Scott Hutchins
Animals is Family
I began Operation Brotherhood—the night I was attacked by a mountain lion—as a passenger of Captain Charlie Hart, my new stepbrother. We were on our way to Camden, Arkansas, in the BMW 535 he’d acquired on his recent tour of duty in Germany. It was a beautiful little sedan, speeding down the four-lane on a beautiful night, the sky cottoned in pink clouds, Hank Williams Sr. on the radio, cognac sloshing in our Solo cups. A plastic Santa dangled from the rearview mirror, in honor of the season. Charlie’s discharge was in the mail, I was a senior at the University, and we talked prospects. I planned to travel around the country; he was looking into the poultry industry.
“Tell me if this is surprising,” he said. “Chicken farmers today use one third of the feed per chicken they used in the 1930s.”
“It is surprising,” I said.
“That’s what I call efficiency,” he said.
I called it efficiency, too.
I said I wanted to live in Colorado. He said Colorado was a beautiful state.
It was a festival of agreement. We were two adults brought together by the decision of two other adults—our parents. We’d both seen them in terrible marriages, and we had our fingers crossed for this one. At least I did. For the past few months, I’d been receiving ESP messages from my father, Please help me on this one. Please make things smooth.
“This is a nice car,” I said to Charlie.
He smiled, pleased.
The passing intersection lights, visible through the open moon roof, blinked in approval.
* * *
The new family—Claudia and Charlie—and the old family—me—weren’t calling each other mother or son or anything. Claudia said she was my friend. After my mother’s death, I hadn’t liked my dad’s second wife referring to herself as my mother, and I appreciated that Claudia wasn’t trying to ram this new situation down my throat, especially since she rammed so much down everyone’s throats: food, clothes, liquor, cheery complaint.
She had definite opinions. She insisted on a sumptuous Christmas, button-down shirts heavily starched, whiskey not rum in the eggnog. She believed the woman was to serve the man, whether he liked it or not. We were chased out of the kitchen, shooed from the vacuum cleaner. Unfolded laundry was snatched from our bumbling hands. Domestic chores were her dominion, and she kept the dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer all perpetually churning. She laundered our clothes, darned our clothes, bought our clothes: She believed the best pattern going was the American flag, and she filled closets with shirts and shorts and ball caps cut from Old Glory. That very morning, under the eyes of Charlie and my father, both in button-down flag shirts starched stiff as beetle shells, she’d given me an early Christmas present, a Tommy Hilfiger heavy coat stitched from four panels—red, white, blue, and white—with a blue sleeve and a red sleeve.
“Charlie helped me pick it out,” she said.
Charlie nodded, affirmative. He was a little shorter than me, dirty blond like his mother, with a sharp nose and a firm handshake. He seemed as unremarkable as heat in July, but to hear Claudia tell it you were in the presence of a man to be considered. Not that she was always positive about him. In fact, she was usually negative. She cited his early potty training as proof of unusual qualities, but took a dim view of his life from that point on. She believed most of his decisions—quitting the high school football team, pledging Sigma Chi instead of Kappa Sigma—shortchanged his potential, and she liked to speculate on how his life would be more complete if he had only taken her advice, which was unstinting.
She was currently puzzled by Charlie’s interest in Shelly Green, his on-again, off-again girlfriend. According to Claudia, Shelly was a woman of no discernible worth.
“Answer me this, Andy,” she said to me, gesturing with a hot iron. It was nine in the morning, my second day home, and I was at the kitchen counter, staring at “breakfast”—an assortment of four meats, eggs, and three vegetables she’d breaded and deep-fried just for me. “Why in the world would someone buy a B-M-W if all he wanted in life was Shelly Green?”
Charlie, who’d already eaten, sat next to me. He frowned and removed a shiny Zippo from his pocket, which he rolled in his hand. “Mother,” he said.
