Large Animals

by Jess Arndt

  At the window a sign reads: “Every Man Hungry.” Exactly right. It’s only scrap sausages. I prod what’s handed at me. Two pale witch’s fingers surrounded by a plateful of grease.

  I have a strong feeling I’m staying at the wrong locale. “It ain’t like the ‘Jewel of the Pacific,’” I address the room. “It’s no Valapai.”

  From what I can gather the rest of my dorm-mates belong to a not-soon-enough departing vessel called Zoila—it rhymes with voila? So what.

  They all, every one of them, have mop-like beards and saucer eyes. Zoila is from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Quebec, a place I would never visit. But here we all are, in the doilied-up dining room together.

  I lower my plate to a table where three Zoilites, identical in every way, bunch.

  “You ever been to Valapai?” I open. But sure they have! It’s the only way round the Horn.

  Still the Zoilites are unmoved. Plus their dishes are licked bare. I’d better tuck in, I think, before these nutsos help themselves. I scarf my sausages, my chunk of toast, my pickled egg. Then I reach my second chunk of toast across and drag my neighbor’s plate.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” I say, nudging his well-shaped shin with my boot. “We do this kind of thing in Valapai.”

  I can’t stop talking about the place! Something eels around. I hate Valapai, if only for a second. I touch my back pocket, the one with the claim shoved in it. Of course I pull it out, caressing the oily script with my finger. Today I’m going to find Butt Riley. Rugged, the stranger had called him. Overly tall.

  “Dear guys,” I say, rolling a cigarette, “saying adios to Frisco must be tough. I know I was glum when I left Vala . . .”

  But the damn clock moans. The Zoilites nicker and draw back their chairs. They move in unison, always.

  “Pals,” I say, “how about a light for my smoke?”

  Their backs are to me now, a desolate line made by the French linen of their shirts. We should all wear the same thing, I offer semi-silently, if we’re going to live like this together.

  Later, a man’s big toe is reaching and reaching and reaching up from out of a stone well. A taste in my mouth of zinc or clay. Now my body’s roaring awake against the seam of my pants. Unbuttoning, I milk myself into the blanket’s wooly face, glancing around without interest.

  My memory is full of bald patches and gaps. Only, I must have returned from breakfast up the wheezing stair to a Zoilite’s dormer because here I am: alone, but in a Zoilite’s room, surrounded by his strange Zoilite stuff.

  I push at my skull. Had I, groping even though outside it was day, wavered at his doorknob instead of mine? Then, when it brushed against me—that terrible thick feeling—jumped not out but in?

  And what if!

  It doesn’t change facts. This sludgy ache tells me I’ve been more than sleeping. Somehow over breakfast they dosed me, dumped me out cold. I thrust open the window and stick my head into the night. Below—all the sounds of evening, the

  vigilantes hounding and tamale vendors begging for my

  stomach’s dollar and a bright steady tonging that I just now noticed going roundly to the east. It must be the mountains. They’re tearing their new machines through the hills! The sound falls just outside my knowing. Each time I think it’s done a distant hammer waits a second longer, then tongs again, making me start.

  Every Man Welcome, I assure myself. Every Man, that’s me.

  I sit down on the Zoilite’s bed and wait. Images of Valapai swim through me at great speed. Can you believe the brand-new funiculars lofting us up her teeming hills, the gorgeous tuba-shaped women and their endless train of “invitation-only” fiestas, the popping sound a sugarcane made when I crushed open a stalk between my molars? There was one party in particular—

  I’d taken Señorita Espacio, “the Bullfighter,” they all called her. I’d been forced to by our hosts. That first meeting, my adversary’s (as she quickly became) calves sparkled in her encrusted stockings. Espacio, enchante!

  It was a miners’ gathering at a palatial ranchero up in the jungly plateaus north of Valapai. They were rough guys, miners of explosives (some said aphrodisiacs)—i.e., saltpeter. Tons of it, clearly: the party-givers were rich. It was the night before they were about to make for the shriveling Atacama Desert and I was drunk already, I must have been, because I remember stumbling over the marble doorframe on dumb feet and everyone laughing and laughing.

  Give Espacio a little pleasure, my female host had said.

