Kept Animals Page 2

  This was the first time Rory had ridden in a convertible. It was not unlike galloping downhill. Her hair was pulled back in its usual braid and tucked into her shirt, while June’s cropped box-dyed blue-black hair danced at the line of her chin.

  June said something that Rory couldn’t hear, then repeated it: “You work too hard.”

  Rory shook her head. She could have said the same about June, except she only rode her own horse and didn’t have to spend half the day forking out stalls.

  “You ever get away? Leave the canyon? Leave the barn?” June asked.

  “For school,” Rory said.

  “Polk High?”

  Rory nodded. Polk was in the valley, off the 101, cloaked in smog. She knew June went to a private school, somewhere in Brentwood or Santa Monica, near the ocean’s salt-scrubbed air.

  June had a broad, plain face with a slightly piggish nose and large white teeth. She was not what Rory thought people considered pretty, but her features were tidy, well-kept, her eyes the wide honest kind, though she often wore large round sunglasses. She always rode in a white cotton button-up shirt, tan britches, and tall polished black boots; dependable as a uniform. The opposite of Wade, who often showed up in swim trunks and a serape, smelling of Banana Boat. But Wade’s confidence shone brighter, a luxury in his own body that drew people’s attention.

  June stuck a cassette into the tape deck.

  “Lou Reed?” Rory asked.

  “Yeah,” June said. “The Velvet Underground, so yeah.” She nodded at Rory and turned it up. “How old are you?” June was practically yelling, competing with the wind and the music.

  “Fifteen.” Rory knew she was small for her age, muscled and flat-chested.

  “You ever smoke? Pot, I mean. You ever smoke weed?”

  Rory’s cheeks flushed.

  “Aw, I should get you high sometime. I kinda owe you—all your help with our horses.”

  It was rare for June not to come work her horse, Palmetto, but when Rory had the chance to ride him she considered it a pleasure. She’d have ridden Pal for free, but she thought better than to say so.

  Rory knew that plenty of the barn brats—this was a Mona phrase—smoked weed. She knew the wet-skunk smell. It had never interested her before. “Okay,” she said, louder than necessary as the car slowed, then stopped, and the wind stilled. Then more softly, “I mean, sure. I’d smoke with you. Whenever.”

  June smiled at her. They were stuck in a line of traffic now, backed up a half mile from the stop sign at the fork onto the main road, right alongside the gated entrance to the Price estate. One of the two winged gates was standing open, like a beckoning arm. The closed side of the gate read, 521 OLD CAN, the lettering in glinting hot silver. The other half—Rory had driven by a thousand times—completed it: YON ROAD. She’d never seen the gate open this way, never laid eyes on the front doors. They were double wide, heavily varnished wood, with an enormous clay pot of fountain grass on each side. A broad silver plate framed the doorbell, shiny as a mirror.

  “You know them? The Prices?” June asked. Everyone knew of the Prices.

  “No,” Rory said. “You?”

  “The daughter?” June said, her voice ticking up in a question. “Vivian? She transferred to our school, Merriam Prep, midyear. Seems nice enough, a little arrogant maybe. But it’s got to be tough being a movie star’s kid.”

  “Right,” Rory chided. But June wasn’t laughing. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. Really.” June tucked her hair behind her ear. “Wade sure thinks she’s all that.”

  “He thinks she’s pretty?” Rory asked. “Vivian?” She liked saying her name, the slip of it, like rope untangling.

  “You’ve seen pictures of her, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Rory said. She’d seen Vivian in Mona’s magazines, the kind full of gossip and wardrobe imperatives, but also—“Our house looks down on their yard.”

  “Bullshit,” June said, glancing at Rory. “Really?”

  It was another two and a half miles and a two-hundred-foot climb up the ridge before they would reach the bridge that led to Rory’s driveway. Carlotta’s sprawling house was perched above the dilapidated little A-frame they rented from her, and now that house, their house, hovered ironically above the opulent expanse of the Price estate. All the canyon’s walls were tiered with houses this way, a result of people putting themselves where they didn’t belong. After the winter rains, the pylons of some houses had become exposed, precarious as the legs of a new foal. But the Prices had dug themselves a big flat lot, and from Rory’s bedroom window, through a stand of scrub oak, she could see the landscaped gardens, the winding slate paths, the giant sandbox, the blue gem of their pool. “I swear. From my room. I’ve seen her there. Not a lot, but—” She’d watched Vivian swimming. Often. Countless times. Seen her lying at the edge of the pool, the top to her bikini flung aside. “I can see their pool.”

