Large Animals by Jess Arndt

Author:Jess Arndt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2017-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

Can You Live with It

“So Raskolnikov goes to Siberia and that’s supposed to be it—he’s absolved, a big flat vacant plane,” I hear myself saying.

“Yeah?” We drink from our beer cups and look at the waves.

“Actually,” I say, “he has to work all of this hard labor and what’s-her-name visits him every day so piously and the other inmates hate him until finally, he cries on a riverbank: ‘I’m here! Alive, inescapably part of things.’”

Or something.

But Siberia’s nothing like Alcatraz, how it’s just sitting out here in the middle. The bay and surrounding hills all drought-brown. We’re on one of those SF boats watching a dissipated Marin dude hit on women and slaughter Willie Nelson songs while the sun does its thing as advertised by Blue and Gold Bay Cruises or maybe it’s the Red and White; we go on those too whenever I come from New York back to town.

We tip him then feel like jerks instantly. Our beer fund lost in an oversized cowboy boot that’s sitting in front of his guitar case like: “I just took this off for you.” Except the boot is huge and he’s wearing sneakers.

“That was stupid,” my buddy says, pulling her lips so her cheeks bump her eyes and her gums glare.

“We can’t just pull it back out?” I say.

Now we’re standing at the onboard bar with its wood grain laminate drinking free water. Slug after slug in plastic cups. Or belt after belt, whatever our alcoholic progenitors called it.

“This tastes like butts.”

“But you can live with it,” assures the bartender. She’s got on a bow tie and the Glade green Christmas lights under her shirt make her breasts glow lopsidedly. She turns the key on the little gate that holds the booze in place. We hear it lock.

Then there was that long night Raskolnikov spent on the bridge over the Neva. The cash-it-all-in night. The one where he’s thinking: Am I too bad.

And doesn’t his mother come?

This morning I walked up and down Folsom Street. It was foggy and damp. Then I sat in the linoleum-floored waiting room, identical to a mall DMV except for the FREE HIV TEST SITE and posters of sexually transmitted cartoony bugs taped all over the walls. The digital clock had those requisite cement fingers. I rubbed my number’s paper dart against my jeans.

In the tiny examination room the clinician gave me a folding chair. “This is going to get real personal,” she said.

“Sure thing,” I said. “Uh-huh.”

From the interior cabin of the Blue and Gold we watch the sun finishing up. The windows are black. There’s a buffet table full of clammy ham wedges and crudités. We climb the narrow carpeted stairs just in time to hear the cowboy deliver his final pitch:

“If I said you had a great body, would you hold it against me?”

It’s just us and two Taiwanese newlyweds on their honeymoon staring toward what was, only minutes ago, the Rock.

“So you’re telling me he walked around with an ax in his sack? Then hacked an old lady just to see if he could?”

“Pretty much,” I say.

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