Reluctantly, I left.
By the time I got to my mom’s again, she was carrying Victor out to her car, and when she saw me, she looked ready to start hollering at me, but she just handed me, without word or fanfare, my son, and then she gave me a cursory peck on my cheek before loading herself into her car and driving off without so much as an offer to give us a ride.
When I got home, the car was in the driveway, and I braced myself for a hellish fight. I figured she would tear into me about lying to my mother and about leaving Victor with her to begin with and then about forgetting about him, and that this would lead to some shouting, some storming around, some random household objects thrown about, most of them aimed at my head, my chest, and as I stood there on the front sidewalk, I wondered what made us fight like some 1970s sitcom couple, and then I wondered if it was worth going inside at all, if maybe Victor and me, we could keep walking, and maybe I could take him to a bar and set him up with some pretzels and let him look at one of those Trivial Pursuit video games and then take in a couple of beers myself, though I couldn’t imagine further than finishing that second beer, couldn’t imagine what would happen after that. I shrugged my shoulders, bent down and pulled Victor out of his stroller, was struck briefly by the image of me walking into the house with Victor held up in front of me like a shield, and then I walked inside with him clinging to my side.
She was there looking exasperated and wild and disheveled and, honestly, pretty sexy, though I’m sure that last part wasn’t intentional, was more to do with the weird, unsettling pleasure I took from working myself into trouble with her. I felt my body tense, waiting for that first wave, but all she did was take Victor from me and take him into our bedroom and then close the door behind her. At first, I figured I’d performed some sort of voodoo, or maybe Victor had, but then I thought about Sheila in our bedroom, in the dark, holding that boy tightly, and I pictured everything that normally would’ve come out of her, and how instead it was building up inside of her, and I started to imagine what might come next. This upset me enough that I had little choice but to sneak off into the kitchen, where I grabbed a six-pack of beer and an unopened bag of chips, which I took with me into the backyard and proceeded to finish, the chips crushed one fistful after another into my mouth.
Five beers and an empty bag of chips later, I felt sick and sweaty and overcome with guilt, which I blamed on the chips.
Back inside, the house was still and quiet and the bedroom door was still closed. I considered risking opening the door, but thought better of it. This was uncharted territory for me, and something about the way this had played out, something about our situation, or my own distractions, made this new development feel dire and irrevocable and exhausting. I sensed something large on the horizon, large and charging toward us, and this feeling that I should flee urged me out of the house and into the car and kept me driving until long after night had settled over Houston, and then farther still, until the engine stopped dead as I was pulling off the highway, leaving me only enough momentum to coast to a stop on the shoulder.
When we were kids in high school, Ralph and I bonded over the fact that we thought we were outcasts, even if we weren’t, and that we lived a reckless life, when in fact we were safely ensconced in our families’ suburban homes. We snuck out of the house not to drink or smoke or fuck, but to drive around back roads and listen to music and to pretend to race other cars in the lanes next to us whose drivers were oblivious to whatever games we were playing, which made it easy for us to win every time off the starting line. We would visit cemeteries, and we would tromp through creeks and what passed for woods. We perceived life and our movement through it as if we were still eleven or twelve and not sixteen or seventeen, but we reveled in this as if we had made a conscious decision to do this and hadn’t been somehow left behind.
One time we found ourselves moving slowly across an unexpected clearing, a patch of dirt and flattened grass and weeds we’d not come across before, which turned out to be a private landing strip. We found this out when a small airplane—a Cessna, maybe, or a Super Cub, neither of us knew, though we speculated for hours on it afterward—began its descent nearly on top of us, or so it seemed at the time, when in truth the plane was probably half a mile away and no real danger to us, and we ran screaming and hollering across that flat expanse as fast as we could and holding hands, as if this would protect us from being inevitably caught up in the plane’s propeller. When we cleared the landing strip, we fell and laughed and told each other how awesome we were, and afterward, for a week or two weeks, we retold that story, embellishing it to ridiculous and impractical heights.
We did things back then, is the point I’m trying to make. Not huge things, not important things, not life-changers, nothing so serious as that, but still. We had an impression of ourselves, of who we were, right or wrong, and we acted out our lives accordingly, and as I sat in my car I wondered when we had come to some reckoning of ourselves, some reappraisal of our personal narrative, when we had stopped thinking of ourselves as guys who did exciting, adventurous, childish things, and then through the basic laws of cause and effect stopped doing those things, or, rather, when I stopped doing those things, when I stopped believing in that story we told about ourselves, because, miserable or not, married to Melissa or not, Ralph was still doing things. Things, for the most part, I wouldn’t do. Things I had no interest in doing, but things, nonetheless, and he had eked out a life for himself that, though just a shadow of the lives we had imagined for ourselves, was at least closer to those lives than anything I had made for myself, and that had now brought him to a Chinaman with a unicorn to sell for cheap.
