The Animal Girl by John Fulton Read Free Book Online Page B

more vivid, more alive that way. She could spend hours thinking of the soft, contemplative way he’d touched his mustache from time to time, and the way he’d told her, “Always stand behind the shooter,” making it clear with his paternal tone of voice that her safety was his foremost concern. She would see them making love and be surprised again by his athleticism, his volume, his surprising confidence in bed. She would see years into an imaginary future with him; how annoying his passivity and meekness would become, annoying and also endearing. She would exhaust herself protecting him from those who’d take advantage of him: his son, his business partners, even herself. She would think of him as a hunter, too, a gentle hunter with great respect for his prey. How quickly he got to his wounded bird and snapped its neck. She would think of how he had lifted his wine above their small feast of grouse and toasted to her success, to their many hunts to come; and how he had lain beside her that night, his hand—the same one he had killed with—touching her scar in a darkness that was, for the time, easier to bear.

REAL GRIEF
    Holly Morris was thirteen and not behaving herself at her grandmother’s funeral. She made the few children in attendance—only there because the counselor from the school district had advised it—play patty-cake with her on the couch while the adults lined up in front of the large, glossy black coffin. Everybody knew that coffin had cost a lot more than the Morris family could afford. And because a funeral home was too expensive and Bethel Mount Chapel, the church where the Morrises and my family and every other family at the funeral went, was no more than a room with gray metal chairs, the Morrises had moved their TV out of the way and put the casket, with its upper lid open to the dead woman, in their living room. Everybody on the front porch and back patio was whispering about the cost of the coffin, not to mention the reconstructive work done on the old woman. The coffin was polished metal and wood with what Larry Truman, a carpenter in Wilford, knew was cherry trim. “Precious,” one woman said about the interior fabric and cushions. People seemed to agree that the expense must have nearly destroyed the Morrises and would not have been necessary had Holly’s grandmother died in a more peaceful way. But they also had to agree that they might have done just the same had it been their tragedy.
    Jack Rogers and I tried to understand the cost in our terms—the number of trick boards and soft-wheels with Speedo bearings and Tracker trucks that kind of money might buy. We both had Kmart specials, plastic held together with rusty bolts. You could have bought twelve or thirteen flexwood-fiber fat boards for what the Morrises had spent on that funeral. “At least that many,” Jack whispered, and I didn’t argue. From the back of the living room, we had both glimpsed, through the throng of adults, the long, narrow box. The three Morris men were kneeling over their mother, weeping, and doing somethingdesperate and inward—praying, talking to the dead woman—while Holly and Belinda Green, who even at eight must have known better, clapped hands and sang out from the back of the room, “Say, say, oh playmate! Come out and play with me!” Finally, Mrs. Morris seized Holly’s wrist and led her away. But as soon as Mrs. Morris returned to her sobbing husband, her daughter was back, recruiting every kid she saw for a game of carpet tag, in which you take your shoes off and drag your socked feet over the shag carpet and shock the hell out of another kid. Holly also rounded up Jack, the Watkins brothers, and me, though in our early teens we were all too old for nonsense. So we stood back while the little kids tore their shoes off and began motoring around that part of the living room to fill themselves with electricity. By that time the