Fox Tooth Heart

by John McManus

  It was good he hadn’t gone through with the emancipation, Hunter realized after Emily ran out of money and Joseph stopped coming around. He dropped out of races to stay home with her. He refused interviews that Cody granted. The cult hero prediction was coming to pass; everyone from Bike to local rags in the mountain towns wrote up their adventure. All the publicity seemed to improve Cody’s riding. He placed at the nationals and got sponsored by Trek and Powerade. The following month he called Hunter to say, “My name’s in this issue twice. Yours, once.”

  “Congratulations, Cody.”

  “Congratulations and . . . ?”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “No, get jealous or something.”

  “But I’m not,” said Hunter, wishing it were a lie, wishing he still cared to compete.

  “Try not being jealous when my emancipation goes through.”

  “I’ll be glad for you if it’s what you want.”

  “Fuck you in the pussy, Death Wish.”

  There was one thing Hunter did envy of Cody’s: his healthy family. Cody’s parents might live fifty more years. Unless she switched religions, Emily didn’t have much longer. It wasn’t hard to guess what was wrong. Yellow eyes, itchy palms, no appetite. He wanted to shout at her as angrily as he could have screamed at Buck. Tell her she was a moron to give up for nothing; cry out that she was stealing herself from him. Was it because she was a coward about doctors? Or was she only scared that Matter wasn’t Error, and there would be no God, no heaven, no illusion, nothing but herself and Hunter, watching TV in their split-level by the Yosemite Freeway? He wished to berate her until she gave in to his greater will. She nibbled at food he prepared for her. One day near the end, she held his hands and said, “Sorry I’m keeping you from your races,” and he mumbled, “I’m sorry too.” Two seconds hadn’t passed before he was rebuking himself again. Sorry for what? Sacrificing himself? Wishing his way toward this circumstance? He had chosen it; somewhere north of Flagstaff his beliefs had taken a wrong turn and here he was, but she wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes had shut. I’ve been emancipated, he thought, although technically speaking she lived on until he reached the age of majority.

  THE GNAT LINE

  1.

  THE NEW LAW, WHICH BARRED registered offenders from living within one-fifth of a mile from a school, church, or other place where children might congregate, had drawn circles onto the Georgia map in the tens of thousands. In the mountains and cotton country the circles stood alone, but Atlanta’s overlapped in cascades and formed tiny islands shaped like boomerangs, narrowed to inches or confined to commuter lots and the inner lanes of I-75. The nearest viable parcel lay north of Acworth, where the terrain grew steeper and a power cut climbed up a bluff from Lake Allatoona. There, among tents in a hilltop copse, lived five rapists, one attempted rapist, and a man convicted of indecent exposure. All were white. The youngest was twenty-five, the oldest fifty-four. On Mondays a truck delivered water coolers to an office park down Glade Road; Gus, the first settler, would steal a few to hang from trees as showers. He drove a MARTA bus, and Bruce edited at CNN. Jeremy worked at the World of Coke. Patrick clerked at the Flying J station. Travis mopped floors at Boeing. Allen sold cars. As for the exhibitionist, he had been a personal injury lawyer.

  2.

  Stephen had been a partner at a respectable firm downtown until one morning in 2007 when he brewed coffee in the nude as a school bus stopped outside his townhouse. There were cell-phone photos of him by the wide-open front window, empty coffee pot in hand. One mother claimed that he must have planned it that way: “Don’t you brew coffee in your kitchen? Where the coffee pot plugs in?” Although the judge handed down a suspended sentence, the registry meant eviction from Midtown. When he showed up at camp, the others wondered if he was hiding a worse crime—“Exposure? Lame,” they said—but he didn’t care what monsters thought. He spent days in his new office and evenings in his tent, reading. He did nothing else. In October he read the last three volumes of Proust; in November, much of Thomas Hardy. Thanks to the court-ordered drug tests, he could focus again.

  One night after a rain, Bruce, the stout video editor who was always grinning, stuck his head into Stephen’s tent and said, “Which ones you done with?”

  “Which European modernists?”

