Living Things

by Landon Houle

  Miriam stared at the pictures. So much had happened that day. So much had been said. It made her feel funny to see the imposter cat, as if she was the one who’d told a lie.

  They were sitting on the front porch. Tommy shook out a cigarette and lit it. He looked at his phone.

  He’d graduated college in May, and now he was, he said, planning his next move. Sometimes he came to see Miriam, but mostly he stayed with his friend, and there were girls, too. Miriam had seen Tommy eyeing Clarice Powell’s granddaughter and another neighborhood girl she ran with.

  When Miriam asked about Evie, Tommy said she still lived in Arizona. She had her own life. She was the same, whatever that meant.

  Miriam stared at the newspaper, at the fuzzy pictures of the cats. Pete had jumped off the top of the electric pole. Miriam thought about the man in the truck. It’s in their nature to be tough, he’d said.

  How do you think they got that baby? she said. Cathy and her friend.

  Tommy made a snorting sound. His thumb worked the buttons on the phone.

  Two women, Miriam said. She’d only been mildly curious before, but the details seemed more important now. You think they used a turkey baster?

  For once, Tommy looked up at her.

  I’m just asking, Miriam said. It’s good to ask.

  Tommy shook his head and went back to his phone.

  There’s a lot we don’t know, Miriam said.

  Sure, Tommy said, though it was unclear what exactly he was answering.

  They say it’s not good for kids to have two men or two women for parents, Miriam said. She was looking out across the yard that needed cutting. She knew Tommy wasn’t listening, but it didn’t matter.

  She was thinking about Cathy and her friend and the fence Spikey jumped. She was thinking about Columbo. About how she’d never been more scared in her life just sitting there in her own living room watching television. Her daughter was alive, and her husband was dead, but the truth was, she’d lost both of them a long time ago. Other than Tommy and the ladies at the church, Miriam was completely alone.

  She was about to ask Tommy if he remembered that day in the parking lot when she’d locked him in the car. She was about to ask, even though he kept on laughing and gurgling and flailing as usual, did he feel the least bit scared? Was there ever a moment when he thought he might not be okay?

  She was about to ask Tommy these questions, when under the wire fence, slipped a burred and muddy Pete.

  Tommy didn’t look up when Miriam stood and walked to the edge of the porch. He didn’t see when she took the steps—four, not three.

  Pete was running toward her. Miriam hadn’t wanted to say so that day in the kitchen, but she knew it wasn’t true—what Ann had said. In most ways, animals weren’t anything like people.

  But then, just when Miriam was close enough to touch him, Pete stopped short. His body went stiff and his eyes—Miriam could see the pupils go wide and flat. He wasn’t hurt. He was scared. Something had happened to him. So much had happened to all of them, and it didn’t matter that you tried to be careful, that you taught your animals to walk on leashes, that you built fences to keep certain things in and certain things out. Miriam saw that now. She understood the real dangers of the world, and all she could do was bend her knees and let things spin. All any of them could do was hold out their hands even as they showed their teeth.

  FIRST-TIME USERS

  Bev deserved more in life than an inflatable kiddy pool, but this, along with some ground round and a pack of butter buns, was the best Cathy and the Black Creek Dollar General had to offer.

  Cathy was just off work from the Quick Stop. The cops who came in for coffee and peanuts said it was gonna be a long one. Crime went up with the temperature. In the summer, you could always expect domestics and a lot of ’em. Folks started sweating, and then they started drinking, and before you knew it, they were just tearing into each other. Heat like this, the fat cop said, makes people wild. Dumb and desperate.

  Cathy’s shoes stuck to the parking lot, and inside the car, the air was thick and hit like the flat of a hand.

  On the ride home, Cathy wondered what she might be coming home to—Bev with her head under the faucet. Bev standing in the open icebox with her shirt pulled up over her bra. Or maybe Bev would be naked and asleep in a cold bath with ice cubes floating around her knees.

