Kept Animals Read online

  “No, I know why this boy’s so eager,” Joy said. “I’ve seen Adler’s commercials. Heritage Ranch, where the best bloodlines are bred.” She stopped to pick a string of meat from her teeth, sucking it off the end of her finger.

  “Commercials?” Wade asked. “Like, on TV?”

  Joy nodded. “Place has got heated stalls, breezeways padded in rubber, a farrier on staff. And of course, you’ll have your stable boy here, waiting on your every need.”

  Tomás stopped moving the sponge over the bowls. Joy was mocking Wade, but Gus couldn’t see his way to making that clear.

  Joy was seven years Gus’s senior and she’d always been a reliable comfort to him. But she’d lived alone for twenty-five years, time that had left the filter between her thoughts and her speech porous.

  “You two sure do look alike,” Wade said then. An insult, Gus realized. An allusion to Joy’s jowly cheeks and thin-lipped smile, which Gus wore more easily as a fifty-three-year-old man.

  “Not as much as you and your sister,” Gus said. He had figured out a thing or two in their time on the road, the sore spot that June seemed to be. “Wade’s a twin,” he told Joy. “Sister named June.”

  Wade stood up abruptly, flattening his shirtfront and swinging his hair back from his face. “Speaking of which, I think it’s time for me to call home.”

  “Phone’s that way,” Joy said. “There’s just the one.”

  When Gus did talk to Rory again, he would ask her, point-blank, about everything that went on outside his purview.

  Tomás turned around, drying his hands. “It’s so quiet here. I thought our canyon was quiet, but this. There’s only the animals. I like it,” he said.

  “See,” Joy said, throwing a thumb in Tomás’s direction. “There’s a boy who’s not afraid to sit with his own thoughts.”

  “It’s okay if I take a walk?” Tomás asked, looking toward the rise beyond the barns.

  Gus and Joy sat quiet in the kitchen as Tomás cut across the pasture, Chap following him down the fence line, lifting her upper lip to the high plains air, inhaling.

  “Seems like a real good kid,” Joy said. “That one, I mean.”

  Gus nodded. He hadn’t told her much about Tomás. But he had admitted that he was coming with an aim at a fresh start.

  “This visit took you too long, Gussie,” she said now. “Shouldn’t take a spoilt marriage to get you to come see me.”

  “Who said anything about—” He was going to object, but Wade’s chortling laughter broke in from the other room and that was enough to shut him up.

  * * *

  WADE’S VOICE WAS falsely gruff, like he believed he’d grown chest hair crossing the Rockies. “Don’t you miss me?” he asked.

  “Not so much,” Vivian said, looking at her fingernails (chipping from hours in the pool). Rory was still in the water, still trying to swim two lengths without needing to breathe. Carmen had had the men come to clean it, finally.

  “Oh, come on,” Wade said. “Don’t be such a tease.” His tongue slithering around on the last word. “I wish you were here. You’d look good in a pair of chaps.”

  Rory came down to the end of the pool and paused, folding her arms on the edge, watching Vivian (with her Mona Lisa eyes). Rory, her name always came to Vivian like an answer to a question. Sometimes she thought of Teddy LaGrange as Rory was touching her, sometimes she was Teddy. She had never been with a girl before (a small white lie she’d told), but more than anything she liked the way it felt when Rory photographed her afterward. She felt briefly powerful then, cunning, like she had everything going for her.

  Wade was going on, whining about staying in Wyoming and how he had to sleep on a futon (poor baby). She was waiting for him to say something about Gus, something she could tell Rory. When she’d told Vivian about going home to Mona and this little one-eyed man (Columbo in a floral robe, eating eggs in the breakfast nook), Rory seemed as disturbed by Gus’s broken heart as she was by Mona’s black eye.

  “There’s a fucking buffalo skin on this chair I’m sitting on and it smells like cow shit everywhere,” Wade said.

  “Patties,” Vivian corrected him. “They call them patties.”

  Wade laughed. “You’re such a smart girl, Vivian Price.”

  “No,” Vivian said, grinning. “I’m just a pretty little head.” She hung up on him and stepped back outside. “How’s the water?” she asked in a come-hither voice.

