The Animals: A Novel (23 page)

IN THE
months that follow, it feels at times as if you have given up everything, and you come to understand that gambling kept you believing, against all reality, that there was a possibility of change, that you might one day be levered up and out of yourself, but now that sense of weird and groundless optimism is gone. You do not know if you can live without it. And then winter is upon you and with it comes profound isolation. You cannot get to town except by a freezing trip atop the snowmobile and sometimes the electricity is out for weeks at a time. You have never been so alone. For days on end you find yourself talking not to yourself or to the ghost of your uncle or even to the memory of Rick, but to the bear, and sometimes you think you can hear him answer. You have moved into your uncle’s trailer now, have sold the smaller trailer to someone who drove up from Sandpoint to retrieve it, and you sit at the little foldout table for many hours watching the vacant space that trailer once occupied. In your exhaustion, it feels at times as if your brother is somehow occupying that vacancy, as if he is out there, even now, in the snow.

And yet somehow, in that snow-quiet isolation, you find a sense of purpose. You keep the rescue running all that first winter, alone, and in the night in the trailer in the snowed-over forest you wonder at where you are, at where you have come to in your life, twenty-five years old and utterly alone in a world of animals. It is not unlike what you fantasized about as a boy when you watched Marlin Perkins on Sunday evenings. And yet it is not like that at all. Marlin would wrestle an animal into submission, would bag it and cage it and send it off for study, whatever that really meant. These animals are mostly accustomed to your presence, ignoring you so completely that you can enter most of the enclosures for cleaning and feeding and repairs. Occasionally you will look up to see one of them watching you: the raccoons staring at you in silence with their black-masked eyes. Or the eagle from its perch. Sometimes you stare at the telephone well into the night, thinking of calling the bookie back in Reno, but you never make that call. There are more important things now, things of life and death. You cannot yet know it but there will come a time, not so very far away, when the person you once were will seem someone else entire, some false doppelgänger set to roost in your memories.

9

EACH TIME THE PHONE RANG IN THE OFFICE, BILL JUMPED AS
if a shot had been fired. Sometimes there were messages but Rick was smart enough not to leave anything that might incriminate him, only stating that he was waiting to hear from him, nothing more, not even a phone number. In his voice was a thinly disguised fury, a hiss that seemed to breathe through every word. Bill answered the phone only twice, both times listening as Rick berated him, accusing him of stealing from the safe an amount of money that slid between ten and twenty thousand dollars. Whatever the amount, Bill could not convince him otherwise, could not tell him that there had been no money, that the safe had been empty in the trailer’s closet for all those years, that he had never once opened it.

This is gonna get ugly, Rick told him.

Just let it go, Bill said.

Fucking thief.

Just let it go.

He hung up on that second phone call and within a minute the phone began to ring anew. He let the machine answer but Rick left no message and after another minute the phone resumed its ringing until the tape recorder clicked on once again—
Hello and thank you for calling North Idaho Wildlife Rescue
—then the long buzz of the dial tone and the click and whirr of the machine rewinding to its starting point and the long silence as Bill waited, shoulders tight around his neck, for the phone to burst into sound once more.

Then a day passed where there were no calls and he wondered once again if the ordeal was over, imagining Rick returning to Nevada, resigned to the empty safe, to the years he had served in Carson City, to all of it. But the reprieve was short-lived, not because the calls resumed but rather because a few days later, on his way back home from Sandpoint, Bill happened upon the dented and rusted yellow Honda parked in front of the Northwoods Tavern.

It was early evening when he passed the bar, the sun dipping into the shadows of the tree line and the whole town darkening quickly into the forested night. He had driven up to Bonners to pick up an antibiotic for Perry, one of the three raccoons, who had a small wound that was proving very slow to heal, stopping in at Grace’s veterinary clinic while he was in town just to visit for a moment, to see her, to touch her face, and then had turned around and gone all the way back through Naples and on to Sandpoint, where he had made the final payment on the engagement ring. Four months to pay off the three hundred dollars but he had it at last and he opened and snapped closed the black velvet box with one hand as he drove. It was Friday. Jude’s event at the school was scheduled for Monday night, and because Bill had told him about his plans, he knew there would be no backing out of them. Perhaps that was, in fact, why he had told the child about it at all: to hold his own feet to the fire.

He thought she would say yes. Was sure of it. Then almost sure. Then had no idea. He flipped the box open again, glancing down at the gold ring with its small diamond, turning the truck left into Naples, instead of right and up the mountain to the trailer, thinking of stopping in at the general store to pick up a chicken potpie and a pack of cigarettes, although he had also promised Grace that he would try to quit.

That was when he saw the little yellow Honda, the ring box still held open on the palm of his hand, his eyes casting over the car just for a moment as he followed the curve of the road toward the store. Then he looked again and his foot came off the gas pedal, the truck slowing in the road.

He slid into a gap in the line of Subaru station wagons and pickup trucks and that one yellow Honda, but he knew he would not go inside the bar. Even if he did, what would he say? Why are you still here? What are you doing? Get the fuck out of my town? Get the fuck out of my life? He had already said such things and he knew that repeating them would serve no purpose. He did not know why Rick had remained but the possibilities flashed through his mind in quick succession and left him shivering and shaking behind the wheel.

After a few minutes he drove on to the store for his chicken potpie, and when he passed the Northwoods Tavern again, the yellow Honda was gone.

