Adam Johnson - Emporium

Again, one eye points down, and the way he has to look out of the top of it humbles him in a way I don’t expect.

Over the intercom, the dad says, “The Rebs are kicking off.” Marty ignores him, even though the barking in the background makes it sound like his father is being eaten by wolves or something. With the static on the intercom, I imagine a man on a radio in Africa. Or a pilot with hydraulic trouble, cutting up with the tower.

There is a Polaroid taped to the wall, and I know this must be Tasha. She’s everything I hoped she’d be: posed in a skydiving dragsuit, her chi-chis are perfect, even through billowy orange nylon, as she stands above a dark and sleeping DC-3.

I nod toward the photo. “Who’s the fox?”

“That’s Tasha, the love of my life. We almost died together.”

“That when you messed up your face?”

Jimbo looks at me like, You fuck, we had ground rules.

“Car crash,” Marty says.

“Rough deal,” I tell him. “Jimbo says you can’t remember most stuff.”

“Some stuff.”

“At least you had Tasha.” We glance at the wall. “You couldn’t forget her.”

Marty’s not sure if I’m dicking with him or not. “She says we were just dating before the crash, but I know it was more than that. On the outside she was a stranger, and I couldn’t say much about her life, but I knew her, you know?”

Marty says this, and my head wanders across eight time zones, a continent away. I find myself looking through the snake cage to the wall beyond, thinking about the boy in the next room.

“It doesn’t bite,” Marty says.

“What?”

“Its mouth is open to check you out. It has glands that can see your heat.”

Sure enough, the snake’s mouth is open. It has three loops around a pine ceiling beam, and it screws itself down some, tail sucking up into the coil of its square trunk, head unreeling to arc closer to my heat.

“What’s with the snake?” I ask.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Let’s feed it,” Jimbo says.

“No, it ate last week.”

Jimbo lifts his eyebrows. “Meow,” he says.

“Meow,” Marty says.

“What about the caiman — you still got the caiman?” Jimbo asks Marty, then looks at me. “Wait till you see the fucking caiman.”

I think of the Cayman Islands, which my mom says is the worst route there is. After Tammy dies, my mother covers her schedule there for a while, but she won’t even speak of the layovers. They don’t have any laws down there, she says. You will never know, is all she tells me. But after a couple years with Ted my mother changes her tune, and they even pop over to beach bum a time or two. Tammy is never pulled from under the D.C. river ice, and Mom likes to say Tammy’s really just laying low in the Caymans, high on piña coladas and that special light they have down there, playing baccarat with the boys at the Royale.

Marty sees the confusion on my face. “A caiman’s a kind of crocodile,” he says, “from Central America.”

“You have a crocodile?”

“It’s a kind of crocodile.”

“Bullshit.”

Jimbo smiles.

We go out back to see the caiman. There is a blue pool with green patio furniture, all surrounded by silver fencing that leads to the base of the bluff above. Everything looks cool, my hands are in my pockets, and the sun is bright in my eyes. Then the wolves come at us, sprinting across a triangular yard of close-cropped yellow grass with their long necks down, their rolling haunches kicking out behind them. The chain-link fence between us isn’t even chest high — four, four and a half feet at best. When they reach the fence, they are coming over, I know it, and the assault at hand is something I feel first as a rattle in my breath and then as a loosening in my veins. Instead, they plunge to the base of the fence, legs splayed, and snap at us out of the sides of their mouths as if they are chewing the metal sprinkler heads.

“Shut those damn wolves up,” Marty’s father says from the patio. He is shirtless, in swim trunks, basting a mounded platter of meat with a sauce-stiffened brush, the kind you use to paint a house.

“They’re only half wolf, Dad. Half Mackenzie, half malamute.”

“I’ll kill them, Marty. I swear,” his father says in a soft way, speaking to meat he dabs with care.

For now though, the wolves are barking machines, vicious and ceaseless, noxious as tire fires. Marty walks, arms crossed, past the pool, until he stands looking down over the short fence in admiration at their snarling faces, as if big, mean animals were a rarity in this world.

Jimbo follows suit. He kneels before the fence and touches their wet noses whenever snapping teeth catch in the chain link. In a sweet, childlike voice, he insults them. “Come to Daddy, you iddle widdle teethy fucks,” he says, and pinches a nose, prompting one wolf to reel back and pop the other’s folded ear.

“Christ,” Marty’s father yells. “Leave the damn things be. It’s Saturday. The Rebs are playing.” The woman who first answered the door slides a blue-screened TV out the kitchen pass-through, and Marty’s father turns all the knobs on the intercom, shouting “Game time” into every room.

Because of all the Wild Kingdom episodes I talk about, my mom tells Ted I’m a big nature fan. One Sunday morning at the SkyLounge, he brings me the gift of a “Safariland” snow globe he says is from Africa, though there’s something like Safariland in Florida, too. The globe features plastic cheetahs, giraffes, and gazelles in brown grasslands, racing full hilt into a surprise blizzard. It is Hecho en Mexico .

So I’m suspicious of the wolves, which are at once completely unreal in this Vegas backyard, yet so obviously dangerous I feel it in my toes. To a lesser degree, I feel the same way about a family barbecue, which is something I’ve never been to.

Somehow satisfied with the wolves at hand, Marty stares up at the imposing rock formations above. Out in the bright light of day, the scars on Marty’s face pronounce themselves with the clear slickness of sexual skin. I follow his gaze up to the communications tower, and the hard throb of the red light on top hypnotizes me. It’s the red light I look for with my current meter all day at Futron, and this red seems right, the way, after looking into a million circuits, you can just feel when one’s going to go reject on you.

Above the tower, a jet splits the October sky, wavering and adjusting on approach to LAS. Its nose floats much lower than a DC-9. This is a Lockheed L-1011.

I know the outlines of airplanes because, at sixteen, I spend a weekend making marker drawings of jetliners and quizzing my mother as we sit on a gold-comforted hotel bed in Michigan. When she gets all the flash cards right, I know she will pass her United test in the morning and move to Detroit the following week. The L-1011 is an easy one: its wingtips curve up at the ends, so from below they look cut off.

Ted tells me he can fly a jet, if push comes to shove, if that’s what it comes down to. I don’t have much to say to that. The statement somehow implies my father doesn’t have what it takes, when it comes down to it, which is why he may or may not be dead. I tell Ted there’s a god of flying. Rickimus maybe. Rick something or other. Something-something-rus, for sure.

Marty’s father tries a softer tone. He is standing at the grill with a long fork, and the heat from the coals is enough to distort the edges of things, to make the brown of the roof and the blue of the sky trade places for an instant. “Come on, Marty,” he says, “bring your friends over for some grub. The Runnin’ Rebs are playing. They’re your favorite. They’re playing Arizona. Remember that big game against Arizona a few years back? You loved that game.”