The Animals: A Novel (17 page)

They mixed up a slurry of ice cream and fruit with a blender in the barn and she returned to the access door in Majer’s enclosure, holding the glass pitcher in her gloved hand.

A way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

True, Bill said.

Then Bess’s voice from down the path: Hey, Bill, telephone.

Who is it?

He didn’t say.

He was going to call after her, tell her to take a message or at least find out who was on the phone, but she had already ambled away from the office door, toward the enclosures nearer the parking lot. Cinder and Baker. Elsie and Tommy. Mountain lion and badger. Owl and eagle. Well, crap, he said.

Get my folder, Grace said as he stepped forward out of the barn.

He crossed down the path and to the office, the room not much warmer than it had been outside despite running the heater all morning. Grace was right that he needed to get the kerosene heater working and brought in from the equipment shed. If he failed to fix it he would need to buy a replacement. Another expense. Coffeepot nearly empty. He picked up the phone. This is Bill, he said.

You son of a bitch, Rick said. And there came the sinking again. The fucking thing is empty.

He stood with the phone in his hand, staring to where the heater glowed orange in front of its silver dish, staring at the cold empty air between himself and the burning wire filaments. Empty? he said.

You fucking knew it was. You fucker.

I didn’t open it. I told you I didn’t open it.

You fucking liar. You sent me to fucking prison and you killed my mom and now you fucking steal from me too?

Listen, he said.

No, you listen, you son of a bitch. Twelve years. I’m going to fuck you up for this.

I’m not a fucking locksmith. I swear to god I never opened that safe. It’s just been sitting on the floor in the closet all this time. I swear to god.

But the line had already clicked to silence. The conversation so fast that it hardly seemed real. A blur of words and then the click and he stood staring at the heater with the phone clutched in one hand and a file folder he did not remember picking up in the other. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. What have you done? What the hell have you done now?

He stood there until the phone began its rhythmic alarm and then he laid it back in its cradle and moved outside again. The day bright and clear. Frost in the shadows. The faint drip of moisture inside the angle of winter sun. He turned up the path to where Grace stood talking to Majer. You’re my boyfriend, she said. You’re my new boyfriend.

He stood next to her without speaking.

Anything important? she said.

Nope, he said. Not important. Not important at all.

7

MILTON WELLS’S DOOR WAS OPEN BUT NAT STOPPED SHORT OF
walking through it, instead lingering just out of sight. His eyes were in line with the brass plaque that spelled out Wells’s name in block letters, under which ran his title: Owner, Milt’s Reliable Ford-Lincoln-
Mercury. Behind Nat, an occasional salesman passed down the carpeted hall, silent but for the swish of a pant leg.

Then Wells’s voice came: Someone out there waiting for me? and Nat blinked and cleared his throat. Um … I wasn’t sure if you were busy, he said, turning into the doorway.

Come on in. The door’s open for a reason.

Nat had stood in the office only once before, on the day he was hired, but it looked just the same: black filing cabinets, stacks of papers, a calendar featuring an image of a car blurring around a turn—this month a new-model Country Squire station wagon with faux-wood paneling—and an oak desk behind which sat Milton Wells himself, a man of perhaps sixty, although his swoop of white hair made him appear much older than he actually was, bespectacled and wearing a Western-style button shirt with looping roses at the shoulders. Around his neck hung a bolo tie.

Nat, Wells said as he entered the room, peering at him over the top of his reading glasses. What can I do you for?

Hello, Mr. Wells, he said. The fact that the man had remembered his name was so surprising that for a moment he could not remember why he had come. He cleared his throat again and then said, I … uh … had a quick question.

Call me Milt. Everybody does.

All right, Nat said. And then added: Milt.

Come in, come in.

He stepped fully through the door and stood awkwardly before the desk until his boss asked him to sit and he perched at the edge of the chair opposite and began, at last, to mumble his question, the sentence punctuated by ums and ahs and long vowel sounds. He had not yet gotten to the verb when a salesman’s voice came from behind him: Hey, Milt, looks like we got that EXP sold, he said.

