The Animals: A Novel (7 page)

You know why.

A sharp tingling was radiating through his chest. What do you want? he said softly.

What do I want? To start with, I want my share.

Your share of what?

What the fuck? Rick said. You think I’m stupid? I want my fucking share.

He glanced around the room, the vinyl-paneled walls, the box of light streaming in through the dirty window. All right, he said at last. Give me your address.

It was silent for a moment, the line clicking and popping and hissing as if aflame. Then Rick said, I got a better idea. I’ll come get it.

It’s a long way. I’ll just mail it.

There was a long moment of silence on the phone. Then Rick said, Your brother’s name, Nat? That’s what you picked?

Bill could think of nothing to say. His throat felt dry and his teeth were clenched tight together.

You’d better have it when I get there, Rick said, and then the line clicked into silence.

Bill slumped back into the chair, holding the phone in his outstretched hand. The space heater hummed from across the room. After a time he set the receiver down, his eyes on the dust motes that spun in the air before him, their golden whorls like fingerprints suspended in the slashing light. His teeth ached from clenching them and his chest buzzed as if filled with insects.

When he stepped outside, Bess was walking toward him. I’m off to the school, she said.

He waved a hand in her direction, walking on past the grizzly enclosure, where Majer stood watching him, and the wolf enclosure, which appeared empty as always, and up to the perimeter fence and through the gate. The day had begun cold and the rising sun had hardly diminished its sharp edge, perhaps not quite freezing now but still frosting his breath upon the air. A hint of snow somewhere across the mountains. The path running from the gate to his trailer farther up the hill was cut through with the same slashed light as the office he had stepped out of, as if those shapes had come with him, trailing some filament of meaning he could not decipher even were he to try, a turning of worlds, a history of fingerprints and shadow and thin cold air.

The interior of the trailer a dark and curtained space. His worn sofa. The bed, covered in its tattered blue blanket. A few spy novels and some reference material from the office down the hill beyond the birch path.

It had rested on the floor of the closet for all these years, so long now that he had ceased thinking about it at all, even though he knew, of course he knew, that there was a chance it might one day be important again. Grace had asked him once what it was, why the squat black safe was in the trailer at all. She asked him what it held and he told her that it had been his uncle David’s and that it was empty. He knelt before it now and pulled it forward, out of the tiny closet, tilting it over the vinyl lip on the floor and walking it, corner by corner, out into the room. Not quite so heavy as he remembered and yet still significant as he slid it into the kitchen, its base scratching furrows into the linoleum. More than anything he wished he had simply left it behind. That such a thing could hold fast to him, its voice a faint cry ever calling a name he knew now would be impossible for him to forget.

4

THE BUZZING WAS A FLY CAUGHT BETWEEN THE CURTAIN
and the window glass. Nat listened to the
tap tap
of its body as it ricocheted over and over against that lit pane, his head’s throbbing coming in concert with his pulse and with each pump of his heart his stomach seemed to flip with nausea. He reached for the curtain and waved it gently and the fly rattled against the glass once more and then found the opening in the slider and disappeared into the cold bright day.

The clock read two thirty. A little past. The cigarette burning down to a stub between his fingers. Through a gap in the curtain he could see a black sedan moving over the speed bump in the parking lot below, the slab of its hood rising and falling again. Farther down the row of parked cars, a bare-armed man in a flannel shirt with torn-off sleeves walked slowly away until he was out of sight.

He had been waiting for Rick and Susan to come out of his bedroom for more than an hour now but he knew they too would likely be hungover and he did not know if they would come out of the bedroom at all. He might leave for work without ever seeing them, a thought that brought a slow wave of disappointment. He had been waiting for thirteen months for Rick to emerge from one door and now he waited for Rick—and for Susan—to emerge from another.

The phone’s ringing jolted him out of his thoughts and he rose and stumbled back to the Formica counter that separated the kitchen from the tiny living room. Hello, he croaked into the handset.

Nat?

He exhaled, already lamenting that he had answered. Hello, Mrs. Harris, he said.

Hi there, honey. How are you?

I’m fine.

Did Ricky get out?

He’s out. I picked him up last night.

He didn’t call me. He was supposed to call me.

We were out pretty late. You know how it is.

He still needs to call his mom.

I know.

Rick’s mother began to cough, the sound sharp and hard through the plastic grill of the phone. How are you doing? he said when it was done.

Comes and goes. I have some new medicine. I don’t know if it works or not. The doctor doesn’t seem to know his ass from a hole in the ground. Her voice was weak and far away now. Can you put Ricky on the phone?

How about I have him call you as soon as he’s up.

She coughed briefly. Then she said, simply, Don’t forget.

I won’t.

Promise?

I promise.

You’re a good boy, Nathaniel. I’m glad you were the one Ricky became friends with.

Well, so am I, he said.

I remember when we first came into town. On that very first day.

Look … um … I was just … He fumbled for a reason, then said, I really have to get ready for work.

Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I’m just talking on and on.

I’ll tell him you called.

She said good-bye in a voice utterly deflated of attention or enthusiasm and he set the phone back into its plastic cradle. His head still throbbed. He knew Rick’s mother would call back repeatedly over the course of several days until she actually managed to get Rick on the phone but even this felt normal to him now, felt like a return to the way things had been.

Good morning.

He looked up to where Susan was just coming out of the hall. She wore one of his own T-shirts, her legs bare and long below its black hem.

Morning, he said. He had not pulled on his jeans but he did so now, and then the T-shirt from the night before, both from a crumpled pile next to the tattered and unraveling sofa.

