Everyday Psychokillers Page 11

  I mean you take what makes a thing what it is and it can go two ways. One is layer and layer the thing until you can’t keep track and it’s buried in the layers it’s wearing, and the other is rip its face off.

  I thought about that.

  The ficus tree was bigger than a ship, and bigger than a brontosaurus. It stood there bigger than I could take in, and it made a microcosm of time. That’s all I’m trying to say.

  I watched Scott swim, or imagined him swimming under the water, my eyes opening and closing in the increasingly darkening light. When the man with spectacles rescued the little blond girl, when he wanted to distract her from her concerns about how she could become a nigger by the wave of Joe’s wand, he led her away from the circle and could feel how tiny her hand was as he led her through the barn to the other side, where his truck was parked in the late afternoon.

  It was a small-sized pickup truck with wooden sides and a roof built over the bed, so the whole back was enclosed, the little truck carrying a leaky shack on its back. He lowered the tailgate and lifted the sheet of plywood that went up on hinges like a hatchback and had a clip on a chain that he clipped to the wooden roof to hold it open up there. The girl watched this process, rapt. She thought about snails and houseboats. Outside, it was hot and bright. She wasn’t much higher than the tailgate when it was lowered, and it made a sort of tunnel into the dark interior of the truckbed. She could hear dry sounds coming from in there, like the sound of someone shaking bunches of straw into a stall. The man with spectacles adjusted his camera strap so the camera rested on his back instead of at his hip, and then he leaned into the truck and pulled out a large wooden box with rope handles. He pulled the box onto the tailgate and the little blond girl could really hear the sounds coming from it.

  “Do you want to see in the box?” the man asked her.

  The girl nodded.

  “Is it okay if I lift you up and then you can look in?”

  The girl nodded again and the man lifted her on his hip and she put her legs around him. The one that went around his back crooked over the camera, because she was almost too big to be lifted, although she remembered quite easily what it had been like to be lifted like that all the time. The top of the box was wooden slats with chicken wire, and she could see in.

  The girl’s father did not come to the barn. He didn’t like horses. The girl’s mother boarded her horse there at Joe’s and came every afternoon when she got off work, picked her little blond girl up from school, and brought her along while she cleaned the horse, rode the horse, and then cleaned her tack. She’d been working since six in the morning. She looked forward to when the girl would be old enough to do more with the horse, because she could put her on the horse’s back as she walked it around to cool down after riding, but the rest of the time there really wasn’t much the little girl could do. Still, the rest of the time she seemed content to watch the people and the animals, or to sit quietly and draw pictures in the dirt, so her mother let herself feel relieved that she had such a thoughtful kind of daughter, who could keep herself occupied so contentedly. She just wasn’t the kind of girl who’d go running around and hurt herself. She was a very sensible girl.

  Plus, these hours at the stable were the only hours of the day that the blond girl’s mother really loved. And you can’t live every day without loving any of it, not if it’s possible to love something of it. She had to balance. She could feel it. She had to do this one thing in her life or she thought one day she’d really do it, she’d strike her kid, and she adored her kid, or she’d walk out on her husband or something awful.

  So the blond girl’s mother was relieved when Marty offered, first, to take a portrait of the two of them with their horse, and that was a really nice thing to do, and then, as he was putting the camera away, said he’d be glad to watch the little blond girl while she was riding, at least when he was around and they were, too. He was such a polite man with his spectacles. He didn’t ride, but he really liked animals. On weekends he took his camera to horse shows and took pictures of kids and their horses in the show, and then he got their addresses from the parents and mailed proofs to them, so they could order copies if they wanted. On weekdays he worked at a kind of zoo, where you paid a few dollars to get in and they had a play area for kids and peacocks wandering around and some animals in cages to look at. He said it was a kind of a front operation, and laughed at using the term, because it was a kind of front operation for a group of people like him who liked to rehabilitate wild animals that were hurt. He said you wouldn’t believe the messes wild animals got into. The blond girl’s mother imagined this secret group in back rooms behind the exhibits at the little zoo, one on call at all times, answering a secret knock at the door and taking in another limp, cute animal, then calling in the secret group and all of them working on the animal on an operating table with one bright light like a spotlight on it, the men and women in white coats and masks, covertly bandaging the creature and then taking shifts rocking it like a baby until it healed.

