Lights Out in the Reptile House (11 page)

He sat slapping the letter against his cheek, mystified and angry. Had his father dropped it off? Had a friend? He checked beneath the step and found more money than his father had ever claimed to have had. He stood staring at it. How long had his father been lying to him? What was he saving this for? Where had he gotten it?

He almost destroyed the letter. He was considering it when Albert showed up. Albert poked around the house as if looking for someone and then said he'd just stopped in to see what the news was. He'd never visited before.

Karel showed him the letter. Albert took it and before opening it mentioned that the zoo was once again shut down. He shook his head while he read. He refused to speculate on what was going on. He agreed Karel had a right to be angry.

They sat in Karel's kitchen contemplating the letter until Albert finally asked if Karel was going to offer him anything to eat.

Karel laid out a few things—a hard-boiled egg, some carrots, some fennel—after giving the old man an incredulous look. He was determined not to apologize for not having anything else. What did I get over there? he thought. Olives? Old bread? Albert looked at the vegetables and egg and made a disappointed chewing noise and then went to the sink to wash up. He noted the water wasn't working.

“I know that,” Karel said, banging a dish down. “I live here.” The egg rolled onto the table.

He should have that fixed, Albert told him.

They ate without speaking. Karel thought, If I could go to a country where there were no people, I'd go.

Albert asked him if there was any salt. They looked at each other. It occurred to Karel that he was in a country like that now.

“Pretty quiet next door,” Albert observed.

Karel crunched his carrot.

“A newspaperman I admire,” Albert said, “or admired, from your home city, wrote in one of his last columns the day after the Party took over, ‘Are we a joke? Are we a bad dream? Whoever hears our speeches has to laugh. Whoever sees us coming had better reach for his knife.'”

Karel nodded. The egg and the carrots were gone. Albert was acting peculiar, and Karel had the feeling he wanted to ask something.

“Well, I'm still here,” Albert said finally. “After some of the indiscreet things I said in your presence the other day. I assume that means you don't aspire to National Greatness.”

“I don't aspire to anything,” Karel said bitterly.

“Very wise, in our country right now,” Albert said. Karel wished he would leave. He had a headache, he was out of food, and he was having trouble imagining a subject that wouldn't depress him.

Albert said, “Perren joined the Party.”

Karel suddenly realized that Albert's earlier remark meant he thought Karel was capable of turning him in.

“Said it was something he had to do,” Albert said. “That it was in the best interests of the zoo.”

They were silent, Karel toying with the rhyme in his head:
had to do, of the zoo
. “So will it help?” he finally asked, out of some sense of obligation as host to extend the conversation.

“Hey,” he said when Albert didn't answer. “You really think I would've turned you in?”

Albert looked at him closely. He gave a small shrug. “Before today I would've said that Perren wouldn't've.”

Karel looked away, and then got up and cleared the table. When the old man didn't move, he was forced to sit back down.

“And they go on about uniting the country,” the old man said.

Karel tipped the empty dish to show everything had been finished. You should talk, he almost said. His father was gone. Albert was turning into a jerk. He had no friends. He had a fleeting image of Leda with her head turned to listen more acutely to something, and then an image of her lips lifting to his, and then she faded entirely.

He was sad and frightened and upset about his father. Albert was going on about the regime. The white hairs in his ears moved when he talked. Karel didn't want to listen anymore and asked suddenly if he remembered the beaches from the city. Did he remember the beachfront hotels? The huge trees, and the way the gables would stick out?

The old man looked at him, a little miffed, and then put his mind to it. He did, he said. He remembered especially the tall white one.

“The Golden Angel,” Karel said.

The Golden Angel, Albert repeated. Rebuilt. Destroyed years ago with the rest of the cove by the tidal wave after the eruption on that island, part of the volcanic archipelago.

“The Roof of Hell,” Karel said.

