Red Ant House Read online

  Barry looks out at the room. Scott’s gorilla head, in the middle of the birthday table, scowls at the empty beer bottles. Barry laughs. “Now that’s one mean monkey,” he says. He twists the panties in his pocket, then pulls them out and drops them on the floor. Later he might tell Rosy that he stole a pair of Janet’s underpants and then left them for the barmaid. Rosy will appreciate that. He figures that’s his job—keeping it interesting for her. But now he pushes his chair back from the table and stands up. He asks his wife if she would like to dance.

  Billy by the Bay

  The boss told Billy he was no damn good, and he told him he was fired. He said, “Billy, git on out of here, and don’t you come back.” Billy got out with his knife.

  It was his birthday. At midnight he would be twenty-four years old.

  In the parking lot there were scores of cars Billy didn’t recognize and one he did. The Camaro he’d barfed in, and slept in, and ridden halfway across the country in. The boss’s car. The car was parked in its regular slot.

  Billy sidled up to it. The car had radials and a hundred percent of its tread. Billy thought of the bouncer and looked back at the door. The bouncer was sitting on his bench, huddled up in a furry-hooded parka, blowing on his hands. Pretty girls with spiked heels were huddled around him, begging to get in free. Tonight, Billy had had his chance at a pretty girl. Billy’s balls were golden birthday balls tonight, and Sally had offered to touch them before midnight. Sally Raleigh. Sally said she would be the last woman to touch them in his twenty-third and the first in his twenty-fourth. Sally Rally, Rally Sally, say it fast—ooh, Billy was drunk.

  But his balls hadn’t been touched, wouldn’t be touched now, not in his twenty-third year, maybe not in his twenty-fourth, either. Billy squatted down next to the Camaro. He tried to remember the last time they had been touched. Certainly since he was a little thumbprint in his mother’s fist. Certainly since then, but just now he couldn’t remember when or who—all he could remember was Sally Rally and her promise. He slipped the knife in the tire. He pulled it out. Air sirened through the crack, and Billy plugged it with his fingers, “Shh, shh.”

  The bouncer was blowing on his hands. The pretty girls had gone on in, and the band was playing “Sissy Strut.”

  Billy began to crawl among the cars. He held his knife between his teeth. He wanted to cut more tires. It felt good cutting them and listening to the air hiss out, though he also wanted to sleep, to go on home, but he would have to catch a taxi now that the boss’s tires were cut and Billy was fired anyway. Even if the tires weren’t cut, he wouldn’t give Billy a ride home, nor lift a finger to help him in spite of everything, in spite of how Billy was his personal pack rat, his toady roadie, how Billy carried his damn drums in and his damn drums out, in and out, in and out of every gig— Carry my drums, Billy, and I’ll teach you how to play— in and out of every gig and set them up while he did his glad-handing, his How-you-doings and Looking-goods . . .

  Billy forgot the rug. Tonight, Billy forgot the rug on which the drums were supposed to be set, the good-luck rug. Why was it Billy’s responsibility to remember the rug? It wasn’t his good luck. Anyway, he remembered the drums. Yes, he did, he always remembered the drums.

  All along the fence behind the bar, smokers leaned out toward the bay. Billy crawled among the cars closest to the smokers and he took the caps off tire valves. He poked the little buttons in the valves with the tip of his knife. Each time a smoker spoke, he poked, and air hissed, and when they stopped speaking, he stopped. The smokers were saying pitiful things to each other, things like, “Food makes me happy.”

  A rat slid over the cement just beyond the smokers’ feet. Billy’s skin crawled. Where there was one rat, there would be two. He turned around and stared at the dumpster behind him and saw rats, hundreds of them swarming the dumpster. Even though he knew he wasn’t really seeing them, he knew he really was, because what you don’t see is what’s real, WHAT YOU DON’T SEE IS WHAT’S REAL. Billy wanted to scream. Mostly all he ever wanted to do was scream, scream, scream, in churches and movie theaters and at the DMV and in libraries and on buses—

  But who would want to touch his balls then? If all he did was scream?

  Tonight he’d watched a seafaring vessel dock among the piers. This was a mammoth of a boat. A president of a boat that stretched half the length of the pier, one hundred percent steel from stern to prow, and Billy had thought, What if I lived on such a boat? Tonight, at sunset, he had stood there, himself, among the smokers, and he watched the boat dock, and he knew with certainty that one day he would be the captain of a great big ship, and he told Sally all about it, and Sally put her arm around him. She said, “Billy, when you’re the captain of that ship, I’m going off my diet. We’re going to have us a party. We’ll invite the fish, and we’ll eat ‘em. We’ll be fair. We’ll eat black fish and white fish and every colored fish there is.” And she said, “This is your night, Billy. You can do anything you want—to me.”

  That was before the boss told Billy he would never be anything but a third-rate roadie who lost the hardware and broke the skins. Said nobody would ever let him play on a gig, and the only reason he let him carry the drums was because he felt sorry for his sorry ass. Said it to Billy’s face on his birthday with Sally Rally standing by, her dress riding low on her tits, tits on display in a help-yourself minute.

  It occurred to Billy right now, glimpsing the big ship just beyond this car’s bumper, that he would kill the drummer tonight. In an instant Billy’s blood turned to quicksilver and he laughed through his teeth.

