Fragile Beasts Read online

  How can someone be gone just like that?

  He had plans. This is the thing I can’t stop thinking about. They weren’t big plans. Nothing ambitious or complicated or admirable. Definitely not anything that could ever be considered a goal. His needs were simple, and his desires even simpler.

  Take today for instance. After Klint and I started off to Hamilton’s farm for their annual September barbecue, we knew he planned to drive to the Rayne Drop Inn for Wing Night. He was going to tie one on with a couple of his buddies and eat greasy chicken drenched in hot sauce. He’d shoot some pool and hope to pick up a woman, but he’d never succeed at it. He planned to drive off into the inky black country darkness in his truck with the new chrome deer antlers mounted on the grill, confident in his ability to get safely to where he was going despite his inability to remember where he was going and why he had left the place he was leaving. He planned to sleep until noon the next day and watch the Steelers game. Then he’d go to a job he hated on Monday because it paid the bills. But, most important of all, he planned on living.

  What’s the point of even making plans if they can be erased in an instant? What’s the point of even getting up in the morning?

  I pull my knees up against my chest and try to make myself into a little ball. My jeans smell like dirt and a smoky wood fire, and my hands smell like the hot dog I roasted for Shelby Jack just a couple hours ago.

  I pull my T-shirt up to my nose to see if any of Shelby’s scent rubbed off on me. She always smells good. I don’t know if it’s from a soap she uses or a shampoo or perfume or maybe it’s just the way she smells naturally. I can’t describe it because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s purely her.

  Talk about having plans. I had plans for tonight, too. Sitting next to her on a log, our shoulders touching, the fire so hot in front of us and the night air so cold on our backs. Her laughing and smiling and smelling Shelbylicious.

  It took everything in my power not to reach out and touch her hair. Not because I’m a sex fiend or disrespectful to women or anything like that. My fingers are drawn to it the same way they’re drawn to the velvety noses on the Hamilton dairy cows.

  It’s long, shiny, and dark and in the firelight, parts of it have a reddish glow like there might be a coal smoldering underneath it.

  I was planning on kissing her and finally touching her hair. I’d fantasized about it for a while. Then I decided to make it a goal, something I could work toward, something I was definitely going to do or else feel like a loser.

  I didn’t even care that she had a thing for Klint. All the girls around here are nuts over Klint. They’re always parading around in front of him in tight jeans and short skirts, pretending to stumble in the hall at school so they can bump up against him at his locker, calling their friends to find out if they’ve heard whether he’s going to show up at so-and-so’s party or whether he’ll be at the football game on Friday or which night he’s going to the Laurel County Fair. (And it’s always been the same night his entire life: Monster Truck Night.) They can try all they want. They don’t know what I know or if they did know, they’d think I was exaggerating.

  People say the reason priests don’t have sex is because they’re married to the church. Klint’s married to baseball.

  That doesn’t mean he loves baseball. I think the love has already gone out of it for him the same way love seems to go out of most marriages. But it doesn’t seem to matter to him. He’s committed for better or worse, in sickness and in health, ’til death do him and second base part.

  I had been ready to make my move on Shelby. I had roasted a perfect hot dog for her: golden, charred just a little, the skin starting to split, and the juices leaking out. I asked her if she wanted me to get her a bun and she said no, she wanted to eat it off the stick. I told her that’s my favorite way to eat it, too, and she gave me a funny look and said, “I know, Kyle. I’ve known you forever.”

  I liked the way she said it. I liked that it was true.

  I was about to tell her I thought the fire was getting too hot and ask her if she’d like to take a walk, but then Bill came driving up to the barn and got out of his truck, crying.

  I get up off my bed and head to my window to look for Mr. B. I know there’s no chance he’ll come around with all this commotion going on, but I’d like to see him.

  Something in the carpet catches my eye, and I stop to pick it up. This used to be my little sister’s room, and every once in a while I find some tiny sparkly reminder of her. It’s usually a bead from a jewelry-making kit, or a sequin from her dress-up clothes, or a dried dab of glitter glue.

  This time it’s a little silver high-heeled Barbie doll shoe.

  I stick it in my pocket and continue on to the window. I push open the screen and lean out and try to make my mind a blank.

  I know I’m not doing the things I’m supposed to be doing.

  I haven’t prayed for Dad’s soul yet. I haven’t even thought about heaven and, if it exists, if he’s up there lying on a couch made of clouds drinking from a solid gold beer cozy shooting the shit with Roberto Clemente. Or if it’s the kind of heaven where he wouldn’t care about beer and baseball and couches anymore and he’d just float around being blissful. I haven’t tried to comfort myself by believing that either one could be true and that someday I’ll see him again when I die.

  I haven’t cried yet.

  Klint did. He bawled like a baby. I couldn’t watch him. I walked away because I knew if I stayed, I’d start crying, too, but I would have been crying because my brother was crying, not because my dad was dead, and that seemed wrong.

