The Animals: A Novel (29 page)

Nat looked over at him but Rick was not looking in his direction now, holding the bright red bottle of 20/20 in one hand and peering out behind them to where the draw opened into the desert beyond, out into the abandoned and unused BLM landscape all around them. I didn’t know what else to say to the guy, Rick said. It didn’t make any sense, but then I was thinking about it, you know, later, and I was like what the fuck?

I don’t get it.

You don’t get what?

So the guy said you were with Susan now. You
are
with Susan. So what?

It was the way he said it. Like I’m with Susan now but I wasn’t before or something. Shit, I don’t know. It was weird, man. That’s all. It was just weird.

Doesn’t seem weird to me.

I don’t know, Rick said. Maybe it’s not. He had lit a cigarette now and sat puffing at it, the bottle in the dirt between his feet, the collar of his leather jacket held tight against his throat. Just seems like there’s something going on that I don’t know about.

Nat tried to aim again but the sights wobbled everywhere across the cans and the rocks and the water jug and he lowered the rifle again. There’s nothing going on, he said.

Yeah. Shit, you’re probably right, Rick said.

Nat lifted the rifle and squeezed the trigger, not even bothering to aim this time. When he opened his eyes against the shot, the water jug remained unchanged. Shit, he said. It’s impossible to hit.

Rick was silent behind him for a long time. Then he said, quietly, It’s just that she’s my girlfriend, you know?

Yeah I know.

No, I mean like when I was locked up she’s all I could think about. Seriously.

Yeah, she’s your girlfriend.

Yeah, well, it’s important. That’s all I mean.

Nat turned back to the targets and sighted quickly and squeezed and closed his eyes and fired and squinted and again the water jug remained there, unmoving. Dang, he said. In his mind, he could see her naked on his stained mattress, the Van Halen poster above them. Her breasts were small and had felt soft and warm in his hands.

The shadow at the bottom of the shallow draw had shifted as they spoke, crawling sideways across them both. His stomach was a tight ball now, a tight hot ball. So you’re in love, he said. Rick Harris is in love.

Yeah, I guess so, he said. I guess I am.

Didn’t see that coming, Nat said.

Me neither, Rick said. He took another draw on the cigarette. Goddamn, he said. Goddamn.

Nat tried to speak but his throat felt small and tight and the only sound he could make was a faint, dry rasp. He coughed and looked back down the draw at the water jug and the cans. They seemed in motion now, as if adrift on some ocean that was invisible all around them. He breathed in slowly but the motion did not stop.

Hey, let’s blow this fucking thing to pieces, Rick said.

Nat had not heard him come but Rick stood next to him now, the pistol held up in the air before him.

Hang on, Nat said. He reached down and levered a shell into the chamber.

You ready now?

Ready.

Rick leveled the pistol, both hands gripping the handle. Then he counted to three.

Nat squinted against the sound. Rick squeezed off shot after the shot. The cans jumped and fell. The water jug remained. Nat stood with the rifle against his shoulder and aimed and aimed and kept his eyes open, his broken finger pointing down at the targets. Then he squeezed off a round and watched the water jug as it exploded at last.

13

ALL WEEK CAME THE SNOW AND WITH IT A SERIES OF BLEAK
dreams that he awoke from each morning in confusion and terror, a night spent scrambling through a blizzarding forest gone black and malevolent, his movement hindered by snow that lay everywhere in his path, clinging to him even as it seemed liquid, fluid, like quicksand. He did not know how many hours he labored in those frozen and claustrophobic landscapes but when he awoke at last it was, each time, to the muffled and strangling darkness of a trailer nearly buried, as if the waking world had come to mirror the dream he had fled, the details of which blew away with each gust of the storm, leaving only the sense of it—fear, panic, terror—his body shaking with cold even though the trailer itself was warm, the propane heater at a low constant hum. And yet he awoke trembling, as if somehow his skeleton had frozen in the night and he woke with cold dry bones everywhere inside him.

Each morning and evening he dug the snow away from the door, creating a burrow that led up to the surface, where all night and day fresh snow fell. By Friday morning it had reached the base of the windows and a heavy drift had accumulated on the trailer’s west side: a clean slope broken only by his dug-out passage, a partial tunnel that led, at a short diagonal, up to the surface. Each morning a new layer of snow had crept up past the bottom of the door so that he would pull the door open and find an icy wall, as if someone had built a second door to mirror the first. One morning he dug the area down nearly to the frozen dirt, the filtered cloudlight coming through the rim of the tunnel so that the whole tube glowed faintly, sky blue and luminous, the stairs he had cut into its side with the blade of the shovel leading into a storm that seemed as if it would never end.

The power had been cutting in and out since Tuesday and the phone service as well but midweek the snow turned to ice in the night and when he awoke in the morning its evidence sparkled on every surface—tree branch and gate rail and on the trailer itself—as if the world he knew had tipped into some other, a world where everything was coated in the transitory and liminal substance of a fairy tale. There had been no power since that night but through some miracle the phone continued to function, although he knew it was only a matter of time until he lost that as well.

He had spent each day working to clear paths, salting the edges of the enclosures in an attempt to clear the fence lines. The snow was too thick to use the blower, too thick and too heavy, and so most of the work had been by shovel and after two days he was so tired and weak that he could not fathom how he could keep up with it, so he had stopped doing all but the most necessary clearing: the doors, some walkways, nothing more than that. He had called a snowplow service earlier in the week and they had come and plowed from the trailer to the parking lot and all the way down to the turnoff to the main road, a span of just over a mile, and despite the plow scraping nearly to the gravel surface of the road, it was already close to impassible. Each winter he took the pickup down to Naples, parking it in a gravel lot near the railroad tracks and thereafter using the snowmobile to span the mile between the rescue and town. That shift usually came well into December, when the snows were heavy enough to close the road between the creek and the rescue, but this season it was already apparent that the days he would be able to drive the truck from town to his trailer were numbered.

