Reptile House Page 9

  Then the hip, “Enormous.”

  Then the jaw, “Stupendous.”

  Then hooves, “Only three,” all dragged, gnawed, and left hither and thither by some hungry someones. Gunfire rang out farther off. An owl called and another answered.

  Head: a fragile clumsy sphere, teetering in space.

  It’s hard not to think and Ben thought: Once, on a summer hunt as boys, Boak and Ben came to a camp on a shore where the men laughed and the bitch barked and the puppies were cooked up in a drum. The fire was rotten and the stirring was done with a broken paddle. A man found it on the rocks. The boys were offered the pick of the litter, ha, ha, ha. The boy Boak had cried. Death is a cricket by a creek. A million dead, a million born. A million dead again. So on, and yet. The willow is eaten, the moose is eaten. The fish never swam home. A blue whale yawns. A foot crushes a nest. A tremendous hoof. A splendid club. A bird hits the windshield, chaos of nature. A man drops from cancer, age, or accident, is forgotten, and never was.

  Ben dug in the gear for the headlamps. He flicked one then the next on off on off on.

  “Quit,” said Boak, and Ben flicked them off.

  They walked.

  Neck: a necessary and narrow conjunction between body and head.

  Ben: a good-natured face, balding with ball cap, shit-kickers except on Sunday, Wranglers, knife on the hip, strides like a thing with a tail.

  “It’s getting dark,” said Ben.

  “My brother the genius,” said Boak.

  “I mean it,” said Ben.

  “Keep walking, little lady,” said Boak.

  “It’s a long way back,” said Ben.

  “We’ve got light yet,” said Boak.

  “We should turn round and go,” said Ben.

  “But we won’t,” said Boak.

  The shack had the porch light on. The generator was buzzing. A dog was barking, people were moving around. A stupid little dog. The boys ducked behind a handcar parked in the splay of the tracks as the porch door opened and a man in an apron appeared for a smoke. The man puffed and the boys watched and the stupid little dog barked louder. The man threw the stub and slammed the door. They backed out of the clearing and kept going.

  “Stupid dog,” said Boak.

  “What?” said Ben.

  “Nothing,” said Boak. “Just a stupid dog.”

  With the shack far behind and real dark near, Boak started up his singing:

  “Riffraff. White Trash. Stupid Dog. Copter Bog. I’m a Hog! Creek!”

  “Quiet,” said Ben.

  “Where’s My Moose. Give Me The Noose. Hey, A Caboose Creek!”

  “Quiet, I said,” snapped Ben. “I’m tired.”

  “Tired Boy! Tired Boy!”

  “Pipe down.”

  “Pipe Down. Why the Frown!”

  Ben stopped walking altogether. He slumped on a stump.

  “Someone should Pay. Anyway. Make my day CREEK!”

  He watched Boak over the rise and listened to him disappear: “Look this Luck, Stuck in Muck, Should have got a Duck Creek!”

  Bliss among humans is rare. In the morning of the best day and the worst, a man does not know it. And how to tell them apart?

  Once from some shrubs back home, Ben followed paw prints he had never seen before, even in books. These new paw prints were pressed into new snow. They made tracks from the shrubs to the pond and crossed. They were a barefoot baby’s feet, curved in, with pretty fragile lines, but giant: the size was a man-sized foot. The giant baby had walked down to town. It had turned corners and crossed crosswalks where boots then trod over its going. The baby, Ben could see, must have turned around from time to time to look back at where it had come from. Must have stood pigeon-toed at the drugstore window, then continued on to the bandstand in the square where Boak and Sue had wed, then to the fire hydrant by the courthouse curb.

  Ben liked to go barefoot.

  When Ben caught up on the flat, Boak was winded and spent. The rifle was ready, serious again about the task.

  The wind kicked sand and they turned their faces into it.

  Boak said, “Who makes them up then?”

  “Makes what?” said Ben.

  “Who decides the names?” said Boak. “Who get the say in what the name of the creek is?”

  “Some guy in an office in town,” said Ben.

  Boak started up more whispery: “Dead Dog. Red Dog. Red Neck. What the Heck. Clap Trap.”

  “Who cares anyway?” said Ben to the sky.