  “For the fire,” Bruce said, climbing through the half-open zipper to kneel by a stack of tomes. “The Magic Mountain. The Man Without Qualities.”

  “Touch one and I’ll shoot you.”

  “How can you not have qualities?” Bruce continued down the row. “The Naked and the Dead. That’s your memoir, I guess. Who’s the dead?”

  From his legal briefcase Stephen pulled out the S&W Model 625 he’d carried since law school without ever firing. “No trespassing.”

  “Felons can’t own firearms.”

  He aimed the revolver. “Planning to go tell?”

  “Fine, keep your books, crazy. Guess there won’t be a fire.”

  “I guess not.” If he’d never hit it off with his neighbors at the townhouse, he wouldn’t make friends here. The camp wasn’t permanent, not for Stephen. Once things died down, he would get his name expunged. Meanwhile he kept his distance, worked long hours in his new office in the strip mall, dined alone in bars, read himself to sleep, until the night the temperature fell to fifteen.

  He lay alone shivering for hours before Gus, the bucktoothed, scrawny driver, called, “We know you’re up.”

  Wrapped in his sleeping bag, Stephen walked out and took a seat at the fire. Bruce passed the vodka. Stephen drank and listened to a debate about Michael Vick, the quarterback charged with running a dog-fighting ring.

  “Asshole should rot in jail and never play,” Gus said, staring at the glowing end of the branch he held. “This was our year.”

  “Naw, Falcons don’t got a year,” Bruce said.

  “Law should keep him a fifth-mile from vets and pet stores.”

  “In college,” said Allen, the salesman, “I intercepted his touchdown pass.”

  “Could you get him free?” asked Jeremy, a blond kid cute enough that Stephen sometimes forgot to ignore him along with the others.

  “I couldn’t get myself free,” Stephen said, glad for the excuse to stare. It wasn’t just that Jeremy was cute; he seemed a reasonable human being. There were three tiers: the ones like him and Jeremy who’d been criminally maligned; the ones like Patrick who belonged in the camp; and the rest, who should never have been paroled.

  “So you defended yourself?”

  “Not the best idea,” Stephen admitted. The other partners had been shunning him by then. “Judge disliked me.”

  “Vick’s judge hates Vick,” Jeremy said. His blond beard stubble glowed in the firelight, tempting Stephen to touch it. “You eat meat?”

  “Cooking some?” He wondered if they were progressing toward something.

  “No. They do worse to pigs than dogs. I say lock up pig farmers, let Vick go.”

  “I hope he comes and lives here after parole,” Gus said.

  Allen shook his head. “The blacks have got their own camp, across town.”

  Watching his frosty breath mingle with the smoke, Stephen wondered if his neighbors were joking. Didn’t they realize that Vick, after serving his time, could live where he pleased? He supposed he didn’t care. Embers rose into a starless sky and he wished a winter storm would bear down, trapping him at work to save him from a night here, but there wasn’t one snowflake, and by next day’s close of business he was choosing a recovery meeting from the list to fulfill his weekly mandate.

  “My name’s Pam, and I’m a sex addict,” said a woman with vibrantly black curls, across the circle from Stephen in the church gym. “Over time I lost interest in dealings that didn’t involve sex. My family, even my dear kitty-cats bored me.” The group thanked her. The vaguer a story, the more likely its teller had come for a signed note. Vera was taking it day by day; Blake was trying not to play games. Chu
rches didn’t have gyms, Stephen decided. It was a former school, a place twice forbidden, so that he imagined a double gnat line surrounding it. That was his name for the circles ordaining where he could and couldn’t live. The real gnat line ran horizontally across the state, near Macon. “Folks is different below it,” Patrick had said, but the only difference was the gnat problem.

  Stephen wasn’t listening. Clockwise around the circle he studied faces: a dead ringer for Lee Harvey Oswald, an exterminator in a pink tie, and then none other than Jeremy, the cute one from camp, in his World of Coke shirt.

