Vanishing Act (25 page)

I
was sitting behind the counter of Noah's Ark, watching two crows peck at the black plastic bags of garbage I'd just put out on the street, while I half listened to the boy standing in front of me.

“Me and my friends,” the kid was saying. “We could close down your store, you know. Just like that.” He brought his right hand up and snapped his fingers.

“Really?” I smiled sweetly. “Be my guest.”

In the mood I was in, I'd consider being rid of this place an act of mercy. At the moment, the thought of not having to clean cages, restock shelves, answer questions about the feeding habits of hermit crabs, or fill out the three thousand government forms New York State inflicts on the small business owner had a lot of appeal.

The boy frowned. “I'm serious. We shut down the fur store on Salina.”

According to the newspaper account I'd read they hadn't, but I wasn't going to call the kid a liar.

“So am I.” I threw the key to the front door of my store on the counter. “Here you go, kid ...”

“Jeff ...”

“Whatever.”

“Jeff,” he repeated, his voice cracking in a preadolescent squeak.

“Fine. Jeff, then.” I massaged a cramp in my shoulder while I moved my arm around. The damn thing had been bothering me all day. I must have slept on it wrong. “I'll make it easy for you.” I pointed to the key. “Take it. The place is yours. Oh, and by the way, good luck returning the fish to their natural environment. The guy that bred most of them lives out in B'ville.”

Jeff swallowed. His eyes searched the room for an answer that wasn't there. What should he do? Take the key? Not take it? He didn't know. The PETA manual had obviously never covered a situation like this. I felt a pang of guilt. The kid was what? Fifteen at the most? And that was being generous.

I was telling myself I shouldn't be giving him such a hard time when he swallowed, straightened his shoulders, and did what any politician would have done in similar circumstances: ignored what I'd said and kept on going with his spiel. My guilt disappeared. Admiration took over. Damn, the kid was good. Who knew? I could be talking with the next mayor of New York City.

The boy was tall and extremely slender. His thinness was emphasized by the clothes he'd chosen to wear: green-and-yellow plaid polyester bellbottoms, a tight-fitting orange shirt, and an enormous black ski parka that came down to his knees, all of which, judging from their condition, I was certain he'd gotten at the Goodwill store. He'd completed his ensemble with a string of yellow plastic beads around his neck, black nail polish on the fingernails of his left hand, a nose ring, plus five earrings on his left earlobe, which served, perversely, to underline the essential sweetness of his face.

Some of my academic friends would have called this kid's style of dress tribal, others would have called it postmodern, I called it bad early seventies. Most of the people I know would have thrown him out by now, but I couldn't. He reminded me of myself at that age. Dressed in thrift store odds and ends to my mother's everlasting mortification, I'd harassed people on street corners and in stores, begging them to sign my petitions for everything from nuclear disarmament to animal rights. I was thinking about what an insufferable little prig I must have been when I became aware that the kid was talking again.

“You think what you do is right?” he said. “You think it's okay to own living creatures, to buy and sell them as if they were chattel?”

“Yes.” I reached for my lighter and lit a cigarette. I couldn't seem to help myself. The kid was bringing out the worst in me. “I do.”

He leaned across the counter. I exhaled in his direction. He coughed and moved back. I lied and told him I was sorry.

I expected him to start lecturing me about the dangers of secondhand smoke. Instead he pointed to the caged tarantula sitting in the corner. “Would it be all right for me to buy one of those and burn it?”

“No. Of course not.” I gently tapped the cage. The spider waved its two front legs at me. “They still experience pain.”

“Even if it is just a spider.”

“Yes,” I agreed reluctantly. I could see where this conversation was going. “Even if it is just a spider.”

“Well, what happens when people mistreat something you sell them?”

“I try to make sure that doesn't happen.”

“But when it does,” the kid insisted.

“Then of course I feel bad.” I rubbed my forehead. I was getting a headache and I'd left my Motrin back at the house. Good resolutions aside, the kid was going to have to leave.

