Read The Animal Hour for Free Online Page B

his clothes on top of the dresser now. Then she was tugging the laundry bag out from underneath the dresser, stuffing in his underwear.
    â€œAvis, would you not do this, please.”
    â€œWell, look at this place, Ollie.”
    His shoulders sagged. He shook his head dismally. He turned and squinted dismally at the window, at the strip of blue sky. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I gave a reading at the café last night.”
    â€œWell, that’s no excuse.” She had moved across the room to pry her son’s fingers from the base of a standing lamp. “Everyone always … oof! … loves your readings.”
    â€œYeah.” He grunted at her. “All those old poems. The same ones over and over. I had to wash away the taste of them. I could feel them stuck in my throat.”
    â€œOh, Oliver, come on.”
    â€œTwo years, Avis. Two years this month since I wrote my last good one.”
    â€œAnd getting tanked every night is going to help a lot.”
    He sighed. Sat silently.
    â€œShit,” Avis muttered. He glanced at her. She had been restacking a toppled pile of Greek histories and had come up with something. She examined it a moment, turning it in her fingers. “I guess someone lost this,” she said. She tossed it across the room to him.
    He caught it in his cupped hands. An earring. Turquoise on hand-hammered silver. Something bought on the street in the East Village probably. “Not one of yours, huh?”
    â€œYou know it’s not.” She showed him her back, walking toward the kitchenette.
    Perkins gazed down at the earring, trying to remember. He had a vague flash of the café. The black microphone in his face. The cool neck of the beer bottle in his fist. Candlelight in the white wine at the tables. Faces at the tables, young men, young women’s faces; the grizzled chins of the old Village denizens; the candlelight in their eyes.
    Avis flicked on the light in the kitchenette. “I hope it’s a girl’s, that’s all,” she said darkly.
    â€œThere was someone.” He studied the earring.
    â€œYou said you weren’t going to do boys anymore. It’s dangerous—especially when you’re too drunk to think.”
    â€œCindy,” he said. “Or Mindy. Maybe it was Mindy …” He looked up then and saw her in the kitchenette. He flinched. A dolmen of encrusted pots and dishes rose out of the sink. Avis was sponging some red slime off the countertop. A roach was scuttling for a crack in the caulking.
    â€œWell, I’m sure she was a nice girl,” she was saying. “She probably just had to get back to school in time for recess.”
    â€œAvis,” said Perkins. “Would you put down the fucking sponge.”
    â€œYou want eggs?”
    â€œOh, don’t make me breakfast. God, Avis, don’t take care of me. I mean it. This is your whole problem.”
    â€œI’ll get a psychiatrist first thing tomorrow. You want them scrambled?”
    Perkins let out his breath, dejected. His chin fell to his chest. There was the baby. Crawling over a Sam Adams to get to his foot. Smiling up at him from his hairy toes, waiting for some attention.
    Perkins reached down and picked the baby up. The baby put his arms around the poet’s neck. “Yeah,” Perkins said quietly. “Scrambled is fine.”
    He lay down with the baby on top of him. He blew out his cheeks again to make the baby laugh. But now the kid had noticed the buttons on the mattress. He was climbing down off Perkins to see if he could get some to eat.
    Abandoned, Perkins lay where he was, staring up at the ceiling. He licked his lips, picking up the faint taste of dried vomit. He listened to the running water in the kitchenette. The clattering of pots as Avis cleared them. He listened to the baby gurgling. The loneliness settled down over him like a blanket.
    Two years, he thought. Not since the