The Animals: A Novel (3 page)

Don’t know.

What’s that mean?

Means I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in like a week.

Shit, Rick said. I thought she’d be with you.

Me too.

Well, shit. He sucked at the cigarette for a moment and then held it in his hand and pressed his face to the wind, squinting as the occasional raindrop spiked through the open window. Then he cranked the glass back up again, the same squeak marking each rotation. The car silent now but for the hum of the engine and the rush of an occasional oncoming car in the southbound lane.

Beyond the windshield ran fast food restaurants, a grocery store, a run of gas stations all in a row. Above them: the dim yellow sweep of the mountains to the west, their crests backlit under a gray sky the texture of curdled milk. All beyond already in shadow: the town disappearing into itself and the desert opening into scrubby underbrush. An onrushing darkness. Jackrabbit. Rattlesnake. Digger wasp. The owl preparing for its night hunt. The mouse slipping into its burrow. To their right, outside Rick’s window, Washoe Lake: a dark strip taking on the color of the night.

So what do you wanna do on your first day of freedom?

I don’t know. Get a burger. Have a beer. I’d like to know where Susan is.

She’ll show up. She always does.

Yeah, well, she should’ve shown up already, Rick said. She don’t even answer her phone. It’s not like I can keep calling all day until she’s around, you know? He cracked the window enough to flick the butt of his cigarette through the gap and then rolled it closed again. What’s new around town?

Not much.

Who’s around?

I haven’t been out much.

Why not?

Working.

You’re not getting soft on me are you?

Let’s find out, Nat said.

Rick laughed. Then he said, I’m gonna need a job too.

Yeah, I figured.

You think they’d hire me out at the dealership?

Maybe. You mean in the shop?

Anything, Rick said. He was silent for a long time then, the darkness in motion all around them. Then he said, My mom’s gonna need another surgery.

Shit.

Yep.

What’s that gonna cost?

Six or eight thousand probably. I ain’t even worried about that. That’s Medicaid’s problem. What I’m worried about is getting her a nurse or someone to take care of her afterward. They said it’ll be like three months before she’s really up and around. State’s not gonna cover any of that.

Nat did not respond. The yellow line seemed to run through black space and the empty geography of thin clear air. From the edges of the road, a few scraggled and flashpopped shadscale bushes wheeled their skeletal shapes against the headlamps.

Ah fuck it, Rick said then. I don’t wanna deal with that shit right now. I just wanna get drunk and high. And laid, if I can find Susan.

Right on, Nat said.

And so they drove on into the increasing darkness in silence but for the quiet entanglement of guitars from the cassette deck, northward along the eastern slope of the Sierra, the temperature dropping so that the spattering rain turned to slush that thwacked against the windshield in uneven punctuations like diminutive gunfire. A grainy and disconsolate luminescence lining the scalloped and rolling clouds to the north. Soon the tower of the MGM Grand appeared in the distance, faintly glowing. Then, on the road before them, the Peppermill coffee shop with its modest casino room and motor lodge marking the edge of town. Beyond it came the towers and the lights, enormous clean rooms of clanging bells and tweedling sound effects. Everything a container for a possibility that would never actually materialize. That was why they had tried the Quik-Stop to begin with. Neither of them would speak such a thing—not then and not now—but Nat knew it was true. There was no getting ahead in this world. That much was true as well.

This the new Van Halen? Rick said. He had lifted the cassette case from where it lay near the gearshift and sat turning it slowly in his hands.

Yep.

Van fucking Halen, Rick said.

Van fucking Halen, Nat repeated. You wanna start at Grady’s?

Sure, Rick said. Fucking Grady’s.

Fucking Grady’s, Nat said.

A quarter mile on, he pulled to the curb and switched off the car. The engine sputtered and died. On the sidewalk beyond Rick’s window, a woman in a shiny dress moved up the street toward the bar. They both watched her progress in silence.

Goddamn it’s good to be out, Rick said when she was gone from view. Shall we?

Hang on a minute, Nat said. He cleared his throat.

What?

So look, Nat said, I know that it, you know, could’ve been me.

Oh man you’re not gonna get all sappy on me. Are you?

I just want you to know that I appreciate what you did.

I didn’t do anything.

Yeah you did. I know you came out because they were hassling me.

I just came out to see where you were.

Well, I’m glad you did. I just wish I would’ve done something.

They were dicks, Rick said. Nothing you can do about a couple of dick-ass cops. Better me than you anyway.

Why’s that?

Just because it is. Gotta take care of your people.

That’s what I mean, Nat said. That’s what I didn’t do.

Rick exhaled sharply as if laughing or coughing. What’s done is done, Natty, he said. Talking about it doesn’t change anything. He sat there in silence for a moment. Then he smiled. Let’s go get fucked up, he said.

Dang right, Nat said, and in the next moment they had both stepped out onto the curb.

WITHIN TWO
hours Nat was so drunk and so high he could barely walk, the room hanging on an axis that seemed to shift each time he moved. Were it not for the cocaine Rick was offered again and again—and in which Nat was included each time—he likely would have passed out altogether. His face was numb from smiling and laughing.

Goddamn fucker didn’t know what hit him, Rick said. He slapped the palm of his hand against the table. A kind of punctuation. All the glasses jumped.

Just boom, like that. Flat on his ass. Rick smiled and started laughing at his own anecdote, a prison story none of them had heard before. Like a sack of shit, he said. Then he was gone-laughing, hard and constant.

Sack of shit, Nat said between breaths.

The barlights swung in their orbits. The stools tipping.

Oh God, Nat said. If I don’t stop laughing I’m gonna puke.