No kidding? Hot damn, Milt said. Who did it?

Vince.

Man alive. That guy could sell you the shirt off your back.

Nat was looking at his boss and then he was looking away from him and into the room. A safe stood on the carpet in the corner, its black surface about two feet square and fronted with a silver dial and handle, books and binders and paperwork packing the shelves all around it. Then he looked away. The poster on the wall was of a Mustang with a dark-haired woman in a thin evening gown draped across its hood.

He’s a beast, the salesman said. Tom’s putting the paperwork together right now.

I hope you watched how he did it, Milt said.

Float like a butterfly.

Sting like a bee, Milt concluded. Good man.

The salesman apologized briefly to Nat for interrupting and Nat mumbled something in response and then the salesman was gone.

That’s how it’s done, Nat, Milt said, smiling. I challenged them to come up with a way to sell it and someone rose to the challenge. That car might have sat there all year, but someone took it up and got it done. You see what that does?

Yes, sir, Nat said.

It’s like a calling.

What is?

Anything, Milt said. Anything you take seriously. Do you understand what I’m saying?

I think so, Nat said.

You’re the brake guy in the shop, right?

Lube guy.

Yeah, OK, so the point is: even a lube-oil-filter can change a man’s life.

All right, Nat said, although he did not understand this statement at all.

It was silent then, silent once again, Nat looking from Milt to the posters on the wall, to the calendar, and back to Milt. All right then, his boss said at last. What’d you want to talk to me about?

Oh, I wondered if I could maybe get a small advance on my paycheck, he said, his voice faltering, the syllables coming in pieces.

The expression on Milt’s face was immediately one of concern. Jeez, he said, we don’t usually do that. You all right?

Yeah, he said. Yeah, I’m all right. He looked at the bend of his own leg, his knee. There was an oil stain on the fabric there and a smudge of grease on the cuff of his pants. He had been surprised that Milt knew his name, but now he realized that it was emblazoned on the front of his pale blue work shirt: a white oval patch containing dark blue script. It’s my mom, he said. She’s pretty sick.

I’m sorry to hear that, Milt said. He leaned forward and took his glasses off. How much are we talking here?

I don’t know, Nat said. A hundred, maybe. Just to get by.

A hundred? Milt said. I don’t think we can do that. Maybe fifty.

I could use fifty, Nat said.

You sending her money?

Every month, he said.

Shoot, Milt said, that’s gotta be hard.

Usually it’s all right but, I don’t know, I just ended up short this month.

How long you been working here now?

Almost two years.

That right?

Two years next month.

Well, that kind of makes you family. We take care of our family here, Nat. Milt sat watching him as if Nat might, at any moment, get up and sing or dance or do somersaults. Then he said, I’ll call Joanne and you can swing by and pick it up.

Oh man, Nat said, relief flooding through him. I really appreciate it.

Don’t make it a habit, Nat.

I won’t.

Your mom here in town?

She’s back home.

Where’s that?

Battle Mountain, Nat said.

Battle Mountain, Milt repeated. He smiled faintly. I went out there for a rodeo when I was younger. Bull roping.

Rodeo’s big around there.

Yeah, I had a good show there, if I remember correctly. In the fairgrounds.

Nat nodded.

Anything else? Milt said.

No, just that, Nat said, rising now to his feet. Thanks a lot. It really helps.

It’s your money, Milt said. I’m just giving you a little of it early. I’ll call Joanne right now.

He nodded, stepping backward through the door and thanking him once again before turning into the hall. When he reached Joanne in payroll, she was already on the phone and he stood before her, hands in his pockets, until she was done. Then she produced a huge bound book out of which she wrote him a check for fifty dollars. He returned to the shop, the final door opening into a long gray room lined with tires and toolboxes and chattering air wrenches, the air suffused with the smell of deep and penetrating grease and oil and gasoline.

