Kept Animals Read online

  Tomás was murmuring, “Lo siento, Rory, lo siento.”

  Johnny bent down and picked up the binder, his shoe pushing the letter deeper under the couch, almost out of view. “I told you,” he said. “I had a feeling.”

  Wade walked over to Rory, and without looking at her he took hold of the straps of her camera, wrapping and tightening them around her throat. “Wade,” she said. “Please.”

  “You’ve been—” He bent down, picking up one of the proof sheets, dragging Rory with him. “You’ve been fucking her, haven’t you? I tell you to stay off my sister, you don’t listen. Then that’s not enough? You have to go after Vivian? What kind of fucking voodoo bitch are you? She’s no lesbian.”

  Tomás, Rory would understand later, had picked up the Silver Trophy cup from the end of the desk and brought it down onto Wade’s head, so that his grip on her went slack. She fell onto her hands, but then Tomás was pulling her up off the floor and steering her toward the back door, screaming at her to run. Rory heard the blunt crash of Johnny slamming Tomás against the wall, picture frames dropping from their nails.

  I briefly thought that I was safe. I had run up the hillside and had made it behind Tomás’s house. The air was so thick with dust, I wiped my tongue with the back of my hand and spat in the dirt. That was when I heard, above all the rattling of the trees, the gunshot. I froze, at first, as one does. As if you have to hold very still to know if it is your own heart that will or will not keep beating. Of course, I thought, they’ve killed Tomás. I didn’t doubt that they were capable of that. And then I was running again, sure that I was next. I was running up the fire roads, the path that I had taken months before, looking for ground soft enough to break and bury the fox. There were no houses up there. There was no one I knew. And then there were headlights piercing the ground in front of me, almost as if steering my way, until they were right up on me. It was Tomás’s car.

  She had turned around to see, to find Tomás in the window, but he wasn’t driving and before she could begin to run again, the car came up on her, the lip of the fender meeting her calves, knocking her down. She was on the ground, rocks gouging into her knees as she tried to stand again. Her camera had both broken her fall and knocked the breath from her. Up ahead were the rotund bodies of two water towers. Water towers you could see from the road, from Old Topanga. She had run farther than she realized and she had found traction in the toes of her boots when Wade grabbed the strap of her camera again, leading her by the throat, a dragged dog. He was talking, his words moving on a higher plane, the wind making layers out of the sounds: the scraping of her body over gravel, the quaking of trees and brush, a muffled voice, a cotton-choked, crying voice—Tomás. She wept. Tomás, help me. And above all this there was Wade talking to Johnny, having a conversation as if at the table of a restaurant. “They take this leather strap, see, like this.”

  A belt is ripped clear of its loops.

  The thing about trauma is that even after it is over, it is still happening. It is a memory in motion, forever present. I have tried to outrun it, but I am still that girl, and she is me.

  And she is holding the straps of her camera and kicking at the ground, trying to get to her feet. Wade hits her in the face and blood fills her mouth; and he is still talking. “They call it a hobbler, cause it keeps the horse from kicking out, right?” Her hands are held to her back and he is lashing them with his belt and she is kicking and kicking, but there is a black sheet in the upper third of her vision, a curtain closing. “Tomás,” she says, but her tongue has gone fat in her mouth. “Quit fucking kicking,” Johnny says, and he swings his leg back and he lifts her up by the belly and flips her over onto her back, her arms twisting into the knot of the belt, and she sees now the bandanna that has been tied across Tomás’s face, muffling him, and Johnny is holding the gun to his head. She turns away and throws up all over her arm and shoulder. “Sick,” Johnny says. “Fucking sick.”

  “That is precisely why neither one of us is gonna touch her,” Wade says.

  “You’re fucking brilliant, Wade.” Johnny laughs. “Always get a wetback to do your dirty work.”

  The sun would be up soon, breaking over the ridge, but Rory could already see clear enough how they had bound Tomás’s hands, how they had already won.

