Women & Other Animals

Page iii

Women & Other Animals

Stories

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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Disclaimer:

Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the netLibrary eBook.

This book is the winner of the Associated Writing Programs 1998 Award in Short Fiction, AWP is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to serving American letters, writers, and programs of writing. AWP's headquarters are at George Mason University, Fairfax Virginia.

Copyright ©1999 by

Bonnie Jo Campbell

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

LC

ISBN 1558492194

Designed by Kristina Kachele

Printed and bound by Sheridan Books

Set in Monotype Walbaum, Serlio, and AT Sackers Italian Script by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Campbell, Bonnie Jo, 1962

Women and other animals : stories / Bonnie Jo Campbell.

p. cm.

ISBN 1558492194 (alk. paper)

1. Michigan—Social life and customs Fiction. 2. Humananimal

relationships—Michigan Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters—Michigan

Fiction. 4. Working class women—Michigan Fiction. 5. Poor women—

Michigan Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.A43956W65 1999

813'.54—dc21 9915159

CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to my writer pals Carla Vissers and Heidi Bell—I toast you with every glass. Thanks to Jaimy Gordon for her wisdom and her unwavering confidence. Thanks to Stuart Dybek for his practical approach, which has made writing both less and more mysterious. As my deadline neared, Lisa Lenzo's help was a godsend.

Susanna, harsh critic and devoted fan (and also my mother), has inspired much in these stories, and my darling Christopher has kept me honest.

These stories first appeared in somewhat different forms in the following magazines:

Alaska Quarterly Review
, Spring & Summer 1998: "Old Dogs"

Controlled Burn
, 1999: "Shifting Gears"

Kiosk 8
, 1995: "Sleeping Sickness"

Michigan Quarterly Review
, Winter 1999: "The Bridesmaid" (herein "Shotgun Wedding")
Moonlighting
, 1998: "Rhyme Game"

New Delta Review
16, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1999): "The Sudden Physical Development of Debra Dupuis"

North Dakota Quarterly
66, no. 1 (Winter 1999): "The Fishing Dog"

Oxford Magazine
13 (1999): "Taking Care of the O'Learys"

Passages North
, Summer 1999: "Bringing Home the Bones"

So To Speak
, Spring 1999: "Celery Fields"

South Dakota Review
, Winter 1998: "Running"

Southern Review
, Winter 1999: "The Smallest Man in the World"

Story
, Summer 1998: "Circus Matinee"

Third Coast
, Spring 1999: "Gorilla Girl"

And three cheers for the Detroit Auto Dealers Association for making "Shifting Gears" the official story of the 1999 Detroit Auto Show.

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Contents

Circus Matinee

1

Rhyme Game

10

Gorilla Girl

15

Old Dogs

30

Eating Aunt Victoria

34

Shotgun Wedding

56

The Fishing Dog

62

The Perfect Lawn

86

The Sudden Physical Development of Debra Dupuis

100

Sleeping Sickness

109

Celery Fields

125

Running

135

Taking Care of the O'Learys

143

Shifting Gears

162

The Smallest Man in the World

171

Bringing Home the Bones

181

Page 1

Circus Matinee

Though Big Joanie senses something is wrong, she does not turn to look at the tiger. Instead, she places snow cones into the outstretched hands of three blackhaired girls, making certain that each girl firmly grips the plastic cup before she lets go. Big Joanie accepts clean dollar bills from the girls' father, who wears a denim shirt, probably washed by a wife who buries her face in her husband's shirts to remind herself of him when he's gone. In less than two minutes, Big Joanie must move out of this cramped front row because the lights will go out, and when they come back on, Helmut, the world's best animal trainer, will appear in the center ring with his Asian tigers. Big Joanie can't quite straighten her body against the hiphigh barricade between the front row and the arena floor, but she raises her arm and holds her snow cones high in the air like an offering.

Behind the oldest blackhaired girl, who is about eleven and wears a silver cross with Jesus crucified on it, a man in reflector aviator sunglasses holds up his finger to signify a snow cone. More than once, Big Joanie has carried a man as big as this man from his truck to his bedroom, then pulled off his boots and unbuttoned his shirt.

She has gotten undressed and folded her pants, blouse, and bra into a neat pile on a chair and crawled in bed beside him.

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Big Joanie need not look behind her to know that Conroy has wheeled the first tiger cage into position, to know that Conroy, who invited Big Joanie to his room fourteen times last summer, has gone behind the velvet curtain to retrieve the second tiger. Everything is the same as every other show, she tells herself, but she senses a disequilibrium, the kind of apprehension a flightless bird must feel before an earthquake.

The band and clowns clamor on, and the audience bites into snow cones. Big Joanie lowers the tray to her shoulder. Her nostrils itch, and she smells the sweat of the crowd beneath the mask of aftershave and perfume and the orangy scent of her own deodorant. Ignoring the hair standing up on the back of her neck, shoving aside the thoughts of men she's known for just one night, she leans across the oldest girl carefully, so as not to drip cherry juice onto her blouse or jeans. Big Joanie offers the sunglasses man the snow cone, and his hand closes around it, but as she lets go the cup slips and crashes to the floor. The man's face changes, stretches as though made out of clown rubber. Big Joanie has never seen a man struck dumb like this. Some men have regarded her with disgust in the morning, seeming to have forgotten the way they whispered to her the night before, but she didn't sleep with this man. She only handed him a snow cone, the way she's handed snow cones to thousands of men.

