We the Animals

by Justin Torres

  We tiptoed. We ate peanut butter on saltine crackers and angel hair pasta coated in vegetable oil and grated cheese. We ate things from the back of the refrigerator, long-forgotten things, Harry and David orange marmalades, with the rinds floating inside like insects trapped in amber. We ate instant stuffing and white rice with soy sauce or ketchup.

  Lina, Ma's supervisor, called to check up.

  "This makes six shifts in a row," she said. "What's going on over there?"

  Machinery buzzed and clanked around her. There was the piercing clatter of bottles being hustled down an assembly line.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Speak up, honey," she hollered. "It's louder than hell where I am."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean it's loud here! I can barely hear you. Fuck it. I guess I'll just have to come over and see for myself." The line went dead, and I waited for the dial tone and then that other noise, the one that means that you've forgotten to hang up the phone.

  Lina came straight from the brewery, still in her long white lab coat, her safety goggles perched on top of her head. She was born in China; she was tall and thick, with high cheekbones that stuck out like handlebars below her eyes.

  "You're huge," we said. "There's no room for you. You'll bump your head on the ceiling."

  We tried to close the door on her, but she muscled it open and held up one of her legs, pointing to her boot.

  "I'm shorter without these."

  She took off her coat, talking about how there was a part of China where all the women were built like her, "like Cadillacs," she said and laughed, holding out her big hands on either side of her in a motion that was meant to imply hugeness. She handed us a brown paper grocery bag, bent down to unlace her boots, and said, "Don't open that just yet, just set it on the table and fetch me your mother from wherever she's hiding."

  "She's sleeping," Manny grunted. We didn't bother taking the groceries into the kitchen. We dumped everything onto the living room carpet and tore into the sliced bread and cheese, jamming fistfuls into our mouths, drinking the milk out of the carton, looking straight into Lina's eyes, the three of us, daring her. She flashed her long, wide horse teeth at us. She tossed her boots into the corner.

  "You'll choke," she warned, "if you're not careful.

  "Comrade!" she hollered, stepping over us, and Ma came running, throwing herself into Lina's big arms, burying her face in Lina's silky black hair, and crying.

  Lina stood there for a while, then reached into her smock and pulled out a tissue, taking our mother's face in her hands and wiping it down, tucking wisps of hair behind Ma's ears. We were kneeling on the floor, not two feet away from them, and the longer Lina stood there, grooming Ma, the less we paid attention to the groceries. Then Lina started kissing Ma all over, little soft kisses, covering Ma's whole face with them, even her nose and eyebrows. Then she put her lips on Ma's lips and held them there, soft and still, and nobody—not me, not Ma, not Joel or Manny, nobody—said a word. There wasn't a word to say.

  Other Locusts

  WE GOT INTO Old Man's garden and helped ourselves. Old Man had a high hedge and lived down a dirt road almost too rough and rutted for our bikes, but we forged the road, pushed through the hedge, got into the garden, and helped ourselves. We tasted and trampled and laid waste, and when we looked up, Old Man was watching us from the porch, just watching.

  "Animals," he hissed. He looked as if he could spit. "Locusts."

  We were ashamed before him. He was very old.

  "This your garden?" Manny asked. Joel let a tomato fall from his hand, then wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.

  Old Man opened the screen door and came down the steps toward us. He dropped to his knees in the dirt and fingered the broken stalks. He picked up a half-eaten cucumber and brushed away the dirt, then flipped open a pocketknife and cleaved away the bite marks. The plants we had pulled up from the roots were pushed back into the earth. He crawled stiffly around on hands and knees, and we stood above watching.

  Old Man pushed the salvaged vegetable parts into our arms, then herded us onto the porch. We dumped the pieces onto a fold-out card table.

  "What's locusts?" Joel asked.

  "What the locust swarm left, the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left"—Old Man paused to narrow his eyes at each one of us—"other locusts have eaten."

  Then he called us invaders, marauders, scavengers, the devil's army on earth.

