Christian Kiefer - The Animals

Now he knelt beside the toilet, leaning back against its curved shape, sweat dripping down into his face.

You have to stop moving, Susan said.

I’m sorry. He stared at her, her face so close to him, inches away now as she worked on the hand he clutched to his chest. He wanted nothing more than to lean forward and kiss her. He would have given anything to do it.

And then Rick was in the doorway again, holding a plastic tumbler that rattled with ice. Here you go, buddy, he said.

He handed down the cup and Nat took it in his free hand and might have drained it all in one ongoing gulp but his throat seized at the vodka and he gave himself up to paroxysms of choking and coughing.

Susan had her arm around him, her hand patting his back. Shhh, shhh, she whispered to him. Slow down. Slow down. You’ll be all right.

What happened out there? Rick said.

I don’t know, he said, his breath a wheeze. They didn’t even give me a chance to talk. They just took me out to the parking lot and broke it. Saying the words made his eyes tear up, not at the pain but at the sense of helplessness he had felt in that moment, and in the knowledge that he had had the money to make the payment, had held it in his hands only an hour and a half before. What a fool you are. What a goddamn fool.

Fucking assholes, Rick said.

Nat brought the tumbler to his mouth again and gulped at it. This time it went down easy, the liquid so cold that it seemed to burst all through his chest, and when he lowered the tumbler, panting, there was nothing left in it but ice.

I still think you have the flu or something, Susan said.

I feel terrible, he said.

We’re gonna have to go get him some medicine, she said. She was talking to Rick in the doorway now.

Yeah, he said. OK.

His eyes had fallen closed. He could hear the jingling of keys and then they were talking about what Rick should buy. Dimetapp or Robitussin or something else.

What do you feel like? she said.

I hurt everywhere, he said.

OK, she said. Rick’s gonna go get some medicine.

He tried to speak but now a shiver ran through him as if he had stepped into a freezer and his teeth clamped together and began chattering like a windup toy.

You should lie down, she said.

He nodded but said nothing.

You’re gonna have to help me. I can’t pick you up on my own.

Where’s Rick?

He went to get medicine, baby.

He vaguely recalled her saying something about that but it seemed like that had been hours ago. Why isn’t he back yet? he said.

He just left.

All right.

He managed to get to his feet and stumbled, with her arms around him, out of the bathroom and into the hall and then into his bedroom. He had never purchased a bed frame and so the mattress lay on the stained carpet in the corner of the room, the bedding strewn amidst piles of dirty clothes above which was tacked a velvet black-light poster of a panther in fluorescent orange and yellow and, beside it, a poster of Van Halen, the band’s flying VH logo centered in gold around which the four band members were caught in motion as if onstage, their instruments glowing, their singer, David Lee Roth, shirtless and leaning forward as if ready to leap out of the image and into the apartment. It looked to Nat, in that moment, the pathetic squalid room it was.

He managed to slide into a sitting position, Susan holding him all the while, and then lay back upon the mattress. She sat next to him there, her hand sliding his sweat-soaked hair off his forehead. You don’t feel warm, she said, but you’re sweating like crazy.

He closed his eyes.

Rick’ll be here soon, she said. You’ll feel a lot better once you get some medicine in you.

Thanks.

Taking care of my guys, she said. That’s my job.

Come here, he said. He raised his left arm, eyes open now, the broken hand still clutched to his chest. She leaned in and when he leaned up to kiss her it was as if an instinct had taken over. The pain. The crashing of his fear and anguish and anger. He could feel her lips for that brief moment and was sure she was kissing him in return.

Then it was over.

You should try to get some sleep, she said.

I love you, he said.

Shhh. You’re just tired.

There’s something wrong with me.

Get some rest. Rick’ll be here soon with the medicine.

What am I gonna do?

Sleep, she said. That’s what you’re gonna do.

He was looking at her, so close, her face watching him with an expression that was pure concern and care and worry. And then he felt himself drifting outside. He hovered over an endless icteric plain: sagebrush and horsebrush, Mormon tea and shadscale. There were animals in the shadows. He could feel them there, could see their eyes reflecting back at him from the darkness. From somewhere, a murmur of voices: Rick’s voice and Susan’s, the sound a spectral echo drifting against a sky awash in the thin high feathers of alto cirrus clouds.

It’s not your problem.

Yes, it is.

How, Rick? You weren’t even here when he got himself in this shit.

That doesn’t matter.

Yeah? Why not?

Because it doesn’t, Susan. You take care of your people. That’s what you do.

Blah blah blah.

Don’t do that.

I don’t know what else to say. He got himself into this, not you. And what about your mom, Rick? What about that? Don’t you think you’ve got your own problems to worry about?

He seemed to be asleep then, although he could still hear the faint hum of their voices from somewhere farther away, and then he could see her at the door that night when Rick was still in prison, three or four months into his sentence, the day of the rainstorm. A knock and there she was, drenched, her breasts showing through the wet T-shirt, hair dragging in her face like something out of one of his secret fantasies. I need your help, she had said. It all seemed to spin out before him now. Even the feeling he had in that moment, the trembling rise of heat in his chest. It was all he had ever wanted to hear her say, not that she needed help but that she needed him, even though he hardly would have admitted such a thing, even to himself. How he had looked at her in those moments when neither she nor Rick would notice him looking. How he had imagined what her body might feel like in his hands. And then there she was, standing in the doorway, asking him for his help. He would have done anything, told himself as much and ascribed that telling to her status as his best friend’s girlfriend. Was he not supposed to help her? Is that not what Rick would expect him to do?

She asked him to take her to the clinic because she was pregnant and did not want to have a baby, told him that the baby was Rick’s, of course it was. He did not think about his response. Instead, he only said yes yes over and over again, his whole heart and soul shivering inside his skeleton as if a great string had been plucked and stood vibrating along the length of his spine. Now he thought this betrayal, the betrayal of his heart, the betrayal of being party to the secret abortion of Rick’s child, was worse, much much worse, than the sexual betrayal that would come later.

He took her to the clinic and paid the full bill, much of which came from a recent loan from Johnny Aguirre, and then waited for her in the lobby, flipping through the various magazines there with a kind of manic fury, as if waiting for the birth of a child. He wondered how she would feel when it was done, hoping that she would need him to take care of her, already planning his call into work in the morning to tell them he was too sick to come in.

When she returned to the lobby she told him he could take her home now and thanked him and then fell quiet as he drove, the wet streets reversing casino towers as grainy and specular ghost images, their colored neon shapes pushing under a surface that rolled forever under his wheels. Occasionally she would murmur a direction until at last he pulled over next to an apartment building on the east side of the Virginia Street casinos, a two-story slab of cracked stucco and concrete not unlike the building he lived in.