The Heaven of Animals: Stories (11 page)

The first sting is in my side. I see the bee caught in my shirt. It wriggles, trying to get free.

“All of the honey,” he says. “For you.”

I leap. I knock Aaron to the ground and pry the rake from his hands. I fling it like a javelin across the yard, far from the hive, and I sit on Aaron’s chest, hands pinning his wrists to the lawn.

A door opens, and a storm trooper steps out. Or that’s what she looks like, our neighbor dressed in white, some kind of beekeeper’s suit and what looks like a watering can at her side.

Her face is hidden behind something like a mask made for fencing, but, when she speaks, her words pierce the mask, clear and unfiltered.

“I don’t know what you kids are up to,” she says, “but, for the love of God, please don’t move.”

They say that, with enough adrenaline, you can do anything. You hear stories of men wrestling torn arms back from alligators and mothers lifting cars off their kids. I’m on top of Aaron, but I see too late that the weight of my body is nothing compared to what courses through his veins, and I see that I’ve failed him again.

“Please,” I say, and then I’m in the air. I’m flying. I’m falling. I’m tumbling, and I hit something, hard. The hive comes apart, the buzz turns to roar, and the moon, like magic, goes out of the sky.

I hear grunting and turn to see Aaron dragging himself toward me on his elbows. He’s like a soldier passing beneath barbed wire. The woman in the bee suit stands over him, pumping a thin fog from her can into the air.

I feel a sting, then another. My legs are lightning, and, soon, I can’t even look at Aaron, who’s no longer crawling, but rolling, a man on fire.

I look up, into the night, into the heart of the pulsing, vibrating ceiling above.

And then the swarm descends, looking, for all the world, like the end of the world.

Refund

T
he evening began in argument. Luke’s first-grade teacher had called a parent-teacher conference, and Joy and I were expected that night at school. This was not the standard midyear check-in. For months, we’d been getting notes. Luke wasn’t finishing his schoolwork. Luke didn’t play well with others. Luke wasn’t paying attention in class.

Dinner was over, the table cleared of everything but a cup, a fork, and my son’s plate. On the plate sat a sad mound of boiled-to-death broccoli.

“No cookies,” Joy said. “No dessert until dinner’s done.”

Luke had never been big on vegetables. Even as a baby, he’d spit out anything green.

“Broccoli’s good for you,” my wife said.

“Not like this,” Luke said. “Boiled vegetables have no nutritional value. That’s what turns the water green, the vitamins and minerals. What’s left is fiber. And fiber just makes you poop.”

My son, six years old.

Joy sighed and shot me a glance. “C’mon, Sam, back me up on this.”

In the pantry, the Oreos waited, their torn cellophane and the stale ones I always skipped on my way down the row to the cookies that still snapped when halved. I said nothing. A limp stalk hung from Luke’s fork, wet and terrible, and all I could think was how I hadn’t eaten mine.

Luke didn’t whimper. He didn’t whine or cry. He was a quiet kid. If he had complaints, he kept them mostly to himself. His fork rose, pushed the pale, little tree past his lips and into his mouth. He chewed, eyes closed, hating it.

“Let the kid have an Oreo,” I said.

Joy’s look let me know that, once again, I’d fucked up. We were supposed to be a team, to put up a unified front. But we both knew who was Abbott in this marriage and who was Costello, who looked like the idiot and who called the shots. And, even if I got the boy’s laughs, it was Joy who got the last good-night kiss, the first hug home from school.

Luke shoveled what was left on his plate into his mouth, chewed, and chased the broccoli down with milk from a coffee cup, the blue one with the steam engine circling the side.

“Very good,” Joy said. She pulled the Oreos from the pantry. Our rule was two, but, because he’d been such a good boy, Joy gave him three. Luke beamed and squeezed her arm. That
I
had been his Oreo advocate had, it seemed, slipped his mind.

Joy was always doing this, stealing the moment. Just that morning, I’d surprised the family with breakfast, only for Joy—Luke stumbling, sleepy, into the kitchen—to cry, “Look, honey, pancakes. We made you pancakes!”

There was no
we
about it as Luke pushed his face into Joy’s hip, hugged her leg. Then she got to sit with him, butter his cakes, and ladle warm syrup to his liking while I was stuck, sweating, behind the griddle. My fear was that she would leave me, and, that morning, it was as if I was out of the picture already, pushed past the mat, past the frame.

