Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

Black cars were passing through the smaller streets. You could see them beneath the streetlights. You could hear them like the wind beneath your window. This was the kind of country that took things away from you, Leda had told Karel. He lay in bed listening to the cars and remembered her telling him the story of the gardener next to her on the bus who had said, “Strict rulers don’t last for long,” talking to himself, talking about the weather, about anything, who knew? And the man opposite him, whom Leda had not been paying enough attention to, had leaned forward and cleared his throat and said with noticeable emphasis, “I don’t quite understand what you mean by that, Mr. — ?” And the whole bus had gone silent.

But Leda had seen beatings. Karel had seen his room, his father, the Reptile House. The next morning he rode into the country on the back of Albert’s truck and they stopped in a dense-canopied ironwood stand. Albert was breeding giant iguanas in a new experimental way for the Reptile House. The iguanas were arboreal and herbivorous, so they usually stayed in the trees, he explained, and since he supplemented their diet they remained in that one stand. He tore open one of the thirty-pound bags of feed and inverted it, spilling rich red pellets everywhere, and the trees filled with sound, the leaves in the canopy rushed with the movement, and while Karel watched, the six-foot iguanas rushed down the central branches and then the trunks, scrambling and sliding out of everywhere like black magic, like the invisible suddenly made visible at his wish.

His father sat in their tattered lounge chair watching him build his flybag. Some of the geckos and anoles at the Reptile House were not eating, and Karel thought he’d show a little initiative and raise some different food. It’d be a good thing to know if he ever wanted his own vivarium, besides. He had greenbottle and blowfly larvae.

Maggots, his father said. He had the one son in a forty-mile radius who spent his mornings playing with maggots.

He mixed the larvae with handfuls of bran and sawdust and shook them onto shallow dishes he hoped his father wouldn’t notice. The dishes he put inside the flybag, a muslin bag with a narrow sleeve on one end spread over a wooden box frame. The greenbottles would pupate in a day or two. The sleeve was used for catching flies (he used a little beaker with snap-on lid) and for feeding them bottlecaps of bran and milk mash to keep them going. An old sock that he’d soaked in water he set atop the bag to provide drinking water.

“The world needs more flies,” his father said. “I’m glad you’re doing this.”

“I like what I’m doing,” Karel said. “Do you like what you’re doing?” Karel’s father was unemployed.

The larvae nosed around each other blindly, coated with bran dust. His father kept watching, and Karel sensed in him some desire to share in this activity at least with his son. He thought about explaining some things — the way the extra meals increased the flies’ nutritional value or the way he’d have to cool them before taking them to the reptiles — while he worked, but he didn’t. His father got up and went into the house.

He tied off the sleeve and carried the whole assembly to the shade. His father was crashing plates in the kitchen sink. He stood in the sun wiping his hands on his shorts while the racket continued. It was already hot. He could feel on his arms and the back of his neck an old sunburn. A small whiptail took up a basking position above the kitchen window, near the roof. The roof tiles were red clay, stained olive in the interstices. The whiptail was a few inches long and spotted, and its throat fan bulged out every so often. Its colors would pale to compensate for its heat intake as it warmed up. He thought about that kind of thermoregulation as he went into the house.

His father was sitting morosely in the chair by the window. He was holding a spoon at both ends, and a large brown ant was running up the neck of it. As it reached one end his father would reverse the spoon, forcing the hapless ant to repeat the performance. Karel started the coffee.

His father tipped and tilted the spoon. He was wearing a sock as a cravat, for the dampness, he claimed.

“Why are you afraid of me?” he finally asked, his attention on something outside the window.

Karel didn’t answer. The knob on the gas stove came off in his hand. He tried to worry it back onto its spindle. He was intensely aware of his father’s attention on the back of his head.

His father asked the question periodically and Karel was always unable to answer, partly because of the fear his father was talking about.

“Did you hear me?” his father said mildly. He dropped the spoon into a dish of old soapy water in the sink. “You’re what now, sixteen? You can’t converse with your father?”

“Fifteen,” Karel was able to say. Above the stove was a calendar, with his quietly circled birthday a long way off. The calendar had a different sampler for each month. The current one read Are There Countrymen in This House Who Don’t Display the Flag on the Praetor’s Birthday?

“I’m the one should be afraid of you,” his father grumbled.

Karel got the stove working. Without turning he asked his father if he really wanted coffee in this heat, and his father said yes, he really wanted coffee in this heat. Utensils pinged and clattered, and outside some crows jabbered around on the back shed.

One night a year or two after his mother died in their old house in the city, his father had stayed out all night. Karel had slept on the balcony. By mistake he’d locked the door behind him. He’d stood facing his reflection in the dark glass before settling down to sleep. The balcony had been open to the moon, and he’d noticed in the catclaw bushes at the end of the garden the thin white face of a man. The man had been watching him. The man’s face had performed a series of grimaces. It had not gone away. Karel had stayed as still as possible, his stomach pitching and jumbling with the intentness of its gaze. His only strategy had been to wait for his father to return. He’d remained so still that pains had begun to shoot up his neck and lower back. Before dawn the spaces between the bushes had begun to pale and lighten and the figure had slipped away like a shadow on water. It had left a small branch wavering. Karel’s father had come back after sunrise, and Karel’s story had first frightened and then angered him. He had inspected the catclaw bushes and then had suspended outdoor sleeping privileges until further notice.

While his father wasn’t looking he tipped the salt shaker into the coffee grounds. His father was humming a victory march without enthusiasm. The coffee took forever. Karel kept his eyes on a print his father claimed his mother had always loved of a brook and some meadows, with a pale red sky and some brushstrokes intended as birds.

“Did you hear screaming last night?” Karel asked, as if they hadn’t yet spoken. “Off by the square?” He’d heard a shriek, while he lay there dreaming of Leda. In the darkness it had inhabited all parts of his room. It had shaken her from his mind and he’d had trouble reassembling her image in the darkness.

His father shrugged, playing with his empty coffee cup. “Lot of things go on nowadays,” he said. He trailed off. “Nowadays” was a common euphemism for the regime.

“Did they say they might take you on for a while?” Karel finally asked. His father had gone north along the foothills of the mountains for the last few days to get some spot work in the quarries. They’d been hoping he could catch on with something steady. That was one of the reasons they had moved here in the first place. It was more or less clear that that hadn’t materialized.