Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

She made a face.

“Did you hear what happened after that?” he asked.

“I heard what they said.” She watched him ease a fan-shaped rock up. Nothing underneath. “What do you think happened?” she asked warily.

“Right here,” he said. “Look.”

She crouched immediately beside him. Her face was more tanned with shade and he could see the tips of her teeth as her mouth opened slightly in anticipation. He held the noose over a head-sized stone concealing a tiny horned lizard smaller than the first. He could hear her breathing through her mouth while she watched him maneuver the rod.

She said, “You never answered.”

He lowered the loop and the horned lizard’s head turned, as if listening for far-off music. “I think they killed him,” he said.

“So do I,” Leda said. She was looking at him intently, and her eyes had the directness of the eyes of figures he’d seen in old mosaics. He could pick up the sun smell of the hairs on the back of her neck. It was as if as a child she hadn’t been spared anything, as if her mother had never changed the subject when she’d entered the room.

“I may want to run away,” she said.

“Where?” he said. Not: With me?

“The city,” she said.

He closed his eyes at a horrible thought. He said finally, “Are you with me only because you want me to help?”

She told him no as if that were a peculiar notion, and the simplicity of her answer flooded him with relief. He waited for her to go on, unsure what to say. “You can’t get on the train without a seat reservation and a permit to leave our area,” she said. “I need three.”

“Three?” he asked.

“David and Nicholas and me,” she explained.

“What about your mother?” He sat on the scree, but she maintained her crouch.

“If my mother would go I wouldn’t need to run away,” she said.

“Do you think it’s going to get worse?” he asked. He still didn’t know where his father was, and now all this was happening. His unhappiness had crystallized into that one thought, run away with Leda, and he worked on the courage to ask her if he could go.

“My mother was talking with my aunt,” Leda said. “Near Naklo they found eighty people, women and children. The Special Sections are killing everybody after the army passes.” Naklo was on their side of the border.

“Maybe they were …” Karel said. He trailed off.

“They’re just killing people,” Leda said. “And we say, ‘Oh, that’s awful. What do you think happened?’ And we don’t do anything.”

Karel dangled the noose, squeezing and relaxing it. Leda put her finger through it and started a gentle tug-of-war. “Everybody thinks they don’t have to do anything and this’ll pass, like the weather,” she said. “Stay quiet and let everything happen and it’ll turn out okay in the end just because the days are going by.” She slipped her finger from the noose and examined it. “Well, every time the days go by I hear something worse.”

She looked up at him for confirmation, and he nodded.

“You want to keep walking?” she said. “My knees hurt.”

She stood and stretched. They walked carefully back down the slope.

What would she do after she ran away? he wondered. What do you do after you run away? How would she live?

She couldn’t talk to Elsie or Senta about it, she said. Kids in their class just sat there, like little birds with their mouths open, waiting for worms. Elsie memorized even what she didn’t understand.

They did believe a lot in memorization, Karel said, meaning the school. It was a principle or something.

“Habit’s our principle,” Leda said. She cupped her hand over a stalked puffball as she passed it. “Our first habit is not asking questions.”

He trailed his nooser as though trolling and thought, What good is asking questions? but then remembered the number of questions he’d wanted to ask his father, and Leda.

“We have to fight them,” she said. “To do that, we have to fight ourselves.”

He nodded, openmouthed. He said, “Where’d you get that?”

“I read it,” she said. “In a newspaper you get in certain places that the NUP hates .”

He was impressed. This was another of those times he felt four years younger.

They were on a road skirting the town and leading through dry scrub. A black-and-red bird darted and swooped over their heads — they were probably near a nest — and a family of jackrabbits still far away were spooked into flight, leaping as they ran.

“I get scared,” Leda said. “People are doing what they’re doing because they’re scared, so they’re not doing the right thing. It’s like they didn’t pay enough attention and then they weren’t brave enough, and now they don’t know what to do.”

We could go back, Karel was thinking. We could go back to the beach and the Golden Angel.

“Does your mother think the same thing?” he asked.

“My mother’s waiting,” Leda said. “Sitting there like a lump waiting for someone to change everything or tell her what to do.”

Karel was quiet.

“It’s like she’s caught in this — box, of just being pleasant about everything and hoping for the best. I said to her at Elsie’s birthday party, ‘Just say what you think. Go ahead.’ You know what she said? She said, ‘Leda, that’s impossible.’ She said, ‘I don’t even think I’d know what to say.’

“So,” Leda added, and then stopped. They sat under a gnarled and peculiar tree he couldn’t identify. She found a clump of long-leaved phlox and took the pale, star-shaped flowers between her fingers.

“Tell me about your father,” she said.

He didn’t know where to start. He tented his sweaty shirt away from his chest to cool off. He found himself in the shade of the strange tree telling her of the times they’d gone to the beach. He’d been five or six. He remembered the bathing huts with their damp pine smell and changing and not liking being barefoot on the splintery and unsteady boards, and the sound at the end of the day of the wet sandy suit dropping onto the wood. He remembered his inability to copy the swimming strokes that his father demonstrated for him in front of the whole beach. It occurred to him while he talked that his father’s power came just from being his father, not from anything he’d earned. He told another story, of his father buying him wafer candies, as many as he wanted.

Leda had her chin on her knees and the hem of her skirt stretched between the two. She said that it didn’t seem so bad, just sad. He was taken aback by the mixture of compassion and perspective.

She said as she got up and they kept walking that she thought starting a family, taking care of kids and showing them what was right, was the biggest accomplishment that anybody could do, and that most people didn’t really do it as much as it just happened to them with their being around at the time.

He agreed. He was happy with how much better he felt, and moved to tenderness by the patience with which she tossed her hair back with a turn of her head. On the outskirts of town they knelt in a stranger’s open back garden like saboteurs, hidden by a screen of shrubs and grunting along the furrows of a strawberry patch. They edged along keeping an eye on the neighboring houses, gobbling the berries and smelling the plants and earth under the hot sun while an irrigation hose trickled uselessly into a culvert.

They came into town on an unfamiliar street. A dog foamed and snarled at them along the length of a ram-shackle corral. Nothing seemed to be keeping it where it was except its own sense of where it could or couldn’t be. Leda gave it as wide a detour as possible.