We the Animals

by Justin Torres

  And then this headbanger swooped in with his "Hiya, fellas" and tore us open, thinned what was thick.

  And not even from our block, just moseying up the street with one hand stuffed into his pocket, pulling on his crotch from inside his dungarees. "I said, 'Hiya, fellas,' can't you talk?"

  And Manny, "What you want?"

  And Joel, "Yeah, what you want anyway?"

  And this headbanger, "I want to show you something. I got something good to show and nobody to show it to."

  "You talking about black magic?" Joel asked.

  "Shut up, Joel," said Manny.

  I waited for Manny to tell the headbanger to get the hell off our log, off our block; I waited for Manny to turn back to us, to turn his back fully on the headbanger, call him a clown, then turn to us and say, "OK, this is what's up for tonight, you listening?"

  But Manny kept his head forward.

  "What you got?" he asked the headbanger.

  And Joel, "Yeah, what you got, anyway?"

  The headbanger stood and clicked on the flashlight and said, "Come here."

  We followed him to the road, and he raised the flashlight high on our sectioned chalk circle as he had before, so that all of it was illuminated.

  "You know what this means?"

  There were the crickets and the lights in the windows of all the houses. We were cold. I put my thumb in my mouth and tasted the dirt.

  "Peace," the headbanger said, "this here's a sign of peace."

  Manny laughed, a knowing puff of air through his nose, then he bent his head back, raised his gaze from the pavement to the stars, right up into God's eyes. Lately, Manny looked out, looked up, looked into everyone and everything, not just us.

  And then this headbanger said, "I got something else to show you. Something good. Better."

  "That right?" Manny asked.

  And so we followed him home.

  In the front room, the headbanger's father smoked, washed in blue from the light of the television, one hand tucked into his armpit.

  "They know what time it is?" he said to the headbanger as we filed into the house and past the television, our shadows sliding over him.

  "They know."

  In the kitchen, I rubbed my hands all over the table, which was smooth and lacquered and cool. The headbanger set out plastic cups of pop for us, and Manny and Joel drank in a too-fast way that made me nervous, gasping for breath between gulps. The father shut the television, and the noise of the crickets rushed in. The headbanger squinted and listened, not for the crickets, but for the father, for his next move. We knew that squint; what stunned us was the way the headbanger was moving his lips—wild, without voice. He was animal-eyed and white-haired and he stunned us. Without his voice, the headbanger told us not to move, or he prayed, or he cursed his father, a black magic voodoo curse, or he did all of those things at once, just by moving his lips, this kid.

  We listened to the father stomp up the stairs and into the bedroom. A door slammed shut, and then another TV started up. I fumbled my cup, and the pop ran to the slit in the middle of the table and made a noise as it fell, exactly like someone pissing on the floor.

  "Leave it," the headbanger said, opening the basement door and summoning us over with a curled finger.

  We made the headbanger switch on the fluorescent light and go down the stairs in front of us. We took three steps, then bent, looked all over for traps, weapons, other kids. We took three more steps, paused. Manny said, "You sleep down here?"

  "Upstairs."

  "Shit smells."

  "It's a basement, what do you want? You fellas chicken-shit or something? Ain't you never been in a basement?"

  "Sure I have," Manny said.

  "We all have," said Joel. "Together. The three of us. Plenty of times."

  But the headbanger wasn't listening; he had moved to a chest and was pulling out a blanket.

  Three steel posts held up the floor of the house above. The ceiling was striped with rolls of insulation nailed to the underside of the floor with a nail gun, and one long strip had unpeeled itself, or been torn down, and now kissed the basement's dirt floor. The tuft of fiberglass was thick and pink and exposed. The headbanger led us to a corner room, sectioned off by three flaking wooden shutters. A gap between two of the shutters functioned as a doorway, and for the door there was a bed sheet patterned with winged helmets.

  Inside this room sat an old console television and a VCR.

  "I'm getting a couch," the headbanger said as he unfurled a ratty tiger-shaped throw onto the floor. Dust flew up and hung in the dank air, and we fanned our hands in front of our noses and coughed. From the hind waistband of his dungarees, hidden under his shirt, the headbanger produced a black plastic rectangle, a VCR tape, and displayed the tape with both hands in front of him, like a steering wheel. The title had been inked out with black marker.

  "This is it," he said, "this is what I wanted to show you."

  The tape began, the image rolled a few times over the screen, then settled and sharpened. A white kid, a teenager, was on a bed, turning the pages of a book. There was a knock on the door, and an older man entered; he called him Dad.

  "Dad," he said, "what do you want?"

  "I want to know how come you haven't done the dishes like I told you."

  One time, months ago, at the public pool, a mother, talking distractedly to her daughter, who was probably five or six, took a left instead of a right, and walked into the men's changing room, where my brothers, my father, myself, and other men and boys were showering, changing, clothed and naked. The mother had flushed and covered her daughter's eyes, instinctively; she had put both hands over her daughter's face and hustled her from the locker room. And the men—who never looked at nor spoke to each other outside their own kin—the men had suddenly looked around from one to the next, and after a pause, they had all erupted in laughter.