  “From your room? Shit, that’s something,” June said. “Maybe you’ll show me?”

  “Sure.”

  When the Prices bought the land, it had been only a hillside consisting of the oaks, a windbreak of eucalyptus, and a small adobe shack. Then orange-vested surveyors came scrambling around like colonizing ants. Bulldozers followed, digging out the slopes. They downed oaks and all the eucalyptus, chain saws buzzing, and set them on truck beds like piles of matchsticks. Rory had watched, hidden up behind the remaining trees, inconsequential as a squirrel. Eight months later, the adobe shack had stretched into a single-story estate, the shape of a flying white crane, with its wings holding—rumor was—eight bedrooms, all spotted with skylights. There’d been grumbling about the bulldozing, more Hollywood types moving in, until a sizable donation was made to the Topanga Historical Society. Rory knew she had a view others would want.

  At the fork, Rory directed June left, but they still had to wait for a break in traffic.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” Rory asked, amazed by her own boldness.

  “Vivian? I think she’s pale.”

  Pickup, car, van, car. Too many people with maps. June gunned it through the smallest break between oncoming cars, saying, “This heat has got to quit.”

  In the dirt turnaround that served as their driveway, June stopped short, and a net of dust hung in the air. Mona’s car was gone, and Rory let out a relieved breath. “She’s at work.”

  “Your mom?”

  “She’s a bartender,” Rory said.

  “A bartender,” June repeated, nodding.

  “In Reseda,” Rory said, wishing she hadn’t. She untucked her braid from her shirt and gripped the end of it. A nervous habit that Mona was always pointing out.

  “Huh. So, nobody’s home.” June cut the engine.

  “You want to come in? There’s beer. Some harder stuff, too.”

  “You drink?” June was running lip gloss over her lips, checking it in the rearview.

  “Sometimes.” A lie, but the kind with a wish folded up inside, a wish for another version of herself.

  “Right,” June said, puckering her lips. “For sure.”

  * * *

  ON THE PHONE, Sarah’s doctor said, “You sound overtired.”

  Sarah knew by the occasional flare of sound coming from the east end of the house that Vivian was home. Charlie was in his high chair, painting the tray with the remains of his dinner. She’d given him something green. Eventually, Vivian would come out and make herself food, but not until Sarah had gone to bed—however temporarily. It was a routine, Charlie’s calling out for her, again and again, then clinging to her neck as she tried to soothe him, groping for her breasts as she stroked his back, shushing him, until finally she would relent and feed him in the glider. Then, when she was sure he was truly asleep—those heavy-lidded eyes!—she would rise, moving toward the crib as seamlessly as she was able, only to have his eyes inevitably pop open as soon as she bent toward the railing of his bed. His torso would go rigid and he’d thrust his
feet to the floor, scrambling away, running from the room, down the hall, flopping onto the carpet. She did not recall Vivian’s infancy rendering her so powerless, but surely this forgetting was nature’s trickery. She’d anticipated Vivian’s teenage years would leave her feeling diminished—and oh, how they did—but this dual attack on her wits … “I’m just not myself right now,” she said to her doctor.

  Ever since Everett had left, yet again, she and Vivian had fallen into a pattern of avoidance. Vivian could simultaneously own a room and not exist in it. She was always stretching out by the pool or putting her feet up on the couch, a Discman tethered to her head, her mind elsewhere while her vanity seemed to pulse, awaiting a spotlight. Her presence was an invitation for Sarah to move to another room. But maybe that was okay. Maybe it was simply Charlie’s turn to have her now. The baby she had so feverishly wanted.

  On the phone, the doctor asked again, “Are you still breast feeding?” He would refuse to up her dosage if she said that she was. They’d had this discussion before.

