The Animals: A Novel (20 page)

You sit there saying nothing for a long time. It somehow feels as if the two of you are merely camping up in the mountains. The sounds of birds everywhere. And then you say it: Bill.

Bill? He nods. That’s actually a real good idea. We can get a birth certificate with that name.

I guess so.

I’m gonna need to talk to your mom some.

Are you gonna call the police?

Why would I do that?

I don’t know. Because you’re harboring a criminal.

Your uncle laughs then. Bill, you’re a regular comedian, he says. Yes, you are.

The feeling of being called by that name is like a fire inside your chest. Each time it burns. You realize that your brother is the best person you have ever known and that had he been alive, had he survived Battle Mountain, you would never be in this situation at all. And because of this fact, you know you have failed him. He gave you a red-tailed hawk to hold in your hands and in the memory of it you can sometimes feel the heat of that great bird arcing up through your fingers.

You do not see the animals that first day, the few animals that your uncle is keeping in small, cramped cages. Instead he takes you to Spokane, a round trip of four hours, where you sell the Datsun to a used car lot for two hundred dollars because your uncle reasons that the car is the only concrete way anyone might be able to track you down.

That first night you sleep on the tiny couch in the trailer and in the morning your uncle takes you down through the birches and shows you the animals. Coyote and bobcat and one lumbering and slow-witted porcupine. You watch them all but when you reach the bear’s cage something changes for you. It is a jolt. Like a wire of electricity that burns in the air between. You will remember, all your life, looking into those eyes, that conduit connecting you to the boy you were so many years ago when your father died and you came to visit your uncle for the first and only time.

Majer likes you, your uncle says.

How do you know?

He doesn’t usually just stare like that. Maybe you smell funny to him.

Maybe, you say.

Majer, your uncle says. Meet Bill. He’ll be staying with us for a while, so best get used to him.

I remember him from when I was a kid.

I expect he remembers you too.

Can he remember that long?

Oh sure, your uncle says. Time’s different for these critters. Sometimes I think he can remember stuff that hasn’t even happened yet.

You smile at the absurdity of the statement and yet in those eyes you can see snow and forests and your own eyes mirrored back at you, afraid, confused, and just stumbling forward into the life that would be yours. Your uncle calls you Bill and that is the life you will claim.

YOUR UNCLE
receives disability checks for reasons he never clearly explains and that seems enough to pay whatever bills there are, or at least it was enough before you arrived. There is a little sign on the highway indicating North Idaho’s Only Zoo, and occasionally tourists stop to look at the animals and your uncle acts the tour guide, talking about each animal in great detail, telling their stories, where they came from and in what situation he found them. Except for the great bear, all of them have been injured in some way and only the raccoons are allowed outside their cages. David tells you that he once entered the bear’s cage regularly and they played catch with a Wiffle ball but then he was thrown against the back wall in a moment of excitement, breaking his arm and his collarbone, and he has not entered the cage since.

Most days you simply do not know what to do with your time. You consider applying for a job, either in Bonners Ferry to the north or in Sandpoint to the south, but your uncle tells you that you will need to wait a year or more just to make sure there are no agencies actively looking for you.

And so you are patient. Or try to be. You sit out in the sunlight and read whatever books your uncle has lying around—spy novels mostly—and then head down to the library in Sandpoint. At first you look at books on animals, mostly because you do not know what else to do and at least this is information applicable to the world in which you have found yourself, information physical and imperative. Later you spend those same hours reading through magazines and newspapers, taking notes:
Indy Car Racing
and
Wrestling
and
Sports Illustrated
and, always a day late, the sports pages of the
New York Times.

When winter comes, it is like nothing you have ever experienced. It snowed in Battle Mountain, of course, and it snowed in Reno, but in North Idaho the snow is fierce and deep and covers everything. The roads become flumes, the sides of which are lined with huge berms like white walls, fences and gates and mailboxes hidden somewhere within. You find that you love the contrast: the wet black trees, the snow sparkling in the sunlight, everything so alive, and you standing there in that old forest breathing in the frozen bite of the air.

IT IS
barely May when the bottom falls out beneath you. You bet on the Super Bowl and win but then lose on the next two Indy car races. You are in the library often, studying the sports pages, still circling the same dank mudwalled hole that drew you to Idaho to begin with, knowing what you are doing but somehow unable to stop yourself, the action as automatic and thoughtless as reflex or instinct, but it is not instinct, you know that much too, and yet you cannot explain what it is and so you cannot explain why. At least in the casinos there was some feeling of belonging and, however illusory, a sense of control, of possibility, but now there is only a crushing and endless loneliness and what sense of control, of possibility, you might have felt is wholly entangled with the guilt of what you have already done and the shame of knowing that you are doing it all over again. And yet still you call the bookie. It is automatic. Without thought. And when you say the words into the telephone you feel the faintest electric spark, a wire running through the center of your chest. It is not excitement so much as it is the feeling that you are grabbing hold of your life, that you are making some kind of decision, even though, of course, you also know that it is no real decision at all.