  We drank cases of just-off-the-boat Italian licorice-smelling Strega and inhaled steaming bowls of cazuela. At one point I was instructing them in the polka. At another, my throat was clogging, I was eating something very dry. After my fifth tiny glass of that sticky yellow heaven I thought briefly about marrying Señorita Espacio. After my seventh, I mumbled something to her, something that lifted from the carriage of my body with great weight. I was teary then, it was such a sad story. After glass eleven an oversized golden horn butted out of her forehead.

  I pressed her hand to my cheek. Her palm felt like clotted cream.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” I said, by way of exiting.

  “It’s probably better that way,” said the señorita, giggling. “After what you’ve told me so far.”

  But what had I said? I felt like I was sitting on an anthill. In the following weeks my agitation only grew. Soon I was pursuing taverns that were always farther afield, places I was sure no one would know me, barrios of ill repute—tin waterfront shacks if I’m honest—with buckets on the sawdust floor to collect the gallons of that cheap grapeskin we pissed, or was it only the rain? Regardless, I was sure that if I got cavernously drunk then I would make that same obliterating confession again. And since I would not stop drinking—impossible in Valapai—I’d better not risk the shame.

  Down on Dupont, the gum trees chatter their dry long tongues. The white of the moon makes me choke. These Frisco streets are large, twice as broad as the tight wends of Valapai. An alien something could take me, I think. Extraterreste: of or belonging to another. Then wonder why I thought it. Get a hold of yourself, Pinkie.

  I do not try the door. I don’t have to. I’ve heard of bunches of poisonings like this, even stood out on Columbus Ave. and broadcast them myself:

  “Sailor, don’t take that drink! Don’t touch that muffin!”

  What this town is famous for. Anyway, I’m sure the door’s bolted. So which guy is it? I wonder, fantasizing about my captor. Try as hard as I can to picture the Zoilites, they all look exactly the same—those beards jumping out from their faces and flying around the room like kites and those wide blue plates they wear for eyes.

  An even uglier thought hits.

  Robbed! I’m sure my pocket’s been pierced and I’m sitting on nothing, nada. The feeling’s so strong I don’t check for my claim. I don’t need to. Instead I tear at the guy’s room blindly, sobbing for Valapai from my boot-bent toenails all the way to the tips of my ears. All of Frisco can hear me but I don’t care. What a careless bitch she is too, to leave me alone like this in the attic of my ruin.

  Come to think of it—if I track it back, everything leading up to my current noose is predicated on my whispered confidence to Srta. Espacio and her scoffing haughty tone. It was in one of those anonymous tin shacks (a particularly sweaty one called Tropezedo) where I met the man with the magic claim and the “friend” Butt Riley, who I am now seeking, am this very day supposed to (in the flesh) meet. In Tropezedo my appearance was porous. The place was so squeezed full of nobodies, I spoke to anyone I could find. Yes, I’d said, reaching toward his robust torso for the claim paper. Leave my dear Valapai? Bend over and grab my ankles? Yes, yes. Of course the stranger planted the idea of “Every Man Welcome” in my head too, although I had much nicer joints in mind. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a Zoilite himself—it’s not so hard to shave a beard, after all!

  Then, as if sensing I’ve come to the ab
rupt cliff-end of a thought, someone knocks.

  “Who is it?” I say.

  A scuffling sound against the doorframe and something thick—body- or barrel-sized—dragging up and down the hall. They’re out there parading like usual.

  “Come in,” I say, making my voice boom.

  He opens the door. His hair shines with water or oil and he’s parted it down the middle so that when he bows it, I can see the white shock of his scalp. His hands are bundled in front of him. It’s his room but, can you believe the gall, he seems to be waiting for me to invite him in.

  “Well, come on,” I repeat stiffly, descending another octave.

  I now see he’s got his left hand clamped on a bottle of ’bou, the only thing the Zoilites drink. It’s a harsh kind of liquor mixed with syrups and wine. I’m thirsty, of course, but angry.

  “Harassing me’s hardly the best use of your time, is it?” I demand. “You have my claim, you mugger, and the hammers are going out there all night and all day, making men rich. What are you waiting for?” I glance around his room—the sheets in sticky ribbons, the drawers sitting dumbly after vomiting their insides. “Butt Riley?”