  * * *

  GUS WAS IN the back of the main office, the room that had been Carlotta’s office; a picture of her son and daughter was still there on the wall. He’d had a drink, maybe three, enough to dull the senses before he cut. It had been a long time, but this was a beautiful animal, a thing to put his mind to, to do right. Mona wouldn’t be home for hours. He poured another drink, but then set it aside, a reward for when he was through the hard part.

  The fox hung from a ceiling beam, one paw strung with twine. He held the limp paw and drew his knife in a ring around it, scoring the skin, before drawing the blade down the flank, where the fur shifted from red to gray, stopping at the tail.

  Outside, the ranch had gone still; a lone mockingbird, a horse’s gusty exhale, and the hum of the freezer behind him were the only sounds.

  It didn’t take much to tug the skin away, separating the hide from the musculature inside, but then there was the odor, that iron tint of blood, enough to overpower the whiskey. He sat down. Every time, this smell did him in. Sissy Gussie. His sister, Joy, she never cried when their father hung a deer to drain. And now she was more than just a ranch manager—she had her own land back in Wyoming. A man can get used to anything, his father always said, implying Gus wasn’t one. It was a phrase Gus still repeated to himself when any complaint took hold. Every jealousy. He knew that wasn’t how his father intended it, that he would’ve never put up with what Gus was dealing with. Not from his wife. But Gus wasn’t his father, thank god.

  He threw back the reward whiskey and refreshed it, stepping out the back door for air, the smell of the cooling earth. The stars were tipping and swimming around him. So he was drunk. He could admit that. Something to eat, that was what he needed, then he could get back to it. When had he last eaten anyway?

  Earlier, he’d seen Jorge sitting with Sonja, his wife, in the shade of the sycamore up against their squat stucco house, speaking in the abbreviated murmur of spouses. Happy spouses. Jorge had been eating from a paper plate—stewed meat, maybe peppers and onions, rolled into a tortilla. That’s what Gus needed: home-cooked food.

  Sonja was always cooking for Jorge and Tomás, her son, and usually making enough for the three other men who also lived on the grounds, in modest quarters above the school horse tack room. When Mona hadn’t wanted to help with Carlotta—despite the fact that she lived directly above them, that they rented their own house from her—Gus had hired Sonja to come and look after her, make her meals, too. After that, he’d been offered a plate of Sonja’s food on occasion, but he knew better than to expect it.

  Still, he was hungry now. And the light in their house was on, a beckoning orange glow. Leftovers, he’d only ask for leftovers. And tomorrow he would apologize for the disruption.

  * * *

  VIVIAN WAS IN her room, on the phone with McLeod. This was the third time she’d called him since they’d moved, since her transfer from Westerly, where McLeod taught AP English, to Merriam Prep, yet another private school where yet another white man in his early thirties stood before his pupils (half of them hungover) and tried lamely to avoid meeting her eyes only to end up looking at her tits.

  “How does it feel to be a stereotype?” Vivian asked. “He even wears the same cologne.”

  McLeod sighed. Everything on his end was overly loud as his “home office” (she had learned this on their second tele-soirée) was actually his garage, acoustically resonant, but most important (maybe?) it was outside of his wife’s domain. “Is this why you’re calling, Vivian?” He had given her his number when she’d taken too much “R & R” from classes at Westerly, offering to “be available” to help her catch up, only she never called until she’d started at the new school. “To insult me?”

  “Noooo,” Vivian crooned. “I’m calling because my dad’s been away for so long that he might as well be at war, and I’m desperate for a father figure, but not a real father figure, McLeod, just the figure part, the part that wants my breath in his ear.”

  “I can’t do this, Vivian.”

  “Yes, you can, McLeod. Play along. I’m bored in my ivory tower. And so hot.” Vivian had muted her television: clips of President Bill Clinton in a press conference, followed by various men, Colin Powell and others, all in uniform, the scroll on the screen: Gays in the Military? That fucking question mark.

  “Where’s your dad now?” McLeod asked.

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Vivian intoned.

  “It’s better than nothing,” McLeod said.