There you are, the shop manager called. That red Fiesta’s in for an oil change. Customer’s waiting.

He looked up at the clock high up on the wall: 4:45. Almost done. He stepped out through the open bay and into the low slanting light. The owner of the Fiesta stood with his arms crossed next to the tiny car, scowling. Behind him, the highway, and yet farther away, an airplane lifted off the runway and rose slowly into the pale blue sky.

HE TOLD
himself that he would sit in the car and would wait for Rick there but by the time he actually arrived at the Peppermill parking lot he had convinced himself that he should immediately cash the check from the dealership and that the casino cashier would be the easiest way to do so, even though he also knew that he really should not enter the casino at all, that finding himself within might drain him of all the money he had, a thought that remained with him even as he pushed through the glass doors and stepped inside. The entrance to the café lay ahead of him, the long line of poker slots stretching off to his left, their sounds bursting all at once into clarity and flooding out behind him into the scattered rows of dark cars.

The cashier handed him the bills and he folded them into his wallet and drifted down a carpeted hall through a vaguely luminous darkness until he reached the Fish Bar with its huge round aquarium, slot machines spaced around it at intervals. The room was mostly deserted and he stood there for a long while, staring at the brightly glowing fish in the tank, following their flitting motions across coral and rocks, telling himself that he should leave and then telling himself that he should not. The machines around him periodically bleeped and warbled querulously. Go now, he said to himself. You need to leave right now. And yet he did not move, continuing to stare at the circling fish and thinking that were his fortune to hold for only a few minutes, he might double the meager fifty dollars he had been given, that the cash might thicken in his wallet, that when Mike came again to make the collection, he just might have the whole amount and could pay off his debt to Johnny Aguirre and be done with it forever, everything outside of the tight encasement of the room fading slowly into fiction, replaced with a sense of possibility. Under the acidic mixture of adrenaline and sweat and joy and despair, he was sure he could smell the felt of the gaming tables, and with that scent the machines in his vision seemed to pulse with lucency.

He told himself ten dollars. Ten dollars only. No more than that, moving back down that dark hall to the table games, and although he had fantasized that he might free himself of Johnny Aguirre, he was not even thinking that he would win now, not really, but only that it might pass some of the time between this moment and the next. And then, without any reason he could determine, he was thinking of the lion, not the lions he had seen on television but instead the only lion he had ever seen in person, a thin but still massive male on display at the MGM Grand across town, the first casino he and Rick had visited when they acquired their fake IDs from the men at the warehouse where Rick had worked and the only casino Nat had entered while Rick was in prison for those thirteen months. When they had first entered, Nat had not known there was a lion inside the casino and had happened upon the animal only because he was lost within the lower level, a cavernous video arcade filled with games and an ice cream shop and on one side of which stood a long line of families waiting to have their photograph taken with the lion. The animal was out of place, out of context, thin and lethargic and chained by the neck to a platform, and yet retaining some sense of its former power and grace, and Nat stood before it amazed.

That was the first time either of them had ever gambled, but Rick plowed ahead with abandon and Nat followed. For the rest of that summer they would spend many nights at the slot machines, high and chain-smoking and filling the machines over and over again with nickels and dimes. And sometimes Nat would fade away from the slots, would return to the arcade to stand before the lion, to gaze at it. Sometimes the animal would look at him, its eyes the color of African grasslands stretching out for miles, the pupils dark water holes draining back through the sand. As he watched, the attendant would lift a hunk of raw meat to wave in the air, the lion’s head rising for a moment, its eyes wide. And then someone would call, Smile! and there would be a flashbulb and the people and the lion would be frozen together, the raw meat already returned to the ice chest beside the stage and the great beast’s head dropping back to the platform, its eyes dimming out, and Nat standing there all the while, mute in that huge carpeted space, beyond belief, beyond understanding.