John McManus: Fox Tooth Heart

“Who put this on?” I asked.

“Mack,” said Ike Senior, pointing to the bearded professor-type to my right.

“My girlfriend downloads stuff,” said Mack.

“Porn,” said the black guy to my left, and the redhead guffawed as if that was funny. I had met the redhead at the bar. Frank was his name. And the table had expanded — the sort of unreal detail that jars you awake from nightmares, except there was only a leaf in the table.

“Singer sounds cute,” Clara said.

“Something less gay would be nice,” said Ike Senior, reaching back to the dial of what I saw was a satellite radio.

My dirge about the feral child Kaspar Hauser gave way to Merle Haggard. I calmed down. Mack dealt me a pair of kings.

“Dollar,” my father said.

Everyone pushed a white chip into the pot but Clara, who stood and turned the dial back to my song. “I folded so I could put this back on,” she explained.

It occurred to me they would think it a tell, how my thumping heart made my shirt flutter as in a breeze, but I didn’t care about my kings. Not even with a flop of king-five-four. Sirius XM won’t play you twice in a row without a reason to. Newsworthiness, for instance. This is the end, I thought, placing a bet only in order to look normal. It got raised and matched until the pot held seventy-five dollars. For the turn Mack produced another five, giving me a full house. Meanwhile “Denouement” had reached its unsubtle pinnacle. I squeezed the table leg and kept matching the outrageous bets.

The river came: another five.

“All in,” Ike Senior said.

“See you,” I replied, pushing my chips in. The song was about to end, and with it my freedom. You didn’t have to know Ike Senior well to see he would bluff his fortune away, swindle his lover, give up his son all in a day’s work. But then the music stopped and no deejay said anything, and he laid down a nine-five off-suit.

“You know how a Dolly Parton works,” he said, raking in his winnings.

Clara unplugged a phone from the stereo. Merle Haggard came back on.

It goes without saying that I’d been drinking all day. In my relief I drank more. I bought back in for fifty dollars. No one knows what I’ve been thinking, I told myself, not even Gracie. The wall had blocked her, and she wasn’t real. None of this seemed real. Aisling had never been alive.

I’m rich, I can afford lawyers, I was thinking when I heard the word ivory , and turned to hear Mack whisper to Frank, “A million, in dollars.”

“As opposed to what?” said Frank, which was when I recalled Haley referring to a husband by that name.

“Yen, retard,” said Mack.

The ivory markets, I thought with alarm.

I tried to meet Clara’s eyes, but somehow she wasn’t at the table.

“Is there something to eat?” I said, because I needed to sober up.

“Tired of eating my friend’s wife?” said Mack.

“In my home, my son eats who he wants,” said Ike Senior.

“Give me a second,” I told them, standing up.

“Take all the time in the world.”

I walked to the refrigerator, found it empty. Behind me the men were laughing. The game had stopped; they were just sitting there scheming. I needed to figure this out. Was it for the smooth running of a con that Frank had let me borrow his wife? Protect Gracie, I thought, but I’d known her only two days. Look at the girl I’d loved for years.

Truth was, I’d have struck Gracie dead along with every elephant if it would have brought Aisling back.

It occurred to me to put this in one of my songs, specify in the liner notes that a fraction of profits would go to the sanctuary.

I went looking for my notepad. Along the way, I got lost, because I awoke in daylight with the words 1st blackout written on my hand. First blackout, I lay thinking, awaiting the headache. This latest one might have been my seven hundredth or two thousandth, but I recalled one thing, the tusks. Frank and Mack had mentioned ivory. What I didn’t recall was who Frank and Mack were or why they knew my songs. If they’d seen the Jaguar. If I’d forged any plan.

In hope of dredging up useful memories, I thought back to my first blackout, on New Year’s Day, 2000.

On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Ike Senior had arrived in Port Arthur after some years absent and announced he was kidnapping me. “If I’ve been praying for it, that’s not the verb,” my mother replied, so it came to pass that my namesake drove me across cypress swamps and oil fields to New Orleans where he said, “A whiskey before the end of the world?”

To shake my head no set bargaining in motion: you choose the label, you keep the change, we’ll sit by the river — except my long-lost father gestured not to a river but to a steep, grassy hill that rose twice my height above our dry position. As if it took no effort to fool a twelve-year-old. As if you could do it in your sleep. So I couldn’t help retorting, “That’s a hill, you sorry bastard, there’s no river.”

Ike Senior looked older to me then than he did twelve years later on the elephant farm. He aged years before my eyes, this man I self-consciously believed had broken my heart. “I’ve lied a few times, but give a sorry bastard a last chance.”

Chanting fuck fuck fuck fuck to staunch my hemorrhage of sympathy, I followed my father upslope. Let’s get this chance over with, I was thinking as we crested the grassy hill to behold a sea lapping at a shore higher than the city.

“Gasp away,” he said, earning several more years of my trust. Forever after, if I saw the French Quarter in photographs, my shame rose to that hundred-year floodplain where I’d apologized for hours on end. “Don’t dwell on it,” he kept telling me that night, which didn’t reassure me until my first sip of Jim Beam. Suddenly it felt like the sun was bursting into the night to pour energy into me. It made Ike Senior happy, I saw as much, because we were feeling it together. Years later I would tell Spin I’d found my tribe at 11:59 that night, when a beautiful song I’d never heard beckoned from a bar and he said, “Neil Young.”

Fireworks exploded above us. “Who’ll be the first chick to suck my cock in the year 2000?” shouted a man in the crowd.

“Tawdry ending to the century,” remarked Ike Senior, a statement around which I would build an EP a decade later. We began the new century on a terrace of the Margaritaville Café. “If this were a film,” he said, “I’d take you to meet the whores.”

“Huh?” I asked, as he poured bourbon into our Cokes.

“One of those flicks where the old man calls his kid ‘Kid.’”

I felt a thrill at this open maw of uncharted country, but I was afraid.

“The father wants to help his son come of age, but the son starts hating him. Father shown to be a failure.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t the whores worry it’s a sting?”

“Oh,” I said, imagining myself drunk the next day, drunk through high school. If the whores didn’t worry, it was because they were drunk.

“Has your mother said what I do?”

“You’re a con man,” I whispered.

“Folks can’t hear you.”

“You’re a con man,” I said a little louder, still afraid of him, trying to lock eyes with any wasted stranger.

“No one but you knows it.”

“Mom knows.”

“She guessed it. To you, I’m admitting it.” And just like that, he drew me in. “Who else can I trust? No one, that’s who else. And I’ll tell you what, Junior, not an hour goes by when I don’t miss you so much.”

Tears sprang to his eyes. How could I have judged them to be false, when after years of absence he sat before me weeping from both eyes?

“I want to live with you,” I said.