“A BMW,” she said, returning to the crease she was dropforging in a pair of my jeans. “Then he”—she stopped—“well, I don’t even want to tell you what he named the BMW, Lord have mercy.” She shook her head in amazement. “He named it Shelly Green.”
Charlie returned the Zippo to his pocket and invited me to go see the car. I followed him out the front door to the curb, where he lit a cigarette. “I’m going to tell you something about your new stepmother,” he said. “She’s going to be in your business. She’s got to be in every single motherfucking piece of business on the planet. Every once in a while, she might just drive you crazy.” He smiled at his reflection in the BMW’s hood; his eyes were large and predatory. He looked crazy.
“Dad can get under your skin, too,” I said. A true enough statement, but really I was speaking ill of my dad in hopes of doing him a favor.
“Not the same,” Charlie said. “There are subtle differences.”
He threw his cigarette to the ground and took a breath, looking calmer, as if his spirit were returning to his body.
That’s when he invited me out for the drink. “Leave the lovebirds alone,” he said.
* * *
Charlie was a veteran of the first Gulf War—this was before the Second Gulf War—so our first stop was the VFW, which was closed. A man in the parking lot said there’d been a fight between the Vietnam vets and the Korean vets, but he offered to lead us to some place called T-Bo’s. A fine place, though he admitted it wasn’t as nice as the VFW. I looked at the peeling paint and barred windows, wondering what could be worse. I was used to the restaurant bar my “girlfriend” insisted on—a martini and manhattan kind of place. But I didn’t balk. This was Operation Brotherhood. I got in the car and poured more cognac.
We tooled down unlit dirt roads, taking odd lefts and rights, switching back and climbing up, until at last the trees opened to reveal a metal building the size of a small Wal-Mart. A single flood lamp stared over the entrance at the few scattered trucks in the lot, Cyclops at his sheep. “T-Bo’s” was posted in cut-out plywood letters next to the door. There were no windows.
“You been here before?” I asked Charlie.
“Nope,” he said.
We pushed through the heavy wooden door. The interior was simply the backside of the exterior. Great steel pentagons held up the roof. A few big-busted beer posters and a life-size cutout of Joe Montana were the only decorations, and T-Bo’s was similarly light on clientele. There were some pool players to the far right; to the far left, before the bare stage, sat a group of people with what looked like a large boxer dog; and in the distance, yards across the polished concrete floor, the only bartender tended to the only customer at the bar, who was face-down in his arms, motionless. There was a general lack of body parts. A one-armed man shot for the eight ball, a man with no teeth laughed out loud near the stage. There was a man with an eye-patch, and others who looked whole but gave the impression of being short something vital, a kidney, or a lung.
Our escort left us for the pool tables, and Charlie and I made our way to the bar to order beers. I felt all eyes—pairs and singles—on me, but the bartender didn’t seem surprised to see us. He was a youngish guy, with heavy-metal hair up to his ears, topped by a smoothly bald head. He gave the impression of an affable jellyfish. He checked our I.D.s “just for meanness” and filled our order with two cans of tepid Budweiser.
“You boys is from out of town,” he informed us.
Charlie looked at him sternly, then ordered two whiskey shots. “Show no fear,” he said to me.
We settled into a conversation, exploring the vast expanses of our dissimilarity. I tried to make connections, cover up the gaps whenever I could. I nodded when he mentioned the music of Travis Tritt, and asked him if the Dallas Cowboys were going to be good next year, not knowing if they had been good this year. I gritted my teeth through some quotes from Rush Limbaugh, and listened carefully while Charlie explained why above all books his favorite was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
“And your favorite book?” he asked.
This was a question that never went anywhere. I always named a book recognizable only to English majors (of which I was one). Besides my favorite book at the time was something called Housekeeping, which contained no guns, no fights, no men, no nothing. It was a total girly book. I looked for something better known, something I admired that would dovetail with the interests of this conservative military man.
“The Bible,” I said.
He sat up straight, nodding. He took a sip of his drink.
