Animals
By Corey Mertes
This is a story about a friend of mine, Wink Elliot, and the part he played in a violent and grotesque incident. Actually, friend might be overstating things a bit. We met at a party in Mission Hills. I had wandered into the vast, baroque gaming room of our host, a colleague of my father’s and, as I later learned, Wink’s father, too, and discovered Wink drunkenly pontificating about the virtues of progressive taxation to a trio of discomfited millionaires. That audacity, together with my visible amusement, formed the basis of our initial bond. Later that month we ran into each other purely by chance, at a speakeasy in the Crossroads, where you whisper the password through a slot in the door and the combo plays free jazz wearing dashikis. The part he played is a deliberate evasion; he was both perpetrator and victim of the crime. But he was the one who ended up in jail.
He had grown up in a house that aspired to be a mansion. A service road separated the freeway from the line of spacious new dwellings, his own family’s fronted by Corinthian columns and a treeless yard remarkable for its statuary commemorating the profligacy of imperial Rome. In the backyard they had a pool in the shape of a sperm.
In high school Wink trained at cross-country around their subdivision’s man-made lake. His mother smuggled Dum Dum into Superbowl XVII. Like her, Wink harbored a secretive nature. When he and his wife parted the previous March, he stole back her sapphire earrings and buried them behind his mother’s begonias. By summer he was renting an apartment again. It was three miles from where the incident would occur, a distance he could no longer run without stopping.
The day had been hot and humid even for August. He stopped for a meal with the intention of later catching at home two litigants whose work addresses the office didn’t have on file. Orange light from the setting sun filtered through the diner’s blinds like lava.
His job at the time was serving process: petitions, subpoenas, summonses to court. Twenty-five dollars for each legally valid delivery. It was his fifth job since quitting what had previously passed as a career in the promising new field of cybersecurity. This one was by far the dirtiest. Earlier that day an East Side barber had cussed him out in a shop full of clubby patrons. A manager at Tension Envelopes had crumpled up the papers and thrown them at his feet.
Sometimes he would glance at the petitions out of curiosity. The one that caught his eye at dinner did so because its address fell among the stately homes off Ward Parkway, not the usual neglected districts. The petitioner, a landscaper, was accusing one Kelly Brock of failing to pay for construction of a terraced garden. Following an argument, she allegedly used her Bentley to force his truck into a ditch.
A woman buzzed him past the tall wrought-iron gate and he crept along a brick road through a stand of umbrella pines and a sea of rose verbena. Next to a large pond the road arced into a circular drive centered around topiary shrubs. Beyond it loomed a palatial limestone residence as solid and formidable as a planet.
Beveled windows flanking the front door divided the living room into a patchwork of prisms. Nevertheless, he could see that she wore golden silk pajamas and was trailed by dogs, as many as one dozen. A Dalmatian heeled at her command and a frisky Bichon Frise sought her attention by circling. When she opened the door, she was younger than he’d imagined. Long tortoiseshell hair framed a perfectly symmetrical face like a wig on a mannequin. In the background, a man he hoped was a friend or a cousin but soon understood to be her lover played a minuet by Chopin—or maybe it was Bach—on a gleaming grand piano.
“What’s this?” she said, unsealing the petition. She was not wearing a ring. He stood there dumb, neglecting to recite his line announcing that she’d been served. She failed too, as she read the first page, to respond with the usual defendant’s dismay. One side of her mouth turned up to form an apostrophe—the mark, he imagined, of a possessive disposition. Her blue eyes swelled. He lingered.
“Gaston!” she called out suddenly. The piano stopped. Could that really be his name?
“That little spic is suing me!” she laughed. It was the crooked laugh of the all-powerful. Gaston found it amusing too.
“Sen͂or Garcia,” he said wryly, “will learn what it means to be countersued.”
The woman began to close the door, still chuckling with what, at that point, could most charitably be defined as circumscribed charms—but that he found positively dazzling.
“Oh,” she said, realizing Wink was still there. On a pedestal sat a large bowl brimming with cash. She handed him a ten-dollar bill.
