Kept Animals Read online

  “Is that true?” he said, “Well, I would’ve cleaned if I’d thought you were coming.” Had she really never been inside his house? Three years of her going up to Carlotta and he had never offered her a glass of water? He recalled her pulling the scarf from the lamp, the door slamming around the corner from their yellow-tiled kitchen. He hadn’t sat with Jorge for very long after that. El Jefe. That was their name for him, just never to his face.

  “Sonja, do you still want to be Carlotta’s nurse? I’m sure we could figure that out, if you wanted.” His neck felt hot and tight.

  “You could,” Sonja said. “I’m sure.”

  Robin had called to tell him that Sonja was talking about moving Tomás away with her, that she was considering staying in Chino. Gus had felt a flash of shameful relief, but Robin’s concern was about good labor, how long it might take to find new help, the time to train them. “Do you need the work—” he asked. If he needed money, they had to need it more.

  Sonja threw the envelope at him then. “Jorge wanted you to read that. He says you’re suffering, too.” Her eyes moved over him. “Are you?” she asked, her face drawing together. “Are you suffering?”

  An acrid taste rose into his mouth. He shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. “You’re a man in your home. With your family. You’re where you should’ve been all along.”

  Gus pulled at the skin of his neck, a collar too tightly cinched. He had yet to touch the envelope. It had been folded and refolded, its creases yellowed. “Is he okay? Jorge?”

  “You know.” Sonja crinkled her nose. “Más o menos.” Sarcasm. She stepped abruptly toward him. “Do you remember what you said to me? That we are always working? Or were you too drunk? He was working. He thought it was his job to see you home.”

  “He was drunk, too,” Gus said. He could hear his own pulse and the echo of it in his cast.

  “No.” She had yelled. He had never seen her yell, how her body inflated with it, lifting her. “Don’t do that,” she said, quieter now. “Papi had three beers. Never more. And only for his sleep, for his shoulder. That was all.” She touched her shoulder. “It never healed, not right, because he never told anyone. A caballo kicked him, when he first started with her. He didn’t want to complain.” All the times he had seen Sonja kneading Jorge’s shoulder. “It was probably broken in there, but he didn’t want to be trouble. Prison is all trouble.” A phantom spider crawled across his cheek, up behind his eye. He put his hand to his face. She turned her back on him. “Go on, open it already,” she said.

  Gus had driven through Chino. He knew the beige fortress of the prison, the sun-scorched fields, Mount Baldy in the distance.

  He lifted his leg and set it down. Sonja moved into the kitchen. The postmark was a week old.

  Dear Mr. Flores,

  Not from Jorge but to him.

  Dear Mr. Flores,

  I am writing to tell you that I do not blame you for the death of my son, Charles Price.

  I hope that this will bring you some peace.

  Sarah

  Sarah Price. Gus’s pulse went rapid and loud, his leg throbbing. Beneath the long loops of her handwriting were Jorge’s stiff, penciled words: Gus, I want peace for you, too. Jorge.

  * * *

  RORY SUGGESTED THEY skip the parking lot and get home. She hadn’t been feeling right for a few days.

  “No way,” June said. “You can sleep in tomorrow.” The barn was closed Mondays. Never days Rory looked forward to, navigating around Gus, his moods and naps.

  They sat in silence, dropped down heavily into their high, until Wade came tearing into the lot, House of Pain’s “Jump Around” thumping from his stereo.

  “Shit,” June said. “I’m too stoned to deal with him.”

  He parked right up next to Rory’s side and leaned out his window, peering into June’s convertible like it was a cookie jar. “I knew you two would be here drooling over each other.” Without touching the ground he stepped from his truck into June’s backseat, smelling of mouthwash and Ivory soap. He’d changed, too, no longer in britches, but a pair of Levi’s and clean white T-shirt, a braided leather necklace against his chest. Rory felt itchy with dry sweat.

  “I thought you had somewhere to be,” June said.

  “Patience, Butch. I stopped at Trouble’s to have myself a scrub.”

  “Trouble’s mom’s house, you mean.”

