When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  The mouth of the mine itself was weeded over with sumac and creeper vine, and there were two sets of mine-cart rails that emerged from the opening like tongues and ended abruptly on the floor of the quarry. You could wonder for hours about where those tracks went. Miles of underground passages beneath the town, maybe a whole underground city, with tunnels that opened in your basement! I explored our basement once, looking for an opening into hidden Atlantis—but all I found were forgotten mousetraps with hunks of dried-up cheese.

  It was almost exactly a year after my conversation with Polly under the sprinklers, and her sister, Shell, was still breaching.

  “I don’t think she’s ever going to stop,” Polly said miserably. “What if she doesn’t stop before I start?”

  “You? But we’re only fourteen.”

  “It’s not unheard of. My parents said it’s not unheard of. It’s different for different people. Plus I’m developing early in other ways.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen yet.”

  “It better not. My parents are going to throw a big party for her when she’s done. That’s how relieved they’ll be. They said I’m not going to be half as bad as her.”

  It seemed as though this were a source of disappointment for Polly.

  So when she came to my house on a weekday morning in July, telling me that everyone was going to the quarry and that we should hurry to join them, I followed her. If I didn’t follow her, I reasoned, I might be left behind forever—a child who simply misses the chance to grow up.

  So we took our bikes, pedaling hard and purposefully. On other days we might have been leisurely about our pace, weaving in lazy arcs back and forth across the empty roads. But that day was different.

  Arriving at the quarry, we saw four girls already there—Adelaide Warren, Sue Foxworth, and Idabel McCarron with her little sister, Florabel, in tow. We scrambled down into the quarry, bringing tiny avalanches of white silt pebbles after us.

  “Where’s Rosebush?” was the first thing Polly said as a greeting to the other girls.

  “I don’t know,” said Adelaide. “Look what we found.”

  We all gathered in a circle around the thing on the ground. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was—a wispy thing like smoke or frayed burlap, it moved with the breeze. Hair. It was a long skein of mousy brown girl hair.

  “It was ripped out,” Sue said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Look.”

  She reached down, gathered its tips into a bunch, and picked it up. Dangling from the base of the lock was a scabby little flake that I quickly understood to be scalp skin.

  Florabel shrieked and started running in circles.

  “Shut it,” her sister said.

  “Whose is it?” Polly asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sue said. “Better be a local girl.”

  A fierce territoriality is the by-product of uncommon local practices. Whatever happened in our town was manageable as long as it stayed in our town. We were not encouraged to socialize with people from elsewhere. We were taught to smile at them as they passed through. Every now and then some teenager from a neighboring town would get stuck here during a full moon—and the next day that outsider would usually go home goried up and trembling. That’s when trouble came down on us—authorities from other places going from door to door, kneeling down in front of us kids trying to get us to reveal something. But for the most part, people left us alone. Ours was a cursed town to outsiders.

  Just then there was a sound in the trees above, and we gazed up to find Rosebush Lincoln standing next to her bike on the lip of the quarry.

  “I’m here, creeps,” she said and let her bike fall to the ground. Strapped to her back was a pink teddy-bear backpack whose contents seemed heavy enough to make it an awkward process to climb down to the floor of the quarry. Once at the bottom, though, she sloughed off the pack and came over to where we stood.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the hair that Sue still held in her fingers.

  “Hair.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rosebush said. “I know where that came from. Mindy Kleinholt. My brother says she’s been going around all week with a new hairstyle to cover the empty spot. Happens.”

  Rosebush shrugged with a casual world-weariness that made her seem thirty-three rather than fourteen.

  Sometimes the thunderclouds gather overhead, and sometimes your haughty cat refuses its food, and sometimes you are partially scalped in a moonlit quarry. Such things are a matter of chance and hazard.

  Rosebush, whose lack of interest in the hair made everyone forget it at once, unzipped her teddy-bear backpack to reveal what she had been struggling to carry: six tall silver cans of beer connected at the tops with plastic rings. She set the cans on the ground before us, stepped back, and presented them with an expansive gesture of her arms.

  “Behold,” she said. “My brother stole it from the grocery store, and then I stole it from him.”

  “It’s double stolen,” said Adelaide, crouching down in front of the beer and running her finger in a delicate circle along the top edge of one of the cans. She was fairylike, always, in her movements. “It’s still cold,” she added.

  “It’s iced,” explained Rosebush. “We have to drink it before it gets skunked.”

  So she passed around the cans to the other girls. I took one but found it difficult to open, so Polly opened it for me.

  “Where’s one for me?” Florabel said.

  “You don’t get one,” said her older sister.

  “Cheers, queers,” Rosebush said, raising hers.

  Everyone drank. I lifted mine in imitation of drinking, but I didn’t let much get into my mouth. Just enough to wet my lips and tongue. The taste was awful, like moldy carbonated weed milk. The other girls crinkled their noses as well.

  Rosebush lectured us.