  “Crap Shack. Shitty Dog,” said Boak.

  “He writes the name down on a paper,” said Ben.

  “I Can Smell Him Creek,” said Boak.

  “He stamps the paper just like that,” said Ben and stamped his hand with his fist.

  “I Can Taste Him Creek,” said Boak.

  “Some fool stamp,” said Ben.

  “Come out, brother,” said Boak.

  “Puts the paper in a drawer,” said Ben.

  “Show yourself, friend,” said Boak.

  “It’s in the drawer forever,” said Ben.

  “Show yourself!” said Boak. “Show yourself!”

  “People go somewhere else entirely,” said Ben.

  The stars blinked awake. The sun was gone behind a pink edge for good. It happens every day.

  The bull stood huge between the railroad ties. He turned his rack on cue. Boak fired for the lungs. The bull went down in a heap.

  “He’s had a setback,” said Boak.

  They stood, then ran. They stood over him and gaped. They gaped at the long way down the Pass, which was almost too dark except for light in the shack far below.

  “Must be eight miles,” said Boak. “I’m tired.”

  “Maybe seven,” said Ben.

  They sat against the bull. He was hot and died. They leaned on him and drank their last tea. They chewed cake from the bake sale and smiled like girls.

  “Long night,” said Boak.

  “A good day,” said Ben.

  The beams from the headlamps prodded the black. The fur and his face. The old bull stared out too. Night lowered and the last of the pink faded.

  They slit him open, pulled his insides out, and quartered him quick. With the rack he was eight hundred pounds easy. They threw the guts to the trees. They piled his parts off the rails just in case. They wiped the ground with their fingers, then lay between the rails for a nap. The wind picked up. The stars were the Big Bang all over.

  On Ben’s best day, there was a moving van in it, a little blue house, and the T: a big heavy box with Sue’s thin arms around it, saying “FRAGILE,” on the side, so true. A blue print dress. Sue teetered past the mailbox. Ben jammed it into neutral, dead center of the T, Ben blocking traffic just like that, King of the Road. Ben ran up the walk to Sue. Ben making the save just when Sue’s arms were about to give. The mailbox, the doorstep, the threshold. “Oh, thank you. Oh thank you oh so much. It’s my mother’s china.” Sue could not tell the difference between them then. Boak or Ben, Ben or Boak?

  The trucks backed up at the T in all three directions. Sue held her head while laughing hard at the trucks.

  “Your truck’s still running,” said Sue, and Ben looked and so it was.

  Once Ben saw Sue’s face in the paper made with a thousand tiny dots, first prize for jam. Who can find anything when it’s really lost? Yours sincerely, Ben. Sincerely yours, Ben. Always and Forever yours, Ben. It’s Ben. I’m Ben. And so happy, Sue, to be Ben.

  “A guy should ride him down,” said Ben in the dark. “That’s how.”

  “That shack,” said Boak. “Those handcars.”

  They stood and looked down on the bull’s face. They threw the gear by the moose rack.

  “Hate to leave him,” said Ben.

  “He’s not going far,” said Boak.

  “Seems tranquil,” said Ben.

  “Others will want to sample him,” said Boak. They looked around and at the trees for watchers.

  “Best be quick,�
�� said Ben.

  “Let’s go.”

  The boys ran the first mile at full steam. Their lights ricocheted off tree and stone, down and down and down.

  The windows of the shack glowed but the generator was off. The racket inside was louder, music blaring. The door was propped with a five-gallon bucket and the dog’s nose stuck out of it. They slipped among the handcars and picked the one they wanted. They hid when the man came out, stood, and whistled a tune.

  They pushed the handcar up the tracks the long way. The ground froze with each step. The moon rose high. They leaned and strained and pressed and sweated and groaned and wheezed. The cliffs gleamed. The headlamps flashed on the rails. A man gets tired. They grunted like pigs made of bone and gristle, skin, tendon and teeth, up and up, and no one there to see them suffer.

  “A long way,” said Ben pushing. Ben felt bush in his gut: red and hot with thorns. He knew it was there, but he didn’t. The tendrils reached and rubbed Ben’s insides.

  “So far.”

  The bush burned his insides: his arms and ribs, rooted in his thighs, it fingered his lungs and squeezed. The crown of it shoved up and choked him alive, hot and cold.