  Trouble was their nickname for Johnny Naughton. Sometimes Trouble, sometimes Johnny Naughty. He had a shaved head and skin that freckled and peeled. A more-than-unfortunate complexion for a surfer that left him looking thirtysomething rather than the twentysomething he was. He’d gone to Polk High a decade ago, but Rory had heard the bad-boy folklore, how he ran with the Surf Nazis, believing they owned certain waters, that the ocean was theirs to patrol, and how he’d had to leave the country for six months while “some drama” blew over with a girl. “One minute she liked it. The next minute she didn’t.” That was how Johnny Naughton talked. When he wasn’t surfing, he worked at a classic car shop on the Westside, which was how Wade and June knew him; he’d worked on their cars. He came to the barn sporadically, always eyeballing girls while he waited for Wade. Wade was endlessly amused by him. Gus had called Johnny a railbird, a lowlife, telling him to get lost. Bad for business, Gus said, but now the barn brats just giggled at him encouragingly.

  Wade had slipped the joint from Rory’s fingers, winking at her. June swapped one tape out for another.

  “Lou Reed? Seriously? How about you Wild Side up some Zeppelin or Floyd?”

  “For sure,” June said, turning Lou Reed up.

  “Whatever, Butch. It smells like a bong in here. You oughta get yourself one of those little trees.”

  He laid his head back and stretched his legs. Rory saw him reach inside his jeans and adjust himself. He blew a smoke ring and broke it open with a lancing finger before it drifted away. June had gone small. Rory reached down and brought her camera to her lap. She fiddled with it, adjusting the aperture, then turned it on Wade, centering his face in the viewfinder. She felt June watching her. Rory had recognized her camera’s ability to shift a dynamic, to alter the energy between her and everyone else. Usually she felt she’d gained something, a kind of solidity. Wade blew a smoke ring at the lens. Click. “You like that, Scott? You want me to show you how?”

  He was easy to photograph, lithe, handsome, the strong nose with a breathy flare of the nostrils, the ruddy complexion. The same features that presented themselves as cheerful and organized on June’s round face were more primal on Wade. Perhaps the difference was his mouth, how it was always a little bit open, revealing his teeth, the points of his canines.

  Rory rested the Canon in her lap and took the joint from him, blowing one perfect ring.

  “Not bad,” Wade said.

  “Not bad at all,” June said, straightening herself behind the wheel. “In case you haven’t noticed, Rory could teach you plenty.”

  Several times that week, Robin had told Wade he should watch Rory’s form over fences. She’d had to steel her mind, refocus herself in the saddle—it was easier to be the one doing the looking.

  “Kiss my ass,” Wade said to June.

  “Get your feet off my leather.” June reached back and smacked at his dusty flip-flops.

  “I’m cleaner than you two twats.”

  The tape abruptly ejected itself.

  “What the fuck?” June said. “Johnny can’t fix shit.”

  “Thank god,” Wade said. “I was ready to bail.”

  With the music gone, the sound of retching was suddenly audible, coming from the creek bed behind the dumpster. Wade put his hand on the back of Rory’s seat, leaning forward to look, and part of Rory’s braid caught in his grip. Her eyes went wet. It was a homeless man in dust-caked clothing—his hands were on the dumpster, pulling himself into view. Rory had seen him walking the road before.

  “Just what we need, another drunk-ass beaner
,” Wade said, lying back down.

  Rory rubbed the sting at her scalp.

  “You got beaner in you, don’t you, P.G.?” Wade said.

  P.G. A bastardization of the nickname Jorge had given her years ago: Pequeña Guerrera, Little Warrior.

  “Wade, shut up. You are killing my high,” June said.

  “Come on, June. You know you’ve wondered. I always knew you had beaner in you, Rory. Maybe something fancier, some Cherokee or like real Indian?”

  “You’re an idiot,” June said.

  “Explains why Tomás has such a hard-on for you,” Wade said.

  “He does not,” Rory blurted.

  “I mean, you’re cute. Don’t get me wrong. Nothing wrong with a little Hispandex. Trouble thinks you’re all that. I know he looks like a skinhead, but those guys really just want a piece of spice for themselves.”

