Upright Beasts Read online

  “Dead man!”

  “What is happening?” my wife asked. She was walking toward me with a towel.

  “You know. Kids,” I shrugged.

  I squeezed my bleeding palm into a fist so Natasha wouldn’t notice. I thought about how easy it would be to toss another rock. There was even a good jagged one by my foot, but the way Natasha was looking at me felt like a warning. Like it would be a cowardly image that would sink into Emily’s little brain and alter what I was to her.

  Natasha handed me the towel and draped her arm over my shoulder. Her cigarette was hovering above my nipple.

  “What the hell is he doing?”

  I shrugged. The kid was working his way up the cliff. “Dead man!” he kept shouting.

  “What you say to him?”

  I could hear the little rock chips falling down the cliff as the teenager climbed.

  I turned away from the kid and looked at Natasha. The sun was bright on her face. She looked frightened, and I wanted to hold her tightly and kiss her there on the ledge. Then I realized I had misjudged something. Natasha’s eyes narrowed.

  “Do not let him to speak like that,” she said. “Beat his ass!”

  Natasha glared down at the boy, her own hands curling into fists. What had seemed dreadful and unavoidable seconds before was suddenly exciting. Blood pulsed its way around my skull, getting me ready. I bent down and picked up the largest rock I could find. I could feel Natasha’s eyes moving over me, perhaps seeing a new me hidden inside the old, like the nesting dolls she kept on top of our fridge.

  The teenager was only about three feet from the lip.

  “Go cover Emily’s eyes,” I said. I flexed my hand around the rock and cocked my arm back into position.

  But just then, right before the moment could be completed for everyone, a gunshot whistled above the quarry. A sharp, short sound that reset the whole scene.

  “Shit!” the teen said, stopping his ascent. He was just high enough to pull his head level with the ground and glance around for a second before diving back toward the other side.

  Natasha’s arms were wrapped tightly around my chest. “What the fuck?” she screamed. She let go and ran to Emily.

  “I don’t know,” I said, jogging after her. “A farmer used to own this land. He would always scare us off when we came.”

  Natasha turned to me with yet another look on her face. “You take our baby to place farmers shoot kids?”

  “I figured he was dead by now.”

  The teenagers had made their way up to their clothes and were running off. The dark-haired boy held his T-shirt to the back of his head.

  Natasha had Emily and was marching away. I gathered up our stuff and cradled it in my arms. We had two more states to drive through, and I was dreading the rest of the ride. I followed them across the field while the teenagers sprinted past us on the other side. One of them stopped and quickly tossed a rock that whizzed past my leg, then ran to catch up with the others.

  “All right,” I shouted to Natasha. “You get to pick the next stop. Deal?”

  A rusty ATV came rolling over the hill, driven by an old man in a blue baseball cap. Natasha stopped and I caught up with her. A cloud of dust followed the ATV down the hill. The man pulled in front of us and flipped off the motor, a .22 rifle leaning beside him.

  “You the kids leaving beer cans all over the place? Think you can treat someone else’s property like a garbage dump?”

  “Do we look like kids?” my wife said.

  The old man had the gun clutched in his hands. He started to get off of the ATV. “Wait a minute, you Steve Morris’s kid?” He pulled the faded baseball cap off his head and scratched at the white hairs beneath.

  “Afraid so,” I said.

  “Well shit, I thought so. I used to chase you off this place ’bout every month back in the day.”

  I tried to let out a friendly laugh. Natasha looked back and forth between us, and Emily grabbed at Natasha’s long blond hair.

  “Even had you in jail once. Your daddy had to come and bail you out. And now you’re starting a family of your own, I see?”

  “Yep.”

  The old man put his face in front of Emily’s and stuck out his withered tongue. Emily giggled.

  “Well, I hope you raise it better than your pa raised you.” He laughed again, then sat back down and turned the motor on. “Do say hi to your pa when you see him.”

  My father had been dead for two years—done in by a heart attack in the middle of the freeway—but I smiled and said, “You bet. I’m sure he’ll get a real kick out of it. I’ll tell him first thing!”

  Natasha and I watched him drive off and then headed back to the car. The sun was hidden by a cloud, and the temperature felt comfortably warm. I put my arm around Natasha, and she shrugged me off. I was feeling all right though, as if I had fought in a noble war and been sent home before being blown apart or disfigured for life. When we got to the car, there was a long key mark down the left side.

  We strapped the baby in the back and rolled down the windows, Natasha putting another cigarette between her beautiful lips. Suddenly I remembered: Carrington Smith. That was the farmer’s name, although when I had known him he’d been fat and mean, and now the years had eaten away at him until he was thin and kind. I had a lot of years to go before I got to that state though.

  We pulled back onto the road. I turned up the radio and let the muggy air wash over me. I knew an ice cream and fireworks shack a half hour more down the road, if it was still there. Might be just the kind of place to take a wife and child.

  SOME NOTES ON MY BROTHER’S BRIEF TRAVELS

  1.

