Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

“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.

The 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?