The Heaven of Animals: Stories (29 page)

Midmorning, the car cranked and Dan left town. In his trunk, he carried oil filters, belts, another battery, talismans against any force that might impede his progress. By noon, he’d traded I-75 for I-10, the interstate that would carry him west, a straight shot through six states, until, north of Tucson, he took I-8. He’d follow the signs to San Diego, then head north to La Jolla. He wouldn’t need a map. He knew the drive as though he’d made it not a decade, but a day, before.

.   .   .

The bridge was rust-colored and seemed to shudder beneath him. Beyond the bridge, a sign announced the state line, and the sun sank into the highway. He was suspended: Below him, the Pearl River churned, muddy as chocolate milk. Above, the sky squatted, pink and orange, the color pulled east across the blue, as though smudged by a thumb.

He crossed the water and pulled his car to the side of the road. He had not stopped in hours, and his sides ached with soda. He followed a path through tall grass and down a steep embankment to the water’s edge. Cars flew overhead. Trucks roared. He unzipped and pissed into the Pearl. The current surprised him, the water rushing by, filmy, its surface like burnt plastic.

Downstream, a boy sat beneath the bridge, watching him. Embarrassed, Dan zipped up and walked over. The boy was young, seven or eight, his face black, his mouth drawn in a frown. He sat on an overturned plastic bucket and held a cane pole in his hands. A line ran from the tip of the pole to the water. A blue length of nylon ran from a loop at the boy’s ankle and into the river. At the end of the blue line, the silver sides of a few small fish spun in the current. The boy wore dirty jeans, cuffed at the knee, and a torn white T-shirt. Across its front, in tall black letters, the shirt read:
THE END IS NEAR
.

“Sir,” the boy said, “you just peed on my fish.”

“I didn’t see you,” Dan said. “I’m sorry.”

The boy watched him, then the water. Dan didn’t know where they stood, whether the boy had accepted his apology. The river rolled by.

“Here,” he said. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and a five-dollar bill from the wallet. The boy scrunched up his face.

“Man,” he said, “what do I look like to you?”

Dan shook his head. He returned the money and the wallet to his pocket. The shoreline held a rind of foam. He nudged the foam with his tan work boot’s toe. A chunk let go and floated away.

And then the boy was up. The pole’s tip disappeared into the water. He turned the pole in his hands, winding the line around the cane. Something large splashed at the water’s edge, a flash of gills.

The fish followed the cane up and out of the water and landed, flopping, on the bank. The boy straddled the fish, pulled the hook from its mouth, then stood and held it out. It was a bass, a largemouth, five or six pounds, big and gleaming. Its dorsal fin unfolded, webbed, against the sky, and its stomach hung, white and distended, between the boy’s hands. It was a beautiful catch.

Dan reached forward. He meant only to trace the fish’s side, to run a finger along the signature pinstripe, eye to tail—to feel the cool, smooth slime. But at his hand’s approach, the boy pulled the fish back. Without a word, he dropped it into the river. The fish hit the surface with a terrific smack and was gone.

The boy waded into the water, and the river made wishbones around his ankles. His small catches darted, pulling futilely at their tether. He bent and let the current run over his hands, then dried his palms on the seat of his pants.

“Why?” Dan asked.

“Sow,” he said. “Belly full of eggs.”

Dan stared at the boy, his worn clothes, his gaunt face. Ribs hugged his stomach on either side.

Dan said, “But you’re fishing for food.”

“I throw her back now, next year there’ll be more fish to catch.”

The boy returned to the shore, knelt, and unfastened the stringer from his leg. He righted his bucket and dropped the line of fish into it. A few flapped their protest against the bucket’s dry bottom. The boy stood and, with bucket and pole, made his way up the hill toward the highway. Dan followed. He wished suddenly that Jack could meet this kid. He would have admired the boy, his sense of—what was it—
ecology
? No, it was more than that, a kind of animal morality. He still couldn’t believe it. The boy had thrown the fish back.

“What does it mean?” he asked. “Your shirt?”

The boy walked on but stopped at the top of the hill. Behind him, cars raced into Louisiana.

“The end is near,”
Dan said. “What does that mean?”

The boy looked confused. “It means what it says,” he said.

“You mean, like biblically. Like the apocalypse?”

The boy shrugged. “I seen Him,” he said. “Sometimes, when I’m under the bridge, I look up and He’s coming over the water, walking just like you or me.”