  I don’t know. My little brother just got sick of town, tossed a few things in the car, and drove across the country to an old mining town in the mountains of Colorado. He drove straight there in about twenty-eight hours, stopping five times in four states for coffee and gas station sandwiches.

  There isn’t much else to say about that.

  He got to town in the early afternoon and slept for half a day. For the next three months, he walked around photographing the dusty maws of abandoned mines.

  Then he came back.

  2.

  The first thing my brother Foster noticed when he reached the mining town was a man in a chicken costume dancing in the late morning haze. It was a big foam costume, the full football mascot treatment. The man was holding a sign for a regional fast-food chain in one hand and flapping the other in mock flight. It was the kind of soggy, gray day you get in the mountains. Everything was covered in some kind of sad cloud.

  My brother had been driving, as I’ve said, for twenty-eight hours, and his body had reached that special combination of no sleep, caffeine, and a stomach full of salted snacks that makes you believe it’s possible you might never die. The man in the chicken costume was at an intersection where the main road turned off into a gravel road that wound up the mountain. It seemed as if the whole world might dissolve into gray for all time, then suddenly this dazzling yellow figure emerged from the fog.

  You have to remember that this was during the recession, and people were taking whatever job they could get.

  3.

  I can’t say if it was because of a girl or not. My brother and I are close in our way, but we don’t talk about certain things. Neither of us is good at communicating. Foster called me once during his exodus, and I e-mailed him a few times, links to amusing news stories I’d seen or thoughts about upcoming films we were both interested in. Then, of course, I visited him near the end. My father had amassed a decent number of frequent-flier miles that were going to expire, and he had been bugging me to use them. It seemed like a good enough reason, and anyway, I myself was having issues with a woman that could only be solved by distance.

  My guess is that our hometown felt used up to my brother. He had lived there his whole life. We grew up on the outskirts, moved to the center as teenagers, and he had gone to college there as well. Not me. I fled to
the big city up north as soon as I could. But my brother bounced around trying to decide what to do with his life before he finally left town. It was a university town stuck in the center of North Carolina. Even growing up, there wasn’t much to do except sneak into frat parties or hang out at the cafés and record stores dotting the edge of campus. What I’m trying to say is we’d already done the local college experience in high school, so I can imagine how repetitive life was starting to feel for my brother. After graduation, Foster spent the next few years trying to avoid our parents, who were still in town, and his old friends, whose successes made him feel angry and alone.

  Perhaps I’m projecting.

  Let’s just say that he felt detached from everything. He had walked by every storefront a thousand times. The dishes at his favorite restaurants had turned into the bland, familiar taste of our mother’s microwave specials. He wanted to see flat plains with horizons dotted with nothing except the occasional dinky town nestled in the dust.

  I read the e-mail from my mother on my phone while I was naked and urinating. “Foster made it to Colorado,” it said. “I don’t think he’s had a real meal in days. Can you call him? I’m worried.” I was feeling tired and drained myself. I had just finished making love to my girlfriend, who had made us stop halfway through and started tearing up. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, and then suddenly she stopped crying, stood up, and said she wanted to switch to doggy style. I asked if she was sure. We finished that way, without being able to see the other’s face, and afterwards she crawled on top of me, laughing.

  Nearly thirty straight hours of driving. I know there are people who can bend pieces of metal with their bare hands or live in a glass box without food for weeks. I’m not saying it’s worth writing up in the newspaper, but it does make you wonder if you can ever really know a person.

  4.

  Five things Foster noticed on his speed tour of the United States:

  a) The way Kansas is shaped, a flatness bent only by the horizon, makes it impossible not to feel alone.

  b) When you emerge from the highway woods, the first sign of civilization is always a large green water tower. What do these towers do? Neither he nor I could think of any instance of them ever being used. Perhaps they weren’t even full anymore, just old relics left as a reminder of leaner days.

  c) The image of an orange sun slowly rising over the blue mountains of Appalachia, which my brother pulled over to photograph only an hour into his trip, has the exact unreality of an early color film.

  d) The number of small mammals that survive off tourist scraps at rest stops could form an army large enough to conquer Chicago.

  e) The subtle changes in fast-food architecture, especially the fake adobe walls of burger chains in the Southwest, are ripe for a postmodern cultural studies thesis—“Capitalist Simulacra in Regional Restaurant Chains” or some such. Perhaps I’ll pitch a blog post about it someday.

  5.

  It was late at night and Foster had crossed the Mississippi River into a new state. He pulled the car into the bright parking lot of a midwestern McDonald’s.

  His legs felt as if they were tingling with TV static. The position of his body while driving had dug his belt into the veins of his legs for hours, cutting his circulation down to a dead man’s. He limped around the parking lot to try to shake the blood back down. A couple walked by, chatting and checking their paper bag for their extra order of fries.

  The streetlamps above the parking lot and the light pouring from the glass windows were so bright, and the surrounding woods and road so dark, that the McDonald’s felt like some oasis in a desert of night. You could imagine wild beasts roaming the edges of the forest, held back by a fear of the torchlike M.

