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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Ducks”
Paps comes home drunk and grabs Ma, who is getting ready for work. She tells him to stop, but he guides her toward the stairs. When she still resists, he lifts her up and drags her as she hangs on to the banister:
Her eyes searched, wild and desperate, for something to grab, and for an instant she looked at us with that same pleading look […] All of this passed in a moment, and only a moment, before Paps kicked the door closed (66-67).
The boys see their mother struggling, and cannot do anything about it. After a moment she seems to accept what’s going to happen, though the passing silent plea for help sticks with the narrator.
The brothers stay downstairs, afraid to even go near the bedroom, and watch television until they are asleep in front of the set. Ma leaves for work while they’re sleeping and then comes back. When she returns, she wakes her sons, telling them to get up and get in the truck.
She drives to a park along the river. There are upturned canoes in the river, and a playground with mostly broken swings. The narrator notices that Ma has put some of their clothes, along with documents and pictures, in clear plastic trash bags that sit in the truck bed. The boys play games where two are always dominating the other one, though the configuration switches.
They walk along the river, eventually climbing up an embankment to a bridge above. Traffic whizzes by. They sit on the side of the bridge with their legs dangling down. Drivers honk at them and tell them they shouldn’t sit there. One lady even pulls over on the other side and warns them that sitting there is dangerous. They say they’re not moving and she continues to try to convince them to move. Manny stands up and calls her a bitch. He grabs a piece of loose pavement and the other boys do, too. The woman walks backwards to her car and drives away.
Ma is still sleeping in the car, so they tip one of the canoes in the river over, tie it to a tree, and sleep in it. When they wake up, Ma is throwing pretzels at them. She tells them that she thought they had been kidnapped. They get out of the canoe and follow her to the car. The boys eat a lot of the pretzels because it’s all they’ve eaten for the whole day.
Ma pretends that they might move to Spain, and they all fill in what life they might have there. Finally, Ma runs out of things to talk about. She says, “We can go home, but we don’t have to. We don’t ever have to go home again. We can leave him. We can do that. But I need you to tell me what to do” (72). The brothers have no answer and Ma becomes frustrated. She turns the car on and drives home. When they arrive, the boys are able to let go of the fear that their lives would change, and feel disappointed by the fact that nothing has shifted. The narrator reflects, “I could feel the bitterness in my brothers’ silence; I wondered if Ma felt it too” (72). Whether she feels like she made the right decision or not, she goes back inside the house. Paps is waiting at the window.
The boys stay outside. Joel says that he thought that something would happen. Manny suggests that they should have killed the woman who told them to stop sitting by the side of the bridge, and then driven off with her car. They argue over whether the ducks in the river would or would not have eaten her brains. The narrator stays out of the conversation.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Trench”
The brothers wake up to the sound of Paps’s grunts coming from the backyard below. They open the window and lean out to find that he is digging a trench.
One of Ma’s coworkers has given the family a box of old military clothes. As a result, they’ve been playing soldier, and today is no different. They put on some of the camouflage and rub shoe polish under their eyes. They hide out back in the hedge, trying to figure out why Paps is digging the hole. Joel suggests that he’s digging a grave—Ma’s grave. Manny says it’s a trench.
They go over and watch Paps dig. Paps looks up and notes that he might never be able to get out of the hole. When he asks for help, the boys try to pull him up, but Paps drags them in. After they get out, they trail behind him into the house, telling him that he forgot to wipe off spots on his pants.
He goes to get Ma from work, but apparently does not make it there, because she comes home a few hours later, “all alone and drunk and mad as hell” (77). Her anger turns to frustration as she asks where Paps is and gets no response. Instead, Joel mentions that Paps is digging a trench. Ma infers that they don’t know anything about trenches. The narrator relays Joel’s theory that it could be a grave. Ma orders them all to take naps. From bed, they hear the back door open and close. Ma goes into the hole and lies down. It begins to pour rain.
The boys get two towels and wait for Ma at the kitchen table. When she comes in, they wipe the mud off of her and then wrap her in a blanket. Ma says, “Does he think I’ll just take this” (79). The brothers are not supposed to answer. They dare each other to go into the hole like Ma did. They want to defend Ma from Paps, so only one brother at a time can go lay in the hole. Joel goes, then Manny.
