The Heaven of Animals: Stories (15 page)

She stops before one of the displays. A bone, coffee-brown and long as a broom handle, fills the case. She thinks of Charlie on Halloween night, bounding across the kitchen, singing the song he’d brought home from school: “The thigh bone’s connected to the
hip
bone . . .”

Arnie leans in. “Big bone,” he says, his voice a cartoon caveman’s. He steps closer, their shoulders touching, then she feels it, her neck, his tongue. “Big bone
lick
.”

She moves out of reach, looks to be sure no one’s seen.

“Christ,” she says, and Arnie laughs, like it’s a game.

The corridor dead-ends in a gift shop, T-shirts and park paraphernalia mostly. A wire carousel of postcards creaks at her touch. A shelf of shot glasses announce:
LICK THIS!
She wonders how long the park resisted before getting in on the joke.

Arnie moves to a bin of stuffed animals and pulls out a bison, brown with gray horns. He carries it to the register, where a woman waits in a green state park shirt. Glasses hang from her neck on a cord of tanned leather. She buffs her fingernails with an emery board.

“These,” he says. He holds up the bison. “Where can I find them?”

The woman is older, tired-looking. She gives Arnie a look that seems to say she’d be polite if only they paid her more. She gestures toward the gift shop bin, then returns her attention to her nails.

“No,” he says. “The real ones. You know, the kind that snort and eat grass?” He gallops the stuffed animal over the countertop, a bison pantomime.

The woman sighs. She lays down her file, blows on the nails of her right hand, then pulls a paper map from a rack beside the register. She unfolds the map, points, refolds the map, slides it toward—but not quite to—Arnie, then picks up her file and begins work on the left hand.

Arnie leaves the bison on the counter. He turns, and now he’s moving toward Linda, grinning, goofy-looking in his enthusiasm.

“Oh give me a home . . .” he sings, and the excitement must be contagious, because, suddenly, she feels it too, a thrill, and, forgiving his carelessness—because, really, what are the chances that, way out here, they’ll see someone they know?—she lets him take her hand.

.   .   .

Practice
.

That’s what he called it the first time. Because what else
can
you call it when you’re horny and fourteen and trying to get your cousin to kiss you? Linda was fourteen too, both of them too old never to have been kissed.

“It’s not like it counts,” he said. “You still get to have your first kiss. It’s just practice so that, when the first kiss comes, you don’t mess it up.”

Linda’s expression advertised her skepticism.

They’d spent the afternoon at the public pool and now lounged in damp swimsuits in front of the television, their skin pimply with air-conditioning. As kids, they’d run through the sprinklers with their shirts off while, on the back porch, their fathers sipped scotch. But those days were over. Her parents weren’t home, and he hadn’t seen Linda shirtless in a decade. The summer had filled in the blank of her bathing suit, and, just to catch a glimpse, just to kiss her, the idea was almost more than he could bear.

On TV, an earthquake shook an elevator still, and Zack delivered Mr. Belding’s baby. The theme music kicked on, and the credits scrolled.

“Never mind,” Arnie said. “I was only kidding anyway.”

Except that, right then, Linda scooted across the carpet. She was close to him, then closer. Their knees touched.

“Just practice?” she said.

He nodded.

“Promise?” she said.

He couldn’t speak, could barely catch his breath as her eyes closed, her face scrunched, and her head neared his. He shut his eyes.

The first kiss was quick, was hardly a kiss at all. Their eyes opened, shut. They tried again.

.   .   .

Get-togethers make her edgy. Those dinners or afternoons when it’s the six of them, Arnie and his wife, she and Frank, the children.

Charlie and Maddy kicking each other under the kitchen table, and all she can think is that it starts with kicks, then it’s mouths, fingers, and tongues.

It’s not that she doesn’t like his wife. There’s nothing
wrong
with Anne except that she’s married to Arnie. Apart from that, Anne’s kind. She’s generous. She makes good pies.

And Frank and Arnie get along fine. They like the same movies, same sports teams, same beer. Standing in the garage, they’ll smoke cigars and contemplate for hours the finer points of Ping-Pong or the intricacies of a table saw.

