Kept Animals Read online

  * * *

  THE TOP WAS up on the Mercedes and even with his body bent toward the wheel, Tomás’s head was touching the fabric. Rory set her camera and backpack at her feet. June’s Grrrls mixtape was playing so low she could hardly hear, some Hole song. “What the hell is this?” she asked, as if she hadn’t been in this car, tolerating this screeching enough already.

  “I don’t know,” Tomás said, pressing eject repeatedly. “It’s just stuck.” He turned the volume all the way down. “June said something about Johnny Naughton fixing it soon.”

  “Right,” Rory said.

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking I’d ask him to take a look at my Supra.”

  “You know that guy’s a racist, right?”

  “They all are,” Tomás said. “But he’s a racist who knows cars.”

  Rory pressed one hand into the dash and hit eject fast with her other hand, and the tape spat out.

  “Okay,” Tomás said. “But do you know about timing belts?”

  “No,” Rory said. She went fishing in the glove box for the cigarettes she knew she’d find. “Least this still works,” she said, pushing the dash lighter in. She felt Tomás watching her. “You want one?”

  “I shouldn’t,” he said.

  “You worried June’s gonna reprimand you or something?”

  Tomás adjusted his hands on the wheel.

  “Fuck, I’m sorry. That was shitty.” The dash lighter popped, and Rory took it, holding the cherry-red end to the cigarette. “You can tell her I took this one.”

  “Oh,” Tomás said. “I wasn’t exactly planning on telling her I took you home.”

  “Yeah, this she wouldn’t approve of, would she?” Rory said. “Does she talk about me?”

  Tomás shook his head, but he also sniffed—a tell, Rory thought. Now he had new loyalties.

  “All right, then,” Rory said. “It doesn’t matter to me anyway.”

  “It’s just a job,” Tomás said. “It’s more money, that’s all.”

  “I know,” Rory said. She couldn’t fault him for taking the work. “She won’t notice the cigarette missing,” Rory said. “I promise. With money like that you don’t have to keep track of anything, really. She never noticed when I took joints from her anyway.”

  Tomás looked at her. “You two sure were a funny kind of friends.”

  Maybe he was only talking about the joints, this small deceit, but what sprang to her mind was him stepping to the railing of the motel balcony, seeing them together. She had sealed that night away, pressed her shoulder up against the door to it, but Tomás saying this—unlocking it all again—her whole body blushed. The heat behind her eyes was like a sudden fever. “I never wanted her touching me,” she said. “Whatever you think you saw, it isn’t true.”

  “Oh,” Tomás said. “I wasn’t talking about that.”

  She closed her eyes just in time then, pinching off the world that was about to flash by—the Price gates, the possibility of the gate being open. It occurred to her then with an unwanted clarity that driving this road had to be even harder for Tomás.

  “I hate this,” Rory said, drawing hard on the cigarette.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t know, I thought that you and June—”

  “Not like that!” Her body was so tense it had wrung from her a voice that was not her own. “I’m not like June. I’m not gay, okay?”

  Tomás rolled through the stop sign and out onto the main road. “Shit,” he said, checking the rearview. “I didn’t mean to do that. Fuck.”

  They drove on in silence, Tomás continually checking the mirror to be sure no patrol car was coming. Rory dropped her half-smoked cigarette into an empty soda can.

  When they neared Greenleaf Road, Rory said, “Turn here,” just to have something else to say. He already knew the way. He pulled over the bridge and in behind the two-horse trailer. A cobweb was strung in its back window, a sparkling lace in the headlights of the Mercedes.

  “Well,” Rory said, “thanks.”

  She gathered up her camera and bag and had her hand on the door when Tomás said, “Are your pictures any good?”

  Rory let herself smile, relaxing. “I don’t know yet. I hope so.” She had shot rolls and rolls of film, but she had yet to finish Foster’s first assignment, a self-portrait, which she had to do before he’d let her into the darkroom.

  “If you ever want to show someone, I’d like to see,” Tomás said.

  “Okay,” she said, opening the car door. “I definitely will, one of these days,” she said. “For sure,” she said, knowing he’d get the joke.