  “I’m Jeremy,” Jeremy said, his glazed eyes staring at the one called Vera, “and I’m addicted to booze, sex, various drugs. Down in Savannah when I was in high school, this fellow Kevin smashes into my mom. He doesn’t have insurance, so he begs her not to report it, he’ll pay cash. Mom agrees, but her back starts to hurt. Pretty soon she’s walking stooped over. Three weeks later, Kevin hasn’t paid a cent, her car won’t run, pain gets worse, she’s a hunchback by the time I go to Kevin’s.”

  Jeremy swallowed and took a breath. “Kevin tells me his dad just died and he’ll pay next Friday. Okay, but I see this brand-new electric guitar in his back seat. Another week. Mom’s in agony. I drive back and damned if Kevin’s car hasn’t been fixed up like new. So I bang on the door and this kid wearing Mickey Mouse ears peeks through the blinds.”

  As soon as Stephen heard Mickey Mouse ears, he knew Jeremy wasn’t speaking as himself, but as Bruce, the wisecracking video editor from camp.

  “Door’s hollow. I bust through. Kid runs to his room. Next thing, he’s got this cigarette lighter and he’s burning my arm. That was what flipped the switch. I grab it and burn him back and say okay, here’s what’s coming.”

  Stephen shifted in his seat. He knew what was coming. Having researched his neighbors on LexisNexis, he couldn’t listen, but he couldn’t block out the words. Please, he wanted to scream. Maybe Jeremy heard him somehow in his mind, because he turned and noticed Stephen.

  He paused his story. “I can’t sit here and nod,” said a guy in Army camouflage.

  “We’d like you to leave,” Vera said, folding her hands.

  “First I need a form signed,” Jeremy said.

  “Actually I’ll be the one leaving,” said the Army guy, and he did, followed by two women. It seemed like the group might break apart, until Stephen heard himself speak his own name.

  “I used to get shitfaced and invite guys over,” he said, feeling the tension begin to resolve around him and in his own shoulders. “Anyone willing to come. If I had a partner, I cheated. If he said no don’t, you’re the one I love, I dumped him. The only ones I wanted to stay were trying to escape, like my last boyfriend, this kid from NA whose arms bent way back like Gumby. He was trying to quit. I did everything in my power to keep him high so we could just fuck fuck fuck fuck until he leapt off Stone Mountain.”

  With thirty curious, supportive eyes on him, Stephen paused. What came after Seamus died? The bus. He wasn’t about to tell that part. He mumbled a few words about living with the pain. The room thanked him. Jeremy in particular should be grateful, he thought, for how he’d redirected their energy—except from all the histories at the camp Jeremy had chosen Bruce’s. The self-calumny was baffling. In sobriety, we found we know how to instinctively handle situations that used to baffle us. Did Jeremy believe Stephen had invaded his meeting? He could be a loose cannon—a convicted sex offender, after all. Maybe Stephen was in danger. As the circle’s testimonies continued, his anxious mind drowned them out. By the end, he felt keyed up enough to rush to the guy in the pink tie, get his form signed ahead of Pam and Blake, and hit the road before anyone could speak his name.

  3.

  Like his neighbor in the woods, Jeremy visited no meeting twice. Like Stephen again he lay in wait for winter storms. It was a matter of aesthetic taste, the snow, and so was Jeremy’s behavior in the meetings, where no member had the right to stand in judgment, where most appeared as smugly pleased in their neutrality as the Honorable Diane Stokes had been at Jeremy’s sentencing. To put their objectivity to the test and then watch it evaporate satisfied him. He’d portrayed Bruce several times, honed the performance until it marshaled a real oppressive energy that peaked at the Unitarian church, where he might have emptied the gym if Stephen hadn’t destroyed the moment.

  The sex rooms had few locations, so Jeremy often wound up at the more populous groups, as well as Crystal Meth Anonymous, Pills Anonymous, even Survivors of Incest Anonymous, channeling voices like Travis’s, the janitor who’d earned his living selling rohypnol that his brother smuggled in. Had he drugged girls himself? Travis said no, while Jeremy’s answer changed with the rooms’ moods. He tended to give his own name. If need be, he assigned himself an addiction to match the group, but his story’s spine was Travis’s roofies, Bruce’s boy, Allen’s girls, Patrick’s dancer, Gus’s gang bangs.

