The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  Thank goodness, then, that they were arriving in Detroit, which was indeed gloomy. The incinerator was not, as Leah had assumed, on the city’s edge, in the shadow of industry, of warehouses and factories, but at its center, just off Cass Street, where only a few years ago, Leah knew, crack cocaine had been bought and sold. A block of concrete supporting two smokestacks, one larger than the other, the incinerator stood just behind a strip of buildings—a diner, a pawn shop, a secondhand store, a bar called I Love Lucy, and a number of boarded-up storefronts. Down the street, a broken fire hydrant spewed torrents of water. A paper bag tumbled across the sidewalk in a gust of hot wind. Shattered glass shimmered in the street gutter. In Detroit almost everyone, it seemed to Leah, was black: the man sitting barefoot against a wall, the boy walking past him wearing sneakers that shone a perfect, unmarked blue, the nicely dressed couple who’d just stepped out of a brand-new Mercedes SUV, the old woman on the opposite side of the street, tapping along on an aluminum cane as she walked her little dog on its leash. This fact scared Leah and made her feel something she rarely felt elsewhere: white. It was one more thing to know, one more thing she couldn’t make sense of.

  The incinerator was surrounded by a red brick wall, blackened by dirt and exhaust, and a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. As they turned into this odd-looking fortress, Jason said again, “Fifty thousand gallons of waste.” A black man stopped them at the entrance. Jason and he exchanged paperwork, and soon Jason was backing the truck into a port, from where a stationary crane lifted the color-coded dumpsters—Categories One and Two—and delivered them into the incinerator. Leah felt the truck lift and lighten. In a few minutes, the dumpsters were spit back out, empty now, and lowered onto the truck. “That’s it,” Jason Clark said cheerfully. He was more and more annoying and made Leah appreciate Max, who despite all this grimness believed in knowledge, believed it led to something more than impressing girls, something more than a list of information to be recited.

  Leah thought it was disgusting how quickly and neatly the animals had disappeared. And though neither stack of the incinerator was smoking, she rolled down her window, sniffed at the air for burnt flesh, and smelled nothing beyond the exhaust of the truck she sat in.

  To enter Noelle’s houses, Leah no longer had to borrow the keys. She’d had them duplicated. She had her own keys now.

  A few times, she’d almost been caught. Once she’d nearly walked in on a couple making love in the shower, their clothes strewn over the master bedroom and the loud sounds of their sex echoing from the bathroom. She’d quietly backed out of the room and escaped. Another time, she’d just left a house through the back as Noelle and a client came in through the front.

  Leah tested the limits of her trespassing. She not only ate meals, peed, and watched TV in these houses, but now and then spent the night.

  Her favorite place for a sleepover was the Bradford house, the first house she’d entered that summer. It was fully furnished, its letterbox stuffed with mail that the neighbors would collect every few days. There was frozen food—pizzas, burritos, Swanson dinners, chicken, steaks, hamburger meat—in a lay-down freezer in the basement. There were twelve-packs of Coke, Sprite, and root beer in the fridge, stores of toilet paper in the laundry room, clean linen and towels in the closets, even movies on DVD, including the small selection of porno films she’d discovered earlier, which she found both thrilling and tedious to watch—all those tits and cocks. Mr. and Mrs. Bradford, with their huge caches of frozen food, their full closets, their beautiful house, their adult films, and even framed pictures of their kids—a girl and boy of grade-school age—poised just so on the bedroom dresser were a mystery to Leah. Why would anybody leave such a life behind, all its trimmings, all its provisions in place? Had one of them died and the other taken the kids and fled? Had one of them left, simply walked out of the house and never turned back? Had their children been brutally murdered, kidnapped? Leah guessed it had been a tragedy. Why else would anyone leave the remnants so obviously in place, so ready for use, for a family to slip into? Everything was there—even a dresser filled with men’s socks and underwear, even three different kinds of half-used mustard in the refrigerator, a coffee can of quarters, nickels, and dimes on a table in the entryway, used toothbrushes in the bathrooms. Everything was there save for life itself, the joy and anger, exhaustion and energy, the desire that was needed to do anything, anything at all: eating, fucking, getting out of bed, loving and raising kids, talking, yelling, shouting, spitting, scratching, kissing. Now all of it had been left—tables, chairs, ceilings, windows, room after room; two staircases, one leading to the basement, the other to the second floor, the master bathroom with marble sinks and a whirlpool bathtub, magazine racks filled with National Geographics and New Yorkers, all of it abandoned, frozen in place. The entire shell locked under one roof, for sale (furniture inclusive, the fact sheet had said), and, as it happened, for Leah’s exclusive use, at least while it lasted.

