John McManus: Fox Tooth Heart

“There’s stuff to learn.”

“I’ll learn it.”

“I don’t want you becoming a mark.”

“Teach me,” I said, and he began to. As he instructed me in spotting marks, I buzzed with pride. My vision was tilting to one side. Although I didn’t know it, my brain had ceased making new memories. Did I like girls? Did I like penthouse suites and poker? Yes, yes, and yes, but before we could enjoy those things, I awoke at sunrise on the levee slope, with trash strewn around me.

My father stood over me with a brown paper bag. “Feel like a doughnut?”

I took one. I could smell bilgewater, and feel shadow memories lurking in my pounding head as I leaned to puke.

He tossed the bag down. “It’s been fun,” he said, “but we’d best head home.”

“Yeah, I’ve had fun,” I replied, standing up, and out of shame or stubbornness I’d been saying similar things ever since. If someone had been around to tell it to that morning after the poker game, I’d have said it again.

Licking a finger to scrub 1st blackout off my hand, I went and found my father snoring in a trundle bed. It was a relief that he was alone. After all, what would I have said to Clara? Hide your elephants?

I would have broken her heart, I thought, wandering out into a windy, cold day. Gracie stood by the fence, eating some clover. I walked down to her.

“We need to get you out of here,” I said.

What’s it to you? she seemed to ask, raising her head.

“You’re in a lot of danger.”

So are all elephants, she said.

My dad cheats people and lies.

Maybe I cheat and lie too.

For a moment I was shaken by déjà vu. My next album’s about you, I told her, at which point the tenor shifted in our exchange.

All along she had communicated without words, but now she conveyed no feelings either. She just put up a shield so my feelings would bounce back at me, like my concern that was driven only by my new songs, and my desire to cancel out bad deeds with good ones. “No, it’s not like that,” I said, fiddling nervously in my pockets. I felt a cell phone, not my own.

I looked in its music library. Both my albums were there.

“Listen,” I said, cuing “Four-Leaf Cover,” because I needed Gracie to perceive the sadness I felt about other people’s pain. Ugly or no, the song will demonstrate it, I thought until a calliope horn sounded, redolent of circus sleaze.

Who was worse to an elephant: a killer of young women or a child who begged to see the circus? I skipped to the next track, “Mom.” “She killed herself,” I said to explain the ugliness of “Mom.” Gracie was still plucking weeds. Who fucking cares? she seemed to ask, until I recalled that she’d heard me play it already, on the porch.

Then it hit me: she recalled it today because she would recall it forever.

By playing the song, I wasn’t just making Gracie like me, I was stashing my catalogue in elephant memory.

I’ve always believed life has no value if no one will remember you in a hundred years. Until now, though, I’d been thinking only in terms of people. Now I saw that Gracie was my portal into eternity: if elephants survived, elephants would remember me. So I knew I had to level with her, if I wanted to get on top of my story.

Already I’d confessed by accident, via fleeting thoughts, so it shouldn’t have been hard. I sucked in air, steeling myself. “Last week it was ninety-five in Austin,” I said, delivering words at a small fraction of the traveling speed of memories. “The air was humid, sultry, maybe Africa feels that way?”

Gracie was pretending not to be bothered, but I could see her listening. “All day we drank on the rooftop deck of this shabby marina bar,” I said to her. “Billy, our bassist, was afraid we’d get too plastered for the show, and Aisling told him, ‘Don’t be a gaywad, I’ll find us cocaine.’”

Like everyone she’d ever taunted, Billy folded to her demand. That’s the kind of girl she was, I explained to Gracie. We toasted and drank. In that winter heat we were matched to our time and place, said Ren, the guitarist. I agreed. We improvised a song about it and sang it with some politicians who’d driven up from Uvalde. In the distance the Austin skyline poked above the juniper like little filaments of wire. I had probably read that description in a book, but I put it in the lyrics just to show off. “You have a gift,” said one of the politicians. I nodded, smiling. Hearing I had a gift was why I wrote songs. I loved for people to think of me as a genius who gambled ever more carelessly with his life. It turned me on to imagine dying young. By sound check we could barely walk. In the nick of time, though, Aisling came through as promised, and what a show: our shirts off for hours of noise and love that the crowd really felt for us, it wasn’t the drug tricking us into believing it. Girls loved us, boys did too, and a few of them invited us afterward to a mansion on a cliff above the foam-green Colorado.

As meticulously as I could, I pieced through that night: Aisling disappearing, some girls leading me into a vanishing pool where we stripped and swam and made out until one said, “You two kiss,” and I turned to see Billy there. Gaywad, I thought, guiding his head in with my palm. I made love to his tongue with mine. Was he weeping or only wet? He seemed to like it in any case. I help people, I thought as I hoovered up another line. The girls’ skin gleamed in reflected moonlight. There was a full moon, and it had risen over foliage so Californian that I decided we were back home on the West Coast.

As I dried off, a man with faraway hillbilly eyes and a liter of gin said, “I’d like to book you for South by Southwest.”

“If you’ll give me some gin.”

“This is filtered water.”

“It says gin right there.”

“Bar’s on the terrace.”

“Guess we’ll play Coachella instead,” I said, exulting at my wit. I turned to recount the scene to the girls, but the pool was empty. So I wandered into the garage to find Aisling alone in the passenger seat of a Jaguar XF.

I got in beside her. The keys were in the ignition, turned to accessories, and “Lumber” was on. I remember because she skipped over it with a jab of her finger. Why, was it a weak song? “It’s weak because it’s about you,” I said, and so on until she called me a con artist like my no-good dad.

I couldn’t help it, I turned the engine and gunned the car in reverse, sending the garage door crumpling off its runners.

We went screeching backward down a steep driveway. “Cheaper ways to jerk off, pissy-pants,” Aisling said.

“I’m wet cause I was swimming with two girls.”

“Same name, same acorn, same tree,” she said, as I spun us around toward a far cluster of city lights.

I think she was too busy mocking me to buckle her seatbelt. My songs were plagiarized, my cock was small, I would never feel real love. Over her drivel I couldn’t think which way led back to Sunset Boulevard. At a split I veered abruptly downhill. Her stomach must have fallen out, because she shut up.

“I don’t think this is the way,” she said.

“Depends where you’re going.”

“This goes nowhere.”

Never would I have asked my fiancée the way to somewhere, but damned if a GPS didn’t power up and advise, “Left turn, mate,” in a congenial cockney accent.

“Follow directions,” said Aisling with the force of a gavel strike, leaning in to push the wheel left with all her might. We went spinning off the shoulder. The car skidded across talus until the ground fell away and we were sailing into space. Ahead of us a cantilever bridge spanned a wide, moonlit river. I had never seen this section of Los Angeles. Aisling howled. Was she upset? “We’re only having a wreck,” I said, before we hit the water.