  She couldn’t figure out how he made money this way, but he always dressed in nice tidy clothing.

  For Marty, though, the real joke was that it was basically a front operation. They did take in injured animals, animals that wandered out of the marshes and got hit by cars on the road or any number of other things, alligators, otters, raccoons, turtles, all kinds of birds, especially, vultures and egrets and owls, as many as they could fit. But they also had other animals back there, animals from all over the world, but from Africa and Brazil mostly, where they had connections who disguised the animals as packages and flew them into the Miami airport: macaws and monkeys mostly, animals that a lot of people wanted to buy, but also tiger cubs and weird rare birds, like Psittacus erithacus erithacus, the African Grey, and Brazilian Conures of the genus Pyrrhura. People had all kinds of fetishes about animals they wanted to buy. A lot of people wanted particular albino animals, for instance. Some people wanted particular reptiles because some varieties lived hundreds of years. One man told Marty, “If you have a lizard that can live that long, it’s like you have to live that long. Who’s gonna get outlived by a fucking lizard?” People’d get one parrot and then want another. They’d want a pair of each. They’d want two by two.

  Occasionally, there was a problem with a shipment and one of the guys who worked the airport in Miami would have to release something, just bust open whatever contraption they were shipping the animal in and let it go on the tarmac. Usually, of course, the animal wouldn’t make it off the airport grounds, security would shoot it, safety reasons as they say, but a lot of the animals didn’t make it because a lot of the animals were just really fucked up from the ride. Some of them, some birds for example, stuffed in nylon stockings and then into suitcase linings, just lower and lower their heartrates until they’re dead, and some of them die of drugs, like a boa constrictor, for example, who’s had cocaine stuffed into condoms stuffed down it and then the condom breaks. Some of them get out and just collapse, right there on the runway. But some of them make it, if that’s what you want to call it, and hightail it right over the chain-link and into the Everglades. The monkeys made it sometimes, and sometimes birds made it. Once or twice they’d even had an escaped bird brought in by someone totally unrelated to the operation, just someone who found a bird broken inside a toilet paper roll or something or found one floundering way away from the airport and heard about this place that fixed up wild animals. Marty loved the sort of cyclic nature of those moments, holding the body of a wildly colorful bird that had been so many places in so many ways, and had ended up there, in the palm of his hand.

  The wooden box on the tailgate of the truck held six coral snakes, and the blond girl watched them and watched them while Marty held her there. Even when his arm grew tired she was still pretty much transfixed, and he leaned against the tailgate a little, so she slid down on his hip and put her weight on the tailgate partly, but kept leaning on him mostly, absently, and he put his arm around her
waist as she watched the snakes, dense rusty red and glossy black, with white-and-yellow rings. Marty knew there were six snakes, because he’d counted them out, six, for the guy who wanted to buy them, but the girl had no idea how many there were. She couldn’t even find their heads. All the bodies moved at the same speed, and the rings seemed to move up and down their bodies. All she did was think about counting them for one moment, because that’s what they train you to do at that age, if you remember, is count, but really, immediately, she knew better, she knew there was no way, and she knew it didn’t matter anyway, so she watched them move as if watching one looping labyrinth of an animal. How immaculate the scales, how glossy and clean, how absolutely even and repeated. And near the tangle, a molted skin hovered in a corner of the box, an afterimage of the snake it came from, any one or all of them.

