52 pages • 1 hour read
Justin TorresWe The Animals
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “You Better Come”
When Paps comes back, he wants to spend every moment with his family. He gives all three brothers baths without bubbles, sending them all into the tub together. He gives them a very thorough washing. Ma is also in the bathroom, in a bra and her work pants, getting ready at the mirror. Paps is shirtless, too, and they can see his muscle. They can also see how their skin is both darker than Ma’s and lighter than Paps’s. Paps looks like an animal, “ruddy and physical and instinctive; his shoulders hulked and curved,” while Ma is small and delicate (45).
Paps pees in front of them and everyone watches, including Ma. Paps sees her watching, and when he’s done, he slides his hands under her bra. Though she shoves him away, they can see that it brings her happiness. The boys are extra still in the bathtub because they don’t want to ruin the moment. When Ma notes that the boys will get sick if they stay sitting in the tub, Paps dries them and puts towels around them. He places each of their palms against his, spending the longest with the narrator. Paps notes that the narrator has grown while he was gone. They listen to their parents talk about how much they are growing up: “We were all together in the bathroom, in this moment, and nothing was wrong. My brothers and I were clean and fed and not afraid of growing up” (46-47). In this moment, the narrator feels content and secure because his parents are projecting a sense of calm.
This continues when the boys play a game involving climbing into the tub and hiding. Ma and Paps pretend not to realize where they’ve gone. However, forgetting that they were supposed to find the boys, they get distracted and begin kissing each other. The boys peek through the curtain, watching as Paps lifts Ma onto the sink. The narrator notes that she looks like she’s in pain, her back against the faucet, Paps’s hands squeezing her hips. However, she seems to be enjoying this discomfort, “like it was a kind of pain she wanted” (48). Here, love and punishment overlap.
Ma eventually sees the boys spying from the bathtub and alerts Paps to the fact that they’re watching. Paps says that he thought that the kids had vanished. Manny notes that Paps and Ma were supposed to be searching for them. Paps says he guesses that he “found something better,” and Ma “slap[s] him on the chest and call[s] him a bastard” (49). She pulls away from him; she is running late for work. The boys sigh; the moment has been broken. When Ma asks Paps to go get her work boots, she turns off the light and jumps in the tub with the boys, closing the curtain behind her.
Paps looks for Ma; when he comes into the bathroom and turns on the light, they jump out and tackle him. He laughs as they tickle and poke him. Though Ma tells them to quit it, they begin to tickle her, too. It escalates, as they slap Paps and then Ma. When Manny hits Ma, “It sound[s] so satisfying, the thwack of his palm on her skin” (50). Manny yells at his parents for not looking for the boys when they were hiding in the bathtub.
Joel and the narrator think that their luck has run out, that Paps will finally react in anger, and with violence. He doesn’t, however. Neither of their parents object. In this moment, the boys have a free pass, and they take advantage, slapping and kicking and yelling: “why don’t you come find us…you’re bad, bad, bad…why can’t you do right, we hate you…next time you better come” (51). In this moment, they are able to take revenge, and express their true emotions without penalty.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Night Watch”
Paps gets a night security guard job. However, because Ma also works at the brewery at night, Manny, Joel, and the narrator have to go to work with him. He brings sleeping bags and has the boys sleep near the vending machines. This seems to work for a little while, until one night the narrator wakes up in a sweat. He finds his father at the guard desk, lazily watching the monitor, a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. Paps pulls the narrator onto his lap and turns the monitor off, suggesting that it was the monitor that woke the narrator.
The narrator falls asleep then wakes to Paps swearing. Paps jumps up and runs to where the narrator’s brothers are sleeping. He grabs the bedding and the boys laugh, until he slaps Manny. Then they realize it is serious. Paps tells Manny to take his brothers to the car and hide under the blanket.
When they make it out of the building, Paps’s replacement is already there. He is a taller white man holding a cup of coffee with steam rising out of it. The other security guard watches the boys walk to the car. Paps turns his attention to the security guard, who asks if the boys are Paps’s. The man stares at the boys’ bedding and asks them if Paps is having them sleep there. Paps gives Manny the car keys and tells them to go to the car.
The boys watch the argument between the two men. Paps gestures wildly. The narrator tells his brothers that their father fell asleep, and that’s why they were late getting out of the building. Though the narrator’s brothers are relieved to learn that they’re not the ones who got Paps in trouble, they still think that he might blame them for it later. Simultaneously, their father’s intense discussion with the other security guard escalates, with Paps slapping the man’s coffee cup out of his hand. The other guard spits and then goes inside.
