The Animals: A Novel (11 page)

Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen, he says. Maybe tomorrow. I gotta figure out how to fix this thing.

Dang, you say.

Maybe you can show this guy the sights. Take him on back to Lemaire’s and get a Coke or something.

Can I have a dollar? you say.

Jesus, it’s like the mob, Bill says, but he reaches into his pocket and hands over a dollar.

OK. You turn to Rick now: You wanna come?

Heck yeah I wanna come, Rick says. Then, to Bill, Nice to meet you. He extends his hand again.

Yeah sure, nice to meet you too, kid, Bill says. He wipes his hand on his jeans and they shake. Bill is smiling as if the whole thing is completely absurd. Stay out of trouble, he says as you turn to walk away, the new boy, Rick, at your side.

All right, you call back.

I wasn’t talking to you, Bill says.

You half turn and wave the dollar. Rick continues to walk, as if he already knows the way, stumping through the weeds and thistle that gap the asphalt and concrete as if it represents some forgotten and unused path. Occasionally he kicks a can or a bottle into the air, an action that seems somehow miraculous. Metal shining in the sun. The sparkle of green glass. Things made free.

IT HAD
been, for four years, just you and Bill, fatherless, sharing the bedroom at the back of the trailer, sleeping next to each other in the twin beds, a scant aisle of floor space between you, your mother sleeping most often in the old green recliner in the equally tiny living room where, on Sunday nights, you and her and Bill would watch Marlin Perkins wrestle with wildlife on
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
.

But now there is Rick and it is different somehow: not an older brother or a father figure but a friend, a real friend. The two of you are inseparable from that first moment in the dust by the broken bicycle, crisscrossing town every day, exploring its edges, its interstices, sometimes walking far out into the sagebrush wilderness that lines the settlement on all sides, Rick taking you farther than you ever would have gone on your own. Out there in the flats, you see coyotes, rabbits, kangaroo rats. Sometimes you bring along the book you were given by your uncle,
Wildlife of the Intermountain West
, and use it to give names to the thistle and scrub, all the while Rick in motion, his engine miraculous, so full of energy it can hardly be believed. Even during that first year you wonder how he keeps going and you wonder why. He is everywhere at once. Later you will realize that his motion had been that of an animal probing a fence for weakness.

At night you will sometimes hear Rick’s father’s voice through the walls of their trailer, your window cracked open, your child’s ear listening to the roar. Close the window, Champaign, your brother will call from his thin mattress across the room. That’s Rick’s dad? you will ask. Yeah, Bill will say, but you don’t need to listen to that. Trust me. It’s better to not have a dad at all if that’s what he’s going to do. And you will wonder if such a statement can be true. Your own father was a truck driver and was gone more often than he was home. It has only been four years but you sometimes have difficulty remembering much about him at all.

Sometimes the noise from Rick’s trailer will end with the door crashing open and the sound of a car starting and then that car blasting off the gravel and onto the asphalt and screeching away. The following day Rick will not tell you what happened, not ever, but you know that Rick’s father hits him sometimes, hits him and hits his mother as well, a fact you will learn only by accident when you playfully slap Rick on the back and his response is to howl in pain, his back covered in a patchwork of purple bruises.

But all of that—the yelling and the beatings and the screeching away of the car in the dark of the night—all of it ends soon after you learn of Rick’s bruises, for Rick’s father simply drives away in the family car one night not long after dinnertime and does not return, not to the trailer and not, Bill tells you later, to his job at the Duval mine. He is simply gone. You try once to ask Rick about it but in response Rick only tells you that his father had to go do some work stuff out of town, that he will return, that his absence is only temporary. So that becomes both the story and the waiting game, Rick believing—or at least telling you that he believes—that his father will return at any moment. You have no reason to argue with him even though Bill has told you Rick’s father is not likely to return to Battle Mountain at all, not after what he has done. What did he do? you ask him but Bill only says, Maybe when you’re older, Champaign, and will tell you no more.

DURING THE
bicentennial summer your brother takes you and Rick shooting for the first time. You are thirteen now. Your brother has a rifle, an old Savage 99 lever action, and Rick is able to borrow his absentee father’s .38 Special from his mother so there are two weapons between the three of you. Your brother takes you out into the sagebrush country, much farther than you have ever been able to explore on foot, and you set up some cans on a rock and Bill teaches you and Rick how to hold the guns, how to check to see if they are loaded, how to sight, how to squeeze the trigger. You will never get accustomed to the sound—each time you wince—but you love the way a can jumps when hit, the sound like a baseball bat striking a metal plate.

Hoo man, Rick says. You nailed that one.

Bill smiles. You’re up, Nat, he says.

You stand and take the rifle and aim and squint and squeeze the trigger.

It’ll be easier to hit if you keep your eyes open, Bill says.

They just kinda close automatically, you say. You squeeze the trigger and again your eyes squint closed but not all the way this time, the light there a sliver as the firearm barks in your grip.

My turn, Rick says.

Hang on a minute, your brother says. He’ll get it.

Shoot, Rick says.

And you aim again and hold your eyes open and miss but this time you know that you were close to hitting your mark and with the next shot the can twangs off the rocks, the sound of it loud and metallic.

Hey! Rick says, clapping his hands together.

