Hall of Small Mammals (6 page)

“Claire.” She doesn't budge. He places his palm flat between her shoulder blades, her skin warm through the T-shirt. He shakes her gently and feels her body tense.

“What's wrong?” she asks.

“Where were you?”

“What?”

“Were you with him?”

“You've got to be kidding. Go back to sleep.”

“If you ever stopped dreaming about him, for whatever reason, would you be upset?”

She rolls over to face him. Her loose state championship volleyball T-shirt twists tight under her stomach.

“I'm beginning to regret I ever told you about Alan.”

And why did she? Guilt, he assumes, or as a provocation. A part of Walker fears this is her way of pushing him away. She turns back over to sleep. Walker climbs out of bed and goes downstairs. He digs some D batteries out of a cluttered drawer and plops down on the sofa with the tape deck. The old batteries are corroded, crusty and white. He inserts the new ones, rewinds the tape to the beginning, and presses Record.

“You are . . . very sleepy.”

He presses Stop, Rewind, and then Record again, his lips within kissing distance of the microphone. “You will not dream about Alan Gass. You will not dream about Alan Gass. Alan Gass does not exist. Alan Gass is not a man. Alan Gass is not made of daisies. He is made of nothing.”

He rewinds the tape and presses Record again. A new and less sinister idea: he could make a tape for himself.

“You
will
dream about Alan Gass. You will tell him to stay away. You will dream about Alan Gass. You will dream about Alan Gass.”

He presses Stop. This is going to take too long. He needs to think out a strategy. Is there a button that makes the recording loop?

“What are you doing?” Claire is at the top of the stairs.

“Nothing,” he says, and goes to the hall closet. He shoves the
tape deck up on the high shelf and joins her in bed. That night he doesn't dream about Alan. His dreams are uninteresting and unhelpful, a slurry mess of anxieties and fears from his waking life. He is lost and swimming in a giant ocean with small gray waves. In the distance metal transformer towers jut up into the sky crackling with electricity, and far away a boat crests each wave, a boat that he cannot reach no matter how much he swims.

In the morning he wakes up to steam slipping under the bathroom door in misty curling puffs. He can hear Claire humming in the shower. In her dreams she is able to visit an alternative universe. It's hard not to feel a little jealous.

•   •   •

Everywhere he goes he sees a Lexus. Lexi. They are a species, classifiable but indistinct. He sees one in the fire lane in front of the liquor store, then another in the parking lot at the gym. The cars are empty. He feels ridiculous each time he glares into a car. The tinted windows reflect only his own face, grim and warped.

Before Claire, he once dragged a date to a five-year high school reunion and made the mistake of telling her that he'd slept with one of the girls in the room. The date wouldn't let it go. She had to know which girl. She wanted him to point her out. She said she wouldn't be comfortable until she knew. But why? Walker asked her. “So I can avoid her,” the date said. “Or maybe introduce myself. I don't know. Something.” At the time, Walker found it amusing. God, he even made her guess the girl.

He makes a full tape of his Alan Gass mantras and tells Claire it's music for the play. When he wakes up, his ears are hot and sweaty from the foam headphones and, even more frustratingly,
he remembers almost nothing of where he's been for the last seven hours, an amnesiac tourist whose film rolls have come back from the lab damaged and half developed—ocean waves, broken escalators, his mother's scowling face, a pack of vicious blue-eyed dogs. It's all meaningless dribble.

•   •   •

Walker's Alan Gass calls with what he can only describe as amazing news—news that he won't share over the phone. Walker agrees to meet him at a pizza buffet called Slice of Heaven.

They sit across from each other in a red vinyl booth that squelches under their butts. Aside from two dumpy women at a table on the other side of the restaurant, they are alone. Walker has already eaten lunch and doesn't plan to stay long.

Alan is distracted. He wants pizza. A certain kind of pizza. He's waiting for the waitress to bring it out on a tin tray. When she does, at last, dropping it on the buffet at the center of the room, Alan is up in a hurry. His body pressed hard to the sneeze guard, he loads his plate with one slice after another. He comes back to the table and takes a large bite. The pizza is yellowish and drizzled with a translucent pink sauce.

“What is that?” Walker asks.

“Strawberry cheesecake. Try a piece.” He slides the plate across the table, still sticky from the waitress's rag. Walker declines and asks about the news that couldn't be shared over the phone.