  “It’s hurting,” said Ben, sweating and puffing.

  “What, Ben?” said Boak, sweating and puffing. “It’s a long way up.”

  “Sure,” said Ben. “Heavy forever.”

  Their headlamps reflected in the moose’s eyes. They wrestled him in over the rim of the handcar: like the scuba man sitting on the bench by the handrail. No whale in sight for the scuba man. The world is big. Gravity is fast and fair. Like falling back in gray water, ready to breathe through his mouth, falling to the judge in black, the bench splitting and spraying spit over the deck and duffel, alive, gray water inviting, Come in and live here, scuba man! Come in, come in, whoever it is you are!

  “That was a good idea,” said Ben, flinging a thigh. “Two can be, one can be, or two can be one. That scuba man had all he needed.”

  “What?” said Boak. He was heaving the moose ribs, so heavy, Ben had to help.

  “Nothing,” said Ben. “Her freezer’s full now.”

  They loaded the gun and gear. Ben found a spruce limb for a brake. He tucked it under his arm. The trees were white in the moon.

  “A great ride.”

  “Yes.”

  They leaned on steel and ran. They left the snout by the tracks as if to watch for trains.

  The True End to All Sad Times

  Evening rush hour and Marlon squinted at the 32 outbound. It was late. The bus lollygagged one block south at the corner of 6th and Franklin. Marlon waited in rubber boots at Washington. The slush was thick. The evening was cold with horns, cars sliding, nearly colliding, fishtailing, spit and sputter. Second shift came on in forty-five minutes. He might still punch in on time.

  When the Franklin light turned green, the 32 roared through the intersection.

  By nature a bus is a vehicle with an amiable face. It belched blue and the haze flew up bluer between soaring glass, steel, brick. The city was sticky and hard. For example, if a guy didn’t notice the white ground or the winter-bare trees in the median islands or the manhole covers rusted and steaming over the city’s seal, or pedestrians’ purple mouths steaming and chattering at the stop for the 41 or 56 across town, or the taxis’ smoking tailpipes, or people smoking in doorways, arms crossed against the bitter cold, everything cold, or if a guy weren’t able to fly up over the city, for example, to reconnoiter the world from above, to examine the icy tangled streets, how they grabbed and held together, how they webbed out, out into frozen gray highways in the country, gaffing the towns and cities and tethering them together into one great raft, he might think he were alone on a hot day in the Sahara.

  The 32 blinked as it sped the block. It changed lanes.

  The girl would get on at Lincoln. The girl, the girl.

  Marlon did not like people. He squinted at a star between black towers. Marlon loved this star. He loved the cracked glass in the doors of the 32 as it rumbled to a stop. He loved the decisiveness of the snow, how clean and neat. He loved George Washington best of all the Presidents for his Cherry Tree, though the man would never have been Father of Our Country had he not been so tall. Just another cotton farmer with bad teeth. Marlon loved the Bluebird in sneakers painted on the side of 32 and its sisters in the metro fleet. How they flocked busily and helpfully about town. How wonderful.

  The 32 shifted right, nosed straight at Marlon, and accelerated.

  He loved his skin and body in theory. But once a red mole popped up on his neck, and when a man at work said, “Marlon, you have jelly on your neck,” and pointed at the mole, Marlon hurried to a stall in the men’s room and, facing the toilet, twisted it off. Marlon squinted when trying to understand things. People at work thought he just needed glasses. His bushy eyebrows prevented him from appearing ungulate on first glance. He had one hair in his left brow that never stopped growing. Marlon loved this hair more than any other part of him, though he knew it was wrong to. At present it was five inches long and resisted tucking into the brow. He used Vaseline to keep it down or an equivalent. He kept the mole in an envelope in his desk. It turned black. He tried to love it anyway.

  The 32 lunged when it stopped, and splashed. Snow was predicted with temperatures dropping and high winds revving up over night.

  The bus doors snapped open. In the big round mirror, the fat driver sat amphibious on his throne chewing pink gum. He fiddled with his foul left ear with his foul left hand where a foul gray audio wire came out of it, sly like. Jowly. Overflowing. Marlon had dissected such as him in biology back in high school. The driver bobbed to invisible bass and drums. His lips, teeth, and tongue snapped and licked. This driver looked down at Marlon standing in the slush. He blinked and subtracted Marlon instantly. Deletion is painful.

