Noah's Wife (11 page)

Leesl refuses to believe that her town is as taxing as it seems. If there were nothing here but the incessant rain, the vacant shops, the failed relationships, the abandoned homes, the fading
zoo, the so-called broken dreams—if it were true that
that
was all there was, then no one would remain. The townspeople would have been gone long ago. Leesl is convinced that there must be something more here than that—something intangible, unseen.

A
fter three full days spent doing rounds with him, Noah's wife informs the zookeeper that she cannot help him anymore.

“This was supposed to be temporary,” she says, when he suggests that they stop in at the diner to dry off and grab a quick lunch. “I only agreed to help you for that first afternoon, while you were still getting the animals settled. They're settled now. I should be spending more time at home—taking care of my own.”

Although she tries to make her voice as stern as possible, the zookeeper's hard gaze wears her down. She looks into her soup and feels the heat flooding her cheeks.

“Is that so?” the zookeeper counters. “You think they're settled?”

She wants to say yes. But then someone slides through her
peripheral vision, and she turns to see the sheriff taking a seat on the stool beside her. As the man reaches for a menu, Noah's wife catches a glimpse of his hands: two fingers wrapped in bandages, and the rest of the skin crosshatched in tiny cuts.

The sheriff notices her looking. “The red panda,” he says. “I've got worse ones on my calves from the raccoon.”

Noah's wife tries not to feel sorry for him. Didn't she and the zookeeper show him how to put the portable pens together? Whose fault is it that he didn't pay attention? She doesn't like feeling responsible for people who are still strangers to her, and yet she cannot help but worry over the townspeople she has seen over the past few days with dark rings under their eyes, bandages on their limbs, claw marks on their arms. It has not been an easy adjustment for anyone, taking these animals under their wings. Earlier this morning even Mauro—bubbly, bumbling Mauro—swore at her and the zookeeper as they stepped through the entrance to the general store. He is tired of waiting for things here to change, he told them, deeply perturbed. He is sick of the rain, of the way that it teases him and toys with his emotions—letting up for a few days here and there so that he begins to think the worst is over, only to come ripping out of the sky with a vengeance some afternoon while he is walking back to his store from the diner. Worst of all are the bugs: the little black and gold beetles that have begun creeping in under the windowsill and scuttling up and down the walls at night. Mauro can hear them in the dark as he lies awake below his blankets, his lips clamped shut and his hands over his ears
because he once read a story about insects that crawled into people's orifices, laid their eggs, and died. The zookeeper assured him that the beetles have no intention of doing such a thing, that they are only coming inside in the first place because the ground is too saturated for them to survive.

“Well, what do
you
know?” Mauro muttered to himself, audibly enough for them to hear him. “Bringing the animals into the people's houses? How can that idea be making sense? This town is not a fairy tale!”

While none of the townspeople are particularly happy about the development, Mauro has turned out to be one of the most distressed. When Mrs. McGinn saw him sneaking away from the town meeting the other day, she brought him right back and promptly assigned him several large birds. His store is now home to three wild turkeys, two blue herons, an emu, and an ostrich. Not one of these has Mauro been able to bring himself to love, despite Mrs. McGinn's assurances. The herons are the most inoffensive—they roost on the shelves of the lumber department and fish for minnows in the kiddie pool Mauro set up for them in aisle six. And Mauro rather likes the two-toed gait of the ostrich, her hairless neck and the black and white feathers that look so soft to the touch. Sometimes he leans on his elbows over the counter for minutes at a time, watching her raise and lower her wings in an odd and delicate movement reminiscent of a lady lifting and rustling her petticoats.

It is the turkeys he hates. They are a gang, the three of them, a bullying gang. They lurk, watching him from behind stacks of
canned goods. Sometimes they drive him back behind the counter when he tries to come out to greet a customer, charging at him as he leaves what they must regard as his cage. He sees them picking and eating the beetles from the walls but even that doesn't change his opinion of them. They make him feel unwelcome in his own home.

“And anyway, this is not my home,” he grumbled. “Rolling stones are too mossy. I should have been going back to Italy all the many years ago.”