  “You have to drink it fast,” she said. “Hold your nose if you need to.”

  “I’m going to enjoy mine throughout the afternoon,” said Sue.

  “Me too,” said Adelaide.

  “Suit yourselves,” Rosebush said and shrugged.

  We sat on the stones, holding our cool cans of beer. I stopped pretending to drink from the can, because nobody seemed to be paying attention to whether I was or not. Instead I put my fingers in the icy trickle of water running down out of the hills.

  At one point the conversation turned to boys, and Rosebush brought up Petey Meechum.

  “We nearly kissed the other day after school,” she announced.

  “What’s nearly?” asked Sue.

  “Nearly,” Rosebush repeated in a tone that suggested any further calls for clarification were forbidden.

  “He once told me I had pretty hands,” said Adelaide, then she held them up for the benefit of any admirers.

  “Anyway,” Rosebush went on, irritated, “Petey Meechum is the kind of boy who puts girls into one of two categories. You’re either a potential lover or you’re a permanent friend.”

  At the words “permanent friend,” her gaze landed on Polly and me. Polly looked down, submissive. I made my face blank, like cinder block.

  “How can you tell the difference?” Adelaide asked.

  Rosebush seemed about to attack, but then she shrugged it off, as would a predator that grows bored with easy prey.

  “Believe me,” she said, “when you’re nearly kissed by him, you can tell.”

  Then she addressed me amicably.

  “On a related topic, do you know who I heard was actually interested in you, Lumen?”

  “Who?” I asked miserably.

  “Roy Ruggle,” said Rosebush.

  “Blackhat Roy?”

  “He’s only got eight toes,” Polly contributed. It was well known that Blackhat Roy had exploded two toes off his right foot when he was trying to modify a Roman candle with a pair of pliers two years before.

  “But he’s dark,” said Rosebush, “like Lumen. And he’s more her
height. Also, he never goes to church, and neither does Lumen. You know, I sit right next to Petey in church. He tells me about his grandmother who died. Did he ever tell you about her, Lumen? You can tell by the way he talks about her he knows about pain. To endure suffering—it’s the most romantic thing of all, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  To endure suffering. I wonder how much people really endure. They talk about heartbreak, and they turn their faces away. But heartbreak is really the least of it, a splinter in the skin. Hearts mend. Most tragedy is overcome with prideful righteousness. The tear on the cheek, like a pretty little insect, wending its way over your jaw, down your sensitive neck, under your collar.

  I wonder how much suffering my husband has endured. Or Janet Peterson, with her dry, overcooked lamb. They are easily horrified, easily disgusted. They turn their heads away from the simplest and most mundane adversity.

  On the other hand, to be bound by your own fate, to feel the eager lashes of a grinning world all up and down your nerve endings. To bleed—to make others bleed. To know there is no end of things. To become something that you can never unbecome. There are in the world sufferings that are not stage pieces but rather whole lives.

  Rosebush Lincoln. I was shut to her that day.

  Yet those words of hers, even now, recall to me the lovely, hungry smell of autumn leaves.

  * * *

  Just as Rosebush Lincoln was extolling the virtues of endured suffering, there was a sound in the trees above the quarry, and we all gazed up to find a boy on the verge—as though we had conjured boyness with our witchy voices and manifested a puerile sprite from the morning dew itself.

  “It’s Hondy,” said Rosebush. “He must’ve followed me all the way from town.”

  Hondy Pilt held the handles of his bicycle and stared down at us in his misty and bloated way. He said nothing. Hondy Pilt rarely spoke, and his eyes never looked at you exactly—instead they looked right over your shoulder, which made you feel that you were just some insufficient forgery of your real self and that your real self was invisible, somewhere behind you.

  So Rosebush invited him to join us, and for the next hour she forced him to drink beer and she put wildflowers in his hair and she told him to sit a certain way so that she could use his bulky body to prop up her own and gaze at the clouds above.

  I felt bad for Hondy Pilt, but he didn’t seem to mind being used as Rosebush Lincoln’s lounge chair, and I wondered if that was his particular magic—to be still content with the world in all its pretty little injustices.

  It wasn’t long before Rosebush got a new idea—which was to send Hondy Pilt adventuring into the abandoned mine. We all looked at the mouth of the mine, weeded and overgrown, a dark void chipped out of the earth, like the hollow well of a giant’s missing tooth. We had heard stories of our older brothers and sisters spelunking the mine with flashlights, discovering networks of underground rooms, rusted mining equipment, bottomless shafts easily stumbled into. Our parents warned us against the mine, because a boy once lost his way in the maze of passages and never came back out—but every time they tried to board up the entrance, the breachers, who did not like to be disinvited from places, would tear it open during the next full moon.

  “I don’t know, Rosebush,” said Idabel. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Come on. Hondy wants to do it. Don’t you, Hondy?”

  She raised him to his feet and wound her arm in his so that they looked like a bride and groom, and the boy smiled at the sky.