  "My goodness," the mother had said, just before grabbing the girl and shielding her eyes. "My goodness." I remembered that.

  And the TV, "Aw shucks, Daddy, leave me alone!"

  And the TV, "Don't you talk back to me."

  We sat on the tiger, each of us holding our knees in the crooks of our elbows—sucker-punched, hypnotized. There was the musty smell, the dirt underneath. There was the headbanger, who had been whistling, claiming, "You never seen a tape like this, I'll bet you never"—now gone quiet, mouth breathing. A film of sweat seeped over my palms, and with the sweat came heat and nausea. There was white magic and there was black magic.

  And the TV, "Aw, I didn't mean nothing by it!"

  Our Paps didn't truck in pornography; he had told us so and told the truth; if he had dirty tapes or pictures, we would have found them. Once, at a garage sale, we had come across a cardboard box with Adults Only scrawled across. The old man had laughed at us from his lawn chair. "You go on ahead," he had said, "but you see a lady stop by to have a look at my dishes, you just step on away from that box."

  We had seen flesh, women, sex parts, and sex acts, but only in still pictures. This man, this teenager, they were alive, or had been once—in this sparse room, just a bed, sheets, a book, one continuous shot, no angles, no cutting away, like a home movie.

  "You're going to learn your lesson, young man."

  My goodness, the mother had said, in the locker room, as if her goodness was a special treat stolen out of her hands by a naughty bird.

  "Pull down your underwear."

  I had seen mothers cover the ears of their children when someone was cussing or when the mothers needed to cuss themselves. And I had seen a woman cover a child's ears when another spoke against God.

  "Bend over my lap."

  Wasn't no one to stop this. My brothers. Wasn't no one.

  "Daddy, please."

  We had seen flesh, but still pictures, women. And, too, we had seen each other's bodies—all of us, me and Manny and Joel, Ma and Paps—we had seen one another beaten, animal bleating in pain, hysterical, and now drugged, and n
ow drunk and glazed, and naked, and joyous, heard high laughter, squeals and tears, and we had seen each other proud, empty proud, spite proud, and also trampled, also despised. We boys, we had always seen so much of them, penniless or flush, in and out of love with us, trying, trying; we had seen them fail, but without understanding, we had taken the failing, taken it wide-eyed, shameless, without any sense of shame.

  "This is for—"

  Wasn't none of it nothing like this.

  "And this is for—"

  Wasn't us. Didn't have nothing to do with us.

  "Yeah, you like that, don't you."

  Why won't you look at me, my brothers, why won't you take my eyes?

  Niagara

  MANNY AND JOEL were flunking, so when a man paid my father to drive a package up to Niagara Falls, it was me Paps took out of school for two days; it was me he brought along for company. We drove for four hours; Paps didn't say much, just that we were headed east, around Lake Ontario, hugging the shore. We stayed in a dusty motel room, and in the morning Paps took me to see the falls, and there, at the rustling and noisy edge, he hoisted me into the air and folded me across the railing so that my torso was suspended above the thick gushing cords of water and the mist was kissing me all over my neck and face, and when I didn't kick or scream, he leaned me out farther and he put his lips to my ear and he said, "Do you know what would happen if I let you go?"

  And I said, "What?"

  And he said, "You'd die."

  The water was tripping over itself, splashing and hypnotizing, and I tried to fix my mind on a chunk of it, like each little ripple was a life that began far away in a high mountain source and had traveled miles pushing forward until it arrived at this spot before my eyes, and now without hesitation that water-life was hurling itself over the cliff. I wanted my body in all that swiftness; I wanted to feel the slip and pull of the currents and be dashed and pummeled on the rocks below, and I wanted him to let me go and to die.

  Later, Paps pulled up to a little museum of curiosities and handed me a five-dollar bill and told me he'd be back in an hour to pick me up.

  "What happens when you die?" I asked.

  "Nothing happens," he said. "Nothing happens forever."

  The museum had wax replicas of freakish heads—people born with two pupils to each eye or forked tongues—and old sepia pictures of Siamese twins and babies with tails. There was a small room with a low ceiling and a bench where a three-minute film was being projected on a loop. The film showed men in barrels, smiling and waving and giving the thumbs-up to the camera as they approached the falls and then disappearing over its sudden edge. While some of these daredevils miraculously survived, the narrator droned, many more met their tragic ends.

  Hours passed. A man came by twice and poked his head into my theater and looked at me questioningly. The third time, he came in and sat next to me and asked, "How many times you plan on watching this crap?"

  I shrugged my shoulders. He was wearing corduroy pants, and I would have liked to drag my fingernail across his thigh.

  "You hiding?"

  "I'm just sitting here," I said.

  "Yeah, never mind," he said. "I guess you're a bit young for that. What about your folks?"

  "My father's coming to get me. He should be here any minute."

  The man stood up and looked down at me. The film projected across his shirt and cut him off at the waist, so that he looked like a giant, rising up out of the great Niagara.

  "You tell your father to come and see me in the ticket booth when he shows up. I'd like to meet him."

