Christian Kiefer - The Animals

That doesn’t look good, Rick said.

Dang, Nat said. It made him sick to look at it.

We’re definitely going to the doctor, Rick said. Maybe you’ll get lucky and they’ll give you some Percocet or something.

He nodded but did not move. Neither of them did. I don’t know what I’m gonna to do, he said after a time. He was still looking at his swollen and discolored finger. What am I gonna do?

We’ll figure something out, Rick said. We always do.

It’s serious, Nat said.

I know it is, buddy. I’ve got some weed to sell. That oughta help some.

What about your mom?

Well, like I said, we’ll figure something out.

From the television came Milt Wells’s voice and they both looked toward it in unison. Milt stood in his characteristic Western shirt and bolo tie before a row of gleaming cars and trucks. That’s right, he called out to them. Five hundred dollars cash back on any new car or truck. Five hundred dollars cash back. The man on the screen fanned a stack of bills in his hands as if they were playing cards.

And there’s all the money we need, Nat said wistfully.

Yeah maybe we should start a car dealership, Rick said.

Nat did not respond now, only sitting there, staring as the commercial ended and the next began.

I tell you one thing, Rick said. If I see that motherfucker Mike or Johnny fucking Aguirre I’ll knock his fucking head in.

Don’t do that, Nat said. That’ll make it really bad.

We’ll see, Rick said.

Nat could feel a sharp twisting inside him, like a short thin blade was rotating through his intestines. The geography of the continent seemed to stretch out under his feet, the desert elongating so that the arrowed points between where he was and everywhere he was not fled from each other across that vast and unending plain of sage and cheatgrass and dry dead earth.

HE TOLD HER EVERYTHING, BEGINNING WITH THE NIGHT AT the car dealership and then trying to explain the gambling and Johnny Aguirre and fumbling through what had happened when Rick had been in prison for those thirteen months and he had been left alone in Reno, knowing that none of it really made any sense, not to him and certainly not to Grace, listening to his own story and knowing it was true but feeling, all the while, as if it were the story of a stranger, something he had overheard somewhere and was repeating, like the plot of a movie. When she told him to start over he began in Battle Mountain, his brother with the disassembled bicycle, and the new kid who rented the trailer next to the one he shared with his brother and mother, the sagebrush rolling out in all directions and the flat top of the Sheep Creek Range looming above the bridge under which he would find frogs in the summer and where the teenagers would swim and smoke stolen cigarettes, the two of them — he and Rick — wandering everywhere across that landscape, and, when they were teenagers, stealing into silent empty homes in the midafternoon, taking souvenirs and sometimes selling them at the pawnshop in Winnemucca. How they would talk about taking care of your people. How that had been a kind of credo, something to live by.

Then his brother’s death. That terrible moment and the funeral that followed. He told her that it felt like there was a hole inside his chest that would never be filled, and when she asked him his brother’s name, he could only tell her that he needed to give her the whole story first and she looked confused but mumbled, OK, and he continued, from Battle Mountain to Reno to the moment they both occupied, he and Grace, in her bedroom, the only illumination the pools of yellow light from the nightstands and a faint blur of snow falling beyond the window.

My god, she said when he was silent at last. That’s all true?

It’s all true.

You did that stuff? The robbery and the gambling and … all of it?

Yep.

My god, she said again.

I didn’t want to tell you.

Apparently not, she said.

They were quiet then. The snow was coming heavy outside the window. He thought for a moment of the animals. They would be awake and moving in their enclosures, the snow a source of excitement, sending signals, sending messages of the winter to come.

Is that everything?

No, he said. There’s one more thing.

God, Bill, she said, this is a lot to take in.

I know it is. There’s just one more thing.

OK, let’s hear it. Her voice was devoid of emotion: flat, lifeless.

You know I love you, right?

I love you too.

He exhaled. When I came up here I told my uncle David the whole thing. All of it. Just like I am now. We were pretty sure the police would be looking for me. So he decided I needed a new name.

She was silent then, staring at him.

Bill was my brother’s name, he said softly.

Her mouth trembled and her eyes were glassy with tears. I don’t understand what you’re telling me, she said at last.

It’s not the name I was born with. My name before was Nat. Nathaniel.

Nathaniel? she said.

Nathaniel Timothy Reed. My brother was Bill. William Chester Reed.

She sat there in the long silence that followed, no longer looking at him, instead staring off into the room somewhere, at the falling snow beyond the window glass. The forest was back there, rising up the ridge behind the house. Sometimes they would lie in bed and watch bats swirling through the thick stands of tamarack and bull pine and red cedar. Maybe that would never happen again now. Maybe everything he ever let into his heart would turn to smoke. Most of it already had.

So what am I supposed to call you then?

Bill, he said. That’s who I am. That person I was before is just gone.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? she said.

He did not respond. He thought her next words would be to ask him to leave. She would not look at him, instead only stared into the far side of the room. Then her voice came at last: I’m gonna need a beer.

Me too.

Maybe a whiskey.

Me too.

I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do with all of this, she said.

I just want you to know what happened. I don’t need to you to do anything.

So this guy Rick … he’s here. In Bonners.

Yes.

And that safe is the safe on the floor of your closet in the trailer?

Was, he said. I gave it to him.

He told her then that he had kept the safe all those years despite knowing that its serial number could, at any moment, tie him back to Reno, back to that winter of 1984, how he kept it even though his uncle told him that he should be rid of it, that it was evidence of the crime in which he had been involved, but he had kept the safe anyway, that

perhaps it had been a kind of penance to do so, to be reminded of where he had come from, the black box holding a sense of gravity that rippled from where he had been to where he was and he knew, had always known, that he might have turned away from all of it were it not for the need to hold this final talisman, an iron to the knowledge that one day Rick would return and everything he had made of his life would be called into question. And of course that was exactly what had come to pass.

So if you gave him the safe and that’s what he came up here for, then why is he still here? And why is he talking to Jude? She looked at him now, her eyes filled with rage and sadness all at once.

I don’t know, he said.

That’s not good enough.

I don’t have a better answer, he said, his lie twisting inside his chest like a blade. I wish I did but I just don’t. He won’t leave. I don’t know why.

Jesus. She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, You didn’t tell anyone about this, did you? I mean you didn’t tell the sheriff or anything?