No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  “Oh good,” he says when he sees me. “You’re here to watch too. Everyone’s eager to see me die.”

  “Gasoline,” I say.

  “It’s under control.” A fresh round of joshing erupts between him and the kids.

  I say, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  But he just shrugs and says, “Ideas are for pussies.” He wades in and starts spritzing gas on the pile, like he’s watering a bed of flowers. Sticks snap under his feet. He stumbles a little. All around him, down in the midst of the failed fire, bits of ember still glow, and here and there tiny blurts of flame shiver.

  “You and Dorlene seem to be getting on well,” he says. “Up on the porch and all.” He waves his free hand at me. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not—”

  The world lights up. Right around his legs a huge gout of flame flares, rearing high up over his head in a flash. It turns the twilight black and orange, far bigger than the fireball from before—and louder, a roar instead of a tear. Tom all but disappears inside it. A push of hot air hits me all over my front, harsh up under my eyebrows for some reason. I make a little sound, I don’t know what, one of those little surprise noises. Everyone else does the same, all those little sounds, some of them loud. A girl further up by the house shrieks. Back behind me somewhere, Dorlene cries, “See, oh!”

  Tom steps out of the flame. He’s not on fire, but he’s still right up in the edges of it. He’s hunched over, his shoulders tucked sheepishly up around his cheeks, into his beard. The fire shrinks but goes on roaring, standing man-high, the shape of a haystack, gray smoke blooming up into the twilight. I can see the terse smile on Tom’s face as he steps away, and the crowd noises behind me swell—exhalations and people saying oh my god and stuff like that, laughing. Tom sidles away, still bent. He looks back at the burning brush. He feels his beard, his eyebrows. The blaze lights up his glasses from where I stand. But he’s got the gas can in his hand still. From the mouth of it, a little leaf of fire flutters.

  “Hey—hey,” I say. I’m the first to speak. I take a step back. “Tom, the can.”

  “Drop it! Drop it!” somebody calls from back by the house, and Tom glances down at the can. The flame, like an orange thumb, seems to fatten as he turns, coming right out of the spout, and for a second it looks like it’ll sputter out, but it doesn’t. Tom doesn’t even seem to notice, but he drops the can at his feet, real casual, not even seeming to watch it drop, like he is tossing his keys onto a table. And then, still turning—all of this in one big turn away from the fire still petering out in the pile of wet brush—he keeps walking off kind of slow. He makes his way toward me. The can smokes in the grass behind him.

  “Back up, back up,” he says, palming his hands at the air between him and me.

  “Is there still gas in there?” I say.

  “Let’s just back up.”

  “Is there gas in there?”

  Tom shrugs, but it’s one of those coy shrugs, like he knows but doesn’t want to say. Which could mean either thing. We walk backward, watching the can. And then suddenly Dorlene’s between us, walking forward up the slope with us. Something about her posture, her hunched shoulders and her bent little neck, makes her seem like a tiny draft animal, like she is pulling Tom and me implacably uphill in her wake. She shakes her head at the ground.

  “Mr. Shamblin,” she says. “I don’t believe I’ll allow such a thing again.”

  We back up against the driveway. Ernest meets us there, his shoes grinding in the gravel. Further down the house Triti’s silhouette stands alone at the front porch, halfway out on the steps, arms crossed beneath breasts. Even in this meager twilight her shape is as recognizable as the sound of her voice, and it doesn’t matter that I can’t quite make out her face—I know it is firm and watchful, as peacefully worried as a mother.

  “You think it will explode?” Tom says to me.

  “I wasn’t expecting any explosions when I came here,” says Dorlene.

  “Gas explodes, right?” I say, though I have no idea how all that really works. “How much gas is in there?”

  “Enough,” Tom says, and he starts ambling away to the left. He starts off on a big circle around the can.

  “Mr. Shamblin,” Dorlene says. She stays by my side, though.

  Ernest taps his lips, swirls his wine. “We should keep back. It’s gonna go.”

  “It is?”