It troubles Noah's wife to hear Mauro so unhappy, just as it troubles her to see the sheriff with his hands torn up. She only agreed to help the zookeeper in the first place because he said that no one else possessed her talent with the animals; he did not warn her about having to deal with the people, as well. Animals are much easier, reflects Noah's wife. Their wants and their needs are obvious, open, straightforward: they are hungry, tired, satisfied, afraid. The townspeople, on the other hand, with their emotions in knots and their hopes and dreams and fears all tangled up in themselves and in their neighbors—well, what would make her think that she could handle all of that? That is Noah's job; not hers.

But these days Noah seems to have little interest in communicating with his congregants. He barely eats and he no longer sleeps through the night. He leaves the house before she wakes, and she doesn't know where he goes. Every time she has tried checking in the church, he isn't there. The two of them have not made love since before the first service; last night she leaned in
to press her lips to the warm skin of his throat, and he turned his head away. She lay awake in the dark for many cold minutes afterward, the muscles in her stomach tense with unease.

And so she busies herself with the beasts that Noah brought into their house: the woodchuck burrowing beneath the quilts in the guest bedroom, the badger snoring in his crate. One of the bathrooms has been transformed into a reptile house, with an orphaned baby alligator half submerged in the bathtub and a tank of lizards sunning by the glow of a light box on the back of the toilet. The one-winged golden eagle surveys the backyard from her perch in the dining room, keeping her eye on the pens with the wild boars, the zebra, and the sheep. In the morning before Noah's wife leaves and at night when she returns, she makes the rounds around the house and yard with buckets of feed hanging from her wrists, the slender red fox trotting at her heels, and her husband nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps it is better, she tries to convince herself, that she is doing this on her own. How terrible Noah is with the animals! He draws too close to them; he reaches out too quickly when he tries to touch them, and it seems as though every evening she is patching up some new wound. The barricades that he arranges while she is away—chairs, tables, lamps—have not proven successful in keeping the species contained in their assigned spaces. The animals simply do not like him. Within their first few hours with the flamingo, the bird attacked Noah twice and would have done so again if they had not given her up to Leesl. Just yesterday Noah's wife found Noah in a confrontation with the
saddle-billed stork (five feet high, sharp-beaked, bad-tempered), her husband trying to scare the bird away by pressing a spatula to its feathered chest. The stork didn't budge. When Noah's wife saw the patches around his beak turning red with anger, something the zookeeper had advised her to watch for, she swiftly stepped between them, took the spatula from Noah, and ushered the bird into the basement. They have heard him cackling through the heating ducts ever since.

She might have tried rehoming the stork, too, but she knows better than anyone that the townspeople have animals enough of their own. Every time she enters a house or a shop with the zookeeper, the occupant looks as skittish and as drained as she feels. No one is happy.

“That animal doesn't do a damn thing,” complains Mrs. McGinn's husband when the zookeeper stops by after lunch to check on the sloth and say hello to his fiancée.

“Those monkeys? The little hanging ones?” says one of the firemen later that afternoon. “They eat all the food they can get their thumbs on the second it passes through this kitchen. We haven't had a piece of fruit for days!”

“I don't see why I have to have the seals, too,” whimpers the postmistress. “Aren't they strong swimmers? Can't they survive outside?”

“The snakes,
really
?” demands the weatherman, whose bookshelves have been stripped of weather tools and are now stocked with fifteen glass terrariums. “I don't even live in this town. Was it really necessary to give me
all
of them?”

“They're social creatures. We needed to keep them all together,” lies the zookeeper, his face blank. He shoves a sack of live white mice into the weatherman's empty hands and then he spins heavily on his heel. Noah's wife knows that he intends for her to follow him, but instead she drops into a wicker chair by the weatherman's window and turns her face to the glass. The weatherman watches her, suspiciously—at this point he is wary of all the townspeople, who scowl when they see him and reject his attempts to drive them out of here. And can he blame them? Noah's wife asks herself, gazing out into the street. No one likes being told by a complete stranger that the time has come to abandon ship—especially when they are so desperate to stay afloat that they are grasping at feathers, sharing their beds with marsupials and their bathrooms with amphibians.