Watching them together, she can’t understand it.

“Frank’s a good guy,” Arnie will say. “What’s not to like?”

“But doesn’t it drive you crazy?” she’ll say. “Seeing him? Knowing, when you’re not with me, he
is
?”

She wants this to drive him crazy, wants to know that, when they’re apart, Arnie’s at least
occasionally
overcome with grief. She wants the thought of Frank, of her—of Frank on top of her—to make Arnie want to strangle the man.

But Arnie only shrugs. “I like knowing you’re with him,” he’ll say. “You’re safe with him. You could do a lot worse.”

She wants to shake him. It’s been twenty years. They’ve been seeing each other in secret longer than they haven’t. Except, she had her chance. After his father died and before he married Anne, Arnie extended the invitation.

“Let’s just come out with it,” he said. “Come out, and fuck what people think.”

She’d offered all the old arguments: Their mothers would disown them. Their friends would freak out. And their jobs, who knew?

Arnie was patient. “Cousin-fucking,” he said, “is not grounds for termination.”

“No,” she said.

“Please,” he said.

In the end, it was Linda who said, “Never,” and Arnie who moved on.

Her predicament now is like when Charlie was younger, when they’d play Candy Land or Life. Her son would roll the dice and land on a square that sent him back. “Do-over!” he’d scream. “I want a do-over!” When she didn’t let him roll again, he’d scream and scream. Sometimes he’d holler until his throw-up choked him and he ran, crying, from the room.

Yes, that was what she needed now, a do-over, the chance to prove Arnie right, to prove they should have been together all along.

But there’d been a chance, and she couldn’t imagine the day when there would be another.

.   .   .

The trail winds through the woods, and he’s walking fast because he can’t wait to see the bison. He’s trying to remember whether he’s seen one before, seen one anywhere besides in a book or on TV. He doesn’t think he has.

“Picture it,” he says. “These things side by side with mammoths, with saber-toothed tigers, and they’re what’s left.”

He’s decided there must be something special about the bison to have cheated history and made it out alive.

At fifteen, he watched his father use a tire iron to turn his mother’s face into something from a horror movie. She lived, made her son swear he’d never become that man, and he hasn’t. He’s become something else—adulterer, cousin fucker—but his father? No. He’s never hit his wife or wanted to.

It’s in him, though, whatever made Dad do it. He feels it, the pull toward recklessness, toward
wild
.

Sometimes he just wants to
he doesn’t even know what
.

His father’s dead. Pulled over for a DUI, he unloaded a revolver into the policeman’s chest. When the other officers arrived, they found him handcuffed to the car. “I done it,” he said. “I done it myself, so there.” This didn’t keep the cops from pummeling his father in the name of their fallen friend, a beating that led to hemorrhaging, then death, a beating that a woman with a camcorder got on tape, start to finish. The lawsuit that tape triggered left Arnie with a cool two million.

He loves the money, though, secretly, he’d trade it all to have been there, to have said, “Hand me a baton,” to have shaken the other men’s bloody hands clean at the end.

His father is dead. Not so the mighty bison.

Survival
.

“An animal like that has dignity,” he says.

He throws a hand up to the woods around him, as though, any second now, a bison might come lumbering through the trees.

“An animal like that demands respect!”

And he sees she’s no longer at his side. Linda’s seated on the footpath ten yards back, her hands at her ankle.

“These boots,” she says.

He kneels before her and takes her feet into his lap.

“My little Cinderella,” he says. He pulls off one boot, then the other.

Her feet are swollen, red.

“Boots like these,” he says, “you have to break them in.”

He lifts one foot and rubs the heel between his palms. The toes curl like shrimp. He wants to fit the foot into his mouth.

He says, “I wonder if their hooves ever hurt.”

“What?”

“The bison,” he says. “Their hooves.”

She groans. “You and your fucking bisons.”

“The plural of bison,” he says, “is bison.”

It could end any number of ways.

They could be caught. Unlikely, but it could happen. The thing about sleeping with your cousin is that you’d have to try hard to get caught. People see you in public, they think:
How nice that family gets along so well
.