  The first time she spent the night in the Bradford house, she arrived home after work the next day, after nearly twenty hours of being away, and discovered that neither Noelle nor Franklin had noticed her absence.

  On another occasion, already tucked into the Bradfords’ king-sized bed and watching TV on mute, she called home and got Franklin. “Leah, is that you?”

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “We thought you were downstairs in your room.”

  She could hear music in the background—the Beatles, of which Noelle was, of course, a fan. They were one of the easiest possible bands to like, one of the bands that everybody, no matter what their ages, adored, and so they seemed just right for Noelle’s good, if conventional, taste. At the same time, Leah had to admit that Noelle’s affection for the music was genuine. She had once seen Franklin and Noelle, in the kitchen, wineglasses in hand, boogying to this music, moving their hips and arms and legs. She imagined them now, even as her father talked to her, dancing, swinging an arm, kicking a leg in an awkward, middle-aged style of dance that was nonetheless joyous. They loved each other. They loved each other so much they wanted to dance together in the kitchen. “Nope,” Leah said. “I’m at a friend’s house. I thought I should call and tell you I’d be staying over here tonight.”

  “A friend’s house,” Franklin said in a tone of surprise. “She’s at a friend’s house,” he said now to Noelle, as if boasting.

  “I do have friends, Dad.” It stung to say this, since Leah and Franklin both knew she didn’t have friends.

  “Of course,” he said. “Which friend’s house are you at?”

  “Michelle’s. I’m at Michelle’s house.” Leah felt a shiver of fear and anticipation because she had just decided to confess, or at least sort of confess. “Michelle Bradford. I’m at the Bradford house.”

  “Great,” he said. “Enjoy yourself, then.”

  “Dad,” Leah said, irritated now. “I’m at the Bradford house.” She clenched her eyes shut and waited for her father to realize what she was saying. But he didn’t. The stupid man simply hadn’t heard her.

  “Okay,” he said, becoming a little irritated himself.

  “Don’t you want the number over here?” she asked.

  “Oh,” he said, “yes. That might be a good idea.”

  She gave it to him, and then he hung up.

  The next day, instead of going home, she entered another house, an “armed” house, as the security stickers on its front window called it. Though she knew the code and could have disarmed the security system, she sat down on the living-room carpet and waited for the cops. The alarm was deafening. Its scream and the pulsating lights of the house seemed to mark the end of everything. She thought about what to say and how to explain herself to Franklin and Noelle, the scene of anger and tears that would soon come. Outside, another beautiful, hot sunny day was in its slow, late-afternoon progression. Five minutes passed, and no cops arrived. It was a Saturday, and the neighbors were either not home or had decided to stay
in their houses. Every man for himself. She could destroy the entire house, and no one would come. She could burn it to the ground, take a hammer to its walls, smash its windows. And as she sat in the middle of the empty living room, she felt sleepy, exhausted. She wanted to curl up and shut her eyes, and might have if not for the terrible electrical shrieking of the house.

  After ten minutes, Leah gave up. She walked outside and had already crossed the street when the officers finally arrived. One talked into the radio while the other, a young Asian woman, came for her. She hardly knew how to be arrested, how to present herself to be “taken in,” and so she’d been about to raise her hands above her head when the cop said, “You see anybody enter that house?”

  “No,” Leah said.

  “Did you see anybody leave?”

  Leah shook her head.

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Nope.” And that was that. The cop left her standing there, on the loose, and she walked down the street now, lacking the courage to turn herself in.