  “Oh yeah. When enough air gets sucked in and the ratio of oxygen is right.”

  “Oxygen to what?”

  “Fuel, man. Fuel.” But somehow when he says this I know it’s not going to go, almost because he says it, like him saying it is itself a safety measure.

  Something tugs at my jacket. Dorlene is pulling the cigarettes from my pocket—or putting them back, rather; she already has one in her hand.

  “You’re almost out,” she says, looking up at me.

  “There’s another pack in the car.”

  “I know,” she says, but there’s no way she could. She begins to wring the tobacco from her cigarette. She watches the can, burning like a candle down below. Tom makes a quarter circle around the can and comes back. The brushpile itself has gone dark and smoldering again. He stands with us, looking out at the can, his arms crossed over the top of his belly. Some tool down below shouts out something about Prometheus.

  Tom says, “You know, what I should’ve done is thrown it into the pile. The can. Once it was on fire. That would’ve done it.”

  “You didn’t really throw it at all,” says Ernest.

  A few seconds later Tom says, “I can’t believe that brush didn’t catch. That was a big fireball.”

  Ernest says, “Bigger than you.”

  And then a minute later: “That mower’s got a plow attachment. I bet I could push that thing in there.”

  Dorlene jabs at him with the glowing point of her cigarette. “Mr. Shamblin, if you try that I swear I will physically fucking stop you, I’m serious to god.” And that is a thing I would like to see. I can picture Tom on his riding mower, that old yellow thing barely big enough for him, and Dorlene standing out on the lawn in her plaid autumn dress, blocking the way, the whole thing a set piece, a tiny Tiananmen Square. I look down at Dorlene, sure she would do it, and I can’t help thinking to myself in this light, with a bit of smoke drifting between us, how beautiful she is. A sound leaks out of me, a stray fragment of a throaty hum.

  Dorlene looks up at me, right into this squeezed-off sound, these thoughts. Her eyes are calm and appraising. She sips her cigarette, lighting her face. I feel utterly seen. Meanwhile Tom and Ernest are discussing, in low tones, the possibilities of the mower plan.

  “My bag,” Dorlene says.

  “Right.”

  “Walk me down?”

  “Okay.”

  And just like that we leave them there, the gas can still fuming. As we walk, it occurs to me that I don’t know where Dorlene is staying tonight. I wonder if she’s staying here in the farmhouse, somehow. I veer toward the jumble of cars, trying to summon up the right tone of indifference with which to ask about her plans, but before I can speak Dorlene says, “No, not that way,” and she keeps walking straight ahead, down toward the outbuildings past the back elbow of the drive.

  “I thought you needed your bag,” I say, angling alongside her.

  “I don’t, David, I’m sorry.” She keeps on heading back toward the dark.

  I almost stop then. I almost don’t go. Not so much because of what she’s saying or doing—because I’m not sure of the truth of that, not yet—but because of what it turns me into, what I can’t help thinking. I don’t even have the gauge to measure my readiness for this, and the fact that I’m fumbling for one makes a slice of me feel old. The rest of my mind is puppies. I follow Dorlene like a stranger. I keep my steps small. We cross the drive back by the cars, passing through the buzzing orange glare of the farm’s single sodium light, high overhead on the utility pole. We don’t look back, either of us. She leads us down t
o the deepest part of the yard, out where no one else is. Me this man, her this woman. We round the corncrib into darkness. We hit upon the wide path Tom keeps mowed through the weeds, a circuit that makes the rounds to the outbuildings—the corncrib, the pigshack, the dairy barn with its high floors of compacted manure, the old barn collapsing picturesquely, the machine shed prim and modern and out of place. All of it unused. We’ve left behind whatever warmth was in the air up by the house, a thing I discover and realize I’ve forgotten about this place—the way the cool air pools in the belly of the back lawn in the after-summer evenings.

  No one can see us now. We walk quiet halfway around the mown loop before Dorlene stops by the big metal water trough.