“I mean as literature,” I said. “You know, the stories. Noah’s Ark, Isaac and Abraham, Cain and Abel.”
He nodded again, his mouth turned down.
“It’s good reading,” I said.
“Well of course it is,” he said. “It’s the Bible.”
“But myself,” I said. “I’m not very religious. I mean, I’m religious—just not in a traditional way.”
“Don’t sugarcoat for me. I’ll respect you more if you stand up for your principles.”
“Oh, I’m standing up for my principles. This isn’t about principles for me. I meant the Bible as literature. I was talking about literature.”
“Literature,” he said, not in a mean way, but with just enough echo that I heard myself and didn’t like the sound. I took a sip of my beer, looking away in embarrassment. The man next to me was still asleep at the bar, his arms encircling a mixed drink and an old-fashioned alarm clock. The bartender snapped a towel at a fly. His forearm was dotted by two awl-sized puncture wounds, each surrounded by an iodine stain. Literature. When my “girlfriend”—aka the grad student I was sleeping with—used the word it sounded high-flown, even heroic. But here it sounded exactly as I felt—ridiculous. I couldn’t say why I had studied books. I didn’t want to go to law school. I didn’t want to be a teacher. I was even lying about Colorado—I didn’t really have any plans. I had studied and now the studies were ending. It had crossed my mind that I wouldn’t do so well outside of school. I was a pleaser. I was at this broken-down bar—something out of the Inferno—just to please my dad.
“Get us a couple more shots, would you?” Charlie asked me, putting five dollars on the bar and pushing off. I watched him pad across the floor under the dim fluorescent lighting; he was headed for the phone. I imagined telling him that I did hold to my principles. I did everything in life exactly as I wanted. But the five-dollar bill, settling into a ring of water, somehow defied this assertion. The problem wasn’t that I acted against my deepest wishes—it’s that my deepest wishes were a mystery.
I waved at the bartender to get his attention, and I noticed that the sleeping man with the beer and the clock had his eyes open and was looking at me. He kept his head on the counter, but he was alert. He didn’t look like he had been asleep.
“Nice coat,” he said.
He was clean-cut, without the obligatory short-long, and his flannel shirt looked new, but I didn’t really believe he liked my red, white, and blue coat. I nodded, looking away for Charlie. Far across the concrete floor, he gestured towards the payphone, as if cajoling it to come sit with us.
“Nice coat,” the man said louder.
“Thank you,” I said, pointing to the colors. “Patriotic.”
He snorted. “This clock gets me to work on time,” the man said. “Don’t it, bartender?”
The bartender tossed his tentacled hair back—a feminine gesture. “I never seen you nowhere but right at that exact spot, Chesnutt,” he said.
“I’ll be late to work one time,” Chesnutt said. “That’s the day I die. Hey, boy”—that was me—“you know what work is?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Work,” he said, “is taking shit from assholes. That’s something you won’t learn in college.”
I smiled vaguely around me—smiling at my drink, smiling at the dusty register. I wished I could ask the bartender about his puncture wounds, or start another dead end conversation with Charlie. I turned to examine the scene in the bar, smiling at the pool players and the group by the stage, which was being entertained by the dog and the toothless man. The dog had buried its face in his crotch, and he was pantomiming extreme surprise, his eyes wide, his mouth agape. “You better not bite me,” he said, rapping a knuckle on the dog’s head. “You better not bite me.” Whack. The men chortled, and the one woman barked a laugh. I was wrong about the Inferno—this was more like the poster in my bedroom, Heironymous Bosch.
“Shit from assholes,” Chesnutt said. He still hadn’t lifted his head. “And there’s none of this lemonade from lemons crap either.”
His eyelids closed and his mouth relaxed. He sucked in a deep, fake snore.
I turned to see Charlie crossing back from the phone.
