Night Kill (2 page)

Marcie heated up the cider, added a ladylike shot of rum to two mugs, and started working on me to go to a party that night, one we had both been invited to. We sat on the sofa: me in jeans and a gray sweatshirt suitable for vacuuming dog hair on my day off, her—as always—in something coordinated and clean. Today it was a blue pullover and charcoal linen pants. She’s blond with big blue eyes, short and round and shy. Marcie’s the alpaca; I’m the big eland. But she’s as close to a sister as I’ll ever have. We met as freshman roommates. Her tutoring and encouragement helped keep me in college for two years, and I stood by her through an ugly boyfriend crisis our freshman year. When I got a summer job at the zoo between sophomore and junior years, that was the end of my interest in college, but not my friendship with Marcie.

Turning down parties is not natural to me, but I wasn’t up for this one. “It’s a zoo party. Rick’s going to be there. No way.” I was curled up with my nice hot mug; leaping into confrontation had no appeal. Remembering my eruption still made me shudder.

“He won’t be there,” Marcie said, holding up her hand palm-out for emphasis. “He’ll think you’ll show up and start lobbing long-necks at him. Incidentally, it still smells a little funny in here.”

Rick had cleaned up the broken beer bottles before he left and I’d wiped down the floor with ammonia, but a hint of stale beer lingered. The front door had a few new dents, a little chipped paint, nothing to worry about.

“I’ll get a new rug soon,” I told her, “and Rick will too show up. He never missed a party in his life. You have Saturday off for party recuperation, but I have to go to work tomorrow.”

“Iris, you’ve avoided him for a week. You don’t answer his calls, you dodge him at work, you take vacation days. You look like your dog died. You know,” she went on, glancing at me sideways, “you have to talk to him someday. And you need to get out and have some fun.” She emphasized “fun” with a little upward flourish of her hands.

“So which one is this party supposed to do—fun or spousal dramatics?” I asked, slouching on the couch the way my mother told me never to do. “Either one means standing around with all the people who can hardly wait for the next chapter of ‘Iris and Rick: Pair Bonding Catastrophe.’ Anyway, what’s keeping you from going with that new guy, Jake?”

“Jack. Wrong type for a zoo party. Cars with animal names are his idea of zoology.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Where better for you to run into Rick than with your friends? My guess is that everyone wants to see you guys work this out. Once upon a time, you two really made each other happy. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think there’s still a chance you could get that back.”

“I’m the hopeless romantic, the one who ran off and got married on impulse. At this point, I have no idea where he’s coming from, and I guess I’m afraid to find out.” I squirmed on the sofa.

“You’re scared, that’s all.”

“Well, that makes it simple.”

And maybe it did. I set the condition that we take separate cars so I could leave early. I dug around in the closet until I found a clean white jersey and a lacy yellow sweater to go over it. The top was skimpy; a thin band of belly showed if I kept my shoulders back. Black jeans, a pair of stylish black boots, silver dolphin earrings Marcie gave me last year for my twenty-fourth birthday. The black boots were freighted with meaning, but I didn’t have anything else in the way of party footwear. Rick had talked me into them a week after we were married while we were in Portland shopping for a Mother’s Day gift for my mom. I’d stopped to admire the boots, gleaming in Nordstrom’s window, and he’d urged me to buy them.

“No way!” I’d scoffed. “Too spendy. And those heels will make me look eight feet tall.”

“I’ll pay for them and I wish you were eight feet tall. I want you to put them on so I can rip them off your body.” He had grinned as he reached for his credit card.

I did think I looked sharp in them and he did rip them off my body later, although, with boots, it’s more tugging and yanking than ripping. Sex and laughter…My throat was suddenly sore, remembering. Living together hadn’t been just irritation and argument, not at first. I checked the mirror. Dark hair was shoulder-length and needed a trim, a little untidy. I tried for a sexy tousle. Definitely tall with the boots. The jeans were new, clean, and tight in the right places. I sighed, wondering who or what I was getting dressed up for. A week without sex was addling my thinking.

We caravaned, me leading in my pickup, across the old Interstate 5 bridge to northeast Portland. People who live in Vancouver, USA, spend a lot of time switching states, hopping across the Columbia River to the big city.

