Fox Tooth Heart

by John McManus

  “Here’s a dude looking. See the green dot?”

  I took the phone and stared down at Ray, at his inimitable fish eyes.

  To appear calm, I stopped breathing. Ray’s skin was pale as ever. I guessed he hadn’t found his wife.

  “Hit ‘chat,’” the guy said.

  It occurred to me to type, “hey,” which floated up the screen in a yellow bubble. Seconds later came the response: “Sup?”

  “Say ‘looking.’”

  “Not much,” I wrote instead, and then “Horned up” chirped onscreen.

  The guy grabbed the phone from me and typed with both hands. I watched the moon rise and shrink while my gut did the opposite. “Dude says come over,” he exclaimed.

  I had always thought people were idiots when they talked about natural highs, but I’d just never gotten jealous enough to feel one until then. “I’ll tail you,” I said. He was too fucked up to notice me pocket his phone. I followed him as far as the Newport exit, where I fell back. As soon as he’d passed it, I got off. I figured I had till morning before the account froze. Several miles from Ray’s house, I pulled into Hardee’s. Five guys had green dots: Clay, James, Anchovi, Just Lookin, and Kid.

  Kid was Ray, twelve miles off. I checked my own profile: I wasn’t the Hummer fellow, but a mixed-race guy called Tyrone, twenty-one, headline reading, “Don’t fall in love with everyone you see.”

  I ordered a hamburger. A journey faced me with infinite directions that led out twelve miles apiece. To confront Ray, I had to try each one, on roads that twisted in on themselves so many times—but suddenly Kid was ten miles off.

  I hit the button again and it said nine. He was coming home.

  I thought of that AT&T phone tower, disguised as a jack pine, and how readily Ray had agreed to it. He must have already been Kid, even back then.

  When they handed me my burger, I thought I might puke, but something in me reached out and devoured it and it revved me up with gas for the first time in days. I channeled that power into the engine and took off toward Ray’s. It felt good not being a pussy. Five miles, said the phone. The radio preacher was saying we’re made of dust and it won’t take much air for the Lord to blow us away. One lung of the Lord, said the preacher, is bigger than the world. I pulled up to Ray’s. The phone said seven again, as if he’d rigged up some decoy. I had one too: I looked like Tyrone, unless Ray had put a green dot in my head.

  That’s how it will be in a few more years, I was thinking as I felt my way to the basement: we’ll drive all night looking for folks, but in our head.

  I plugged in the bulb. It swung on a cord in front of a mirror reflecting a St. Andrew’s cross and a workhorse. I walked to the closet and swung the plank, and there was the bowie knife, its handle wood and its blade curved and I’d forgotten what war it came from.

  I was climbing the stairs again when my phone rang.

  “Where are you?” said somebody called Damien Warman. “You two think you can treat me like this?”

  I decided to practice not being a pussy. “Where are you?”

  “Oh, come on, screw you.”

  “No, I asked you a question. If you want to live—if you want to survive another minute of your worthless life, answer it.”

  There was a gulp. “Where’s Tyrone?”

  “Dead. You’re next.”

  “Where is he?”

  “No, tell me where you are.”

  “Downtown Hilton.”

  “Well, you best get yourself out of that downtown Hilton.”

  What a thrill it gave me, saying those things. I hung up, and then the screen showed the earth in space, the clouds moving in real time. Mountains inching toward dawn. I guess the camera was on the moon. In anticipation of sunrise, my blood heated up. Just as I was about to catch fire, Damien Warman’s name flashed across outer space again. To be a pussy was to answer, “Just kidding,” so I hit “ignore,” found a jug of bourbon, took a swig, and realized the dog should be barking.

  I went upstairs to his cage, in which he lay dead. That bothered me. “Sup?” said a new message from Kid, four miles away.

  I went out into the night and ran the knife blade along my finger. “Not much,” I wrote, bleeding as I typed. It felt strange, so I pricked another finger, rubbed the blood on my pants.

