THERE WAS A WOODEN SIGN THAT HAD THE word GYPSIES painted on it on the side of the highway. We drove down the path that was next to it. It led to a clearing where a group of white houses stood at the end of the road. They could all have used a coat of paint, but they were actually kind of pretty. There were motorcycles everywhere, which ruined the effect of it being a kind of a nice little enclave.
We stopped the car in front of the biggest house. There were all sorts of chairs and an old couch on the porch. There were pots of plants all over the steps. There was a small statue of an angel, which had enormous pores from having survived countless winters.
There was a very young girl with a blond mullet and a Mitsou T-shirt, which she had knotted under her underdeveloped breasts, sitting on the couch next to a boy who was covered with stick-on tattoos. Children always ended up looking and acting like their parents. Which was a thought I didn’t want to be having right then.
We were going to see that biker named Rosalie, who lived here. He opened the front door and gestured that we should follow him. His hair was wet, as if he had just taken a shower, and he had on a leather vest. He walked us out behind the house to a cottage. He opened the door of the garage and there, unmistakably right in front of us, was a cage with a lion in it. He was telling Raphaël how a person could train a lion and make a fortune leasing him out to American film companies. And how people liked to get their photographs taken with lions at fairs and birthday parties.
“What’s its name?” Raphaël asked.
“Michelangelo,” Rosalie answered.
At which I rolled my eyes as violently as any human being could. Raphaël turned away from me, so that he didn’t laugh. He came and stood next to me as we looked at the lion.
The lion looked heavy. It looked like a sweater that you had pulled out of a bucket it was soaking in. His belly slouched toward the ground as he paced. The lion’s step was so quiet, however, as if it was walking on carpet in a suburban home. It had giant black gums and little brown spots all over its body. It had big amber eyes that were filled with so much innocence, it was terrifying. It was hard on some level to believe that the lion was dangerous, because it was hard to believe that it was real. It seemed like I was just imagining it. I jumped back when it raised one of its paws.
“I never imagined that a lion could have such big paws,” I said.
“Yeah, it takes a while to get used to. It’s better to sell them when they are cubs like this. Before people have fully grasped the idea that they’ve bought a lion.”
“Aren’t you worried that the lion will eat your children?”
“He’s totally tame. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. If someone came and slit my throat, he’d probably just sit there yawning. I got to get rid of it because my ex-wife says she’ll tell the lawyer and I’ll lose visitation rights.”
“That’ll do it.”
“She’ll say anything about me.”
While Raphaël was looking at the lion, I followed Rosalie back into his house. I was worried that Raphaël was going to buy that lion and try to fasten him into the back of the car with a seat belt. I didn’t want to be around when he made such a decision. At least later, while I was being ripped apart, I would know it wasn’t any of my doing. Rosalie sat in a leather easy chair and did a line of cocaine. Cocaine was popular in this neck of the woods. His cheeks were all flushed and he glowed, like a baby that was fat on breast milk and about to pass out. He started babbling.
He said that he came from a small town where all the women his age were named Charlotte, after a character on a television show that was popular that year. He said he had once cut his initials into a tree trunk and the tree died.
Three other Bleeding Sparrows walked into the house and came in the living room. A boy followed them. The boy, who was about four years old, was wearing nothing but diapers and a pair of red cowboy boots.
“Your husband is, like, the deepest dude that I ever met,” one of them said. “Once we smoked mescaline. We were in our underwear. And he taught me all these rules. He taught me about the physics of the universe.”
He was wearing a bright yellow tank top that was almost exactly the same colour as a dandelion. Because they wore sunglasses, it was hard to know how stoned they were.
They all seemed to have at least three tattoos of roses a piece. There was an entire rose garden sitting right there in front of me. He had never promised me a rose garden, but here it was.
“What kind of freaky weirdos buy lions anyways?” I asked.
“I’ll take him,” Raphaël said, walking in.
For a second I thought that he meant the lion, but I saw he had a huge German shepherd following behind him. I never thought I’d be relieved that we left there with a dog.