Hall of Small Mammals (14 page)

“What's
anal
?” Hank asks.

“It has to do with your bum-bum,” Bet explains, a nervous smile. “Hank, that reminds me, do you want to tell your daddy about what happened with the frog and the sprinkler? Remember that?”

Hank nods yes, that he remembers, but then he mutters, no, he doesn't really want to tell that story.

“Oh, come on, Hanky,” JT calls up to him. “It's such a funny one.”

Hank doesn't look up from his feet.

“Honey, don't ignore people when they're talking to you,” Bet says. “It's rude. Tell your dad the frog and sprinkler story.”

“Don't be afraid,” Mrs. Ash says, head turned back. “You can do it, Hank. Remember how it starts? With us turning on the sprinkler?”

The boy throws his stick into the woods, eyes still on his feet.

“Hank,” Mr. Ash says, clearly irritated. “Hank, your mother and Grammy are
talking
to you.”

“It's okay,” Felix says, suddenly aware of all those eyes sharply focused on his little boy. He imagines Hank, half asleep, being led downstairs night after night to a room full of strange squawking dinner guests, all of them demanding he tell the one about the frog and the sprinkler. He imagines these people laughing, and Hank not knowing what it was he said,
exactly
said, that made them laugh so much. Even if it was the funniest frog story since Mark Twain's jumping frog, Felix does not want Hank to have to tell it against his will. “Leave him be.”

“But I want you to hear it,” Bet says. They've stopped walking now. Through the trees other backyards are visible—trampolines and garden beds, a swimming pool.

“Hank, no one is forcing you to tell the story,” Felix says, leaning toward his son, whose eyes are still trained downward. “It's totally up to you. Maybe later you'll want to tell me, or maybe you won't. Either way is fine. Okay, buddy?”

“Remember what happened when the frog landed on the sprinkler?” JT asks. “What happened when we—”

“Drop it,” Felix says, looking hard at JT. “Didn't you hear me? Lay off him. Can't you see he doesn't want to tell it?”

“All right, calm down, no need to be an ass about it, Felix,” Mr. Ash says.

Felix digs the heel of his shoe into the dirt. Here it comes: the wrong thing, welling up in him. “Nick, if I want your opinion, I'll ask for it.”

“Enough,” Mr. Ash says.

“Enough what?”

“Enough everything.”

“Does anyone know the story about the old man's asshole and the sprinkler?” Felix asks. “'Cause that's a really good one.”

“Not appropriate,” Bet says.

“You don't have to be here, Felix,” Mr. Ash says. “No one said you had to come this weekend. You chose to come.”

“Daddy, that's not going to help anything,” Bet says.

“Yes, Daddy, you're not helping,” Felix says.

“Felix,” Laura whispers. “Stop.”

Hank looks at all of them, confused. Felix pivots and starts back for the house. They aren't far from the house, maybe three hundred yards. He can feel their eyes on his back. Along the trail, at the top of long metal poles, are wooden bird boxes. If he shook one, would a bird fly out? Only now does he remember that he
has no rental car back at the house in which to make his retreat. He'll have to wait for someone to give him a lift back to the hotel. More than anything he does not want to turn back around and ask to borrow a car. The ability to run away: it's part of what makes one an adult. Laura catches up with him, her eyes wide.

“I apologized for you,” she says.

“I didn't want to apologize.”

“Never hurts to apologize.”

They walk fast over the trail and then turn left into the Ashes' backyard. If he continued walking, maybe Laura would agree to wait and ask to borrow a car. She could pick him up down the road.

But Hank. Shit, he never said goodbye to Hank. He could leave something for the boy, a gift of some kind, something that would communicate how sorry he is for bailing like this. He fishes around in his pockets and finds his keys. On the ring he has a small metal hamster trinket, a gift from the network when the show started its second season. Felix spots the treehouse. He could hide it for him up there, as a surprise. The rope ladder stretches when he steps onto the bottom rung, bringing it all the way to the ground. It bucks as he climbs, his feet swinging ahead of him.

“What are you doing?” Laura asks.

