Search Party (6 page)

But the boy Jackson had more going on than Dooley or anybody screaming in the outer office knew about, because what he did in the next second was point the gun at his own head. And that was when Dooley did the job the girl social worker had pretended all along to think was his. Arguments came to his tongue. He talked the kid out of putting a bullet in his own head.

The dog bled all over the mat but he lived too. He dragged a foreleg but he was a young dog with a trusting nature and he was going to go on for years doing his part of the job.

The Llamas

A
NN
told her friends she was nowhere. What was ahead? She didn't love her boyfriend. He accused her of not liking him but he thought the love part could survive that. He didn't like her, either, even though they maintained a truce over their differing views of the world. Ann's had always been that where the world was not cruel, it was treacherous, even though many advantages surrounded and secured her, including a job several rungs above his in the same company. His view was that the world didn't matter if you were having a good time.

When Casey Clare's brother died, Ann had to attend the funeral because she was Casey's boss. She felt the obligation even though Casey had been her assistant for only a few months. Todd, her boyfriend, said the obligations she felt were imaginary half the time and they did nothing but add random pressure to her crowded life. Her friends said the same thing. They didn't press the point that she often shirked these responsibilities after getting herself into a state about them. But she had said she would go to Casey's brother's funeral, and she did.

As an assistant—Ann had known it within a week of hiring her—Casey was not working out. She could spend half a morning being reassured and primed by Ann to get down to jobs that weren't all that complicated or taxing. Every day, she presented herself anew with her blunt inquiries into Ann's affairs, and then
a rundown of things seen and done between close of business the day before and the reopening of the office doors.

Ann had to sit turned away from her computer at an awkward angle, looking up at Casey with an expression of commiseration, gradually picturing how it would be to lean over the in-basket and slap the girl into action. Girl—Casey was thirty-three, two years older than Ann. But her big smiling face and her packed lunch and her blouses a little too tight, as if she had just grown those breasts, made Ann think of an overgrown schoolgirl turned loose in the workplace and fending for herself. Or not entirely for herself: Casey did have a large family, a whole phone book of relatives advising, making demands, dropping in with food, all comically devoted to each other. Not to mention the dozens from her church who prayed at the unconscious brother's bedside.

He was in the University Hospital. Every day, Casey urged Ann to visit him, as if the problem Ann had was simply getting up the nerve. Casey said, “Yeah, why not this Sunday? Just stop by, come up to the floor. After you get done with the vigil.” She knew Ann attended the Green Lake peace vigil—not that far from the hospital—any Sunday that she could make it. She had done that since before the beginning of the war in Iraq.

“Come on,” Todd said. “Let's get out of town.”

“The vigil is all I do and I have to do it or I'll go crazy.”

“That's crazy,” he said. He didn't go out of town without her; he didn't have the focus to plan a trip and get in the car all by himself and stay with it, and she didn't say it but that was why he wasn't getting anywhere in his job.

The peace vigil: that was no problem for Casey. God wasn't on either side; how could he be? Almost every day, Casey had a question about God for Ann, and not trying to smoke her out as an atheist, either, but simply assuming that the matter of what God would think or do would interest anybody. “I mean, you wonder,” Casey would say. September 11, war, and the accident that had befallen Randy—an angel to all who knew him, a fireman, minding his own business and raising llamas. “You wonder
how these things can happen.” Ann would agree, clicking her nails on the keyboard as she appeared to give thought to the conundrum. Eventually Casey would go sighing back to her desk, where she would pick up the phone and call whoever was sitting with Randy in the ICU. She herself began and ended each day with a visit to the hospital where he had been lying in a coma since before she started working for Ann.

“I admire that about her,” Ann said to Todd, who was telling her that if she couldn't face firing Casey she ought to get her transferred out of the office right that minute, before she wormed her way in any further. Ann thought about that and because it raised the question of exactly where, at work, her obligations lay, she said, “I think she'll get down to work when her brother gets out of the hospital.” But the day after they had that talk, Randy Clare sank deeper and died of his injuries.

H
ALF
the people who had arrived from the funeral were standing in the rain, mud oozing into their shoes. They were smoking, drinking wine from plastic cups, and watching two llamas.

They had trooped out of the house where the wake was going on—or not wake, reception, or whatever the church the Clares belonged to called such a gathering—off the sagging porch and down the path, really a pair of ruts, to see Randy's much-loved pets. Two wet animals as tall as camels stood by the fence. One of them, head high, had apparently walked as far forward on its front legs as the back legs, stationary in the mud, would allow. The other stood with its four feet—pads with toenails were not hooves, were they?—close together. That one was almost tipping over, like a tied bouquet. Then the stretched-out one raised a delicate bony leg and then another, and stepped a few paces away from its mate—if it was a mate—and the mate sprang loose and planted its feet on a wider base in the mud.

Ann said, “Does it seem to you like they're posing?” All the while a soaking rain fell on their thick, wormy-looking coats and on the long faces both supercilious and gentle. One of the women said, “Those poor things aren't rainproof like sheep,
did you know that?” and people answered her, as they had not answered Ann. Some of them knew that piece of information and some didn't.

The eyes of the llamas were glazed and gentle. But the heads were poised atop those haughty necks. A face came vaguely to mind, someone looking around with a sad hauteur. Who? An actor. Somebody gay.

The woman, an older woman with a smoker's voice, knew something about llamas, though no one, she said, could hold a candle to Randy Clare on the subject. Randy had explained to her, as he would to anyone with an interest, the spitting behavior of llamas. Llamas spat when they were annoyed and what they spat was chewed grass, a kind of grass slop brought up from the gut and carrying the smell of that region.