Shelly Green, he told me, might come over for a drink. She lived in Magnolia—only fifteen minutes away. But she was a radiotechnician at the hospital and she had to get up early. She was tired. But she liked to have a good time. He thought she was sure to come out.
“She’s a good girl,” he said. “You know, Mother’s just a very particular person. She would like Shelly if she got to know her. Mother can just get obsessed.”
“I’ve noticed that,” I said. “Like how she is with the American flag.”
He nodded, a puzzled smile on his face. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“The clothes,” I said, plucking the collar of my jacket. “It’s like a flag coat.”
“Oh,” he said. “I never thought of it as a flag coat.”
“It’s just that it’s red, white, and blue.”
“Well, that coat’s not going to be everyone’s style. I like it, but it’s not for everyone.”
“I like it, too,” I said. “I like the coat. You were just saying how Claudia can get obsessive about something, and I was saying like the American flag. She always buys clothes with the American flag.”
“I think ‘always’ is putting it a little strongly,” he said.
“I don’t mean it as a criticism,” I said. “It was just something I observed.”
“I didn’t take it as a criticism,” he said, flipping his Zippo in his hand. “Mother has a few quirks, but she’s a smart woman.”
“Absolutely. She’s very smart.”
“You may not think so. That’s your right.”
“I think she’s incredibly smart.” This was laying it on a little thick.
“Of course, she’s not an intellectual, like you.” He ordered two more whiskeys.
“I wouldn’t call myself an intellectual.”
“Mother has an intelligence that is different than yours.”
“Everybody’s different.” My brain felt like a hot air balloon snapping free of its tether lines. I had no idea what I was agreeing to anymore. “Makes the world go round.”
“There may be something to that,” Charlie said.
“My dad has his annoying traits,” I said. “He refuses to answer the phone at home. He thinks everyone’s his secretary.”
Charlie nodded. “He works long days. Could be he’s just tired.”
“Sure, of course he’s tired.” I definitely wanted to concede that point, but I also felt that Charlie hadn’t quite grasped what I was saying. “But it goes beyond that. He’ll tell me to write down some thought he had, or remind him to do something the next day. The tone in his voice—it’s exactly the tone he uses for his secretary.”
Charlie lit another cigarette, staring across the bar at the whiskey bottles. “Well,” he said, “you should know he’s very proud of you.”
I felt ashamed. Behind me, the voice of the toothless man said, “You better not bite me.” His knuckle rapped the dog’s skull, bringing fresh laughter from the crowd.
“I know that,” I said. “I’m proud of him, too.”
“Of course you are,” Charlie said. “Now, what in the hell is that guy doing to that dog? Giving it hell, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m going to make one more phone call,” he said. He put another five on the bar, and suggested I order more shots.
* * *
“Daddy’s a big office man, huh?” Chesnutt said. “Bosses you around.”
“You ever heard of a private conversation?” I said.
“I bet Daddy pays for school, don’t he.”
“Not entirely,” I said. I had a scholarship for one quarter of my tuition.
“Right,” he said. “I bet you work hard up there at your work-study job. You probably get tired pushing them carts of books around the library, talking to your friends.”
“It’s not like that,” I said, though it pretty much was like that. Only I filed cassette tapes in the foreign language lab, talking to my friends.
“I was a college boy myself one time. You wouldn’t guess that, would you?”
“I wouldn’t guess one thing or another about you,” I said.
“Arkansas A&M,” he said. “I made it a year and a half before the money ran out.”
He closed his eyes.
“You’re a liar,” I said. “You’re a goddamned liar.”
“Who you talking to?” Charlie asked, climbing back on his stool.
“This guy’s just pretending to be asleep.” I slapped the bar. “His name is Chesnutt.”
“He probably just wants to be left alone.”
“Bullshit. Every time you walk off, he opens his eyes and harasses me.”
“He does,” Charlie said, weighing the unlikelihood of this assertion. “Well, drunks. I say we let the sleeping beast lay.” He informed me that Shelly definitely might come now. She might bring a friend for me to meet—a good-looking girl. Though Charlie admitted he didn’t know my type. Claudia had told him I was very particular about girls.