Whatever impulse it was, whatever incalculable synaptic connections were made, when he passed their cream-colored Bentley, license plate H0TNSPCY, on his way back to his car, he stopped to insert his own key into the driver’s-side door. Naturally it didn’t fit. He looked to the sky at that moment and found, in a flash of neuro-transmissions, like Kepler, a universal form. He checked the handle. The Bentley was unlocked, so he got in.
With a similar shortsightedness he had quit his job at CyberSafe. He believed his wife would understand. She was lying on the couch, reading a book.
“You did what?” she said.
Her tone made him tight in the gut. “I quit. I had to . . . I couldn’t take it anymore.”
The soughing of the wind kept startling the cat. His wife slammed the bedroom door. He was being honest that he had reached his limit. There had been evidence of flagging motivation: three-hour lunches, the lies to his boss. When his wife finally came out, she said she didn’t figure on marrying a deadbeat. After a long fight he agreed to see a therapist.
He placed his hands on the leather-padded wheel. The sun disappeared with no sign of returning. Security lights turned on automatically above the scarlet awnings and revealed beside the patio a shotgun aviary framed out of wood, and beyond that a partially finished garden half-encircled by a ditch, no doubt the scene of the landscaper’s claim. Inside, Kelly and Gaston lay entwined on a burgundy chaise. Wink noted a yellow carriage house behind him, used either for horses or as a servants’ quarters. It reminded him of a brief period when he had lived in Los Angeles in some failed blind effort to escape. He began dating an actress there named Laura Klein. She lived in a yellow duplex. He had seen her for the first time in a play, some tragic romance, and her heated performance had moved him, it had touched the entire audience. With every word and gesture, she’d convinced him there was more honesty and hope in the ecstasy of noble passion than in all the joyless commandments of the world.
Their first date was magical. He picked her up at home. In a playful ruse he offered her a single chocolate kiss every half hour. She poured shots of Polish vodka and they drove to The Palomino, where Johnny Shines opened for Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. In the car on the way back she gave him a hummer. By their third date, at the zoo, he was falling in love.
Then she stopped returning his calls. Days passed, a week, two. One day he thought he saw her in a crowded grocery store. The woman turned his way before pressing forward out of sight. He scuttled after her, up and down aisles, like a laboratory mouse on cocaine. Suddenly they were face to face.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Ha ha ha.” She’d been busy, she insisted. Rehearsals for a new play. Sorry, and all that. She described her co-star. “Such physicality,” she said. “Such presence.”
He’d played opposite Al Pacino in some movie, she went on. She didn’t say so but she was fucking the guy, that much was clear. Not Al Pacino, thank God. Or would that have been better?
“Ah,” he said blankly. “Physicality . . . and presence.”
Within a month his bleak Hollywood experiment was over.
They hadn’t all turned out that bad. The first “serious” one, in college, was an ultra-feminist whose abusive father had died a year before and whose mother was the highest-ranking female in the Pentagon. She flew in from D.C. and took them to dinner. Some fancy French restaurant named after a species of turtle. Wink is double majoring in art history and astronomy, the girlfriend said.
“Well,” the mother responded without looking up from her menu. “They’ll be beating down the doors.”
When he admitted he didn’t know how to order, the mother suggested the Ragoût de Flageolets et Jarret d’Agneau, spoken like a crusty native. He chose the filet mignon instead, and said it wrong on purpose. When she corrected him, he waited until she was looking down before flashing her a splay-fingered mock salute, like Hawkeye Pierce. The girlfriend suppressed a giggle. Her bare foot found his crotch just before the soup arrived. Later, while she fucked him silly in the dorm, they alternated giving each other orders.
He heard she teaches political science now in Mexico City and writes books about the Institutional Revolutionary Party. “Dammit!” he cried suddenly. The ignition rejected his key. Kelly Brock appeared at the window caressing a Chow Chow in her arms. She formed half a blinder with her palm and, squinting, pressed her forehead against the glass. He could read her lips: “What the hell,” she was saying. She said something to lover boy, who straightened up on the couch and retrieved from a bureau a crowbar stowed in a black canvas bag. What a memory that triggered! The infamous gym bag. Wink standing by the closet with the gray bag in his arms, the one with Dunn & Sons Development and his father-in-law’s company insignia on a metal plate beneath the handle, wondering when and why Hank had been there, and wasn’t Hank’s gym bag a distressed denim? His wife burst open the front door, took one step, and froze. Panic stoppled his throat like a wine cork.
