Circuses
Pa’d say most important thing a man does is provide and he’d be gone, sunup to sundown, to prove it. After the shop’d close, he’d barge through our tinny storm door, fling his gnarled frame onto the recliner’s ratty pleather, and get drunk on local news and bad beer while I helped my brother with his homework and made us three hot dog mac and cheese.
Our grandfather was a coal worker out in West Virginia, died in his thirties from black lung, and Pa’d go on living like that sort of thing was genetic except instead of digging under a mountain he’d bury into car hoods and steel chassis and engine oil his whole life. Hoped someday those fumes’d short his hard living too. It wouldn’t be his lungs that give in though, it’d be his third herniated disc. And it wouldn’t kill him outright, just slough him home crooked and crinkled to a retirement that’d get him lost, loster than that zebra that escaped Dawsey’s farm when we were kids. Every night that animal stayed loose, Pa’d laugh at our TV, the beer frothing down cold, rubied knuckles, and holler, Animals like that don’t belong here. Like he knowed what belonged anywhere. We were in Maryland then.
One day, his craggy bass sifted through the speaker on my desk phone at the dealership. My shrink said not to wait for it but I wondered if someday he’d call, finally ask forgiveness. He didn’t. Pa asked me what I knew about Guangdong. He thought I’d be fixin’ to find my own answers about where I come from, like he’d found in the mountains that Nana’d abandoned after Pop Pop died. Assumed everyone was just a salmon looking for their stream. I told him I didn’t know anything about it and he grunted, Okay, and hung up. Was the last I’d heard from him.
Pa’s reception was in a musty mustard yellow church basement with a van’s worth of well-meaning strangers, dawdling around a potluck of meat salads and reused paper tablecloths, paying respects to the best mechanic in Charles County. I didn’t plan to stay but my brother said he might should show me something by the house. He never was any good at leaving.
Still in our funeral blacks, he drove us out in that old ’92 Ford Explorer. He liked the windows down even in winter and that ice rain. To him, glass was just walls by another name and he couldn’t stand feeling trapped any more than he’d had to. Been like that since I drove him to Pop Warner, no matter the weather, he’d ask me to put down the windows. Pa’d see his truck’s precious interior all wet the next morning and I’d tell him it was my fault and he’d horsecollar me to whatever room my brother wasn’t in. Loosen up his teaching belt.
It didn’t happen the way people been saying, my brother said.
I figured, I said. Coyote bite wouldn’t’ve killed that bastard.
No, my brother said. Reckon not.
I’d held him when he cried before but my baby brother was full grown now and it’s something jarring to watch tears from someone six-three, two-thirty sink into a beard like steel wool. You’d think a man that size wouldn’t need protecting.
My adoption was Momma’s idea, her insisting in her barrenness it was Christian to save a baby from Commies, but Pa figured she ain’t have enough faith God’d provide. So when God did some years later and that nine-pound miracle squealed and heaved out of Momma’s wilting body so bad it wasted her, Pa wrenched everything he had into that boy. He’d tote that tender child to the garage soon as he could walk. On weekends, he’d get the nose my sweet brother’d press into foamflowers greased up, the soft hands that caught swallowtails calloused and hard.
I trudged behind him and his flashlight’s wobble past the house through the woods to a makeshift pen with a llama whinnying in the drizzle. Big chicken-wired cages penned in a few quivering porcupines. A big muddy lump of fur curled into the corner of its own crate hissing something awful and broken. Turns out, in Pa’s last years, my brother’d been building this sad circus with him.
He got connected to a Chinese smuggler, my brother said. They got those wet markets. He said he asked you about it.
I suppose, I said.
Spent his whole savings on a legacy, my brother said. For us. Said after he was gone, we needed to build it into a real attraction. Sell popcorn.
He caught my stare on that one pitiful hisser and shone the light. That there’s a red panda, he said. Tougher than he looks. A real survivor. He’s the one bit Daddy, gave him that infection. People’d pay big to see him. Daddy was proudest of that one.
When the badger-looking thing saw me kneel beside its cage on the damp underbrush, it stopped gnashing, stopped bellowing. Those eyes, black like anthracite, glowered like it’d seen we were both freaks living a bad misinheritance, desperate to sound right and natural someplace again.
I’m proud of you too, I said.
Middle of that night, my brother lay on his bed the way he always had, coiled like a roly poly. He woke up groggy, saw my black hair sopping rainwater, the flashlight white-knuckled in my hand. Pa’s rusty bolt cutters leaned up beside his bedroom door.
I let them out, I said.
He didn’t ask what I meant, only stared at the ceiling. Remember what happened to Dawsey’s zebra, my brother said. Got itself hit by a tractor-trailer crossing Route 301. Didn’t belong out there, all lost.
I thought about those creatures, all these made-freaks and their corrals. The highways and the men. Only ever doing what they’d been trapped to do.
You think I’d make it, my brother asked when it got quiet.
Nothing holds us anymore, I said, But us.