  Cathy had seen all of these things before, and it was more disturbing than a person might think. Cathy couldn’t shake the feeling that she was walking in on something she wasn’t supposed to see. I can’t remember a time, Bev said, when I wasn’t burning up.

  But this time, there wasn’t anything to see. Bev’s car was gone. There was a note on the counter. Mozelle in bad shape. Be back late. Don’t forget trash.

  Mozelle was one of Bev’s residents. Bev bathed Mozelle and rolled her hair every day because Mozelle was sweet on another resident named Lewis who she sometimes took for her husband and other times thought was her father. She’s eighty-four, Bev said, but she don’t know it. Some days she thinks she’s still a little girl.

  Cathy knew Bev would be upset not if but when she lost Mozelle. Cathy didn’t think it was good for Bev, that it would be good for anybody, to be around so much dying, but Bev said she was a professional. What was worse than sitting with a dying person was being that dying person and going it alone. Bev kept that from happening. She was the one who held hands and washed foreheads until the very end. She could handle it, she said. She had been handling it for nearly twenty years now, but Cathy wasn’t so sure. Just because you kept living didn’t mean you were okay.

  Cathy still had the sack of groceries in her hand. She looked up from the note. There were some work trucks next door, but the engines and the hollers were muted by the windows and the blinds that were closed to the sun. The air conditioner kicked on. The fridge was running. Otherwise, the house was dark and quiet.

  Cathy left Bev’s note where she’d found it. She stuck the buns on top of the microwave. She took out the package of meat and opened the ice box. She was trying to decide whether to fridge it or freeze it. She saw the blood that ran and pooled at the corner of the deli Styrofoam.

  Cathy and Bev had a lot in common. Sure they did. They both liked a good hamburger, for instance. But in some ways, they couldn’t have been more different. Bev was used to blood, saw it all the time, but looking at the ground round, Cathy felt a lurching in her gut. She’d nearly been sick last week when Wally had a seizure and smashed his face against the ice cream freezer. Just before it happened, Cathy had asked where he’d left the mop. It was a simple question, but a certain look had come into Wally’s eye, as if he saw through everything in front of him to an answer that was more complex than any of them could understand. The next thing Cathy knew, he was on the floor, trying to tear his clothes off.

  Cathy hadn’t ever had a seizure, but sometimes she felt like she was in a kind of daze. Snap out of it, Bev would say. Cathy blinked. She looked down at the ground round like she was just seeing it, and quickly, she shoved it into the freezer beside the Kool Pak Bev used for her migraines. There wouldn’t be a barbecue that night, but she could have the pool set up by the time Bev got home. She wanted a surprise. She wanted to do something that day besides sell beer and cigarettes and lottery tickets. The pool would be good, Cathy thought. The pool would be something.

  The box was small but heavy. Cathy carried it outside. She chose a spot where Bev used to set up her lawn chair before the headaches got so bad. The grass was crisping, and it was sharp, a kind of torture under Cathy’s bare knees as she knelt to open the box.

  Next door, Duke Energy was trimming branches off the line. There was the whining buzz of the chainsaw, the beep-beep of big things moving backward. A man yelled, Keep going!

  Cathy had cooled some in the house, but already she was sweating again. She squinted against the sun. The pool was ten feet long and three rings. The box showed a father and mother, two kids, all Hispanic. The bo
y was throwing a beach ball. The girl was waiting to catch, her hands in the air. But there was something unsettling about the picture that made it look like each person had been cut from another advertisement. Things were slightly out of proportion. The mother wasn’t looking at the children. She was looking past them.

  Cathy flipped the box over, pulled out her knife, and cut the tape. There was the strong odor of hot rubber.

  That ain’t level, a man said.

  Cathy jerked around. She had the knife. She held it in front of her.

  Whoa, the man said, and when he took off his hard hat, he caught Cathy’s eye. She would have seen him before had she thought to look up about thirty feet where he stood in the bucket of a Duke Energy truck watching her. Whatever it is, he hollered down, I didn’t do it.