He had called Grace on Wednesday and talked with her for nearly an hour, standing in the relative warmth of the office, the kerosene heater he had finally repaired sending an invisible stream of hot air blasting into the room. In confirmation of his concerns about the road, she had told him that she and Jude had driven up to see if they could get to the rescue but the big snowplows had just come through, revealing the snowpack on the rescue road to be nearly two feet deep. Had Jude not been with her, she said, she might have skied up the road, but the route was a full mile and she worried about the boy and so they turned back to Bonners, their progress slow and steady amongst cars spun everywhere into the drifts. She sounded happy to hear from him and he thought that maybe, just maybe, things could still move back to the way they had been before Rick had arrived.

A few minutes later, as if in confirmation of his desire, the phone rang as he was still seated at the desk.

Bill Reed, the voice on the other line said. Glad I caught you. This is Judge Harper up at the First District Court.

Yes? he said, his chest a flurry of electric lines.

I guess you’ve got a problem up there.

A problem?

With Fish and Game, the judge said.

Oh, Bill said, relief flooding through him all at once. Do I ever.

Yeah, Sheriff Baxter was telling me about it. Asked if there was anything the court could do.

Yeah, Bill said, Earl mentioned he might talk to you.

Well, no guarantees what this will do in the long run, but I got a lawyer friend to file an injunction on your behalf.

What’s that mean?

Means Fish and Game can’t do anything until we work it out in the court. It’ll just be temporary but maybe it’ll buy you a month or two. Hell, with this storm it might buy you a lot longer than that.

Dang, he said. Thank you so much.

Well, you should thank Earl, really. I owe him a bunch.

I’ll certainly do that.

The judge told him the name of the lawyer who would call him. They spoke for a few more minutes about the severity of the storm and then Bill set the phone down slowly and stood there in the new silence. It had stopped snowing momentarily but the sky roiled with ash-gray clouds. Through the tiny window in the trailer, the snow seemed to glow with a faint luminescence that flowed backward into the trees. From that pale light came a stunned silence that descended everywhere around him, as if falling from the sky and rising from the earth all at once, and when he tried to dial Grace at last, the phone emitted no dial tone and so he came outside again, the generator chugging away at the base of the hill, powering heaters for Cinder and the raptors and Katy the fox and the trio of raccoons. For a long while he stood in front of the office, wondering what he should be doing, wondering if he should be doing anything at all, finally walking up the short rise to where Majer sat just inside the overhang on the concrete interior of the enclosure, as if waiting for him.

Hey buddy, Bill said to him. I got some good news.

The bear cocked his head, dipping his long snout twice, three times, as if nodding in response.

We’ve got a judge on our side, Bill said. He sat on the stump in the little vestibule and leaned forward to open the aperture in the zookeeper door, thinking of lighting a cigarette even though he never smoked inside the rescue and especially not near Majer, who had lived too long to have to breathe in the aftereffects of his keeper’s bad habits.

The bear nosed at the opening, asking for a treat. Oh buddy, he said, and inexplicably his eyes filled with tears. His fingers had come through the opening in the door and the bear touched them with his nose, so gently. The bear’s great grizzled head. Those milky eyes. We might be OK after all, he said.

He sat there for nearly an hour, talking slowly, quietly, watching the bear, his friend, in that moment his best friend in all the world, sitting in the cage he had built for him, the animal nodding slowly as if understanding every word he said and then pressing its great head up to the wire and emitting a long, low moan.

ON SATURDAY
he returned to the office after several hours of heavy labor in the snow to the ringing of the telephone. Despite the previous day’s good news, he had awakened that morning from a troubled sleep of blurred and terrifying dreams. During the night there had been a moment where he thought he had seen a figure in the darkness but he often saw such illusions in the winter after days and days of solitude and when he went out to investigate he could see nothing and even the trailer itself was only a thin and wobbling shape in a swirl of black snow. When the morning came, he could not even recall if he had actually stepped outside the trailer to investigate or if that too had been a dream. With the blowing wind it had felt, most of the night, as if the trailer had become unmoored and floated down some dark river, toward what destination he could not imagine, but in the morning all was as he had left it: the snow everywhere, the truck buried to the windshield, the trailer nearly gone altogether, and all the while the thick flakes continuing to fall.

He ate a hurried breakfast at the Formica table and dug out the front door again. Then he bundled his coat and scarf around his neck and clambered up through the burrow onto the high surface of the new snow, the snowshoes clutched in his gloved hands. Perhaps two feet of the edge of the trailer were still visible, the rest buried in the drift. He sat at the top of the ramp that led down to the trailer’s door and strapped the snowshoes onto his boots and then stood, blowing steam before turning downhill into the birches, his head lowered, teeth clenched and eyes squinting into the wind. Already his mustache and beard were caked with ice and he knew that the office below would be dark and cold, that it would take a full hour or more just to get the temperature above fifty degrees. Everything so much more difficult without electricity. He had about fifty gallons of gasoline in the equipment shed and had been running the generator to get power to the heaters inside the enclosures but fifty gallons was not much and he would need to get to town soon to resupply.

The snow completely unbroken. No sign of animals anywhere. No birds nor deer nor elk. No track. Nothing. As if, in the face of the storm, the animals had simply fled out across the mountains somewhere. Or as if he had already shifted out into whatever world lay beyond.