  5

  At the end of the summer, the lab had a barbecue and softball game, to which everyone—Leah, the security guard, Diana, Jason Clark, and people from different departments whom Leah had never met—was invited. The diamond was in a park across from Max’s house, where people hung out in the backyard drinking beer and waiting for hot dogs, chicken breasts, and hamburgers to come off the grill. It was Leah’s last chance, before leaving the lab and returning to school, to impress Max, to show him who she was and what she was capable of, and to make a claim on him greater than that of a student and dullard adolescent. And so, naturally, she did nothing. She froze and felt painfully shy, holding an illegal beer, the taste of which she did not at all like, while jolly and collegial adults told jokes, conversed, drank a little too much and gossiped all around her. “What?” Jason Clark asked in mock surprise as he looked at the selection of grilled meats. “No lamb chops. Why on earth not?” Leah, Max, and Diana all laughed. Other researchers joked about the animals they worked with. Someone giggled at the gruesome thought of rabbit stew. “I sometimes dream about mice. I see nothing but mice,” a woman said and began to laugh uneasily.

  Meanwhile, Leah wasn’t having a good time and wasn’t laughing.

  Max tapped her shoulder at one point. “You seem quiet, kiddo. You all right?”

  “Of course,” Leah said. “I’m fine.”

  Always oblivious to fashion, Max wore shorts that were just a little too short and an old pair of leather cleats. He held a worn baseball glove in one hand and a bat in the other, and Leah saw in his soft burliness something she hadn’t anticipated: the eager physicality of an athlete. “Let’s go play,” he said. Then he began following the other research scientists and laboratory employees across the street to the baseball diamond when he surprised Leah again by turning around and saying, “By the way, you look great today. You really do.” It was the first time he’d noticed, and though his tone suggested nothing more than friendliness, and seemed to reflect more his good mood than anything he saw in her, Leah felt a distinct lifting of spirits. She’d taken pains that day to look her best; she wore eye makeup, lipstick, a jean skirt and white tank top, through which showed, very faintly, the red lace of her bra.

  Because she had taken extra care in her appearance and felt that it could easily crumble, that she could lose all her elegance in one wild swing of a bat, she refrained from playing and stood behind the high chain-link backstop and watched. It was a mild day in late August with a light breeze, a seamless blue sky, and a full, if not quite hot, sun, a day in which the chill of autumn, still distant, could nonetheless be felt. The great maples that bordered the park lifted countless pale green leaves that shimmered in the light. Tree cotton whirled through the air. In the distance Leah heard a siren, but it was faint compared to the urgent calls from the infield of “Hey, batter. Hey, batter, batter, batter.”

  Leah was surprised by the competitiveness of these scientists. They wanted to win, none more than Max, who turned out to be a powerhouse. When he stepped to the plate, the outfielders stood farther back. And though Diana threw a fierce underhand pitch, winding up and throwing strike after strike, she couldn’t keep her boss from hitting a three-base grounder and a home run in the first inning. Max ran like a tank, not fast but with a scary momentum and force, his entire body leaning forward and the muscles in his thighs quivering with power. After the first hour of play, he was drenched and his T-shirt was heavy with sweat. And though Max hit another homer with the bases full in the final inning, and jogged over each base with the confident swagger and ease of the victor, his team finally lost, overpowered by Jason Clark and a skinny, pale research scientist with long, braided hippie hair, who despite his sticklike frame matched Max in strength and competitiveness. As much as he wanted to win, Max didn’t seem to mind losing, shook hands, and said, “Next year. There’s always next year.”

