The Animals: A Novel (4 page)

You look terrible, Rick said, his voice slurring the syllables into one long word.

It took Nat a moment to realize that Rick was now speaking to him. The light in the bar had begun to fade, as if the whole room had flooded and they now sat, all of them, underwater.

You do, Susan said to him. You look like a sad sack.

You need to get laid, Rick said. We need to get him laid.

Nat leaned on the bar, bleary-eyed, watching him fade into and out of focus.

My best friend here needs to get laid, Rick said.

A collection of screechy female voices hooted up from the darkness around them.

Jesus Christ, Nat said, laughing. You asshole.

Just helping my buddy, Rick said. No charge.

What’s your name?

The voice came so quickly that it seemed as if the woman had materialized on Rick’s command. And perhaps she had. She might have been forty, although she wore so much makeup it was difficult to tell, eyes wiped with turquoise as thick as paint and hair like a bundle of blond wires. She licked her lips. He had seen animals in nature documentaries perform similar actions while feeding on carcasses in the plains of Africa.

This is my pal, Marlin, Rick said. His voice slurred so profoundly now that he could hardly finish the words before bursting into laughter once more. Marlin Perkins. But he’s not related to
that
Marlin Perkins.

She did not seem to catch the joke, or if she did she did not care. Perhaps she had never heard of Marlin Perkins. Nice to meet you, Marlin. I’m Vickie. She extended her hand. Nat took it.

The whole world had blurred into vowels. Nat tried to catch a word from that current but then Rick’s hand shot into the air, pointing down toward the far end of the bar, where a small color television hung from a metal bracket. Fuck all, Rick said thickly. On the screen was a map of the United States with nearly every state colored in red. Across the screen fell white static as the station bled into and out of range.

What the hell you complaining about? Grady said. He had come back from the far side of the bar and stood with the rag over his shoulder once more, staring up at the television. You vote for Mondale?

Shit no, Rick said. I didn’t vote for nobody.

You? Grady looked at Nat now.

I voted, he said thickly.

You voted? Rick said. What the hell for?

Mr. Mitchell. Civics.

I failed that class, Rick said.

Yes, you did.

Who’d you vote for?

I’m not telling you that, Nat said. The television on the wall disappeared into snow. Returned. Once again faded.

Why the fuck not?

He paused, looking for the words. Then he slurred out, It’s private.

Says who?

Mr. Mitchell. Civics.

Fuck, Rick said. I fucking hate Mr. Mitchell. Civics.

He hated you too, Nat said. Probably still does.

The television on the wall showed nothing but static now. Grady stood beside the box and banged it with his fist and the image skipped and rolled like a blank space on a slot machine. No red 7s. No bunched trio of cherries. No map of Reagan’s reelection. Then white static, the red map appearing for a moment and then covered once more like blood disappearing under new-fallen snow.

Wanna dance? the woman next to Nat said into his ear. He could not remember her name.

I don’t know if I can stand up, he said.

Maybe we should go lie down.

Nat could only smile weakly in response.

Across from Rick, Susan flashed him a thumbs up. Her hair shining in darkness. Her smile radiant in the dim light of the bar.

And somewhere outside, in a nearly endless dry basin that once contained a vast inland sea, night creatures swarmed the sagebrush. Windscorpion and pocket mouse and kit fox skittering through Mormon tea and shiny hopsage, rustling the bottlebrush, the ricegrass, and rustling too the tilting neon room, the men and women within, all adrift under the surface of that impossible dead ocean.

3

THAT NIGHT THE MOOSE CAME TO HIM IN HIS DREAMS. HE
was on the road but it was twelve years ago and he was coming up out of that last blasted winter in the desert. The eyes that stared back at him from the rearview mirror were young and red-ringed and crazed with panic, set against a receding darkness from which he expected, at any moment, the red and blue flashing lights of the highway patrol to appear. But there was only the fleeing and faintly luminous night road that led backward to Battle Mountain. Nothing more.

He had thought he would drive nonstop, through the night and into the next day, through Oregon and eastern Washington and dipping at last into the Idaho panhandle, chain-smoking all the while, the burning torment of what had happened, of what he had done, rolling through the shell of his body like a fire. But then he had grown so tired so quickly, sleep rushing in on him with a ferocity he had never before experienced, and he pulled the laboring car into the gravel beside the road and dropped his head back and was already asleep.

He slept in the dream and in the dream he woke to a quiet breeze and an ocean of grassland in all directions. Twelve years ago. He could not remember where he was or what he had done to come to such a place, but then the whole of it returned to him, every detail stark and absolute and irrefutable. His body sticky with sweat despite the chill and the interior of the car coated with a thin layer of colorless dust. What he had done. What he could never undo.

A few feet away began a low hill covered in golden grasses that shook and trembled and seemed to extend forever into a landscape endlessly rising and falling in all directions like an ocean of slowly undulating waves.

And then he saw the animal. It stood atop the hill, its thick horns and black eyes staring back at him with apparent disinterest, all of it so still that it seemed at times to waver back into the grasses from which it had come, an animal that appeared, even then, as if it had stepped directly off the cover of the field guide he had had as a child and which was now, at least in the moment of the dream, of the memory that was the dream, with him in the car, the book his uncle had given him so many years before and which he had read and studied, both out of interest and, later, out of sheer boredom. The animal on the cover was exactly this animal in exactly this location, as if the color image had become real and extant before him in the grasslands beside a road the numbered designation of which he could no longer recall, the only missing item the title that would have been emblazoned across the grass in thin white letters:
Wildlife of the Intermountain West
. He thought of reaching down into the floorspace behind him for that book, but he could not do so. It seemed impossible to move somehow, impossible in his past, impossible in the dream.

