Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

“ Up to?” Karel said. “What’s he care about us?”

Albert lifted the bowl to the open enclosure and tipped the two lizards onto the gravel. They fell on their bellies together with a quiet plop. “He probably did,” he said. “Your father, I mean. Why wouldn’t he?”

“If he did it’s not my fault,” Karel said.

Albert finished up with the cage.

“I don’t like staying there right now,” Karel said. Albert nodded and turned and led him down the hall through one of the outbuildings to the quarantine station. Karel was uncomfortable the whole time, his hint hanging unacknowledged, and he wished there were a way to take it back. At the quarantine station Perren was working alone, humming to something slightly syncopated on the radio. He was guiding a dead mouse into a bushmaster’s mouth with a pair of forceps. On the table opposite there was a metal basin the size of a bathtub.

Albert peered over into it and made whispery clicking noises with his tongue. A black-and-red Gila was asleep inside. It was on its back with its legs in the air in the relaxed and oblivious manner of a puppy. Some egg yolk was drying in an anchored dish near its head. Albert remarked sadly that no one was eating lately, and Karel understood he was being asked to leave.

Albert mentioned Seelie, who was refusing even eggs. His bringing up the Komodos at this point hurt Karel in ways he couldn’t explain. He couldn’t quit. “Do you think I should stay somewhere else?” he finally said.

Sure, stay with me, Albert could say. You can’t live with those people. It’s not like you don’t have anywhere else to go.

Albert seemed to be aware of Perren at the other table. “I don’t see why,” he said. “It’s your house, too.”

Karel fought the humiliation and disappointment the way he’d fought surf at the beach. His face burned with it.

It wasn’t like it was a real problem, anyway, he told Albert. They got along. Kehr wasn’t like the others. And he was starting to show him things.

“I’ll bet he is,” Albert said. Perren turned off the radio. Albert said, “Maybe you’d better not come back here for a while.”

Karel closed his eyes. He felt pitiful and hated it.

“There’s no work now, anyway,” Albert said. “And you have all this to deal with. We haven’t paid you for your old work.”

“You’re not letting me back here,” Karel said. “Because of all this.”

Perren made a clacking noise with the forceps, and Karel had the impression he was being made fun of. Albert reached in and lifted the sleeping Gila like a red-and-black baby and didn’t say anything else, and Karel turned and ran out of the room and out of the zoo.

At home he found Stasik in his T-shirt and uniform pants playing with a ringtail while Kehr watched. The ringtail was on the floor in the kitchen and they were flanking it with chairs. Kehr was on the field telephone, listening, for the most part. Whoever had installed it had punched a hole through the kitchen wall.

The ringtail was curled in a crouch and jittery. They had the doorways to the other rooms blocked off with empty cartons, and it was giving each carton the once-over. It was a few feet long and had the weird amalgamated look of all ringtails, as if assembled by committee: a cat’s body, a fox’s head with huge, pale eyes, a raccoon’s fat bushy tail banded in black and white. While he watched it lifted a pink paw to him as if in greeting.

He’d always heard from his father that they could give a nasty bite, but Kehr and Stasik seemed unfazed, and Stasik was feeding it crickets. He had the crickets in a paper bag. He set them down one by one, and the ringtail would back off, its fat tail curling and undulating warily. It ignored the crickets’ first tentative hop and pounced after the second, coming down on them with both paws and stuffing them in its cheek.

Kehr cupped his hand over the receiver and introduced it to Karel as their new friend. Stasik had found it in the shed with the chickens. The ringtail backed coolly under the kitchen table at Karel’s approach and refused to come out. It cheeped when he passed through heading for his bedroom, and when he stepped over the boxes it negotiated its way along the wall in the opposite direction. Near the sink it defecated.

In his room he shut the door and lay on his bed. Why was he worrying about the house like he was caretaker? Who else cared about it? What was he looking out for? Boxes of family things he didn’t recognize? You don’t have a family, he thought. Get that through your head. What did he care about this town, this zoo, Albert, his father? Why hadn’t he run away already?

He heard someone come up the stairs and stop outside the door.

“I know somebody’s there,” he said.

There was a cough and a knock. “What?” he said. “What? What do you want from me?”

Kehr opened the door. He had a folder in his hands. He sat on the bed, and Karel moved his legs to make room.

“Our ringtail was having an energetic discussion with the chickens when Stasik found him,” he said.

“What’re you doing here?” Karel said. “All you do is hang around the house. They pay you to hang around the house?”

Kehr smiled. His skin was completely smooth, and he seemed at ease. If I looked like that Leda would love me, Karel found himself thinking. He shook it off. Kehr said, “I haven’t started working yet. I’m engaged in what we call the preliminary stages.”

Karel wasn’t even going to ask, and give him the satisfaction. He reached over and switched on the radio. Kehr opened the folder and looked inside it as if waiting for something. The radio went on about sectors in the rear being scoured of trouble, and Karel reached over and shut it off.

Kehr said, “I have something for you.” He held out the folder.

Inside was a photograph of a woman’s face. She had large eyes and dark hair under a big hat. She was looking at him with a serious expression. Her mouth was slightly pursed.

He blinked. He could feel pressure in his throat, like the impulse to swallow. “Is this my mother?” he asked.

Kehr nodded. He had had it sent, he said. It had been in one of the old files.

Karel held it before him, trying to overlay the image on his blurred and incomplete memory. Kehr put a hand on Karel’s shin and then took it away. The face was so concrete and open to study that it was disorienting and made him suspicious, even as he recognized how moved he was by its revelatory power: this is her, this is what she looked like .

“This is my mother,” he said, to himself, and while he continued to look Kehr stood up and left the room, closing the door behind him.

He stood the photo against the wall and turned off the light. The face gazed down at him whitely from the darkness. It was as if he had somebody else now to think about, his father, Albert, Leda, his mother from the tiled floor, and now this woman. When he slept that night they all mixed together in ways his dreams didn’t make clear.

The next morning he heard a banging in the kitchen and went downstairs. Kehr was on his back under the sink with a huge range of tools. The others were out. The ringtail was cowering under the kitchen table from the noise.

“Good morning,” Kehr said. “Time to fix the plumbing. I made some coffee.”

Karel poured himself a cup and sat down. The ringtail scrabbled away at his approach.

Kehr clanked and banged away unseen. Karel sipped his coffee. This was better than the stuff he made. Someone had cleaned the pot. “Time to put a little work into this house,” Kehr said.

Karel rubbed his eyes, disoriented by the attempted domesticity. “Don’t you have people who could do that?” he asked.

“Give me a hand,” Kehr said. “Hand me the wrench.” His hand waved and flopped around outside the cabinet to indicate its search.