Christian Kiefer - The Animals

The judge told him the name of the lawyer who would call him. They spoke for a few more minutes about the severity of the storm and then Bill set the phone down slowly and stood there in the new silence. It had stopped snowing momentarily but the sky roiled with ash-gray clouds. Through the tiny window in the trailer, the snow seemed to glow with a faint luminescence that flowed backward into the trees. From that pale light came a stunned silence that descended everywhere around him, as if falling from the sky and rising from the earth all at once, and when he tried to dial Grace at last, the phone emitted no dial tone and so he came outside again, the generator chugging away at the base of the hill, powering heaters for Cinder and the raptors and Katy the fox and the trio of raccoons. For a long while he stood in front of the office, wondering what he should be doing, wondering if he should be doing anything at all, finally walking up the short rise to where Majer sat just inside the overhang on the concrete interior of the enclosure, as if waiting for him.

Hey buddy, Bill said to him. I got some good news.

The bear cocked his head, dipping his long snout twice, three times, as if nodding in response.

We’ve got a judge on our side, Bill said. He sat on the stump in the little vestibule and leaned forward to open the aperture in the zookeeper door, thinking of lighting a cigarette even though he never smoked inside the rescue and especially not near Majer, who had lived too long to have to breathe in the aftereffects of his keeper’s bad habits.

The bear nosed at the opening, asking for a treat. Oh buddy, he said, and inexplicably his eyes filled with tears. His fingers had come through the opening in the door and the bear touched them with his nose, so gently. The bear’s great grizzled head. Those milky eyes. We might be OK after all, he said.

He sat there for nearly an hour, talking slowly, quietly, watching the bear, his friend, in that moment his best friend in all the world, sitting in the cage he had built for him, the animal nodding slowly as if understanding every word he said and then pressing its great head up to the wire and emitting a long, low moan.

ON SATURDAY he returned to the office after several hours of heavy labor in the snow to the ringing of the telephone. Despite the previous day’s good news, he had awakened that morning from a troubled sleep of blurred and terrifying dreams. During the night there had been a moment where he thought he had seen a figure in the darkness but he often saw such illusions in the winter after days and days of solitude and when he went out to investigate he could see nothing and even the trailer itself was only a thin and wobbling shape in a swirl of black snow. When the morning came, he could not even recall if he had actually stepped outside the trailer to investigate or if that too had been a dream. With the blowing wind it had felt, most of the night, as if the trailer had become unmoored and floated down some dark river, toward what destination he could not imagine, but in the morning all was as he had left it: the snow everywhere, the truck buried to the windshield, the trailer nearly gone altogether, and all the while the thick flakes continuing to fall.

He ate a hurried breakfast at the Formica table and dug out the front door again. Then he bundled his coat and scarf around his neck and clambered up through the burrow onto the high surface of the new snow, the snowshoes clutched in his gloved hands. Perhaps two feet of the edge of the trailer were still visible, the rest buried in the drift. He sat at the top of the ramp that led down to the trailer’s door and strapped the snowshoes onto his boots and then stood, blowing steam before turning downhill into the birches, his head lowered, teeth clenched and eyes squinting into the wind. Already his mustache and beard were caked with ice and he knew that the office below would be dark and cold, that it would take a full hour or more just to get the temperature above fifty degrees. Everything so much more difficult without electricity. He had about fifty gallons of gasoline in the equipment shed and had been running the generator to get power to the heaters inside the enclosures but fifty gallons was not much and he would need to get to town soon to resupply.

The snow completely unbroken. No sign of animals anywhere. No birds nor deer nor elk. No track. Nothing. As if, in the face of the storm, the animals had simply fled out across the mountains somewhere. Or as if he had already shifted out into whatever world lay beyond.

He spent most of the day trying to get the snowmobile to run, pausing only briefly to heat up a frozen burrito for lunch. His uncle had purchased the machine new soon after Bill had arrived at the rescue twelve years ago and it had served him well in the intervening years, but now when he pulled at the cord it simply would not start. He removed the fuel lines and the filter and carburetor and then reassembled the machine and then pulled and pulled and pulled at the cord.

When he reentered the office, the snowmobile still did not run but his hands had gone numb from the cold and his patience was finished. The phone was already ringing as he came through the door.

North Idaho Wildlife Rescue, he said into the handset.

Don’t hang up, man, Rick said. His voice was calm. Quiet. And Bill did not hang up. Did not even breathe. I just want to talk for a minute. That’s all. Can we just do that?

I thought you were gone.

No, Rick said, I’m still here.

He could feel the handset in his grip. Cold plastic. I don’t have what you want.

Can we just talk? Just for a little while?

Leave me alone, Bill said.

I just want to talk for a minute, goddammit, Rick said, an edge in his voice now, and when Bill did not respond he said, more calmly, Let’s say you and me grab a beer.

Grab a beer? Are you serious?

Yeah, I’m serious. You owe me that much, Rick said.

Not after you went and talked to Jude. That’s crossing the line and you know it.

What line is that? I’m just trying to get your goddamn attention. You make it pretty near impossible. What else was I supposed to do?

You’re supposed to go back to Nevada.

I just want to talk. We’ve been friends for a long time. Don’t you owe me that much?

The drawing Bill had made as a child hung on the wall in its cheap wooden frame, faded with age but still recognizable as a bear, the animal’s head much larger than it was in life, its eyes blue, and underneath it, in red crayon or marker: MAJER. He could not imagine being the child who had made such a drawing, and yet there was the proof. He thought of Jude. Of the boy’s drawing of the wolf.

Twelve years, Nat, Rick said. Twelve years I’ve been locked up.

Shit, Bill said. He looked across the room to where the heater hissed a constant stream of kerosene-heated air into the room. All right, he said at last. All right. He already regretted saying the words.

AN HOUR later he entered the Northwoods Tavern to find the bar well attended despite the storm, a dozen or more patrons laughing and drinking and carrying on under the illumination of the same neon lights that burned ceaselessly in apparent disregard of the blizzard. Across the room, Rick sat at a table near a dim frosted window, a bottle in front of him. He looked at Bill as he came through the door, the expression on his face indicating no emotion at all, not even recognition, as if glancing up at something inanimate: a stone, a tree, a stick.

Bill had spent the hour between Rick’s phone call and their meeting working on the snowmobile and jerking repeatedly at the pull cord, all the while snowflakes filtering in through the open door of the equipment shed and his heart riding in his throat. He adjusted the choke and pumped the gas and then pulled and pulled and pulled and at last, to his relief and surprise, the machine caught and warmed up enough that it would idle without throttle.