  * * *

  VIVIAN HEARD A car cross the bridge and in the illumination of its headlights she saw a dirt driveway, crescents of tire tracks, the hitch of a trailer that was tucked out of view. The house was right up against the ridge, so near that she had to press herself against its chipped brown siding. The car engine was purring. She got to her knees and crawled to the corner, craning her neck, still unable to see the car itself, only the moths dancing in its lights. The blood on her leg was tacky, matted with dirt and broken leaves. If she stepped out now she could startle whoever it was (“Movie Star’s Daughter Induces Heart Attack in Old Pervert.” Ha). She heard the voice of a young girl, words she could not decipher, then the car door shut, followed by the squeak of a screen door opening and its closing clap. As the car pulled away, she scrambled to see it, catching the cat eyes of its brake lights, but the color of the car itself was unmistakable, a car she knew. June Fisk’s.

  * * *

  RORY’S ROOM WAS still holding the day’s heat. She turned the fan on low and opened all the windows, stopping to look down to the Price pool below. The lights were on, the surface of the water rippling, bougainvillea tumbling across the stone patio and into the water. All the curtains were drawn, the gardens dark and still. Rory had yet to see Mrs. Price. She had been looking. Ever since Fresno, she had let herself look again. Not every day, but sporadically. Out of concern, never amusement, not anymore. She was sure no one was really living it up. Though she had seen Wade there, Wade and Johnny actually. They were parasites, using Vivian for her house and pool. Once, she saw Wade shove Vivian into the pool and—though she might have imagined it—she thought she’d heard Vivian’s shrill scream, its mix of delight and terror.

  She hit play on the tape deck by her bed, prompting the unnervingly quiet first chords of Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here. In the bathroom, she felt behind the mirror, finding and lighting one of the joints she’d lifted from June.

  * * *

  THERE WERE NO other cars in the front of the house, just the horse trailer, its wheel wells trimmed in rust. The front door had been left open and only the screen remained between her and the inside.

  “Hello,” Vivian said quietly. Beneath the porch light, the gash in her leg was beastly. “Just me out here,” she said, cupping her hands to see beyond the screen. “Bleeding out.”

  Whoever this girl was, this friend of June’s, there was no sign of her now.

  Out of habit, Vivian slipped her shoes off just inside the door.

  * * *

  GUS HAD ANGLED the bathroom mirror when he’d built the bathroom, saying it would make the room feel bigger, but instead it reflected the umber tiles of the counter beneath and the wood floor, blackened with water damage over the years—a room folding in on itself. Gus’s red-winged blackbird was on the counter, a bird he’d told her could be found anywhere grass grew in the continental United States, as if to say it wasn’t all that special, but she still saw it as she had at five years old, a creature full of unknown potential. She exhaled into the paper tube she kept stuffed with a dryer sheet, damping the smell, just in case anyone came home early.

  She set the joint on the rim of the sink and pulled the rubber band from her braid, shaking out the plaits of her hair. She turned the bird on its mesquite perch toward the mirror, so that they would be looking at one another there. She wanted to disappe
ar in the billow of her hair, to be just another object in the frame. She picked up the camera and sought her focal point: a self-portrait, since she had to.

  * * *

  THE HOUSE OPENED into the living room, a threadbare couch facing a small television atop a buckling shelf. On the coffee table was an ashtray, thick with ash, soda cans, and magazines. Maybe she’d just find a washcloth and go. Find the road back down.

  In the kitchen, she leaned into the sink and guzzled water from the faucet, watching fruit flies lift from a bowl of mold-speckled oranges. She cupped water onto her face. A dirty white stove, dotted with toast crumbs and a gray slick of grease. She pulled the dish towel from the oven handle and wiped at her neck and face. The digital clock incorrectly read 2:02 a.m. (time clearly not of the essence). She peered into a cabinet, hoping for an easy swig of something, maybe a box of Band-Aids. She tied the dish towel around her wounded leg (G.I. Jane here).