  It is the kind of wind that rips through the trees, snapping branches away, scurrying trash cans down the road, flinging rocks up from the ground and throwing them back down. All god’s creatures wait it out in their dens. Birds root themselves in the densest shrubs, tucking their beaks. And the horses press their faces into the corners of their stalls.

  Rory had closed her eyes, willing herself to black out, wishing someone would kill her. She felt the weight of Tomás drop down, the cold metal of the buttons of his jeans on the insides of her calves, his bare skin against her thighs. Someone had torn her underwear away. “Get the fuck in her,” Johnny kept saying, panting. He had his hand in her hair, lifting her head, shaking her as if she were a doll whose eyes he could rattle awake. She could hear him, his hand rubbing himself. She felt it on her face. She threw up again.

  “You’re a sick fuck,” Wade said.

  “Look who’s got the butch tied up and a gun to the spic’s head.”

  They both laughed, sharp, brusque laughter. Someone kicked Tomás, called him a nag, a burro, told him to keep moving. She had stopped struggling. “I think she likes it.” She let dirt crawl into her mouth. She felt Tomás’s tears pooling at the base of her throat before everything slipped away. Only her body remained.

  Tomás. I don’t know his last name, Charlie. Maybe it is his mother’s, Delgado. Maybe Flores, for Jorge. But in all the years I knew him, I never asked. I called him my friend, but I never knew his full name. He was there when I woke up, wiping my face clean. Crying beside me. I’ve never felt so many things, the chaos of so many emotions, though I have seen it on thousands of other faces since.

  What I wanted was for everything to burn.

  The car was gone, of course. It was found weeks later. They’d pushed it off a cliff in Tuna Canyon. It was charred down to the frame. Wade magically disappeared for a while. I didn’t look for him, but June tracked us down in Wyoming years later, called to tell me—of all people—that her brother had died. An overdose, she said, not a suicide. Johnny Naughton went to prison, I know that. He was arrested for slashing tires and pouring sand into the gas tanks of protesters who were rallying to keep Malibu beaches accessible to the public. When they fingerprinted him he came up wanted in two separate cases, one of assault, another for armed robbery.

  Eventually, Mrs. Keating and her husband, Harold, bought the ranch, believing it was worth rebuilding.

  Why do I think you will want to go there? I suppose because you can.

  We aren’t all given the same choices, Charlie. We aren’t all so fortunate.

  The gas pan that Johnny had supposedly replaced for Tomás either hadn’t been repaired or had cracked again when they drove that car up the fire road. Either way, I saw the dashed line of dripped fuel, the wetness on the earth, as we staggered back to the barn, fighting the winds. I had a cigarette in my mouth, a lighter in my hand, and a singular, wrathful thought in my head. And then there was fire.

  * * *

  ACCORDING TO ARTICLES I’ve since read, a blue Ford pickup truck was reported near where the blaze began, a truck that they traced to two newly minted firefighters. Men who fell under the scrutiny of a blame-hungry community and were accused of setting the fire so that they could put it out (they’d conveniently had a garden hose in the back of the truck) and go on to be hailed as heroes. One witness came to their defense, saying the power went out seconds before he saw flames, that the high winds had to have downed a power line, dropping a spark into the tinder-dry grass. Years later, those firefighters were acquitted and went on to win a lawsuit against the county for defamation.

  Still, investigators ruled the fire had to have been arson.

  * * *

>   On the phone, Vivian said to me, “Any one of us could’ve started that fire.”

  “But you weren’t there. You were home.”

  “Yeah, I left. Was I supposed to stay? I was hurting, Charlie. And when I got home there were people sleeping on my floor. Friends, supposedly. People who hadn’t even called me after my brother died. But a photo shoot? By all means. June was already gone. I went looking for her. There was puke on my kitchen counter. A horror show. It took everything out of me just to kick those people out. I wanted to be left alone. Funny, right?”

  “And then you drank some more.”

  “I did, yeah. Am I supposed to be apologizing to you? I went looking for her, you know. When I saw Wade’s car was gone again—that he hadn’t even come in the house to yell at me, call me names—I knew then. Not what, just something. What was I supposed to do?”

