Christian Kiefer - The Animals

It felt as if the whole of his past was closing behind him. Closing at last. His mother had moved to Phoenix to live near his aunt Lucy. His brother’s grave in the desert of Nevada as it always would be but there was no reason to visit such a marker. The cluster of trailers where he and Rick had grown up were someone else’s now, if they were still there at all. Sunday nights he would sit on the stained, broken green sofa with his brother at his side and his mother in her recliner, each of them with an individual oven-warmed compartmentalized meal, watching Marlin Perkins drive his Jeep alongside a cheetah, pilot a road grader into a hippo pool, guide a hawk to land on his outstretched gloved fist. His brother. His mother. Often Rick as well. Nothing in his life ever felt as safe, not before and not since. Then the night Marlin wrestled the anaconda, and everything was changed. It sometimes felt in the weeks and years that followed as if that night had swept clean some illusion, revealing the geography for what it had been all the while, the boundaries of his life circumscribed upon a landscape he had not chosen. Not even the Truckee River managed to flow out of that dry basin, instead pouring ever and always into Pyramid Lake and evaporating slowly into the sky. Kangaroo rats skittering through the shadscale. The sagebrush stretching in all directions, the cold bare peaks of the mountains like islands floating above, and you a faint dim speck between them, indistinguishable from the scrubby spike-covered plants that everywhere held fast to the dry, hard sand.

Now, at long last, the whole of that landscape was fading into a flat darkness and in its place a faint spattering of slushy rain against the window of the trailer. The wet forest beyond. And there he was: reflected upon those trees, reflected on the glass, beard and mustache a bedraggled mess under dark-ringed eyes but the encasing of his world tight and shining once again, a glass orb containing the forest and the mountains and the animals, and the few people he cared about: Grace and her son Jude. His mother, although only via telephone. Bess and the volunteers. No one else. The world around him a forest of high-banked ridges filled with animals of tooth and hoof and claw and you among them, staring out the window of your pale white enclosure into the spitting slushy rain.

He looked at his watch and then stood and put on his coat and the cowboy hat Grace had given him and stepped through the door. The path through the birch trunks shadowless in the gloom: a dim reckoning of faint cloudlight against peeling white bark beneath which pockets of thick frost dotted the black earth as if some child had dropped a series of snow cones along the path.

When he came down through the gate, the two boys were at the new raptor enclosure, working despite the weather, the walls up and Bobby running the saw through a two-by-four as Bill approached.

Looks good, guys, he said.

They both looked across at him, Bobby setting the saw down and Chuck tapping a stubby pencil against the plywood floor. Thanks, boss, Bobby said.

The boys sat on their haunches watching him, their shaggy hair falling in scraggly cascades over their eyes. When they had first come on as volunteers six months before, he had asked them what they wanted to do with their lives and they had looked at him with a kind of wild confusion. No idea, Bobby had said at last.

He knew he might have answered the question the same way at their age and probably had, but the response still surprised him. What do you want to volunteer here for then? he had asked.

We like animals, Bobby had said in response.

And this place is cool, Chuck added.

Yeah that too, Bobby said. It’s cool.

Bill had been taken aback by the response and for a long moment he did not even know what to say. In the end he signed them on. They were applying to do something for no reason other than to do it and while part of him did not trust the impulse — part of him ultimately did not trust anyone but himself — he thought that he should at least give them a chance.

As it turned out, the boys’ work ethic was surprising. Within the first week he apparently mentioned that the roof of the Twins’ holding pen was leaking and the next morning woke to find that the boys had torn much of the roof away and were repairing it with lumber they had scavenged — or so they had told him — from some abandoned building site, the two martens watching from a nearby tree stump with apparent interest. He had asked them how it was going and they had looked down at him from the rafters of the marten enclosure. It’s going great, Bobby had said. This is like the best day ever.

He thought at first that the statement must have been meant ironically, for the two of them had already been working on the roof for at least two hours for no pay, just to do something, and in response he said, That so? and Chuck, who he had already learned rarely spoke, said, Heck yeah, and Bobby added, Totally. We’re building the hell out of this thing. And Bill stood there watching them, the two of them watching him in turn, until he finally said, Well, good job then, and Bobby had said, Thanks, boss, and Bill had turned back toward his office again.

He had had to speak with them only about the safety and care of the animals, letting them know that they would need to check in with him or with Bess before tearing into anything related to the enclosures, but otherwise he found them to be totally remarkable, two young men unafraid of doing virtually anything, building or shoveling lion or bear shit or anything else, working as if they had just discovered it, a trait so unlike him at that age that he still wondered from time to time if their presence was some kind of bizarre joke, certainly the two best volunteers he had ever had and perhaps the best he ever would have, so much so that he had pondered ways of paying them although he knew in actuality that his budget would never allow for such a thing.

Thanks for the help, you guys, he said now, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched up under the spitting rain.

Sure thing, boss.

I think I’ll see if I can start getting the roof up later.

Cool, Chuck said.

Listen, I think we’ll have a quick meeting in about a half hour.

Everything good? Bobby asked.

Yeah, just winter coming. That’s all.

Cool, Chuck said again.

Literally, Bobby said, and they both chuckled.

From the fox enclosure came a high cackling and the three of them looked over to where their red fox, Katy, stood at the front of her enclosure, eyeing them with apparent curiosity, her orange hair shining in the afternoon light.

JUDE’S HOMEWORK was a single page, handwritten, the title WOLF penciled across the top in swirling letters above an illustration in colored marker. Bill held it in his hands while the boy watched him, his eyes bright and wide and shining. Really excellent, buddy. Super cool.

That’s Zeke, Jude said.

I thought it was.

The boy was next to him on the couch, sitting but not really sitting, squirming with energy, his limbs folding and unfolding.

You got the whole thing right, he said. His eyes too.

Yeah, I know it, Jude said. He’s got spooky eyes.

Sometimes.

It’s just a practice drawing, he said. It’s for Mrs. Simmons. We’re doing a unit on ecology.

Ah right, he said. You told me. And that reminds me that I have something for you.

What is it?

Bill stood and went to where his coat hung on a hook by the door and from its pocket brought forth a clear plastic ziplock baggie containing the tattered and worn paperback, its pages held together by a rubber band. I told you I thought I had a book on desert animals, he said, and I found it.