Luke was now on Oreo number three.

A man shouldn’t marry someone smarter than him. He does, and he’ll spend the rest of his life feeling like something less than a man. Joy was smart. She’d gone to college, graduated debt-free on her parents’ dime. I’d done college too, but Joy was crazy-smart. And, any argument she couldn’t win with logic, she’d win by riling me up.

“I’m going for a walk,” I said.

“Hmmm?” Joy said, ignoring me and . . . something else. Was she? She was! Slipping Luke Oreo number four. Motherfucker!

“I said I’m taking a walk.”

“In this weather?” Joy said.

I slipped on my jacket, my hat and shoes.

“Well, hurry,” she said. “We have to meet Luke’s teacher in an hour.”

.   .   .

Walking the neighborhood’s what I did when I was angry, when I was tired but couldn’t sleep, when I was bored. But mostly when I was angry.

And so I walked. In rain, I walked. In rain and tornadoes. In ice storms. Around me, the houses of River Run Heights huddled for warmth, rooftops licked by moonlight. Icicles hung from rain gutters and made mouths of windowsills. Driveways glowed gray beneath streetlights.

Across the street from the neighborhood stood the school. Tall and boxy, it rose into the stratosphere. Who’d ever heard of a four-story elementary school? But Atlanta land was at a premium. Desperate architects were reaching new heights of creativity and whimsy.

That week, we were in the grip of an ice storm, the city’s first in two decades, and so the windows of River Run Elementary hovered in suspended animation, frosted, opaque. Standing on my front lawn, I watched the school awhile, my breath coming out in clouds, then I turned and made my way, cautiously, down the driveway to the sidewalk and into the neighborhood.

We belonged to the neighborhood and we did not. The land behind us had been bought up once we moved in. The developer offered good money for our lot, twice what the house was worth, but Joy and I were newly married and very much in love. Which isn’t to say that we finished each other’s sentences. It is to say that we didn’t need words, as though whole conversations were exchanged—whole worlds erected and razed—with a smile, a wink, a nod. The implications, of our first home wrecking-balled into oblivion, we found unsavory and metaphorically problematic. That was then. Now, I’d have traded the house for the cash were it not for the school, a good one, the kind of school Joy wanted for our son.

So, we’d stayed and were accepted, reluctantly, into the development. Our neighbors didn’t hate us, though most kept their distance. We were enemies of symmetry. We’d thrown off the development’s feng shui, imperiling property values. In the end, we scored free lawn service, plus access to tennis and two pools. In exchange, a concrete marker the size of a compact car was lowered by crane onto our lawn. In imitation marble, it read:
RIVER RUN HEIGHTS
. And, below this:
A KEN BUTLER PROPERTY
.

I circled back, down side streets and past houses with turrets, until I came to a small, white house leaning into the wind. The house was not like the others. It was old and without brick, and it was ours. With its mossy shingles and peeling paint, our house failed to advertise River Run Heights’ grandeur, just as the neighborhood failed to live up to its namesake: Amid the property lines and cul-de-sacs of the developer’s wet dream, there was not now—nor had there ever been—a river. Instead, there was a dry creek bed that, come spring, trickled runoff approximating, in both color and odor, the pleasures of raw sewage.

Inside, my family waited for me.

All I had to do was open the door. Then we’d bundle our boy in his warmest coat. I’d sling his train bag over my shoulder, we’d each take a hand, and, with Luke between us, Joy and I would cross the street. We’d take small steps.

.   .   .

The elementary school was well-lit and clinically clean. We followed our son up three flights of stairs, Luke bounding the whole way, Joy and I pausing at each landing to catch our breath. The stairwell smelled like paint and character education. Each wall was plastered with artwork, the deformed dogs and amputated cats of childhood rendered in finger paints. Everywhere were smiling suns and happy rabbits. On a wall left over from November, Native Americans and Pilgrims enjoyed a smallpox-free feast.

Miss Morrell met us at the door. She was a stern-looking woman, tall, in her thirties, with dark eyes and dark hair that hung to her shoulders. Her bangs had been cut to fall in a sharp line across her forehead. The line seemed to balance on her eyebrows. She led us to her desk. A pair of chairs faced the desk, and we filled them. Joy emptied Luke’s train set onto the floor. He sat and began fitting track together.