There’s pregnancy to consider—that accidental henchman. Linda’s not the type to get rid of it, so they’d be stuck with who knows what. Some three-eyed monster. Some tangle of however many limbs.

But Linda’s on the pill. She doesn’t want another kid, not his and not Frank’s. If she wanted to trap him, that’s not how she’d do it.

How
would
she do it? An announcement, maybe. Linda, at dinner, standing before his wife and daughter, her husband and son, saying, “Since we were fourteen, Arnie and I have been in love,” after which Frank would punch him in the nose, the kids would cry, and Anne would leave him.

And he can’t have that. He loves Linda, but he loves Anne too. And he loves Maddy most of all. Seeing her today, working the ball up and down the field, blasting it from grass to sky, past the goalie’s gloves and into the net, he knows he couldn’t stand it, a divorce, anything that meant weeks off and on.

No, the way things are, it will have to do. There was a time. Now, though, once, twice a month with Linda—it’s enough.

Her feet are hot in his hands. He’s rubbing, rubbing.

“Carry me,” she says, and he does. He expects the weight he feels at parades or amusement parks, Maddy on his back. But Linda’s heavier, too heavy. Before long, his knees hurt.

They follow a trail of yellow, bison-shaped markers. Sunlight struggles through the canopy and the day grows sticky. Still, he presses on, past pines that threaten to swallow the path, branches closing in on either side, a labyrinth of needle-thickened limbs.

.   .   .

Through the trees, she sees the bison, sees them even before Arnie steps into the clearing. No other visitors have braved the heat or the hike, and they’re alone. A chain-link fence cuts the clearing in half. It rises nine, ten feet high. From the fence hang signs. They read:
NO TRESPASSING
and
KEEP OUT
. The animals can be aggressive, the signs warn.

Beyond the fence, the bison loom like cows on steroids. She counts twelve. The largest has horns like cornucopias. The rest have less dramatic horns. Even the little calf who weaves among the bent necks, among the mouths that graze like the mouths of cattle, has horns. The calf butts a bison across its flank. The larger animal flicks its tail.

Their hair is brown and black, matted and patchy, and she wonders how they can stand the heat. Not far from the bison is a gleaming, silver trough, but the water seems a small consolation. She imagines the animals shaved, like dogs in summer, and wonders how much of their bulk is muscle, how much hair.

Arnie moves toward the fence. She’s still on his back. Her feet throb. She carries her boots under one arm.

The boots were a gift, sweet and stupid, from Frank. She only wore them so that, when Arnie asked, she could say, “Birthday present,” and he’d feel bad. But Arnie never asked, just as he never remembers her birthday. A week has passed, a week without a gift, a card, a message on her phone.

Arnie stops before a brown and yellow state park placard. The placard is titled
ADAM’S HAREM.
It seems the bison, all but one, are female, and they all belong to Adam. He is the herd’s “alpha male.”

“Now, that’s what I’m talking about,” Arnie says. He says it singsongy, joking. He laughs. Her body lifts as he leans forward, snorts and stamps a foot.

“Put me down,” she says before adding, “please.”

She’s thirty-four years old. In fifty, sixty years, she’ll be dead, and everything reminds her of this fact but him. With Arnie, she imagines she might live forever.

And what would it look like, to be with him at last?

It would look like Christmas morning:

Arnie curls beside her before the fire. His huge, brick house—now theirs—yawns around them. The hearth is lined with four cocoa-stained mugs. The floor is carpeted in torn wrapping and tissue paper. Outside, Charlie fits a carrot into a snowman’s face while Maddy buttons his chest with charcoal briquettes.

And where have the spouses gone? What’s become of Frank and Anne?

She doesn’t like to think it, but maybe they’re dead. A messy business, but over with so quickly. The kind of cancer that ravages the body and you’re gone almost before you know you’re sick.

Or else they’ve moved away, left her and Arnie with the children and run off to Mexico together. Even now, they’re drinking daiquiris. No hard feelings.

And the children? The children are happy. They’re well-adjusted. They never miss their other parents, never miss the way things used to be.

Arnie pulls her to his chest. His body keeps her warm. They watch the fire and wait for the New Year.

That’s the dream.