“Just give me a minute,” he says, head and shoulders through the opening now. He barely fits. When his butt clears the jagged and splintery circle, he sits back and admires the new view of the yard. Laura looks up at him, her arms crossed like a none-too-satisfied audience member. Spread across the platform are the corpses of mangled action figures. A small white bucket near one
of the tree ballasts contains a dozen rotten crab apples. Felix doesn't have any paper for a note. He takes out a pen and looks for a suitable place to write a message.

“You don't have to go.” It's Bet, calling up to him. She's standing beside Laura on the ground. “If you really want to, I'll take you. But I think for Hank's sake you should both stay. But Felix, please, take a walk or something. Get yourself together. You've been acting strange ever since you got here. And what's this about the rubber snakes?”

So JT told her. That makes sense. They are together now, a real couple, and naturally they will share such information. They will talk about people, judge them. Felix is one of those people. He is someone for them to discuss, to judge.

“I don't think Felix meant anything by the snakes,” Laura says to Bet.

“JT was pretty sure Felix was calling him”—her voice drops to a whisper—“a racist.”

“It wasn't like that,” Laura says. “Not exactly. Don't get me wrong, I'm not excusing Felix. You're right. It was very poorly put.”

Felix watches them talk.

“I'm sorry about the snake thing,” he says. “I am. And yes, you're right, we should probably stay. For Hank. I can hang up here for a while and cool off. Go eat dinner. I'll eat mine up here. I'll come in for dessert. What's for dessert? It's not your mother's pecan pie, is it?”

He begins etching Hank's name into the wood beside his knee. He has to drag the pen back and forth, against the grain, to make the ink visible. The others emerge from the woods, and Bet tells them all to go inside and wait there.

“You should send him packing,” Mr. Ash says quietly, though not inaudibly, to his daughter before Mrs. Ash drags him off toward the house.

“Sorry about the snake thing,” Felix says as JT passes.

“All right,” JT says, and keeps walking.

The rope ladder shakes. A small head emerges. It's Hank—small, wonderful Hank up in the treehouse—the red tights stretched thin and transparent at the knees and toes, a somber expression on his face.

“What's up, buddy?” Felix asks. “I'm not leaving. Don't worry. The adults were just having . . . an adult moment.”

Hank gazes down at the half-finished
H
in the wood beside Felix's knee.

“The frog,” Hank says, and sighs deeply. “It died.”

Felix smiles. He can't help it.

“Honey, that's not the best way to tell the story,” Bet says, from below, and then appeals to Felix. “I mean, the frog
did
die, he's right, but it's not as bad as all that. The other way he tells it is actually funny.”

But it is funny. Can't they see that? That no one is laughing is proof of that. It is beyond laughter. The frog died. Bah-dah-dum. End of frog. Oh, shit. Oh, God. Oh, flaps: Which was it for the frog? The boy looks up at him thoughtfully, with what Felix wants to interpret as an expression of mutual understanding. He stands and lifts his son off the platform into a high, soaring hug. “You told it perfect,” Felix says. “I'll bet that frog never saw it coming.”

Hank's little arms give Felix a squeeze. The boy's red legs dangle loose at first but then begin bicycling wildly, ready to touch
back down on the platform. “Let go,” Hank says, squirming, but Felix resists. He's not ready to let go just yet. If he does, those little red feet might carry the boy away at a tremendous speed. Laura and Bet watch from below. Bet has her hands out like she thinks Hank and Felix might both come tumbling down off the platform. “Careful,” she says. “Please.”

“You told a good one,” Felix says, and sets his son down gently. The boy smooths out his shirt. “Let's talk about these tights. What's going on? And where can I get myself a pair?”

Hank walks to the platform's edge and steps off. Shit. God. But no, the fall is barely five feet, and Hank is fine. It seems that he does this all the time. He lands on all fours, catlike, then sprints across the yard. Bet follows him up to the house. Felix approaches the brink, gazes down at the patchy grass. “I guess I'll jump down too,” he says to Laura.