“Well,” Miss Morrell said, “you must be very proud.”

Joy and I looked at each other. Then Joy nodded, though neither of us knew why she was nodding.

“You got my memo, yes? The yellow sheet in Luke’s Friday folder?” Miss Morrell drew in an exaggerated breath. “Okay,” she said. “The reason you’re here is that we would like to enroll Luke in River Run Elementary’s Gifted and Talented Program. It’s not curriculum replacement, but it
is
enrichment, enrichment that we believe Luke needs.”

There was a long pause before Joy asked, “So, he’s not in trouble?”

Miss Morrell returned our look of confusion with one of pity. I recognized the expression. It was the one Joy gave the Kroger bag boy, Down Syndrome Doug, whenever he bagged meat with bleach or lowered a melon onto our bread.

“You may have noticed that Luke isn’t like other boys his age,” Miss Morrell said.

Joy nodded, and I knew that, later that night, I would get the I-told-you-so talk of the century. From infancy, Joy had speculated that Luke was unique. I figured he was but hadn’t wanted to give Joy the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten more of her genes than my own. Now, she had the confirmation she needed.

“The first graders take IQ tests,” Miss Morrell continued. “Luke’s score is several standard deviations above the mean. He fell into the hundredth percentile.”

“That’s wonderful,” Joy said.

“It’s beyond wonderful,” Miss Morrell said. “I’m not saying he’s bright. I’m saying that your son is effectively smarter than ninety-nine percent of his first-grade peers. Nationwide.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, as though to let that sink in.

“Well, so is everyone in this room,” I said. I reached down and ran a hand through Luke’s hair. He was intent on his trains. He didn’t look up.

Miss Morrell leaned forward. She uncrossed her arms, grabbed the lip of the desk, and squeezed her knuckles pink.

“Mr. Davis,” she said.

“Call me Sam,” I said.

“Sam,” she said, “I don’t doubt you’re smarter than a first grader. But I will tell you that if Luke’s development is allowed to proceed uninterrupted, if his intellect is properly nourished, then his mind will surpass everyone’s in this room. And I don’t mean by a little.” She let go of the desk. She leaned back, looked at us like we were a couple of assholes.

I knew what she was thinking. Here was the mother who sold makeup and the father who got by in telemarketing. Like our house, we didn’t look like much. And here she was thinking of the apple, how it sometimes falls far from the tree. Except that, like I said, we weren’t idiots, Joy especially, just underachievers, people who’d settled into the steady income of easy, after-college jobs, then, getting older, let our chances at better work pass us by. I won’t defend our choices, but I won’t apologize either.

On the floor, Luke had assembled his wooden set into a circle. One train waited on the tracks while he added an engine and caboose to another. The assembly was taking longer than usual, maybe because he’d been listening, maybe because he was wallowing in his puffy winter coat. Sitting there, fitting together toy trains, he didn’t look all that special.

“You have to understand,” Miss Morrell said. “Most parents would kill for a kid like yours. Parents
beg
me to place their children in the gifted program. I’ve turned away bribes.”

Joy and I knew these parents. At fund-raisers and picnics, on skate nights, conversation invariably turned to the kids: which children were walking by one, potty-trained by two, reading by four. When Luke was reading at three, I wanted to be thrilled the way Joy was, but what I wanted, really, was for my boy to be normal, to be like me.

“I’ve always known Luke was special,” Joy said.

Miss Morrell nodded. She’d found her ally. Already I could see her joining Joy in the fight, and I hated this woman for it. I hated the way she looked at me. I hated her hair, those bangs like a black gash opening up her pale forehead. But mostly I hated how she talked like Luke wasn’t in the room.

I turned to the window. From the fourth floor, the view of midtown was striking: River Run Heights’s cluster of homes and the tall buildings beyond, the city blued by night. All the world was ice. I imagined Miss Morrell pushed out the window and flailing the way villains do when they fall from high buildings in bad movies.

“We owe it to Luke to see that his potential is reached,” Miss Morrell said. She spoke slowly, succinctly, eyes and bangs blazing. “We’ll do everything we can for him at school, but you two . . .” She paused, watched me, resumed. “You need to create an environment in the home that fosters learning.”