“Be patient. You'll find out in”—he checks his wristwatch, digital with an orange Velcro strap—“about ten minutes.”

Walker takes the tape recorder out of his bag, slides it across the table to Alan.

“Did it work?” Alan asks.

“I'm letting it go. Like you said, some dumb fantasy.”

Alan smacks on pizza and dabs the strawberry sauce from the corners of his thin pink lips. Though a wiry man, he has the look of physical inactivity. He has a curved back, flaccid arms, and probably a poor heart. Something about this pizza buffet—the quality of the light or the greasy floor tiles, perhaps—makes Walker feel exhausted.

“Until you came to see me,” Alan says, “I'd never really thought about there being other Alan Gasses in the world. But that got me thinking. Somewhere out there is the best possible Alan Gass.”

“And somewhere else is the worst.” Walker motions to the waitress.

“I'd like to think I'm somewhere in the middle. Most Alans are. Statistically speaking.”

The waitress waddles to the table, her stockings tan as crust, her eyes green as bell peppers. Walker asks for a coffee.

“Over the last few days I've been digging around online and making some phone calls,” Alan says. “To other Alans.”

“And?”

“There's an Alan Gass in Utah who runs a ranch. There's an Alan Gass in New York who travels the country selling baseball cards.”

The waitress brings over a mug and a hot pot of coffee, its steam thick with the smell of burnt peanuts. Walker dumps three creamers into the cup, turning the liquid a cardboard brown.

“Oh, good, you're here,” Alan says to someone behind Walker.

Walker turns. A heavy man in a blue polo shirt with eyebrows
so dark and thick they look like two black holes in his flat face smiles at them. His short hair is parted neatly down the middle.

“Walker,” Alan says, “I'd like to introduce you to
Doctor
Alan Gass.”

The man shakes Walker's hand firmly. His knuckles are hairy. Alan makes room for the other Alan on his side of the booth and explains that the second Alan lives only an hour north of here and when he discovered he was a doctor, well, he thought Walker might be interested in that.

“Doctor of what?” Walker says.

“Of religion,” the man says, and grabs the menu from behind the napkin holder. “Mainly Eastern philosophy.”

“You gotta try a piece of this,” the first Alan says. The second Alan says no, thanks, he doesn't have a sweet tooth. He's going to have a calzone.

“There's another Alan Gass two hours from here,” the first Alan Gass says. “He's invited me to see his collection of North American beetles. He studies them. Amazing, right?”

“I wonder how many of us there are in the world?” Dr. Gass asks.

“At least a thousand,” says the first one. “We should organize a party. Wouldn't that be something?”

Walker imagines an army of Alan Gasses. They are the building blocks of something larger and more monumental. He sips on coffee, listening to the two men compare their lives, both of them amazed that two people with the same name can have had such different experiences and opinions of the world. How did Walker end up here, in this booth, with these men? He drops a few
dollars on the table and says he must be going. Both Alans reach out to shake his hand.

•   •   •

The experiments in Europe—with the black sphere and the K-matter—have failed horribly. Claire comes home so excited she almost tackles Walker. The failure doesn't exactly prove Daisy Theory, but the theory does emerge relatively unscathed. Particles, for the time being, can still half exist. Walker joins when her advisor takes the entire team out for celebratory drinks. In a suit jacket, jeans, and sneakers, his boyish face glowing, her advisor steadies himself on an assistant's shoulder and steps up on a booth, raising his dark whiskey glass high. Claire lets out a whoop.

The music in the bar is disco music: Donna Summer, maybe, but with a newer backbeat. Claire's advisor lures a research assistant onto the dance floor. Claire lures Walker too. They dance in the middle of the group. She spins under the flashing lights. She moves away from him. The dance floor is crowded. Bodies merge and move like extensions of the same creature. Claire orbits around Walker, but when he turns she's disappeared. He stops dancing, the only stationary body in that sea, until she reappears again, moving away from the group and toward Walker with hands raised. She's looking right at him. Their waists meet first.

“I want to take you home tonight,” he says.

“What?”

She can't hear him over the music. He kisses her. Kisses are a kind of vocabulary, he thinks. This one, both lips parted, tongues touching with the most delicate of flicks, has a particular message.
The message is,
Let's be happy
, and that feels like the wise decision, a conscious decision to be happy.

They have to leave their car at the bar that night and take a taxi home.