Without thinking or looking, I threw my car door open and pulled myself out of the driver’s seat, only to be honked at as another exiting car swerved around me. Then I slammed the car door, and then I opened it and slammed it again. Then I walked down the exit ramp and across the access road, and then I looked around to see where I was, which was less than an hour’s walk from Ralph’s house.
Ralph was there as he had been the night before, asleep and barely covered by his bathrobe. The unicorn turned to glance at me, but regarded me only a second before it turned its gaze back inward, or so I assumed, back to whatever it was unicorns thought of when trying to ignore their surroundings, the fact that they were trapped in a shed in a suburban hellhole outside of Houston.
Quietly, I opened the gate and I checked Ralph to make sure he was fully asleep. A bruise had begun to purple on his lips, which were beginning to swell, and one of his eyes looked like it would be seriously blackened by morning, and I wondered at what kind of marital strife had caused this, though I was pretty certain it had something to do with the unicorn. Then I checked the house to see if any windows were lit up, and satisfied that no one was awake and spying on me, I quietly, slowly, gently moved close to her, held my hand out to her, not sure if that’s what you were supposed to do, but figured it couldn’t hurt. She ignored my upturned palm, and feeling hesitant but desperate to touch her, I reached my fingers out to her pearlescent skin, to run my finger down the length of her throat and neck, which looked cool to the touch and soft.
I don’t know what I was expecting to happen when I touched her. An electric shock, maybe, or to feel an incredible warmth or stunning coldness, or to be flooded with memories, of the girls I’d loved, of their perfect faces, their soft lips, of my son’s birth, of my wife’s long, bony fingers, of the first time I’d had sex, or images of the future, my own or the world’s. But nothing happened. Nothing, that is, so drastic or dramatic as any of that. I raised my hand to her head and touched her lightly and then drew back, in anticipation of something, but then gently ran my fingers in a soft line down the length of her neck, the feel of which sent a shiver through me, and she shook her mane, and she made a sound or I made a sound, but whoever made the sound, it was loud enough to wake Ralph, or maybe he had been awake that whole time, awake
and standing behind me, waiting for the perfect moment to interject, to say, “What have we got here, Mano?”
It was a strange and violent fight that followed. Strange because, in hindsight, it’s possible Ralph had had no intentions to fight when he saw me standing there, and strange, too, because we weren’t, neither of us, much for fighting. Ralph was short and overweight and strong but clumsy, and I had a suspicion he needed glasses but wouldn’t ever own up to it, a suspicion only cemented by how wildly he swung at me, how long it took for him to catch sight of me out of the corner of his eye whenever I moved to the left or the right of him. He said, “What have we got here, Mano?” and I wasted no time, swinging wildly around even before he hit the M of Mano. I hit him hard on the neck, though I’d been aiming for his face. This threw him off a bit and made him start coughing, made him grab his neck with both hands, and for a moment, I stopped, not a little upset to see him there in pain like that because of me. He took this opportunity to throw himself into me and slam me into the corner of the shed, hard, so that I felt the pain of that corner digging into my back all the way down to my feet. Then we proceeded to punch and kick at each other, to grapple and push, grunting and swearing, and at least once I landed a lucky punch right on his swelling lips, splitting the top lip open so that now we had some blood in the mix.
When I had imagined this fight between Ralph and me, and I had imagined it a number of times before, though I had never tried to imagine the circumstances that led to it, it was me, always me, who got the upper hand of it, quickly straddling a prone and defeated Ralph. I was the more athletic, the more cunning, I had always assumed, and maybe that’s true, but at the moment, it didn’t matter, and soon enough I found myself flat on my back, Ralph pressing down on me, his red, swollen, sweaty face hanging heavily over my own. Then he spit on me, and then he said, “What the hell, Mano?” Then he spit again, but this time into the dirt. Then he said, “Jesus Christ, what the hell?” And then for a moment I felt like a fool and an idiot and an asshole. Then I heard a hoof paw in the dirt, and I tilted my head back so that I could see the unicorn, upside down and behind us, and then I tilted my head forward again and saw Ralph, his lip bleeding still, his mouth moving, though I didn’t hear or understand what he was saying, and then I tilted my head farther forward and saw that his bathrobe had twisted open so that, except for the corduroy belt still tied around his belly, he was bare and vulnerable from his chest on down, and seizing my opportunity, I jerked my knee up into that softest part of him with as much force as I could muster, which made him pitch forward and land heavily on my face before I could roll him off of me. Then I stood and kicked him once more for good measure, hard enough to stop him swearing and hollering for a moment at least.
I took a moment to catch my breath and then saw that a light had come on in one of the upstairs windows, and then I thought I saw the silhouette of Melissa move away from the lit window, and then other lights started to come on in the house, and so as quickly as I could, I grabbed at the harness Ralph had tucked over the unicorn’s head and I pulled, firm but gentle, not sure what I would do if the unicorn decided not to go with me. It didn’t take any coaxing at all, though, and I had her out of the shed, and then I kicked open the gate, and then pulled her into the alley, which dead-ended, and then led her around the side of Ralph’s house and into the front yard. Then as soon as we’d cleared Ralph’s property and were moving into the street, that unicorn stopped and abruptly and smoothly tossed her head, and with a subtle flick put a gash in my chest the length of my arm and then swept my legs out from under me, and the last I saw of her she was trotting down the street, spearing that horn through every mailbox she saw; I watched that unicorn lower her head and spear through first one mailbox and then another and then another, and before long I lost sight of her, but I could hear her still, her hooves against the pavement, her horn tearing through the aluminum boxes, the crash of them hitting the street. Then I laid my head back against the street and I closed my eyes and I listened for as long as I could, and I waited. I waited for something else, anything else, to happen.