  The cuts stung. I’d gotten so sober that I could feel pain.

  As time slowed, I looked up at the moon bisected by the pine. If it was broadcasting my thoughts to Ray, I didn’t care; I was ready for him. I checked the distance. Two miles away: curvy miles, so I figured I had about four minutes.

  I typed, “Zeela Tipton 1950–2009,” and read about my ma’s journey to meet the Lord. She was survived by two brothers and a daughter-in-law, said the obituary, and no one else. There wasn’t time to fret about that. I might be meeting the Lord soon myself, and I wanted to show him there was some good in me, so I typed Lisa’s number in and wrote to Lisa, “Ask Dr. Lighter for a blood test.”

  The noise of a motor faded and grew closer. The phone said 800 feet. I went in and turned off the lights. A siren blared for a split second and quit. Through the peephole I watched a single shadow climb out. It lurched forward and grew larger. I had read the obituary to help urge myself ahead. She has traveled to meet the Lord, I said to myself, moving from the hinged to the unhinged side of the door.

  Last thing before it swung open, I looked at the phone, which said zero feet.

  His hand reached through the dark. I clutched the knife and plunged it into his arm. It sank into his flesh. I pulled it out and saw his eyes bulge as I stabbed again. He lunged toward me, spurting blood. I held tight onto the hilt. “Sandra,” he said as he sank, which is when I knew what that siren had meant.

  He contorted away, making gurgly noises. I let go and ran out. The cruiser window was open, and I could hear cops on the radio. “How do you know a Kentucky girl’s on the rag?” one of the cops asked, and then they all laughed as the pines heard my own phone ring.

  Me, I’ve written ten, maybe twelve songs.

  “Babe?” said Ray when I answered. “I heard you’re back in town.”

  “How’d you hear that,” I managed to say.

  “I was on my way to you, but I drove into the river.”

  “I don’t live at your house anymore.”

  “Lisa never answers your door.”

  “I gave her AIDS. I caught it from you.”

  “But you never came down with the flu.”

  “You ruined my life, Ray.”

  “I have some crystal.”

  The blue of the light bar gleamed in moonlight as Ray told me he was at the S-curve. “I was scared of how much I liked you,” he said.

  “That’s retarded,” I said.

  “But I’m trying to say things I mean.”

  The front door wouldn’t budge. I broke the window with a brick, climbed in, and saw the cop sitting up against the door, meeting the Lord. I reached in his pants for Ray’s phone. I checked the distance against Tyrone’s: 2000 feet. A chill went through me to think Ray had been talking from the cop’s pocket. If I was high, I might have tried to saw down the cell tower, but he was at the S-curve.

  I knew that.

  I put the phone in my pants with the other two, where they could all signal each other if they wanted. Driving the cruiser, I took Ray’s out to check the messages. Sup. Hey stud. Where u at. One was named Lucifer and he was ten miles away. I imagined him ten miles down into the earth. I passed Dollywood, which is on a back road in a holler, not where you’d expect. Deeper into the forest I pulled off by a precipice. At the bottom of a ravine Ray stood by his wrecked car in water to his knees.

  I left two of the phones on the seat, got the knife, and scooted downhill to the bank. “That’s my knife,” he said from across the water.

  “I’ll slit your throat with it,” I told him, brushing dirt off.

  He opened his mouth, then shut it. “The crystal got wet.”

  “I’m not afrai
d of you anymore.”

  “Then get on with it.” He pointed to his neck.

  “That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

  “Mark’s on his way. Cop from the dogfight.”

  “I doubt we’ll be seeing Mark.”

  “I made a deal with him. He’ll file it as a suicide.”

  “Why don’t you piss off, Ray.”

  “No, it’s really what he’s coming here for.”

  Ray’s eyes were fixed on mine, but it was easy to look Ray in the eye and still hate him. Nor was I touched by the sound of his voice. I hadn’t been prepared, though, for the effect of his breath when I waded into the river. It smelled of bourbon and smoke and instantly I was back in Lubbock drinking bourbon with him, holding him in the bed, thinking he was only a lonely child.