“Fun time?” he asks, but she's already passed out against his shoulder. The last round put her over the edge.

The taxi pulls up in front of the house, and Walker, too tired to do the math, tosses the driver a twenty before going around to the other side and helping Claire stand. He throws her arm over his neck, and they cross the dew-wet lawn together. She mumbles into his shoulder as he fumbles with the door key. Upstairs she crawls across the bed and then collapses, hair flowering out in all directions across the pillows. He unzips and tugs off her boots and lays a blanket across her back. He's sitting on his side of the bed, untying his own shoes, when Claire says she loves him.

“You too,” he says, and shimmies out of his pants. He slides across the bed to her. Her eyes are closed, her face long and relaxed against the pillow. She may already be asleep—or on the verge of it. He considers testing her, giving her shoulder a light shake, but she looks so tired and content. Waking her wouldn't be right.

T
he boy scrapes the stick across the grass a few times and flings it behind the hedge before Flynn can even get his car into the driveway. Flynn is home late from work, and driving up he saw it in the darkness, the small flame eating the end of the stick. The boy is alone on the front lawn in a red T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He stands very still, pale arms crossed behind his back. The smoke hovers around his head like an apparition. “Ryan,” Flynn says, rising from the car with a huff, “I thought we'd put this fire business behind us.”

His son's eyes are like his wife's eyes, which are like an owl's eyes, hardly blinking and gigantic. Nothing else about his wife is very owl-like. She is skinny as a ferret and not at all nocturnal. She's in bed by eight, or seven-thirty if
Jeopardy!
's a repeat.

“Whatever you used, give it here,” Flynn says, and Ryan forfeits a small yellow matchbook. Flynn shoves the matches deep into his pocket and grabs the stick out of the hedge. The dark ash smears his hand, and with his index finger he smudges his son's
nose. When he opens the front door, the boy darts under his arm and runs ahead down the carpeted hall to his room.

By the time Flynn gets there Ryan is already under the covers with the stuffed blue bear, Mookie. His wife used to call her older sister Mookie, but that was years ago, before cancer killed Mookie at the nearly young age of fifty-one. His wife doesn't like to talk about her sister's death. “Why Mookie?” his wife is always asking. Meaning, why, of all names in the world for a bear, why
that
one? Ryan and Mookie (the bear) share many common interests: kites, Erector Sets, matches, magnifying glasses, flaming sticks, aerosol sprays. Ryan and Mookie (the aunt) never met unless you count the birth, and Flynn doesn't, as his son was not then a real, thinking human animal.

Watching his son sleep—or rather, pretend to sleep—he swishes a toothpick back and forth across his lower lip. The toothpick is a sorry substitute for a cigarette. He rations out his pack across the week as a means of quitting, and he smoked the last of the day's allowance at work.

Flynn is the activity director at an upscale drug and alcohol treatment center in the mountains, and as such, he arranges outings and adventures for patients—nature walks, movie screenings, theater performances, and so on. Today he drove a van full of recovering addicts to a chain bookstore, which would have been a pleasant excursion if not for the fact that one of the patients hadn't shown up at the appointed time. The missing man—Small Paul with the needle marks between his toes, “Small” because you really could just about fold him into a shoebox—had checked himself in to the center voluntarily, but Flynn had still feared the worst. Along with a nurse he'd spent the rest of the afternoon
going from store to store before finding Paul in a Sharper Image at the mall, testing out back massagers. “Already time to go back?” he asked when he saw them.

Flynn sits down on the end of the bed, and the boy's eyes flicker open, then close again. His brown hair is wild and messy, the small snub nose just above the covers. He's short for his age, just over four feet, but then again so was Flynn at nine.

“I don't need to tell you I'm disappointed,” Flynn says. “Because you already know that.”

The closet door is decorated with Ryan's old school paintings, and on the other side of that door, Flynn knows, there's a black ring burned into the beige carpet, hidden by a doormat. Ryan is not a pyromaniac, or not yet, anyway. The doctor calls him a “fire-starter.” He's more curious than compulsive.

“I'm sorry,” the boy says.

