Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

We could barely even hear the fireworks. The bullets sang up from the town’s cluster of lights, rising to their designated heights and no higher, where they exploded into shimmering umbrellas of sparks and made noises that arrived late to our ears, noises that after running up our slope of the valley had been reduced to little pops no more impressive than the sounds of string-tethered corks pneumatically thrust from the muzzles of popguns. Pop!.. pop-pop!.. pop! And, like a giant clumsy child with a brimming bucketful of light, the fireworks carelessly splashed their waves of artificial color — red, yellow, blue, green — all over the faces of the mountains on either side of the wide dark valley.

Obviously all the animals on the ranch were terrified of the spectacle, but there was little that could be done to comfort them. They heard the shrieks and bangs distinctly from far away; the elephants felt the vibrations of them in their big flat feet, all the ungulates huddled together for protection; the birds hid their heads beneath their wings and the burrowing animals burrowed deeper into the earth. In their benighted animal minds, stars were not supposed to swing so low. The night was supposed to be silent and dark. These things could be the portents of disaster, the end of the world or the beginning of a new one.

We were sitting on the deck drinking white wine, wine from Mr. Lawrence’s own vineyard. The other chimps had gone to bed. Or, I recall that Larry and Lily had gone to bed — was this before the death of Hilarious Larry? — it couldn’t have been — so it was just Lily who had gone inside to retire for the night. Where was Clever? Clever had curled up and fallen asleep in a deck chair. Lydia is sitting in the hot tub. I am sitting in the hot tub. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence are sitting in the hot tub. It is the Fourth of July. Is Lydia wearing her canary yellow bathing suit? Yes, let’s say she is. So much of her smooth beautiful skin on display for eyes that are not entirely mine. I do not particularly like water — I mean, I drink it, yes, but I don’t like my body being in water — few chimps do. We cannot swim because our bodies are too dense. I just dabble my toes a few millimeters deep into the swimming pool, feel the bone-chilling shock of it, and jerk them back, thereafter flatly refusing to submerge my body any further in the vile stuff. But I don’t mind the feeling of being in a hot tub. The Lawrences’ hot tub was embedded in their deck and shaped roughly like a kidney, a kidney full of warm aquamarine water, caused to glow from within by underwater lights, and steaming and bubbling like a witch’s brew. A hot tub is different from a swimming pool. Lowering oneself into a hot tub is like lowering oneself into a tank full of amniotic fluid, like slipping back into the womb. And the Lawrences’ hot tub featured a certain switch that when switched incited torrents of bubbles to shoot into the water from a series of holes in the tub’s smoothly curving inner walls. I would press the switch again and again, and position myself right in front of one of these holes to let my body be massaged by the pressure of the jet thunderously farting out a hot stream of bubbles. We were all sitting in this hot tub. There were no more fireworks. The fireworks had come and gone away.

Are the humans drunk? I don’t know. Probably. They never permit me to drink very much. Each of us is sipping a glass of white wine. No, I am not. I have already had my allotted fill tonight, but the three humans are still drinking wine. They are holding and drinking from glasses full of wine while actually sitting in the tub at the same time, occasionally setting the glasses on the surface of the deck. Everyone has his or her arms stretched over the lip of the tub in poses of relaxation. They are talking. Mrs. Lawrence and Lydia are enjoying some sort of conversation, while Mr. Lawrence contentedly looks on. I am enjoying the sensation of the bubbles massaging my back. I don’t remember what is said here, but I think Regina Lawrence is the one who just said it, and I remember that whatever it is that has just been said has caused Lydia to blush. I can almost feel the temperature of the already-warm water rise a degree or two from the sudden heating of Lydia’s blood.

“No, no,” Lydia denies, speaking to Mrs. Lawrence as I glance over at her. Lydia is shaking her head vigorously back and forth, and her hair — which at this point has grown long again — is wet, and slaps her face as she shakes her head. But Lydia is not seriously upset: she is smiling, smiling a smile that threatens to erupt into a laugh, despite the fact that she is vehemently denying whatever Mrs. Lawrence has just accused her of. Her almost-laughter is half-gleeful and half-nervous. Is she drunk? My God, yes: she’s drunk.

“Don’t think we’re stupid,” says Mrs. Lawrence, smiling also, to soften the aggressiveness of the comment. Regina Lawrence’s titanic breasts are pushed together by the top of her crimson bathing suit. She is leaning into the area of her husband’s body where his lean arm meets his chest, which is wet and furry with curly white hair. “I can tell when a woman’s in love.”