  Foster walked inside and went straight for the bathroom. He pissed for thirty seconds and washed his hands with a squirt of pink liquid. He had to hit the faucet button three times.

  Even at this hour, there were people ahead of him in line: a couple holding each other around their waists and two teenagers talking loudly about the shapes of their boyfriends’ privates.

  Foster was a man of routine, part of the reason this drive was proving something about himself to himself, so he already knew his order. The cashier looked half-asleep as she punched in the different orders with fingernails that had been painted the yellow and red of the chain’s logo.

  Foster calculated the miles he had left to go. It seemed to him he was living a version of the American dream, staking out a new life for himself in a land miles from home. Sure, he was probably less likely to die of dysentery than travelers on the Oregon Trail, but the principle was the same.

  He had two hundred dollars in his wallet and a few more in the bank.

  It was his turn, and he stepped up and glanced again at the various options. He already knew what he was getting, but it was some kind of reflex. Perhaps he just didn’t like looking random cashiers in the eye.

  “I’ll take the number six combo,” he said. “With a regular Coke and large fries.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I was saying?” the cashier said.

  “What?” Foster said. Now he glanced at her. She was thin and sickly looking. Her uniform visor was turned stylishly off-center. She gave an annoyed sigh and gestured at the teenagers, who were squirting ketchup from a hooked tube.

  “No more burgers,” she said. “They got the last meat!”

  6.

  I want to expand on something I said earlier about not knowing exactly why my brother left. Sometimes I say this to people, especially women who are strapping their bras back on, and they think it means my brother and I don’t get along, or that family isn’t important to me. We get along quite well. When we get together, we talk about new movies or old books, but we don’t pry open our rib cages and poke at what’s inside. I visit him and my parents a few times a year. The big holidays mostly.

  You can lose touch with people pretty quickly this way. I remember my first girlfriend, at least the first one I’d count as real, meaning we had sex and saw each other more often than a monthly dance. Her name was Vanessa Chance, and we’d first kissed below the bleachers of a homecoming game. When the school year ended, Vanessa went away to summer camp in another state. She sent me a letter that said, “You’re so far away, it’s hard to believe you still exist.” By that time her face was already starting to turn fuzzy in my memory. We broke up two weeks before the start of tenth grade.

  7.

  Foster passed the man in the chicken suit every time he drove to town. Foster didn’t have a job exactly. He’d worked long hours on the fly rail of a local theater to save up for his temporary escape. He was now living in an apartment he had secured on Craigslist before he drove west. His plan was to photograph all the dusty, crumbling old mines. If the photos turned out well, he would try to get a gallery to display the series alongside an artist’s statement about loss, forgetfulness, and the decline of American industry. Mostly, like everyone I knew, he just wanted to pretend he was doing something with his life.

  The man in the chicken suit was the first thing Foster saw every morning before getting his coffee. The man made a real impression on him. Perhaps he simply seemed so bright and absurd in the middle of this forgotten town of half-empty buildings and abandoned mines.

  I wish I could say that Foster caught the man urinating behind a tree on the side of the road or with his foam head resting on a bench as he rolled strikes at a local bowling alley, but it never happened. The man just danced sluggishly on the strip of gravel on the side of the road.

  Perhaps it was a woman in there or a different man each day. You couldn’t tell.

  8.

  The town in Colorado was called Victor. I remember looking it up on Wikipedia before flying out there, and the town’s population was under five hundred in the last census. I can’t remember if it was named after a man named Victor or merely the concept of triumph.

  9.

  I was pretending to be a writer at the time, bummin
g around New York on meager savings, attending literary parties for free cheese cubes and sour wine. Not that things have changed on that account, beyond the cheese getting softer and the wine more delicately poured. The point is that it wasn’t hard for me to make the time to visit him. I told myself it counted as research for a novel I’d been outlining over and over without ever starting.

  I booked an aisle seat, so I could go to the bathroom without stumbling over some sleeping stranger. When the plane took off, the man next to me, who had the exact same haircut as my father, asked me if I wouldn’t mind holding his hand until we leveled off.

  “What?”

  “It’s just something I always do,” he said. “Makes me feel calm. Normally my wife does it, but she couldn’t make this trip.” I didn’t respond, and he started to tear up. “She has cancer,” he added.

  The man was balding and had a large gray mustache draped over his lip. I held his hand, which was surprisingly smooth and warm, as it would have made me feel petty and embarrassed to deny him. But I looked angrily away and imagined the nasty things I should have said to him instead.

  10.

  “Look,” Foster said. “Right there!”

  He swung the tan Camry onto the main road. The car’s floor was littered with trash. I even found a petrified taco clunking around its cardboard box. It annoyed me, because the car had been my car. It was my college graduation present for my pointless degree, and I’d left it at home when I moved to the city. It wasn’t worth the hassle up there. In my absence, my brother had moved in with his fast-food wrappers and Talking Heads CDs and made it his.

  “Just like you said.”

  I turned my head in time to see the yellow blur of the man in his chicken costume. He seemed to be looking into the car at us, and I gave him a wave.