When he rounded the counter she was bent over, staring into the open door of the refrigerator, pink panties fully visible. You guys need some OJ, she said.

For sure, he said.

She stood and closed the door.

His eyes snapped to her face. Rick still asleep?

Yeah. She looked at him now. You boys can’t hold your liquor.

I don’t think it was the liquor.

Same thing.

You look like you’re feeling all right.

Like I said, you boys can’t hold your liquor. She was opening cabinets now, one after another. Don’t you have any coffee?

I don’t think so. Percolator doesn’t work anyway. Rick melted the cord.

No instant or anything?

Sorry.

She looked for a moment like she did not know what to do next, hand lingering on the faucet. Bum a smoke? she said at last.

He handed her the pack and she took one and he turned the burner on and she leaned in to light the cigarette, her head below him, hair a tangled nest where it had rested in sleep.

She came up drawing on the cigarette and then exhaled, the first puff swirling inside itself like a tiny whirlpool. Thanks, she said. She settled on one of the barstools at the Formica counter and sat staring around the room.

What do you do here all day? she said into the silence.

Me?

Who else?

He shrugged. Watch TV. Play Atari.

You got any weed?

I wish.

You need to go shopping. No OJ. No coffee. No weed. I’m going back to bed.

When she turned off the stool he said, Hey, where were you yesterday anyhow?

Yesterday when?

When we were gonna go pick up Rick. I waited for you but you didn’t show up.

Just got busy. That’s all. Probably just missed you.

He stood looking at her there, her eyes ringed with shadow, the cigarette in her hand. The T-shirt she wore had been purchased as a souvenir when he and Rick drove out to Reno from Battle Mountain for the Rush show at the Coliseum. A man leaning away from a five-pointed star. The band’s name in rainbow colors above it. Rick had been obsessed with the band’s then-new album,
Moving Pictures
, blasting it from a portable boom box that lay upon his lap as Nat drove them around Battle Mountain in the Datsun, often rewinding to play the cassette’s first song, “Tom Sawyer,” over and over again, the guitars and drums distorting from the tiny speakers. The show had been the first full-blown concert either of them had ever seen and it felt as if it had permanently altered something in both of them, not the music or the show but the whole of it: the drive to Reno, just the two of them, feeling as if they had burst through into some dream of the adult world that Nat, at least, had never even imagined could be real. With it came the understanding that there were places outside that ring of bare treeless hills so that when they returned from that first trip he could feel the constant tug of the long strip of highway that fled west through Winnemucca and on to the city. Even now every time he heard that song, a thin whip of anticipation cracked through him. Modern-day warrior. Mean mean pride.

Now here was the T-shirt on Susan, her nipples poking the fabric at the edges of the star.

All right, he said at last. Just wondered what happened.

She continued to stand there, not speaking, watching him.

What? he said.

That thing, she said. That’s still just between us, right? I mean, you’re not thinking of telling anyone about it.

I’m not. I wouldn’t.

Good, she said. There was no humor or friendliness in her voice now, just a cold clarity, and before he could think of anything to say in response she turned and he was left to watch her recede down the hall, the shirt’s black fabric pulling against her bare pale skin.

RICK FINALLY
appeared two hours later, materializing from the bathroom with hair dark and wet from the shower, dressed in a T-shirt and black jeans, his eyes bruised with exhaustion. Susan was gone by then, had been gone for nearly an hour. She had said nothing to Nat as she passed through the room and out the door, did not even acknowledge that he was there at all.

Back from the dead, Nat said from the sofa.

I’m not sure about that yet.

Feelin’ it?

Shit, I haven’t even had a beer in thirteen months. You?

Like a truck ran me over.

You see Susan leave?

Yeah. Like an hour ago.

Shit, I must have really been asleep, Rick said. Hey, thanks for letting us use your bedroom.

No problem.

You’re gonna have to wash the sheets.

Kinda figured.

Rick smiled briefly, an expression that became a yawn. What’s for breakfast? he said, slumping onto the stool by the kitchen counter.

There’s no food.

Why not?

Ran out.

Shit, Rick said. No cereal or anything?

Nope.

You got any cash? I’ve been dreaming of Landrum’s for thirteen months.

Probably a little, Nat said. He had been watching a Channel 5 documentary on the lions of the Serengeti Plain. The big yellow cats had come down to a muddy watering hole in an increasingly bare and cracked desert wasteland. A small herd of water buffalo stood warily in the pool, their tails twitching like the tails of cattle, white birds riding on their smooth black backs. He turned the volume knob until it clicked and the animals became a bright white star and then were gone altogether.

Your mom called, he said.

How’d she sound?

Tired.

I need to call her, Rick said. Nat thought he might have a cigarette first but he settled onto a stool at the kitchen counter and lifted the handset and dialed the number. A moment later he said, Hey Mom. Yeah I’m out. Feels great. How are you doing? There was a softness in his voice now, a quiet care.

Nat stood and lit another cigarette on the stovetop and then opened the slider and exited into the low sunlight heralding the end of the day. The patio was a simple railed platform that looked down on the farther reaches of the parking lot with its bare trees and dead strips of grass and the colorless stucco expanse of the building itself where rows of matching patios floated in the faintly humming air. He stood and smoked, leaning down over the parked cars. Through the slider came a few snatches of Rick’s telephone conversation until he turned and slid the door closed and the sound was gone.

He had smoked his cigarette down to the nub when the sliding glass door opened behind him and Rick stepped out onto the patio, his own cigarette held between thumb and index finger as was his habit.