“I like to think of myself as discerning,” I said. “Not particular.”
“I bet you do,” Charlie said, uninterested. “Shelly’s had a few glasses of wine. She’s a big wine drinker.” He laughed. “Sometimes I think she loves wine the way I love family. Seriously. I think people have room in themselves for about one big passion. I’m not saying it’s something she won’t grow out of, but it could be a big problem between us. Family is what I’m all about, Andy. That’s why I got out of the Army. You love family?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I don’t mean a little. I mean, family is what drives me. It’s what I want to give my life to. You feel that way about family?”
I thought I should say no, if only to stand up for my principles—to worry less about pleasing. But I didn’t know if the answer was no or yes, or if there was something else in my life I could say no or yes to, identify as the thing that drove me. There wasn’t really a part of my life where I engaged such questions. In school, I did my schoolwork. Here at home I was trying to make things easy for Dad. I wasn’t really the main character of my life.
“I don’t really,” I said. “At least, not yet.”
“It might come with time,” he said. “But probably not. I’ve always felt this way. Listen, this is the last phone call. I’ll be right back.” He pushed off the stool, and staggered away.
On the wall in front of me, the beer posters rippled in a slight draft. The bartender was out collecting empties. I rotated my stool so I looked directly at Chesnutt’s alert face.
“Discerning,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You a faggot?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“I bet you know a lot of faggots, don’t you. Up at the University.”
“I don’t know any,” I said. What I meant was that I don’t know any faggots, because I don’t use the term faggot, but I wasn’t parsing any more synonyms for the night and suddenly I was denying my gay friend, of which I had one. We shared a work-study shift at the language lab; he was the person I got paid to talk to.
“Well, you just don’t recognize ‘em,” Chesnutt said. “They’re there. Every time you turn around they’re staring at your ass.”
“Has anyone ever—ever—stared at your ass, Chesnutt?”
“You sure sound like a faggot,” he said, closing his eyes and snoring.
Charlie climbed back on his stool. Shelly was practically in the car already. It was as good as a sure thing. Her friend was very interested in coming along, if she could get away. Charlie was just on his way to the bathroom, but he wanted to tell me that if I didn’t like that coat, I should return it. Claudia wasn’t all-knowing—we had recently met—and I had to stand up for what I liked, and who I was.
He gave me another five for whiskey shots. I trembled with rage.
“So you’re particular,” Chesnutt said.
“I’m not talking to you.”
“Maybe you’re just a little faggoty. Can’t handle real life.”
I remained silent.
“Real life. Hey, bartender—tell college boy here what happened to your arm.”
“Aw,” he said. “The bitch done got me. She shore did—got me.” He shook his head, impressed. He held out his arm with the puncture wounds for my inspection.
“That’s real life, college boy,” Chesnutt said. “That’s what your lady does to you if she’s got anything to her.”
“That’s your opinion,” I said.
Chesnutt leaned towards me. “She’s right behind us,” he said in a stage whisper, nodding to the crowd by the stage. “Right over there.”
I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but I couldn’t help myself. I turned slowly to see. The one woman sat in her chair, barking her one-note laugh at the toothless man. She was thick and animatronic-seeming—an improbable girlfriend even for the bartender.
“There’s the bitch,” he said, and he and the bartender cracked up. They were talking about the dog.