  Cathy held the knife. I’m innocent, the man said. He grinned with his mouth open until Cathy took the knife in her other hand. She folded it up, put it back in her pocket. But when she tilted her head back to see the man, she cocked an eyebrow so that her lip curled over her teeth.

  The man put back on his hard hat. His hair was long and hung over his shoulders. Because of the sun, Cathy couldn’t tell much else about him.

  Just thought I’d tell you that what you’re doing, the man said, it ain’t gonna work.

  The pool was still in the box. Cathy glanced at it. Then she said to the man, Hadn’t done nothing yet.

  Still. You’ll need a straighter place.

  Cathy studied the yard. It looked level enough from where she was, but maybe the man saw it different. She didn’t like the way he was getting into her business, but it was true that from where he was, things were probably easier to see.

  That side, the man said, pointing at Cathy. It’ll cave right in, and then all your water—

  He didn’t say what the water would do. Instead he pushed his hands through the air, and his mouth puckered. In the sun, Cathy could see him spitting in the air.

  I’m just warning you, he said. Those seams’ll split.

  Cathy looked at the house. You see somewhere better?

  The man turned his head and reached for the controls. The bucket moved toward the house and back away from it. The mechanics of the machine were noisy, and the crane loomed like a giant version of the child’s arcade. From such a vantage, the things over which the claw hovered were nothing but junk toys and cockeyed dolls. Because of their elusiveness and perhaps, too, their charming imperfections, they were the objects of sharpest desire, totems of the world’s conditions contained so neatly within a lit glass box.

  It’s just a blow-up pool, Cathy yelled, but the man didn’t hear her. The bucket moved, and the man surveyed the yard, and finally, he said, There’s all right. He pointed at the spot where Bev usually parked her car, an oily patch of dirt in front of the shed.

  Bev liked that spot because there was a tree and some afternoon shade, but the shade would be nice for the pool, too. And the man was right. The yard was more level there. All right then, Cathy said. She tilted her chin. Then she waved at him, but the bucket didn’t move.

  Appreciate it, Cathy said. She carried the box over to the spot in front of the shed. Still the man watched, and after a minute, after he’d watched Cathy wrestle the pool out of the box, he said, It’s better with two people. Easier, I mean.

  Cathy glanced up at him and went on unfolding the pool. She took out the manual, and when she opened it, carefully keeping her head down, she heard the gears of the bucket working. In the booklet, there were pictographs of a person diving, smashing her head against the bottom. The manual said every precaution should be taken. The manual said first-time users are at highest risk of incident.

  You got a compressor? the man said, and the bucket had moved but not far.

  Cathy looked up. Got a bike pump.

  The man shook his head. Then he rubbed at his face. It was a gesture of real sadness, crushing defeat. You’ll need a compressor, he said.

  For all his good advice, the man in the bucket didn’t have much follow-through. Yeah, he had a compressor in the truck, but it wouldn’t be smart of him to let Cathy use it. Company policy and all. What if something happened? I’d be glad to drop by, he said, after hours.

  Cathy had short hair, and usually, this was enough. She wasn’t used to men talking to her this way.

  Think you got the wrong idea, she said.

  The man in the bucket made a face and hitched a shoulder. Things aren’t always how they look, he said. He watched her as he fired up the chainsaw. Then he turned and went at a limb.

  The man was right. Cathy needed a compressor. Cathy pushed herself up, and for a strange minute—what was probably only a few seconds—she thought she might fall down. The burnt grass tilted and enough time passed for Cathy to think, This place isn’t flat at all.

  But then things snapped back and the yard held still. She left the pool laid out where it was in the yard. She locked up the house and got back in the car, which was nearly as hot as it had been earlier. She and Bev kept some tools in the hall closet—a hammer, nails, a dozen screwdrivers they’d bought as a set from Walmart. But Walmart was at the edge of town, and Cathy didn’t feel like driving that far. The heat was working on her.