  I haven’t let myself really think about what happened. I haven’t asked myself all the important questions, like once he missed the curve and lost control, did he know he was going to die? When his truck started somersaulting down over the mountain, did he have time to understand what was happening? Was he scared? Was he sad? Did he think about us? Was he worried about what would happen to us? Did his life flash before his eyes like it’s supposed to? Did he see a movie in his mind where he was a little kid getting tucked into bed by Grandma Bev, and then he was a young man marrying Mom, and then he was a proud father watching Klint get his first Little League MVP trophy?

  Did it hurt? The state trooper said he died instantly. Died instantly after having his neck broken. What about before he died instantly? What about while his neck was being broken?

  What if terror, pain, and loneliness were the last things he felt, and now there will never be a chance for him to feel anything else?

  I haven’t asked myself any of those questions yet.

  All I can think about are his plans. He had a lot of plans but no goals. He and Mom used to fight about that, but they used to fight about a lot of things so I never placed more importance on that particular topic than any other. Maybe I should have.

  I remember when I started sixth grade three years ago, our new teachers gave us one of those getting-to-know-you forms to take home and fill out. It asked things like: What’s your favorite subject? and Do you have any special concerns about integrating into a larger student population? One of the questions was: What are your goals for middle school?

  I was reading that question out loud to Mom while I was sitting at the kitchen table and she was trying to tear open a bag of frozen french fries without breaking a nail and without letting the ash from the end of her cigarette fall onto the counter—a feat I always regarded as a skill—when Dad and Klint came through the back door. Dad was all smiles, which meant Klint had a good night in the cage.

  Dad had heard the question and he grinned at me and rubbed his knuckles on the top of my head as he passed by on his way to the fridge for a beer and said, “Goals are what you score in hockey.”

  Mom had resorted to trying to tear the bag open with her teeth. I saw her give him a nasty look over the top of the bright red Ore-Ida bag before she took it out of her mouth long enough to tell him that just because he was a loser without any
goals didn’t mean he should try and make his kids losers, too.

  He slammed the refrigerator door hard enough to make the dishes in the cupboards rattle. Mom made a motion like she was going to throw the bag of frozen fries at him, but she thought better of it and put it back between her lips and he walked back outside.

  I didn’t think anything of it at the time. My parents were always loud and violent with each other, even when they weren’t fighting.

  Sometimes they were loudly and violently in love and Dad would chase Mom around the house roaring about what a lucky man he was, and he would catch her and she would squeal and shriek as he smacked her butt or planted loud sloppy kisses on her neck, and Klint and I would watch gratefully as they went out to the bars to continue celebrating Dad’s good fortune before returning home a few hours before dawn and waking us up with thuds as they stumbled through the house on the way to their bedroom. The rest of the time they were loudly and violently not in love with each other: Mom throwing things and screaming at Dad that he was a loser who couldn’t get it up, and Dad kicking furniture and telling her she was a lazy slut whose tits were starting to sag.

  A few days after Dad’s comment about goals Mom took our little sister, Krystal, and moved to Arizona with some guy we’d never heard of before.

  I don’t know if it had anything to do with goals. Maybe this guy had some and Mom liked them. Maybe Mom had some goals of her own, and we were all getting in her way.

  I never turned in my form. I looked at it one more time and thought they should have included the question: How do you think you’ll cope with middle school if your mom leaves?

  “Mr. B.,” I call out softly. “Where are you?”

  I know exactly where he is on a night like tonight. He’s out killing something, and even though death is one of his favorite preoccupations, the death of a human means nothing to him.

  There’s a knock on my door, and I close the window and sit down quickly on my bed.

  “Kyle? You asleep?”

  It’s Bill.

  “No.”

  “You want to come out to the kitchen for a minute? Your aunt Jen’s gonna leave.”

  “Did all the other people leave?” I ask him.

  “Yeah. It’s just us.”

  I open the door a crack and see Bill standing in the hallway being careful not to look at me.

  He’s a big guy, beefy not fat, with shaggy salt-and-pepper hair, a broad, flat face, and small brilliant green eyes set so deep inside the folds and wrinkles of their sockets that they usually go unnoticed but every once in a while they flash like two emeralds lost at the bottom of a craggy canyon of skin.

  He’s leaning heavily on his cane. He had his leg broken in a mine cave-in six years ago. It was too smashed up to heal properly, and it still gives him problems. Some days he can’t walk on it at all. Most days he talks fondly about J&P Coal and how he wishes he could be back on his crew. Every day he drinks. He says it’s for medicinal purposes, but I think he does it to make the boredom go away as much as the pain.

  He’s been our next-door neighbor for my entire life. Before tonight, I’ve seen him cry exactly twice: once when Jerome Bettis fumbled in the final moments of the Steelers playoff game against the Colts a couple years ago and once from laughing so hard when my dad cut off the top part of his pinkie while trying to install his new chrome grill with the deer antlers on the front of his truck.

  They put the amputated part of his finger in my dad’s beer cozy and took it to the ER, but it was impossible to reattach it, so Dad brought it home and set it on the front porch in a coffee mug and declared it to be a conversation piece.