“Your choice,” she says, “but don't ask me to take you to the emergency room when you break your ankle. I won't do it.” She turns for the house without him and climbs the grassy hill to the patio door. Felix takes out his pen and finishes the
H
and then lays the metal hamster there beside it, a terrible gift. But he's still here, in Atlanta, and he has more time to make it up to the boy. He considers the distance to the ground, which really isn't so far, just a few measly feet. The yard is quiet and empty now. A bright glare across all the windows on the first floor of the house makes it impossible to tell if there's anyone left to watch him drop.

How NOT to Ride Down Stairs HUGE FALL

A boy with floppy brown hair and freckled arms pedals his mountain bike toward some concrete steps outside of a high school. There are twenty-five steps, and they lead down to the teacher's lot. The boy's friends are waiting at the bottom to see what happens. When he reaches the first step, he leans back in his seat to keep from toppling over the handlebars. His name is Davy, and he can draw a hand perfectly. Nobody draws a hand like Davy. His art teacher wants him to apply to art schools next year. She believes one day Davy will draw not only a perfect hand but also a perfect wrist and a perfect arm and, if he is diligent, a perfect shoulder too. Beyond that she dares not hope. Necks are the most beautiful part of the female body, and no one has ever captured one as it really is.

The art teacher possesses a neck more elegant than most. If it wasn't indecent, she'd pose for Davy. At the moment of his stunt,
she is locking up her room, a box of school-bought art supplies under her arm. She doesn't see Davy fall, but she's the first adult on the scene. Davy is conscious, on his back across the bottom three steps. She orders him not to move an inch. The bone has punctured the pale skin of his left arm. She calls the ambulance and follows it all the way to the hospital in her beat-up Acura. In the emergency room, she finds a seat beside a big man whose leg is wrapped in a bloody towel. The teenager to her right doesn't cover his mouth when he coughs. She flips through a
Golf Digest
. The old woman across from her is reading a novel with bees on the cover. “What happens in it?” she asks the woman, and the woman says, “Two beekeepers fall in love but it's impossible for them to be together.”

Old Woman FALLS into Polar Bear Habitat

The book about beekeepers is
Now a Major Motion Picture
starring Julia Roberts. “Swimming,” one of the songs on its sound track, has become very popular on the radio. The song was written and performed by Simon Punch, a whisper-voiced guitarist with a hip Rasputin beard and a long thumbnail painted black, and the lyrics are based on something that happened to him as a boy at the zoo with his grandmother.

They were watching two polar bears paddle around in a clear blue pool when she leaned too far over the concrete wall for a photograph and fell eight feet down into the water. Simon was too young to do anything but watch as she splashed and screamed, scraping at the wall like a lunatic. A crowd formed. A man dangled his jacket down to her and she grabbed hold of it. Because she wasn't strong enough to hold on for very long she kept plunking
back down into the water. A lady who worked for the zoo ran over with a bucket and tossed fish parts into the pit to keep the polar bears distracted, but one of the bears lunged and bit his grandmother's leg. When she finally emerged over the concrete wall—dripping wet, bleeding, embarrassed—they ripped away her pants and discovered that the bite wound, thank God, wasn't life-threatening. Still, all these years later, Simon sometimes dreams about polar bears. They come after him with impossibly large teeth and suffocative fur. They chase him down streets and up stairs—to the perimeter of his dreams. When he wakes he can feel their chilly wet breath on his neck.

Stupid People Falling Ouch Try Not to Laugh

A man is on his way to meet a friend for a late drink and stops at an ATM for some cash. His wallet is ridiculously fat—not with cash but with movie stubs, wads of receipts that he will never actually sort, a photo of his wife, a photo of his long-dead basset hound, and all his cards: the Anthem insurance card, the library card, the one-year pass to the contemporary art museum, and of course his many credit cards. The bank is closed for the night. The lights are off in the main lobby. The ATM is not directly on the street but in a small glass anteroom. Accessing it after hours requires that you slide your bank card into the slot by the door.

The man inserts his card, and a tiny light above it flashes red three times. He inserts his card again and pulls it back out more deliberately. The light blinks red again.