  In the living room, there were only a few framed photographs: a woman with fine wrinkles around almond-shaped eyes; a man, jowly, but handsome in a jovial way, always in a cowboy hat, his smile—shit. Him. She knew him. The corset of her ribs pulled taut. This was that man’s house. The man who’d swerved. Nothing for you to worry your pretty little head about. Why had June been here? She spun around to the door, the window. The stairs. There was a backpack sitting on the bottom step. Of course, the girl’s voice. She searched the photographs again: the man, Gus Scott, with his foot up on the railing of a fence, his face in shadow beneath his hat, and a girl with him (ten or eleven) with the same dark hair and eyes as the woman.

  She could hear the music now, the acoustic guitar. Pink Floyd. She stepped onto the bottom stair, as silently as she could, and lifted the backpack to her shoulder like it was her own.

  * * *

  RORY WAS CHANGING the focal point in the mirror—from the bird back to herself, snapping one picture after another—until, mid-click of the shutter, she heard her door opening. She would later find that her body had become a blur in the frame, though the eyes of the bird remained in focus.

  “Vivian,” she gasped. The camera nearly fell from her hand. “Shit,” she blurted. “You’re Vivian Price.”

  “You were expecting me?” Vivian said, stepping into the room, indicating the barely righted camera in Rory’s hand.

  “No,” Rory stammered. “I was—” The camera, the joint between her fingers, the mane of her hair, all felt electrified. She set the camera down and flicked the joint into the toilet. “Fuck,” she said, instantly regretting its extinguishing hiss. She ran her hands over her hair.

  “You look different,” Vivian said.

  “It’s my hair,” Rory said. She was stoned. “Wait, from when?” Vivian’s eyes grazed over her. She was holding Rory’s backpack. A dish towel was tied around her leg. Rory saw these things but Vivian, the fact of her, was still too hard to comprehend.

  “There’s a picture of you on the mantel,” Vivian said. “Downstairs.”

  Rory had not left the bathroom doorway, feeling the bedroom no longer belonged to her.

  “With the man who swerved,” Vivian said.

  Rory’s pulse became a watery thrum in her ears. She looked at her hands.

  “And clearly you’re a friend of June’s.”

  “No,” Rory said, too quietly to be heard. “Not anymore.”

  “And you’re a photographer?” Vivian went on, not waiting for a response. “But that’s all I know about you. Well, that and your view—” She turned toward Rory’s window and Rory watched her T-shirt shift at the curve of her shoulder, the tied strings of her bathing suit at the back of her neck revealed. The teal bikini.

  “How are you here?” Rory asked.

  “I climbed the hill,” Vivian said, pulling a leaf from her hair.

  “Jesus,” Rory said. “And you’re hurt.” The dish towel around her leg was darkening with blood.

  “I’m fine,” Vivian said blithely. “It’s not so bad.”

  “No,” Rory said, considering the climb she had made. “It—we should get it clean.”

  Vivian slid the backpack from her shoulder and lifted her foot to the end of Rory’s bed to get a better look at her leg. Her foot was clean, but in stark contrast her ankles were scratched and smudged with dirt. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Do you have anything—”

  In the bathroom, Rory opened drawers, digging out bandages, gauze, and tape. She found Betadine and ran water on a washcloth. She heard the give of her bedsprings: Vivian Price sitting down on her bed.

  “I assume you know Wade and June from that barn?”

  Rory brought the washcloth, dripping water down her arms. “Yes,” Rory said, standing in front of Vivian now. “But we aren’t friends.” Who had told her? June? Or had June told Wade—of course, of course she had. After Fresno. And now Vivian knew.

  “But just now, I saw you,” Vivian said. “June just dropped you off here.” She was untying the dish towel from her leg. An abrasion, raw and still bleeding, but not deep.

  “You were outside?” Rory said.

  Vivian nodded. “I wanted to know who my fan club was.”

  This phrase, she could hear Wade saying it. “It doesn’t look like you need stitches,” she said, clearing her throat. “Anyway, that was June’s car, but she wasn’t driving.”

  “Oh,” Vivian said.

  Rory extended the washcloth, but Vivian had leaned back on the bed, a clear suggestion that she wanted Rory to clean the wound. And Rory kneeled beside the bed. “It was Wade, wasn’t it? Who told you about my room?” Rory set the washcloth to the side of the scraped skin and Vivian winced.