Just that week, right before I came home for Christmas, my girlfriend, aka the grad student I was sleeping with—fucking, as I liked to say in more macho moments—had taken to fucking me. She had explained the ecstasy of the prostate gland and gotten me to agree to her entering me with a strap-on. I liked it in the moment, liked it more than anything I could imagine. But afterwards I felt broken and loose. It was like she had found whatever was holding me together and snipped the string. Just the flash of the thought could bring the shame in my cheeks and here the whiskey vapors in my head were mixing with the man hitting the dog—the girlfriend was writing a feminist theory paper on the use of the word “bitch”—and all the little dead ends of my evening. My evening of having no principles, of being a pleaser, of being—in fact—a little bit faggoty. It was all disheartening and confusing, and I think I would have just put my head in my hands and tried to let it pass, but that toothless man continued to rap the dog’s head with his knuckle, continued to admonish her not to bite him. It was driving me crazy. His friends laughed, and their laughs echoed in the tin corners of the ceiling. I’d tried to hold my snobbishness at bay, but they were a loathsome group of people, from the bartender to Chesnutt to the animal abusers. The only thing that could stimulate their stubbed nerves was cruelty, and if they couldn’t give me a moment’s peace at least they could leave that goddamn dog alone.
You better not bite me. You better not bite me.
I stood from the stool, zipped up my patriotic coat, and took a deep, steadying breath. I crossed the floor until I stood over the toothless man. He looked up at me, working his jaw, as if trying to remember my face. I can only imagine what I looked like. A boy. An enraged red-faced boy.
“You’re going to leave this dog alone,” I said, my voice shaking, high. I gave the dog a little push on the shoulder with my foot. “Right now.”
Everyone stared at me, perplexed.
“You’re going to leave this dog alone,” I said. I felt close to tears.
“You just relax, young man,” he said almost kindly.
“Now, goddamn it,” I said. I knelt down and started pulling on his knees, trying to loosen their grip—to free the animal.
“Don’t get down there, dammit,” he said, struggling to push me away. I leaned close to the dog, and started to pull on it. It was muscular like the most powerful pit bull, with huge paws and a long tail, and I suddenly didn’t know if I was struggling with the man or the dog when I shoved off his knees and rolled onto my back, the dog’s paws on my chest. It bared its fangs and let loose a slow staccato growl. I looked closely at its face—the long whiskers of the nose—until it was sorted out in my head that this wasn’t a dog, but a full-grown mountain lion.
Her paws tensed on my chest, and this was when the claws would be going in, slicing right through my ridiculous coat, rending my last garments. I didn’t feel anything, but I was sure she punctured a lung and I was afraid of the pain, and afraid—most of all—of my fear being so clear to everyone around me. She growled again, this time a shout in my face, and made a low dive with her fangs out—God knows for what—my neck? I raised my arms to protect myself, and would have at best ended up like the bartender, but I was protected by a heavy rope which secured the cat’s neck to the toothless man’s ankle. She whipped the man out of his chair like a sheet off a bed, but it interfered with her timing, and she turned back to growl at him. By this time Charlie was shouting, coming my way; the bartender was rounding the bar with his cattle prod. The cat took off for the stage, dragging the toothless man across the slick floor strewn with cigarette butts, bumping him into tables. He screamed that they better goddamn well get him out of this goddamn rope before he kicked all their asses.
“Come on, sugar,” the bartender said in a sweet voice. “Just come here and I’ll take that rope off. Come on.”
I felt my chest for the blood, but the coat was dry. Then I feared the true fear—that I had pissed or shat myself. Neither. I pushed up on my elbows. Up on the stage where bands must play on more promising nights, the bartender was offering the cat his unbitten left hand. She was agitated. Her tail thumped the hollow wood. But she allowed him to detach the toothless man, and lead her out the back door.
“You all right?” Charlie asked. He was standing over me.
“Are my pants wet?” I asked.
He helped me to my feet, taking my arm. “You look all right.” I walked haltingly back to my barstool and sat, not quite believing my luck, good and bad.
The bartender returned, removed his leather gardening gloves and clapped his hands together to warm them. He bought shots for Charlie and me and a beer for Chesnutt, as long as charity was going around. He apologized for the cat’s behavior. She was on edge: They’d just had to put her mate down for attacking a customer. That’s when he got around to his concern.
“You’re not going to report her, are you?” he asked.
