The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets (21 page)

“Help!” she shouted. “Help me!”

She kept screaming as Oren dragged her back to the garage. He pushed her against the wall and hit the switch with one hand. Someone must have heard her. Someone was calling the police right now.

She couldn't help it, she grinned. “Somebody heard me. I know it!”

Oren's face went that awful empty again. She watched it happen like a TV going black and silent in the middle of a program. His eyes filled with tears.

He reached out his hands. He's a child, she thought, he wants a hug. He realizes the game is over. She stepped forward, opened her arms, but he circled her neck with his hands. His hands were cool and for one brief second refreshing. She almost said thank you and then he began to squeeze. Tight. Tighter. As he squeezed he danced and jittered. She was pulled to her tiptoes—and then she could not breathe. She struggled. She clutched his hands and tried to pry them away. She needed air. Air! Her head would implode without air. She tried to catch his eye, to make him see it was her, but he kept his face to one side as if to listen to her die.

And then, abruptly, he let her go. She collapsed, gasping, clutching at her neck, mouth open wide, gulping air.

He took her arms and yanked her to her feet.

“Come with me.”

“Oren, please,” her voice like a rusty hinge.

She tried to pull her arm from his grasp. He took the knife from his pocket and cut her forearm. Calmly, without a word, he left a two-inch stripe of red. Winnie froze. She stared at the blood bubbling up into a stinging mountain range, then up into his face. His eyes were small and dead, his face slack, but his body rigid. He took her upper arm and pulled her up the steps, into the hot, terribly hot house.

“Please!” She couldn't help it. Back in the oven, this time she would fry.

He flicked the knife and gave her another tiny cut. She started to exclaim, but stopped herself. Cookie was scratching. Oren led Winnie away from the kitchen, down the hallway. He stopped in front of the only closed door, the last room in the house. He opened it and pushed her inside. She stumbled against a pile of cardboard boxes. The room was full of stuff, old fashioned footlockers and decorated trunks, bolts of fabric rolled and stacked in the corner. But what Winnie noticed first were the bars on the two corner windows.

She turned to Oren, afraid to speak, but pleading just the same. He came toward her with the knife. She retreated, backed up against a stack of boxes and could go no further. She turned her face away and gritted her teeth, ready for pain and blood, but he gave her a push and she tripped and grabbed a box to keep from falling. On the top of the box there were two big jars filled with amber liquid. She looked closer and saw eyes, arms, too many tiny feet. Pickled Siamese twins, their tiny faces turned to her, eyes open and sadly staring. She quickly looked at the other jar: a single baby with four legs and a tiny head protruding from its stomach. She spun. The rest of the room was just as bad. More jars and containers. A poster leaning up against the
wall advertised “O'Keith's Carnival of Wonders” and “Lobster Boy and the Two-Headed Cow” with a drawing of a skinny boy draping a lobster claw arm around the cow's two necks. A collection of sideshow oddities.

She turned to him. Blood spilled off her arm onto the carpet. She saw him look at her cuts and frown. “Don't leave me in here.”

“Don't touch anything,” he went on. “It's my uncle's collection. It's very valuable.”

“It's scary in here. Please, Oren?”

“I have things to do.”

He left and locked her in. Locked. The door locked from the outside. The windows had bars. It was as if he was expecting a captive. Her. He had been expecting her.

“Oren,” she called. “Please. I'll be good. I won't go anywhere. Let me out of here. Come on. I'm sorry.”

She did not know if he was right outside or if he had walked away. Her hands were shaking. The vertebrae in her neck ached. She kicked the door once, but then she stopped. She did not want him to come back and cut her. She climbed over boxes to the windows. The small diamond shaped panes had been so popular once. There was no way to open the sliding panels, they were nailed shut and the bars outside were permanent. She looked at the boxes. Maybe one of them would have a weapon or something she could use, a souvenir baseball bat, or an ornamental sword. She moved a stack of folded canvas off a narrow leather case and opened it. She gasped. Inside was a withered leg and foot, the skin like jerky over the bones, the toenails long and yellow, cushioned on faded purple velvet. A handwritten card read, “The leg of Prince Orloff.” She hoped she would never meet Uncle Nolan. Or maybe he was coming later, with his bag of tools,
to add her to his freak show. Stop it, she told herself again. Please stop it.