But then he looked again and saw that the animal was not the pronghorn antelope but the moose of the evening before, its head partially blown apart and its leg twisting behind it on that awful hingepoint of broken bone, his own heart sinking in his chest even as his skin blew into pinpoints and the landscape everywhere flew away into thin blue darkness.

When he woke his throat was dry and seemed coated with the same floury dust that had lain upon every surface of the car he had returned to in the dream. He sat up in the trailer on the stiff mattress and coughed and then rose and drank from the sink and stood there in his long underwear, alone in the dark, beer gut pressed to the edge of the counter, staring into the scant black rectangle of the window, into the reflection of his own wild eyes and scraggly beard. Beyond that visage lay a vacancy of empty space.

He returned to the mattress but his eyes would not close and he lay there, awake, watching, for what seemed like hours, as a blue square of moonlight slanted across the cracked vinyl paneling of the adjacent wall. After the clock had passed two in the morning, he rose to his feet once again, dressed and lit a cigarette before lacing up his boots and stepping outside. The night was cold, well below freezing, and the forest around him glowed under the blue light of stars and a sliver of waxing crescent moon. The birches faintly radiant, their bases pooled in black shadow, and the path he followed invisible in the darkness. And yet he followed it nonetheless, arriving at the gate and turning his key in the padlock and stepping through into the rescue.

He stood there for a time, puffing at the cigarette, a habit he had quit many times but could not master. Before him, the enclosures lay arrayed in their wide curving loop on the slope of the mountain. From the gate he could see nearly all of it: the cages shining with silver light, the jagged silhouettes of giant pines and furs rising everywhere against a night sky in which the Milky Way appeared as a clear bright spillage of clustering stars. Across from him stood the office trailer, inside which he had slept for many years before his uncle moved in with his girlfriend and left him the travel trailer, and uphill, on his right, he could just make out the edge of the big shed that housed the refrigerators and freezers, the tools, the snowmobile.

It was Majer he wanted to see most of all but the bear was asleep in his den at the center of that great loop of cages, as he knew he would be, and so he snuffed the cigarette and dropped the butt into his coat pocket and then walked a slow circuit among the other enclosures, pausing to look in on each animal as he passed: Napoleon and Foster, their quilled bodies trundling slowly across the expanse of their cage, noses sniffing the air at his approach; Baker in his den, napping, only the raked claws of one forepaw visible; the twin martens swirling along the branches that crisscrossed their enclosure. The remainder of the animals asleep or awake, depending on their species and activity level, but all safe and secure. The two bald eagles silent. The turkey vulture as well. Of the raptors, only Elsie was awake. She hooted from her enclosure, swiveling her head as he approached, her great round eyes examining him with some mixture of interest and boredom, waiting until he passed before starting up her call once more.

These he had saved, had brought back from whatever deprivations had been enacted upon them, most often, like the moose he had lost, the result of collision with the various blunt and sharpened instruments of the human world—vehicles, firearms, fences, traps, poisons—and whatever sense of unease he had carried back from Ponderay, back from Muletown Road and that single rifle shot, back from the dream, dissolved slowly in their presence, his feet moving along the fence lines and those animals nocturnal and active running their noses along the wire in investigation of his scent. He stood by each and spoke in low, quiet tones, telling himself what he already knew: that the promise he made was a false one. There are times when you must become the instrument, when you must deliver a living, breathing thing to whatever heaven exists for such a creature. To the heaven of the moose. And the fox and the badger and the bobcat all watching him with their eyes bright and shining under the shadows of the black trees, watching him without comprehension, but he did not ask for such a thing. He only needed them to be there, and there they were.

When he came to Zeke’s enclosure, he stood at its edge, watching the darkness for a long time until the wolf appeared, drifting forth from the shadows of the trees like a silver ghost and pausing only to squat and urinate and then to sniff the sticks that lay strewn upon the ground, rocks and dry pine needles, after which the animal dissolved again into the shadows from which it had come, its three-legged motion like the flow of some hobbled ghost.

He spoke now into the absence that the wolf had left behind, telling him that he knew which side of the fence he was supposed to stay on and thanking him for the reminder. The palm of his hand against the chain link. He told him that they were still looking for a companion wolf, a female, but that they had been unable to find one suitable. Then he told him that he would not give up, that they would find a mate, a partner, that he would no longer be alone. Words into a vacancy, the wolf somewhere much deeper in the enclosure, perhaps watching him; perhaps not.

He did not know how long he stood there, but after a time he unzipped his jeans and urinated a long, steaming stripe a few inches from the outer edge of the fence. Then he turned and walked back up the path through the birches to the trailer and, at last, to sleep.

HE RETURNED
to the rescue just past dawn. Majer had not been out of his den when Bill first walked the enclosures but the bear was awake now and stood upon the big rock over his swimming pool, staring down at the water as if a fish might materialize from its depths.

Hey there, Bill said. I came down to see you last night but you were snoozing.

The bear looked at him with its pale eyes and then walked heavily to the zookeeper door and lay its head against the small opening there.

Is that how it is? Bill said, but he walked to the door and put his hand through the opening and scratched the bear’s rough fur, the skull underneath a hard uneven shape. How we doin’, buddy? he said, repeating those words and words like them as he scratched, the bear shifting so that Bill’s hand scratched the top of his head and then behind his ears and then the thick fur of his neck, Majer’s breath coming short and loud with the pleasure of it.