  “Was that Wade?” Rory asked. “Did he say anything about Gus?”

  “No,” Vivian said. “An old friend from school.” Vivian could hold her breath for two lengths of the pool and still come up looking refreshed.

  * * *

  THE MARE HADN’T been ready, so Gus had dropped Wade and Tomás at Heritage Ranch alone.

  Every day since, he and Joy had trotted Chap out, taken her temperature, and no matter what the number, they showed her to Joy’s aging stallion, Buck. So far, the two horses had looked at one another like animals of a different species. “You sure he still knows which end is what?” Gus said.

  “You’re out of season. You oughta come back in February, March, try again when this thing’s meant to be done.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Gus said. “But this one’s paid for, the wheels in motion. I’ve got this shot or I’m just more in debt. She’ll come around,” he said, though he no longer felt sure and he tossed every night, hearing the clock tick.

  After more than a week had passed, Joy woke him early and dragged him down to the river to fish—seven trout in two hours, a bounty that bordered on offensive. Walking back toward the house, Gus felt a new linen stiffness to the air, the Wyoming winter approaching.

  “You know you’ve missed it here,” Joy said.

  Gus smiled vaguely. He’d swooped out of himself just then, had seen the picture the two of them painted, how old they’d grown.

  Mark Adler’s property had been a study in greens: the barns hunter green, the covered ring gray-green and flanked by dark green shrubbery. In the office—a chalet-style building, just as the commercial advertised—Gus had sat hat in hand, while Wade eyeballed the trophy cases. Finally, a spry young woman with at-attention breasts, in a polo shirt two sizes too small, came in, greeted Wade and Tomás, and took them away. Without even so much as a question when Gus said he’d have to come back with the mare. “Yeah, okay, sure” was all she’d said, clearly not paid by the syllable. He’d found himself saying half-baked prayers ever since, aware of the nightmare it would be to return to Adler’s ranch to pick up Wade and Tomás in a week, with the mare never having cycled again. Wade Fisk’s equestrian taxi, at your service. Fucking hell.

  “You know you’ve missed that mountain,” Joy said, still trying to reel him in.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course. Just not the sheep.” He tried to smile.

  They used to work Jack and Janet Traden’s sheep up the river and over Battle Mountain, grazing them at Fletcher’s Peak. They’d slept under the stars and he’d always woken to Joy’s stirring, her deep breaths, checking the air for the iron tint of blood, seeing if they’d lost one in the night. Now all of her breathing seemed labored to him. Every night, she turned in earlier than he did. She’d confessed to him that she didn’t have the revenue to warrant full-time help, having to share labor with the Crace family up the road.

  “Shit,” Joy said now, stopping him with a hand to his chest. Gus scanned the hill, thinking she’d seen a bear.

  He did envy Joy her staying power here. Keeping things up and running, with a hound and a collie that took turns lacing themselves around her feet, being pleasure enough. He hadn’t called home once, hadn’t called the barn. He couldn’t bring himself to without having news, good news. Yes, he missed this place, but same as he missed Mona when she was right beside him—just another thing that was not his own.

  “No,” Joy said. “Over there. It’s your mare.”

  They’d left Buck and Chap in neighboring pastures and they
were both at the fence line, that pulse to the air between them, Chap doing the dance that horses do—swishing her tail, showing Buck her face, then her rear. October 13, and she had come around.

  “God damn,” he said.

  “You’re taking me with you this time.” Joy always had a way of sounding proud of him, even if he’d only fallen into dumb luck.

  * * *

  EIGHTH PERIOD. PHOTOGRAPHY. She was late.

  “Well, well,” Foster said. “She lives and breathes.”

  Everyone else was in the darkroom, printing, but Rory had yet to develop new negatives.

  She’d missed five days of school since Gus left, but Vivian had been calling the attendance office at Polk, doing a reasonable impression of someone’s mother, saying her daughter, Rory, would be absent for a dental appointment, a sinus infection, a stomach bug, knowing this would at least circumvent the school calling Mona again. To keep up appearances, Rory slept at home and rose as if to make the bus, Vivian waiting around the corner in the black BMW wagon. She’d called Rory an addiction, a new kind of drug. She had, Vivian said, made her stop caring about other people’s opinions. Rory found it hard to believe Vivian ever had.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Foster asked, motioning to the table where the changing bags and development spools sat.