  But the Zoilite steps around my outburst easily, in fact, he barely seems to notice. He perches on a plain wooden chair, uncomfortably close to my position on his bed. Our knees, damn him, dance. I throw his blanket across his thighs. Cover up.

  “Do you know, in Valapai, there are apes in the hills?” I start. I’m not in fact sure of this, but who is sure of anything, anymore. “With big ape faces and big ape hands and they drag their fists like this [I demonstrate] in the brush.”

  There you go, Pinkie, I think. You’re winning this.

  The guy hasn’t said a syllable; it’s like his mouth is full of paper or pitch. That’s tree’s blood! I try to continue with my story but can no longer find its pulse. Only that, in my final weeks in Valapai, I believed a shape moved next to me, the shadow of the ape.

  I’d like to tell you more about it but that’s all I know: at the corners of my vision a figure lumbered. When I turned, it was gone. Worse, I had the distinct feeling that it was not the ape itself who was tracking me, but only the dark spot it cast by being alive.

  The Zoilite uncorks the bottle and takes a wet gulp. He waves its mouth end at me.

  “And now you want me to drink,” I hear myself saying.

  What choice do I have? I’m desiccated. Those distant sausages were just cheap salt packed into old casings. I snatch the spirit from him, wipe the neck, and pour the stuff down.

  It’s hard to say what comes next. The room seems to fill up with Zoilites, or is it just the same guy, multiplying, getting bigger? Then we’re outside, tossed from “Every Man Welcome” onto the bumpy face of Dupont. Marching beside him, I feel exactly as if I’m being carried aloft on his broad Zoilite shoulders and I begin to see the streets as channels flowing toward some terrible outcome that I’ve been streaming toward ever since Tropezedo, the stranger’s crushing odor, the moldy peeled cane walls.

  Again I’m filled with all the old worries and complaints. I’m sure behind the bungled ape story, another one lurks. One that will permanently expose me.

  Kerosene lamps bob like buoys in the pulpy dark, stretching a long way off. A few guys swim past with their collars up but by and large the avenue is empty. I’d expected the Zoilite to keep offering the spirit, but he’s tucked it away, the miser, just as my thirst picks up. In Valapai things soar on well past dawn. Where’s the fun anyhow?

  Frisco, honey, you seem grim.

  Just then a foghorn comes on, low and gassy. At first land I’d cozied up to it but now its monstrous bellow fills me with nervous, chilly vibration. If I felt more myself I’d punch my subjugator in the beard-smocked throat and jump on the next packet to Hunan or distant Boston or even, as the foghorn implores: GO HOME.

  Impossible, my brain howls. I’ve been robbed. Still, I try to keep my head.

  “What streets are these?” I say. But we go on and on in engulfing silence.

  Finally he puts his hand up. In front of us, instead of

  wharves—cannibalized sloops and hay barges, half-sunk, filled with trash. I scuff my foot. I much prefer the broad eucalyptus-

  lined avenues near Dupont. You know, Stockton, Kearny, the Devil’s Acre, yes, even Sansome! This is a desolate drop-off, rimmed by semi-built factories. “Dew Drop In,” it says above

  the door.

  I don’t laugh. Why would I? It’s a shack with a stovepipe, that’s all.

  The Zoilite stands listening in the door’s breach, smoking. This guy is implacable. Here we are out in the City of Speculations and he wants to take me to the dumpiest joint around.

  “Is this your best choice?” I say. “In Valapai we have Bertie’s, Flora y Fauna, A Little Bit of Sol-o.” I tick off my favorite spots. Keep Tropezedo out of it, I tell myself. “Christ, I didn’t want to come to Frisco,” I moon louder and spit.

  Sure, when I was on the jetty, on dry land finally where I could see those brown hills coaxing me to play my claim and someone yelled “You aren’t fine till you’re in Frisco!” I’d felt a small bang.

  But if this is all she has to offer? My mouth jerks free of my brain. Espacio! What had I said? I’m lost in the murk, but her crystal stockings, her legs of ice, won’t let me go.

  I remember (with fresh sprouting horror) the cramped letters I’d written her, the names I had called her, the threats I had made. Wasn’t it true she’d been making her rounds? Bowl after neighborly bowl of cazuela? Dinner after blabby dinner? Sharing my news?