Hap Ricketts, the Commissary manager in charge of supplies and animal food, held a rowdy, noisy party at least once a year. Marcie and I walked toward his stucco house, loud music inviting us in from the chilly evening. No one was likely to hear the bell, so we let ourselves in. The place was crowded with zoo people, both staff and volunteers; a few of Hap’s half-feral bike club friends; and miscellaneous significant others. We added our jackets to a four-foot stack in the living room. I caught a glimpse of Denny’s blond head. He was running the music system from a bedroom off the dining room: surf rock and lots of it. I gave that two minutes until Hap got the sound back to Motörhead.

Hap interrupted a story he was telling Arnie, the bear keeper, to wave and shout something incomprehensible at me that seemed to be a compliment. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea to come. Or to wear the boots. As long as Hap stayed away from the jello shots and didn’t repeat the scene from last year’s party—pinning me against the wall in the hallway to vow his eternal friendship and deathless loyalty. Rick had rescued me with high-spirited horsing around that left Hap laughing. If Hap’s wife, Benita, had found us instead, she would have eviscerated me on the spot with a plastic spoon. I’d forgotten that little situation. Where was Benita?

Marcie fished a dripping soda out of a cooler and I found a bottle of wine and a plastic glass. I didn’t want beer that close to my nose. The music hit a brief lull and I could hear Hap’s parrots screeching in a back room.

I pushed through the crowd toward the dining room, where the food was likely to be. I love party snacks. I could hear howling—somebody was in a party mood. Next it would probably be gibbon hooting or competitive birdcalls. The crowd shifted and I stopped dead. In the middle of the room with a half dozen other people stood Rick, bright blue T-shirt with a black lizard design, worn jeans, and scarred motorcycle boots, waving a tall glass. He had his head back, eyes closed, and was howling like a particularly horny he-wolf. I stood stock-still, fight-or-flight reactions surging back and forth.

Flight won. I turned to go, but Marcie grabbed me by the elbow. “You big chicken. You can’t run from him. You work together.” She tried to whisper, but had to use a medium yell to be heard. Her fingers flicked “go in there.” I hung back as pride and anxiety fought it out again. This time pride won. He wasn’t going to run me out of a party with my people.

Sam Bates, the elephant and hoof stock keeper, was responding with a pretty good coyote serenade when I stepped into the room. They were arguing about fox barks when Rick finally saw me. He went still for a second, then nodded curtly. Sam turned to see who it was. Somebody behind me said, “Let the games begin.”

Sam and others began drifting casually out of the room. Benita, luscious in a tight red blouse and matching Capri pants, smiled brilliantly at me and tiptoed out on her four-inch heels, leaving Rick and me, plus a few innocents neither of us knew. I stepped uneasily toward the food and grabbed a paper plate. Rick rocked a little on the balls of his feet as I piled up chips, salted nuts, and vegetables with dip, not looking at him. The tension was roughly equivalent to Bonneville Dam’s electricity output.

Done with foraging, I cleared my throat, something caught in it. “Getting your daily quota?” I waved toward his glass.

“No. It’s root beer. Sam makes it.” He held it out to me. I eyed the glass suspiciously.

The music volume dropped, changed to k.d. lang singing about love. Denny setting a mood? Promoting eavesdropping? You never knew with Denny. Rick said something softly; it might have been “Don’t quit me, babe,” but I couldn’t be sure.

“We should talk.” Not that I had a clue what to say.

“Outside. My truck?”

I hesitated, then abandoned the plate. My stomach wasn’t really up for salsa-flavored chips anyway. We walked through the living room and outside, ignoring people who were busy not noticing us. I shivered as the night air hit me and kept on shivering in the passenger seat. He started to reach out to pull me closer, but caught himself as I growled. Cuddling was not on my agenda, cold or not. He started the motor and turned on the heater. I shifted my boots around a big envelope on the floor mat.

Rick twisted around to face me, leaning his back against the door. “I been trying all week to figure out what to say to you,” he said, slow and quiet. The streetlight left one side of his face in shadow. “I was really hacked off at you for getting hysterical and making a mess. It really bothered me that you spilled beer all over the house.” He folded his arms across his chest. His voice stayed pensive. “Then I thought, why am I worrying about the beer and the house? We had something really good and it’s all screwed up. I want to quit being annoyed at you and you being mad at me. It’s too hard.”