  “Playing catch-up,” Rory said.

  She had shot twenty-seven rolls of film, all safely wound in the metal fists of their canisters. Most of them she’d shot in the last two weeks, but a few were from Fresno and before. There were images she remembered taking, holding the memory of them like talismans in her mind, but she had no certainty of their exposure, no confidence in her calibration of film speed and f-stop, let alone which roll had been shot when. She hadn’t thought to label them and now there was no way of knowing what, or who, was going to swim up on these plastic ribbons of gelatin and silver halide. There was nothing to do but crack them all open and develop each and every one. Foster was still standing there, waiting.

  “I’m okay,” Rory said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Foster said, turning, and closing the door behind him.

  Light-safe bag. Can opener. She slid her hands into the bag and wedged the can opener under the lip of the cartridge until it gave. One after another. She closed her eyes, focusing, feeding one ribbon into the circular teeth of the plastic spool. Only Carmen had seen them together, finding them asleep, holding one another in the guest bedroom. Now they locked doors, even if Carmen wasn’t coming. She was thinking of the way Vivian took her hand and moved it for her, as if Rory’s hands were just a way for Vivian to know the outlines of her own body.

  “How’s it going in here?” Foster asked, head popped in the doorway.

  He had startled her, but she’d managed not to jerk her hands from the changing bag.

  “Fine,” Rory said.

  “It’s even hotter in the darkroom,” Foster said.

  “Right,” Rory said, uninterested in making conversation.

  “Are you planning on printing at all today?”

  She’d found canisters that would hold three negatives at once, but she wanted to process and dry them all and that was going to take—“No, maybe next time?” she said. If she appeared the right amount of withdrawn, teachers usually didn’t push her, but she sensed that the pile of film on the counter and her absences had piqued Foster’s curiosity.

  “Glad to know you’ll be returning,” Foster said and left again.

  Measure developer, add water, agitate, wait, agitate, wait again.

  Rory homo. She thought she had heard this, earlier, in the lunch line. Another girl, saying it under her breath. Rory told herself it was paranoia, that she hadn’t changed, that no one knew. How could they? She and Vivian, they existed in a separate realm, a light-safe bag, a world of locked doors and absent parents. Far away from Polk High. But it had been one of the senior girls. Part of the gaggle that always wore baby doll dresses and Doc Martens. Yes, someone had said it. And the giggling that had followed, from that menagerie of hair-tossing friends, was echoing in her ears. With each watery shake of the canister, there was laughter. Was this how she’d always been seen? Wind, wind, mix, agitate, wait, agitate. Rory homo, that girl had said. So sure, so knowing. What had changed? You think if you ignore it, it’ll just starve and die off ? June. Nothing had changed, except the girl.

  When Foster came back in, he looked surprised to see her still there. The clock: 4:34. She’d missed the last bus, but she started pulling her negatives from the drying line as if she still had a chance to catch it.

  “Hey now,” Foster said. “You might as well leave me something to grade.”

  * * *

  A MAN IN blue coveralls motioned for them to pull the trailer up to a slope-roofed Dutch barn. The aspen trees at Heritage were still green, leaves holding tight thanks to irrigation.

  Chap’s eyes were roving, her nostrils flared, as Gus eased her off the trailer. He put his hand to the silky skin of her clipped snout. “I know it,” he said. “This place is a lot.” He’d cleaned her up, top to bottom, helping her look the part. Adler still had to approve of her, so this was a catwalk kind of a day.

  Two more men in blue coveralls were coming toward them. “I’ve seen more men than horses here. Oh, thank heavens,” Joy said, recognizing one of them was Tomás.

  “Look at you,” Gus said. Tomás put his hand out to Chap, and she rested her muzzle in the cradle of it. His coveralls were too small, revealing the tops of his muck boots, but his head was high, the new member of an exclusive club.

  “She’s sure glad to see you,” Gus said.

  “I came to fetch her. And Billy here will show you to the breeding shed.”

  Billy, a white boy with the head of a mule, tipped his big face toward the road.