“Right, the Seprides, the Roof of Hell,” Albert said. He drummed his fingers on the table and cast around the kitchen for food.

“What happened?” Karel said. “When it blew up?”

Albert lifted salt from the plate with his moistened finger and ate it. “You don't know this story,” he said, as though that were news to him.

“I don't know this story,” Karel said.

Albert made a face as if his life lately were an endless string of small surprises. One June morning, boom, he said. The entire cove of the city had been destroyed, two thirds. There'd been the usual warning phenomena: tremors, water levels in wells changing, domestic animals refusing food and getting excited, birds and rodents migrating inland. Cattle moved to high pasture. The tide went out completely and abruptly. A lot of people knew at that point but hoped the high ground would protect them. What else was there to hope? There'd been a grammar school right on the waterfront, and Albert imagined the children at the classroom windows, awed, looking at the stranded fish and the muck of the exposed harbor bottom, amazed by the beached and listing ships. And then the wave came in piling up on itself, shoaling and rearing on the shallow harbor shelf to sixty or seventy feet. Albert's father had told him all this. His father had been on higher ground. His father, Albert said, had never forgotten things: the way whole buildings were driven through the ones behind them like parts of a collapsing telescope, the thunder of the walls disintegrating booming up the cove, the far-off screams, the wash of bodies and debris back down the harbor.

His father dreamed about the wave the rest of his life, Albert said. In the dream they were all whirling and singing, shouting and falling, his father, his brothers, an elderly aunt, his mother, with the wave rising behind them like a curtain. His father, Albert said, lost his whole family to that wave. He'd been playing where he wasn't supposed to be playing, in one of the high quarries, and their house had been lower down. He used to say he could still hear the sound of their roof going. He used to say,
Oh God of mercy, all those roofs and all those people just like that
.

On Saturday he found Leda folding sheets and towels in her kitchen. Her mother and David were out and her mother had given her two thousand things to do. She suggested a walk.

On the front step she slipped out of her sandals and laced up some light ankle boots: He watched the lacing proceed before asking her where she'd been. He hadn't seen her since he'd brought David home. And they kissed, he wanted to add.

He couldn't see any difference in the way she acted toward him. Maybe she'd forgotten it already. Here he was mooning about it even with his father gone.

They'd gone away, she said, to stay with their aunt. It was hard on everybody. It brought back her father and all. Karel summarized for her disconnected parts of the parades and performances.

She got up and rocked back on her ankles to display her tied shoes. “I thought you could show me how you go noosing,” she said. “Catching little lizards with the fishing pole.”

He agreed. He said while they walked to his house, “I don't think I'll ever be able to predict what you're going to say.”

She seemed flattered. The street was crowding for the market day. He didn't know how to tell her now about his father. He'd waited so long it would sound funny.

“My father's missing,” he finally just said.

“Oh,” she said, and stopped so suddenly in the street that people behind them shied away in alarm.

“Well, I got a note from him—he's all right,” Karel said, stumbling. “He's not in any trouble. I don't know where he is.”

Oh, Leda said, annoyed he'd scared her for nothing.

Before, he'd been worried, he tried to explain. There'd been no note or anything. He still didn't know what was going on.

She nodded, peering at him. They were at his house and she stopped. Oh, forget it, he thought in disgust. I'm never going to make myself clear to anybody.

While she waited outside drawing shapes in the dust on the side of his house, Karel rummaged around upstairs for the nooser. He tested the action in front of her before they left, pulling the metal loop so the tiny hangman's knot of string shrank and grew. She arched her eyebrows to show she was impressed.

“How does it work?” she asked, as if determined to be interested.

“This is it,” he said. “This is all it does.”

They walked to the south end of town. They avoided the street that led to the cave with the bats. Leda appreciated the sunlight beneath the wild olives and remarked on the smell of the dusty gravel. Where the town ended some barren hills began, at the foot of which refuse was dumped. Jackals and mangy dogs picked and haggled over the piles and watched them climb the first slope. It got steeper quickly, scree and larger rocks giving way in short cascades beneath their feet.