  “What is this?” Dorlene says, and I think it’s an ignorance until I understand: she can’t see over the lip, can’t see the water, black and textured and still inside. The water’s half-covered in rotten wooden planks that Tom is always threatening to replace. I tell her what it is and she raps a knuckle against the side, light as a twig against a window. It sounds like stone.

  Dorlene looks all around us, out at the lightless fields in three directions. When the property went up for sale, Tom took the house while a neighboring farmer took the fields all around, and so the place feels like a promontory out over alien spaces. We’re deep down in that territory now.

  Dorlene tilts her face to the sky. It makes me feel giant, so I look up too. Westward, blue twilight still stains the black, but the stars are already out with a force they could never muster in town, and I know that later the Milky Way itself—the actual visible thing—will blaze from one horizon to the other, letting us know just exactly where we are. It’s a spectacle that would make anyone feel small, a scale-crushing sight, but I can’t make it out just yet.

  “Tell me about Triti,” Dorlene says.

  I breathe. The words jangle me, derail me, though I can work them into the tumble of thoughts I’ve been riding if I try—this could be a formality, of sorts. I stand there and think it through, but the more I try to imagine a way to begin, the more impossible an answer feels. There is no telling that could mean anything to anyone else, certainly not Dorlene. A thousand little stories I tell myself, really, messy and disobedient, each one an attempt to wrangle what happened into an overall shape I could encounter, could wrestle to the ground or put on a shelf or kill or own outright. And these are wordless stories, too, drawn around the relative moving positions of the relevant players. Meanwhile all of it shifts and rearranges itself restlessly as the events themselves drift further from where I now am, at any given moment. And so to tell it, to speak any one version of what happened—that would mean pretending that this one story was more true, or more meaningful, or more revealing than all the other stories I might tell. And I don’t mean the facts, because there are no facts. If there’s an account that’s even close to true, I don’t know who knows it. It would be an elected truth. And if I can’t even claim the silent sculpted stories in my head I sure won’t claim anything that I drag out now and beat solid beneath the stars for Dorlene.

  I look down at her. She is frowning, an expression that slides a needle up into my heart. I tell her, “I can’t.”

  After a minute Dorlene nods. “Well, that’s fine, David,” she says, and somehow the way she says it makes me feel like the two words I’ve chosen to say have told her more than anything else I might’ve given up.

  And so I tell her about Lisa. Not about anything that happened, but just about how things were. I don’t know why I do it—I’m just here at the farm, out among all these owned abandoned buildings, trying to describe for this tiny woman, this miracle of a person, the jagged growing chasm around which Lisa and I at some point began to circle. I talk through our last cigarettes, and well on past that, and Dorlene just listens. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t even make any listening sounds—not a yeah or an oh or even a hum. I tell her things I haven’t told anyone, like how the shape of Lisa’s panties lying on top of the laundry used to make me sick, a sensation I can’t even imagine anymore. I talk until I say, “I don’t know.” I say it two times, three times.

  Quick into the quiet that follows, I’m wishing I had more cigarettes. The voices up by the house seem a mile away at least. Finally Dorlene says my name. She holds her arms up toward me. “Here,” she says, but I have no idea what she means. She wiggles her fingers at me, waving me in. “Here.”

  I drop into a crouch. I’ve got no idea if it’s what she wants, but she wraps her thin arms around my neck like rope. She puts her head on my shoulder, buries her throat in mine. I put my arms around her, easy at first but a little harder when I feel how unfragile she is. I wrap myself around her so completely that my hands come back around to touch my own sides. She smells like fruit and bark. Her hair on my cheek and neck is coarse and thick. She tightens her grip and I wrap her up in return, pulling her so close that at last I understand I’ve lifted her from the ground, that one arm is crushing our chests together and the other has pulled her pelvis and her thighs up into my belly, her legs between my own. Her legs strain toward me, stiff, the tops of her feet curled firm against the undersides of my thighs.