  Extremes like these drove me to Valapai’s social citadel: the courthouse. So Romanesque—with its uniforms and columns! My eyes were still burning from the long nights at Tropezedo. But what choice did I have?

  Better if I unclothed her before she unclothed me.

  “Fine, fine,” I said, announcing myself to the clerk. “Here I am. Let’s clear this thing up.”

  But I shuddered when I entered the interior office. The colonel in charge was a Valapai party man. In fact, it was his ranchero I’d been at—he’d headed up the saltpeter miners that condemning night. Now his boar-like face charged at me from behind his desk and his eyes glittered from wet folds of skin.

  “Señor Pinkie,” he breathed. My presence seemed to inject a localized pain.

  “Señor Pinkie, it doesn’t look . . . so . . . good.”

  These were a surgeon’s words before he tossed away a healthy leg, or a finance man emptying your account. You dunce, he’ll want a payoff, I thought. After all, Espacio was his wife’s friend. I reached for my wallet. Ten reales. Twenty reales? How much could he expect?

  I paused.

  Hadn’t she hoped to infect me against myself? Then wasn’t it normal to launch a campaign? Violent, sure. Push a dick through a garden window? Well, if it was open, why not? I shook my coin as the colonel moaned sadly. A few grubby pesos fell into my palm.

  “Señor Pinkie . . .” he said again.

  That breathing! My neck prickled. Its sucking sound made a familiar gurgle in my brain. But then his face unfolded and widened and the well-boiled nubs of his teeth snuck out from behind his lips, making me wince.

  “Espacio, she was . . .” I started my defense.

  “Brandy!” he exhaled. Suddenly we were faced with two shiny tumblers and a half-full resinous carafe.

  I wasn’t sure whether to sit or stand so I hunched over in front of him on his llama hair rug.

  “Do you remember how you made us writhe around,” he said, “how you made us pray to that whore Hathor, show our ass puckers, out there in the yard?”

  I nodded to please him, but if I’m honest, my mind (besides my half-cognizant and exhausting encounters with Espacio) was blank. Hathor, goddess of miners, I found myself mumbling. Thou art the Mistress of Jubilation, the Queen of the Dance, the Mistress of Music, the Queen of the Harp Playing, the Lady of the Choral Dance, the Queen of
Wreath Weaving, the Mistress of Inebriety Without End!

  He bent his head and then swung it up as if catching a scent.

  “We crept under the vines together, Señor Pinkie,” he said. He crashed his tumbler down and the brandy slugged over. “Eh?”

  Then he seemed to change tacks. His eyes swiveled to the ceiling.

  “Dammit, we scoured for those hidden caliche beds. But the Atacama . . .”

  His face was terrible now, cracking into little pieces.

  “. . . was dry! . . . Hahahaha, get it? The Atacama was dry!”

  The Zoilite crushes his cigarette under his boot and shoves his hands together, blowing off the cold. He smiles at me, at least, his lips twitch.

  We enter a dank passageway. Lamps smoke up from the gravel floor. The walls are tight. Coral flowers cover the wallpaper, oozing like tiny decapitated heads. From the outside the shack looked infinitesimal; now I realize they’ve sneakily buttressed it from the back.

  We press in farther. The passageway slopes to a steep grade. It’s colder. The walls flanking us are no longer wallpapered but seem to be bleeding: hacked out of sedimentary stone.

  I know where we are. Buried under the city where they’ll wrap me up like one of Tut’s mummies and trade me off for a dollar to any old passing ship. He must have a fistful of chloroform. That’s why he’d been listening so closely, to make sure we were alone.

  “I’m guilty!” I beg, grabbing at his linen frill. “Do what-all you’ve come here for!”

  My memory of Espacio has ruined me. I’m sure I’ve performed even more desperate things that are only waiting to catch me in the dark. Even at “Every Man Welcome,” I’ve stirred the pot. Haven’t I hated the Zoilites? Reported them to the local squads? As if I was hotter stuff?

  I stare into the gloom. “At least give me some more of that ’bou, man, so I can get good and poisoned,” I say.

  But even that he withholds.

  I pull a claim from my back pocket. Then more, claims with Zoilite names on them even, waving them all at his retreating shape.