The Animals: A Novel (34 page)

He had occupied that space, lived in it, right up until they had left for Reno, but Bill’s had been the left side of the room, and even after a year had passed and then two, Nat sixteen and then seventeen, right up until the day he moved out, nineteen then, he had never really expanded his territory to that side. Someone came to take Bill’s bed away and the gap it left became a kind of receptacle for dirty clothes and cassette tapes and the other detritus of a boy’s life, not a space that he used but a space that collected the overflow. Now that gap was bare carpet and he knew that it had never really been his room but always shared with his brother and he also knew, looking into that gap, that this would always be the case.

And then he understood that he would never see this room again, for when he returned to Reno it would be to die.

When he returned to the front room it was to find his mother still asleep, the final tumbler of Long Island iced tea still half full on the foldout tray. He knelt before the television and flipped through the three channels the coat-hanger antenna managed to collect from Reno. A rerun sitcom on one. A commercial on the other. And then, on Channel 5, a close-up image of a wasp dragging a paralyzed insect to the entrance of its burrow in the dirt, its alien limbs pulling at its immobile prey. It lingered there for a moment, its antennae moving, and then disappeared into its burrow as if to ensure all was ready within before reappearing once more to seize the insect and pull it into the darkness. The narrator’s voice was calm and instructive, even soothing, explaining that the wasp would now lay its eggs on the body of the insect, providing a ready food source for the hatching of its young.

But then something changed. Another wasp or perhaps the same. The insect in place at the entrance and the wasp disappearing into the burrow but at the moment of that disappearance an instrument like a metal toothpick appeared at the edge of the frame, pushing the paralyzed insect a few inches from where the wasp had left it. The wasp appeared from the burrow for a moment, paused, its antennae waving, and then moved forward and grasped its prey and dragged it once again to the entrance and disappeared into the burrow again. In its absence, the instrument reappeared and pushed the insect a few inches away. The wasp emerged, once again found the insect, returned it to the entrance, and once again disappeared inside.

The sphex will repeat this behavior over and over again
, the narrator said while the wasp checked and rechecked its burrow, the instrument shifting the insect each time it disappeared from the screen.
What we might initially see as a behavior rooted in decision-making is revealed to be programmed instinct. The simplest action—in this case moving its paralyzed prey—creates a loop from which the wasp cannot escape. In some cases, researchers have created conditions where the sphex will check its burrow up to fifty times, triggered each time by moving the paralyzed insect a few inches.

He was shaking as he stood and clicked the television off and stepped past his sleeping mother to lift his coat from where he had draped it on the back of the sofa before opening the metal door and stepping outside. The night was frigid, his breath a tower of rising steam, and the trailers in their rows were dark. The whole town around him a blankness but for a distant streetlight swirling with frantic insects. A shush of cars on the interstate but otherwise no sound at all. The high desert endless around him. He extracted his cigarettes and lighter but his hands were shaking and he could not spin the tiny wheel to spark the flame. After a moment he rolled the wheel back and forth across the edge of the stairs, an old trick he had seen his brother do once in the rain, and at last a thin flame rose from the cylinder, its shape shaking and dancing as he lit the cigarette. Then he leaned against the peeling rail, puffing smoke into the black night, the cloud of bright insects throwing themselves against the hot burning globe, the Datsun floating amidst those circling frantic stars. Wasps everywhere caught up in their loop of activity.

He stood there for a half hour before he heard the door of Rick’s mobile home open and click shut again and Nat came across the gravel, his breath a hot white cloud before him.

Hey, he said quietly.

Rick came down the stairs. You got a light?

He handed across the lighter and there was the brief bright moment of the flame.

My mom’s dying, Rick said.

What do the doctors say?

That
is
what the doctors say.

What’re you gonna do?

No idea.

He took a drag on the cigarette. That thing you talked about the other day, he said.

What thing?

About Milt’s safe. You think we can pull that off?

Rick scoffed. If we can get in there, I don’t see why not.

Nat puffed at the cigarette again. Across the desert floor came the distant roar of a truck barreling down I-80. I think I know a way, he said.

No shit?

He nodded faintly.

Goddamn.

The night felt sharp and clear around him. The distant streetlight seemed to falter for a moment and then shone steady once more, the insects swooping and curling all round it, their shapes striping the air.

PART III

THE BOOK

OF THE DEAD

15

AT THE END, THE BEAR FINDS HIMSELF LOOKING DOWN AT A
vast sagebrush plain lit only by starlight and ringed by dry colorless mountains gone the color of black night. The two men stand at the edge of a collection of battered buildings and trailers that huddle in the middle of that darkness. Around them is a bleak town of some sort and the bear knows this even though he does not know what a town is, has never seen one, and yet knows more now than he ever has in his life, here at the end, although he does not know where he is or how he has come to such a place. There are questions but the bear does not ask them. The time for questions has long passed. One of the figures below him is the man he knows, the man the bear might call friend if he knew such a concept. Maybe he does. But what the bear wonders at now is the man’s smell, for it seems to come to him across time and across the darkness. He can smell him across all his life and the sense of him there makes the bear call out in a long protracted moan. How much he misses the man in that moment. And how much he knows that he will never see him again.

The bear knows too that the other is the stranger who came up earlier from the bottom of the mountain, came up from the snow near where the river crosses the road, bearing with him that hard sharp scent that felt like a jagged cloud swirling all around him.

He tries to call down to the man he knows but now his voice will make no sound at all and what exhales out of him is only a long slow hiss that flows upward into black trees that hang above his body like porcupine quills punched through a snowed-over night sky. And then he knows that he is in the forest again, even though he can smell the desert, a scent he has never smelled before but which he recognizes because there is something of the man he knows in that place, in that dark plain. Now he is in some other night, in some other time, as if the blizzarding gray sky is only a thin membrane so insubstantial that it has become transparent, so that when he casts his sightless milky eyes upward the snow seems to part, does part, circling away to be replaced not with the sky but with the dark desert plain ringed with high bare mountains gone flat black in the moonless night.