  “Canada. Is Toronto in Canada?” Vivian squeaked, playing dumb. “That’s where Daddy is this time.” Then her voice went flat again; disappointed. “It’s not what he said he’d do. Clinton, I mean.”

  “It’s progress.”

  “You’re all so smitten with him,” Vivian said. She clicked over to MTV. From her bed, she could see across the patio and pool to the other wing of the house, to her parents’ room (more mausoleum), and to Charlie’s room, where Sarah was drawing the curtains, as if this would keep him in bed. “Why don’t you tell me about your wife instead? How is Mrs. McLeod?”

  * * *

  WHEN JUNE CAME inside, Rory saw her house as if she too had never seen it before: the trail of crusted dishes, the dripping faucet, the dead flies on the windowsill. June moved past her and pulled a glass from the kitchen cupboard, tearing away the last paper towel on the roll to clean the glass’s rim. She ran the water a solid minute before she filled the glass, downed it, then looked at Rory. “So, where’s your room?”

  Upstairs, June slipped off her sandals, set her sunglasses down on the dresser, and moved into the room. She paused to touch the battered camera that Rory kept on a hook beside the bookshelf. A Canon AE-1 that Mona had given her earlier that year, having unearthed it from the bar’s lost and found. Rory had accepted it indifferently until Mona elbowed her, saying, “Come on, I know you wanted one.” They were uncomfortable, these moments when Mona knew her like this, though Rory couldn’t say why.

  June was in the bathroom, looking at the two taxidermied birds Rory kept on a wicker table beside the sink. The ones Rory had snuck off with as a little girl, before Gus could pack them away, believing she was rescuing them from the horror of being sealed up in a dark cardboard box. A red-winged blackbird and a towhee. Each frozen atop mesquite perches, permanently alert.

  “Those are weird,” June said, brushing off her hands. Then she pulled her britches down and sat on the toilet, the stream of her urine audible. Rory turned, fiddling with the knob of the floor fan, the room suddenly hot. “But it is nice up here,” June said.

  It was nice up here. It was always a relief, to remember her separateness from Gus and Mona, from how they lived below. Her room had been the attic, long, like a train car with a pitched ceiling, but with three windows that sat above the tree line, letting in a play of light against the unpainted pine walls. Gus had refinished the floors and he’d managed to turn the storage room into a narrow bathroom.
I didn’t marry rich, but I sure married handy, Mona had said, rubbing his neck. Years ago, Rory had begun cutting images from magazines, from Equine Times, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, and the more obscure news magazines that Carlotta let her cart away, and tacking them to the walls. She’d chosen some for their faraway destinations, others for their composition, their intimacy. She’d looked at the faces in these pictures for so long and so often that she felt she knew them. Otherwise, Rory kept the room spare: her bed, a rocking chair that Carlotta had given her in one of her manic unloading of things, the single dresser, a bookshelf, and the industrial metal fan—its low breeze lifting the corners of the pictures now. June was holding down the image of two women walking across a beige wash of desert, each balancing a basket, a shine in their eyes, aware of the photographer.

  “You headed to Kenya, Scott?” June asked, her finger to the caption.

  “Probably not,” Rory said. Scott was Gus’s last name, but Rory didn’t correct her.

  “Sure you are,” June said, pulling a bag of weed from her pocket.

  * * *

  GUS KNOCKED AND leaned into the doorframe. He heard the inside of the house go quiet. He knocked again, and Sonja opened the door. Her face was blurry, but he registered some antipathy. Behind her, Tomás stepped into the living room and, seeing Gus, he stopped, lifting one hand to wave. He had his headphones on, his head bobbing. Gus went to lift his hand to wave back, but he’d been leaning on that hand and now he was moving into the kitchen, past Sonja, trying to explain, “I’m not here to make work. I promise. I’m only, I’m hungry—I couldn’t stop thinking about some food. Your cooking, Sonja. I haven’t eaten since—”

  “Señor, you’re here so late,” Jorge said. There he was! Sitting at the little kitchen table in the corner of the room, a can of beer perspiring in front of him. The chair opposite him slid back from the table as if by magic. “Siéntate, mi amigo.”