  Rory’s face went hot. The homeless man was halfway submerged in the dumpster, riffling for anything edible.

  “Trouble would fuck a goat,” June said.

  “You calling your girlfriend a goat, Butch?”

  “You are so vulgar,” June said. “Enough.”

  She knew it was because her skin went an olive brown in the summer and because of her hair—the hair Mona refused to let her cut, that she kept braided back because otherwise it was so dense and wild. She didn’t know what she was, except for her mother’s side: all black Irish, Mona said. And Rory had no memory of her father and had only braved asking about him once: “Your father wasn’t anything,” Mona said. Which seemed true enough. He had never been anything to Rory anyway. “I’m Irish,” Rory said, looking at June. “Not that it matters.”

  “It doesn’t,” June said.

  Wade smiled. “Aren’t you the sweetest, June. That’s what I’ll call you two, Sugar and Spice.”

  * * *

  Wade left when the parking lot lights snapped on, scrambling into his truck as if he were late. “Don’t miss your curfew,” June hollered as he spun the truck around.

  “He has a curfew?” Rory asked, dimly.

  “Nah,” June said, a part of her still tucked away, protected from Wade. Rory didn’t want to go home just yet. “He’s not always such an asshole,” June said.

  “He didn’t get to me,” Rory said. “I mean, I’m used to it.”

  “Yeah,” June said, running her hands over the steering wheel. “I know what you mean.”

  “Trouble’s worse, anyway,” Rory said. The moon was up, a sharp sickle behind the trees.

  “Oh, Johnny’s not so bad,” June said. “Where’d you think all this weed comes from?”

  “Oh,” Rory said. “Right.” She hadn’t wondered before.

  “Can I ask you something?” June said. “I mean, will you be honest with me?”

  “Of course,” Rory said.

  She figured this would be about Fresno, and was preparing a flattering response about the likelihood of June’s win, but then June asked, “Do you still sit outside? On your balcony? Watching Vivian?”

  “What? No.” This was true. She hadn’t. She couldn’t. Not anymore. She had drawn the curtain back, she had looked, yes, but she hadn’t seen any of them and even the few times she’d realized she was waiting to, she’d stopped—understanding that she could never look down there in the same way again. The cherished thrill was gone; there was no innocent witnessing. “It’s not the same anymore,” Rory said. “I wish I’d never looked, that I didn’t have that view at all. That we hadn’t seen them that night—”

  “Hey,” June said. “But that’s the night we became friends.” Her voice was chirpy now, changed. “Just tell me you aren’t going to look. I mean, because I just think that would be—”

  “Wrong,” Rory said. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Good,” June said, almost cutting her off. “Well, come on. Switch seats with me. I’ve been thinking, I should teach you how to drive.”

  * * *

  SONJA CAME BACK in with a glass of water and his pill bottles. “You take these?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Gus said. Sweet mercy. His mind thrummed with the anticipation of relief. “Just two codeine.”

  “It says one.”

  “Please,” he said, leaning into his good foot, wanting to take the glass of water and the bottle, too—but that’s when she kicked him, with some force, in his good ankle.

  “I know you can walk on that thing,” she said. She kicked him once more, solidly.

  He bit down on his lip, the pain radiating in places he’d forgotten. He waited, accepting that she might not stop, that she might keep kicking him for some time, but then she sat down on the couch beside him.

  “Now you can have two.”

  She shook the pills into her hand, giving him two and then setting one into her own mouth and swigging from the glass of water before passing it to him.

  “She didn’t send that letter from here.” Sonja touched the top of the letterhead, the blue embossing: CLIFFSIDE, MALIBU. “I looked it up. It’s a rehab, for drugs. And suicide. She’s suffering, that I know for sure.” Sonja looked as if she might cry.

  Gus imagined Sarah Price in a white hospital gown, an equally white room, attendants in uniforms. He heard soft instrumental music and remembered fondly the cloud that had encased him on the other side of his morphine drip. Sonja wiped at her face with the sleeve of her shirt, then folded the letter in half and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. He had wanted to keep it. Ingrate.

