Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

The old man looked at him, a little miffed, and then put his mind to it. He did, he said. He remembered especially the tall white one.

“The Golden Angel,” Karel said.

The Golden Angel, Albert repeated. Rebuilt. Destroyed years ago with the rest of the cove by the tidal wave after the eruption on that island, part of the volcanic archipelago.

“The Roof of Hell,” Karel said.

“Right, the Seprides, the Roof of Hell,” Albert said. He drummed his fingers on the table and cast around the kitchen for food.

“What happened?” Karel said. “When it blew up?”

Albert lifted salt from the plate with his moistened finger and ate it. “You don’t know this story,” he said, as though that were news to him.

“I don’t know this story,” Karel said.

Albert made a face as if his life lately were an endless string of small surprises. One June morning, boom, he said. The entire cove of the city had been destroyed, two thirds. There’d been the usual warning phenomena: tremors, water levels in wells changing, domestic animals refusing food and getting excited, birds and rodents migrating inland. Cattle moved to high pasture. The tide went out completely and abruptly. A lot of people knew at that point but hoped the high ground would protect them. What else was there to hope? There’d been a grammar school right on the waterfront, and Albert imagined the children at the classroom windows, awed, looking at the stranded fish and the muck of the exposed harbor bottom, amazed by the beached and listing ships. And then the wave came in piling up on itself, shoaling and rearing on the shallow harbor shelf to sixty or seventy feet. Albert’s father had told him all this. His father had been on higher ground. His father, Albert said, had never forgotten things: the way whole buildings were driven through the ones behind them like parts of a collapsing telescope, the thunder of the walls disintegrating booming up the cove, the far-off screams, the wash of bodies and debris back down the harbor.

His father dreamed about the wave the rest of his life, Albert said. In the dream they were all whirling and singing, shouting and falling, his father, his brothers, an elderly aunt, his mother, with the wave rising behind them like a curtain. His father, Albert said, lost his whole family to that wave. He’d been playing where he wasn’t supposed to be playing, in one of the high quarries, and their house had been lower down. He used to say he could still hear the sound of their roof going. He used to say, Oh God of mercy, all those roofs and all those people just like that .

On Saturday he found Leda folding sheets and towels in her kitchen. Her mother and David were out and her mother had given her two thousand things to do. She suggested a walk.

On the front step she slipped out of her sandals and laced up some light ankle boots: He watched the lacing proceed before asking her where she’d been. He hadn’t seen her since he’d brought David home. And they kissed, he wanted to add.

He couldn’t see any difference in the way she acted toward him. Maybe she’d forgotten it already. Here he was mooning about it even with his father gone.

They’d gone away, she said, to stay with their aunt. It was hard on everybody. It brought back her father and all. Karel summarized for her disconnected parts of the parades and performances.

She got up and rocked back on her ankles to display her tied shoes. “I thought you could show me how you go noosing,” she said. “Catching little lizards with the fishing pole.”

He agreed. He said while they walked to his house, “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to predict what you’re going to say.”

She seemed flattered. The street was crowding for the market day. He didn’t know how to tell her now about his father. He’d waited so long it would sound funny.

“My father’s missing,” he finally just said.

“Oh,” she said, and stopped so suddenly in the street that people behind them shied away in alarm.

“Well, I got a note from him — he’s all right,” Karel said, stumbling. “He’s not in any trouble. I don’t know where he is.”

Oh, Leda said, annoyed he’d scared her for nothing.

Before, he’d been worried, he tried to explain. There’d been no note or anything. He still didn’t know what was going on.

She nodded, peering at him. They were at his house and she stopped. Oh, forget it, he thought in disgust. I’m never going to make myself clear to anybody.

While she waited outside drawing shapes in the dust on the side of his house, Karel rummaged around upstairs for the nooser. He tested the action in front of her before they left, pulling the metal loop so the tiny hangman’s knot of string shrank and grew. She arched her eyebrows to show she was impressed.

“How does it work?” she asked, as if determined to be interested.

“This is it,” he said. “This is all it does.”

They walked to the south end of town. They avoided the street that led to the cave with the bats. Leda appreciated the sunlight beneath the wild olives and remarked on the smell of the dusty gravel. Where the town ended some barren hills began, at the foot of which refuse was dumped. Jackals and mangy dogs picked and haggled over the piles and watched them climb the first slope. It got steeper quickly, scree and larger rocks giving way in short cascades beneath their feet.

“Yuck,” Leda said, watching one dog carefully. It was watching her as well. Something filthy and limp was hanging from its mouth.

“They’re all right,” Karel said. As they got higher the rocks increased in size.

“Are there scorpions here?” Leda asked, holding a foot in midair.

“I guess,” Karel said. “I haven’t seen one during the day.”

She completed her step. “I don’t like scorpions,” she said.

They climbed, leaning forward and making huffing noises, until they reached another steeper slope abutting theirs.

“Here,” he said, and in a minute or two, flipping over flat stones, he found a lesser earless lizard, gray with pale blue along its spine. It skittered a foot or so away and froze with a quizzical expression.

Leda was facing the panorama of the town below them. She said, “It’s pretty up here.”

“I thought you wanted to watch,” he said, and lowered the noose slowly over the lizard until it looked condemned by a tiny lynching party. He yanked the noose and his hand must have jerked: the lizard was magically gone.

“Huh,” Leda said.

“It usually always works,” he said. His armpits were sweating and the sun was hot on his back.

“Well, keep trying,” Leda said. “It looks hard.”

“It isn’t, really,” he said, irritated with himself. “It’s not supposed to be.” He crouched beside some chia blooming in indigo clusters above the slope. There was something there, too, maybe a horned lizard, but as he maneuvered the bamboo rod through the tangles it disappeared.

“Huh,” Leda said again.

When they’d disappeared they were right nearby, often downslope, Albert had taught him. While he searched the area in a crablike crouch she gazed back at the town again, shading her eyes with her hand.

“Did you hear about Mr. Fetscher?” she said.

“I was there,” he said. He overturned a rock slab to confront a Jerusalem cricket, tomato red and enormous, grotesquely humpbacked.

“You were?” Leda said. She turned, shadowed by the sun. “Oh, God. Look at that thing.”

He shooed it away, and it left unhurriedly, dragging itself audibly over the shale.

She watched it clamber over a rock with distaste. “So?” she said. “What happened?”

Karel shrugged. He piled some rocks. “They took him away.”