THE FALL
Festival at the elementary school was comprised of a parade of children dressed as pilgrims and Indians, all of them singing off-key songs that seemed to have neither melody nor lyrics. It was difficult to focus on what was happening onstage. Bill’s ass was numb from the metal folding chair and he was nervous about the approach of his planned marriage proposal, a plan made yet more urgent by Jude’s barely contained excitement. And yet seeing Rick’s yellow Honda had shaken him inside, so hard and heavy that he wondered what he was doing here at all. Then he saw himself in the forest somewhere, just briefly, out of breath and struggling through thick wet snow, all the trees black and featureless, and then he was falling through that surface and into some dark twilight, the sense of which made him jerk awake in panic. But he was not in the snow. The children were still singing their monotonous, nearly tuneless songs, all lined up on the stage on a set of bleachers, and the room was still hot and overpacked with parents and grandparents.

He looked over at Grace briefly and was relieved that she had not seen him nod off, or did not acknowledge it if she had. She glanced back at him and then leaned in close and whispered in his ear: I’m dying.

Me too. My ass is dead.

I don’t even have an ass anymore.

They smiled at each other and tried to suppress their laughter.

Jude’s class came onstage at last, their construction-paper pilgrim hats lopsided and falling over their eyes as they tried to find their places on the bleachers.

There he is, Grace said. She waved. Jude’s eyes were clearly looking for them in the audience but the boy did not see his mother and so Bill stood and briefly waved both hands above his head as if signaling an airplane and Jude found them at last and waved and smiled.

I think he sees you now, Bill, a parent behind him said, and a few people laughed.

The students on the stage began to sing again and Bill felt himself warm to the sound of it and to the sight of Jude, the boy’s voice indistinguishable from the mass of fourth-graders around him and yet clearly singing strong and loud. Each time the boy’s eyes found them in the audience, Bill could see them light up, the curl of a smile on his face, and Bill himself was smiling so broadly that he knew he probably looked utterly demented. And yet he could do nothing to rein it in.

Afterward he and Grace stood outside in the dark with the other parents, each waiting for their children to be released. Her arm was wrapped through his, her fingers interlaced with his own in his coat pocket. The weekend’s snow, the first of the year, was piled up along the path in tall berms and the concrete sidewalk upon which they stood was crusted with salt and sand. It had been a brief heavy snow, early in the season but enough to remind Bill that he was running out of time to prepare the rescue for the true winter to come, the thought of which reminded him, once again, of the impending issue with Fish and Game. In some ways he knew he had been dragging his feet, that Grace was right about him already feeling defeated, but he also knew he would not let them lead his animals to slaughter. He could not. They had saved him and he would do the same for them.

He shivered.

Cold? Grace said beside him.

A little. You wanna stop and get a hot chocolate or something?

I don’t know, she said. Jude’s already half crazy today.

Is he?

You didn’t notice?

Excited about the show, maybe.

She looked at him and for a moment he thought she must have found him out somehow but then she only said, Maybe, and looked toward the room where, at any moment, Jude himself would emerge. Around them, other parents and grandparents were talking among themselves, laughing, telling stories about their children.

That was fun, he said. Thanks for inviting me to come.

I always want you to come.

Do you?

Of course.

I’d come to all of these. I mean, everything.

Would you?

Well, I guess, he said. If I don’t have anything else to do.

Oh shut up, she said, laughing and pinching his belly through his coat.

OK, OK, he said, smiling. Dang, that hurt.

Sissy, Grace said.

So?

Jude appeared a few seconds later, bounding out of the classroom and then telling them both that he was ready to go.

You want to stop for some hot chocolate? Grace asked him.

What? No, the boy said.

No?

No, let’s go home.

You don’t want hot chocolate? What kind of kid doesn’t want hot chocolate?

This kind, Jude said. I just have something important. He glanced up at Bill when he said this and his mother looked from him to the boy.

Bill shrugged. All right, then, let’s go home.

Jude practically pulled them to Grace’s truck and then leaped inside and sat waiting for them. What’s all this? she said.

No idea, he said.

Really?

He did not answer now and when Jude entered the truck she looked over at him and said, You sure no hot chocolate?

Positive, the boy said, his eyes fixed on the windshield as if something of intense interest were just outside the glass.

Weird, his mother said. Very weird.

Soon they were moving up Main toward the North Hill, where Grace’s house sat on its small acreage of cleared land at the edge of the forest, their voices momentarily falling quiet as houses and businesses and trees and heaps of plowed snow flashed across the turning glare before disappearing behind them.

And then Jude spoke. Bill did not hear the words at first, or perhaps did not understand that Jude was speaking to him and not Grace, or perhaps he knew somehow, already, that he did not want to hear what Jude was about to tell him.

What did you say? Bill said.

I said I met one of your friends. At the hamburger place.

Who’s that?

And now it came, that single syllable: Rick, Jude said.

What did you say?

Rick, the boy said again. Your friend Rick.

You met my friend Rick? His mind was blank. Outside the windshield, dark and angular trees rotated in the headlights. Where?

In town with Jimmy.

Today?

No, yesterday when we went for hamburgers with Jimmy’s mom.

In Bonners?

At the hamburger place.

Who’s Rick? Grace said. Do I know him?

Uh, Bill said, hunting for words, for any words at all. You don’t know him.

Someone you know from the rescue?

Yeah, uh … not even really a friend.

He said he was your friend, Jude said.

We’ve talked about this before, Grace said to the boy. Remember? Stranger danger?