The Animals: A Novel (31 page)

When he finally pulled into the Safeway parking lot in Bonners and saw Grace’s pickup there he nearly wept with relief, the truck sliding in next to hers, his door already opening. She stepped out onto the snow and he embraced her and told her he loved her and that he was sorry and she looked at him and put her hands against his face. This guy’s nuts, she said.

He nodded. I called the sheriff from the bar. He’s out looking for him.

Good, she said. Where are we going?

He hesitated before answering. Then he said: Coeur d’Alene.

Bill, she said slowly, you’re coming with us, right?

I can’t, he said.

She looked away.

You know I can’t.

Dammit, Bill, she said. There were tears in her eyes now. What am I supposed to do now?

Highway’ll be clear down to Coeur d’Alene. Get a hotel room and I’ll come down later tonight.

Later tonight? She would not look at him. You probably don’t even have a phone up there right now.

I can’t leave them, Grace. I haven’t even had the chance to feed them tonight.

They’ll be fine for one night.

You’re probably right but I just can’t do it.

The truck’s window cranked down and Jude’s face appeared. Come on, he said. Let’s go.

Hey big guy, Bill said.

Hey back, Jude said. We’re going on a snow adventure.

Crazy, Bill said.

Hey I have your book.

That’s all right, you keep it. He glanced over toward the truck and as he did so the book tumbled from Jude’s hand into the snow. He stepped over and picked it up. It was still in the plastic ziplock baggie, the rubber band holding the whole thing together.

You can keep the book, pal.

Mom says I need to work on returning what I borrow.

Oh, he said. All right. Good job, then. He unzipped his parka and slid the book into the inside pocket and then zipped it up again.

So let’s go, Jude said.

He looked from the boy to the woman and back. Roll your window up, buddy, he said. I need to talk to your mom first.

Hurry up, the boy said.

I’m trying.

Jude looked irritated but he rolled the window up and then scooted into the dark warmth of the cab.

Look, it’s gonna take me a couple hours, Bill said. I’ll have to take the sled up.

She did not respond, looked away from him out over the parking lot.

I just need you and Jude to be out of here, he said.

Dammit, Bill.

I know. Believe me I know.

What’s wrong with this guy?

This question he could not answer.

She embraced him. You’re pissing me off, she whispered in his ear.

I’ll see you tonight.

You’d better, she said. Her voice was thin and her eyes glossy with tears.

NAPLES HAD
never been much more than a scant collection of battered buildings along the railroad tracks and the creek but now it was full dark and in the blizzard it seemed as if the entire town had simply blown away. Everything black. No power anywhere he could see. Even the bar had gone dark. He parked the truck at a gravel lot near the school, a place he parked each winter during the heaviest snowfall, and pulled the ramps down and started the snowmobile, jerking the cable repeatedly until the engine caught and started running, and then backed down the ramps onto the snow. It felt solid and substantial under him, a heavy machine set upon tracks and ready to scream out into the snow like a banshee. He lifted the ramps and returned them to the bed and closed the tailgate. Then he opened the cab once more to look in at the interior. The rifle and the dart gun were both in their single case under the bench seat, and he thought that he should probably bring the case with him but there were only three or four rounds in total for the rifle and he did not know what he would do with it were something to happen, the thought of which sent a long shiver through him. In the end he left the case behind.

A car fled past him on the plowed highway. Then another. He sat upon the snowmobile, straddling it, the machine humming under his body, the truck behind him already disappearing from view. Then he pulled out into the road at last. The vehicles that had passed before him dissolved now into the blur of snowfall and no headlights appeared behind. Ice crystals stung his face, his beard and mustache already frozen, the snow a fleeting field of sparks that seemed to run out before the faint glow of the machine.

He turned off the highway onto the spur and turned again into the mile-long road that led to the rescue, following the path of a dark flat creek for a quarter mile, its edge rimed with ice and its surface a perfect unmoving black plate bordered by white, and finally turned up the draw toward the top of the ridge, a curl into darkness, the sled below him whining and growling, the throttle held nearly wide open. The snow was smooth here, although he sometimes thought he could see the faint trough of old footprints illuminated in the headlights, but if so the image was too faint to be sure of and seemed to materialize and fade each time he looked at it, like an illusion visible only in the peripheries. He thought of Grace and of Jude, riding south on the highway toward Coeur d’Alene, hoped they were safe, wondered then why he had not climbed into the truck with them. But he could not leave the animals. He could not leave without checking on them, without ensuring that they were all safe. It was simply something he had to do, every night, without fail.

When he saw the footprints in the lit swath of the storm, he thought at first that the track must have indicated the path of an animal, but the path was like a trough, not like the careful prints of elk or deer or even coyote but the slogging boot prints of a man. He turned the sled to the side, slowing, peering down as they approached and then seeing the trail where it came down the mountain and then moved into the forested darkness beside the road.

His body seemed to burst all at once into gooseflesh, his hand off the throttle now so that the machine stood idling at the side of the road, and the feeling that ran through him was pure terror, his eyes peering into the black trees where the boot prints disappeared as if some huge beast might emerge, something out of story, out of myth. He knew he was being watched but in that moment it felt like he was being watched not by a man, not by Rick, but by something else entirely. The darkness. The forest. The black trees all around.

He looked up the road to where the footprints disappeared beyond the glow of his headlights. The disappearing path he had seen earlier was someone coming up the road in the heavy snow and this deep trough of dragging footprints was made by someone descending.