His name is Marshall, and he manages a nearby stationery shop. He is also an accomplished cellist. He is third chair in the
city symphony. His favorite composer is Brahms. Sometimes when he hears Hungarian Dance No. 5 he has a funny feeling that is difficult to explain to others. He's told only one or two people about it. The feeling involves the possibility of a past life.

Through the thick bulletproof glass, faintly, Marshall can hear music playing—not Brahms but something else. It's that Simon Punch song, he realizes, the one from the Julia Roberts movie about beekeepers. He consults the pictogram on the card reader to make sure his card was properly oriented. He rubs the magnetic strip back and forth across his pleated khakis to make sure it wasn't dirty and then he inserts it again. The red light flashes. Maybe something is wrong with the reader or with the ATM behind the glass. Maybe it's out of order and the bank forgot to hang up a sign. A woman with jangly gold earrings approaches with clacking cowboy boots.

“Let me guess,” she says. “Broken?”

“Might be,” he says, and steps aside so she can try her own card.

Her card is silver. She slides it in the slot and pulls it back out hard and fast, and when it flashes red, she does it again, hard and fast. Marshall can't help drawing certain conclusions about this woman. He pictures the woman naked and on top. The light flashes red, red, red.

“What a piece of shit,” she says. The woman looks to be in her forties. She taps the bottom of the door with her stiff boot toe. She has on way too much mascara. It's like her eyes are at the back of a dark cave. “There's another machine around the corner outside a liquor store,” she says, “but it'll charge you a hundred dollars practically.”

“If it's broken, they should have put out a sign,” he says.

“I only need like ten dollars.”

If he had ten dollars, Marshall would give it to her. They stand there, peering through the glass for a few more moments, the traffic moving lazily behind them on the street. Marshall imagines throwing something at the glass, shattering it, the two of them stepping through together triumphantly.

The woman pushes at the door without sliding in her card at all. It opens, magically. The red light was meaningless; the room was unlocked all along. They roll their eyes at each other:
Of course it was open!
She goes in first, and he waves her toward the machine. He says, “Be my guest.”

“I'll be quick,” she says. He waits a few feet behind her. This isn't a large space, and he could see her screen if he wanted. When the ATM spits out the woman's money, she turns to him and holds up her receipt, victorious.

She leaves, and Marshall inserts his card, punches in his number, and selects the fast cash option. The machine buzzes and the money pops out and the receipt curls toward him. He checks it quickly, then looks again. His account balance, it's very low. Thousands of dollars are missing.

Susan. This has to be Susan's doing. She recently moved out. “Temporarily,” she said. It was a total shock. Sure, they argued—about the way he drags his feet when he walks, about who it was that forgot to recork the red wine before bed—but this made them no different from any other couple.

Susan said she was going to stay at her sister's place, but he suspects his wife has a lover. That's the only way to explain it.
When Marshall called Susan's sister, she said Susan was in the bathroom, but when his wife returned his call later that night it was from her cell phone and there was strange dance music in the background. She was at some kind of party, obviously drunk, and all she wanted to talk about were tiny chairs. She could barely hear him. She wasn't answering his questions. It was infuriating.

“Enough with the Brahms,” his wife used to say.

Many years ago he told his wife how he feels hearing Hungarian Dance No. 5, about that hazy cloud that descends, about the cascade of images both familiar and unfamiliar, a long dusty street, a distant flat mountain, ships on a waterfront, white horses and carriages, a ten-story hotel with ornate columns and a large gold clock in the lobby, a bag over his shoulder, a beautiful woman in a maid's outfit, a bustling kitchen, a pantry with white shelves full of food, the light sneaking under the door, the woman's dress raised high, her legs spreading to receive him, the flour spilling onto their shoulders, her breath hot in his ear. “That's not a past life,” his wife told him, “that's historical porno.”

Marshall examines the receipt as he turns away from the ATM. His wife, who hasn't even collected all her clothes from their closet yet, has basically robbed him. He can think of no other word for it. She's stolen his money; she's going to strange tiny chair parties; she's sleeping in another man's bed.

