Christian Kiefer - The Animals

They changed positions, Nat with the rifle and Rick sliding to a seat on a stone beside a scraggly and ill-defined bush bristling with spikes and tiny gray-green leaves. The field guide lay next to him on the rock where Nat had left it and now Rick lifted the slim book and paged through it. What’s this thing called?

Saltbush.

Saltbush, Rick said. Christ, how do you find anything in here? Everything looks the same.

It’s just like reading a map, he said.

A map to where?

To here.

It was almost Thanksgiving and the cold of winter had already descended from the mountains, their breath outspiraling under a sky so pale it was very nearly white. The shallow draw they occupied was sunken between two low hills into which the sun shone lengthwise so that the whole of its short span was aglow.

Rick laid the book beside him on the rock and lifted the bottle at his feet. You said he had a safe in his office, right?

Yeah, so what?

So if Milt is giving people five hundred dollars cash back on every car sold, how much does he have on hand?

Nat stared down at the cans and the water jug. His broken index finger pointed down the length of the barrel. Depends on how many cars he sells in a day, he said.

Yeah, so let’s say it’s only like three or five cars. Something like that.

What’s your point, Rick?

My point is it’s open seven days a week so that would be … what … six days would be forty-five hundred and another fifteen so that’s six grand. Probably all in that safe in his office. And that doesn’t even include cash down payments and stuff like that.

Nat turned and looked at him now but Rick only lifted the bottle of Mad Dog from the dirt and took a long drink. You gonna shoot? he said.

Nat returned to the cans and took aim and fired, pulling the trigger with his middle finger. This time the bark of the weapon made his index finger jolt with pain. Nothing moved. Not even a puff of dust.

How big is that safe you saw?

I don’t know.

Small enough to carry?

I don’t know, Rick. Maybe. Probably … This is crazy talk. That’s what this is. Where’s all this coming from?

Just talkin’, Rick said.

No you’re not, Nat said. He had turned toward Rick but now he faced the targets again. This is a bad stupid idea. Seriously. A bad bad idea.

Jesus, I’m just talking, Rick said. Don’t get excited.

Can we just shoot? You’re freaking me out.

It was Saturday. All week he had lain in the apartment, shaking with fever. The clinic had reset his broken finger with an aluminum splint lined with bright blue foam and had given him a prescription for painkillers and antibiotics, neither of which he could afford to fill, and so he had ridden out the subsequent four days in a fever dream awash with throbbing agony, his body temperature seeming to burst into heat and then drop into a freezing chill like an ever rising and falling wave.

With each missed day of work his paycheck dwindled. After taxes his full-time every-two-weeks pay hovered around two hundred and twenty dollars, but he had taken the advance and now had missed four days and what remained for him to pick up at the office would be closer to eighty. Rent was due on Monday. That would be two hundred. And of course he feared the inevitable knock on the door that would be Mike coming to collect for his debt to Johnny Aguirre. He listened for that sound all day long and well into the night.

On Friday afternoon the fever broke and for the first time since the night in the casino parking lot he felt like he might survive whatever illness had descended upon him. Rick and Susan arrived after their shifts — Rick’s at the Peppermill coffee shop washing dishes and Susan at a video rental store across town — and that night they remained in the apartment with him, watching Rick Hunter and Dee Dee McCall track down bad guys in Los Angeles at nine and then watching Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs track down bad guys in Miami at ten. He tried not to look at her and he mostly succeeded. When she left just after midnight she embraced him gently, leaning down to where he lay prostrate on the sofa. I’m glad you’re feeling better, she said.

Thanks for taking care of me.

She glanced over at Rick briefly, giving him a look that might have held some meaning he could not trace, and then she was gone.

In the morning he came out of the bedroom to find Rick seated at the little kitchen table with the guns spread out on a ratty dish towel: the Savage 99 he had inherited from his dead brother and the.38 Special Rick had inherited from his absent father.

You’re not going on a killing spree now, are you? Nat said.

Feeling better?

Finally.

Just thought we might get outside and do some shooting.

Really? he said. It’s been a while.

No shit, Rick said. Might make you feel better to get outside. We can go out toward Pyramid Lake. Pick up a bottle of Mad Dog. It’ll be like old times.

What about your parole?

What about it?

Isn’t it against your parole to have guns around?

Only if they find out, Rick said.

And so a few hours later they stepped out onto the pale burned earth of the desert with the rifle and the pistol, a six-pack of beer, a bottle of Banana Red MD 20/20, and a couple of sandwiches they’d picked up from a deli on the way. Rick had received his first paycheck from the café the day before and so he paid for all of it and the ammunition as well.

Nat had hoped he would feel better out in the desert but he could not stop thinking about what would happen when Mike returned to find his pockets empty once again. As he aimed, he imagined Mike as a tin can down there, the sights swinging around that silver shape, but each time he pulled the trigger the can remained and he was left with a sharp arc of pain shooting across the broken finger bone.

So I went over to Bishop’s this week, Rick said from the boulder behind him.

Yeah? He aimed but did not fire this time. His whole hand had begun to throb.

That guy with the weird shirts was there. You know that guy?

Not from that.

He’s got that mustache that curls up. You know. The guy who looks like the guy on the Monopoly box.

Oh yeah. That guy.

Yeah, so I’m just sitting at the bar and out of the blue he said to me, “So you’re with Susan now?” and I was like, “What do you mean now ?” and he just sort of laughed like it was a joke.

Yeah?

Yeah so … Rick’s voice trailed off. Then he added, Just seemed like a weird thing to say.

Nat looked over at him but Rick was not looking in his direction now, holding the bright red bottle of 20/20 in one hand and peering out behind them to where the draw opened into the desert beyond, out into the abandoned and unused BLM landscape all around them. I didn’t know what else to say to the guy, Rick said. It didn’t make any sense, but then I was thinking about it, you know, later, and I was like what the fuck?

I don’t get it.

You don’t get what?

So the guy said you were with Susan now. You are with Susan. So what?

It was the way he said it. Like I’m with Susan now but I wasn’t before or something. Shit, I don’t know. It was weird, man. That’s all. It was just weird.

Doesn’t seem weird to me.

I don’t know, Rick said. Maybe it’s not. He had lit a cigarette now and sat puffing at it, the bottle in the dirt between his feet, the collar of his leather jacket held tight against his throat. Just seems like there’s something going on that I don’t know about.

Nat tried to aim again but the sights wobbled everywhere across the cans and the rocks and the water jug and he lowered the rifle again. There’s nothing going on, he said.

Yeah. Shit, you’re probably right, Rick said.