  Marlon fingered the pocketknife in his trousers.

  He stepped from the slush up the steps of the 32. His coins clanged into the steel box.

  The driver’s name tag said “Boone,” but Marlon knew this name was a lie. A name is just a word and can be concocted for show or effect. “Boone.” Once, “Boone” hit and killed a calico cat at the corner of 6th and Hoover. Marlon was the only rider in the 32 at the time, the only witness. Hate is like a rock in the dirt that a guy finds when he digs deep enough with a shovel.

  The 32 took off and Marlon swayed down the center aisle.

  Dear Mr. Bluebird Metro:

  I am a regular customer on your bus line service. I take the 32 out to work at 5:10 Monday through Friday and back downtown on the 2:33 AM, the last bus. It is hard to complain. I am not a complainer by nature but

  “Boone” parked his car on BB, the lowest level of the metro lot, space #429, and was often the last metro employee to leave at 3 AM. An earthquake or terrorist attack would crush the small car easily. Rat poison, enough to kill every living thing on earth, could be contained in one average sized water tower. Marlon dreamed of retaliatory deletion: in the elevator down to BB and a lead pipe; in the bushes in front of the driver’s rundown apartment building by the river with a pair of scissors from a Hitchcock movie about love and jealousy; in his favorite coffee shop, a Styrofoam lid, a syringe; between the yellow lines at #429, a maul from the thrift store for a dollar, wiped for prints and dumped in the donation bin later that night after the deed was done. The yellow would slant parallel, but the yellow paint on the concrete was not permanent. Grease and blood on concrete were not permanent. Nothing was permanent. The girl at Lincoln was permanent.

  His mother was permanent. Way back, Marlon’s mother had given him the pocketknife for Christmas embossed with the word M A R L O N in gold script over red enamel. At work, silverware and cutlery were commonly stolen from the break room. Marlon’s knife had often saved the day in break room emergencies: blocks of cheese needed to be cut, for example, a salami log, celery and carrots for the dieters, a cake on someone’s birthday. His thumb had since rubbed away al
l the letters but the M A. Once Marlon had a dream of subtracting himself of his arms and legs. He lived on a cart with wheels and a pull cord for a puller. A bad vision to wake up to, but he attributed it entirely to the driver. Marlon did not believe in dreams.

  The 32 rolled along.

  Marlon sat, as always, in the seventh row back on the left and watched the “Boone.” The man next to Marlon at the window wore all black clothes: new slacks, jacket, scarf, overcoat, and an old-fashioned felt hat too small for his head that must have belonged to some other older man. He wore sunglasses with lemon yellow rims even with the sun almost down. He tipped his chin in the air as blind people do and Marlon knew the man must be blind. He held a thick pile of legal-looking papers on his lap. His fingers rested on the mute lines of type. Marlon craned his neck and read Whereas, Whereas, Whereas written in bold at the beginning of each paragraph. The heading at the top said Last Will and Testament of someone. The paragraphs were totally surrounded by white space, by nothing at all. Marlon felt sorry for the man and the white spaces. The blind rode free on any Bluebird Metro. They got on first, got off first, even before the pregnant ladies and the old folks with walkers.

  It stopped at Adams, a President who, history has proven, loved his wife more than the Presidency or power. An old man climbed on, gave the driver a dollar bill, then kept walking up the aisle to a seat by the emergency exit in the way back. The driver stuffed the bill in his pocket, a crime Marlon had witnessed from this “Boone” more than once.

  “Put it back,” Marlon said. “It’s a crime.”

  The driver grinned greasily and waved in a pretty girl in a peach parka who did not pay her fare. He gave guff to a kid in a hockey jersey over some nickels, then the nickels spilled and the hockey kid was on his hands and knees grasping for nickels under the driver’s chair, between the gas and brake, nickels splayed over dirty rubber as seconds passed, a half minute, a minute or more until the hockey kid began to cough as the exhaust boiled in at the door, which was still open, blue haze seeping up the stairs as if to smother the hockey kid.