  “Like a cult round here,” Joy muttered. Gus had said nothing of what he’d already seen of Heritage, knowing Joy would find it as overly manicured and pretentious as the commercials, if not more so. He hadn’t wanted her detecting the covetousness in his voice.

  Gus lingered, watching Tomás and Chap move down the breezeway, until they were threaded into the emerald fabric of the grass on the other side of the barn. “Come on already,” Joy was hollering after him.

  The breeding shed was a covered ring with wood-paneled walls, and a door at each end, his and hers entryways. Billy gestured them toward a bench behind a padded wall, the only place to sit, it seemed, and left them there to wait.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t stay with her,” Joy said.

  “Because Adler doesn’t want to have to say no to our faces.” With no history of her bloodlines, no papers, Chap had a one-in-fifty shot of Adler letting this all happen.

  “Ridiculous. As if an animal’s made outta paper.”

  The deal Preston Fisk had struck on Gus’s behalf was that Cosmo’s Waltz would cover the mare once and only with Adler’s approval of Chap. There would be no guarantee of a live foal, as a papered broodmare in the proper breeding season would have received, but Adler’s compromise was that if, in eleven months, there was no foal, Gus would only have to pay the first half of the fee, five thousand dollars. And if there was a standing foal, only after Adler’s approval via video could Gus register Cosmo as the sire. Papers might not make an animal, but they were what made one worth any real money.

  They didn’t have to wait long. By the time they’d assessed the construction and general layout of the breeding shed, what Joy would have done differently, et cetera, et cetera, Adler was striding in with Wade Fisk following behind—of course. Men and boys in this echelon always made quick comrades.

  Joy stood up, muttering, “Well, will you look at that. They’re multiplying.”

  Gus extended his hand to Adler. There was still no sign of Chap being brought around, and the possibility that Adler had only come to tell him it wasn’t going to happen had his bad leg aching. “Gus Scott,” he said.

&nbs
p; “Call me Mark,” Adler said. His hand was as smooth as beach glass. A man with corporate sponsors. “Sit down, sit down. Wade here told me you’re recovering from a bit of a car accident. There’s no need for you to put yourself out today.”

  “So that’s a no?” Joy asked. “Just like that?”

  Adler laughed. “How do you do? You must be”—here Adler looked at Wade—“the sister I heard about. I understand you run your own breeding barn, up north, is that right?”

  “Quarter horses,” Joy said. Not meeting his offered hand. “Papered or not, I only care how they cut a cow. None of this cousin with cousins crap.”

  “Joy, quit,” Gus said. “I’m sorry,” he said to Adler. “Joy, let the man speak.”

  He shouldn’t have brought her. Wade was smiling.

  Adler cleared his throat. “Well, you’ll be pleased to know your mare’s temp is up and my men are bringing Cosmo over. They’ll put him in the pen around the way, until we’ve got Chap readied here. Boy’s going to be eager. Hasn’t seen a mare since end of May.”

  The light streaming in the opposite door went dark and Gus turned to see it was Tomás and Chaparral filling the doorway, then the light flashed bright again, filling back in around them, Chap’s coat glinting like a penny in a wishing well, and Gus had a flickering memory of the boy’s red hair.

  “I’d like to offer my help,” Joy said abruptly.

  “No, no,” Adler said. “I don’t ordinarily allow women in the shed, so let’s just have you two stay back here.” At this Adler moved toward the mare.

  “Fucking hell,” Gus said. “What a prick.”

  Tomás was still holding Chap. Adler pulled a leather strap from the wall and handed it to big-headed Billy, who brought the strap round Chap’s right front leg, cinching it so her hoof was held aloft. Chap looked relaxed enough, her neck and ears slack.

  “That ain’t necessary,” Joy said, her words tucked into his shoulder.

  “Let it be,” Gus said.

  This was no longer about making-ends-meet money for Sonja or even for himself. This foal and its imaginary destiny—its future on the event circuit, its ribbons, maybe even its subsequent offspring—were a matter of pride. Gus needed a new legacy, a better reason to make the news. Even if, right now, it meant he had to sit all stupid-like behind this padded wall with his sister seething beside him.