“Report her? No.”
“That’s a relief,” the bartender said. “You know, I been thinking about that question: Do you really love family? And I was thinking: I do. But for me, it’s animals—animals is family.”
I looked to see if this was another joke, but he was as earnest as an apostle.
“To animals,” Charlie said, raising his shot.
“To animals,” I said.
“To family,” Chesnutt said. The whiskey was tasteless in my mouth. I returned the heavy shot glass to the bar, and slid off my stool, turning to sit on the cold floor. The overhang of the counter cast a horizontal shadow across my gut, dividing me in halves, one lighted, one dark. In the bright fluorescence, my dirty jeans and my loose-jointed, splayed feet—I felt like a puppet someone had finally set down.
* * *
When I was nine years old, my family—my real family—took our last vacation all together. It was to California to see Disneyland, Sea World, Los Angeles, and the Mojave Desert. This trip was far more extravagant than our usual jaunts to Gulf Shores, Alabama, or the Ozark Mountains, and I think even I knew something final was happening.
It was a great trip. We were fascinated with the country and with the city. But our favorite pastime was watching the people and the cars on the enormous, shimmering highways. We saw three Lamborghinis and ten Ferraris. A car shaped like a banana and another like an old boot. And there were VW bugs all around, so we were always able to play the punchbug game.
One day, east of Los Angeles, my dad tailed an old truck, unremarkable except that the driver sat in the middle of the seat. He was having some trouble controlling the car from that position, and we came up with various theories as to why he drove this way. He was paralyzed on his right side. He was more interested in working the radio. He was trying to sit in the shade. Because I knew the trials of being too short to see out of a car, I suggested he might have someone short in there. “He might be helping him,” I said.
I was partially correct. Before long a woman wearing no shirt sat up in the passenger’s seat; she adjusted her ponytail, her beautiful breasts just visible in the back glass.
My mom’s cancer was in remission, and she’d been well long enough to have her own hair, but I can only imagine how this scene of animal good health made her feel. She’d had a double mastectomy, and had recently been bedridden for weeks, suffering through the latest—and last—round of chemotherapy. She had been crossing her fingers for four years, watching her luck come up bad.
In the truck, the young woman’s bare back was clearly visible for a few more moments—drawing the tide of our attention—before she ducked down.
Then my mother and father exploded in laughter. I joined in, though I didn’t really know what was going on. When the woman disappeared from view, I figured she was hiding, embarrassed to have forgotten her shirt. I knew something adult was happening, and it would have normally agitated me not to understand. But that day the laughter in the car comforted me: it was the laughter of a family quick on its feet, ready for whatever the world could dish up.
We would get something like this laughter, Charlie, Claudia, my dad, and me. In any situation that called for profundity, we said, “Animals is family.” Charlie and I never hit brotherhood, but we had an easy friendship, focused as it was on the desire to see our parents happy. What I didn’t fully consider at that time—still in my changeable years—was that my plans might work too well. That instead of the usual fear of the son growing away from the father, the father might grow away from the son. This is how it went. In his increasing layers of red, white, and blue, my dad became unrecognizable. At least, to me. It was, of course, a natural process. An understandable process. To be as we’d been before would have been a small repudiation of his new life, and I wouldn’t have wanted that. I felt grateful to be in my twenties, able to fend for myself. Grateful, too, that I’d gotten to adulthood relatively unscathed. When I looked for the source of these quiet successes, I always got a flash of us in the car in California, of that man who laughed, despite our upcoming sadness, laughed, despite his dying wife and his soon-to-be motherless son. He was just the right person to steer us—with grace and confidence, as I recall—through those last days together.
Scott Hutchins’ work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Catamaran, Five Chapters, The Owls, The Rumpus, The New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, and Esquire. His novel A Working Theory of Love was a San Francisco Chronicle and Salon Best Book of 2012. A native of Arkansas, he teaches at Stanford University.