  People came from everywhere to see it. Dad would tell the story, then stick the nub of his pinkie up his nose. It looked like he was pushing a regular-sized pinkie much farther than it was supposed to go, and it never failed to gross out Klint’s friends and make girls shriek and giggle.

  Klint never laughed about it. Not once. He and Dad had some ugly fights over that stupid pinkie. Klint told him there was nothing funny about making people think he had so little inside his head that he could stick an entire finger up inside it, but like all their fights, what he was really saying was please stop drinking.

  I KNEW SOMETHING was terribly wrong when I saw Bill standing next to his pickup truck at the Hamiltons’. Even worse than the tears streaming down his face was the fact he had taken off his ball cap and was clutching it in both hands in front of his big belly.

  Crying was one thing, but I’d never seen him take off his hat.

  “It’s your dad,” he said.

  We didn’t need to hear anything else. I looked at Klint and he looked at me, and I could see myself in his face. It’s the worst kind of fear, free-falling, no way to be saved, no way to turn back, like being pushed from an airplane.

  We knew what the next words were going to be.

  If Dad had broken his leg or been arrested or lost his job, Bill would have been smiling. Even if Dad had slipped into a coma, Bill would have made a joke about it.

  Only one thing could have made him cry and take his hat off.

  I was still staring at Klint as his lips started to tremble and his eyes turned glassy with tears.

  This was Klint: a guy who could step up to a plate with a full count hanging over his head, two outs, a man on base, a tying run at stake, and smash a triple over the right fielder’s head with the same calm he would have hit a practice ball with my dad in the backyard; this was a guy who could play four tournament games in a row on a ninety-degree Saturday and never complain and never make an error in the field; this was a guy who had broken his nose, his left thumb, pulled a tendon in his foot, and had a stress fracture in his shoulder by the time he was fourteen and each injury just seemed to make him stronger.

  And now he was going to cry.

  I covered my ears and closed my eyes and backed away. I was more scared of seeing Klint fall apart than hearing the next words out of Bill’s mouth: “He was in an accident. In his truck.”

  “No,” Klint said.

  “I don’t know how to tell you.”

  “No, no, no,” he repeated, shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry, boys.”

  “No!” he shouted. “No!”

  That’s when he started to cry, and I ran away down the road toward our house.

  BILL REACHES OUT and puts a hand on my shoulder, but he still doesn’t look at me. He talks to the floor.

  “You feeling any better?”

  “No.”

  “Course not. That was a stupid question. I just meant … did you get any sleep?”

  “I’m okay,” I tell him, mostly to make him feel better.

  It seems to work. He takes his hand off my shoulder, sighs, and starts limping into our living room.

  It’s empty except for Klint, who’s sitting on Dad’s easy chair, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together, staring into space, like he’s listening intently to some invisible person’s confession.

  His eyes are raw and red from crying and there are gray shadows of exhaustion beneath them but otherwise he looks like himself. Relief sweeps through me. I want to hug him. I want to feel his physical body and know that he’s real, but Klint doesn’t hug. Not even when he wins. He stopped hugging years ago. It wasn’t a big deal for me or Dad to abandon the practice. Our hugs had been nothing more than pats on the back after a game. Mom took it much harder, though, and continued wrapping Klint in her arms even after it was obvious he was never going to return her embrace.

  He glances my way.

  “You okay?” he asks me.

  “I’m okay. You okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Aunt Jen is standing in a corner, smoking. She’s Mom’s sister. She’s our only family around here, and I suppose it was good of her to come so fast on a Saturday night, especially since she never liked Dad except for when she tried to date him back when he was dating Mom.

  Dad’s only sibling
is a half-brother who’s a lot older than him and lives all the way in California. He’s some kind of junior executive (even though he’s over fifty). He doesn’t drink, his kids all went to college, and, according to Dad, his wife thinks her shit doesn’t smell.

  He and Dad never had much to do with each other as adults, not because of any profound dislike but more from mutual disappointment.

  Dad’s parents are both dead. He was a late-in-life baby, and his mom was a late-in-life wife for his dad. My grandfather was dead before I was born, and Grandma Bev died a couple months before Mom left with Krystal.

  Mom’s dad ran out on them when she was ten, and she’s never been able to talk about him without her eyes going eerily blank, like the only way she can force herself to talk about him is by making herself not think about him. Her mom died of some kind of female cancer the year I was born. Mom and Aunt Jen have never provided more details than that to any of us, but sometimes they used to get together and discuss Grandma’s condition for hours in intense hissy little whispers over a bottle of Tequila Rose and would always end up with their arms around each other crying before the alcohol fully kicked in, and then they’d remember all the jealousies and grudges they still held against each other, some going all the way back to grade school, and they’d start fighting.

  Aunt Jen is pretty in a mean, skinny girl kind of way. There’s nothing wrong with her face except the lack of anything soft or inviting about it. She reminds me of a viper I saw once at the Pittsburgh Zoo on a school field trip. It was covered in a geometric pattern of sleek, bright colors. I thought it was beautiful until it woke up and fixed its beady eyes on me, and I realized there was nothing in them except self-preservation and poison.