Dan waited for more. He watched the river, but he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t imagine a man, anybody, crossing the water, not the way he could when he closed his eyes and saw Jack’s seals.

When he turned, the boy was already up the road. Dan watched until he was a speck against the sun. Then the sun dipped below the horizon, and the boy followed.

.   .   .

Passing through Baton Rouge, Dan thought of the night when, miraculously, Jack was a voice on the phone. It had been five years, and Jack was finished at LSU. He had his degree and, now, a job. His voice was no longer a boy’s, and Dan’s heart broke to hear it.

They met at a restaurant near campus. Jack did not hug him, but stepped forward and shook his hand. Dan had braced himself for anything. He’d expected someone meek, effeminate, the teenage Jack, who, for a time, Dan had forgotten how to love. But this Jack was tall and muscled, with a tanned face and copper-colored arms. He had a good, strong chin that reminded Dan of his own. He wore a sensible haircut.

Still, some things set Jack apart. Not the way he talked or dressed, not exactly, but a hiccup in his step, or the way his arms hung at his sides, or his habit of bringing one hand to his face when he spoke. He ordered a meal off the menu that would have been Dan’s last choice, and, in conversation, used words at whose meanings Dan could only guess. He was changed—Dan couldn’t say whether for the better—and their trip began like a foot, the truck’s cramped cab a new boot, the men pressed like toes, close, each too close to the other.

The first day, they didn’t speak. They listened to the radio and took turns at the wheel. At each stop, Dan checked the hitch that joined Jack’s car to the back of the van. At a Texas motel, they took separate rooms. The second day, though, Jack told Dan about his studies and Dan discussed work at the garage, and that night they shared a room. By the third day’s end, navigating the mountains of Southern California, the boot’s leather had stretched, and they flexed, they laughed, breathed easy. Jack even asked Dan’s advice on taxes and car repair.

They hit the ocean too soon. Dan didn’t want the trip to be over. He didn’t want to say goodbye. But he was not asked to stay. So, the next day, with Jack’s belongings secured and the moving van returned, Dan stepped onto a plane. Had he been asked, right then, when he’d see his son again, he’d have said
soon
. But
soon
had turned to ten years, and Dan couldn’t explain it.

He might, in those rarest, most honest of moments, have confessed that he’d been afraid, scared of what closeness required—an acknowledgment of boyfriends, of lovers, of a life he didn’t want for his son. He’d wanted to appreciate Jack’s
other
qualities, the kind heart, the elegant mind. But there were so many aspects of Jack to contend with, so many Jacks: the Jack who was gay and the Jacks who made up his son—the baby in the cradle; the toddler crouched, laughing, beneath the kitchen sink; the boy on the lawn—sunshine and the haze the sprinklers made, the water a mist, then steam, before it hit the ground—and Dan could not reconcile the one with the rest.

He’d hoped to learn, in time, to take Jack as he was, to not have to cut phone calls short, afraid of what he might hear, or who—a voice in the background or a man on the line, listening in.

He’d hoped to learn, in time, been certain there was time, always more time.

He drove on, past billboard-strewn Baton Rouge, across a wing of the Mississippi wide as memory, through Lafayette, past green fields and black swamps, and on, and on, toward Texas.

.   .   .

Late in the day, he reached the rest stop outside Lake Charles. They’d taken their first break here. Jack stepped out of the van, stretched, and his spine marked his shirt like links in a chain. The hem lifted, and Jack’s back was as dark as his arms. His was the skin of a man who spent his days not under cars, but on boats and knee-deep in waterways, bent to net specimens. Dan felt something at the sight of it, a pain, dull and deep, and another seeing the hairs—light, feathery—that traversed the hollow where back met waist. The fall from the window had broken Jack’s arm, and the hairs had come out of the cast curly, elbow to wrist, a living nest.

Dan counted his cash. The first trip, business had been better, gas cheaper. He’d have to be careful. He had no savings to fall back on—nothing but the house and the car, both so far gone as to be of no real value. He bought two bags of chips from a vending machine, ate them leaning against the car, then found a phone booth, the old-fashioned kind with windows and a door that closed.

The man named Marcus answered the phone.

“How is he?” Dan asked.

“He’s sleeping,” Marcus said, and his voice was like hot gravel pressed to a fresh road. “Today wasn’t terrible. But every day is different. Each day’s a surprise.”