  “I’m an addict,” he told an unusually diverse group at the Triangle Club the evening before the snow. “Growing up in Hiwassee, my cousin Garth and I were racing to see who’d get laid most. Same girl twice didn’t count, you had to get new girls. It’s a small town. Ladies got wind. Nothing we did up there was a crime, though; all Hiwassee could do was chase us down to Clayton.”

  He kept ramping it up. They would hate him no matter what. They wanted him ashamed of loving Melissa, and if he could learn to feel shame over that, it might be a step toward turning the love into something else. Something positive. He had petitioned to move to Alaska, where it was dark all winter and snowed in July and he’d heard there were twelve men per woman. Of course his mother didn’t want him to go. The snow he awoke to on 1 December felt like a premonition to ignore her.

  Five minutes down the slippery trail, ten to de-ice his windshield, twenty to creep toward I-75. An hour later, when he arrived downtown, inches of snow lay unblemished on the empty parking lot of the World of Coke, closed due to weather.

  He walked six deserted blocks to a diner, where he bought the paper. Emotionlessly he read about the presidential primary. He’d backed away from caring about stuff like that. His candidates, like his teams, lost every time. That was the kind of guy he was. Most people had bad and good luck mixed together, but not Jeremy. He’d been accepted to Emory by accident, a mistake the school had cleared up weeks later. There was a fifty-fifty chance he had the Huntington’s gene. When he was ten, his class had flown to D.C., and he was the only boy without a window seat on either flight leg.

  “You’ll get stranded,” said a waitress, slightly pretty, her hair the color they called dishwater. She had no supposed neutrality to put to a test; still, folks all reacted one way or the other, and Jeremy liked to know where he stood.

  “Is there a school or church nearby?”

  “Doubt it. We’re downtown. Why?”

  “I’m twenty-five, my ex is twenty-two, and it was seven years ago.”

  She tapped at her order pad as if waiting for the point.

  “Have you heard of the Georgia Sex Offender Law?”

  “Oh, okay,” she said.

  “When Melissa’s dad found out, she was applying to this summer program at the University of Seville. He decided I must have brainwashed her into going there, because you know what Spain’s age of consent is?”

  The waitress shook her head. “Thirteen,” Jeremy said, not to prove a point but to state a fact. If she thought he meant that it sounded nice, that age, she could join the queue. He paid and left. Walking on, he luxuriated in the cold. Drifts on the east side of the street came as high as his knees.

  At Turner Field his mother phoned. “Jeremy, are you inside?”

  “I’m at work in a warm building.”

  “You’ll catch cold.”

  “No smoke breaks, remember? I quit.”

  “I’m immunocompromised, you know.”

  “I know,” he said, lying down in the parking lot where the old stadium had been. His bed could be the for
mer home plate, where Deion Sanders had once stood and batted a foul into Jeremy’s glove, back when his dad took him to games. Holding the phone steady with his shoulder, he moved his arms to make angel wings.

  “Will you come by later to feed the birds?”

  “If the weather lets up,” he replied. He lay under a soothingly gray sky, musing on Alaska. Talkeetna, to be specific. In a cold place people would know who he was. Men in Georgia looked at him and saw someone who wanted to sweat in Spain. Heat speeded up neurodegeneration, probably. It made cops restless. One sweltering June day a cop had asked if Jeremy wanted a Taser up his ass. Police in Talkeetna would be calmer, he thought, closing his eyes. For most people there was bad and good luck, mixed together, and he let himself hope his was just a longer pendulum, ready to swing back to carry him north on a surge of fortune. Sleep would test it. Freeze, or wake up in a white room with a nurse leaning in, and no guard hovering. “Nothing wrong with you except your mind,” she would say, and he would ask, “You mean the snow?” hoping for once somebody didn’t know.

  As soon as he had shut his eyes, a policeman pulled up and offered to help.

  “If you’re not a dick, don’t be a cop,” Jeremy said, and then of course he was raising his empty hands, getting patted down, explaining why he’d paused to rest and why his address was a public tract in Bartow County.

  The cop relaxed. “Case you’re wondering,” he told Jeremy, “it shows on my screen what you did.”