“I will. First thing tomorrow.”
Frank smiled. “We’ll be here.”
Quickly, almost without thinking, Annie grasped his elbows, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed his cheek. Then, without another word, she left. Frank followed her to the front door and watched through the side window as the Glouck brother who still had both earlobes grabbed the wheelbarrow filled with firewood and stomped across the gravel, following his sister. The second brother, still holding his bleeding ear, reluctantly trailed along at a distance.
They left the lights of the parking lot and disappeared into the darkness of the field. Before long, though, Frank could see the first tentative flickers of a fire out in the star thistles. Frank got a beer and made himself comfortable, sitting sideways on the windowsill, watching the figures, letting his eyes adjust. When the fire had been burning for a good long while, Annie took a long branch and scattered the coals evenly on the ground around the fire and without any warning at all, whipped the thick branch at the closest brother’s head. Frank couldn’t tell if it was the one missing an earlobe or the younger brother. The blow knocked him face first into the star thistles and glowing coals, unconscious before he even started to fall forward.
The smell of burning skin mingled with the smell of rhino shit.
Frank turned away from the windows, feeling good, feeling fucking great. He grabbed another beer and headed back to his cot and .12 gauge. Outside, Annie had the second brother walk around in the fire pit barefoot, using the smoking branch as persuasion. Frank fell asleep to the second brother’s screams and for the first time in months, he didn’t dream.
DAY FIFTEEN
Annie wasn’t the only customer to visit Frank. Two days later, the woman with the brittle red hair from the gas station rushed into the veterinary hospital, clutching a cat carrier. A coughing male cat, just shy of six pounds and twenty-two years lay inside. The coughing jag subsided, and it hissed like a slow leaking tire. It was dying. Frank knew this. The woman with the red hair knew this. The cat knew this.
“Help him. Oh please help him,” she said.
But the cat wanted to die. It was ready. It needed to die. It shivered, breathing about seven hundred miles an hour for a while, followed by that long, low hissing leak that caught the attention of the lionesses out back when Frank took him out of the carrier.
At first, only the two lionesses closest to the back door noticed. They drew themselves upright and cleaned their shoulders, ears cocked. Then the others heard the familiar sound and one by one, stopped and went motionless.
Frank threw as much technical jargon as he could at the woman, trying to stall, anything, wishing the goddamn cat would finally just give up. After two minutes that seemed just a hair shorter than the last ice age, he tried to gently give the cat to the woman, saying slowly, “Why don’t you hang onto him for a moment, and…well—it might be time to say goodbye.”
But she couldn’t say goodbye and wouldn’t take the cat. She couldn’t face the thought of losing her little man, and gripped the side of the table with her right hand, squeezing it hard enough Frank was worried that one of the purple veins across the back of her hand would rupture, filling the muscles and tendons with blood, slowly filling the skin until it resembled a pink Mickey Mouse glove. This cat was her life. It was that simple.
Frank started to place the cat as gingerly as he could on the table, but the woman shrieked, a short, sharp bark that escaped like a hummingbird out of her mouth. She clapped her left hand to her chin and shoved it down at her chest, held it there for the briefest moment, then plucked a towel out of the carrier and straightened it out on the table, so he wouldn’t have to lay on the cold steel.
Frank put her cat on the towel and grabbed a sealed syringe and a 30 cc vial of Sleepazone. It looked like blue toilet bowl water and would stop the cat’s heart instantly. The woman had her chin in her right hand before he said three words. She knew precisely what he was about to say and she wanted none of it. She demanded that Frank do something, anything to save her cat.
Admittedly, Frank didn’t know much about common housecats. He had only really studied horses in school, but he knew that all the textbooks in the back room weren’t going to help this cat. It was finished.
So Frank cradled the cat in his arms and talked to the cat and the woman in a low, calm voice. He talked about the cat’s markings, the shape of the skull, splay of the claws, praising everything. The woman clasped her hands together, little trickles of tears mingling with black eyeliner and peach rouge rolling down the wrinkles in her face. The cat hyperventilated and leaked air.
* * * * *
It took nearly ten minutes, but the cat finally drifted into a sagging death in Frank’s hands. And then, the woman with the red hair really lost it. She backed away, skipping through the denial stage of death in about two or three eyelash flutters, and plowed right on into anger. A low, keening sound seeped out of her lungs as she tried to wrench the examining table out of the floor, dumped a roll of paper towels in the sink, and scooped a whole armload of vials onto the floor in a shattered mess.
Frank felt sorry for her. He really did. This cat was probably the only thing this woman had for a family, and now it was gone. As she crumpled on the table, cradling the cat, sobbing into the limp gray fur, Frank found himself listening seriously to a calm, reasonable voice inside that suggested just plunging a syringe full of Sleepazone into her ample backside. The medicine would hit her heart in less than a second, and it would be over. She’d sink to the floor, forever joining her cat in whatever heaven that allowed animals. At least then she’d be happy. No more sadness. No more death. Just an eternity together.
Frank actually broke the seal and had the syringe itself out before he realized that he didn’t want to be responsible for another death. Killing her wasn’t the best way to ease her suffering, although he’d be damned if he knew a better way. Instead, he found a small Styrofoam ice chest in the back, and together, they buried the cat out in the field of star thistles, near Annie’s still smoking fire pit. It seemed to make the woman feel a little better, but Frank knew that once she got back to her empty house, the pain would be back with a vengeance, and again, he considered just gently easing her out of this world and into the next.
Before the idea really took hold, he urged her into her car, offering empty encouragement like, “He’s in a better place now, and wouldn’t want you to be sad,” and “It’s going to be okay. It really will get better.” Both of them knew it was lies, but at least it got her moving. She drove away and Frank went inside for a beer.
* * * * *
The phone was ringing. It was Sturm. “How’re my girls?”
“Better. They’re moving around more, picking up on stuff. Eyes are clear. Stool looks good. So far, they seem to be responding quite well to the food.”
“Good to hear, good to hear, ’cause come Saturday, I’m gonna need them to be, well—if not healthy, then active at least. We’ll need four of ’em; one of ‘em’s gotta be the tiger. You think at least four of ’em’ll be healthy? I want them to be able to run. Think they can run?”
“Saturday?”
“Yup. Got an old buddy coming into town. Known him for years. He’s bringing some associate, and we’re gonna have ourselves a good old fashioned safari.”
“Saturday then. I’ll have four cats ready.”
“Don’t forget that tiger.”
* * * * *
At night, Frank would sit in the office with Petunia, reading. At first, she would growl at him from her spot on the couch. But after two or three days, she let Frank sit on the couch with her and before long, she let him touch her back. Frank had lined the floor with newspaper, and replaced it every day. He kept the food and water dishes full and fresh. By Friday night, she was curling up on the couch next to him, throwing her shoulder into his thigh and sleeping as he read aloud about rabies vaccines and feline leukemia.