Christian Kiefer - The Animals

My best friend here needs to get laid, Rick said.

A collection of screechy female voices hooted up from the darkness around them.

Jesus Christ, Nat said, laughing. You asshole.

Just helping my buddy, Rick said. No charge.

What’s your name?

The voice came so quickly that it seemed as if the woman had materialized on Rick’s command. And perhaps she had. She might have been forty, although she wore so much makeup it was difficult to tell, eyes wiped with turquoise as thick as paint and hair like a bundle of blond wires. She licked her lips. He had seen animals in nature documentaries perform similar actions while feeding on carcasses in the plains of Africa.

This is my pal, Marlin, Rick said. His voice slurred so profoundly now that he could hardly finish the words before bursting into laughter once more. Marlin Perkins. But he’s not related to that Marlin Perkins.

She did not seem to catch the joke, or if she did she did not care. Perhaps she had never heard of Marlin Perkins. Nice to meet you, Marlin. I’m Vickie. She extended her hand. Nat took it.

The whole world had blurred into vowels. Nat tried to catch a word from that current but then Rick’s hand shot into the air, pointing down toward the far end of the bar, where a small color television hung from a metal bracket. Fuck all, Rick said thickly. On the screen was a map of the United States with nearly every state colored in red. Across the screen fell white static as the station bled into and out of range.

What the hell you complaining about? Grady said. He had come back from the far side of the bar and stood with the rag over his shoulder once more, staring up at the television. You vote for Mondale?

Shit no, Rick said. I didn’t vote for nobody.

You? Grady looked at Nat now.

I voted, he said thickly.

You voted? Rick said. What the hell for?

Mr. Mitchell. Civics.

I failed that class, Rick said.

Yes, you did.

Who’d you vote for?

I’m not telling you that, Nat said. The television on the wall disappeared into snow. Returned. Once again faded.

Why the fuck not?

He paused, looking for the words. Then he slurred out, It’s private.

Says who?

Mr. Mitchell. Civics.

Fuck, Rick said. I fucking hate Mr. Mitchell. Civics.

He hated you too, Nat said. Probably still does.

The television on the wall showed nothing but static now. Grady stood beside the box and banged it with his fist and the image skipped and rolled like a blank space on a slot machine. No red 7s. No bunched trio of cherries. No map of Reagan’s reelection. Then white static, the red map appearing for a moment and then covered once more like blood disappearing under new-fallen snow.

Wanna dance? the woman next to Nat said into his ear. He could not remember her name.

I don’t know if I can stand up, he said.

Maybe we should go lie down.

Nat could only smile weakly in response.

Across from Rick, Susan flashed him a thumbs up. Her hair shining in darkness. Her smile radiant in the dim light of the bar.

And somewhere outside, in a nearly endless dry basin that once contained a vast inland sea, night creatures swarmed the sagebrush. Windscorpion and pocket mouse and kit fox skittering through Mormon tea and shiny hopsage, rustling the bottlebrush, the ricegrass, and rustling too the tilting neon room, the men and women within, all adrift under the surface of that impossible dead ocean.

THAT NIGHT THE MOOSE CAME TO HIM IN HIS DREAMS. HE was on the road but it was twelve years ago and he was coming up out of that last blasted winter in the desert. The eyes that stared back at him from the rearview mirror were young and red-ringed and crazed with panic, set against a receding darkness from which he expected, at any moment, the red and blue flashing lights of the highway patrol to appear. But there was only the fleeing and faintly luminous night road that led backward to Battle Mountain. Nothing more.

He had thought he would drive nonstop, through the night and into the next day, through Oregon and eastern Washington and dipping at last into the Idaho panhandle, chain-smoking all the while, the burning torment of what had happened, of what he had done, rolling through the shell of his body like a fire. But then he had grown so tired so quickly, sleep rushing in on him with a ferocity he had never before experienced, and he pulled the laboring car into the gravel beside the road and dropped his head back and was already asleep.

He slept in the dream and in the dream he woke to a quiet breeze and an ocean of grassland in all directions. Twelve years ago. He could not remember where he was or what he had done to come to such a place, but then the whole of it returned to him, every detail stark and absolute and irrefutable. His body sticky with sweat despite the chill and the interior of the car coated with a thin layer of colorless dust. What he had done. What he could never undo.

A few feet away began a low hill covered in golden grasses that shook and trembled and seemed to extend forever into a landscape endlessly rising and falling in all directions like an ocean of slowly undulating waves.

And then he saw the animal. It stood atop the hill, its thick horns and black eyes staring back at him with apparent disinterest, all of it so still that it seemed at times to waver back into the grasses from which it had come, an animal that appeared, even then, as if it had stepped directly off the cover of the field guide he had had as a child and which was now, at least in the moment of the dream, of the memory that was the dream, with him in the car, the book his uncle had given him so many years before and which he had read and studied, both out of interest and, later, out of sheer boredom. The animal on the cover was exactly this animal in exactly this location, as if the color image had become real and extant before him in the grasslands beside a road the numbered designation of which he could no longer recall, the only missing item the title that would have been emblazoned across the grass in thin white letters: Wildlife of the Intermountain West . He thought of reaching down into the floorspace behind him for that book, but he could not do so. It seemed impossible to move somehow, impossible in his past, impossible in the dream.

But then he looked again and saw that the animal was not the pronghorn antelope but the moose of the evening before, its head partially blown apart and its leg twisting behind it on that awful hingepoint of broken bone, his own heart sinking in his chest even as his skin blew into pinpoints and the landscape everywhere flew away into thin blue darkness.

When he woke his throat was dry and seemed coated with the same floury dust that had lain upon every surface of the car he had returned to in the dream. He sat up in the trailer on the stiff mattress and coughed and then rose and drank from the sink and stood there in his long underwear, alone in the dark, beer gut pressed to the edge of the counter, staring into the scant black rectangle of the window, into the reflection of his own wild eyes and scraggly beard. Beyond that visage lay a vacancy of empty space.

He returned to the mattress but his eyes would not close and he lay there, awake, watching, for what seemed like hours, as a blue square of moonlight slanted across the cracked vinyl paneling of the adjacent wall. After the clock had passed two in the morning, he rose to his feet once again, dressed and lit a cigarette before lacing up his boots and stepping outside. The night was cold, well below freezing, and the forest around him glowed under the blue light of stars and a sliver of waxing crescent moon. The birches faintly radiant, their bases pooled in black shadow, and the path he followed invisible in the darkness. And yet he followed it nonetheless, arriving at the gate and turning his key in the padlock and stepping through into the rescue.