Upright Beasts Read online

  Donald takes me by the hand and leads me downstairs and out onto our front porch. “There’ll be a housing depression for a little while, but with the bad elements gone, the market will stabilize before the twins are even in preschool.”

  We step onto the trimmed green grass. I can feel the twins swimming inside me. The empty neighborhood they will be born into surrounds us. I look at the facade of the house across the street. It is similar to our house, but different. It has the garage on the left, and ours has the garage on the right.

  NORTH AMERICAN MAMMALS

  FILLING POOLS

  People say I have a baby face. You can look at me and pretend I’m drowning. I do this watery thing with my eyes. How you work the face is important in this line of work. Window to the soul and all that.

  “Your child’s childhood ain’t your momma’s childhood,” I tell the woman at the door. “Don’t let nostalgia get in the way of safety.”

  She has a six-year-old wrapped around her leg and a baby hooked into her arm. I can tell this lady is one who craves the visuals.

  “One moment you’re sipping ice tea on your lawn chair,” I say, rubbing my boot across the welcome mat. “The next moment, your little girl has bonked open her head on the bottom, chlorine rinsing her brain.”

  The mom gets a twitch in her eye when I say that.

  I fill in the deep ends of pools door-to-door. Make them all an even shallow. Learned how from videos online. It’s a better business than you might think. All I have is a sump pump, a cement mixer, and some cans of blue paint. I had some other things, like a backhoe and a minivan, before the divorce. Now Sarah, my ex, has those things. Well, not the backhoe. The city repossessed that and then gave me a nice big fine.

  The cement truck is mine and custom-made. A commercial cement mixer hooked up to the back of an ’82 Ford.

  “Is that thing up to regulation?” the woman at the door asks.

  “Fuck the regulations,” I tell her. “We’re talking about children’s lives.”

  I study faces a lot. I used to be a painter. I even sold a few portraits to Sarah’s family, before the divorce. The woman in the doorway has a trustworthy face, soft and fuzzy like a TV interview lady.

  “Is the mister around?” I say.

  “I’m afraid the mister isn’t ever around,” the lady says, looking down at the little girl. “He is, uh, on a long vacation.”

  I nod my head sympathetically, offer a discounted rate, and hand over my card.

  It all started when this showboat was doing backflips at night in the community pool. Apparently he had the deep end mixed up with the shallow. His lady friend ran screaming down the street buck naked.

  I was there when they fished him out. If you wanted to see a good face, you should’ve seen his. All pop-eyed and head flopping around like a fish. It was disquieting.

  The community was in an uproar on account of both this and the toddler who’d drowned last year during swim class, but City Hall wasn’t doing anything. I knew a business opportunity when I saw one. Sarah was walking out the door for girls’ night and gave me a face like, Boy, I hope you know what you’re doing.

  My first job, so it was kinda lumpy. But there were a few people who might have said I was a hero. One newspaper did, and I carry a clipping around to show the customers.

  I think my favorite faces are the faces of children. Like the next day, when I’m back at the lady’s house, lowering a sump pump into the deep, and the little six-year-old is smushing her pudgy face right into the chain-link fence.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Petunia,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say, “like the flower.”

  “No!” she shouts.

  I hook up the hose to the pump and turn that sucker on. The girl’s face gets all white and she runs inside.

  It’s a hot day, and I sit on a deck chair under a faded blue umbrella. Watching all that water being sucked into the sewer makes me wish I had a beer. A few minutes later, Petunia is back outside stuffing fish sticks in her face. She hands me one through the fence. It’s still a bit frozen on the inside, but I swallow anyway.

  “Thanks,” I say. I can see her mother watching behind the glass door. I give a little wave, flash my kindly neighbor face.

  “Come around if you want,” I say, and I lie down in one of the pool chairs, listen to the sump pump churn. The sound reminds me that I need to call my ex-wife.

  Straight to voicemail.