“See the pile of dung over there? That's their bathroom. They all use it. They don't just go any old place.”

A wet dog trotted up and crouched, head down, licking its lips and yawning with eagerness as it peered under the fence. Ann thought it might suddenly slip under and give chase, but it did not.

Even so, the two heads of the llamas swung around and the big dark wet eyes rested on the dog and then moved back to the group at the fence. Certainly there was some emotion there, in those eyes. Did the llamas know they were bereaved?

“All right,” Casey said. “You've seen 'em. Bootsy and Baby. His darlings, except for Baby isn't so darling. Let's get back inside and get dry and get drunk.”

They waded back to the house. Nobody said anything about caked shoes and muddy pant legs, though the women fussed with their dripping, flat hair. They piled their wet raincoats onto a top-loading freezer in a room off the kitchen just big enough to hold it and leave space to pass through the back door. “Deer meat?” Ann asked Casey, indicating the freezer, proud of herself for recalling that Casey and her brothers hunted deer. “No way, not now,” Casey said, closing herself into a tiny bathroom off the kitchen. “Donna's catering stuff,” she yelled from inside. One of
the sisters had her own business; she had done the rolled meats and the trays of vegetables and dips in the dining room, and the laurel leaves on the tablecloth, which were actually sober and pretty, Ann thought, with white candles at either end.

Around Casey's desk, and at the copier too, the sagas of her sister Donna's business could be heard any day: the crushed cake boxes, the tiny refrigerators some people made her manage with, the cucumbers leaching dye from beets.

At the table sat the not-very-old mother, wearing big tinted glasses. Three of her grown children had lived in this small house with her. Two now. Why didn't they leave home? “You're all together, that says so much about your family,” Ann said to Casey through the bathroom wall, hearing the sugary tone in her own voice.

“There were seven of us.” Casey came out waving her hands behind her and saying, “Don't go in there just yet.” Her eyes were extraordinarily red; they looked the way Ann's had long ago, in college, on weekends when she smoked too much weed. It occurred to her that this might be what Casey had been doing in the bathroom. “Rocky and I are the last ones, and who knows when we'll get kicked out.”

“Watch yourself,” the mother called out from her chair in the dining room, pointing with the cigarette, taking a deep draw, and coughing with her mouth closed.

Casey grabbed a framed photograph from among the cakes and pies on the shelf of the cut-away window to the kitchen, and held it out to Ann. “This is him. Randy.” The picture was of a very young man with a florid, heavy, smiling face. He had the fireman's neat mustache.

Half the city fire department was in the house. They had all driven to and from the cemetery in a caravan with little flags flying from their windows, though Randy had not died in the line of duty but in a freak crash on a secondary road in the eastern part of the state, where he had gone in his truck to pick up a variety of hay the llamas liked to eat.

The firemen all seemed to belong to the same church the
Clares did or to be familiar with its terms. “Prayer partner.” Ann heard that one twice as she moved from one spot to another with her wine. She was on her third full cup. “Randy Clare. Casey Clare,” Todd had said. “Shouldn't they be Catholics?”

The rambling service, with its speakers standing up for the mike to be passed their way and its sudden calls to prayer, had had an air of unfinality to it, like a wedding where the vows had been written by the bride and groom when they had had a few too many. In the huge, carpeted sanctuary, light poured through skylights onto a botanical garden. The music for the funeral was piped in, but sound equipment hung from the ceiling, along with banners and American flags, and the plants rose in tiers to a bandstand with keyboards and a drum set.

Years ago, Casey told her, the founder of the church had gone around the state preaching against war. That was in the eighties, when there was no war going on. He was a young man and he was preaching against nuclear war. Being attacked on our own soil had washed all that stuff out the window. This afternoon in the hot, crowded house Anne had heard several restatements of this position, from people steaming, as she was, in their damp clothes. The firemen seemed to scent her politics—whatever her politics actually were.

She poured herself more wine. There was ample wine. The massed bottles were positively Irish. Ann's own heritage was Irish. That was why she had to be careful, as Todd would have reminded her if he had been there.

As far as she could tell, there was no one in the crowd with whom to be ironic. She had to answer, “I'm sorry,” when a broad-chested man blocked her way and said, “Casey tells me that's your car with the
NO WAR
sign. Well, I sure wish there was no war, too. And not only that, ma'am, you're gonna need a winch to get you out, where you parked.” She had felt the car settle into mud. There had seemed nowhere else, by the time she got there. She gave a shamed, appeasing laugh. Fortunately Casey appeared and said, “Sam, you leave her alone. That's my boss.”

“I know that. That's why I'm talking to her. I'm making a good impression.”

“This is my big brother, Sam,” Casey said, flashing her red eyes. “Come in here, I'll show you Randy and Rocky's room,” she went on, taking Ann's free hand and pulling her. By the laden table Ann pulled up short and set down her cup to refill it. She had come, she had done her duty, but she had to protect herself. Casey kept hold of Ann's hand and held her own cup out to be filled too. “You haven't actually met Mom,” she said. “This is my boss, Ann,” she called to her mother across the table, waving Ann's hand at her. Her mother was talking to several people sitting up close to her chair or bending around her, but at the sound of her daughter's voice she looked up and smiled, wreathing her forehead with the smoke she was blowing straight upward into her own nose, away from the faces of her listeners.