The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (12 page)

The Animal House

W
endy claimed she found the house on her way home. She claimed she could smell it from the sidewalk, and maybe she could. Her nose was better at smelling things than mine was. As it was, I couldn’t smell anything even standing on the small cement porch out front. Only after she opened the door and I stuck my head inside did the smell hit me. It was thick and damp, full of hoof and fur, though when I mentioned this to Wendy, she told me, “None of these animals have hooves.”

The noise was such that I was surprised we couldn’t hear them bawling and cawing and thrushing in our own house, two blocks away. The animals were caged, and I asked Wendy, “Where did those cages come from?”

She shook her head. “Animal shelter?”

“I thought the shelter closed,” I said, but she only shrugged.

Then we walked through the house. There were ducks and grackles, a couple of squirrels, a few feral cats, a litter of rats, and two brown animals I didn’t recognize that Wendy said she thought were nutrias, which didn’t sound like the name of an animal so much as a sinus medicine. In larger cages outside in the backyard, she told me, there were three stray dogs. She showed them to me, all of them, gave me a tour of the house and all its residents, and for a moment she acted as if they were her animals, her responsibility. And then she bent down to one of the cages and I asked her what the hell she was doing and she said, “I want to hold one of them.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you should.”

She gave me a sharp and disapproving look and then shook her head and opened the cage and pulled out one of the nutrias, which climbed into her arms. She petted it on the head and cooed in its ear and lifted it out and held it for me to touch, and when I told her no way, no how, she told it not to listen to the bad man.

When I first met Wendy, I was lying in the middle of the floor of an empty house and it was dark and she was standing over me. A house I should mention I had broken into, thinking it could be a place I could live. She was brandishing what had at first looked like a shotgun, but which was a floor lamp, held not like you’d hold a gun, but like you’d aim a cattle prod or a spear. She was the first person, aside from my parents, I’d had any real interaction with since moving back.

I’d moved in with my parents, and I was short of cash, having used the last of it to work my way back to my hometown, which I came to discover had been all but abandoned for no other reason than that, for most people, it seemed like a good time to move on—to some other small town, or a city, maybe—and then, of course, some of the people didn’t move on, but instead passed away, which more or less had the same effect. In any case, it seemed like as good a time as any to move back to my parents’ house, my parents being some of the few who decided to stick it out, and there get my bearings straightened out, or oiled, or whatever thing you do to bearings to make them work again. After a short while I figured I needed to find my own place, but I still had no money and there was a shortage of jobs, so I found it difficult to scrounge up enough money to move out. But the town was sick with empty houses, old and run-down, and I figured they couldn’t be in such bad shape I couldn’t pull one of them together again and then live in it, and so I began to wander through town and study them with a critical eye.

The one I’d finally picked, though, turned out to be Wendy’s, which I discovered the first night I spent there.

The sight of her, silhouetted against the front window, faint moonlight filtering in through the threadbare shades, made me feel drowsy and unhurried, and for a moment I considered going back to sleep, knowing she’d stay standing over me until I woke again.

“That’s not how you hold a gun,” I told her.

“It’s not a gun,” she said, knowing, as she said it, she should’ve lied. “What are you doing here?”

“Is it a cattle prod? Or a spear?” I asked.

“A cattle prod?” she said, and in her voice I sensed that she wanted to laugh at what I’d said. Instead, she slammed the lamp onto my shin, which was how I understood it to be a lamp.

It hurt because it was unexpected, not because it hurt. She didn’t have the strength to hit me hard enough, and the lamp was cheaply made, and she didn’t have good leverage on the swing, throwing the end of it down from her chest like a hockey player slapping his stick against the ice. Which made me wonder, briefly, what had happened to all of the ice from the skating rink in the mall now that the mall had closed.

“What are you doing here?” she said again.

It had been a long time since I’d had to come up with anything substantial to say to anyone, and when she asked me the question, I didn’t know how to answer.

She swung her lamp down at my shin again, though this time I was prepared for the attack and moved mostly out of the way.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

And she paused, her lamp brandished higher, ready for another, stronger swing, and she waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.