  “It’s good to hear your voice, Sarah,” I say. “Wondering if you can give me Bob’s number.” Bob’s our old plumber. I’ve got a burst seal in my basement. I pump it out every morning, but there’s a new pool each night. “Let’s let bygones be bygones. Also, let me know if you want to get coffee sometime.”

  While I’m on the phone, Petunia opens the gate and sits down on a fun noodle near the pool’s edge. I click the phone off, stuff it in my pocket.

  “Why are you filling in our pool?” she says with an angry face.

  “Just the deep end, baby-doll.”

  “Why are you filling in the deep end?”

  “So you don’t die.”

  She frowns and eats another fish stick. She walks to the edge and kicks a floaty duck into the pool, watches it lower inch by inch.

  Backyard deep ends can go up to ten feet deep, which I level out to four. That’s a lot of cement. Sometimes I toss little things down as it dries. A plastic truck or some coins, makeup or jewelry Sarah left at the house, whatever is around. They get covered up and left where no one will ever find them. You could fold a few bodies into that goop before it hardens.

  After a day’s work, I like to just drive around looking for splashes of blue over the fences. I keep a map of potential clients. What’s funny about these neighborhoods is you drive around them enough, and they start to feel like a giant maze. You can’t remember where anything is supposed to be. The faces of each house look the same as the last.

  I give Sarah another call and again she doesn’t pick up.

  “How much of this is a man supposed to take, Sarah?” I say. “This is my fucking basement we’re talking about! It’s growing a weird mold.”

  I pull into my driveway, go inside, and flip on the TV.

  I’m back the next day, mixing up the cement. Petunia is squatting on the noodle, singing a song. The mother gives us mugs of lemonade.

  I’m watching the gray bits swirl together and thinking about Sarah, the way she thinks she can treat me, when Petunia pulls on my wallet chain.

  “Why are you sad?” she says.

  “What?” I say.

  I make my face look confused for a while. Then the mother comes sprinting up with the cordless still in her hand. She’s holding the baby tight in the other.

  “I’ve got an emergency,” the lady says to me.

  I give her a nonchalant wave, tell her I’ll be okay. She puts her arm around Petunia, smothers her against her knees.

  It’s her father, she mouths. She can’t see him.

  “Can you keep an eye on Petunia?” she says out loud.

  “Sure,” I say, “protecting children is my job.” I give her the all-business smile and Petunia the silly-clown smile. Petunia winces. Her mother pulls her inside and gives me a string of thank-yous and curses.

  The cement takes quite some time to dry after you’ve flattened it out, so I go inside to wash the gunk off my hands, maybe find the little girl a bag of fruit snacks or a stack of crackers.

  The house isn’t that large, but it feels comfortable and calm. The walls are decorated with framed family photos and paintings of running dogs. It feels like the place Sarah and I always thought we’d have, although Sarah was a calico cat girl. I didn’t like having to clean up after her’s but liked the look of its furry tortoiseshell face. When she left, she took the cat too.

  Petunia is at a computer playing with cartoon hippos.

  “Is that educational?” I ruffle her hair a little, give her a pinch on the cheek.


  “Can I have a juice box?” she says.

  “Sure thing, sweet pea.”

  It feels good helping out a family in need. I walk to the fridge and fish out a grape juice for Petunia, then search around until I find some whiskey. I pour a little into my mug with a picture of a beaver and the phrase “too much dam work to do” and walk around the house checking out the different rooms.

  Something about the blue mug, with its comical phrase printed on the front, makes me feel like a father as I stroll through the rooms. Like this could have been the castle I was king of if things had happened a little differently. And who knows, maybe I could have something like this someday still.

  I try Sarah yet again. “Hi, Sarah,” I say. “You’d never believe where I am right now!”

  I’d thought it was the voicemail again, but it was her actual voice.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Burt?” she screams. “I don’t have any goddamn number of any goddamn plumber. Call me one more time though, and I’ll use the number of the goddamn police!”