  It was getting dark outside. Her mother called for her from the other side of the barn and the sound sounded funny, bouncing through the barn down the cement aisle toward them. Marty whispered, “That’s enough for today,” and put her down, and quickly shoved the box back into the dark truck, lifted the tailgate, undipped and lowered the plywood.

  “Here we are,” Marty called, as the blond girl’s mother emerged from the barn, shaking her fluffy blond hair out of its braid, shaking it loose with her surprisingly immaculate painted fingernails. “Here we are. We were right over here. We were talking.”

  “Thanks, Marty,” the blond girl’s mother said. “You know I worry about her.”

  And that’s how he made it so that for the next couple months he could show up as many times a week as he thought he could get away with and lead the girl around the stable and the pastures, trees, and brush behind it. If you went to the back of the property, you could go on the other side of the fence and there was a whole orange grove back there, and no one really went back there, people didn’t even trail ride back there because there was no place a horse could get through.

  One night Marty called the girl’s mother at home. He’d been thinking he’d like to take the blond girl to the little zoo. He could see how great it would be for her to see the peacocks and imagined how he’d take her in the back where she could see the other animals they had there, too, because he knew she wouldn’t tell and it would be so great for her to see them. He kept thinking about how great it would be for her to see them that it started to seem really wrong that she hadn’t been able to see them already. It started to seem like she’d been kept from seeing them. He phoned up their apartment, and the girl’s mother answered the phone. It was pretty late, but not that late. Still, the girl’s mother sounded funny when she answered and she might have been sleeping. This kind of pissed him off for some reason, but he steadied himself.

  “Hello, this is Marty,” he said. “You know, from Joe’s.”

  “Are you okay?” asked the blond girl’s mother.

  “Oh, me, yes, of course.” He tried to picture a slow animal, to help him keep steady, because he could feel himself flushing. He recognized this as anger, but then what he noticed was that more than feeling angry he felt humiliated. He could not believe that he had to do this, that he had to ask this woman. He felt like an idiot, asking.

  Can your daughter come over to play? It was an insane question. Mrs. Fucking Jones, can Janie come out to play. It was ridiculous.

  We’re all adults here, he wanted to say. What’s the fucking problem.

  He tried to think of a slow animal. I’ll think of a slow animal and that’ll slow me down, he thought. He thought of a turtle first, of course, and this annoyed him immensely, that he would think of a dumpy turtle. He thought of a big cat, crouched and moving through tall grass and this too was so wrong it turned his stomach to have it cross his mind.

  He tried to turn his mind off. He tried to picture blank space. He did, finally. He pictured blank, black space like in a planetarium, with scattered twinkling dots that set off the blackness so you can see it.

  “I’d like to take her to the zoo where I work, okay?” he said. “I’d like to take her tomorrow and I can come and pick her up.”

  “Tomorrow’s Tuesday.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a schoolday, Marty.”

  “Right, yes,” he said. “But that’s okay.”

  “Couldn’t you take her on a weekend?”

  “What I want to do is take her tomorrow,” Marty said. The girl’s mother didn’t say anything immediately and his insides tightened, so he said, “It’ll be so much better than school. It’ll be educational.” He couldn’t believe he’d said that, it was such an idiotic thing to say, although it was true, schools brought kids to the zoo, and it was educational, so he couldn’t figure out how he’d managed to say it and have it sound like such an idiotic reason, because it wasn’t an idiotic reason. But her mother still wasn’t saying anything, so he said, “I mean, what are they going to study tomorrow that’s so important? I mean, it’s not like she’s got a big test,” he said, and then realized that he could try to make that sound like a lighthearted joke, so he did that sort of half-panting thing you do to try to make yourself laugh. He could feel his breath bounce off the phone. It was humiliating.

  “I don’t want her to miss school,” said her mother.

  “I don’t think you understand,” said Marty.

  “I don’t want to argue about this,” said her mother.