Lydia says nothing. The gods of Smile and Frown war for dominance over Lydia’s expression. After a long struggle, Smile emerges victorious. Then she laughs, but covers her mouth as if her laughter were a cough or a hiccup.

“Don’t worry, darling,” says Regina Lawrence. “We’re no puritans ourselves.”

I look again at Lydia, whose smile and laughter have gone from her mouth, and whose eyes are now staring down into the aquamarine depths of the warm, steaming water. I look into the water, too, trying to see what she might be looking at. Then I look up at the stars. Stars! Stars! Then my gaze settles halfway between the water and the stars, and I look at Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence, sitting directly across from us in the hot tub. I notice that a cloud of tension, without my realizing exactly when, has recently entered the airspace between us. I look over at Clever Hands, my mute companion, who is fast asleep in the canvas seat of a lounge chair on the deck, about fifteen feet away from us. Clever lies in the chair, slack-limbed and snoring. Sukie, the dog, is curled up asleep on the deck directly beneath Clever’s chair. I look back at Mr. Lawrence, and see what may or may not be a wild look of sex in his eyes behind the foggy shields of his glasses.

Then I see something floating on the surface of the water. The bubbles rising from the bright depths of the tub bat the thing around on the steaming surface of the water. It looks like a lily pad, or a dark red flower, some sort of floating vegetable matter for a frog in a swamp to sit upon. It floats around aimlessly in the water between us, in the middle of the tub. I stare at it, transfixed. I realize that it is the bottom portion of Regina Lawrence’s swimsuit.

In the vast darkness beyond the deck, the night is ferocious with the rhythmic chirping of crickets. There must be a cricket hiding under every leaf out there. The din they make deafens one, their incessant krreepa, krreepa, krreepa . Very far away, a band of coyotes cackle in the mountains. For a moment, nobody moves.

Seeming eons and probable moments later, more articles bubble up to join the limp red rag of material floating on the surface of the smoking blue-green water. Regina Lawrence sets her wineglass on the surface of the deck, settles into the water till it comes up to her chin, then resurfaces, and as she does, the upper portion of her swimsuit now also floats to the top of the water. The voluminous cups of her swimsuit top drift around in the glowing water like the bulbous red eyes of a sea monster whose body lurks just below the surface. Now Mr. Lawrence gradually worries his Speedo down his legs, and that too rises up to the surface from below the gurgling water. I look blankly across the water at them, across these three pieces of fabric floating in the tub like dishrags, and at Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence, whose blurry and pale bodies are now completely naked beneath the bubbles and the steam that wafts up into the atmosphere from the pale blue-green water. Mrs. Lawrence’s breasts bob on the surface of the water for all the world like the bodies of two plucked geese. And her nipples. I must draw special attention to her nipples. What nipples! I’ve never seen such nipples. Lydia — Lydia has these tiny pink buttons for nipples, like the sweet little eyes of a white rabbit — but these ? — these nipples are like big fat mushy cookies! I cannot help but stare! I flick a sidelong glance at Lydia. What in the world is she doing? Her breathing is heavy and irregular. Her breathing is heavy and irregular, coming into her in gulps of breath and going out of her in staggered shivers. I recognize that look on her face: the inner corners of the eyebrows tending upward, the eyelids half-closed over eyes that are not seeing, an expression of pleasure so intense it is almost an expression of pain. I recognize that look on her face and I recognize that cadence in her breathing. This is what she looks like, this is how she breathes when we are in the preliminary stages of making love. I look down: down into the glowing blue water. It’s hard to see in the steaming, wobbling water, but my eyes are able to ascertain the following information: (one) Regina Lawrence has at some point in the recent past diagonally extended one of her trunk-like naked legs across the middle of the tub; (two) she has placed her bare foot in the crux of Lydia’s groin; (three) the big toe of this foot has managed to maneuver itself beneath the fabric of Lydia’s canary yellow swimsuit; (four) this toe is currently employed in the business of sensuously rubbing the flesh of what may or may not be Lydia’s clitoris. The naked Lawrences begin to scoot toward her, with clear prurient intent. At this point Lydia inadvertently drops the glass of wine that she has been holding in her hand this whole time, but about which she has recently forgotten. It happens like this: deeply distracted, her fingers involuntarily loosen their grip on the thing, which plops into the aquamarine water; the wine in it spills into the water; for a brief moment the wineglass floats on the surface like a boat before the bowl of the glass fills up and the vessel capsizes, goes under, and plummets, surprisingly quickly, straight down into the tub, where it gets caught in one of the thundering streams of bubbles issuing from the holes in the sides of the tub, which shoots it through the water and smashes it against the other side of the tub. The glass shatters, noiselessly.