When it’s the narrator’s turn, he stares down into the hole then takes off all of his clothes and descends into it. He thinks that it is a grave and Paps dug it for him. Though it is muddy, and though he is afraid he might be buried alive, the narrator has “a wish, and so [he stays] to wish it” (81). He feels his body moving with the clouds above his head, “certain that [he is] moving, and the hole [is] magic” (81). He is down there for a while, and the only thing that pulls him out of his trance is laughter. Ma, Joel, Manny, and Paps are all staring down at him. Paps reaches to grab him and pull him out, saying that “the war [is] over” (81).
Chapter 15 Summary: “Trash Kites”
The brothers sneak out and walk for miles. As it begins to get colder, Joel and the narrator suggest they go back. Many says that the path is good and that they’re safe. When they reach an open field, they put their backpacks down. They grab the twine and three plastic bags that they brought with them and make kites. They run with their homemade creations until it is night and the stars and moon are above them. They take out their sleeping bags and sleep until headlights illuminate their makeshift campground. It’s Paps. Assuming it was Manny’s idea, Paps hits Manny many times. Manny keeps calling him a “murderer,” even though no one has been killed (83).
When they’re home, sleeping again, Manny climbs into bed with the narrator and tells him that he has been dreaming of kites. The narrator can tell that Manny’s body is clenched, and that he’s likely in pain. He talks about how he believed they could escape, but he was wrong: “I was sure that God would grab hold of those kites and lift us up, protect us” (84). He points out that they have to figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that they can “fall upward” and get to heaven (85). The narrator imagines them rising above the earth, floating upward past stars and space until they are “safe as seed wrapped up in the fist of God” (85). Manny’s desire to be safe and protected is taken up by the narrator and converted into an even more fantastical vision.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
This group of chapters offers a number of juxtapositions, reversals, and ambiguities. If in a prior moment the rough intimacy displayed by Paps and Ma is seen as something akin to bonding, in “Ducks,” it is presented only as marital rape. After this moment, Ma takes the children and leaves, but then doesn’t know where to go; this irony is exemplified by the overturned canoes on the side of the river. Further, when the woman stops for the children and actually does offer a viable means of escape from Paps and, perhaps, Ma, the boys threaten to kill her. Their only means of escape is escapism—something that has been echoed by both parents at this point, as Paps runs off at various points and Ma imagines a new life in Spain that she knows she’ll never attain. That Manny and Joel later wonder whether they should have murdered the woman who offered them aid in order to flee and start a new life shows the rampancy of delusion and dysfunction in the family. The narrator stays out of this conversation, showing that he is beginning to individualize and grow old enough to correctly perceive his family’s actions as consistently incorrect.
The large hole in “Trench” functions as a multi-faceted image, and one that in some ways is akin to the game played with the ketchup and moisturizer earlier in the novel. One can view that combination of liquids as blood and semen, symbolizing, for this family, violence and rape, with the furthest possible result on that spectrum being death. However, Ma views it as placenta—that is, a symbol for birth. The actions of the “Never-Never Time” game are warlike, and this life-as-war mentality resurfaces here, with the trench being viewed by the boys as a safe space to effectively hide from the violence and dysfunction transpiring around them. The confusion of their lives has reached an existential pitch; no one knows why Paps is digging the hole, or what’s it’s for, and therefore it can only be used as shelter from the war that is their lives or as a final mode of escape from those lives—that is, as a grave. Paps is the one digging the hole, going deeper and deeper into cycles of unemployment, depression, and violence that he cannot climb out of. He is dragging his whole family down with him and they must spend time in the trench, too.
The narrator stays in the trench the longest; this can be seen as further foreshadowing of what lies ahead for his character. A part of him wants to be buried and be taken away from his circumstances. When his whole family stands over him, and Paps tells him that the war is over, conflict has momentarily passed. However, it’s not mentioned whether the narrator truly wants to leave the trench, as there will surely be another battle soon.
“Trash Kites” shows the brothers in trouble again. They run away and fly makeshift kites in a field surrounded by trees until very late. When Paps find them, Manny gets severely beaten. Later, back at home in bed, Manny gets in next to the narrator. He says that he was sure that they would be protected, and that the kites would allow them to escape; he seems surprised and frustrated that this doesn’t occur. The juxtaposition of what Manny feels they need to do with how the world is (that is, Manny’s want to “fix” gravity) echoes the earlier desire to shoot the stars from the sky while in the back of Paps’s truck; however, Manny’s beating arrives as a form of coming-of-age, as he begins to accept more fully the boys are “nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We’re on our own” (84).
