THE MEAT – EATER

1 2 9 R T H E M E A T - E A T E R J E A N M c G A R R Y He came in a strong size, making his parents look like pygmies, and his parents were tall to start with – not that he cut them down, more wore them down, looking up to see his head large and bright as a sun. His father was fifty when he was born, joining a ten-yearold sister, as plain as he was fancy, not fancy but choice. She was average: height, health, and intelligence. She even had an average name: Fran. His was Karl, but the name grew with him so that the r purred like an outboard motor. The K hardened the opened mouth, where the C had just the round shoulders. Karl came into the world a strong syllable, butting the doctor with his head, making his mother (always his champion) laugh, craning her head to see him in his full length, stretched in the nurse’s bloody hands, with his screech filling the swampy room. Cleaned up, measured and weighed, he took up his life as a baby, but no one really thought of him that way, not with that head and those mitts. He was in command upon arrival home in his whites, and no matter how tightly they locked his cabinet door, and turned up the Victrola, they could still hear him. Their ears and nerves were all his. The first word he had to say was Karl. 1 3 0 M c G A R R Y Y Everything else was mush in his mouth, even when Fran pinched his lips and stuck a finger down his throat. He had just enough dental ridge to bite the finger, masticating it. He always called her Frances, when he called her anything, and she became a Frances. Everything he told her to do, she did, but that was later. In the beginning, her hateful face mooned over his cradle, and sometimes under it, butting it, or stuck a pencil through the webbing so he could feel it. Or bouncing the cradle till he spilled a bellyful of milk over his face and garments. All of this he stored up in his infant memory, delivering his reply over a decade’s span, from the time he reached half his height at seven, and the remainder at twelve. By then, they were all shattered, not so much shattered as depleted, their lives a bad taste in their mouths. She became a nurse to transfer some of the aftertaste to others. But go back. He came into the world full of ideas, but how could he capitalize on them, wrapped like a mummy, impotent, and full of cravings? His mother told Fran that he’d come in the beak of a large seabird, but not wrapped in a diaper, the way she’d seen it. No, it was not that simple a story, and his mother didn’t want the plain-faced one anticipating the flight of the beauty. Fran was her mother’s helper, and then a nurse. She’d cleaned the house he lived in for nine months. So even at ten, Fran had in her mind’s eye, put there by her mother, a boy-bird. Don’t simplify. Not a boy with wings, or a bird with a boy’s face: a boy-bird, both and all, no overlap. He’d been flown in by a bird and was a bird, although he looked like a baby. She had been discouraged from encapsulating him in any of her categories. He was an energy field. Try that one. But that scared her, hearing his breathing in the night, in the room she insisted on sharing. If they loved him so much, she wanted a piece of the action. But was it love when birds are so fierce and love so feeble? At first, they barred the door. Let her keep her bed where it was, in the pink room against the wall. One day she rolled it through the doorway, down the hall, and next to his basket and nest, then...