“So whose side are you on?” the weatherman demands, interrupting her reflection.

“Excuse me?” she says.

The weatherman heaves a sigh of impatience. “Don't play dumb,” he says. “I know what people are saying. They think I've holed myself up in this apartment because I'm up to no good, that I've come here only to torture them with my threats and my predictions. They don't think there's any truth to what I say: that this town is in danger of going under.”

He grimaces and leans back in his chair, away from her. His feet are propped up on his desk and his arms are crossed over the buttons of his plaid shirt, his slicker draped behind him. The desk is lined with tools: hygrometers, barometers, and
others she doesn't recognize. The walls are tacked with maps of the region, topographical charts of the river and the hills. Beside the door hangs a lunar calendar, its pages warped with water damage.

“I'm not sure,” she says. “I haven't been here long enough to say.” How should she know if they should stay or go? Noah was called here, and so she came. She will stay here until he is called away again. Her path is as clear and as simple as that.

The weatherman raises his eyebrows. “You're not sure,” he repeats. “But you're the minister's wife. Shouldn't your husband be providing some kind of leadership right now? Don't you think that it's your job to know what's going on with his little flock?”

Noah's wife hears the contempt in his voice. “It's my job to help Noah,” she says, bristling. “It's not my place to make decisions for him or for his congregation.”

The boa constrictor lifts a gleaming head from its basket in the far corner of the room and pours itself in a rush of copper coils from the wicker to the floor. It slides across the room to the weatherman's desk and slips into the shadows. The weatherman shudders.

“Right you are,” he says. “That's the only intelligent remark I've heard since I arrived in this place. People make choices. They're the ones who get themselves into messes like this one, so let them try to get themselves right out again. Your neighbors aren't anyone's responsibility but their own. Isn't that so?”

Noah's wife recalls the first service, remembers her husband's
despair. The people he tried to help only turned against him. Is it their fault that he is not himself? Would everything have turned out better if he had left well enough alone?

The weatherman clasps his hands together, continues. “You know, they told me how strange this place was. They told me that its economy was built on a goddamn zoo, of all things, and then when the rain started, tourists stopped coming and the money stopped flowing.” He narrows his eyes, glancing quickly at a forked tongue flicking inside the glass tank to his right. “I was warned that the people who were left here are stubborn and tactless and set in their ways. But I was also told that in spite of all that it is my job to get them out. They haven't listened to me yet, but I've got to give them one more shot. That's why I'm calling a town meeting—whether that McGinn woman likes it or not. Last night I combed through all the town statutes: if she tries to oppose a meeting for emergency measures, she hasn't got a leg to stand on.”

Noah's wife shakes her head. “You don't understand how invested they are in this place,” she says. “To be honest, I think you're wasting your time here.”

He stares at her for so long that she begins to feel uncomfortable. “What choice do I have?” he finally says. “My career depends on this. I used to chase storms. I used to love it. No people, no problems. Just the four winds and me. Then I made one or two poor calculations, and all of a sudden they've got me on the evacuation circuit, running around to the towns nobody else will touch. If I don't get this right, I'll be out of work.”

He pauses. For a minute the room is silent, but for the rain against the windows and the snakes shifting in their tanks. When the weatherman speaks again, his tone sounds less callous. “This is all I've got,” he says flatly. “Didn't you ever have something like that? Something you were good at, that you would be sorry to lose?”

Noah's wife looks back to the window. “I used to take pictures,” she says after a moment. “In the city. I used to work for a studio. I suppose I miss photography, sometimes.” She checks herself. “But Noah needs me here.”

The weatherman jolts upright. “You're a photographer?” He reaches for a small leather bag resting on the corner of his desk, opens it and draws out a plastic canister with a roll of film. “I've been taking pictures, too, for proof. I've got shots that show the river is rising, shots of the trees hanging over telephone poles and all the rotting, abandoned houses. The ruin, the devastation. If they insist on being blind to the situation at hand, well, I'll just show them these photographs in order to
make them see
.”