The Animals: A Novel (25 page)

I feel terrible, he said.

We’re gonna have to go get him some medicine, she said. She was talking to Rick in the doorway now.

Yeah, he said. OK.

His eyes had fallen closed. He could hear the jingling of keys and then they were talking about what Rick should buy. Dimetapp or Robitussin or something else.

What do you feel like? she said.

I hurt everywhere, he said.

OK, she said. Rick’s gonna go get some medicine.

He tried to speak but now a shiver ran through him as if he had stepped into a freezer and his teeth clamped together and began chattering like a windup toy.

You should lie down, she said.

He nodded but said nothing.

You’re gonna have to help me. I can’t pick you up on my own.

Where’s Rick?

He went to get medicine, baby.

He vaguely recalled her saying something about that but it seemed like that had been hours ago. Why isn’t he back yet? he said.

He just left.

All right.

He managed to get to his feet and stumbled, with her arms around him, out of the bathroom and into the hall and then into his bedroom. He had never purchased a bed frame and so the mattress lay on the stained carpet in the corner of the room, the bedding strewn amidst piles of dirty clothes above which was tacked a velvet black-light poster of a panther in fluorescent orange and yellow and, beside it, a poster of Van Halen, the band’s flying VH logo centered in gold around which the four band members were caught in motion as if onstage, their instruments glowing, their singer, David Lee Roth, shirtless and leaning forward as if ready to leap out of the image and into the apartment. It looked to Nat, in that moment, the pathetic squalid room it was.

He managed to slide into a sitting position, Susan holding him all the while, and then lay back upon the mattress. She sat next to him there, her hand sliding his sweat-soaked hair off his forehead. You don’t feel warm, she said, but you’re sweating like crazy.

He closed his eyes.

Rick’ll be here soon, she said. You’ll feel a lot better once you get some medicine in you.

Thanks.

Taking care of my guys, she said. That’s my job.

Come here, he said. He raised his left arm, eyes open now, the broken hand still clutched to his chest. She leaned in and when he leaned up to kiss her it was as if an instinct had taken over. The pain. The crashing of his fear and anguish and anger. He could feel her lips for that brief moment and was sure she was kissing him in return.

Then it was over.

You should try to get some sleep, she said.

I love you, he said.

Shhh. You’re just tired.

There’s something wrong with me.

Get some rest. Rick’ll be here soon with the medicine.

What am I gonna do?

Sleep, she said. That’s what you’re gonna do.

He was looking at her, so close, her face watching him with an expression that was pure concern and care and worry. And then he felt himself drifting outside. He hovered over an endless icteric plain: sagebrush and horsebrush, Mormon tea and shadscale. There were animals in the shadows. He could feel them there, could see their eyes reflecting back at him from the darkness. From somewhere, a murmur of voices: Rick’s voice and Susan’s, the sound a spectral echo drifting against a sky awash in the thin high feathers of alto cirrus clouds.

It’s not your problem.

Yes, it is.

How, Rick? You weren’t even here when he got himself in this shit.

That doesn’t matter.

Yeah? Why not?

Because it doesn’t, Susan. You take care of your people. That’s what you do.

Blah blah blah.

Don’t do that.

I don’t know what else to say. He got himself into this, not you. And what about your mom, Rick? What about that? Don’t you think you’ve got your own problems to worry about?

He seemed to be asleep then, although he could still hear the faint hum of their voices from somewhere farther away, and then he could see her at the door that night when Rick was still in prison, three or four months into his sentence, the day of the rainstorm. A knock and there she was, drenched, her breasts showing through the wet T-shirt, hair dragging in her face like something out of one of his secret fantasies. I need your help, she had said. It all seemed to spin out before him now. Even the feeling he had in that moment, the trembling rise of heat in his chest. It was all he had ever wanted to hear her say, not that she needed help but that she needed him, even though he hardly would have admitted such a thing, even to himself. How he had looked at her in those moments when neither she nor Rick would notice him looking. How he had imagined what her body might feel like in his hands. And then there she was, standing in the doorway, asking him for his help. He would have done anything, told himself as much and ascribed that telling to her status as his best friend’s girlfriend. Was he not supposed to help her? Is that not what Rick would expect him to do?

She asked him to take her to the clinic because she was pregnant and did not want to have a baby, told him that the baby was Rick’s, of course it was. He did not think about his response. Instead, he only said yes yes over and over again, his whole heart and soul shivering inside his skeleton as if a great string had been plucked and stood vibrating along the length of his spine. Now he thought this betrayal, the betrayal of his heart, the betrayal of being party to the secret abortion of Rick’s child, was worse, much much worse, than the sexual betrayal that would come later.

He took her to the clinic and paid the full bill, much of which came from a recent loan from Johnny Aguirre, and then waited for her in the lobby, flipping through the various magazines there with a kind of manic fury, as if waiting for the birth of a child. He wondered how she would feel when it was done, hoping that she would need him to take care of her, already planning his call into work in the morning to tell them he was too sick to come in.

When she returned to the lobby she told him he could take her home now and thanked him and then fell quiet as he drove, the wet streets reversing casino towers as grainy and specular ghost images, their colored neon shapes pushing under a surface that rolled forever under his wheels. Occasionally she would murmur a direction until at last he pulled over next to an apartment building on the east side of the Virginia Street casinos, a two-story slab of cracked stucco and concrete not unlike the building he lived in.

