The kid sets down his issue of PitCrew. It’s the one featuring Rick Kreiger’s 500 win. Then he does a strange thing. He takes his desk lamp and swivels its armature so the hard bulb shines in my face.
This is where one story could become another.
This other story I could tell would be about the following years when your father doesn’t open the door. It would have to do with the after-school jobs you pick up to kill time, about the GM family sedan proving ground behind Futron’s industrial park, how you can spend whole lunch breaks without taking your eyes off circling cars that stop only to change the drivers who will run them into the ground. This different story would have to do with a mythology class in which you discover the gods are all-petty and their names are hard to remember, or the endless chain of nature shows about Africa a skilled TV viewer can find from midnight on, or the place your mind goes while waiting for a diode to finally light reject-red.
A woo-hoo high-five sounds in the next room, and this boy and I look toward the source, our eyes landing on a poster of the space shuttle. There is a white plastic intercom next to my shoulder that surprises me when it comes to life. “What’s your 10–20, copy?” a man asks over a hail of barking — the kid’s dad, I assume. When there is no answer, the father says, “Roger this: the griddle is firing up. The Runnin’ Rebs won the toss, and they’re taking the field.”
The boy returns the light to his magazine. “Please,” he says, with an air of boredom and indifference aimed at me, his father, and life in general. I have nothing deep to add, so I go.
When I open Marty’s door, there is a giant snake, but I try to act cool. The room’s darker than I expect, though I can clearly see the snake cage takes up a third of it, framed floor to ceiling with studs and chicken wire, and there is a faint smell of cat piss. Marty is shaking the box of scorpions. He holds it to his ear, his eyes roaming the room, looking right past me as he listens. He squints some, smiles. Satisfied, he sets it on a junk-strewn desk without opening it. Marty doesn’t need to look in that box just yet, either.
Jimbo reloads the bong and holds it out to me. It hovers between us, and I do not take it. In less than a year, after I fail mythology and the doors of Futron are chained shut, Jimbo will kiss me, awkwardly, on the neck, in a secretary stable named Fuddrucker’s. Even now, I look at him suspiciously. He knows I don’t smoke, and this stoner’s etiquette is only for Marty’s benefit. The snake hangs from a ceiling beam at the edge of my vision, its skin the felt green of a Vegas gaming table.
“Go for it,” Marty says. “Bong up.”
Again, one eye points down, and the way he has to look out of the top of it humbles him in a way I don’t expect.
Over the intercom, the dad says, “The Rebs are kicking off.” Marty ignores him, even though the barking in the background makes it sound like his father is being eaten by wolves or something. With the static on the intercom, I imagine a man on a radio in Africa. Or a pilot with hydraulic trouble, cutting up with the tower.
There is a Polaroid taped to the wall, and I know this must be Tasha. She’s everything I hoped she’d be: posed in a skydiving dragsuit, her chi-chis are perfect, even through billowy orange nylon, as she stands above a dark and sleeping DC-3.
I nod toward the photo. “Who’s the fox?”
“That’s Tasha, the love of my life. We almost died together.”
“That when you messed up your face?”
Jimbo looks at me like, You fuck, we had ground rules.
“Car crash,” Marty says.
“Rough deal,” I tell him. “Jimbo says you can’t remember most stuff.”
“Some stuff.”
“At least you had Tasha.” We glance at the wall. “You couldn’t forget her.”
Marty’s not sure if I’m dicking with him or not. “She says we were just dating before the crash, but I know it was more than that. On the outside she was a stranger, and I couldn’t say much about her life, but I knew her, you know?”
Marty says this, and my head wanders across eight time zones, a continent away. I find myself looking through the snake cage to the wall beyond, thinking about the boy in the next room.
“It doesn’t bite,” Marty says.
“What?”
“Its mouth is open to check you out. It has glands that can see your heat.”
Sure enough, the snake’s mouth is open. It has three loops around a pine ceiling beam, and it screws itself down some, tail sucking up into the coil of its square trunk, head unreeling to arc closer to my heat.
“What’s with the snake?” I ask.
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Let’s feed it,” Jimbo says.
“No, it ate last week.”
Jimbo lifts his eyebrows. “Meow,” he says.
“Meow,” Marty says.
“What about the caiman — you still got the caiman?” Jimbo asks Marty, then looks at me. “Wait till you see the fucking caiman.”
I think of the Cayman Islands, which my mom says is the worst route there is. After Tammy dies, my mother covers her schedule there for a while, but she won’t even speak of the layovers. They don’t have any laws down there, she says. You will never know, is all she tells me. But after a couple years with Ted my mother changes her tune, and they even pop over to beach bum a time or two. Tammy is never pulled from under the D.C. river ice, and Mom likes to say Tammy’s really just laying low in the Caymans, high on piña coladas and that special light they have down there, playing baccarat with the boys at the Royale.
Marty sees the confusion on my face. “A caiman’s a kind of crocodile,” he says, “from Central America.”
“You have a crocodile?”
“It’s a kind of crocodile.”
“Bullshit.”
Jimbo smiles.
We go out back to see the caiman. There is a blue pool with green patio furniture, all surrounded by silver fencing that leads to the base of the bluff above. Everything looks cool, my hands are in my pockets, and the sun is bright in my eyes. Then the wolves come at us, sprinting across a triangular yard of close-cropped yellow grass with their long necks down, their rolling haunches kicking out behind them. The chain-link fence between us isn’t even chest high — four, four and a half feet at best. When they reach the fence, they are coming over, I know it, and the assault at hand is something I feel first as a rattle in my breath and then as a loosening in my veins. Instead, they plunge to the base of the fence, legs splayed, and snap at us out of the sides of their mouths as if they are chewing the metal sprinkler heads.
“Shut those damn wolves up,” Marty’s father says from the patio. He is shirtless, in swim trunks, basting a mounded platter of meat with a sauce-stiffened brush, the kind you use to paint a house.
“They’re only half wolf, Dad. Half Mackenzie, half malamute.”
“I’ll kill them, Marty. I swear,” his father says in a soft way, speaking to meat he dabs with care.
For now though, the wolves are barking machines, vicious and ceaseless, noxious as tire fires. Marty walks, arms crossed, past the pool, until he stands looking down over the short fence in admiration at their snarling faces, as if big, mean animals were a rarity in this world.
Jimbo follows suit. He kneels before the fence and touches their wet noses whenever snapping teeth catch in the chain link. In a sweet, childlike voice, he insults them. “Come to Daddy, you iddle widdle teethy fucks,” he says, and pinches a nose, prompting one wolf to reel back and pop the other’s folded ear.