The Animals

You fucked with the wrong guy, my friend, someone says.

It appears as if the entire crowd from inside the bar has filtered outside now. They stand in their flannels and T-shirts and beards, leaning on the rail, making side bets, watching as you sway in the reflected light of the sign and the single lamppost that lights a faint patch of the road.

You think only that you are going to be pretty badly beaten and that tomorrow you will still have to rise and feed the animals, that no matter what happens to you tonight, tomorrow all the animals you care for will look to you to provide, realize this suddenly and completely, not only that you are responsible for them and that they need you, but that you need them just as much. Everything else, everything beyond these simple and irrefutable facts, is wholly and completely irrelevant: their world and your own overlapping so tightly that they have become, at least in this one area, indistinguishable from one another.

I’m sorry, you say.

It’s a little late for that. The man in the green cap steps forward out of the circle of his friends and stands loose limbed before you, leaning into the dim light.

You open your mouth to speak and in that moment the man punches you full and hard in the stomach, doubling you over, and your breath rushes out of you all at once. Your hand is already raised. Wait, wait, you say, gasping for breath. Hang on. You think you are going to vomit, a sensation that comes and disappears and then returns again.

Hang on for what?

I got your point, you say between breaths. Don’t hit me again.

Don’t be a pussy about it, the man says. People are watching.

I get it. I was an asshole.

You’re goddamn right you were an asshole, the man says.

I know. I fucked it up. I’m sorry.

The man stands looking at you as if contemplating what to do next. Well, shit, he says, don’t be such an asshole next time.

There won’t be a next time, you say. I’m going home now.

Good, the man says. Jerk.

Yep, you say.

They all stand there waiting for you to throw a counterpunch but when you remain doubled over someone says, Let’s go back inside. The crowd assembled on the tiny front deck mumbles and murmurs and then the whole group begins to disappear through the door.

You got some problems. The words come from the same young man, the man in the green cap, who continues to stand there watching you.

I know, you say.

You need to get your shit together.

I know that too.

All right then, the man says.

He turns then and walks back up the stairs, his friends still watching you and then following the green hat back into the bar. The band stopped at some point during the fracas but now, from somewhere that seems very far away, it starts up again, the bass shaking through the walls without tune or rhythm.

You remain crouched on the asphalt in the darkness. At some point you vomit. Later still you stand and try to find your dead uncle’s pickup truck.

IN THE months that follow, it feels at times as if you have given up everything, and you come to understand that gambling kept you believing, against all reality, that there was a possibility of change, that you might one day be levered up and out of yourself, but now that sense of weird and groundless optimism is gone. You do not know if you can live without it. And then winter is upon you and with it comes profound isolation. You cannot get to town except by a freezing trip atop the snowmobile and sometimes the electricity is out for weeks at a time. You have never been so alone. For days on end you find yourself talking not to yourself or to the ghost of your uncle or even to the memory of Rick, but to the bear, and sometimes you think you can hear him answer. You have moved into your uncle’s trailer now, have sold the smaller trailer to someone who drove up from Sandpoint to retrieve it, and you sit at the little foldout table for many hours watching the vacant space that trailer once occupied. In your exhaustion, it feels at times as if your brother is somehow occupying that vacancy, as if he is out there, even now, in the snow.

And yet somehow, in that snow-quiet isolation, you find a sense of purpose. You keep the rescue running all that first winter, alone, and in the night in the trailer in the snowed-over forest you wonder at where you are, at where you have come to in your life, twenty-five years old and utterly alone in a world of animals. It is not unlike what you fantasized about as a boy when you watched Marlin Perkins on Sunday evenings. And yet it is not like that at all. Marlin would wrestle an animal into submission, would bag it and cage it and send it off for study, whatever that really meant. These animals are mostly accustomed to your presence, ignoring you so completely that you can enter most of the enclosures for cleaning and feeding and repairs. Occasionally you will look up to see one of them watching you: the raccoons staring at you in silence with their black-masked eyes. Or the eagle from its perch. Sometimes you stare at the telephone well into the night, thinking of calling the bookie back in Reno, but you never make that call. There are more important things now, things of life and death. You cannot yet know it but there will come a time, not so very far away, when the person you once were will seem someone else entire, some false doppelgänger set to roost in your memories.

9

EACH TIME THE PHONE RANG IN THE OFFICE, BILL JUMPED AS if a shot had been fired. Sometimes there were messages but Rick was smart enough not to leave anything that might incriminate him, only stating that he was waiting to hear from him, nothing more, not even a phone number. In his voice was a thinly disguised fury, a hiss that seemed to breathe through every word. Bill answered the phone only twice, both times listening as Rick berated him, accusing him of stealing from the safe an amount of money that slid between ten and twenty thousand dollars. Whatever the amount, Bill could not convince him otherwise, could not tell him that there had been no money, that the safe had been empty in the trailer’s closet for all those years, that he had never once opened it.

This is gonna get ugly, Rick told him.

Just let it go, Bill said.

Fucking thief.

Just let it go.

He hung up on that second phone call and within a minute the phone began to ring anew. He let the machine answer but Rick left no message and after another minute the phone resumed its ringing until the tape recorder clicked on once again—Hello and thank you for calling North Idaho Wildlife Rescue—then the long buzz of the dial tone and the click and whirr of the machine rewinding to its starting point and the long silence as Bill waited, shoulders tight around his neck, for the phone to burst into sound once more.

Then a day passed where there were no calls and he wondered once again if the ordeal was over, imagining Rick returning to Nevada, resigned to the empty safe, to the years he had served in Carson City, to all of it. But the reprieve was short-lived, not because the calls resumed but rather because a few days later, on his way back home from Sandpoint, Bill happened upon the dented and rusted yellow Honda parked in front of the Northwoods Tavern.

It was early evening when he passed the bar, the sun dipping into the shadows of the tree line and the whole town darkening quickly into the forested night. He had driven up to Bonners to pick up an antibiotic for Perry, one of the three raccoons, who had a small wound that was proving very slow to heal, stopping in at Grace’s veterinary clinic while he was in town just to visit for a moment, to see her, to touch her face, and then had turned around and gone all the way back through Naples and on to Sandpoint, where he had made the final payment on the engagement ring. Four months to pay off the three hundred dollars but he had it at last and he opened and snapped closed the black velvet box with one hand as he drove. It was Friday. Jude’s event at the school was scheduled for Monday night, and because Bill had told him about his plans, he knew there would be no backing out of them. Perhaps that was, in fact, why he had told the child about it at alclass="underline" to hold his own feet to the fire.