The Animals: A Novel (2 page)

She nodded and left his side, moving in the direction of the sheriff as Bill walked to the moose, raised the gun, and in one quick, sure movement, fired the dart into the animal’s shoulder.

He had used the dart gun many times. On a wolf and a coyote and an elk. In each instance the animal had hardly even registered the shot. The sound like a puff of air and the animal’s response maybe only a brief twitch of furred hide. But this time the moose released a long bray of surprise and anger and anguish and staggered forward on its spindly legs, its massive head rocking from side to side, the broken leg cycling in a weird sickening orbit around the break, the hoof backward, ungulate points ticking against the asphalt as its front legs scraped forward a few more yards, the human bystanders jerking out of its path. Then it went down, the whole of the thing collapsing, hind end first, not from the medication but from its own broken body and from gravity itself, its pelvis hitting the asphalt, and then its chest, the front legs splayed out for a terrible moment and then the head rising again, the animal clattering up on its front hooves, legs stilted out, everything about it agony and the will to live, to survive.

Christ, Bill said. Go down. Please go down.

He did not look up at Grace but he heard her voice now. He will, she said. He will, honey. She put her hand on his own and he realized then that his hand was trembling where it gripped the dart gun.

How long’s this gonna take to work?

The voice had come from the sheriff, and then Grace’s voice in answer: Twenty minutes, she said. We might have to dart him again, though.

All right, the sheriff said. I called for a tow truck. Probably’ll be here around the same time.

At these words, the moose let out another series of honking cries. Bill stood watching for a few moments and then stepped back to the car with the gun and opened the breech and returned it to the black zippered case. When he turned, he could see the sheriff moving toward the bystanders again.

And now we wait, Grace said.

He nodded. They stood side by side, watching the animal as it stumbled forward on its spindly front legs, panting in short, heavy breaths, the rear of its body sloped down toward the street and the dart’s bright red tuft waving from its furred shoulder like an ornament.

Bill leaned against the truck.

I was just gonna call you, Grace said after a time.

Now you don’t have to.

No, I do not, she said. She smiled at him briefly and he tried to smile in return. I was thinking I might come over for a visit.

You got a sitter?

Maybe. Why? You busy?

Well, I wasn’t before.

Yeah, she said. Neither was I.

They fell silent then, the two of them in the cool dusk with their bodies just touching, hip and shoulder and ankle. Her hand came into his own and squeezed and then held there, her fingers interlacing with his. He looked out at the moose standing spraddle-legged in the road. Once upon a time, you told yourself that you would be no killer, that this was how you would live your life. And yet you learn and relearn that everything is the same. The animals will call you. And sometimes you will answer them with gunfire. Majer’s voice again, or maybe it was only and always himself and himself alone.

When the moose began to go down, Bill stood in the street and spoke to it softly, in human words, telling it that it would be asleep soon and that it needed to lie down so that it could be taken care of, and then the moose did so, as if it had considered the intent of Bill’s words and had determined to comply, first by setting its head upon the road in an attitude of rest, of relaxation, then lifting that great head once and then again and then setting it down and moving it no longer, its chocolate eyes closing slowly and the head falling sideways, a limp tilting like a wooden basin tipping onto its side.

Grace placed the silver disk of her stethoscope against its chest. Heartbeat sounds good, she said. She shifted to the animal’s flank and ran her hands along its hip again and again, her hands pausing and squeezing and then lifting the moose’s rear leg and examining the break. When she was done, she returned to him, the stethoscope dangling loose around her neck. That hip’s pretty much shattered, she said. Even if it wasn’t, that back leg would need to come off at the joint. It’s just hanging by a tendon there.

Shit, Bill said.

I’m sorry, baby.

I don’t know why I expected anything else. Moose versus pickup. There’s only one way that story ends.

Sad but true.

You’re not gonna say I told you so, are you?

How about I love you.

That’s better, he said.

When the tow truck arrived, the hooked cable was wrapped around the animal’s still-intact rear leg and those who remained helped guide the body up the ramp and onto the bed of the truck: Grace and the sheriff and a deputy and a couple of wool-shirted men from town. Bill held the moose’s great head in his arms, the animal’s breath blowing against his chest in a great flood of exhaling air, and he remained there at the edge of the bed even after he had laid its head down upon the cold steel, its deep brown flanks growing darker as the buildings and forestland around them drifted into their night colors.

Grace’s hand was on his shoulder. You don’t have to, you know. We can call IFG.

No way I’m doing that, he said.

OK, she said. Earl wants to take him up to Muletown Road.

He know someone to butcher it up there?

I don’t know, Bill, she said. Probably. You want him to just lay out there?

No, he said. Maybe. Coyotes and bears could get a meal out of it.

So could some family. Of people.

He looked at her. Her dark eyes. Her brown hair in its loose curls, moving to shadow. Muletown, he said at last. All right.

THEY FORMED
an unlikely caravan then: the sheriff, with his lights flashing, followed by the tow truck carrying the incapacitated moose, then Grace and Bill, the two of them side by side in Bill’s truck, moving up the highway to the north and then onto Muletown Road and into the deep forest, following that path to a turnout where the sheriff exited his cruiser and waved the tow truck back until the metal platform of its bed extended off the shoulder and into the trees.

They parked and watched as the bed tilted and the winch unspooled and the moose slid from the metal to the dirt and grass, tilting at an odd angle and actually rolling over once, its three good legs flopping around the orbit-line of its body before coming to rest.

When the sheriff unholstered his pistol, Bill cleared his throat. I think I better do it, he said.