Marshall has forgotten that he is enclosed by glass. When he runs into the glass wall, it doesn't shatter or crack—but wobbles. He falls back onto the floor. One palm lands on the greasy white tile, the other on the dark rubber mat with the bank's insignia. The receipt is on the ground in front of him. There's a tiny camera
in the ATM and another security camera looking down on him from the top right corner of the room.

Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Man Falling Down

Among Thomas Edison's earliest films you will find footage of zooming trains, electrocuted elephants, boxing cats, and a snuff-induced sneeze. Surely an early documentation of a falling man comes as no surprise. There had to be a first. The footage is grainy, and the frames skip. The man is one of Edison's assistants. Until they tripped him with a wire, he was under the impression they were making a film called
Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Man Jumping Up and Down
.
Falling down has never been the same. Now we can watch the same fall a hundred times. We can laugh at it. We can study it. We can slow it down. We can speed it up. We can linger on a single frame. We can see the birth of fear and panic in a human face. We can identify that moment when a person suddenly realizes that he is no longer in control of what happens next. But the simple truth is that we are never in control of what happens next.

Falling down is the universe being honest with you, finally. It's life as it really is.

This occurs to Marshall as he walks home from the bank, his plans canceled, an ugly bump already bulging on his forehead. His wife is out for the night, no doubt, probably having the time of her life with all their money, and he will spend the rest of his evening with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his head, like an
idiot. He feels like throwing a rock at the canoodling couple across the street. He wants to kick the cat that darts across his feet on the stoop. That airplane overhead, the little flashing dot of light, he wishes it would come crashing down out of the sky and just put him out of his misery, kaboom.

People Falling on Snow/Ice Funny!!!

Twenty-two thousand feet overhead, Beth is on her way out West. When her seatmate leans toward her and says his name is Randolph, she laughs.

“What's so funny?” he wants to know.

“Nothing,” she says, embarrassed, hand rising to her mouth. She's never been the giggly sort. Her father used to call her his Gloomy Little Mac-Beth. She wonders if it's possible her seatmate is having this effect on her. “I'm just excited,” she says. “That's all. I drank too much water or something. Maybe it's the air pressure.”

The man has a white linen pocket square in his sports coat and some kind of gel product in his brown hair that makes it shine. He's in the window seat and he has his shoes off, one socked tumescence rubbing the other. She tries not to examine his feet. Through the porthole the darkness is interrupted every few seconds by the flashing bulbs on the wing. Sometimes the wings appear to wobble, a fact she finds very disconcerting.

“Let me guess,” Randolph says. “A ski trip.”

“Snowboarding, actually,” she says. The trip is an early graduation gift from her mother. Beth is meeting a friend at the airport. In a few months Beth will have her B.A. in sociology. Her thesis
is a case study of frequent-flier programs. According to her laptop's Find function, the term
sociotechnical
appears in her paper seventy-three times. Though she has studied frequent-flier programs, Beth does not belong to any herself. She doesn't find this fact ironic, as she has flown maybe three times in her entire life, present flight included.

“I do development,” the man says. “For a children's hospital.”

She nods politely, too politely, and the man unloads about the latest capital campaign, how they're trying to raise $5.2 million, and how he's close to getting it—so, so close. Fingers crossed he's lined up a very famous actor to help raise the last few million. She asks him what actor, and he says he shouldn't reveal that yet, but then nuzzles close and whispers,
Skeet Ulrich
. “I'm sorry,” she says, “who?” He gives her a wounded look.

When the plane lands, they stand up too early, together, and have to hunch beneath the bins. “Well, it was nice to meet you,” she says when they start to move, but then there's another delay, and he says, “We're never going to get out of here, are we?”

“There must be some kind of way out of—” she says but doesn't finish the lyric because the line is moving again.

They part ways in the terminal, but she sees him again at baggage claim. Before wheeling away his roller suitcase, he tips an imaginary top hat to her. When her bag shows up, Beth takes a bus to the rental car office. Amy, her friend since grade school, is already there with the keys. The drive to the resort is almost two hours. They talk about the end of school and the drugs they've never tried but might still and all their friends who are already engaged and how statistically at least three of those friends will be divorced within five years. They eat gross fast food on the way
into town, and by the time they check in to their condo, it's after ten but feels more like one a.m.