Upright Beasts Read online

  That was not to let women off the hook, especially not mothers like Paul’s, who would back her against the kitchen sink, stab a finger into one of Cheryl’s ovaries, and ask, “When are you going to stop letting these go to waste?”

  The sun broke through a fist of clouds. Cheryl was looking up at the treetops when she felt a stick smack against her shin. “Shit!” she yelled.

  A small girl and her even smaller brother were standing in front of her. The boy was whirling a stick around and making zapping noises with his mouth. The girl was staring up at Cheryl with a broken stick in her hand and a pout on her face.

  “You broke my wizard stick,” the girl said.

  “And you said the s word,” the boy added. He whacked his sister’s jacket and said, “Shazam!”

  The girl didn’t acknowledge her brother. She kept looking at Cheryl and made her eyes start to water.

  “Okay, okay,” Cheryl said. She walked into the woods and tried to rip a thin branch off a sycamore. It clung surprisingly to life. Eventually she just picked an appropriate-sized stick off the forest floor, which the girl grabbed without even a thank-you.

  “You want to see a Death Fire Spell? I’ll show you a Death Fire Spell!”

  The two ran off down the path. Cheryl was feeling tired and leaned against a large tree with dark red leaves. Maybe Paul could be the end, she thought. She did love Paul during certain hours of certain days. How many hours did you have to love someone to be in love?

  She felt something crawling on her neck. Ants poured out of the bark.

  Cheryl ran up a pathless hill, swinging her arms around to ward off branches and small plants. She thought if she got to the top she would be able to spot Paul.

  There was a plastic bag full of Chunky soup cans tied up at the overlook. The large rocks were piled up with deep cracks, and Cheryl wondered what kinds of beasts or snakes might leap out at her. She climbed to the top of the rocks and looked out across the valleys and toward the shrunken town. Autumn was spreading with crackling orange and red leaves, like the path of a teenage pyromaniac. There was even a little house ablaze on the side of the hill, smoke worming toward the clouds. Through breaks in the trees, she could see fire trucks the size of toys racing up the slope.

  “My cans!”

  “What now?” Cheryl said, turning. A man covered in dirt and bits of dead leaves was crawling out of a crevice. He crouched on the rocks and thrust his hand toward her. Where did they keep coming from?

  The man was holding out a rusty blade. His face was one giant beard with eyes attached.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “My cans,” he said, a little sadder now.

  She looked over at the sack of canned goods hanging from the tree. The man was inching toward her across the massive rocks.

  “I don’t want your stupid cans or anything else,” she said.

  The man made small swipes with the knife.

  She pulled the bag off the branch and swung it at the bearded man. It hit him in the knee, and he let out a loud growl before tumbling off the rock.

  Cheryl looked down at where the man had fallen and saw bits of blood on the rocks. The sun was beginning to go down, and his body was mostly in shadows. It was very quiet. The man’s hands twitched their last twitches. A bird watched with a cocked head from the neighboring rock.

  “Cheryl!” a voice said down the hill. Of all people, it had to be Paul.

  Cheryl gazed down into the crevice where the man had come from. She could lower herself down there with ease, live a new life in these woods.

  Paul was working his way up the hill. Cheryl stood there at the peak. It was another in an unending succession of situations in which she had no interest in learning what it was she was required to do.

  THE DEER IN VIRGINIA

  Or take the day my father handed me his glass of lemonade and reached for the rifle. My mother had gone inside to fetch a tray of crackers. My father’s hands no longer worked well, and he asked me to pump the gun. I did so as silently as I could.

  “Watch this,” he said into the chamber as he held it against his shoulder with both hands.

  It was his birthday, and the backyard was drunk on the green nonsense of spring. Below us, a group of deer nibbled on my mother’s daffodils. Suddenly they became as stiff as cardboard cutouts. The rifle was only an air rifle, my present to him that day. It came with a sandwich bag of silver pellets. Deer were everywhere in Virginia. They had been my whole life. When I was a child, I would watch my father hurl baseballs at the deer in our yard as I ate my cereal. Now his pitching arm ached, and the only thing he wanted for his birthday was a BB gun.