  “You could’ve called the police.”

  “You haven’t been listening,” Vivian said.

  “So, you called your friend.”

  She snorted. “He was a better friend than anyone else had been.”

  * * *

  I picture McLeod driving up the canyon, his hands gripping the wheel, disbelieving that he has finally given in, comforting himself that this was a truly earnest cry for help, that this time she really needed—she was quite specific—him. Only he could help. He lights a cigarette to calm his nerves, this nascent habit of his so blatantly connected to their conversations that with each inhale he can hear her breathing in his ear, a Pavlovian conditioning—no, it is a sickness, his preoccupation with this girl. His hands shake as he steers his aging Peugeot up the canyon roads, the combination of nicotine and curves (perhaps his conscience) making him nauseated. As he crests the hill she cracks her window and drops his cigarette through its narrow opening.

  * * *

  The two firefighters’ stories never changed; they’d been driving to the valley to visit a friend when they happened upon the first flames. Their intentions were good, but the fire had been more than they could battle alone.

  * * *

  GUS DROVE STRAIGHT through, only stopping once for gas.

  As he climbed the roads into the canyon, the wind was blowing fierce, making a tin can of the trailer behind him.

  At the ranch, Sancho was steering the tractor around, finishing the morning feed. A hat on his head to protect his eyes and a bandanna covering his mouth, the dust in the air was that bad.

  The office lights were on, but Gus didn’t see anyone inside. Robin’s car wasn’t there yet.

  Gus unloaded the mare on his own. “Easy, girl,” he kept saying.

  He’d thought he would let her run around in the turnout, but she was too fresh, too scatterbrained by the wind, likely to hurt herself. He drew the stall door closed, her bedding lifting up around her in a tiny cyclone.

  Of all the people to whom he wanted to make amends—a running list in his mind—it was Sarah Price, the memory of her at least, that he took some comfort in. He thought now of the night in the hospital, what she had said when she leaned down and whispered to him: We should have known. There was comfort in the collective we, that the blame was not his alone, but there was also comfort in the idea that they could have known, that there was a way of being in the world that could elude disaster, or at least limit its possibility. He’d have given her his life in exchange for her son’s. If he could go back, he would have thrown the truck into reverse and blocked the road, blocked the path of the car that he had known was following him. He’d have gotten out of the truck and moved the fox to the side of the road.

  At the house there was a black Peugeot in the dirt turnaround, a car he didn’t know. Yet another friend of Mona’s? But that didn’t matter anymore. He was massaging words, trying to find how to say what needed to be said, wanting to be deferential, apologetic, to establish some peace in the house before he told them that he was going back to Little Snake for a while, that he wanted some more time with Joy, though he already suspected he would be staying on for good.

  He’d not yet gotten to the door when Vivian Price came running from the house, going for the car. “Gus,” she said, knowing who he was. She had on a well-worn T-shirt and jean shorts ripped in half a dozen places, their pockets hanging from the holes.

  A man came out behind her, saying, “We can’t just barge into someone’s house like that.” He was wearing tortoiseshell glasses, a clean white pressed shirt tucked into belted trousers, his sleeves rolled up, sweat blooming on his face. The sort of person who seemed innocent enough to cause real trouble.

  “Rory isn’t here,” Vivian said, above the racket of the wind. “I’m worried.”

  “Can I help you?” Gus said, more concerned right then with this man, his air of thievery.

  He offered his hand to Gus. “I’m a friend,” he said, “Mickey McLeod. I meant”—he was tripping over his own tongue, shaking his head—“I’m Vivian’s teacher. Used to be.”

  “Gus,” Vivian said again. “I have such a bad feeling. I have no idea where she is.” She was grabbing Gus’s arm. “I thought—I don’t know what I was thinking. Wade and Johnny—there were pictures.”

  “She’s been through a lot,” McLeod said, like Gus didn’t already know.

  That’s when the first sirens came screaming past.

