Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

An old line of Bet’s; she used to say Felix’s gray-flecked beard and earring made him look like a character off Captain Hook’s ship.

“I’m JT,” the man says, and crumples up the paper. “Mr. Ash got held up at work, and Bet asked if I could come get you. So, here I am.”

“Nice to meet you,” Laura says. “And congratulations.”

“Yes, congrats,” Felix says.

“Thank you. Thanks. I’m out in short-term,” he says.

JT leads the way through the double doors and into the sunlight, his red polo shirt tucked tightly into his neatly pressed khaki pants. The white van at the end of the lot is his. Across the side: JONES & SONS CARPET CLEANERS. “Your chariot,” he says. “The back is full, so we’ll have to all sit up front in the cab.” He opens the passenger door. On the dashboard is a coiled brown and gold snake and, in the driver’s seat, a yellow one with an open mouth and vicious red fangs. “Rubber,” he says, and tosses them on the floorboard.

“Why do you have those?” Laura asks, climbing up first and sliding toward the floorboard transmission.

“Oh,” he says. “Kind of a joke. I work in some rough neighborhoods. We like to say it scares off the criminals. Are you hungry? You need a snack before tonight?”

“We ate some on the plane,” she says. “So, are you excited about the wedding?”

“I can’t wait. I’d do it tomorrow if I could.” He walks around to the driver’s side as Felix joins Laura in the cab. When he’s behind the wheel, “Bet wants the real deal, though — flowers, big white tent, all of it. Can you imagine me in a tux?”

Felix doesn’t take the bait. The van rumbles to life. JT grips the vibrating stick shift and reverses out of the space. Felix has his window down, and once they are on the highway the warm air blows pleasantly across his face.

“It feel good to be back South?” JT asks him. “You’re from around here, aren’t you? Originally, I mean.”

“Not from Atlanta,” Felix says. He grew up in North Carolina but hasn’t lived there since college and no longer considers himself much of a southerner. He has aunts and uncles he doesn’t visit and who would probably dislike him. His parents live in other cities now, Pittsburgh (his mother) and Phoenix (his father), each with different partners. They’ve started entirely new lives for themselves. “A second chapter,” his father called it once. “A page-turner, I’m sure,” Felix said to that. Growing up, Felix had never thought of his parents as particularly unhappy. His father had always opened doors for his mother, and she’d rubbed his neck when it was sore. Sure, his mother would look away disgusted whenever his father belched into his hand, or complain about his habit of never filling a gas tank more than three-quarters; and yes, Felix had once overheard his father call his mother “sexless” to a group of his cigar-smoking buddies, a word his father would pretend to not recognize when a nine-year-old Felix asked for its meaning. That his parents had so rarely argued with each other would later make Felix wonder if the marriage had all been a charade for his sake, an idea that made them seem less like parents and more like actors in a bad play about parenting.

The brown and gold snake is under his foot on the floorboard. He grabs it by the tail and makes it slither up Laura’s bare leg. She slaps it away playfully.

“You know,” Felix says, “I used to have an uncle who kept a rubber snake in his truck.”

“That right?” JT asks.

“Yeah, he said it scared off black people.”

JT is quiet, both hands on the wheel. Laura shoots Felix a quick but discernible look: Please don’t.

“Why are you looking at me like—” Felix begins. “Oh, come on, I’m not saying that’s why JT has a rubber snake in his van.”

“It’s definitely not why,” JT says.

“Right, exactly, and that’s not what I meant. The snake just made me remember about my uncle. That’s all.”

“Your uncle sounds like a lunatic,” Laura says.

“He wasn’t all bad. He taught Bible class to the sixth-graders. He used to take me deer hunting.”

“I can’t imagine you hunting deer,” Laura said. “I can’t imagine you hunting anything. You get queasy at the grocery store looking at the meat behind the glass. You get this funny face—” Her eyes go wide and her lips part a little, like she’s watching a spaceship land. “I always think you’re going to pass out right there in front of the butcher.”

“Ha. Ha,” Felix says. “We both know that’s not true.”

“You’re funny,” JT says, and Felix has to peer across Laura to see that JT means her and not him. He is accustomed to this. People always seem let down to discover that he — a comedian! — is not particularly funny in most situations. His clever one-liners and retorts arrive days too late. He considers himself more of a storyteller than anything else. Tell us a joke, people sometimes request, and his mind goes empty, not even a single knock-knock joke to be found (not that he’s ever told a single knock-knock joke). “It doesn’t work that way,” he usually tells these people, and that it does work that way, for some comedians, is a source of not a little anguish.

• • •

JT drops them off at the hotel and says Mr. Ash will be by in an hour to get them. The engagement party is the next day and tonight the family will eat together at the Ashes’ house. Upstairs in the hotel room — sand-colored wallpaper, white fluffy bedspread, a remote control at the end of the bed — Laura strips down for a quick shower. Felix flips through the channels on the flatscreen and then joins her in the bathroom to examine himself as she towels her hair dry.

“You’re a real piece of work,” she says. “What possessed you to say that about your uncle?”

“About the snakes?” He pastes his toothbrush, then hers. “It’s a true story.”

“Who cares if it’s true? Truth has nothing to do with it. It’s not a great way to start any sort of relationship with the guy.”

“Don’t you wonder, just a little bit, why he had the snake on the dash? It wouldn’t surprise me if—”

“Felix.” Her hair is a damp frizzy explosion of blond. “You don’t mean that.”

“I might.”

“If you feel that way, then I suggest you keep your mouth shut about it. Give the guy a chance. You shouldn’t always assume the worst about people. The last thing you want is to make an enemy of the man who will be raising your son.”

They are talking to each other’s reflections. Felix glances at his own. Geez, Gonuts sometimes says, you look like you just swallowed a furball. The furball: that JT will eventually be closer to Hank than Felix ever could, that Hank will come to think of JT like a father. It is inevitable. The kid is only four, and JT will be the man in his underwear at the breakfast table on Saturday mornings. With proximity, intimacy. Felix will be just some ghost on a phone line.

“Shit, my moisturizer,” Laura says, digging in her orange toiletries bag. “I must have left it.”

Felix unzips his own bag and produces the small plastic travel bottle that he spotted by the sink just before they left the apartment. He stands behind her and rubs some of the lotion into her shoulders. “See, we’re good for each other. I keep you moisturized, and you call me on my bullshit.”

“Well, it’s just that sometimes you’re your own worst enemy.”

“And that’s exactly why I need you here. My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

She bumps him away with her butt and smiles. “Go change.”

He slides into a fresh pair of dark jeans and puts on a gray blazer. “I’m not going downstairs to sit at the bar,” he says. “I’m not going to drink as many whiskey drinks as I can before Bet’s dad gets here.”