  I had returned to town because it was all I had left. Everything else I’d lost or had sneaked away in the night: my friends, my job, my apartment in the city, and you, my almost wife.

  My father only wanted to drive the deer back into the woods, but when he fired, the pellet rode a gust of wind into the largest deer’s eye. This sent it frantically sprinting into the trunk of an old oak tree. The body dropped into the mulch beside the tree trunk where, growing up, I had hidden cigarettes and cheap beer. The others leapt away in different directions. The sunlight was peeking over the distant hills and into our eyes.

  Or else another time, when you and I were fighting on a four-hour drive through West Virginia in the rain. We were back together for what I thought would be the time that lasted, but along the way things had collapsed again. You had a blue scarf tied around your throat and the window down three inches to let out your cigarette smoke. We were fighting over something one of us had said. I was driving, and you were turning up a country station, the only one that came in, as loud as you could when a small buck darted out from the trees. I swerved to dodge it and barely held on to the road. The car made its way in and out of the gutter and continued straight as if nothing had happened. You turned the radio off, and we were silent for a while before we both began to laugh. The storm was starting to peter out. We emerged from the shade of highway trees into fields of wheat and a bright sun that, for a brief second, made everything look as if it was wrapped in cellophane.

  Then ten miles later, we stopped at a gas station because the car didn’t seem to be accelerating correctly. We thought maybe a tire had popped, but when we stepped out of the car, we saw the trail of red and fur and, underneath, the buck with its head twisted in the front axle, its wet body hiding behind the wheels like a playful child.

  So many days seem to end this way: bewildered, standing in a town I do not know with a person who might as well be a stranger, and the windshield wipers flicking specks of rain against my cheek.

  HALFWAY HOME TO SOMEWHERE ELSE

  The baby had been bawling since the West Virginia border, so I figured we could use a break. We were driving by a series of hot dog joints in a town called King’s Crossroad. I don’t think any king had ever visited there, but the pilgrims that built this land had a zeal for history. I took a right turn by a shack selling flags and T-shirts, Confederate and tie-dye mostly. It was hippie hillbilly country.

  “This not our exit,” my wife said in her broken English, turning down the radio with her cigarette hand. The other was holding the baby to her open-air boob.

  “I thought we could use a little break.”

  “Your trip,” she said. She took a drag and blew it carefully out the open window and away from the baby’s face.

  It was one of those muggy days where the sun licked you all over like a stray dog. The kind of day that wore on you. All you wanted was some lemonade, but the little boys and girls were inside with the TV and AC, and the paper cups were being chewed apart by angry rats.

  I did like driving with the windows down though.

  “There’s an old swimming hole around here I used to go to,” I said. “We can cool ourselves down.”

  “My swimsuit in bottom of bag,” my wife said. “And what the hell is swimming hole?”

  A bearded trucker leaned out of hi
s window as he drove past. My wife flicked him off and tucked her breast back into her cutoff shirt.

  “You can change at the hole,” I said. “It’s an old stone quarry. Some digging machine went too deep and hit an underground spring, and now you can swim there. We used to go all the time in school. The machine is still under there, near the south side. One time, a kid at the rival high school did a swan dive too far down and ripped open his belly on the rusted metal. It was in all the newspapers.”

  Clouds of gnats bounced off our windshield.

  “That’s horrible,” my wife said. “That’s another horrible thing you tell me.”

  Maybe here I should say that Natasha was my mail-order bride. At least that’s what she liked to say. I brought her over to work at my restaurant, a waitress exchange program with one of those splintered-off Soviet countries I used to confuse. We served Southern food with an haute cuisine twist. Mango salsa rub on the fried chicken, wasabi-coated French fries, that kind of spineless bastardization. Natasha wasn’t the best waitress, but she had fierce, sad eyes and whispered nasty jokes about the customers into my ear. Her fingers were pale, thin bones with limp ash perpetually growing between them. She didn’t even seem to mind when I grunted my sorrows between her legs on the wiped-down bar after closing. She just smoked her black Russian cigarettes and scratched my neck, saying, “It is okay.”