There you go, Champaign, Bill says. He has been drinking beer all afternoon and you can see the gloss of it in his eyes and in the roughness of his hand as he claps you on the shoulder.

I can’t believe I finally hit the dumb thing.

Just gotta keep your eye on the ball, he says.

It is when you are returning from that trip that you come upon the hawk. It hops in the dust just beside the roadbed. You think at first that it must be capturing some prey—a kangaroo rat or a grasshopper mouse—and you expect it to fly away at the approach of the truck but it does not, only struggling there in the dirt.

Check it out, Rick says, pointing.

Red-tailed hawk, you say.

Bill has already slowed the pickup and draws it to a stop and the three of you step out of the truck again. The hawk still does not fly, instead hopping beside the road in a manic fury at your approach. A great brown bird, its chest lightening to pale cream, tail dark and red in the sun, its hooked black beak open and tiny red tongue testing the air. One wing is angled down as the bird moves, its long thick primaries dragging in the dirt.

Something’s wrong with it, you say.

Broken wing, looks like, Bill says.

You stand there in silence, watching next to your brother, and then a small stone strikes the bird in the side, the hawk jumping at the contact and emitting a brief sharp squawk.

Jesus Christ, don’t do that, Bill says.

I just wanted to see if it would take off, Rick says.

It’s got a broken wing, Bill says. I just said that.

Sorry, Rick says. Jeez. It’s just a dumb bird.

It’s a red-tailed hawk, Bill says.

Whatever, Rick says, his voice low and sullen now that he has been chastised.

What do we do? you say.

You are afraid of what your brother will say in response but you have to ask the question, you have to know. And to your relief, Bill says, I think we’d better get her into the truck.

Really? you say. How?

Bill returns to the cab and emerges holding his denim jacket out before him. Let’s get around her, he says.

The three of you form a triangle beside the road, the raptor hopping in a tight circle at its centerpoint, its eyes hard and wide, trying to watch all of you at once, one wing held out and the other limp at its side. It seems miraculous to you: something you have seen fly above the trailer, the town, the desert, now there before you in the stirred dust beside the road.

Let’s just move toward it really slow and I’ll try to drop my jacket over its head so it can’t see, Bill says.

And then Rick: Goddamn.

You move forward then, all of you, so slowly, and when Bill is four or five feet away, he heaves the jacket toward the bird. The hawk is facing you now so that the jacket comes from behind and drops all at once over its head and back. Immediately the hawk is in motion and it is you who grab hold of it, Bill’s coat jerking everywhere beneath your hands.

Holy shit, holy shit, you got it, Rick calls out, smiling and laughing.

Bill is beside you now, kneeling next to the hawk, the raptor calming and then becoming quiet and still. The jacket’s denim has made its shape rough and imprecise but you can feel the heat of it rising up into your hands.

Awesome, Bill says. Let’s get her into the truck.

Do you want to do it?

Naw, you’re doing fine, your brother says. He stumbles a little in the dust, the effect of the six-pack he drank down to empty cans during the target practice.

When you rise, the great raptor is held between your hands. Bill holds the jacket in place over the bird but the hawk’s huge feet are still visible, splayed out before you, talons sharp and terrible but also beautiful and so perfect that the sight of them empties your breath. When you set the hawk on the tailgate, those claws scrape and rattle against the metal like knives.

You climb into the bed as Bill holds the jacketed hawk in place. What are we gonna do with him? you ask.

We can call Uncle David and ask him, Bill says. Maybe he knows a zoo or someone who can take care of her.

Can’t we?

I don’t think so, Nat. She’s wild.

We could try.

Let’s just get her to town. Then we’ll figure it out. And be super careful of those claws. They can probably cut you up pretty bad.

Damn right, Rick says, his voice high and excited.

Then you are settled in the bed of the truck near the cab, Rick beside you, Bill behind the wheel and pulling forward onto the road. The hawk is quiet but you can feel its life even through the jacket, a kind of fierce and fragile whirring that seems to run up through your arms and into your chest. What thoughts you have are about the impossibility of this moment, that some great and mighty creature of the air might find itself broken beside a roadway just at the moment that you and your friend and your brother happen to pass. And yet here it is between your hands, a wild thing as if from some storybook.

You keep that great creature close for the rest of the day, releasing it from the jacket and watching as it leaps around in the dust between the mobile homes. You wish you had a mouse or a rat to feed it but you can think of no way to get one and so you simply wait with it there, its one wing folded into its body, the other dragging, until, in the early evening, a truck from the Nevada Department of Wildlife arrives and two men load the hawk into a plastic box.

What are you gonna do with her? you ask.

There’s a raptor lady out near Reno, one of the men says. She’ll take good care of her.

All right, you say, but you are shaking your head no all the while.

When they drive away, Bill remains with you between the trailers for a long time, sipping at a can of Budweiser and puffing now and then on his cigarette. Neither of you speak. The sun is low in the sky to the west and the trailers cast long stripes of shadow across the road.

You did a good job with that bird, your brother says at last.

You nod and for reasons you cannot begin to understand, your eyes fill with unwarranted and irreconcilable tears. You turn away from your brother now because you do not want him to see, because he does not cry and so you will not either, and after a moment he says, Well, I’m going in, and you manage a quick, clear OK, and then you are alone and the sun is casting down beyond the edge of the mountains to the west and soon the whole of the desert is plunged into darkness.