You sure about that? the sheriff said.

I’m sure.

The sheriff looked at Grace for a moment. Bill did not know if she gave some sign of her acquiescence to such a plan, but the sheriff’s pistol went back into the holster on his belt. He nodded at Bill and then stood there, waiting.

The moose lay in the ferns and grass under the cedars, silent but for its breathing. Bill had removed the rifle from the case, the same Savage 99 he had owned since he was a teenager. His actions now were not unlike those he undertook when loading the dart gun with its tranquilizer. He pressed the cartridge into the breech and then stood with the lever down, the breech open.

He could feel Grace near him somewhere, her hand, or perhaps her quiet voice nearby. The sheriff. The tow truck driver. A deputy whose name he did not know.

You know where to hit it? the sheriff said.

Bill did not look at him and did not answer. He could feel, once again, the animals in their dens, their noses lifted to scent the air, watching him with their poised and myriad senses even from all these many miles away.

Above him, above them all, the sky had gone full dark and stars seemed all at once to rise from the tops of the trees, their pinpoints wheeling for a moment across that black expanse only to return once again to those needled shapes, as if each light had come up through the soil, through the epidermis of root hairs and into the cortex and the endodermis and up at last through open xylem, the sapwood, through the vessels and tracheids, rising in the end to the thin sharp needles and releasing, finally, a single dim point of light into the thin dark air only to pull one back from that same scattering of stars, the cambium pressing down the trunk, pressing back to black earth. Time circling in the soil and the silver-tipped needles. Time circling in the big sage and cheatgrass of everything to come before.

He pulled the lever back to the stock, the breech closing with a smooth almost silent whisper. I’m sorry, he said, not to the sheriff or to himself but to the moose before him in the underbrush. Then he lifted the rifle to his shoulder, leaned forward until the barrel was just a few inches from the hard curl of its skull, and squeezed the trigger.

2

1984

HE SHIVERED AND STARTED THE CAR AND SAT WITH THE
heater vents blowing, cold at first but then increasingly warm, a procedure he had already repeated several times as he waited in the cramped confines of the Datsun, his eyes tracing the shape of the prison over and over again: the white guard tower and the blank plate of the door, the fence line topped with barbed wire that leaned inward toward a stone building so imposing and bleak that it looked like something out of a horror movie. It had been past noon when he first pulled into the parking lot and over the course of the subsequent hours the shadows of the tower and the door and the fence had shifted across the asphalt under a flat white sun that descended all day through a wash of pale clouds, its movement marked by the incongruous soundtrack of the Van Halen cassette that reversed again and again in the dashboard deck. Now Diamond Dave was singing,
Might as well jump!
for the tenth or eleventh time.
Go ahead and jump!
The melody spelled out by a synthesizer.

He had been thinking of that night in front of Grady’s all day and he thought about it again now as he dozed, mumbling to himself softly as had long been his habit, his head lolling against the cracked vinyl of the seat. How lucky they had been at first. The Quik-Stop had been empty, the cashier out back smoking a cigarette. Rick simply tapped the square green key on the register and when the drawer rolled out he grabbed the cash and the two of them returned to the car and drove away. And then, later that same night, how quickly their luck had changed. The two policemen had looked crazed under the yellow streetlights. And their words. Faghetti, one had said, and the other had laughed. They already had Rick pinned to the hood of the car then, his eyes wide but his voice still defiant, calling the police cockholes. Their response had been to punch him hard in the kidneys and Rick’s face had curled in upon itself like a fist. Nat had watched all of it with his back slipping against the brick front of the building, moving sideways, unable to turn away from the sight, slinking toward the barroom door like a coward. And what he was thinking in that moment was not that his best friend was being arrested but that the money they had gotten from the register at the Quik-Stop was in the inside pocket of Rick’s jacket.

He could feel the rough surface of the wall and could hear the thump of the bass from the jukebox inside the bar, but then he was no longer on that dark street in Reno, was not in Reno at all but instead stood beside a different road in the failing light under huge shadowed pines. The feeling was the same—from Reno to wherever this was—his stomach churning and a tight feeling of despair rising in his chest. There you are. There you are.

It was from this image that he jolted awake. The cigarette had burned almost to his fingers, the ash falling upon his hand now and scattering across the seat. Dang, he said into the vacant interior of the Datsun.

He had just removed another cigarette from the glove box when the door in the fence opened, opened and then closed and at last swung wide. And there he stood. He looked, at a glance, just as he had that night in front of Grady’s, as if no time had passed. Not thirteen months. Not a single day. Thin. Freshly shaven. Even wearing the same tight jeans and rust-colored leather jacket. The dark curls of his hair cut short but otherwise the same. Holding a cigarette with the tips of two fingers as if holding a straw. And what a flood of relief. In an instant all those empty days wiped clean. Alone in the apartment watching lions stalk antelope across the box of the television screen. Marlin Perkins in the Jeep with his binoculars, Jim Fowler at his side. Nothing but an endless strip of empty days, broken at last as the guard shook Rick’s hand and Nat stepped out of the car into the drizzling rain. Hey hey, he said.

Rick said nothing at first, but his grin matched Nat’s own. The door closed behind him and he shifted the small bag to his left hand as they embraced.

Welcome to the free world, Nat said.

It’s free now, is it?

Nat shrugged as Rick threw the little bag onto the back seat and they both stepped into the car. Despite the chill, Rick rolled the window down immediately, the crank squeaking as Nat pulled back onto the highway.

Where’s Susan? Rick yelled over the wind roar.