  When her work visa expired, what were we supposed to do? Natasha didn’t want to go back to her “rotten land filled with crooks and assholes,” and I, while still young, was old enough to know the scarcity of steady sex, and anyway Natasha was now my floor manager, and business was booming.

  I only got lost once looking for the old quarry. I took us down an unmarked gravel road that kicked up so much dust we had to roll up the windows.

  “You make me waste smoke,” Natasha said.

  At the end of the road we found an old farmhouse, maybe from the plantation days. The paint still looked white, but dried vines reached up the walls. The dust cloud collapsed on our windshield. I had to use three squirts to wipe it off. Looking around, we saw the yard was filled with scrap-iron unicorns. They were belly deep in crabgrass. There was at least a half dozen of these welded beasts: the sculptures of either a bored heiress or a schizophrenic squatter.

  “This what I love about this country,” Natasha said without elaboration. She took a snapshot out the window, and we backed away.

  “Must be the other way,” I said.

  “Must,” my wife said.

  The baby said nothing but reached out to me as a dribble of spit spilled down her puckered lips. I stuck a finger in her hand, and she squeezed it and laughed as I drove.

  Natasha and I had gotten in another ten months before an Asian Tex-Mex fusion joint opened up across the street, and my customers scampered away. Their tempura tacos had been rated best in the South by Gourmet. All we had left were a few drunkards plucking bits of dried fruit out of their mashed potatoes.

  Then the baby sneaked her way out of some broken condom. We named her Emily. I loved her and blew kissy farts on her stomach, although there was some part of me that found it hard to think of her as anything but an animated ball of dough.

  What fool had told me at a dinner party that my art school dropout kitchen concoctions were good enough to pay twenty a plate for? If I saw him again, I’d pop his eye out with a wine key.

  So now I was driving to Asheville for a sous chef interview at a place called Impossible Possum Bistro, with an impossibly beautiful wife and a baby in whose lumpy white face I didn’t recognize a single feature of my own.

  The quarry was marked with a large quartz tossed into the ditch on the far side of the road. Someone had sprayed “Dingus Crossroad” on the rock in pink spray paint.

  “I told you,” I said, pointing toward the rock. “See?”

  I parked the car on a path that had been beaten into the woods by countless horny teenagers. Just far enough inside to hide from passing cop cars. When we pulled up, there was a blue jeep parked ahead on the path. Crumpled beer cans decorated the dirt around the tires. I turned around and looked at the baby strapped into her seat.

  “I think she’s ready for a nap. Let’s put her under some blankets in the back.”

  “We aren’t leaving baby in damn car.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “It was a joke.”

  My wife handed me the baby and stood behind the car door. She dropped her shorts and panties to pull on a blue bikini. The sight of her pale bottom made me begin to swell, even in this heat. They were the kind of high, white cheeks that made everything in the world click into place for a brief second.

  “Where is your suit?” she said.

  “I’ll swim in these,” I said, “like the old days.”

  “Swim in jeans? Dumb old days.”

  I put some diapers and blankets in a yellow camping pack I had in the trunk. “I think it’s back this way,” I said.

  I found a good-sized stick on the ground and waved it in front of me to knock any spiderwebs out of the way. It whizzed through the air. I felt as if I was the protector of my wife and infant child.

  We walked through the pine trees and then out into the open field. The sky was almost painfully blue. About fifty yards off, the field was interrupted by a circle of rocks and evergreens that guarded the swimming hole. It was like an oasis that you’d see in a comic strip desert.

  We placed some blankets and the baby down on a flat rock. I scratched the bottoms of her feet, and my wife popped a pacifier between her lips. We walked to the edge of the quarry, arms around each other’s waists, and I slipped my thumb below her waistband to rub across the slope of her behind. Natasha lit a cigarette and stared into the quarry. It was a good thirty-foot drop.