This is where you live? The rain had stopped now but the clouds continued to roil atop the mountains to the west. The desert everywhere had already sucked its water down under the sand.

No, this is just a friend’s place. I’m staying here for a while.

Oh, he said. Is your friend home?

I don’t know.

Do you want me to come up?

What? She looked at him, her eyes a mixture of confusion and sudden mounting anger. No.

I just meant— I just wanted to make sure there’s someone here to take care of you.

I don’t need anyone to take care of me, Nat, she said. Her sense of anger seemed to have faded just as quickly as it had come. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and then opened the door and stepped out into the drizzling rain. He thought she might say something to him, some last thing, but the door swung closed and he watched her walk up the stairs to the apartment and disappear inside.

He did not see her the next day nor the day after that and although he knew that he had no reason to expect her to knock on his door again he still caught himself harboring that expectation, as if what he had done had cemented some bond that he knew they did not actually share. And then the guilt, because he also knew he was pining over his best friend’s girlfriend, a condition that became acute only after he heard, from the car’s tinny radio, Rick Springfield singing plaintively and publically about everything he held secret in his heart. He punched the buttons on the car stereo to find anything else but all the stations had turned to static and he drove on past the nightclubs and casinos with the hiss of dead air streaming into the car from all directions at once.

He did not hear from her for two weeks but then she appeared again, knocking on the apartment door on a bright warm day and asking him, of all things, if he would like to go see a movie with her, a question that seemed so surprising that all he could do was stammer out a brief, Sure, sure, that sounds great, all the while standing in the doorway in a kind of frozen bewilderment until she said, Well, OK, let’s go then, and he turned and grabbed his coat and keys and came out the door so quickly that he nearly collided with her. Easy tiger, she said and laughed.

She put her arm through his as they came down the stairs and he smiled. When they entered the car she told him that she was grateful he was her friend. Her hand came into his own for a moment and squeezed it.

I’m glad I could help, he said.

He drove them across town to the movie theater by the Peppermill using the same route he used nearly every evening when driving to work, a route he did not have to think about but which turned them through the casinos and down Virginia Street past all the bars and clubs he and Rick had spent their nights in, the storefronts of which looked grim and silent in the white light of the late afternoon.

He bought them popcorn and sodas from the concession stand and they sat next to each other in the back row like lovers and midway through the film she laid her head upon his shoulder and then whispered up at him, Put your arm around me, Nat. I’m cold, and he did, stroking her hair slowly in the darkness while people danced on the glowing flat plane of the screen. That feels nice, she said. The heart in his chest seemed a machine blown clear of all measure, not beating anymore but ringing out like the hammer and bell of an alarm clock. He did not know what was happening on the screen and did not care. For years afterward, any time he would hear the film’s title song on the radio he would be transported back to that theater, to the smell of popcorn and the warmth of her nestled there beside him in the darkness like a secret. As if they were innocent. As if anything was.

Later, they sat on the sofa in his apartment and she sat so close to him that her knee pressed against his own, the feeling of it a faint heat running into him. She told him that both her parents were dead, that her father had worked for the telephone company, that her mother had been an office clerk of some kind, and that both were alcoholics. She told him that when she was fifteen her father had tried to drive the three of them into the grave at the wheel of a funeral-black Oldsmobile. Both mother and father had been killed in the accident. She had survived. Her only living relative was an uncle but he was in prison in Carson City and for this reason they put her in foster care and she walked away from that house in the middle of the night and came to Reno.

The strawberry wine seemed to slosh back and forth inside his chest. He wanted to ask her more about those blank years but he also did not want to know what she had done to survive. As it turned out he could not have asked her anyway because in the next moment she had pushed him back onto the sofa and had slid her tongue into his mouth.

He thought that he should stop but his body was moving of its own accord now, moving with a ferocious and unstoppable need. He might have been saying something too but if so he could not stop that either. The words were like a colored ribbon pulling out of him.

What’re you sorry about? she said into his ear.

What?

You keep saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” What are you sorry about?

Shouldn’t we—, he began but there were no words beyond those two and when she pulled his hands to her breasts he could not even think of what question he was trying to ask.

HE AWOKE
to the pain of his throbbing finger, opening his crusted eyes into his dingy bedroom, the contents illuminated by an angle of light that seemed incongruous with the morning. He did not know what time it was and at first could not remember what had happened but then it all came flooding back to him and when he pulled his hand up in front of his face he could see the tattered white tissues wrapping his broken finger. He pulled the clock from where it lay on the dirty carpet below him and set it upon his chest: 12:05. Then the lit window high up on the wall and then back to the clock again. It was past noon.

He managed to stand and to stumble forward out of the bedroom and into the hall and then into the bathroom, his head throbbing in concert with his hand. He was able to unzip his pants and to urinate one-handed but then could not further operate the zipper and finally gave up and came into the living room holding his pants up with his only functional hand, the other held tight to his chest.

There he is, Rick said from the couch as he entered the room.

I can’t zip up my pants.

Shit. Rick stood and grabbed Nat’s pants and snapped them closed and then pulled the zipper up. The things I do for you, he said.

No kidding.

How you feeling?

Pretty miserable, he said. And I missed work.

Susan called us both in sick.