  “Ro’bush,” he said in his indistinct way.

  So she led him to the mouth of the mine, and we all gathered around, too—because nobody could stop Rosebush from sacrificing Hondy Pilt to the mine.

  “Go on, Hondy,” she said. “Go on now.”

  He looked into the darkness, then at his own feet, then in the direction of the girl at his side.

  She encouraged him with sweeping hand gestures.

  “Go on,” she said. “Bring me a treasure. Find me a gold nugget.”

  And he went. While we all watched from the mouth of the mine, he moved forward step by step.

  “Rosebush,” Idabel admonished.

  “Shush,” said Rosebush, her eyes never leaving her knight errant. In fact, the farther he went into the dark, the more intent she became, her fists clenching themselves into tight balls, her breath coming faster, an expression on her face like some excruciating ecstasy. I could hear her breathing.

  He stopped once, turned, and looked back at us, as if to be reassured.

  “Warrior!” Rosebush called to him in a strange, whispery voice.

  Then he moved forward again, slowly, until his form was lost completely to the dark.

  We waited. A caught breeze blustered through the quarry, rustling the dried sumac, blowing strands of hair in a ticklish way across our lips. We used our fingers to tuck the hair behind our ears, and we waited.

  Then, from the deep echoey dark of the mine, we heard a hiss, a monstrous, spitting hiss. Then Hondy Pilt’s voice, a low, whining complaint, followed by quick movement—a crash, the sound of feet advancing fast in our direction, his voice again, miserable and high—and behind it all that feral hissing.

  Then we saw him disclosed from the dark, his panicked bulk running toward us.

  And then we believed in monsters, hissing creatures like aged demons unearthed from the dry crust of the world. We ran. The woods came alive with the sound of our shrieks. Birds fled and crickets hushed, and we turned and ran from the mouth of the mine, squealing, across the floor of the quarry and up the opposite slope, our fingers digging into the loose gravel for desperate purchase.

  We were halfway up the side of the quarry when we heard a loud cry of pain below. Hondy Pilt had emerged from the mine at full speed and had tripped over Rosebush Lincoln’s pink backpack. He now lay curled into a ball and howling on the floor of the quarry. It would get him. He was a goner now—food for the beasts of the earth—and we left him and hid behind the trunks of trees.

  Except that then, beyond him, we saw emerge from the mine the monster that had chased him out of its den, hissing and spitting the whole way. It was a possum. Assured that its home was no longer in danger, the creature turned and scurried back into the dark depths of the mine.

  Sometimes it happens this way. Your greatest fears in the dark turn out to be nothing more than angry rodents and zealous girls with pink backpacks. Or nothing less.

  * * *

  It was all discovered. Hondy Pilt’s forearm was fractured from his fall in the quarry. He would have to wear a cast for the next three weeks, and Rosebush Lincoln would be the first to sign her name on it in pink marker. We suffered little in comparison. Our palms were covered with tiny abrasions from our quick scramble up the side of the quarry. But it was nothing a coat of stinging Bactine couldn’t fix.

  Our parents discovered we had been drinking beer, and they intuited that we had been responsible somehow for Hondy Pilt’s accident.

  The orchestration of blame was intricate and devious—it was decided that I would take the blame for everything.

  After we delivered Hondy Pilt back to the hospital in town, Rosebush Lincoln took me aside to have a talk.

  “You have to say it was you,” she said, her voice casual but uncompromising.

  “It was me what?”

  “The beer. And Hondy, telling him to go into the mine. It has to be you.”

  “Why?”

  “They won’t do anything to you. You’re too good.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Look, Lumen. It was an accident. I like Hondy. I didn’t want to hurt him. I’m already in trouble for a million things. My parents’ll kill me. They’re not nice. They’re not like your dad. Please.”

  So I did it. While I held my hands palm upward over the sink and my father poured hydrogen peroxide on them, I told him it was all my fault.

  “Is that right?” he said.

  “Yes. I brought
the beer. I told Hondy Pilt to go inside the mine.”

  “Really? Where did you get the beer?”

  “I stole it.”

  “Stole it!” He smiled down at me. “So you’re a thief now, are you?”

  “Just that once.”

  I looked down at my palms, the hydrogen peroxide foaming in all the cuts.

  “And you made Hondy Pilt go into the mine?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  It had never occurred to me that someone would ask why I had done the things I claimed to do—just as I had never thought to ask Rosebush why she was Rosebush. Why ask? People are like characters in books. They are defined by their actions—not the other way around.

  “I don’t know,” I said pathetically.

  The smile never left his face. He narrowed his eyes at me, trying to puzzle through my gambit.

  “So…well, all these moral lapses—I guess you should be punished.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Let’s see.” He pursed his lips and tapped his chin with his fingertips. “What time is your curfew?”

  What he meant was between full moons. Everyone had the same curfew when the moon was full: sundown.

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “All right, then. Let’s make it nine thirty for the rest of the week.”