“Too hard?” I could feel anger rising to warm me and steady my knees. Too hard to find his own rental? Too hard to be my friend, like he used to be, before we got married?

“Yeah. Too hard going it alone. If it’s going to be this tough, I want it to be from figuring out what we need to do. I want it back like it was before, not all the tension and bad feelings.”

He looked through the windshield at the empty street. His face in profile was too much for my heart. I looked away.

“I miss you,” he said.

I stared down at my black boots, invisible in the shadows under the dash, and tried to find a home for the anger. I couldn’t. It eased on out. “What went wrong? I don’t understand what went wrong.”

He turned to face me again. “I figured out part of it, I think. You know how it is with your parents? You grew up knowing what being married is like when two people do it right, the way your folks do. It wasn’t like that for me—I never saw being married work out.”

It didn’t seem the time to launch into a critique of my parents’ marriage. For sure, it was better than ours. Rick’s parents had died before I met him; he’d never wanted to talk about them. “So why did you want to get married?”

“I really didn’t think about it. Maybe I figured it would keep you with me.”

“What about your folks?”

“They really didn’t like each other. Nonstop fighting and bitching. Fun for me was somewhere else, where they weren’t. They were both heavy drinkers. It’s probably why my mom got diabetes and Dad had a bad liver. They both died before they were fifty. My sister left when she was sixteen. I never really put it together until now. Pretty stupid, huh?” He was looking out the windshield again, not at me.

“So why did we end up doing them instead of my parents?”

“I don’t know. It has to be me, but I just don’t know. It’s not what I want, that’s for sure.” He turned toward me. “It was so great at first. I feel like I wrecked it. Maybe we should have stayed together and not gotten married.”

“Well, we did get married,” I said. “So we either rerun your parents’ marriage until we get divorced or we do something different.” “Divorced” sent a shiver up my spine.

He flinched, too. After a moment, he said, “I’ll try to quit the beer. I think you must be right about that, because the idea really bothers me, like I’ll never feel good again. But I can do it. I’ve started.”

He sounded like he meant it.

“I’m not sure what to do about the rest of it,” he added. He ducked his chin and looked hard at me. “You still in the game, then?”

I shifted toward him, relief and a timid joy washing out the last of anger and sorrow. “Yeah, that’s a start. Maybe get into a group or something for the alcohol. We can figure out the rest of it one step at a time.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

We talked until the party emptied out, one or two at a time. We watched Denny walk Marcie to her car. One by one, vehicles coughed to life, headlights flared, and they retreated, leaving a quiet street dotted with pools of light from street lamps.

We talked until we ran dry and still we sat in Rick’s truck, the motor muttering peacefully. When he pulled me into his arms, the last of the knots in my heart and stomach eased. We held each other like hurt children. Finally I raised my face and, gently, he kissed me.

That first kiss was sweet, filled with relief that we hadn’t decided to part forever. The second kiss was a reminder that we’d kissed before and knew how to do this right. The third was between consenting adults. I slid my hand under his T-shirt, feeling warm skin over the muscles of his chest and back. He reached down and grabbed the big envelope next to my feet, dropping it behind his seat back. I twisted around and he shifted over to the passenger seat underneath me—a little difficulty getting the seat leaned back, my knees straddling his lap—then his mouth found mine again and it wasn’t difficult at all. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that all the windows were steamed up. Then I forgot about the rest of the world.

Chapter Two

I hiked through the morning gray of early fall toward Felines the day after the party. I was almost on time. Well, twelve minutes late. I was short a few hours of sleep. Several hours of sleep. Still, I felt better than I had for a week. I hadn’t let him come home with me, but Rick was my partner, at last, in figuring out how to be together. He was no longer just a husband on his way to becoming an ex. I was stumbling from sleepiness, but my heart gave a cheerful skip. I’d get through today, get some rest, and then we’d figure out what came next.

After four years at the zoo, even tired and preoccupied, I still felt a tingle walking toward the cats, past the old giraffe peering out of his barn, past zebras munching on the hay Sam had set out. Gibbons whooped and hoo-hooed their lilting morning song from over at Primates. A big peahen sailed over my head, gliding on set wings from her nighttime roost high in a Douglas fir. She landed heavily on the pathway ahead of me, caught her footing, and shook her gaudy feathers into place before starting a busy day of extorting hot dogs and popcorn from toddlers.