  “Now hold on,” I say, but she’s already hung up.

  I walk back to the kitchen, pour some more whiskey. I go to the couch and sit and stew. Then, I don’t know why, but I just start to cry.

  Petunia comes over, and I cover my eyes, pretend I’m laughing at something on TV.

  “I knew you were sad,” she says. She puts her little hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Tell me about it,” she says. She gives me a serious look, like a cartoon psychologist.

  “It’s just my ex,” I say. “She twisted my heart like a bendy straw.”

  “My mommy always says you have to stand up for yourself,” she says. “That’s the only way people will respect you.”

  I take another gulp of whiskey, shrug my shoulders. She keeps asking me questions, and all I can say is that I don’t know how things ended up like this. I don’t know anything. I get a refill of whiskey and offer Petunia another juice box.

  “You need to tell her how you feel, right now!” she says suddenly.

  “We should wait here while the cement dries,” I say, waving my hand toward the window.

  “No!” Petunia shouts. “Right now, mister.” She gives me this face that makes me think, Out of the mouths of babes, you know?

  I scribble a note for the mother on the door with the relevant details.

  “Road trip!” Petunia says, her little hands filled with plastic-wrapped snacks.

  I check on the cement. I’d forgotten to take out the floaty duck, and its yellow butt is popping right out of the gunk.

  We peel out of the driveway in my truck. I turn on a little rock ’n’ roll on the radio.

  “This okay? I don’t know what the Barney station is.”

  Petunia is opening a pack of Oreos. I can feel the whiskey working in me, and I roll down the windows, let the summer air in. I take a left at the light and then a right after the children-crossing sign.

  “How much farther?” Petunia says.

  “Not much,” I say, but after we’ve been driving a while, I realize I can’t remember the way. I know Sarah now lives on a road named after a kind of tree. Is it Sycamore or Sugar Maple?

  We keep driving through the flat suburban grid. I try to sneak a look over the fences for possible clients.

  “I’m tired,” Petunia says.

  “Did we already pass that house?” I ask. I stick my head out the window, try to remember if I’ve seen those garden gnomes already. The phone starts ringing in the loose change pit of my car.

  “Sarah. Speak of the devil.”

  “Sarah? This is Cynthia Hartman,” a female voice says. “Is this Burt the cement man?”

  “The very same.”

  The voice gets louder. “Where the hell are you? And where is my daughter?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be back in a jiffy,” I say. “We’re just finishing a little errand. Can’t talk now.”

  I turn the wheel this way and that. We drive past dogs and children running around well-trimmed yards. Some of them try to wave at us as we pass.

  “I want to go back,” Petunia says. All her snack wrappers are empty and shining on her lap.

  “Come on, Petunia,” I say. “It’s right around the corner, I’m sure of it.”

  We turn on Spruce Street, take a left onto Sapling. I’m drumming on the steering wheel in anticipation. We can’t go back now. I’ve got things I need to say to Sarah, things that need to be said right now.

  “I want Mommy. I want to go home,” she says.

  The phone keeps jiggling around in the dish.

  “It has got to be right around here,” I say.

  I turn onto Sequoia Street. Petunia’s face is getting red and starting to crinkle.

  “It’s gonna be great, Petunia,” I say. “Don’t you worry. The two of us will let Sarah know what’s what,” I say. “You and I will show her she needs to reconsider things. And if she doesn’t answer the door, we’ll use the mixer and pour it right onto the doorstep. Cement her right in!” I give a little laugh. “Can you imagine? I can’t wait to see the look on her face!”

  HIKE

  Cheryl huffed off, which she could do because Paul had a gimpy knee. They were strolling through the yellowed leaves of fall. Cheryl thought sometimes the only way to talk to Paul was to march away in silence.

  The trail went all over the place, moving up and down the hills, turning back on itself.

  Cheryl came across an overweight man lying in the middle of the path. His son was sitting on a log, playing a game on his cell phone.