When Paps gets into the car, he’s livid and demands the keys from Manny. The drive home is silent and tense. Manny asks Paps if he thinks he will be fired. Paps just laughs, but Manny keeps at it, wanting to know what the other guard said. Paps punches the ceiling of the car. After a while, he begins to make a wheezing noise, pounding the dashboard with his fist over and over again. The boys start to knock on the car, too, all in rhythm: “it felt like we were building something, a tribe—us four together, us four angry and giddy and thump-crazy together” (58-59). The boys begin to chant, “‘No More Work!’ ‘No More Floor!’ ‘No! More! Coffee Cups!’ ‘No More Crying!’” (59).
When they get home, they’re still chanting; Ma is confused. Paps sits on the couch, his head in his hands (59-60). She thinks that he might be tired. Paps says, “We’re never gonna escape this” (60). He sweeps his hand around the room; “this” refers to their circumstances, their lives.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Big-Dick Truck”
Paps has to go to the car dealership; the previous night, he was driving home after taking Ma to work (the boys were in the car) and the car stalled. They had to walk along the shoulder in the rain, until a woman finally pulled over and gave them a ride. When they were in the car, Paps said he was going to go to the dealership the next day and replace their car. The driver thought this was fantastic; the boys don’t believe that this will happen. When they got home, Ma agreed that it was a good idea to get a new vehicle.
Manny, Joel, and the narrator wait for their father on the front lawn, barely able to contain their excitement. When Paps comes driving down the street in a blue truck, they can’t believe it. He slowly makes his way toward the driveway, and even some neighborhood kids come out to inspect the new vehicle. Once it comes to a stop, they all inspect the interior. The boys tell the other kids not to get their greasy fingers all over it.
When Ma comes outside, she is not pleased. She interrogates Paps about how many seats and seatbelts are in the truck. He tells her that it has one backseat bench. Ma is livid: “‘This fucking truck that doesn’t even have enough seat belts to protect your family.’ She sp[its] in the direction of the driveway. ‘This fucking big-dick truck’” (64). Paps slaps her, but she keeps calling it a “big-dick truck” until he puts his hand over her mouth. Paps tells her that she’s right, and that he’ll return the truck to the dealership the next day.
The brothers are disappointed until Paps suggests that they all ride in it together before he returns it. After dinner, Ma comes around to the idea, and dresses up for the occasion. She sits in the front with Paps, and the boys bring their plastic guns and sit in the bed. As the truck roams the streets and backroads of their town, the brothers point their guns at the stars, aiming to shoot them out of the sky.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
These chapters suggest that even in moments of relative calm, happiness, and unity, brutality lies just under the surface of the family’s interactions. In “You Better Come,” the boys bask in a moment of equilibrium. During the scene in the bathroom, their parents love each other, and are not angry with the brothers. It seems that Paps has just returned from being gone, and he and Ma cannot get enough of each other. Their encounter is rough, but Ma seems to welcome it; for her, and perhaps for all of the family members, pleasure and pain are so intertwined that it’s hard to separate them.
Ma and Paps are in fact so engaged with each other that they forget the boys are there, or they don’t care, moving them towards the animal realm in their lack of bashfulness about being sexual in front of their offspring. When the boys punish their parents for ignoring them, surprisingly, the parents accept it. Perhaps they know they deserve the slaps and kicks for being negligent, or, alternately, they are too stuck in their own euphoria of being back together to be angry. Either way, the boys finally get an outlet for their frustration, and they take advantage.
“Night Watch” brings the family back to reality. Paps gets a job, but they cannot afford childcare; here, Torres shows the realities of life for the working poor. After Paps is let go from the job, the male family members sing on their way back home; this exemplifies the continued naivete of the children, in that they don’t seem to fully understand the gravity of the situation. When Paps admits he feels like giving up, Ma telling him not to arrives as much as a threat as it does support.
In “Big-Dick Truck,” we’re made privy to the overlay of materialism and machismo. Paps’s escapist tendencies are actualized through the purchase of the big, blue truck, which is entirely impractical and unsafe. Nonetheless, it awes both the narrator and his brothers and the other boys in the neighborhood. The double entendre of the phrase “big dick,” which here can be perceived in one regard as possessive of a large phallus, and, in another way, as someone who is a sizable “jerk,” are both made material in the truck itself. The truck is able to make Paps momentarily feel like more of a man while at the same time showing how self-centered he is, in buying a vehicle that is unsafe for the family he is supposed to care and provide for.
Ma allows Paps his momentary fantasy and agrees to go for a ride, even dressing up for the occasion. If the truck functions as Paps’s fantastical giant phallus, this is echoed in the toy guns the narrator and his brothers have. The action of shooting the guns at the stars above exemplifies the futility of the boys’ lives; they can act violently, but the larger world will do little more than ignore them.