In the same moment, the expressions of people sitting near the sunglasses man freeze the same way. Have they all just noticed Big Joanie's overlarge head and her hips as wide as the length of an axehandle? Are they stunned by her acnepocked face? By her lightningstruck hair? Then she sees the answer reflected in the man's glasses, a double rearview vision of a compacted and curved circus world in which a miniature tiger stands in front of, not inside, its cage.

Scraping feet and muffled screams are not quite drowned out by the circus band. People at the top of the section and in the aisle seats escape toward the exits, falling upon one another. But at the bottom center, those sitting in a halfcircle around Big Joanie are trapped in their seats.

"Stay still!" shouts a voice from the floor, Conroy's voice. Big

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Joanie has heard it in ninetyseven arenas, in the pie car, and whispering in his lower bunk in train car eightyfive, but never has she heard such urgency. Conroy is the assistant to Helmut's assistant Bela; Conroy is the person who makes sure the sixinch steel pin is dropped through the slot to secure the doors on each tiger cage as it is pulled into the arena. Conroy shouts, "Y'all stay still. We'll get her back in." Whenever Big Joanie went to Conroy's room on train car eightyfive last summer, Conroy's roommate eventually stumbled in drunk and turned on the light. Conroy would pull the blanket over Big Joanie's head, uncovering her feet which hung off the end of his bunk.

"Just stay still. Nobody'll get hurt if you all just stay still." Conroy's voice cajoles in an attempt to soothe the tiger. "Queenie, take it easy," he says three times, as if trying to convince a small, pretty woman to come to his room. "If y'all move,'' he says to Big Joanie and the audience, "this girl might get excited."

Big Joanie can imagine Conroy—he has small hands and a bald spot the size of a copper pot scrubber—but that doesn't help her now. She tries to feel Conroy in her nerves and bones, the way she felt him last summer, but she senses instead the tiger pacing. Each stride is longer than the last, looser, as though in the pads of its feet it has stored a genetic memory of life in the Asian forests where its ancestors took down game.

Big Joanie doesn't move. Her size twelve canvas shoes stick to the snow cone juice and flattened cotton candy as the tiger's feet meet clean floor mats, swept and scrubbed after each show. For six years, in sometimes three shows a day, Big Joanie has seen this tiger pour into the caged center ring, but she never considered the possibility of the tiger walking free. Now she imagines tiger feet prowling her spine, stepping on vertebrae which float up her back like bone islands.

The three blackhaired girls are crying, but their sobs are so quiet Big Joanie must strain to hear them. She has never looked squarely into the faces of frightened girls, has never watched their pretty cheeks being sliced by tears. The girls have just seen a woman no bigger than the elevenyearold and clad only in a glittering bikini let go of the rope and spin by her braid; they have seen the Polish

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acrobats pile atop one another, stretching upward in a human tower of Babel, risking everything to get their body language to the upper tiers of the arena. A daredevil rode a motorcycle upside down, but nothing prepared the girls for this.

In two of the cheapest seats, way up in section P, a manager of a regional sales office sits with his girlfriend, who compares to his wife as filet mignon compares to a cubed steak. During the first half of this matinee, people filled many of the seats, but by twos and threes they have migrated to lower sections into better seats than they'd paid for. The loudspeaker behind the couple bangs out a spedup version of "The Entertainer," but their distance from the arena mutes the action. The manager watches clown stooges hit each other with handbags and plastic hammers far below. A female clown whose figure is camouflaged in polka dots hangs shirts on a clothesline. When she turns her back, a little dog jumps up and tears them down.

The chainlink enclosure appeared miraculously in the dark of the center ring while that tiny woman spun by her hair in the spotlight above, and now a tiger has been wheeled out in a cage. The tiger is the brightest toy in this toy circus, a butane tigertorch, a brilliant carved bit of amber the manager might hang on a chain. In China, he has heard, men increase their virility by eating the powdered penises of tigers.

Christ, he loved that sparkling little woman who spun by her hair. She had seemed small enough to fit in his hand, as perfect as a wish, a bikiniclad genie he could conceal in the pencil holder on his desk. His girlfriend loved the animal acts—the camels, the bareback stunts, even the ridiculous bowtied and skirted poodles.

His girlfriend hasn't noticed the tiger. Her fingers have been sliding upward from his knee and now she unfastens his fly. He shifts in his seat to help her. There is nobody else around, and even the pushy vendors won't bother coming here for only two people. This is precisely what he hoped for, precisely why he didn't buy better seats. His girlfriend is a district sales manager; she has thick dark hair and an apartment not far from the office. She reaches through the fold of his shorts. They have eaten restaurant meals at

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corner tables, and she has never done more in public than touch his leg. She lowers her head into his lap, and he strokes her shoulders. Two men emerge from behind the purple curtain with a second tiger cage, but they stop halfway across the arena. The manager sees what they see. The first tiger is stepping out through the open door of its cage, the powerful head first, then front paws, back paws, and long, muscled tail. Or is he imagining this? His girlfriend doesn't even notice when the music slows.