  “You’re being ridiculous and I don’t think you have your daughter’s best interests in mind,” said Marty. “I mean I think you’re really not realizing that this would be the right thing for her to do tomorrow. I’m going to show her all the rescued animals. You know we’ve talked about it, and she really wants me to bring her to see the rescued animals.”

  “No,” said her mother.

  “You are unreasonable,” said Marty, his voice rising.

  The blond girl’s mother watched her hand move quicker than she’d be able to move it if she was thinking, and she watched it come down on the plastic see-through buttons in the phone’s cradle. She sat in bed with her other hand still resting on the telephone receiver, letting it hang on her shoulder. Her husband said, “Who the fuck was that?” but she couldn’t think about it, and she couldn’t think about it, and she couldn’t think about it.

  Here’s something that always confused me about Pandora’s box: Pandora can’t help herself, curiosity overcomes her, she can’t obey orders and so she lies or whatever and she opens the box. Out fly all the terrible things, like sorrow and war, anger and meanness, gangrene and deep unscratchable needs. She is stunned and shocked and can’t get ahold of herself, watching these dark live ghosts scatter into the world, becoming particles within the air. When she snaps out of it, finally, and slams down the lid of the box, the only thing left is Hope. This is how the story was taught to me, during the Mythology Unit. My teacher said, So thank goodness she closed the lid, so that Hope is left and we still have Hope with all these evils in the world. Trouble is, my teacher was an idiot, because look, it’s right there in Pandora: evil is loose in the world and hope is not, it’s shut in a box. Precisely the moment Pandora thinks she might have come to her senses, she’s created the most damage of all.

  I thought of the snakes in the box and the snakes in the water where Scott was still swimming. It was so close to dark that I couldn’t tell when he was underwater and when he was not. I could hear little splashes, but they could have been Scott or they could have been any number of animals. If I forgot I was looking into darkness over a pond, it could have been something splashing into water as easily as out. It could have been the sounds of twigs snapping. The way a hushing air sound could be wind or breath, any small disturbance can sound the same. It could be dark out or you could have your eyes closed, same difference.

  At some point in my reading, I realized, with enormous reluctance, that Hiawatha was supposed to be a boy, and not a girl. With his name like Samantha, or Cynthia, names I liked to name my dolls. With long black hair, running through the woods. It took a
long time, but I settled, finally, on imagining something half, both, or neither, something androgynous, hermaphroditic, or even sexless, but more likely I settled on trying not to worry about it. I let the book call him “him,” although I knew the truth.

  I watched him run, caught up with how quickly he moved, how the forest was unchanged as he moved through it, how he could run through a field of purple flowers and none broke and none bent. Something felt odd, though, watching him, and then I knew: silence! Hiawatha ran silently, the way a barn owl with giant white wings has silent flight. It makes you dizzy to see a barn owl. It’s flapping, but there’s no sound. It feels like when you’re in a car and the car next to you moves forward a little and it feels like you’re going backward, even though you know you’re not. That’s what it feels like to watch a silent-flight bird flap. It’s incongruous, but true. Hiawatha running: no snapping sticks and no whipping branches, no hot hard breath, no beating heart. He’s not moving like the wind, because the wind howls. He’s not moving like a fish because a fish will flop and gurgle. He’s moving like a mere image, like a ghost, like animation.

  I watched Scott that way, in the complete silence and the darkness that comes only in the imagination. I watched the darkness, and I knew that in the darkness was the enormous tree, and that the enormous tree was like a ship or like a brontosaurus by the shore of the pond, and that within the darkness, under the water, Scott swam in the dangerous water, silently, as if it was not dangerous. Somewhere in the pastures behind the pond my mother rode someone’s horse. My father was somewhere in Miami. Marty was leading the blond girl among cages of exotic animals. Distance through darkness, through history, through the unintelligibility of multitudinous likenesses and insufficient sight. I watched Scott like he was my false Hiawatha, because someone gave me Hiawatha warped, and I had to make everything up from there.