The people at the table with them kept changing into other people. Billy Carl was there but when Nat looked again he had become Sheila and later Dave Vollmer. All people he had not seen since Rick had been put away and now he found that he could not keep track of any of them. He had been telling Billy Carl a story and now Billy Carl had become someone else entirely but then he was too high and too drunk to remember the story and Rick was here and he was talking and they were laughing and it had been a long long time since he had laughed.

He had even forgotten to look for Susan, although when they first arrived at Grady’s he had done so without cease, searching for her shape in the bar, for the dark sweep of her hair, but with the alcohol and the cross tops and cocaine and the laughter he had forgotten for a moment and so had also forgotten to hope and to fear that she would arrive. So when her arm came across Rick’s chest and her hair fell across his shoulder it was as if she had materialized out of thin air, her body leaning into Rick’s. A feather in her hair like an Indian princess out of
Peter Pan
. Where the hell have you been? Rick said, and in the next moment their open mouths were together.

Nat’s smile was frozen on his face, stuck there for a long moment as the others around the table mumbled their oohs and ahs. When they broke apart at last, her eyes glanced over at him, just for a moment. It’s not polite to stare, she said.

Oh, he said, a small involuntary sound that he hoped covered the guilt that flooded through him like a hot wave.

She leaned in to Rick and whispered something in his ear, or seemed to, and then slid onto his lap. I missed you so much, she said.

I missed you too, baby, Rick answered, but I’m still pissed.

How come?

You were supposed to be there to pick me up.

Didn’t Nat pick you up?

Yeah, but that’s not the point.

I’m here now, aren’t I?

They kissed again, quickly this time, and then she took the beer from his hand and took a long drink.

Don’t be mad, Susan said. She kissed him on the cheek this time and then settled back and looked across to where Nat slumped against the table, held his gaze for a long moment above that surface, over the scratched wood, the furrows running with spilled beer and the wet ash trails of burned cigarettes.

From the jukebox came a power ballad that had been everywhere on the radio, and Susan dragged Rick out onto the dance floor and draped herself upon him under a dim and rotating light that moved slowly from red to green and back to red again. At the table, Billy Carl was still Dave Vollmer but Nat thought Sheila had reappeared to become both Peter Mendy and some girlfriend of his or maybe the girlfriend was Sheila, he could not be sure, and he thought the other guy was named Danny something but he could not remember that either. But then he did not have to because they all began to scatter, slowly floating back to the bar or to other tables, their bodies like flotsam adrift in some current that could be felt but not seen.

The room shifted into some lower speed now, as if a record player had clicked from 33⅓ to 16 revolutions per minute, everything kicking down a full octave, even the beating of his heart, of all their hearts, Rick and Susan tilting on the dance floor under the colored lights and Nat alone at the table, the feeling of it not unlike the silence of those empty homes when they were teenagers in Battle Mountain, a silence that was not empty because it was filled with absence, like finding within that silence a clear tone like the sound of a tiny bell, its ringing flung out beyond the streets and buildings and into the bare sloping hills beyond.

When he looked up, he saw Grady staring back at him, his hands resting on the polished surface of the bar, stained rag over his shoulder. Nat nodded and stood. The room tilted in all directions but he managed to cross it and to slump onto a stool.

Incarceration hasn’t mellowed him any, has it? Grady said when he arrived.

Not by the looks of it.

You want another?

I think I’m pretty well tapped out, Nat said.

You’re looking pretty cross-eyed anyway, champ, Grady said.

Naw. Barely started.

Grady smiled briefly beneath the drooping mustache. Then he tilted his head, his eyes meeting Nat’s. Johnny’s been in here looking for you, he said.

Even at the mention of the name Nat felt his stomach churn. What’d he say?

Just asked if you’d been around.

What’d you tell him?

That I haven’t seen hide nor hair in—what’s it been?—a year, I guess. Or damn close.

I appreciate it, Nat said.

Not like I had to make it up, Grady said.

Nat nodded, leaning into the bar. The sense of drifting immediately slowed into a dull soft wave that lifted and descended like the motion of a swing.

You got a job?

Still at the Ford dealership. I’ve been there two years.

Selling?

I wish, he said. I’m in the shop. Lube and oil.

Well, a man’s gotta work.

So they say. Nat shrugged.

Grady set an ice-filled glass on the bar and filled it with vodka. This one’s on me. Keep your head down and your pecker up.

Thanks for the advice, Nat said.

Someone down the bar called to Grady and he glanced in the man’s direction and nodded but did not move from where he stood in front of Nat. You watch yourself with Johnny Aguirre, he said. That guy isn’t messing around.

I’m taking care of it, Nat said. Even to himself, his voice sounded like a white blur.

I hope so, Grady said. I was a little surprised when he said your name.

Why’s that?

Just don’t seem like the type to get tangled up in all that.

Nat shrugged and after a moment Grady seemed to dissolve, reappearing farther down the bar. Nat sipped at the vodka and then forgot it was there and remembered and sipped again, huddling over his drink as wave upon wave of fatigue flowed through him. He wished that he had Dottie’s number from the front office of the dealership and that she might be willing to sell him a couple black beauties to get him through the rest of the night but he possessed no cash and did not think he could successfully drive anywhere to meet her even if he did.

Natty man, Rick said.

He looked over to where Rick was settling onto the stool beside him, smiling. Beyond his friend, Susan leaned against the bar, a thin sheen of sweat across her face, her skin luminous in the neon glow of a beer sign. From the Land of Sky Blue Waters, the sign read. Nat lifted the vodka and smiled weakly.

Rick waved down the length of the bar. Grady stood at its far end, talking to a woman in a tight black T-shirt. Hey there, you horny old man, Rick called. Grady glanced up and nodded but did not yet move in their direction.