The Heaven of Animals: Stories Read Free Page A

compromise he accepted grudgingly when the boxing gloves he found, while offering superior protection, failed to provide him the ability to grip, pick up, or hold.
    “This is stupid,” I say. “Are we really doing this?”
    “We’re doing this,” Cam says. He swats a fly from his face with one oven-mitted hand.
    There is a clatter of chain-link. We turn to see the alligator nudging the fence with his snout. He snorts, eyes the T-bone, opens and shuts his mouth. He really is surprisingly large.
    Cam’s parked the pickup in the backyard. He pulls off his oven mitts, lowers the gate, exposing the wide, bare bed of the truck, and we set to work angling the two-by-fours from gate to grass. We press the planks together, and Cam cinches them tight with the bungee cords. The boards are long, ten or twelve feet, so physics is on our side. We should be able to drag him up the incline.
    We return our attention to the alligator, who is sort of throwing himself against the fence, except that there is nowhere to back up to, no way to build momentum. Above his head, at knee level, is a hand-sized wire door held shut by a combination lock. With each lunge, the lock jumps, then clatters against the door. With each charge, I jump too.
    “He can’t break out,” Cam says. He picks up the bolt cutters.
    “You don’t know that,” I say.
    “If he could, don’t you think he’d have done it by now?” Cam positions the bolt cutters on the loop of lock, bows his legs, and squats. He squeezes, and his face reddens. He grunts, there’s a snap, and the lock falls away, followed by a flash of movement. Cam howls and falls. The alligator’s open jaws stretch halfway through the hole. All I see is teeth.
    “Motherfucker!” Cam yells.
    “You okay?” I say.
    Cam holds up his hands, wiggles ten fingers.
    “Okay,” Cam says. “Okay.” He picks up the T-bone and throws it at the alligator. The steak lands on his snout, hangs there, then slides off.
    “He’s not a dog,” I say. “This isn’t catch.”
    Cam pulls on the oven mitts and slowly reaches for the meat resting in the grass just a few feet beneath all those teeth. Suddenly, the pen looks less sturdy, less like a thing the alligator could never escape.
    The cage shakes, but this time it’s the wind, which has really picked up. I wonder whether it’s storming in St. Petersburg. Cam should be at home with Bobby, and I almost say as much. But his eyes are wild. He’s dead set on doing this.
    Cam says, “I’m going to put the steak into his mouth, and, when I do, I want you to tape the jaws shut.”
    “No way,” I say. “No way am I putting my hand in range of that thing.”
    And then this happens: My son walks out of my memory and into my thoughts, his arm hanging loose at the elbow. The nurse asks what happened, and he looks up, ready to lie for me. There is something beautiful in the pause between this question and the one to come. Then there’s the officer’s hand on my shoulder, the “Would you mind stepping out with me, please?” Oh, I’ve heard it a hundred times. It never leaves me. It is a whisper. It is a prison sentence.
    I want to put the elbow back into the socket myself. I want to turn back time. I want Jack at five or ten. I want him curled in my lap like a dog. I want him writing on the walls with an orange crayon and blaming the angels that live in the attic. I want him before his voice plummeted two octaves, before he learned to stand with a hand on one hip, before he grew confused. I want my boy back.
    “Come on!” Cam shouts. “Don’t puss out on me now. As soon as he bites down, just wrap the tape around it.”
    “Give me your oven mitts,” I say.
    “No!”
    “Give me the mitts and I’ll do it.”
    “But you won’t be able to handle the tape.”
    “Trust me,” I say. “I’ll find a way.”
    We do it. Cam waves the cut of meat at the snout until it smacks teeth. The jaws grab. There’s an unnatural crunch as the T in the T-bone