  She pulled up to Higgin’s Hardware. Besides the doors and the windows, the building was made entirely of corrugated metal and painted an ugly blue. When Cathy opened the glass door, a gust of conditioned air hit her face. It was as cool as the Quick Stop and felt good but made her head hurt, too.

  Howdy, she said. Her eyes adjusted to the light, and she saw there was nobody at the register. It didn’t seem like there was anybody in the whole store. There was a radio playing in the back, a song Cathy didn’t know.

  She took a few steps down the aisle. There were nails and screws, nuts and bolts. She’d never been inside Higgin’s before, and she looked up for some sign of direction, but what she saw was taxidermy animals, most of them frozen and mounted in expression of struggle or attack. There were dozens of fish, curled as fish curl when they are out of the water and wanting more than anything to breathe. There were a couple of snarling hogs. A bobcat. Deer that looked serene but stupid, as if they’d been fooled and accepted it. And there, right on top of a shelf of motor oil, was a coiled up rattlesnake, its pink mouth open to strike.

  Cathy reached out. She’d never been so close to a rattlesnake, dead or alive. Like needles, the fangs. A little pinch, Bev would say. Just a little pressure.

  They’ll kill you good, a voice said, and Cathy jumped to see a young man behind the other end of the counter. She hadn’t seen him before, but he must have been there the whole time, leaning back in the chair like he was, chewing on a toothpick. It made her feel strange to think of him just sitting there watching her. All they need, he said, is half a chance.

  Cathy looked back at the snake. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so real. The eyes were poorly molded plastic, and the scales, even if they were real, seemed just as artificial. It was more like an imitation of itself, a piece of junk that had never been alive.

  You killed it? Cathy said.

  The boy didn’t answer. He pointed up in the air. Shot that doe, he said, Thanksgiving weekend.

  Cathy glanced up at the deer, at the ears which hung like a dog’s.

  The boy chewed the pick. You hunt?

  Cathy shook her head.

  You don’t believe in it, the boy said. He didn’t give her time to say whether she did or she didn’t. There’s hunting in the Bible.

  Cathy scratched at her leg. Something had bit her. She felt the knife in her pocket. I’m looking, she said, for an air compressor.

  It had been cool when she’d first walked in, but she was feeling the heat again, a damp run down her back. Cathy was looking around the store, but the boy kept his eyes on her. He said, Every living thing is made for us. For men, I mean.

  Outside, a cloud passed before the sun, making the day seem suddenly later than it was. I need a compressor, Cathy said, so I can blow
something up.

  There’s a compressor there, a woman said. She’d come from the back where the music was playing. She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, and there was dirt there like she’d been working. You got a flat?

  I got a pool, Cathy said.

  The woman didn’t smile, but she came out from behind the counter. Lucky you, she said.

  Yeah, lucky me.

  The woman squatted. Her nametag said Jill. She took a box off the shelf and handed it to Cathy. This one ought to do it, she said.

  Cathy looked at the box. All right.

  You can hook it up to the car, Jill said. To the lighter.

  Cathy nodded.

  Jill stood up. She made her way to the register. She didn’t look at the boy, but she talked at him. Boone, I thought you were supposed to be at some revival.

  Boone eyed her with no small amount of meanness. Nope.

  That it for you? Jill said, and Cathy told her that it was. Cathy said, I like your hair.

  It wasn’t something Cathy would normally say. Truth be told, she didn’t usually say much to anybody. She kept things to herself and kept herself from other people. But there she was talking and sounding, she thought, pretty stupid.

  The color of it, she stammered because Jill’s hair was sort of streaked with a reddish-purple color, and even though her hands were dirty, her fingernails were polished that same bright plum.

  I get it done, Jill said, in Columbia. I lived there for a while.

  Cathy nodded. That’s where you’re from?

  That’s where I lived.

  But now you’re here, Boone said. He pointed at the ceiling. He knows best. He’s got the plan.

  Jill cut her eyes down the counter.

  Everything happens for a reason, Boone said.

  Shut up, Jill said. Nobody’s listening to you.