  “It’s for my kids,” he said. “If you had kids, you’d understand.”

  I stepped onto a bar of gravel and kicked some into the water. I guessed there was a fair chance he was telling the truth.

  “I’ve been down in Florida,” I said.

  “I like it there. Took Angel and Ray Junior to the Daytona 500. Remember at the Bristol Speedway, when you thought we were dying?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never been to Bristol.”

  “You were pretty lit up then.”

  “You were as lit up as me.”

  “But I was aware of it. You, you acted surprised.”

  With no memory of Bristol I tried to imagine that city, which straddles Virginia and Tennessee. I pictured a dotted state line painted down the middle of downtown. I did remember a line like that, but it had been in Mexico. Fast cars racing in circles, steered by remote. They crashed over and over until the stadium was about to explode. Panicked, I dragged Ray out into a country I’d never seen. What happened next, Ray punched me, right in front of all the Mexicans. “Now you’ll have a black eye for your ma’s birthday,” he said. He still drove me to her house but by then we were in Leo, and Ma was a Cancer. I staggered in and found her on the couch with her quilting circle—three ladies who together weighed less than me, sitting in a row like sticks of brittle.

  “This is my son,” said my mother.

  I can’t account for what came next. I looked down at the quilt, a patchwork maze whose path mapped all that I’d done wrong in her eyes. I saw my house when the bank forced Lisa out of it. I saw her in the future, dying of AIDS. I saw Ma getting sick and writing in my baby book: a list of my firsts, which she was coding into the quilt as triangles arranged in a loop. With that loop she was telling me I would never change. “Up yours with a plunger if that’s what you think,” I said, which Ma must have taken as a response to her words.

  I stepped into the icy water and sat on Ray’s car hood. I knew he wouldn’t change. “I need you alive,” I told him, taking his hand.

  He slipped on the algae but I held on, pulling him toward me. “You were about to kill me,” he said.

  “I don’t have anyone else.”

  “You’ve got Lisa.”

  “I don’t want her.”

  “You want me?”

  “You’re better than nothing.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and kicked at some rocks. “That came out wrong,” I said, and he looked at the shore and said, “No, it’s true.”

  The phone purred in my pants. Ray took it out and squinted. It was Tyrone’s.

  “This guy says he’s glad I’m online again,” he said.

  “I wonder what that could mean.”

  Ray pressed his fingertips to the holes in mine. “Can you drive?” he said, glancing at his smashed car. The river was roaring around it, rising toward its broken window. He squeezed my hand. High tide must be on the way, and if mountain rivers had tides, then tides were everywhere. Those lithium-and-lye bottles had tides. Flasks had them; so did tree sap, gas tanks, storm drains, even the blood in my heart. I squeezed back. “So long as we find a dry bag of crystal,” I said, because—here’s how sober I was—I could feel high tide in my veins, surging toward the moon, cresting like it must have done every day of my life.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the following organizations for their support in recent years while I’ve worked on this and other projects: Caldera Arts Center, The Camargo Foundation, The Robert M. MacNamara Foundation, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Fundación Valparaíso, The Corporation of Yaddo, The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, The Ucross Foundation, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and The Creative Capital Foundation. I’m also grateful for the help and support of Jason Cook at Fiddleblack, everyone at Sarabande—especially Sarah Gorham, Kirby Gann, and Kristen Radtke—and my agent, Samantha Shea.

  Knox Garvin

  JOHN MCMANUS is the author of the novel Bitter Milk and the short story collections Born on a Train and Stop Breakin Down. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award, and a Creative Capital Literature grant. He lives in Virginia.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary press located in Louisville, KY, and Brooklyn, NY. Founded in 1994 to champion poetry, short fiction, and essay, we are committed to creating lasting editions that honor exceptional writing. For more information, please visit sarabandebooks.org.