force
, telling you it had to be a secret. He was excited to see it and his excitement made you excited as well but in the warm dark space of the theater you grew bored and closed your eyes and drifted off to sleep. When you woke, it was to your brother shaking you softly and calling you by the nickname he had used since before you could remember: Hey, Champaign. Wake up, buddy. Movie’s over. You will remember that feeling for the rest of your life: that you are in exactly the place you are meant to be. You wonder now if you will ever feel that way again.

When the bicycle chain breaks you nearly come off the front of the handlebars. Bill shouts, Whoa! as you coast to a stop.

You jump down. What happened?

Chain slipped, he says. He looks down and then steps off the bike.

You hold the handlebars and he kneels. Dang, he says. Chain
broke
. He emphasizes this second word, so sharp is his sense of surprise.

Can you fix it? you say.

I don’t know. I hope so. He stands, looks up and down the street as if a bicycle repairman might be within his field of vision.

You are only four dusty blocks from the trailers and so Bill lets you ride on the seat as he pushes the bicycle, sometimes hurling the machine forward so that you can pilot it in its long coast to a standstill.

The trailers are arrayed in two short rows in the dry and colorless dust, each ringed with a variety of household goods like debris washed up from some ancient inland ocean: abandoned sofas and broken cars, discarded air conditioning units, bent and unusable folding chairs. Some hold to stretches of brief and haggard fencing wrapping an idea of yard filled with the broken stubble of dead grass. Many have ramshackle stairs leading up to their front doors, and all of them, each and every one, peel and rust and bake under the summer sun and the seemingly endless hot wind blowing down from Golconda Summit to the west.

You are walking beside the bike now, Bill pushing it forward across the dirt beside the road. It is then that you see him: a boy of about your age who looks up at you as Bill upends the bike in the dust, its wheels hanging in the air like twin zeros. Sweet bike, he says.

It was, Bill says, turning toward the trailer.

Chain broke, you say.

Bummer. The boy wears a bright blue T-shirt with a rubbery soccer ball iron-on that looks hot and damp in the summer heat. A red bandanna is wrapped around his forehead, most of it covered by dark shaggy hair that falls in wild curls nearly to his eyes.

Your brother has disappeared inside the trailer now and you and the boy say nothing while you stand waiting for him, both of you staring at the bike. When Bill reappears a few moments later, he is lugging the heavy red toolbox that had been your father’s.

That’s a cool bike, Rick says to him again.

Yeah, thanks, Bill says. He is already kneeling in the dust and has clicked open the toolbox but he looks up at Rick now. You new around here?

Yeah, we just got here.

Moving into Mrs. Brown’s?

Who’s Mrs. Brown?

That one, Bill says, pointing to the trailer.

Oh, yeah, Rick says. Me and my mom and dad.

I’m Bill, he says and he puts his hand out and the boy shakes it briefly. This is Nat.

You nod, wondering if you and the boy should shake hands as well but the boy only nods and says, Cool, and then turns his attention back to the bike.

Bill has pulled the chain loose and squats there upon the dry earth, staring at where the links have broken free.

Hey, uh, Bill, Rick says, can I bum a smoke?

Bill looks up at him, squinting at the new kid through a tousle of thick brown hair bleached almost blond by the summer sun. Heck, no, you cannot bum a smoke, he says.

Come on, man, Rick says. I’m out.

How old are you?

Thirteen.

Bill looks at him. No way.

Am too.

What year were you born?

Nineteen …

Bill waits, smiling, and then says, Yeah that’s what I thought. How old are you?

Twelve.

Twelve?

Almost twelve.

How old are you now, Champaign? Bill says.

Same, Nat says. Almost twelve.

Bill chuckles.

Oh come on, the new boy says. When’d you start smoking?

Maybe I never started smoking, Bill says. That shit’ll kill you.

Life’ll kill you.

Where’d you hear that?

Just made it up.

Sure you did. Bill makes a sound, an exhalation that is like a tire losing air. No sale, kid, he says.

Shoot. I had to try.

And you did. Bill swivels around to look at you. This is gonna take a while. You might as well go find something to do.

The disappointment shows on your face. We were gonna go to the gravel ponds, you say.