Christian Kiefer - The Animals

YOU CALL her Ginny, after a girlfriend of Bill’s you had a crush on when you were ten or eleven, and you pour yourself into that animal. Perhaps that was your uncle’s plan all along, his way of keeping you on the straight and narrow. When other animals come in you do the same. The year pulls to a close and then another. There are three and a half years of that, days and nights of working and building up the enclosures, and figuring out ways to entice people to pay to see what they had gathered. A few fund-raisers in town. A family discount week. Ginny grows into a beautiful doe and when you release her a year after her rescue, when you watch her disappear into the forest, you cannot deny your tears. She returns briefly for a few seasons and then disappears forever among the others of her kind. You and your uncle rescue a one-winged bald eagle from near the highway where the Long Bridge crosses out of Lake Pend Oreille in Sandpoint, and the following year you bring that giant raptor to the local elementary school and the children treat you as if you are a god, the eagle perched beside you on the great wooden T you have erected for that purpose. The eyes of the children are wide and filled with wonder, and you can see your own childhood self reflected in their gaze.

And then your uncle is gone. The event is not unlike your brother’s death a full decade earlier. One day he is there and the next the sheriff is telling you the news, that David has suffered a massive heart attack in Bonners Ferry while visiting his girlfriend and that he is dead. You can think of nothing to say so you say nothing.

You cannot fathom running the rescue without your uncle and you do not even know if that is indeed what you are supposed to do. Part of you simply wants to release them all, to open the doors of the enclosures and step back and watch them flee into the forest. In such fantasies their mangled bodies are made whole again, their minds clean and pure and made up of wilderness. Or wildness. They dream of fields of golden grass and meadows filled with elk and moose and stands of dark pines and white birch and cool clear rivers flowing from melting snow. And perhaps such an idea is true. Perhaps even now. But you know that were you to open the cages, the animals would simply stumble to their deaths. One-winged birds. Three-legged animals. A bear who would walk up to the nearest human, seeking a marshmallow, only to find fear and death.

There is no funeral, no service of any kind, and when it is revealed that there is a will, you learn that your uncle owned the property outright and that it has been — all fifty acres — willed to you and you alone. Your uncle’s girlfriend receives nothing at all. Her only words to you are to tell you to fuck off. You never see her again.

You have thought less of Rick than you did years before but now in your loneliness and despair his face swims up out of the muddy darkness of your dreams. It has only been four years since you left Reno. Before your uncle’s death, you might have claimed that the whole of that geography felt cut off from you, like a severed limb, but now it feels too close, as if just beyond the trees. Thinking of Rick and then thinking of Susan. You know in your heart that you will never see her again and your relief at such an understanding is mixed with a slow and painful longing.

Soon after the reading of the will you stop at a low, dark drinking hall in the strip of small battered buildings that comprise Naples, the town you ostensibly live in and which is in some ways no town at all but a dot on the map between Bonners Ferry to the north and Sandpoint to the south. The sign reads Northwoods Tavern. Wagon wheels line the entrance. Old chain saws in the rafters. Perhaps you somehow think you will be welcomed here in the way you had once been welcomed at Grady’s. What you know is that you have never felt more alone in all your life. You take a stool at the bar and ask for a vodka on the rocks and then turn and look at the room. There are only two others present besides yourself and the bartender, two older men who sit at a back table, drunk and mumbling to each other. Beyond them are mounted all manner of animal heads: a big-horned buck, a moose of enormous size with a rack that extends like two huge fins, a feral pig of some kind, its mouth permanently molded into a snarl. Smaller animals as well. A badger and, mounted upright in a running pose, a mink or marten.

All mine, the bartender says.

What’s that? you say.

Those kills. All mine.

Oh.

You turn back to the bar, sip at the vodka. The bartender is a thickset man, barrel-chested and possessed of an enormous round belly and a downward-curving mustache not unlike the mustache that Grady wore those few years ago back in Reno. Perhaps the fashion choice of discerning bartenders everywhere.

I don’t really hunt, you say.

It’s not for everyone, the bartender says.

Your eyes have fallen upon a ten-by-ten grid marked on a big sheet of butcher paper and decorated with felt-pen drawings of football helmets. Various names have been scribbled into a good many of the squares. What’s that? you ask.

Football pool. Super Bowl. You want in?

How much?

Dollar.

Sure, you say, and even in that single word you feel the hard twist of metal in your gut. I pick the numbers?

The bartender looks up briefly and then returns his attention to a small, soundless television mounted up above the bar. Numbers will all be random, he says. Shirley’ll pick ’em out of a hat or something, day of the game. I don’t think I’ve seen you around. You new around here?

You look across the bar at him. I’ve been here four years.

Yeah?

Yeah, I live just up the hill.

Doing what?

My uncle has— had —a little wildlife thing. A grizzly and a couple of coyotes and that kind of thing.

You mean that weird little zoo up there?

You cringe at the description but not enough that the bartender notices. Yeah, that’s the place.

What’s the deal with that anyway? It’s like wild animals, right?

Yeah, it’s animals that can’t survive without help.

That’s what I mean. Those animals are wild. You don’t put a wild animal in a cage.

My uncle’d probably argue you don’t shoot one either.

That’s not the same thing, the bartender says, glancing at you and then looking up and down the bar. At least out there it’s understood. They’re part of the food chain. Caging them up ain’t right.

They’d die in the wild, though, you say. I mean they’re mostly permanently injured in one way or another.

That’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to die in the wild. Not in a cage.

You tip the contents of the glass into your mouth and swallow. Well, you say, thanks for the drink anyway.

Shit, don’t be sore about it, the bartender says. We’re just having a discussion.

What do I owe you?

The bartender tells you and you pay and slide off the stool.

Where you from anyway? the bartender says.

And you almost say, Battle Mountain, because you are angry but you catch yourself and in the end you simply say, I’m not from anywhere.

None of us are, the bartender says. You turn to leave and the bartender calls to you again, Hey, kid, and you turn back, standing in the doorway now. No hard feelings. Really.

Whatever you say, you mumble.

You are nearly back to the rescue before you realize that you did not give him a dollar for the football pool.

YOU SPEND the next three days feeding and watering the animals as always, but the bartender’s words continue to burn inside you, a twist of hot anger that you cannot release. You find yourself thinking of calling the bookie again, although it has been many years since you have done any such thing. You fantasize briefly that you might place some insubstantial wager but for some reason you do not make that call and because there is no one to talk to — not about this urge nor about your uncle’s death nor about the bartender’s words — you find yourself talking to the animals, a kind of ongoing monologue that continues as you make your rounds.