Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

They were all quiet at the conductor’s courage. He was looking at the man with his rearview mirror. The woman next to Karel took out a handkerchief and gestured toward the blood. She said, to break the silence, that it was terrible what these people thought they could get away with.

Halfway up a hill the conductor stopped the trolley. They could hear sirens and honking behind them. The young man scrambled out and disappeared between two houses.

So Karel never got to the application office. All the passengers were loaded onto another bus and driven to the local police station, where they waited to be interviewed. The trolley conductor disappeared. The woman who’d been next to Karel said, “This is terrible. This is an outrage,” while they waited. Karel was interviewed next to last — naturally, he thought — by a beefy sergeant tired of the whole business whose interrogation lasted all of four or five minutes. The sergeant asked Karel what he saw, and Karel told him. The sergeant asked if the man had any confederates, and Karel said no. The sergeant asked if he could describe the man, and Karel said truthfully he hadn’t seen him too clearly. The sergeant frowned, his pencil making edgy little anticipatory lines on a pad, and told him he could go.

By the time he reached the application office it was closed and he’d missed the last bus besides. He got a long and meandering ride home on the front of a manure truck, holding his breath futilely and swatting at flies even after it was too dark to see.

The next morning he went over Leda’s to tell her the story. Mrs. Schiele told him that Leda was busy. He could wait in the living room. She sat opposite him with a great exhalation, as though she believed it was her unhappy job to entertain him until he drifted away from boredom. She gazed at the piano, a small black upright polished and shiny with disuse. “Do you play?” she asked, though the question seemed ridiculous. She said she once had, and left the rest to his imagination. She indicated her hands — arthritis? he wondered — and rubbed her knuckles as if to remind herself of the pain.

“What an artist the world lost,” Leda said impatiently, coming into the room to flounce herself down on the fat green chair opposite him.

Her mother sniffed. “I tried to get my daughter to carry on, to have a little—”

“Oh, stop,” Leda said. “So what’s the news?”

Karel told her about the trolley. Mrs. Schiele was looking at him, and he realized he had a dirty arm on a lace doily that looked to be a hundred-year-old family heirloom or something.

Leda was appalled. She said that this was the kind of thing that everyone was supposed to be patient about. The NUP was always asking for patience while it consolidated its position and ferreted out those working against the unity of the country.

Her mother tsked.

“I don’t know what I would have done,” Leda said. “These people are such pigs! ”

“Leda!” her mother said.

Leda put her hand to her forehead. She said, “What they get away with is so outrageous it makes me want to scream.”

Karel winced. She was too loud. He felt cowardly, ready to agree with anything to win her over.

Her mother got up and looked ready to leave the room. “Miss Politics,” she said. “Fifteen years old and she knows better than everybody else.”

“I do ,” Leda said with some vehemence.

“So when you’re old enough you be Praetor,” her mother said.

“When I’m old enough I’ll help throw all them out,” Leda muttered.

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” her mother said vaguely. She rubbed her eyes with both hands and sighed.

“You’re scared of everything,” Leda said. “Daddy’s ghost, this place, everyone around us.”

They were quiet. Karel felt intensely uncomfortable, and politically too ignorant to know what he should be arguing.

“You listen to rumors,” Leda’s mother said. “This party’s like the rest. You don’t remember things before.”

“I know,” Leda said with that sarcastic look she had. “I’m too young for things.”

“Why do you always twist my words?” her mother demanded.

Leda was silent.

Her mother rubbed her knuckles and the back of her hand. She was still standing in the middle of the room. She said, “You talk about border troubles and things you hear about. I’m talking about things I see, things like more jobs and less fighting and not a new government every ten minutes, things like that.”

“I can’t talk to you,” Leda said, as if announcing the weather.

They sat quietly, Karel surrendering his hope of an invitation to lunch.

“They say in their own Party program, which they even published, what they’re going to do,” Leda said, sadly. “Twenty-five points.”

“Who reads programs? Do you read programs?” Mrs. Schiele asked Karel. He shook his head. “The National Unity Party is something new,” she said. “That’s all it is.”

“Well,” Karel said, standing.

“What about all the troubles, all the beatings, the people who are missing?” Leda said. “You think it’s just foreigners it happens to?”

“I think troublemakers who won’t mind their own business are getting into trouble,” her mother said sharply. “You leave trouble to the police.”

“You’re an idiot,” Leda said.

“Leda,” her mother said.

“I’m sorry,” Leda said, frustrated. “ You’re awfully quiet,” she told Karel.

“Oh, leave the poor boy alone,” her mother said, working into an anger. “You have to badger him as well?”

“Do I badger you?” Leda asked.

Karel shook his head, his mouth half-closed.

“There,” Leda said, without triumph. “See?”

“There’s no sense arguing with you when you’re being impossible,” her mother said stiffly. She left the room.

“So don’t,” Leda called after her.

“You’ll just disagree with whatever I say,” her mother said from the kitchen.

“So test me,” Leda said. “Tell me the NUP are idiots.”

“I don’t like you using that word! ” her mother yelled. She was standing in the doorway, brandishing a large stirring spoon.

Leda quieted, frightened. Her mother left the doorway.

Karel cleared his throat. He put his palms together in front of his mouth.

Leda swung her legs around and hauled herself from the chair and suggested a walk. “We’re going to go get into trouble, Mom,” she called from the front step, and then shut the door behind her when her mother didn’t answer.

On the walk Karel asked about Nicholas, to change the subject.

“That’s one good thing,” Leda said. “The NUP says too much aid goes to places like mental institutions. Naturally. They probably all escaped from one. I’m hoping they’ll just abolish the whole thing and send him home.”

“Where do you read all this stuff?” Karel asked. Leda shot him a look, and he didn’t pursue it. “You don’t like Nicholas’s … place, huh?” he said instead. “I thought they teach them skills and things.”

“I’ll tell you what the kids learn,” Leda said. “They learn to clean filthy things. They learn to sweep. Sometimes to count. I asked Nicholas once what he was learning and he said he was learning to be quiet.”

Karel nodded sympathetically, chagrined that this topic too had exploded. He hadn’t had any idea things were that bad there.

“I don’t know whether to cry or hit people when I go there,” she said. “It’s so terrible.”

“I’ll go with you next time,” he offered. Another, shadow part of him said, Are you out of your mind?

“You want to?” Leda asked, and stopped, and looked at him closely. “Thanks,” she said, and squeezed his arm. “That’s nice.”