“Wolf!”
My father didn’t become violent until, one night while camping outside of Nacogdoches in the East Texas Pineywoods, he was bitten by a stray and sickly wolf.
Perhaps it was a dog.
Before I continue I would like to put to rest some of the myths concerning werewolves, reveal truths that, had I known them before, might have saved more of us:
The Full Moon
Father’s changes were not restricted by the light of the full moon. The changes, in fact, began even before he returned from his trip, rushed home by his fellow bird-watchers.
His beard had filled out, climbing up his face, covering his cheekbones, and reaching up to the lower lids of his eyes.
His nails had grown longer, sharper, and seemed, at the end, to be made of something harder than metal.
His snout had grown, too, allowing for an enhanced sense of smell.
In fact, all of him, by the end, had grown large, and at times I wondered at the deep reach of his long arms, at his hands and how vast they had become.
Silver Bullets
No matter how many I fired—
into his chest (near his heart),
into his side (piercing, so I discovered after the autopsy, his kidney),
through the thickest part of his neck,
into his soft underbelly,
and into his skull—
no matter how many silver bullets, he refused to quietly lie down, fall into a peaceful, interminable sleep, refused to keel over dead, refused, even, to turn from my youngest sister, whom he slaughtered before I could fire even my last shot.
Sunlight
When we captured him, my mother and I, finally, after two weeks of hiding and foraging and planning, after having buried the rest of his “brood” as Father liked to call us, or, rather, after we buried what was left of them, most of them being—well, let’s not go into that just yet—but finally capturing him with a net knotted together by my mother’s thick, supple fingers, Father was sleeping on his back in a wide strip of sunlight that poured into the living room and spilled across the rug and across his favorite chair.
Father had gone to the Pineywoods (more specifically, into the Angelina National Forest)—that year as he had every year since my birth and most likely before—in search of Henslow’s sparrow.
Not that the sparrow in question is particularly difficult to spot, though it is listed as an uncommon and inconspicuous bird. Not that he hadn’t observed and recorded his observations of Henslow’s sparrow numerous times in the past.
More that this particular sparrow was an obsession of his, one none of us outside of Noah quite understood, and we had our doubts about Noah, too.
Still, despite the yearly trips and frequent sightings, I could only find this blurred photograph of the bird in his office, in a box that contained other ornithological trappings (some ten notebooks describing sightings, habitats, movements, dates, times, etc.; some twenty ornithological texts, including The Audubon Guide to the Birds and Waterfowl of East Texas; two pairs of binoculars; and a small box of photographs [all of them as unfocused as this one, for though he was a fine observer and though he could sight birds quicker than his bird-watching fellows, he never had the steady hand necessary for photography]).
What I am trying to say is: My father was a patient man, an observant man.
The point I’m trying to make perfectly clear is: My father was a man who liked birds, and that men who like birds are, on average, men of a peaceful nature.
My youngest brother, Noah, who had, more than any of us, inherited Father’s ability to sit and wait and record, sat at our father’s bedside for two days after he was returned to us from his camping expedition. The doctor had been summoned, had arrived, had administered medicines, and had proclai
med him (our father) in no real danger.
“But what about the hair on his face?” Noah asked. “What about his fingernails?” he said.
The doctor laughed and said, more to Mother than to any of us children, “Your father merely needs a good shave and some super-sturdy nail clippers. Certainly nothing to worry about.”
“And his nose?” Noah asked. “What do you make of his nose?” he said.
But the doctor had a ready answer for that as well: “It’s only made to look bigger by the hair on his face. See if he doesn’t look as normal as Sunday once you’ve given him a good shave.”
Or maybe he had said, “As right as rain.”
In any case: Mother had my sisters shave him.
They used clippers first and then shaving cream and a fresh razor and then more cream and a new razor, as the other had been dulled by the bristles of his beard.
Two hours later, Noah, who had sat silently by throughout the entire process, came to us, Mother and I, and told us that Father’s beard had grown back again.
“Just as full?” I asked.
“More so,” he said. “And, also, I’d like to take a moment to point out that against a clean-shaven face, his nose looked even larger still.” That is how Noah spoke. Very much like our father.
“Must you watch him like that?” Mother asked. “Haven’t you homework or housework to finish?”
“I’ve done it all,” he said.
“Fine, then,” I said. “Keep us informed. Tell us what you find out.”
To that effect, Noah kept notes. But his notebook is incomplete.
Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041) Page 18