He wonders if it is because of his smoking. If the boy has seen him light too many matches. Does Flynn work too much? Does he not pay the boy enough attention? Should they be playing more catch? Does the boy need hobbies? Flynn's father used to take him fishing and made him gut the fish in the sink behind the house, and at the time he'd hated it but looking back on it makes Flynn smile. Should he take Ryan fishing? Would he like to learn how to weight the line and wipe the gummy knife across his shirt? Is the boy bored? Is it a feeling of boredom? Is it a feeling of not belonging? When he looks inside his heart, does he see clouds or sunshine? Isn't that how the doctor put it?

“This isn't over,” Flynn says, giving his son's foot a gentle squeeze, before going next door, to his wife's room. The boxy television on the edge of her dresser flickers blue across her bedroom.
They sleep separately because of the snoring. His
snoring, not hers. She is asleep, or was, nestled in her mechanized queen bed with the hospital controls. She isn't sick but kept the bed after Mookie died because, supposedly, it helps her back. He flips on her bedroom light, and she moans. She gives him a look like,
Please, not tonight.

“He's doing it again,” he says. “I don't think he ever stopped. I think he's been hiding it from us.”

She rummages for the control, and the bed vibrates into a sitting position. “We should call the doctor first thing,” she says.

“What, so he can squeeze another three hundred dollars from us?”

“The doctor said to call him.”

“He can't fix the problem.”

“And the problem is—what?”

“The problem is a feeling. A feeling of not belonging.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the boy needs friends. He needs to be included. You know, to really
belong
to something.”

Her bed vibrates backward into a reclining position.

“I'm going to sign us up,” he says. “For the Grasshoppers.”

“To be continued,” she says.

•   •   •

Grasshoppers aren't allowed at the father-son Grasshopper Camp until they've been in the program for a full year and earned enough beads. Flynn learns this in one of their brochures. Unfortunately, he's never even taken Ryan to a Grasshoppers meeting.

Flynn goes to see Bill Tierney, a malpractice attorney in town
with an ad on the back of the phone book. Tierney's son, Grayson, is older than Ryan, president of the student body at the elementary school—and a Grasshopper. Tierney is the Head Guide.

The attorney wears a tan suit and offers Flynn a seat on the other side of his desk. Bill Tierney wonders if maybe Flynn would like some pistachio nuts. Bill Tierney is crazy about them. Was Flynn aware that the nuts have been part of the human diet since the Paleolithic? That they're one of only two nuts in the Bible?

“What's the other one?”

“The other what?”

“The other nut in the Bible,” Flynn says.

“Hell, I don't know. Noah? Sorry, bad joke. Let's get down to business. Tell me about yourself.”

“I'm a father,” Flynn says. “And I love my son very much.”

“Yes, of course. Family's got to be number one.”

“Right. And I want my son to feel like he's a part of something bigger than himself.”

Flynn uncrosses his legs and reaches for a pistachio. The shell doesn't want to pry. He admits that he should have signed his son up earlier and that he knows about the requirements for the father-son camp, but he'd be very grateful if the organization could make an exception in the case of his son, Ryan, who's nine years old and who, Flynn thinks, would make a natural Grasshopper. His son is a good boy and loves the outdoors, and the camp would do him so much good. It would be a great fit. Flynn spins the chalky nut between his fingers.

Tierney squints, his mouth hanging open. “I'm sorry,” he says finally. “I was under the impression you were here looking for representation.”

“No,” Flynn says. “I was hoping you could help me. As the Head Guide.”

“Ah,” Tierney says.

“Right.”

Neither of them says anything for a few moments. Not many people know this, but Tierney has a brother named Herbie who's an addict. Flynn has tried to help Herbie at the center, but Herbie doesn't want to be helped. That's how it is with some people. Flynn considers mentioning this now, as a way of creating a bond, but decides against it.

“It would mean so much to my son,” Flynn says.

“Sure, okay.”

“Okay?” Flynn didn't expect it to be so easy.

“Done,” he says, and pretends to sign an invisible piece of paper suspended in the air between them. “The Grasshopper district office is in Charlotte. You can go there and fill out the paperwork, pay up for camp. I'll take care of the rest.” He stands and smoothes the wrinkles from his suit pants.

“Thank you,” Flynn says.

“Glad I could help. Now I'm afraid I need to . . .” His voice trails off as he motions vaguely at his empty desk.

•   •   •

Father and son rise early to depart on a Saturday morning, shafts of sunlight through a rising fog, the birds tweeting in the sycamore tree on the front lawn, its bark hanging like strips of beef jerky. You couldn't ask for a more suitable morning, Flynn thinks.