  “He could get a hearing in three years, with good behavior. I tell him, ‘Be quiet. Keep your head down. Don’t bother nobody.’ I don’t want Tomás in Chino. He belongs here.”

  Topanga. Gus had heard it was a Shoshone word, meaning, “above place.” Heaven.

  Outside the window there was a black flash. Gus followed it into the lichen-covered trees: only a crow, but it was holding the slack leather body of a lizard against the branch, drawing its insides out. Same way he’d left that fox in the back room of the office. Someone had to have cleaned up after him. How that body must have turned in this heat.

  “I want to help you.” The words so readily there Gus hadn’t thought them. “I have to help you,” he said.

  Sonja extended her hand, palm up, welcoming a stack of cash. She was smirking.

  “Work alone isn’t going to be enough.” The motor of him, slow to start, was humming again. “Not for either of us. I don’t know what I can do, but I’m going to find a way. I will think—”

  Sonja exhaled as if to say it was all hopeless, her posture going limp against the couch.

  “Maybe Chaparral,” he said. It was a short walk to the realization that the mare was all he owned, all he could sell if money was what they needed. And she might actually be worth something, ’specially if Rory did well in Fresno. Robin had told him how fit Rory had her. A new, real lawyer for Jorge, the payment to the anesthesiologist, the labs, every hand in a latex glove seemed to send a separate bill. The mare wouldn’t pay for it all, but—

  “Rory’s horse?” Sonja said. “Don’t you dare.”

  * * *

  WHEN SHE FINALLY got through without McLeod’s wife answering, Vivian compared herself to Marlow, on a dark slip of river surrounded by savages. She’d known the allusion would garner an appreciative moan, but then his voice turned all syrupy with concern. “Actually, I’m fucking fine, okay?” This was the first time she’d spoken to McLeod since that night and she’d only called to prove to herself that calling him didn’t make anyone die, that it wasn’t her fault.

  Of course she wasn’t fucking fine, not really. Everett’s sudden hoarding of broken things, Mommy’s dive into lunacy, and her friends weren’t her friends now, not when she wasn’t interested in being seen at the beach or sucking smoothies at the Malibu Country Mart. All of their siblings were still alive, their parents still within the realm of acceptable mental instability, and their worst fears were of unfounded rumors about meaningless things.

  “The funny thing is, I n
ever really liked any of them anyway.”

  “Who?” McLeod asked. She could hear the rising tremor of Mrs. McLeod in the background, calling him.

  “Any of them,” Vivian said.

  “Vivian,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “Of course. Women have a sixth sense about these things.”

  “Will you call me again?”

  “If no one else dies,” she said and hung up.

  Another chair had been delivered earlier that day. Blue, but a royal blue. The movers had left it in the foyer, wrapped in Saran Wrap just like one of the lasagnas people kept bringing after the accident. But it had been weeks now since the house was filled with meals, steaming in their own juices (culinary dioramas), and the flowers, so many flowers, slowly wilting in their browned water. And now here she was missing all that ripe decay. Maybe, just maybe, she even missed the hulking cameramen and their indifference. What now? What did she need now? She tore at the plastic on the chair (not even a recliner!), shredding it in sheets until the clear spaghetti of it lay all around her on the floor. If the cameramen had stayed, if they were still sitting outside on the hoods of their trucks, breathing heavily, she’d have pushed this chair to the roadside and sat down with them, given an interview, asked questions back (What did they hope to learn? What was it people needed to know? Why did they think her family held some magical key for how to be—even in tragedy? Or did they want to see them suffering?). As if in response, as if she’d answered one of her own questions, the buzzer rang. The buzzer outside the gate.

  Sliding over the plastic strewn on the floor, stumbling to depress the intercom, she yelled into it, “Do you want to see me crying? Huh? Is that it?” She hoped whoever this was would give her a reason to go on yelling (it felt so good to yell).

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” came through the other end, “is this a bad time?” Then static.

  “Who is this?” she asked, disarmed. It was an oddly familiar voice, a voice from another life, a voice from school?