“Why do you do it then?”

“Sell livestock?”

Jeff nodded.

“Because it's part of my business.” About forty percent of it, to be exact. The rest consists of pet supplies of one kind or another.

“That's totally bogus.”

“Is it now?” I raised an eyebrow. “I'll tell the bank that's holding the mortgage on my house that.”

“You could earn a living doing something else if you wanted to.”

“I'll go down and get a job flipping burgers at the mall right now.” I wasn't going to tell this kid that in my former life I'd worked for the newspaper, or that this store hadn't been my idea, it had been my husband's, or that I'd been against the whole thing from the start, or that I'd gotten stuck with the place when he died, mostly because it was none of his business.

Jeff flushed. He gestured at the cage full of canaries. “They should be out flying around.”

“They would be dead if they were,” I retorted. “They're captive born and bred. They've never even seen a worm, much less built a nest.”

“Some would make it,” the kid insisted.

“Yes, some would, but most won't.”

I had to raise my voice to be heard over the blare of the police car speeding up the street. I wondered if it was going to another shooting. We'd had two fatal drive-bys not too far away from here in the past week, a record for Syracuse this time of year. Some people put it down to the weather. Usually by the end of January everyone's inside shivering, but for the last two weeks we've been averaging a very unseasonable forty degrees.

Other people say the New York City cops have a new policy. It's called share the wealth. They buy upstate bus tickets for gang members and tell them to get out of town. As for me, I ascribe the rise in crime to the economy. Thirty years ago, Syracuse was a manufacturing town, but most of those plants have moved to Mexico and other points south, taking the high-paying jobs with them, and leaving the part-time, badly paying jobs behind.

The kid coughed and I turned my attention back to him. “That still doesn't give you the right to keep them,” he told me, pitching his voice over the siren of a second police car.

I took another puff of my cigarette before reluctantly taking up where we'd left off. “If it wasn't for places like this, those birds wouldn't exist. They were bred to be sold.”

The boy fingered one of the beads around his neck. “The whole concept of pets is wrong.”

A third police car whizzed by. I made a mental note to turn on the evening news when I got home. “Tell me, did you ever have a dog?”

“Yes,” Jeff said uncertainly, not sure of where I was going with this. “We have a golden.”

“Do you love that dog?”

“Yes.”

“Do you treat that dog well?”

“Of course.” The “of course” was indignant.

“Is he happy? Does he love you?”

“She. Amber is a she.” The kid shook his head impatiently. “Yes. Amber is happy. She sleeps in my bed, my mom takes her everywhere, and she has more toys than my kid brother. But that's not the issue. The issue is that she didn't pick us, we picked her. We could be horrible to her. She doesn't have any rights.”

“Actually she does under Statute 26 of the New York State Market and Agriculture Law, but let me ask you something else. Did you pick the family you were born into?”

Jeff leveled a finger at me. “Don't confuse the issue.”

“I'm not. I'm just trying to point out that things are more complicated than you're making them out to be.”

A sneer crept over the kid's face. “Complicated is the word adults use when they know they're wrong. Complicated is the word adults use so they won't have to do anything.”

“But you'll do better, right?” I shot back. I wanted to clap my hand over my mouth as the words left my lips. My God. When had this happened? When had I begun to sound like my mother?

“Yes, I will.” Jeff went into his pocket and drew out a sheaf of pamphlets. “You should read these,” he said, laying them on the counter. “You'll see what I mean.”

But I didn't. After he'd gone, I dropped them in the garbage. I'd seen the PETA material before, pictures of rabbits with their eyes being held open so caustic liquids could be dropped in thereby insuring the safety of our shampoo, pictures of foxes caught in traps, gnawing their own legs off to get free, and I didn't want to see them again. It was too upsetting.