  I drop onto my knees, my legs spreading. And just like that I get ambushed by the vague thoughts that had me going as we came down. I get huge inside my pants. It happens in an instant, dizzying me. I loosen my grip on her and arch my back awkwardly to get away from the press of her shins into my crotch, but she tightens her grip around my neck and worms her body into mine. I know she can feel me. Her face shifts into the crook of my shoulder. I feel like a fucking flashlight down there, not even me at all, an unbelievable heft and pressure—hell, if conditions were different I’d like to take a look at what I’ve done. I arch over Dorlene, frozen, my back straining against all the weight of this embrace.

  Dorlene lets go. Her body goes slack and her arms leave my neck. She drifts right through my grasp like water and alights on the ground, her hands on my shoulders and her eyes into mine. My own hands come to rest on her hips, and I’ve got no idea at all what to do with them. My knees complain, but I stay down if for no other reason than I’m too embarrassed to straighten.

  She arches toward me. “It’s okay.” Her words are like bubbles. Her breath blooms around my face. “It’s okay.”

  I want to swallow her, put her inside me. I squeeze the horns of her hips and feel the sure, answering bone beneath her flesh. I want to wear her like a puppet, hollow her out like eggshell. She lays a hand against my cheek, her fingertips on my skin the most novel thing I have felt in adulthood, I swear, and what wouldn’t I do for this? What wouldn’t I do?

  Dorlene steps back. My hands fall from her hips and onto my legs. She bends down, her eyes on me still, and she reaches with one hand up under her dress. As she straightens she lifts up the hem, her hand traveling up the space between her legs until it stops at the top of them, the front of her dress all bunched around her wrist—hiding her there still, but exposing her legs to their roots. She’s barefoot; I have no idea when or how that happened. Her legs are white and longer than I thought they would be. They are tiny and fatless, the muscle of her thighs like plastic. She works her hand gently, works her hips around her hand too, looking down at herself thoughtfully. And for a moment, in a way—I don’t think I’m exaggerating—it’s the most excruciatingly spectacular thing I’ve ever seen, her out here like this with all these dark buildings standing over us and the grass all around and the sky overhead.

  But then, for no reason I can name and all at once, I lose everything. I mean all of it. Every bit of urgency in me goes silent and soft. Maybe it’s the sight of so much of her skin, the imagined body revealed; or maybe it’s the way she’s working her hips and the sensation that she shouldn’t know how to do this thing. Maybe it’s that I want so badly to know what any of these approaching acts would be with Dorlene, because they seem literally fantastic. Or maybe it’s because when the actual mechanics surface in my mind—the simple act of kissing,
to say the least—I can’t quite tune my urgent body to the choreography her strange machine would have to require, and I just stall out. I don’t know. I’m inventing things. All I know is I can’t understand what’s happening to me and I can’t make it stop. Something in my vision and in my skin and in my muscle has lurched sideways, and for several long seconds that I can’t escape, Dorlene looks like just what she is. Like just what she is and no more: this little thing.

  Dorlene steps back into me, thighs still bared. I tense. I realize I’m holding my breath. I turn my head slightly away, and I work to keep my face from wrinkling in distaste. Dorlene comes right up to me, straddling one of my legs. The lifted curtain of her dress grazes over me. One of her bare legs touches my arm, cold as dirt.

  I raise my other hand. Wait, I am about to say, but before I can say it she’s gone. She’s off me and turned away, her dress fallen back into place. She stands still and pert, like a lawn ornament. She’s turned, staring out and away into the long grass.

  “What is it?” I say. I sit up, craning my neck, following her gaze toward the machine shed thirty yards beyond. I can’t see anything.

  After a long pause she speaks, sounding like a songbird, a dove: “Got spooked.” She holds her pose a beat longer, and then she flits into motion, turning and heading back up toward the house, drifting across the dark like a spirit.

  I scramble to my feet. I straighten to my full height, turning, knowing what I will see out in the weeds, out by the shed. But I don’t. Instead I see nothing. I don’t hear anything either, just the people noises from up at the house and the gentle ocean sounds of the breeze through the corn buried out there in the dark. And it’s only then that I suspect there wasn’t anything to see.