That final time, you switch your bet to another car but when the results come in you realize that had you simply kept your bet the same—Bobby Allison in the top three—you would have won, for Allison has finished third. This time you have wagered a thousand, the bookie’s credit extending out with the goodwill of your regular payment upon loss. But there is no money left now, none at all, and you sit out in the forest on a downed log, sweating in the spring sunlight, your body filling with defeat and failure and shame. Next to you, separated from your uncle’s trailer by a few dozen yards, is the even smaller oval travel trailer your uncle has procured through a trade with a neighbor. You told him you would pay him back but of course you know now that you will do no such thing. Your blood feels hot and your stomach churns with nausea.

That night, at the picnic table in front of his trailer, your uncle asks you why you are so quiet and the whole of it spills out. When you have finished, your uncle says: I figured there was something going on. You’ve been walking around talkin’ to yourself like a crazy person.

Yeah, I do that, you say.

No shit. So is that all of it or are there more surprises coming?

That’s it, you say. You wipe your runny nose with the back of your sleeve. There’s something wrong with me. I can’t stop.

You’re goddamn right there’s something wrong with you, your uncle says, but you’ll sure as shit stop.

I can’t.

Yes, you can, your uncle says. You know how long it’s been since I’ve had a drink? He waits for a moment, looking at you sideways. Then he says, Twenty years. That’s why I came up here to begin with. To get away from all those drunks down in Winnemucca. Shit, your dad. Your brother. That would’ve been me too. So I got the hell out of there.

But I’m up here and I’m still fucking up.

You’re not listening. I haven’t had a drink since I was twenty-seven years old. You make a decision and fight hard to keep it that way.

It’s not a decision.

Everything’s a decision, your uncle tells you. Every goddamned thing. But in that moment you do not think your uncle knows what he is talking about at all.

HE TAKES
the pickup keys and will not let you use them but he tells you a few days later that he has paid off your gambling debts and that if you accrue any more he will turn you out onto the road, blood or no. You agree, although you pack your meager belongings in advance of that day to come.

A week later, when the snows have mostly thawed and tiny flowers have begun to appear everywhere out of the black earth, he tells you that a call has come in about a fawn stuck in a fence near Crossport.

What do we do? you ask him.

We go get it, unless you’re busy doing something else.

A half hour later your uncle pulls off the road near an olive green pickup beside which stands a couple who frame, between them, a stretch of square-knit fencing entangled within which is the shape of a fawn, a creature hanging upside down from a rear hoof, impossibly small and crying out in a voice that sounds not unlike that of a infant child, and your memory returns for a moment to the broken-winged red-tailed hawk you found with Rick and your brother. You wonder what became of it, if it lived, if it continued to have a life.

Dang, it’s tiny, you say.

It is that, your uncle replies. You want it?

Do I want it? you say. I don’t even know what that means.

It’d be some work.

What kind of work?

Well, the first part of the work would be figuring that out, he says.

What’s the other option?

I can call Fish and Game. They’d probably just let it go. It’ll starve without its mom. Or something’ll eat it. He stops talking and fixes his eyes on you.

What? you say and when he does not speak you say it again: What?

You know, he says.

Do I?

You’d better.

You look back at the tiny deer and as you do it emits a loud piercing shriek. Let’s get it out of there, you say.

I was hoping you’d say that.

The fawn’s forelegs wheel in the air over the roadside ditch. All the while it continues to wail.

Your uncle has brought a plastic pet carrier box and you retrieve it from the truck and open it to extract a wool blanket and the two of you come to stand next to the couple.

You from the vet? the man asks.

Wildlife rescue, your uncle says.

Ah, the man says. How old you think this one is?

I’d guess a week. Maybe week and a half.

Get her out of there, the woman says. Her eyes do not move from the fawn. Limp now, limp and suddenly silent in the fence line.

That’s what we’re here for, your uncle says. You ready?

You nod.

Let’s get her foot out.

You set the pet carrier in the gravel beside the road and then you and your uncle approach the animal, so slowly, and the fawn does not move until you are upon it, your uncle tossing the blanket over its body. Then it is in motion again and its cry starts up, loud, its shape writhing under the blanket as David wraps his arms around it. Get its foot now, he says.