I no longer use animal-tested cosmetics and I don't wear fur or eat baby animals, but I still eat beef and wear leather shoes. Which makes me what? A hypocrite. Me and ninety-nine percent of the other adults on this planet. Despite my resolution not to, I found myself thinking about what the kid had said as I watched a hamster stuff a treat I'd just fed him into his cheek pouch. I was still thinking about it when Manuel and his cousin, Eli “don't call me Elazaro” Bishop walked in and put the cap on an already bad afternoon.

Manuel was wearing jeans, an oversize flannel shirt, an expensive GorTex shell, sneakers with treads large enough to fit a dump truck's tires, both of which I was sure he'd boosted from a local retail establishment, and, of course, his ever-present baseball hat. He'd recently stopped trying to grow a goatee and mustache, contenting himself with long, fifties-style sideburns. They made his face seem thinner than it was and emphasized the narrowness of his chin. At seventeen, he looked like what he was: a street kid who had seen and done more than he should have.

“No,” I said before he and his cousin reached the counter.

“No what?” Manuel asked.

I stubbed out what was left of the new cigarette I was smoking in the empty dog food can I was currently using as an ashtray. “No to anything you're going to ask.”

Manuel raised his hands in a gesture of mock offense. “How can you say that? You don't even know what I want.”

“Exactly. And I don't care. Whatever it is, all I know is that I don't want any part of it.”

Even though Manuel was a friend of mine (we'd met under unfortunate circumstances a few years ago), I've come to view him, as one of my Catholic friends would say, as a penance for my sins, which, judging from him, are multiple. Whenever Manuel is around bad things happen. Or maybe complicated is a better word. I'm talking the kind of complications that usually take me days with the phone pressed to my ear, while I'm put on hold, to straighten out. The kind of complications that brings me in contact with people I'd rather not meet, under which heading I include representa tives of various social and law-enforcement agencies as well as low-level thieves and grifters.

“And,” I added, covering another possibility before Manuel brought it up, “if you want to borrow money, you're out of luck. I'm flat broke.” I pointed to the stack of envelopes in front of me. “I don't even know how I'm going to pay my bills this month.”

Manuel grinned, exposing a gold cap on one of his upper molars. When had he gotten that? I wondered.

“Which is why today is your lucky day,” he told me.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “Manuel, I have neither the time nor the patience to get involved with another of your schemes.”

“This isn't about me.” Zsa Zsa, my cocker spaniel, came out of the back room where she'd been taking a nap and ran over to Manuel. He was one of her favorite people, which shows you what her judgment in people is like. He took a second to bend down and pet her, before continuing. “This is about him.” He straightened up and gestured in Eli's direction. “He's got a problem and I told him you're the man ...”

“Woman ...”

“... that can fix it.”

By now Manuel and Eli were across the counter from me. I regarded Eli. If it had been Manuel that had the problem, I would have thrown him out, but I liked Eli, even if he was a distant cousin of Manuel. Over the past year he'd bought two Jackson chameleons, an iguana, a couple of skunks, and a small king snake from me. Once in a while he'd stop in, and we'd chat for the odd half an hour or so. He seemed knowledgeable and responsible. At least when it came to reptiles.

He gave me an embarrassed nod and I nodded back. He'd moved here from Florida a couple of years ago. Five years older than Manuel, he was supporting himself working as a prep chef in a restaurant on Erie Boulevard while he finished up an associates degree at Onondaga Community College. With just one more semester to go, he was talking about going on to a four-year school.

He was as fat as Manuel was thin, and as slow as Manuel was quick. He was clean-shaven, and had short brown hair, myopic brown eyes, glasses with thick lenses, a short stub of a nose, and a mouth that was a shade too small for his face. He dressed in normally fittingjeans, flannel shirts, and sneakers. Best of all, unlike Manuel, he didn't seem to be addicted to shortcuts.

He didn't, as far as I knew, sell stolen merchandise, or break into cars and rip off their stereos and CD players. On the other hand, I wasn't putting Eli up for canonization yet. The fact that he had a problem he wanted me to solve was a definite red flag. The fact Manuel had brought him to me for help made the color of that flag go from brick red to scarlet.