Once again he can feel that deep shifting color inside him, the jagged scent that the stranger brought up from the bottom of the mountain, and with it comes the feeling, the desire, above all, that the man he knows will somehow sense his need, his encroaching panic, and will rise through the trees to talk him back from the darkness. But the bear cannot even feel the man now, cannot sense him at all except in his memory and in that spectral dark shape on the floor of the black desert below.

He can hear the wolf panting somewhere and all he can think is that something is wrong, and then thinking again that if he can somehow will the man to his side, can summon him back from wherever he has gone, that it will be all right somehow, that the man will fix everything. But he cannot even feel the man now, cannot smell him anywhere on the freezing wind, which continues to rise from below, passing beyond mountain lion and badger and turkey vulture and eagle and porcupine and through the wire boundaries of his own enclosure, and then on past the wolf and into the forest that breaks into peeling birch and rises yet to spin around the empty trailer where the man dens and up to the top of the ridge and into the high thin dark impossible desert air, its passage curling everywhere in endless spirals like fern frost spreading upon an endless sheet of clear dark glass.

The jagged black scent of the stranger is headed away now, into the blizzarding wind so that the bear can feel him, smell him, can sense him all the way back down the road through the stands of cedar and black spruce and through the shaggy hemlock trailing, down at the river, long pale swaths of old-man’s beard that now hang heavy with ice. Through all of it moves that jagged scent, diminished now that the stranger has dropped the raw meat into the enclosures, has tossed it up and over the fences, has managed, even for those fenced in roof and all, to squeeze it through the gaps in the wire, so that every one of them has had the taste of it. He could sense that something was not right even then, could smell it through and under and above the blood, and he might have called out to them, to all the animals in all their enclosures, but he could no more do so than he could resist the raw flesh that had flopped onto the frozen and crystalline snow at his feet, and before he could even think about what it was, about the scent he had followed up from below, he had swallowed it down. They all had, and he knew it. Wolf and raccoon and porcupine and badger and eagle and turkey vulture. The jagged scent in every one of them, pulsing slowly, from one to another, into their blood.

He had known it was not right. No strangers came at night. And no strangers came when the snow fell. Only the man he knew, the man who was his friend and who sat with him day after day on the stump beyond the fence. Only he would come at night or in the storm, descending through birches the bear had never actually seen and yet could witness in his body when the wind came crosswise through their slim peeling trunks, could pick out their scent as it curved down through the others: the heart-leaved sticky twayblades sprung up through dark fragrant earth, fringed grass of Parnassus with its curled leaves and white lobed flowers, and the pale bouncing crowns of cow parsnip, those tiny blossoms held aloft on thick stalks filled with milky sap. He could sense all of it out there, even though most of what he sensed, smelled, felt, he had never seen. And yet it was there and he knew it was there and it came to live in his body, as palpable, when the wind was right, as if he walked down that path every day with the man. And in many ways, this was exactly what he had done.

But the man he knew was not coming and the wind would not blow his scent to the bear. Instead, what he could smell came to him from the base of the mountain, the thick white stream of it rising from the river where sometimes he could feel moose and deer and elk moving along the banks and the slick and diaphanous flashes of silver fish streaking the current. There had been times when he had longed for them, when he had lain in his den with his nose crushed under his paws, trying only to will their scent away, but the silver moved in his mind evermore and would not be stilled, and he could see, feel, smell, the slick lightning of them coming up the rapids, and in his heart he grasped for them, his claws flashing in the foaming wake of the current, his breath coming in gasps.

But all that is already past now, the stranger long departed and the bear alone by the frozen pond with the snow coming down all around him and the smell of the desert deep in his body. The wolf quiet. The bear thinks he hears a distressed squawking from the raptors but the wind seems to blow in all directions at once and he can form no image of them at all. He wonders if the wolf has gone to his warm place at the far side of his enclosure, a place the bear can sometimes sense with such detail that he can nearly lie down in it himself in his mind. That enclosure was his own for so long he ceased to understand that there could be anywhere else for him to place his scent, but it had become a vast and confusing geography to him as he grew old and weakened and then lost his sight. He might have continued to live there but the man had moved him to this smaller place and there was the pond and the man had come often with his marshmallows and such things were good enough. He knows the wolf does not like the old place, perhaps because it continues to smell of bear or perhaps because the wolf still remembers running through the big trees. The bear can feel that memory all around the wolf, coming up through its blood like sharp young jack pines bursting free of black earth. In his heart are snow-covered mountains and a pack that flows down from the high places like a river.

As for his own: he still held, as a vague scent somewhere deep inside his mind, that gray winter when he and his mother came up out of the den and wandered down through the forest. Even now, in his dreams, he sometimes feels her warmth against his face. He might once have remembered her eyes, the sound of her voice, but if so these have long since disappeared from memory. What he has been left with is that moment of being totally alone, when all the trees in the forest turned black and the big bears rumbled and roared from every mountain and ridge while he trembled: a tiny furred thing mewling in the shadows of the giant trees.

The men who found him tied a rope around his neck and pulled him into a cage that smelled so strongly of dogs that the little bear screamed and fought, so sure he was that if he entered that space he would be immediately torn apart. But there was no such attack. He remained in that cage until he could hardly smell its previous occupant, peering out at a rotating group of men and women who came to stare at him as if he were some kind of exotic creature. And perhaps, to them, he was. Their smells confused him, some so strong that he could not help but press his face to the cage wire and moan.