  * * *

  EIGHTEEN THOUSAND ACRES, nearly four hundred homes, a man who went to save his cat, an older couple whose car didn’t start fast enough—a fire that began on the mountain’s farthest peak and then went hopscotching over canyons, moving west and north, an unfathomably bright wave gliding down the hills, over to Malibu, igniting new blazes, lapping up homes, and meeting the shore within minutes.

  The worst part, Grandad said, wasn’t the heat or that it was nearly impossible to breathe, but the fact of the horses.

  “There was no outrunning fire like that,” Grandad said. “There was nothing we could do but stay and try to save them. We gathered them into one ring—fifty-four horses in this arena-turned-pen. That’s all there was to do. Round them up and turn the fire hoses on. We were aiming for the trees, the grasses—whatever would burn the fastest. Trying to wet down a perimeter around us, with our backs turned on these frightened animals. They were so scared. Bodies slicked in sweat, white-lathered, and kicking out, turning on each other in surges of anxiety. The air was so thick with smoke, the heat so hellish. And we had to stop them from jumping out of the ring. It was the safest place that they could be, but every now and then one would jump the railing. Your mama, she never got over that. Wild horses,” he said. “They catch the smell of smoke in the distance and they move in the opposite direction. But not horses like those, horses who have only ever known the four walls of their stalls. If that’s the only home an animal has ever known, they will run for the barn even when it’s the barn that’s on fire.”

  * * *

  I made the turn up Old Topanga, the creek running alongside the truck. I stopped at the sycamore tree, where Mama said people sometimes left balloons. There is no longer a wall or gates outside the Price estate. Though the house survived the fire, it is a husk in disrepair, sold off after the earthquake in ’94.

  As I drive on, the spaces between houses widens, allowing for the rock faces that jut from the hillsides, white and pocked as the moon. Every turn is a blind one, every corner unknown, yet somehow familiar to me. And then the road opens and I see the silhouettes of grazing horses on a hillside, the surrounding grasses grown long, the chaparral dense and verdant after a long winter of rains.

  I wish I could have come here as a passenger in Mama’s car. I wish I were five, or ten, or even fifteen, but I wish we had come here together. I would have put my hand out the window and let it ride the wind, begging her to look, getting her to smile. I would have told her then that none of what happened was her fault. That she could hold my hand and talk to me and that she wouldn’t get hurt for loving me.

  I would have told you this, Mama, for us both. But chaos,
that was what you knew.

  I have pulled over to look at the vista that you described to me, the ranch that you loved: the rows of paddocks, the windbreak of cypress trees, the three smooth-planed riding rings, the rebuilt barns, and the corrals, the rock teetering at the edge of the property. All of it held together by the surrounding hills, like a bowl made of two cupped hands. It is early July, but the sun is still gentle with its heat. The sweet odor of hay and horses hangs in the air.

  I pull down under the wrought-iron archway that still reads LEANING ROCK EQUESTRIAN and park the truck, alongside a car that could very well belong to Robin Sharpe; Mrs. Keating kept her on for continuity’s sake. Walking down the driveway, toward the school horse corral, I wonder who might recognize my amber eyes, this brown hair, the sun-thickened freckles over my nose. You wrote that I have my father’s eyes. That my height is his, as I have always suspected, but it is also that of a hog farmer, hopefully long dead by now.

  Which stories we honor, you said, that is the difference between being kept and being free.

  When I find him, he is stealing time in the shade, alone, as I so often have, whittling balsa, or maybe oak, with a pocketknife.

  When he looks up, I suspect he will have that tic of cordiality—the standard wave, the half-formed smile—that working a ranch demands. I will wait. I won’t respond, but after one or maybe three heartbeats, he might ask, “Do I know you?”

  “No,” I’ll say. “But twenty-two years ago, you and Mama, you buried an animal together, a fox, up in the hills.” I’ll look toward the summit, beyond his house. “She told me you helped her that day, that you held her hand while she said a kind of prayer.” I might see recognition in his eyes then, his mouth gently open. “She told me you said a prayer for the little boy, too, that you cried together. You helped her that day and then again, months later. She blamed herself for that fire. And she said you were probably living with a similar kind of guilt.”