  When he left, I stood where he had been, and the waterfall projected across my face and arms. I moved closer to the wall so that the waterfall swallowed me up and I danced. I pretended I was a mer-boy prince and it was my job to try and catch all the men in barrels and save them from their deaths, but when I cupped my hands and reached up, they always slipped through. When they disappeared over the edge, I danced a special underwater dance, so that their souls could go up to heaven. Soon I stopped trying to save them at all because I was consumed in the death dance; spinning on my toes and looking down at my body, the water slipping and rushing over me, I slithered my arms and wiggled my hips against the current.

  When I looked up, Paps was in the doorway, watching me. His arms were raised, resting on the top of the door frame, and the light poured in behind him, obscuring his expression from me, but I knew from his silhouetted muscles and close-cropped Afro that it was him, and I knew too that he had been standing there, watching me, for some time. He dragged his hands down the sides of the doorway and then slapped them against his legs.

  "Let's get out of here," he said.

  Out on the sidewalk, I looked behind us, half expecting the man in the corduroy pants to be running after, but we were alone.

  We ate at a counter with spinning vinyl stools. We both had hot dogs; Paps broke his in half and stuffed an entire half into his mouth, then turned to look at me—his eyes wide and his cheeks bulging. I didn't laugh; he had left me there, alone, for too long.

  It was dark by the time we got on the road. We drove all night. Paps said he was exhausted and it was my job to keep him awake. He kept yawning and yawning, and I stared up at his profile, watching his eyelid grow heavy and droop and finally close, then I'd grab his arm and shake him, and he'd say, "What? What happened?"

  We didn't speak. I knew he was in a faraway world, half dreaming. When we pulled off the highway and onto the road that would bring us home, he said, "Yeah, it's a funny thing." He said it out of nowhere, as if we had been in conversation the entire time.

  "I stood in that doorway, watching you dance, and you know what I was thinking?" He paused, but I didn't answer or turn to look at him; instead I closed my eyes.

  "I was thinking how pretty you were," he said. "Now, isn't that an odd thing for a father to think about his son? But that's what it was. I was standing there, watching you dance and twirl and move like that, and I was thinking to myself, Goddamn, I got me a pretty one."

  The Night I Am Made

  THEY GREW UP wiry, long-torsoed, and lean. Their kneecaps, their muscles, bulged like knots on a rope. Broad foreheads and strong ridges along the brow announced their resemblance. Their cheeks hollowed, their lips barely covered their teeth and gums, as if the jaw and the skull inside wanted out.

  They hunched and they skulked. They jittered. They scratched.

  Out on the loading dock, in the lamplight, they watched the night. They watched their breath chill before them and float out into the cold dark. They stood hoodless in the snow, pinching the cotton filters from their cigarettes. They talked about breaking and entering. They loved to say about a thing that it was laced—their night, their drugs. Later, one of them will smash his face into the locker-room mirror over a girl, another will slice up his arms. They'll flunk. They'll roll one car after another into a ditch. Later they'll truck in all manner of pornography. Soon they'll drop out. At work, they'll fall in with all the other boys like them, boys with punched-out teeth, bad breath, easy winks. They'll skunk around in basement apartments with grown men who keep pet snakes in glass aquariums. Later still, they'll realize that those boys are actually nothing like them at all. Who knows this mutt life, this race mixing? Who knows Paps? All these other boys, the white trash out here, they have legacies, decades upon decades of poverty and violence and bloodlines they can trace like a scar; and these are their creeks, their hills, their goodness. Their grandfathers poured the cement of this loading dock. And downstate, in Brooklyn, the Puerto Ricans have language, they have language.

  Later, they'll see, ain't no other boys as pitiless, as new, as orphaned.

  But out on that loading dock, they looked into the future and saw otherwise.

  They felt proud to be the kind of boys they were—boys who spat in public, boys who kept their gaze on the floor or fixed on a space above your head, boys who looked you in the eye only to size you up or scare you off. When they bit the chapped
skin from their lower lips, when they chewed up the web between thumb and pointer, when they scratched inside their ears with house keys, they were looking at memories, proud memories, blood memories, or else they were dreaming about their wild futures. Out on that loading dock they chanted, Nah, man, Get out of here with that shit, Fuck that, Let me tell you how it was, Let me tell you how it's gonna be.

  They weren't scared, or dispossessed, or fragile. They were possible. Soon they'd be sailing right over them ditches. Soon they'd be handling that cash. They'd decide. They'd forge themselves consequential. They'd sing the mixed breed.

  And me now. Look at me. See me there with them, in the snow—both inside and outside their understanding. See how I made them uneasy. They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent. They believed I would know a world larger than their own. They hated me for my good grades, for my white ways. All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud.

  Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still.

  MIDNIGHT

  WE FINISHED OFF the liquor, hopped down from the dock, and Manny tossed the empty bottle Hail Mary into the line of trees. We didn't hear it come down, we didn't hear a single rustle or thud—and we reveled in the joy of this silent miracle. Manny invented a black hole; Joel suggested that the bottle landed perfectly in a raccoon's yawning mouth; I just razzed, That's the stupidest bullshit I ever heard. We stepped into our shadows and the echoes of our laughter, headed nowhere. The alcohol warmed our bellies; the snowflakes thickened the air before us.