  “Just go around me,” the man said, panting. Were these the same people Cheryl raced against to get to the shortest line at the grocery store?

  She looked the other way as she skirted past. Cheryl had grown up in this town, left, come back, left, and come back again so many times that even seeing the welcome sign made her dizzy.

  God, she was thirsty! Why had she left the water bottle with Paul? There was a thin creek worming beside the path. She stopped to splash some water on her face.

  Paul materialized around the bend.

  “Cheryl!” he said, waving his hands. “You’re going the wrong way. This is the Robin trail, we agreed on Blue Jay.”

  He always had to say something like that.

  “Wait. I’ve got the granola.”

  Cheryl ran back to the signpost. This time she took the path with two blue lines painted on the oak tree. Small birds sat in the trees singing songs like bratty children. Cheryl looked straight ahead and tried to forget herself and blend into the woods.

  There was something uncanny about the changing mood of the land. One second you were in an enchanted forest, the next you emerged on a ruinous pile of broken rocks. It was like walking through sets of different Hollywood films.

  Paul would never understand the way you have to impose your will on the land.

  Here is another thing Cheryl hated: the way Paul dug his knuckles into the dimple of her tailbone when he thrust from behind.

  Cheryl passed an elderly couple holding hands. They didn’t know which way to move, and she ended up ducking beneath and knocking their hands apart.

  “Slow down!” the old lady shouted.

  Instead, Cheryl descended into the shade of the valley. The trees looked like cancer patients in their yellowing leaves. Tumorous fungi lined the damp trunks.

  The trail rounded a bend and split into two more trails. You can never really reach the end of anything!

  Cheryl felt sad and tired. She hoped Paul was sadder and even more tired. Maybe they could tire each other out enough that they could shut up and go home and take a hot bath or watch a movie. She couldn’t even remember what Paul had said, or what she thought he had said, or even what he had thought she had said that made him say it to begin with.

  Someone was whimpering behind her. Cheryl turned and found a woman in a red windbreaker crouched in the leaves. When she look
ed at Cheryl, her face was pink and wet.

  “I followed him here, and he did it again!”

  “Who are you? And how do you know Paul?” Cheryl demanded.

  “I’m not talking about Paul. I’m talking about Eric.”

  The woman led Cheryl a little way through the woods to a secret swimming hole. Cheryl stood on a boulder to get a better look. The pool’s water was black in the shade. On a flat rock beside the water, she could see one pale body bouncing up and down on another.

  “He said he loved me. Don’t words mean anything anymore?” The woman wiped her tears on Cheryl’s sweatshirt and tried to hug her. Down on the rock, the couple humped away.

  Cheryl was not thinking of Paul when she picked up a stick and tossed it in a blind arc. It spun around down onto the man’s clenched buttocks, causing him to yell and roll off the woman. He fell into the swimming hole with a quiet splash.

  “Perverts!” the naked woman shouted, pointing at them. She was scrambling for her clothes. “The woods is full of perverts!”

  Cheryl felt relief flow through her. She turned and smiled at the woman next to her, her new sister in a world of shitty men.

  “Why did you do that?” the woman said. Her face scrunched up as she stepped backwards.

  “I thought that’s what you wanted,” Cheryl said.

  “You have to let me confront things on my own terms,” she said.

  The naked woman was running deeper into the woods, and the man was staring up at Cheryl.

  “Hey!” the naked man said to Cheryl, clothes clutched to his crotch. “Aren’t you in my yoga class? Charlotte, right? Or Charlene?”

  Cheryl left them all there shouting and tried to find a path without people. She followed the curve of the valley and then ascended on the far hills. Bright lichens covered everything.

  Before Paul there had been Theodore, and before Theodore there had been Christopher, Jeremy, Karl, Andy, and Abraham. And there was another horrible line of them waiting in the future, with even worse names like Kevin and Camden. She could feel all of them groping her with endless clammy palms.