Some of the boxes were too large and heavy to move. She crouched down behind a stack, thinking she could hide behind it and when he came in she could jump him, stick her fingers in his eyes, kick him again and again in the balls. She could do that, she knew how.

After Jonathan left her, Winnie had enrolled in a self-defense class. She needed to take care of herself and little Lacy. She needed the confidence. Plus punching and pounding and yelling and kicking sounded so good. It was a morning class of five women and one younger man, taught by Master Yamada, an older Japanese man with many degrees of black belt in karate. They listened carefully as he described in his thick accent the wounds and destruction they were inflicting on their invisible enemies.

“Two fingers out. Dig in eyes. Pull down and leave him blind.”

Winnie had been going for seven months when she had a question. “Master Yamada?”

“Yes, Mrs. Parker?”

“What if my attacker has a gun?”

The others looked at her. No one had ever asked about guns.

“What if he shoots at us? What do we do?”

Master Yamada nodded sagely. “Spread legs,” he instructed.

Winnie did as she was told.

“Bend over. More. Farther.”

She bent over as far as she could.

“Now. Kiss your ass goodbye.”

He laughed so hard his nose whistled. The rest of the class laughed with him. Winnie tried to laugh too, but instead she saw
how stupid the class really was. Seventy-five dollars a month—for nothing. She made the motions and got through the rest of class, but she knew she would never be back.

As she walked to her car, Stone Curtis, the only male student, trotted over. “I'm glad you asked that.”

“Not a very comforting answer.”

“Bullets win every time.”

Winnie opened her car door, but he kept standing there.

He smiled. “Do you want to have dinner sometime?”

She was completely surprised. He was way too young for her.

“I mean it,” he said. “Friday night?”

He had that no color hair, a tarnished taupe that would never go gray, and his eyes were not green or brown but neither and both. He was stone-colored just as his name suggested. She had no idea why he was free to take self-defense classes at nine o'clock in the morning. Waiter, writer, independently wealthy. She had nothing to lose.

“Sure. I'd like that.”

He seemed pleased. He was prepared for her address with a piece of paper and a pencil waiting in his pocket. As she drove toward home she smiled out at the morning. She had a date. Only nine months after Jonathan had officially and legally left her for his farm-raised contestant with the perfect mammary glands. Jonathan would be sorry if Winnie and Stone fell in love. He would hate it if she found someone else, someone younger, so quickly. It could happen. One date could turn into a lifetime. Winnie and Lacy and Stone. Stone was an odd name, but solid.

She was jittery with anticipation waiting for Friday, deciding what to wear. The afternoon of her date she volunteered to drop Lacy off at her dad's, just so she could wear her new blue dress and say nonchalantly to Jonathan that she had met someone.

“He's a little younger than I am,” she said, “and kind of dreamy.”

She loved the cloud that crossed Jonathan's face, the way his lips pressed flat.

Stone rang the doorbell right on time. Winnie opened the door, breathless, happy, and stifled an immediate sigh. He was so young. He had even spiked his hair for their date.

“You look very nice,” he said, but she could tell he was expecting something different than her blue dress. She probably looked like his mother.

“You look nice too.”

Stone shrugged. “I thought we'd go see the new James Bond film.”

“Perfect.” She would have to tell Jonathan they'd gone to a club. “Glass of wine?”

“No, thanks. I'll have a Coke at the movies.”

“Sounds good.”

In the car he cleared his throat and said carefully, “I like older women.”

She didn't like the way he drove with one finger on the steering wheel while he looked at her and not the road. She also didn't like the way he laughed when she asked him to pay attention. And then he drove past the freeway entrance and took the longer route through Griffith Park. He said he preferred it.