His wife comes outside in her bathrobe. “Couldn't we just go to the beach?” she asks Flynn, a little upset because after three
years without even using a sick day, Flynn is taking an entire week off from work, and he's not using it to take his whole family on vacation. Instead he's only taking his son to some mysterious camp in the woods. “Are you sure this is what he needs? He won't know any of those kids.”

“This will be good for him,” Flynn assures her. “Kids make friends fast.”

When Ryan comes outside with a bowl of cereal, milk dripping down his chin, she gives him a cell phone. “Pay as you go,” she explains to Flynn. “I'll feel better.” To Ryan, she says, “So you can call me if you want.”

The car is packed with sleeping bags, a tent, an electric lantern with the price-tag sticker still on it, and all the other equipment necessary for two human animals to live comfortably in the woods for five nights. Once they're on the road, the boy is the navigator and is responsible for tracking their progress, his index finger across the atlas, and for calling out each step from the printed directions.

“Grasshopper Pledge,” Flynn quizzes him. “Go.”

“There's a way,” the boy says glumly, “around every wall.”

“The beads you can earn and their colors.”

“Beads of Truth are the red ones. Beads of Mercy are the white ones.”

“And the third?”

The boy shrugs.

“They're black . . .”

“Oh,” Ryan says. “Beads of Skill.”

“And how many beads does it take to move up a level?”

“Six beads.”

“Exactly,” Flynn says. “And you'll have them in no time at all. Last question. The salute.”

Ryan points to his heart with his index finger, and then Flynn does the same.

“Aren't you excited?”

The boy says he's not sure if he's excited. His brown shaggy mop—he hates haircuts—makes his small, narrow face seem even smaller. “What if it, like, rains?”

“That's what the tent is for. We're sharing a tent. That will be fun, right?”

The boy gives him an uncertain look. They drive into the mountains and then down a long road with thick woods the color of katydids and khaki: muted greens and browns. Ryan directs Flynn onto a paved road that turns to gravel, the rocks popping under the tires. Then the gravel road becomes a dirt one, a volcanic cloud of dust behind them in the rearview mirror.

Up ahead, rough beams form an arch over the road. The camp's entrance.

“You should probably put on your uniform now,” Flynn says.

The shirt is yellow cotton with a white rugby collar and the Grasshopper patch sewn over the heart. It hangs loose on Ryan's small, pale body.

Flynn pulls up in front of the director's cabin, and a man in a green T-shirt much too tight for his potbelly comes out with a clipboard. He wants their names. He wants their district number. He's got the pen top in his mouth, a small red ink stain on his bottom lip. What was that last name again? The man's sweat drips down onto the pages. How do you spell that last name? He's shuffling through the pages. That was with a
C
? No, he doesn't see
that one on here. Wait, here it is, on the back. There's a problem. Ryan hasn't met all the requirements for camp. He still needs eighteen beads. That's three levels up from where Ryan is now, which is nowhere, according to the information on the clipboard. Can Flynn show documentation that Ryan has earned even one bead? Flynn can't, of course, but he explains that he's cleared this with Ryan's Head Guide, Bill Tierney, who can sort all this out for them. Special arrangements have been made for Ryan.

The man puffs out his upper lip with his tongue, sniffing at his blond mustache hairs. All right, he says, wait over there. The walkie-talkie, crackling all along, comes off his belt, and he asks for someone named Bryant. Father and son sit together on a bench outside the cabin, slapping mosquitoes off their legs and arms and necks. Flynn didn't bring any bug spray.

Tierney arrives on a golf cart. He's wearing a linen shirt with pink stripes and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. He doesn't smile or wave.

“What can I do you for?” Tierney asks the man with the clipboard.

“This gentleman says you told him he could bring his kid, even though he doesn't have his beads.”

Tierney lean-sits on the front of the golf cart, his arms crossed. “Right,” he says. “I'm sorry. I meant to call the district office about that. This going to be a problem?”

“Maybe,” the man says. “The rules are pretty clear.”

The two men are talking low now, their lips quiet and slow like butterfly wings. Flynn can't hear what they're saying. Tierney laughs a little and pats the man on the back. The man nods and motions to the lake. Tierney nods then. Maybe Flynn should go
over and join them. He can help make this okay. He stands too late. The conference that will determine his son's fate has ended. Bill Tierney strides over to the bench.