  Old Man spoke crooked and singsong—a Missouri accent, it turned out—and we didn't understand half the words he used, but locusts, the threat and possibility of locusts, seized our imaginations, and we made Old Man tell us about them over and over again until we understood. We even made him draw us a picture of locusts, a flurry of black marker dashes near the top of the page, the sky, more and more dashes, one on top of the other, until the top half of the page was filled with black.

  "That there's locusts," he said. "You'll see, by the by, you'll see."

  This was all on the porch; he never invited us any farther into his home than that, but neither did he ask us to leave. It was late afternoon, sunset, dusk, into evening; the late summer air cooled quickly but didn't chill. The porch was screened in; the screens had bits of fabric sewn right into their mesh to patch up the holes and keep out the mosquitoes, but the mosquitoes found their way in anyhow. Old Man called them skeeters.

  We sat around that fold-out table and slapped them skeeters dead on the tabletop or on each other's exposed calves or forearms—we made a game of it, slapping at each other and laughing, but if a skeeter landed on Old Man, we didn't slap or smack but brushed his dry skin with our fingers. Once I stood and blew a gust of air across the back of Old Man's neck, where a skeeter perched to bite, and Old Man winked and nudged me in the ribs.

  "Best medicine for a skeeter bite is to cut a cross, like this," he said and carved a tiny cross onto my arm with his thumbnail. "That way you break up the poison and kill the itch."

  Old Man was from the Ozarks, which was a place in Missouri with sinkholes and caves and backward lightning that rose up from the earth and stretched into the sky.

  Old Man told us we were on the lam. He had all kinds of names for us, castaways, stowaways, hideaways, fugitives, punks, city slickers, bastards. Manny told him we had run away and weren't ever going back, and Joel added that our mother was dead, so there wasn't nobody to call anyhow. He was very old, and he didn't seem to care to call anyone or do anything. He also called us sweets, babies, innocents, poor pitiful creatures, God's own. He strung the words together, and talked mostly to himself, all the while chopping those vegetables into smaller and smaller pieces on the table; what he was doing was this: making us a salad.

  He got up and went into the house to fetch a bowl and plates and forks. He moved very slowly.

  "Old Man's all right," said Manny.

  "He is too," said Joel.

  Joel spotted the yellow of a plastic wiffle-ball bat among some rakes and brooms and shovels, all leaning in a corner.

  "What's he got this for?"

  He dug out the bat and looked around, but there was no ball. He faked a slow home-run swing, filling his cheeks with air and exhaling the moment he imagined making contact.

  "And don't tell lies about Ma being dead," Manny said to Joel. "That shit ain't right."

  It had gotten so dark that the light from the porch prevented us from seeing into the yard beyond. Our Ma was still broken, still dead-eyed, but she was not dead. She'd even returned to the brewery. She'd be there now, working. And our Paps was still disappeared. Manny said he'd picked up with another woman.

  Joel took another home-run swing, then faked the roaring of a crowd. Soon we would have to walk our bikes home in the dark, down that rutted-up dirt road without any streetlights.

  "You hear?"

  "You think you know everything," Joel said, pointing the tip of the bat clo
se to Manny's nose. Manny flared and tensed and Joel smiled. "But you don't know shit."

  "The fuck I don't," Manny said, and the words were barely spoken before the bat was swung, snapping Manny's head sideways. Then they were on the ground, fighting in the worst way—kennel style, Paps called it, all teeth and tearing and snot and blood.

  I yelled for them to stop, that's all I did, yelled that one word over and over, stop, stop, stop. I thought of Ma, whispering that same stop, stop, stop to our father. Manny sucked down the snot from his nose into his throat and spat a lugie in Joel's face, and the mucus slid off, like egg yolk.

  "Animals," said Old Man, "animals."

  Then Manny and Joel did stop. They stood and panted and pulled their clothes back into shape. Old Man stayed in the doorway to his house and ordered us off his porch, into all that dark. The air buzzed with insects. There was no moon. Summer nights seemed the wildest nights of all.