Dan asked whether he was in a lot of pain, and Marcus said that he was.

“But he won’t show it,” he said. “He’s being brave. He won’t take the morphine.”

Dan understood what Marcus meant, that Jack was waiting for him, that Jack needed him there faster, needed him now.

And how would Jack look when he saw him? He pictured a skeleton, bones draped in bedsheets, eyes swollen in their sockets, yellow as yolks.

“Make sure he eats,” Dan said, and Marcus said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Food means nothing. We’re way past food.”

The man on the phone was not on Dan’s side. He was dangerous, but he was all Dan had. He was the one keeping Jack alive, and so Dan would have to be careful.

“Just tell me when you’ll be here and how I can reach you,” Marcus said.

Dan promised to be there in two days. He would call along the way, whenever he stopped, wherever he found a payphone.

He thought Marcus was coughing before he knew he was laughing.

“Hello to the twenty-first century,” Marcus said. “Cell phones and airplanes. These are not new things.” And then Dan heard a screech, and then a recorded voice. The voice asked him to deposit more money. He patted his pockets for coins, then hung up.

Back behind the wheel, he considered pulling away, driving all night and the rest of the following day. He had come nine hundred miles. He still had far to go. He’d need caffeine, lots of it, or he could try to score a few turnarounds at a truck stop. He shut his eyes. The headrest was warm on his neck. He could almost see Jack beyond the windshield, stretching, stretching, his fingers tangled in sunlight, ready for takeoff.

.   .   .

Raindrops came through the open window and pelted his shoulder. It was early, still dark. Dan rolled up the window, then ran through the rain to the restrooms. He stood beneath an overhang, watching the water come down. He dreaded the day ahead, the monotony of the road, the tiny gas stations and blank faces of the men and women who worked the registers. And he was afraid. He feared that his tires, leather-smooth, would run off the road. He feared that the wipers, which rattled and slapped even in light rain, would seize and leave him blind in the downpour. And the one true fear, what all the other fears suggested: that he might not reach Jack in time.

Today, he would have to drive faster, go farther, and he did, until the silver smolder of the diner on the hill compelled him to exit. No cars filled the spaces in front of the diner, but a blue neon sign in the window glowed
OPEN
.

The diner was smaller than he remembered. They’d stopped here the first night, before finding a place to sleep. A gas station, long boarded up, stood in the adjacent lot. The vast absence of anything else extended as far as he could see.

Inside, Dan took a seat at the counter. Across the empty diner was the booth where they’d sat, Jack stacking sugar packets into towers until the food came. When they left, Jack said he’d forgotten something and ran back in. Then, through the window, Dan watched his son add a few bills to the tip he’d left, an embarrassment that made him feel cheap, accused. He wished Jack had just come out and said it. But Jack was not his father’s son. Given discretion and confrontation, Jack would always choose discretion. Between these, Dan imagined a third way to be, but neither of them had ever been good at in-between, each already too much himself.

Through an opening in the wall, Dan could see into the kitchen. A man in a paper hat stood at the grill. He pressed bacon with a steel spatula. Before he’d learned cars, Dan had done this work. He came home nights stinking of lard and lemon-scented cleaner. Now, most days, he smelled of grease and gasoline, which was okay. Garage smells didn’t bother him the way the restaurant had, how the food stink clung to your clothes, how it combed itself into your hair.

“Annie will be with you in a minute,” the man said, without looking up.

Dan pulled a yellow menu from a greasy rack fastened to the laminate countertop. The menu was the kind with pictures in place of descriptions. Grainy photographs advertised the Hungry Man Breakfast, the Lumberjack Special, and the Ultimate Combo. The Ultimate Combo was pancakes, toast, potatoes, eggs, and a mess of meats. He was hungry enough to eat it all.

“It’s a lot of food,” she said.

Annie was short and wide around the middle. She wore a blue-and-white getup and an apron, as though she belonged not here, but in a diner from Dan’s youth. Her hair, blond, then brown where the roots reached out, was brushed forward in a stiff wave over her forehead. The rest fell in curls that settled on her shoulders. The bridge of her nose was wide, but her skin was smooth and unblemished, her mouth small and red. Her eyes were blue pools, and her face narrowed from a high forehead to a point of chin, like an egg balanced on its tapered end. Jack had shown him that, how to balance an egg, how it wasn’t something you could do only on the equinox the way people said.