  Leah never would have guessed at this happy, vigorous, physical side of Max had she not seen it. And now that she had, now that she knew more about him, she was thrilled. He kept surprising her. She wished it wasn’t true, but it evidently was: She loved him. She loved him despite—or even because of—something else she’d discovered during the game when she’d gone in to use the bathroom in Max’s empty house. She couldn’t resist searching his medicine cabinet and was saddened to see that her guess had been right. He did take Prozac. She’d been stupid to hurl her reckless guess at him a few weeks ago, to say something so intentionally hurtful. Nonetheless, after she’d made this discovery, she searched for more secrets. Having invaded several homes that summer, she knew right where to look, right where people kept the things they wanted no one else to see. She could hear the distant noise of the game still in progress—the cheers and boos—as she sifted through Max’s closet, looked through a few boxes and bags, and found nothing more than dozens of pairs of old sneakers of the sort he wore every day, photos of him and his ex-wife on various vacations, shoehorns, and bottles of athlete’s-foot powder. Just before giving up and leaving his room, she bent down and saw the box under his bed, which was not, she was surprised to discover, a waterbed. He’d hardly hidden the stuff. He had no one to hide it from. The two magazines showed typical images—women with fake boobs engorging themselves on cocks, men with multiple women climbing over them and serving them in every conceivable manner. There was a bottle of lubricant called Sex Silk and a well-worn paperback entitled Stories of Eden: Real Erotica Written by Women. Leah was angry at first, jealous. She might have thought he was a creep had she not already known him and had she not seen that some married couples kept this sort of thing stashed away. And so her jealousy was tinged with curiosity and sympathy. He was needy, vulnerable. He wasn’t just a scientist, a careful and brilliant man. He wanted what most men wanted. He wanted women and didn’t have them. He wanted sex and didn’t get it. He no doubt wanted companionship. And unlike the married couples who—or so Leah imagined—used this stuff together, Max had to look at it alone, locked in his house, and this sad thought made Leah want him more.

  She stayed late that night, after everyone else had left, helping clear the plastic cups and empty bottles from the porch while Max scrubbed grill utensils and silverware in the sink, soapsuds sticking to his hairy forearms. Kind of Blue played on the stereo, a sliver of bright moon hovered in the corner of the kitchen window, and Leah hummed to the music as she wiped down the counters and put a few dishes away. As she worked she felt that she and Max made something like a family, something that felt comfortable and maybe even permanent.

  Afterwards, they sat on the couch in the living room, where Max offered her a second beer—“As long as you think Franklin won’t mind”—and she took it, though she had no intention of drinking it. Max sat back into the puffy couch and smiled at her. “You’ve changed your look, haven’t you?”

  He’d now noticed her for the second time that day, and Leah felt things begin to shift between them, begin to feel different, slig
htly uncomfortable and tense in a good way. “A little,” she said.

  “I noticed that Jason Clark has taken an interest. He tries hard whenever you’re around.” Max was smiling. He thought it amusing, this romantic tension between two young people in his lab.

  “I could care less about Jason Clark.”

  “Poor Jason,” Max said, with far too much sympathy. Then, in the dim puddle of light cast by a dinky side-table lamp, Max reached over, leaning in close to Leah, so close that Leah almost lifted her face to his, almost presented herself to him, just when he clinked his beer with hers and ruined everything by sitting back into the couch and saying, “We’re going to miss you. I have no idea how we’re going to replace you at the lab. Thanks for your good work this summer.” And that was it: good-bye with a simple clink of beer bottles.

  “I think Jason Clark is an asshole,” Leah said, unable to suppress the tremor of something like tears and rage that made Max sit up then. “And I like you. I still like you a lot.”

  “I like you, too,” Max said.

  “Don’t say that.” She grabbed his arm, unsuspectingly draped across the couch, then his shoulder, gripping onto his cotton sweatshirt, and pulled him toward her with more force than she’d thought herself capable of. Their lips did not meet so much as collide, and when she kissed him she felt both teeth and mouth and smelled the surprising salty warmth of him.

  “No, Leah.” He started to push her away, then recoiled when he realized that his hands were on her breasts. He relented then, and for a moment that Leah might have imagined, he started to kiss her, really kiss her, before he dug his fingers into her shoulders and threw her back against the couch.

  “Stop that. Jesus.”

  “Let’s just kiss.”

  “Leah,” he said, half shouting now. “I don’t want to kiss you.” And then, obviously out of discomfort and completely without humor, he began to laugh and shake his head.