  There were still millions of questions, about God, and locusts, and the Ozarks, about getting old and dying. Old Man held our bowls in his hand, and because we could not look him in the eye, we looked at those empty bowls. We looked so silently, we looked so hard, that he turned from us and set the bowls down somewhere inside the house.

  "Go on," he said, "scram."

  Millions of questions. Like, how come animals aren't afraid of the dark? Especially the tiny ones, the bunnies and little birds that are skittish enough during the day—what do they make of the night? How do they understand it? How can they sleep out there, alone? Were the trees and bushes and rabbit holes all filled with ears listening, listening, and eyes never daring to shut?

  And the other locusts, what's wrong with them, why do they come last, and what's left for them to eat?

  Talk to Me

  WE WERE SEATED at the kitchen table, hungry, impatient, clamoring. We threw our heads back on our necks and grasped our bellies. Every night we died of hunger. Ma was suckling her fingertip; she had cut herself on the jagged edge of the soup can. The phone rang, and Ma spun around and popped the cut finger out of her mouth.

  "It's your father," she said but didn't answer, just dumped the soup into the pot and resumed her bloodsucking.

  We stopped whining and looked back and forth from each other to the ringing phone—this was a new game. We rested our elbows on the tabletop, held our faces in the palms of our hands, and watched her back, mirroring her silence, waiting for the next move, but she didn't look at us or offer an explanation; she just kept stirring. The phone rang as the soup simmered and hissed, the phone rang as Ma splashed the broth into three bowls and slid them under our faces, the phone rang as we extended our chins and noses into the steam and stuck out our tongues to taste the hot air. We hadn't seen or heard from our father in weeks.

  Ma ripped open a bag of crackers, scattered them across a plate, clattered that plate onto the middle of the table, and said, "What? Eat."

  She joined us, her chair turned sideways. She unlaced her work boots, slipped off her socks, and massaged her feet. The phone rang just above and behind her head. She knew where Paps was at, knew the secret of his urgency, and she wasn't going to tell us. The foot massage was a bad sign, but worse was the smile when we asked for more dinner.

  "That's it," she said, smiling her crooked tooth smile, staring at her painted toenails. "That's all there is."

  We stayed at the table for another forty-five minutes, running our fingers around our empty bowls, pressing our thumb tips into the cracker plate and licking the crumbs off, lulled into a trance by the even tempo of the phone's ring, immobilized by the repetition, listening carefully, hoping it would never stop. He was somewhere, at some phone, in a phone booth, or sitting on the edge of a someone else's bed, drunk or sober, and it was loud and hot, or cold, and he was alone, or there were others, but every single ring brought him home, brought him right there before us. The tone of the ringing changed too, from desperate to accusatory to something sad and slow, then it was a heartbeat, then it was eternity—had always rung, would always ring—then it was the piercing bell of an alarm.

  Ma stood up from her chair, lifted the receiver, and placed it back down again in one swift movement—and for a moment nothing, maybe even a full minute, long enough for our ears and clenched muscles to relax, long enough to remember and realize fully something we had long suspected: that silence was absolution, that quiet was as close to happiness as we would ever get. But then it started again, the ringing, and continued.

  "What if he's having a heart attack?" Manny asked.

  "What heart?" said Ma.

  "I'm going to get it," Manny said, and without even a second's hesitation our mother grabbed his bowl and smashed it onto the linoleum.

  And still the phone rang.

  Ma dismissed us, and Manny went and shut himself up in our room, so Joel and I headed down to the crawlspace, where we sharpened popsicle sticks into points, preparing for war. Footsteps were amplified in the crawlspace, voices muffled, and the phone didn't exist at all.

  Paps finally arrived home, and they made thunder, stomping above us, chasing each other, tumbling furniture. Their screams and curses reached us not as words but as soft, blunt rhythms. One of them finally got in the car and left, then nothing, silence, except for the light scraping of a broom.