Six or seven or eight years ago I worked a little job for a small zoo near where I lived with my parents, or not a zoo, more a nature trail, or a series of trails that had animals on it. I mean, the land had animals on it, wild animals: owls, bobcats, squirrels, snakes, rats, mice, hawks, buzzards, and other sorts of wild animals; but it also had a small area set aside for an odd assortment of caged animals. These consisted of two dik-diks, four ring-tailed lemurs and two brown lemurs, a porcupine, a pair of wallabies, a greenhouse-like structure full of butterflies, a capybara, and an African wild dog. It wasn’t a good job. I was an office assistant and sometimes they would ask me to watch the ticket desk or to move furniture around in the small conference room they advertised for businesses that wanted to conduct meetings or ropes courses there. I didn’t do anything interesting and I wasn’t paid well and I didn’t receive any benefits, but it was, out of all the jobs I held before leaving home, my favorite, mainly because very little was asked of me, the smallest amount of effort on my part warranted high praise, and when no one was paying careful attention, I could easily sneak away from my desk or whatever clerical task I had been assigned and spend half an hour, and sometimes up to an hour, wandering through the trails.

This was the last job I had before I left home to go out into the world and make something of my life, and my first thought, after living with my parents again, was that I should live there, that if I was really going to leave my parents’ house, what better place to live than in the woods, among those trails and the animals that inhabited them. I pictured a small, mobile camp, somewhere in between the Hoot Owl Trail and the Woodduck Trail, or deep into the trees off the Bluestem Trail. I pictured a minimal kind of life, a paring down, a small fire just after dark when the weather turned truly cold, nothing to signal that I was there, that anyone was there.

I pictured all of this so well that the next night I walked to the only bookstore left open in town, which happened to specialize in hunting and survival texts. For an hour or two, I browsed through various survival guides, including books that promised to show me how to survive in any climate and on any terrain, and books that instructed me on brain tanning and field dressing and head and leg removal and flintknapping and on making primitive tools, like a primitive adze or a primitive vise, but ultimately I bought the book recommended to me by a man in his late twenties or early thirties, a pit bull of a man with a short, square haircut and tanned, rough-looking skin, who pulled a book off the shelf and handed it to me and told me if I was looking for a real and a really good survival book, the book I should use was this one, which he owned himself, and which he used when he air-dropped—I think he said air-dropped—himself into Southeast Asia with just a knife and some rope and a small pack and this book and spent six weeks living completely off the land before walking himself back out of the wilderness and into civilization.

He was an earnest-looking and trusting man, the kind of man who might have served several tours of duty in some part of the armed forces, eagerly, no doubt, and might be gearing up to serve yet another, and I felt a little guilty accepting his recommendation knowing what I had planned to use the book for, but not guilty enough to put the book back.

When I got back to my parents’ house, I ate a quick dinner, spoke only briefly to my father, my mother having long before fallen asleep, and then hurried upstairs to start learning all I could learn about survival in the wilderness. I flipped to the contents page and glanced briefly at the headings, and then flipped to the section on how to build a hobo shelter, and then flipped to the sustenance chapter and read the section on procuring a snake using a forked stick, and then I closed the book and placed it on the nightstand, and then never opened it again.

Which was what I told her, the girl with the lamp. Not the whole thing, but the bit about the zoo and the trails. I thought it might appeal to her, or to anyone, really, standing over me with a floor lamp in her hand. How dangerous is the guy who worked for a nature reserve? I told her this and then I began to tell her other things about myself, lying there on the ground, not sure what else to say or how, except to start from the beginning and as quickly as I could, until eventually I pulled us through the sludge of my recent past and into the mire of my present. I had come home again, I said, but I wasn’t sure why, and I had plans for one of these empty houses, but I wasn’t sure what plans. I said this one appealed to me, but I didn’t know why about that, either.

Then she told me about herself, which wasn’t much to tell. She had just finished school. She had left home when she was sixteen. She liked living in these old houses. She had stored some of her stuff in a few other old empties—she called them
empties
as if they were beer bottles—around town. She wanted to be a veterinarian. Her dad, before he died, had been a large-animal vet. It all seemed pleasantly run-of-the-mill, and so I stood up, finally, and lightly pushed aside the lamp, which had grown heavy in her arms and dragged along the floor, and leaned in to kiss her, and then a week later she made me leave the house, which I was afraid to leave, afraid I wouldn’t be able to find it or her again, but she forced me to go. “It’s been a week,” she said. “Your parents must be worried sick. You need to go see them.” And so I left.

I went back to their house and told them what had happened to me, and they were upset, my mother especially, though I can’t say for sure what upset her most, that I had been gone so long without telling them where I was and that I was okay, or that I was still alive yet living so recklessly. When I told them about Wendy and about our plans, my mother locked herself into her bedroom and didn’t come out again until after I left.