“So now you know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“The bag, Jeremy—” She had made a mistake. She walked toward the couch looking at the floor, thinking of a way out.
He unzipped the bag and held up the unfamiliar clothes, he opened the wallet. After a long silence she said, “You brought this on yourself.”
“Get out.”
“Who just quits a good job like that? Jesus H.”
The bag hit the door. “Get out!” He pointed frantically as if directing children from a burning school.
She walked calmly to the door, picked up the bag. On the way to the bedroom, she said, “The condo is in my name, remember?”
In the coming days he may or may not have magnified the humiliation by riding the elevator at Dunn, hour after hour, hoping, until the moment security asked him to leave, to fabricate some kind of encounter.
Historically women paid a price for such behavior. The ancient Semites legitimized stoning. Colonial Americans famously affixed letters to their bosoms. Michelle paid no price whatsoever. She shacked up with this Jeremy fellow, a lawyer at Dunn, and now they’re the ones dining at The Capital Grille with daddy and the disreputable mayor.
He bent over with the intention of hot wiring the car. He had never learned how. It’s not something you pick up in private school. Perhaps it can only be done in the movies.
He thought about his mother and her concise philosophy: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. She had introduced him to the city’s elites, its executives and private equity mavens, and summarily dismissed his romanticized view of bartenders, musicians, and gamblers. Not one of them could help him now. The petitioner, Manuel, on the other hand, would be able to hot wire a car. . . .
Oh my. Score one for class-wide prejudice! . . . Another impenetrable sequence of neural analogies flared as he reached into the glove compartment for the manual. Nothing in the index under Hot wire. Flipping through he recalled how much he had loved reading with Michelle in the early days on her father’s front porch. Rollicking sex often followed, made spicier by the names for the role-play they invented: Catholic Conversion, Good Cop Bad Cop, Training the Seal. Soon came the extended European honeymoon before it all went sour. Together they were turned back at the Grand Casino for wearing bathrobes and slippers and tilted up their cigarette holders like Hunter S. Thompson down the plush mahogany stairs. After a pat down at the French border, they tittered on the train like children about the overlooked hashish in his shirt pocket.
“You two will be so happy!” his mother had screamed when he told her the news. This was before she’d even met Michelle. He couldn’t remember her hugging him like that since he’d found a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk as a child, so relieved was she that he’d be marrying into his own set, as she put it, “after all those close calls with actresses and whores.”
Suddenly she pressed him away, wild-eyed, as if her medications had worn off. “This isn’t Tuesday, is it?” She looked genuinely frightened. “I’m late for Pilates!”
When they returned from Europe her father surprised them with a down payment on the condominium. Together they selected furniture and curios for the den. An activity that previously would have aroused disgust, holiday shopping on the Plaza, he accepted, even anticipated, free of cynicism and snark. Her concession, if anything at the time can be categorized that way, was baseball. Dipping their feet in bleacher fountains, he described the roar following a triple play that had hooked him as a child.
What else? Jazz, they held in common. Some nights they made the rounds, beginning in the basement of Majestic, ending in a booth near the kitchen at Jardine’s. Her dad settled upon another gift, an interview for Wink at the company of an old friend. Cybersecurity made sense in the beginning—everything did during that run—given the unexpected flair he’d stumbled upon in college for coding.
Time chastens. Stars began to illuminate. He banged his head on the steering wheel. How naive to think he could steal a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car. He got out and went to his own ageless green Camry, a final joint gift at graduation from his separating parents. An ex-cop with the agency had recommended he bring along a baseball bat as a safeguard against the occasional threatening respondent. There it rested on the back seat. He also carried a small pistol in his back pocket.
A Louisville Slugger swung at full force, it turns out, cracks but does not break the windshield of a Bentley Turbo R Sport. A second strike formed a twin supernova, the redundant end of all time. A cry from the open door interrupted his third windup.
“What the fuck are you doing!”
God, she looked radiant in that backlight. Her dogs filtered outside. One of them—a Doberman, he guessed correctly in the instant before it leaped—seemed to mirror its owner’s outrage, snarling and dripping saliva. Wink’s checked swing grazed the dog’s shoulder but it latched onto his arm. Pain circulated throughout his body like contaminated blood. A furious struggle ensued.