“Yuck,” Leda said, watching one dog carefully. It was watching her as well. Something filthy and limp was hanging from its mouth.

“They're all right,” Karel said. As they got higher the rocks increased in size.

“Are there scorpions here?” Leda asked, holding a foot in midair.

“I guess,” Karel said. “I haven't seen one during the day.”

She completed her step. “I don't like scorpions,” she said.

They climbed, leaning forward and making huffing noises, until they reached another steeper slope abutting theirs.

“Here,” he said, and in a minute or two, flipping over flat stones, he found a lesser earless lizard, gray with pale blue along its spine. It skittered a foot or so away and froze with a quizzical expression.

Leda was facing the panorama of the town below them. She said, “It's
pretty
up here.”

“I thought you wanted to watch,” he said, and lowered the noose slowly over the lizard until it looked condemned by a tiny lynching party. He yanked the noose and his hand must have jerked: the lizard was magically gone.

“Huh,” Leda said.

“It usually always works,” he said. His armpits were sweating and the sun was hot on his back.

“Well, keep trying,” Leda said. “It looks hard.”

“It isn't, really,” he said, irritated with himself. “It's not supposed to be.” He crouched beside some chia blooming in indigo clusters above the slope. There was something there, too, maybe a horned lizard, but as he maneuvered the bamboo rod through the tangles it disappeared.

“Huh,” Leda said again.

When they'd disappeared they were right nearby, often downslope, Albert had taught him. While he searched the area in a crablike crouch she gazed back at the town again, shading her eyes with her hand.

“Did you hear about Mr. Fetscher?” she said.

“I was there,” he said. He overturned a rock slab to confront a Jerusalem cricket, tomato red and enormous, grotesquely humpbacked.

“You were?” Leda said. She turned, shadowed by the sun. “Oh, God. Look at that thing.”

He shooed it away, and it left unhurriedly, dragging itself audibly over the shale.

She watched it clamber over a rock with distaste. “So?” she said. “What happened?”

Karel shrugged. He piled some rocks. “They took him away.”

She made a face.

“Did you hear what happened after that?” he asked.

“I heard what they said.” She watched him ease a fan-shaped rock up. Nothing underneath. “What do you think happened?” she asked warily.

“Right here,” he said. “Look.”

She crouched immediately beside him. Her face was more tanned with shade and he could see the tips of her teeth as her mouth opened slightly in anticipation. He held the noose over a head-sized stone concealing a tiny horned lizard smaller than the first. He could hear her breathing through her mouth while she watched him maneuver the rod.

She said, “You never answered.”

He lowered the loop and the horned lizard's head turned, as if listening for far-off music. “I think they killed him,” he said.

“So do I,” Leda said. She was looking at him intently, and her eyes had the directness of the eyes of figures he'd seen in old mosaics. He could pick up the sun smell of the hairs on the back of her neck. It was as if as a child she hadn't been spared anything, as if her mother had never changed the subject when she'd entered the room.

“I may want to run away,” she said.

“Where?” he said. Not: With me?

“The city,” she said.

He closed his eyes at a horrible thought. He said finally, “Are you with me only because you want me to help?”

She told him no as if that were a peculiar notion, and the simplicity of her answer flooded him with relief. He waited for her to go on, unsure what to say. “You can't get on the train without a seat reservation and a permit to leave our area,” she said. “I need three.”

“Three?” he asked.

“David and Nicholas and me,” she explained.

“What about your mother?” He sat on the scree, but she maintained her crouch.

“If my mother would go I wouldn't need to run away,” she said.

“Do you think it's going to get worse?” he asked. He still didn't know where his father was, and now all this was happening. His unhappiness had crystallized into that one thought,
run away with Leda,
and he worked on the courage to ask her if he could go.