  “I not jumping in that.”

  “You can scamper down the side there to a ten-foot ledge.”

  A hot cloud of smoke blew into my face.

  “Fine,” I said, pulling off my shirt.

  Across the gap there were a few teenagers, two guys and a girl. The boys were doing flips into the water while the girl cheered them on while looking at her phone.

  “Eight point five for Aiden.” I could just make out the girl shouting.

  “That was a goddamn ten!”

  I looked back at Natasha rubbing sunscreen on Emily’s pink cheeks. I took off my shoes and stepped up to the ledge. The heat was pulling the sweat out of my skin. I tried to remember the technique for jumping thirty feet into water. I knew I had to keep my arms straight up, but I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to knife my toes into the water or break the surface tension with my soles. It felt as if I was standing there for a long time, staring down into the bright blue water. The walls of the cliff still contained rectangular cuts on the otherwise smooth surface. The water below was making me thirsty.

  “Get a move on, dick nut!”

  Across the way, I saw one of the teenagers, a small boy with black hair, with his hands cupped around his mouth. The other one high-fived him. They were drinking beer and laughing the cheap laugh of idleness. I turned around and gave a wave to the baby and Natasha. She didn’t look up from her book. I flipped off the teenagers and held it long enough to sink in, then stepped off the cliff.

  The water was the same color as the sky. When I jumped in, I felt like a fly hurtling toward a bottle of Windex. The water was shockingly warm. It must have been cooking there in the Virginia sun. I let myself plunge into the warmth and held my breath, curled in a fetal ball. I looked around and couldn’t see anything at all. Not a fish, rock, or weed in sight. No nature at all, only sunlight stabbing through the blue.

  I stayed down there until I felt a splash in front of me and saw a stalactite of bubbles form. I rose to the surface and saw the dark-haired boy swimming toward me.

  “You trying to show me up in front of my girl, old man?”

  “Fuck off,” I said and kicked water in his face to swim away. I was dog-paddling when his arms gripped my ribs from behi
nd. He crawled onto my shoulders and pushed me down under the water.

  I couldn’t see anything except bubbles. He was on top of me, and my face was pushed against his abdomen. I tried punching him in the ribs, but the water slowed down my fists to the point where I felt like a small child trying to beat up his father.

  I hit him impotently a few more times, and he let me up. His friends were whooping as he held his arms in a victory formation.

  I backstroked toward my side of the cliff, watching them. There was a low ledge, and I pulled myself up. I sat there breathing for a minute. My wife was calling me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I coughed up a bit of water. My breath was still hard, yet I felt peaceful. A small bird hopped around the rocks in front of me. I took a warm, fist-sized rock in my hand, stood up, and chucked it at the kid’s head. For a while in high school I’d been a middle reliever on the varsity team, until practice interfered with partying. But I still had my arm.

  The rock glanced off his head, and the boy limply went under.

  “Jayden!” the girl shouted. I looked up at her, but she didn’t seem to notice me. The teenager surfaced a few seconds later, the water turning pink around his neck.

  I looked up the cliff wall and began to climb. It was covered with small chips of stone that spilled down past me. The dirt stuck to my wet body. My fingers dug painfully into the rock, but I had the adrenaline of a young man pumping through me. The climb only took me a few minutes, even though I sliced open my palm on a rock. When I reached the top, Natasha and the baby were smiling in the shade.

  “How is water?”

  “Hot,” I said.

  I looked over and didn’t see the other boy and girl. Only a six-pack of beer and small piles of clothes sitting on towels. I walked back to the edge and saw the two others near the water with the third. He seemed to be all right. He was sitting on a rock and cradling his head. The second boy pointed at me with his mouth open. Then he dove into the water, swimming freestyle across. He was a smooth missile in the water, like a pink barracuda. I watched him climb up, pointing and shouting at me every few feet. He had hair like wet wheat, and his body seemed to be one throbbing muscle. It was the kind of body I’d had once, before the butter, beer, and sloth turned me squishy and tired.