What happened next might seem heartless: he shot that dog. What choice did he have? He only wounded it, in the hind leg. It lay whimpering as he straightened up, seizing his triceps with a grimace. The smaller, less savage dogs darted around while he picked up the bat and tucked the pistol into his pants. Kelly Brock stood perfectly framed in the doorway like a Vermeer. She cupped an ear to muffle the dogs’ yelps while calmly describing the scene to the police into her phone. What composure! He could marry a woman like that. Not so controlled was Gaston, now frantically opening dresser drawers in search of a more potent weapon.
Meanwhile, Wink brought down the bat on the Doberman’s skull. It cracked a lot easier than the Bentley. The other dogs scattered and began to whine. Kelly—he thought of her simply as Kelly by now—screamed. Wink turned in time to catch a flustered Gaston checking the chamber of the gun he had finally located. Trembling, Gaston shot into the air as a warning. Wink laughed, in a way. And Kelly? Not so amused. She snatched away the gun. Wink made no effort to defend himself, he carried right on laughing, right up to the point where she shot him in the thigh. Really exceptional aim given the artificial light and the distraction of all that barking.
On the ground, Wink shrieked in agony. A brilliant orange and blue bunting abandoned the shelter of a birch and passed by overheard. Gaston rushed toward Wink but only to retrieve the dead animal at his side. He cradled the dog in his arms and, walking away, began to cry.
Kelly stepped up next. She was still holding the gun. Instead of plugging him again she kicked him in the back of the head. In a fever, Wink made a Freudian association just prior to the toe of her pump blackening his brain: his mother had alligator shoes just like that! He remembered her wearing them the day she’d said to him about his father, who had left the courtroom first, “I should have poisoned the son of a bitch when I had the chance.” The last perception before consciousness melted away was of bloodthirsty beasts licking his face and wounds.
They called their veterinarian first. Doc Price confirmed the obvious. “He’s dead alright,” regarding the Doberman.
Wink awakened to a sensation of flight as a gurney lifted him skyward. Red and blue strobing gave the limestone the aspect of a circus. In his delirium, Wink expected elephants to parade by.
Despite the pain and embarrassment and the limp that lasted more than a year, and although the court ordered a psychological evaluation to go with fifty hours of community service at an Ivanhoe shelter, a seed of recovery was sown even before the ambulance doors were closed. He noticed Kelly and Gaston at opposite ends of their mammoth sectional. Public television was on, a piece about chimps. She sat arms crossed, her head tilted in sullen reflection. Gaston petted their Havanese in measured strokes and still appeared to be crying.
During his probation, Wink heard echoes of the tortured and the damned.
I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry, he wrote in the first of his many letters to Kelly that went unanswered. Subsequent letters assumed a more philosophical tone:
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
The snake which cannot cast its skin must die.
That there were no repercussions for the letters, a clear breach of the court’s prohibition against contact, motivated him to became more personal: I am sorry you must endure a man like that, he wrote near the end. You deserve so much better.
One day he returned to the Brock mansion, left his car on the street, and used one of the tricks of his former trade, donning a wig and a fake moustache and a UPS outfit to gain entrance to the grounds. God knows his original intent: to apologize in person, to challenge Gaston to a duel? He simply may have wanted to ask Kelly out on a date, having wrongly discerned in the interplay of her features the blueprint for a less fragmented world. His presence there certainly violated his probation—which, in a point hotly debated that spring by the state legislature, was not true of the revolver he kept concealed in his brown polyester jacket. The only real freedom, they concluded, is freedom from fear. A similar sentiment might have found agreement among the diverse fauna residing in that private space, were they capable of such thoughts: the squirrels who paused on the road as he marched their way, the ducks in the still pond at the turn, the dogs baying in unison behind the glass patio doors as if issuing an ancient warning.
Corey Mertes received a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Film and Television Production from the University of Southern California. His work has been shortlisted for the American Fiction Short Story Award, the Tartts Fiction Award, and the Hudson Prize. His first story collection, Self-Defense, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in spring 2023.