  “Just do it quick,” Vivian said. “So it doesn’t hurt so much.”

  Rory folded the washcloth over and held it there until she felt the muscle of Vivian’s leg relax. “This house was here long before yours. I mean, it’s not like I meant to be able to see your yard.” Vivian’s eyes were closed, her eyelashes golden against her cheeks. “It’s just a coincidence, I guess.”

  Rory moved the washcloth, trying to take as much dirt as she could in one motion.

  “Shit,” Vivian said.

  “This might sting more,” Rory said, showing her the bottle of Betadine. At Vivian’s nod, she squirted it across the wound, the dish towel catching most of what slid down her leg, some leaking past, staining the blanket beneath. Rory tore open the package of gauze.

  “You don’t like Wade very much, do you?” Vivian asked.

  “Hold that there,” Rory said. Vivian was searching her face as she put her finger to the corner of the gauze. Rory unspooled the tape, tearing it with her teeth. “He doesn’t like me either.” She pressed the tape into place and looked at what she’d done, feeling briefly dizzy again—she’d just bandaged up Vivian Price’s leg.

  “Thanks,” Vivian said.

  Rory looked up at her. “Of course,” she said. “I try to help everyone who breaks in.”

  Vivian laughed. She had made Vivian laugh.

  “Well, I’m sure you want to go now,” Rory said. “Whatever Wade told you about me, it isn’t true. And I won’t—I don’t look at your house or anything.”

  “Actually, I was just realizing that I don’t even know your name.”

  “Rory,” she said. “Wade didn’t tell you?”

  “Just Rory.” Vivian smiled. “Like Cher?”

  “Rory Ramos.”

  “Rory Ramos,” Vivian repeated. “Alliteration. That’s always fun. You know, you have really beautiful hair.” Rory had started to braid it back, but Vivian put her hand to Rory’s wrist, stopping her.

  “I do?” Rory asked, looking at Vivian. There was something about her that required a narrowing of attention, like a distant shoreline.

  “Leave it down,” Vivian said. “I like it.”

  Rory let go of what braid she’d finished.

  “So, what’s with the birds?” Vivian asked, looking behind her now, to the dresser.

  The towhee was
there, on its side, having fallen off its perch weeks ago. The wooden base and twig of mesquite stood separately. “Here.” Rory picked it up and handed it to her. “I don’t know what glue to use to glue it back on.”

  Vivian took the bird gingerly, turning it over in her hand before bringing it to her nose, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do. Rory laughed.

  “What?” Vivian asked, running her finger down the bird’s rust-hued feathers.

  “Nothing,” Rory said. “I mean—you smelled it.”

  Vivian shrugged. “When else can you get this close to a bird?”

  “Gus makes them,” Rory said, bringing the blackbird from the bathroom counter. “He doesn’t shoot them or anything. He finds them. They’re animals he’s found—already dead.”

  Behind Vivian, the window curtain luffed on a shallow wind.

  “Gus,” Vivian said, looking at the bird’s leaden eyes. She’d said his name with the same tinge of bitterness Rory used in her own thoughts about him now.

  Vivian turned the towhee over again, its beak trained up. “Already dead.”

  “Because they were sick,” Rory clarified. “Or dehydrated—” She flashed on Gus pulling the truck over, bumping onto the dirt shoulder, the shine of the fox’s fur in his high beams.

  “Or hit by a car,” Vivian said, a sharp glint of pain crossing her face.

  Rory had gone back to the barn that night, needing to hold the fox in her hands, to do what she wished she’d done in the first place, take it from him—that might have altered everything that came afterward. It wasn’t until now that she wondered who had struck the fox, how far back the blame might lie.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Vivian said, still cradling the towhee in her hands. “Coming here like this.”

  “You didn’t,” Rory said. “I understand why you came. I really do.” She was going to the window. “You want to see?” she asked. “I want you to see.” She was holding the curtain open, waiting for Vivian, sensing that showing her the view was an opportunity, a new chance to make everything a little more right.