  We climbed farther back in the crawlspace, as far as we could go, to the cinderblock wall. We found a heap of relics, a patchwork purse with fake, crackling leather, a broken typewriter, and our old yellow phone. Joel spun the dial.

  "Ring ring," he said.

  I used my thumb to hear and my pinky to speak.

  "Hello?"

  "Mami, how come you don't answer the phone when I call you?"

  "'Cause you sound so ugly!" I said, and we bust up laughing.

  I grabbed the phone and called him.

  "Yo, yo, whassup."

  "Woman, this is your husband talking to you right now, you better act right."

  "What do you want from me?"

  I stared at the receiver in my hand; I couldn't think of anything to say, so Joel took the phone and called me instead.

  "Hello?"

  "Dígame, Mami," he said. "Talk to me."

  "I been missing you, at work, them long-ass hours, I been missing you real bad."

  "I know, Mami, I know."

  We both hung up; we weren't really laughing anymore, weren't really looking at each other, but we were smiling. After a pause, Joel called me.

  "Hello?"

  "I got a job!"

  "You got a job?"

  "Yeah, baby, everything's going to be real fine from now on, just real fine."

  We both hung up, but I called him back right away.

  "I'm sorry."

  "Nah, baby," Joel said. "I'm sorry."

  The next time Joel called me, I made my voice sexy.

  "Hey, you," I said.

  "Hey yourself," he said, and we both hung up, blushing.

  I called Joel.

  "Hello?"

  "What are we gonna do?"

  "What do you mean, 'What are we gonna do?'"

  "It's just going to be like this forever?"

  "No, baby, it's not going to be like this forever."

  "So what are we going to do?"

  "Well, we'll do whatever it takes, I guess," Joel said.

  I was confused about who he was pretending to be.

  "What does it take?"

  "I'm not sure yet." He stretched the cord like a bow and arrow, then let it fly.

  You Better Come

  NOW THAT PAPS had returned, he wanted to be with us, all five together, all the time. He herded us into the kitchen and gave us big knives to chop up the onions and cilantro while he picked through the dried beans and boiled the rice and Ma chatted at him and smelled the air and sent us winks.

  After dinner he led us all to the bathtub, no bubbles, just six inches of gray water and our bare butts, our knees and elbows, and our three little dicks. Paps scrubbed us rough with a soapy
washcloth. He dug his fingernails into our scalp as he washed our hair and warned us that if the shampoo got into our eyes, it was our own fault for squirming. We made motorboat noises, navigating bits of Styrofoam around toothpicks and plastic milk-cap islands, and we tried to be brave when he grabbed us; we tried not to flinch.

  Ma was leaning over the sink, peering into the mirror, pulling out her eyebrows and curling her eyelashes with shiny metal instruments. "Be gentle," she said without even looking at him, without even blinking her eyes.

  They were both topless; Ma was in a flesh-colored bra and heavy cotton work pants, and Paps had taken off his shirt to wash us. We saw everything—how our skin was darker than Ma's but lighter than Paps's, how Ma was slight and nimble, with ribs softly stepping down from her breasts, how Paps was muscled, the muscles and tendons of his forearms, the veins in his hands, the kinky hairs spreading across his chest. He was like an animal, our father, ruddy and physical and instinctive; his shoulders hulked and curved, and we had, each of us, even Ma, sat on them, gone for rides. Ma's shoulders were clipped, slipping away from her tiny bird neck. She was just over five feet and light enough for Manny to lift, and when Paps called her fragile, he sometimes meant for us to take extra-special care with her, and he sometimes meant that she was easily broken.

  Paps stood to piss and we saw his stout, fleshy dick, the darkness of his skin down there and the strong jet of urine, long and loud and pungent. Ma turned from the mirror; we saw her watching him too. He zipped up and stood behind her, then slid his hands under her bra, and mounds of flesh rolled and squished between his fingers. It made us giddy because it made her giddy, even though she pushed him away. They were playing with each other, and no one wanted to leave the bathroom, no one wanted to fight or splash or ruin the moment.