The park was dark. The headlights of an oncoming car illuminated Stone's smooth face. He looked calm, determined.

“What do you do?” Winnie asked him. “Why do you have Tuesday and Thursday mornings free for karate?”

“I'm a pool guy,” Stone said. “I work for my brother.” He looked at her. “Yesterday I had to clean a pool after a suicide.”

They came to the stop sign by the entrance to the old abandoned zoo. There were still cages up there, carved into the
rocks, with broken bars and metal doors jammed open. Winnie had gone with five-year-old Lacy and she had climbed inside and pretended to be a jaguar, a monkey, something else, until a homeless man woke from under a pile of leaves and chased them both away.

At the turn to Burbank and the movie theaters, Stone went straight instead.

“Where are we going?” Her voice came out high and worried. She didn't know him. She her hand inside her purse on her phone, her fingers poised over the buttons.

“This is fun,” he said. “You'll see.”

The section of the park that ran along the 134 Freeway toward Forest Lawn Cemetery had always been a meeting place for men. Winnie drove that way occasionally when the freeway was crowded and she had seen men in pick-up trucks, men in small compact cars, and men standing back partially hidden in the trees. Once she had seen an older man, white haired and potbellied, walking out of the woods straightening his clothing. The men were different ages and ethnicities. She didn't know if money exchanged hands or why the police allowed it to continue.

Stone pulled over to the curb between two other cars.

“What are you doing?”

“Watch,” he said.

He rolled down her window, the park side window. A man emerged from the shadows. He had a buzz cut, tiny eyes, and a dark plaid shirt. He leaned into the car and at first he was puzzled when he saw Winnie and her frightened face.

“You available?” Stone asked.

The guy shrugged.

“Can she watch?”

He nodded.

“Oh no,” Winnie said. “No. Absolutely not.”

The man was waiting. Stone was trying not to laugh.

“Come on, honey,” Stone said. “You told me next time you wanted to watch.”

“This isn't funny.” She turned to the man outside. His flesh was mottled in the single street lamp's light. “We're not staying,” Winnie told him. “This is his idea of a joke.”

The man's doughy face turned angry. He began to reach into the car. Stone laughed and peeled away from the curb.

“Stone!” Winnie didn't know what else to say.

“Come on. My friends and I do it all the time.”

Winnie looked at him and a shiver went through her. He was young and mean.

“That was not funny,” she said.

“Fucking faggots,” he replied.

He pulled a U-Turn and drove back the way they had come. They made the appropriate turn toward the movie theater and Winnie exhaled. Then Stone put his hand on her thigh, up high and rubbed the blue fabric with his finger. She picked up his hand and dropped it in his lap. He laughed. He put it back on her thigh, but before she objected, he removed it and laughed again. It was a child's game; he reached his hand out, then drew it back, then left it hovering over her thigh, but not touching her.

“Your mother is Daisy Juniper, isn't she?”

The light—that old familiar light—went on. She had wondered why Stone asked her out. Now she knew. She nodded.

“I can't believe your mother is Daisy Juniper.”

“Sometimes I can't either.”

“She's hot. Daisy Juniper. Really hot.”

Winnie heard the wistful lust in Stone's voice. Just the thought of her mother reduced most adult men to teenagers; they erupted with instant zits and boners, inane teenage slang.

“What was it like?” he continued. “You know, growing up with her? Did you—”

Winnie answered the questions before he asked them. She had heard them so many times before. “She was sixteen when she had me. She's never been married. She has been committed twice, but for insanity not drugs. She did lose her first Oscar in a poker game. Those are not body doubles—she does all her own nudity.”

“You don't look a thing like her.” Stone shook his head.

“I really am her daughter.”

He put his hands back on the wheel as he turned into the movie theater's parking garage. Winnie hoped he would go up, but Stone took the route down and circled into the depths. She hated parking garages, terrifying on the best of days.

“How long's it been?” he asked.

“Since what?”

“Since you've been laid.”

Stone's cute face aged a hundred ugly years. The garage was empty of people but every parking space was taken. He kept driving down.