And then he knew what he should have known already. That Rick had not gone after Grace or Jude at all. He had not even left Naples. Instead, he had only waited for Bill to drive away and then had come up the path, on foot, to where the animals were all held captive in their cages in the snow.

14

HE WATCHED FOR MIKE EVERYWHERE, RETURNING HOME
with Rick only past midnight to grab a few scant hours of shallow, fitful sleep, all the while expecting to hear Mike’s thudding hammer-like fist on the door. He had brought his meager paycheck to the cashier window at the Peppermill and had managed, somehow, not to spend it that first night, returning to the café to wait for Rick to appear from the kitchen at the end of his shift, wondering if Susan would arrive as well and hoping, more than anything else, that Mike would not. Even with cash in his pocket he was terrified that it would not be enough or that Mike, at Johnny Aguirre’s instructions, would break his arm or leg or more of his fingers. When he looked at the aluminum splint, its bright blue foam now stained with grease after eight hours of oil changes and lube jobs, the sight of it produced a thread of panic he could barely contain.

The next night he sat in front of a slot machine, once again waiting for Rick’s shift to end, near enough to the café that he could see the booth where he had been sitting moments before, his empty coffee cup still resting on the tabletop. He reasoned he could play the slots for a good long while and not spend more than ten dollars and so he dropped quarter after quarter into the machine, watching bars and lemons and plums and bunched cherries on little stems spin through their reels, but the repetition of that single machine bored him and he worked his way down the row and then into the next. After a time he found himself playing Wild Wild Nights, a dollar slot with five reels that spun simultaneously, the win lines moving in all directions, and he pulled and pulled and pulled at that handle.

He stopped when he was down sixty dollars, not because he was done but because he knew Rick was probably already sitting in the café waiting for him, and so he stumbled away from the machine in a wide-eyed daze looking like a man who had been struck by lightning or as if he had been asleep for some period of years and had now suddenly awakened into a world of clanging bells and ringing alarms. What have you done? You goddamn idiot. What have you done now?

He still had more than fifty dollars and perhaps it would be enough to keep Johnny, to keep Mike, from breaking more of his bones, but he still feared that meeting, even though he knew it was inevitable. But that night passed and then it was the week of Thanksgiving and he reasoned that even a man like Johnny Aguirre must have family somewhere. Perhaps Mike as well. Maybe they were both simply out of town. Maybe it was as simple as that.

He returned to work at the start of that week with a note from the medical clinic and with his finger still splinted and aching. On his break he bought a candy bar from the vending machine in
the carpeted hallway that led to the sales floor. From there, he could see the door to Milt Wells’s office: a plain wooden slab, painted white to match the hallway, sometimes closed, sometimes wide open.
The alarm keypad was mounted on the wall by the back door, the same door he used to get to and from the lube bay. The screen read simply
DISARMED
. A waferlike sensor on the door itself and on the doorframe.

All day completing oil changes and greasing ball joints for one car or another: a Mercury Monarch, its shape floating above him on the lift like some enormous slab of powder-blue stone, a Fiesta, a Mustang, an LTD, a Granada, a Lincoln Continental. With each pull of the grease gun’s flat trigger came the sound of pressurized air escaping the valve and the low
galumph
of the grease pushing forward through the zerk. The cars different but the cars also the same. This was what he did, a thought that filled him with a sense of unrest and unease of such intensity that it made his splinted finger throb. He thought again of the lion in the arcade at the MGM Grand. Lethargic. Chained to the platform upon which it rested. The photographer waving the steak. The great lion’s head rising. Those sparkling eyes. The grim smiles of the family as the flash popped. All its days the same.

When five o’clock came on Wednesday, his constant watching for Johnny Aguirre and Mike had worn him down to a frayed mess. He stood by the bay doors and smoked three cigarettes in rapid succession, watching the huge white airliners as they rose from and descended to the airport past the highway. Most of the mechanics had already gone. Down on the road beyond the rows of new cars, he thought he saw a rust-colored vehicle moving slowly along the frontage road but although he stood on his tiptoes he could not be sure. As he watched he puffed his third cigarette down to a stub and lit another. A newspaper swirled away from him in the direction of the runway, riding a freezing wind down from the mountains to the west. He could not see the rust-colored car anymore and did not know if he had seen it at all.

Hey there, a voice came.

He turned from his view out over the cars to see Milt Wells stepping through the door that led from the service bays to the long carpeted interior hallway within, his swoop of white hair just as perfect as it always was, bolo tie swinging gently with his step.

Hello, Nat said. And then added, Milt.

Milt held a small zippered bag in his hand with a bank logo on it, packed thickly with what Nat could only imagine was some quantity of cash.

Off to the bank? Nat said.

My weekly errand. Usually Fridays but with the holiday I thought I’d better get it in early.

Good idea. He stood there for a moment in silence. Then he said, You … uh … want a cigarette?

No but thanks, Milt said. My wife made me quit. If she smells it on me I’ll be in for it.

Nat grinned a little at the thought.

You break your finger?

He nodded.

That happen here?

Naw, I slammed it in my car door at home last week.

Ouch, Milt said.

Yeah, not my most brilliant moment.

I came out to the shop last week but they said you were out sick.

Yeah, I got the flu or something.

Broke your finger and got the flu?

Yeah it was quite a week.

Feeling better though, now?

More or less. He looked out toward the airport again, where another white plane was descending slowly from a gray sky.

How’s your mom doing? If you don’t mind me asking.