  Billy began to crawl back along the cold cement, through cigarette butts and broken glass, toward the Camaro, and as he crawled he whispered, “Could and would, could and would,” through the knife in his teeth.

  Just then, people started pouring out of the club, coatless people fanning themselves, glistening throats in the club’s neon light. Billy could hear the boss tapping the snare and talking through the microphone, “Don’t go away. Be right back. Pause for the cause—”

  Billy skittered into the shadows behind the Camaro. He was cold, shivering cold. He felt as if rats were creeping up his neck. He didn’t want this moment to turn sour. Every other moment this goddamn year had turned from sweet to sour—Here’s our Billy-come-later—before he knew it, before he could do a thing— Tell you what, if you can’t come in on the beat, please don’t come in at all—sweet to sour—Better late than never, hey Billy? Billy’s off in la-la land—because he always thought first and acted second—Because you are a MENTAL PERSON! You couldn’t find the pocket if you fell into it. Don’t think about it, JUST DO IT, BILLY!

  Billy always thought about it and then the moment turned, sweet to sour.

  The boss and his brother, Louis, had come out and were walking toward the Camaro. Louis was fishing in his pocket.

  “Did you see that girl?” the boss said. They stopped in front of the car.

  “The one who almost fell on me?” Louis pulled out his sawed-off, drilled-out piano key. He began cleaning the key with wire.

  “Fine sense of balance.” The boss laughed, and Louis laughed, too.

  “I thought I was a dead man,” Louis said. He began packing the piano-key pipe with weed.

  “I thought you was smoked, you and the piano.”

  “What she’s carrying around—” Louis said.

  “You and the pi-ana and the floor.”

  “What she’s carrying around,” Louis said, “how does she keep from falling over?” He passed the pipe, held his lighter to it.

  “I’ve seen her fall over,” the boss said. He dragged on the pipe. “Mm, hmm.” He held his breath in his throat. “And when she falls—she bounces.”

  Louis laughed.

  “Ba-boom, ba-b-b-b-boom. Don’t take no applications,” the boss hollered into the night. “We got us a bouncer!” He dragged on the pipe. The sweet smell wafted back to Billy.

  That dress was about to fall off of her,” Loui
s said. “I didn’t know they made ‘em that big. Good-looking lady, though.”

  Billy plugged his ears. He didn’t want to hear them talk about the good-looking lady. In his head, Billy sang, “La-la-la-la-la-la,” so he wouldn’t have to hear who they were talking about, and he whispered “la-la-la-la-la-la-la” just under his breath—

  “What was it she was saying to you?” Louis said. “I saw her talking to you.”

  “She promised me affection. She said, ‘This is your night, boy. You can do anything you want to me.’”

  La-la-la-la—Billy would like to do something to him. Billy would like to—Billy would like to—Billy’s eyes were fog-fuzzed headlights. Under the neon, the pencil-legged girls hiked their skirts and flexed their butts and Billy would like to, he would like to—feed them, feed them, feed them unspecified food for a long time, unspecified food right in front of God, right up there onstage, feed them, fill them up, their arms and legs and toes and ears and nostrils and hair follicles for a long time and every time they cried, “I’m full!” Billy’d feed them some more until they split right open and their cardboard blood came spitting out, their—

  “Hey, you guys,” a woman yelled. “My tire’s flat! Hey, all these tires are flat!”

  Billy ducked down. He crouched, hugging his knees. Air whistled through his teeth. “HEY!” a woman yelled, and Billy dove under the Camaro’s bumper, rolled to the Chevy next door, scooted on to the Nissan. People were shouting about their flat tires, and Billy’s blood was thudding in his ears. He rolled and crawled, rolled and crawled to the chainlink fence, closed and padlocked, but Billy was skinny, a whisper in the night, and he squirmed through the gap underneath the lock. “Billy! Goddamn you, Billy!” He squirmed and ran down the pier toward the boat, his own name thudding in his ears.

  The pier, moon-white under the fluorescents, his skinny legs fluttering in the cold: Billy was laughing, zigzagging down the way, and behind him, fatter people were climbing the fence. “BIL-LY!” they all screamed.

  Birthday Billy, you scoundrel! He laughed, but he was screaming, too, in his head, because he had done it again. Let the moment pass. What had he been thinking? And the man just under his thumb.

  The sour stench of rotten plank rose under his feet. There was nothing to run to. At the end of the pier, a wall of lonely steel was docked ten feet from solid ground. A ship. A monster of a ship that was so far out of reach it might as well be on the moon. And a bay. A frigid bay full of rats and don’t you come back. Billy ran. As he ran his granite birthday balls flopped between his legs. “Could and would, could and would!” he sang. Behind him, somebody was keeping time. Tic-toc, tic-toc, at the stroke of the clock the time will be—

  But Billy was running, not thinking at all, and then he was leaping over the inky water of San Francisco Bay, right smack-dab into the middle of one sweet moment.

  About the Author

  A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona writing programs, ANN CUMMINS has published stories in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories 2002, among other publications. The recipient of a Lannan fellowship, she divides her time between Oakland, California, where she lives with her husband, and Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.

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