The Stud Book (37 page)

She worked the way she’d weed a garden, dig a pit toilet, rock climb. She’d done all of it, always as a multitasker: Now while she sorted and peeled, her body built a whole new person, a baby.

A baby who she’d send to OMSI science camp and every other science camp—everything she herself never got—until maybe that child would have what it took to save the planet.

It was late. Her store was closed. Arena had stayed after school to work on art. Barry Gibb encouraged her, and the class had a show coming up.

Nobody expected Nyla to make dinner. Nobody needed Nyla at all.

The cure for despair? To do good work. The store was her art
installation, her perfect world, her new pet. She hummed an aimless tune, her back to the door, then heard the doorbell’s fairy chime. When she turned around there was a man in the store, gawky and stooped. He pulled his stocking cap off.

“I’m sorry, we’re closed.” She ran a hand down her ponytail. Outside it was dark.

He shuffled from one foot to the other, and tugged off his gray fingerless gloves. He said, “I’ll turn the sign around for you.”

She kept a careful eye on him. He turned the sign in the window from open to closed, and she waited for him to go but he didn’t. He said, “You don’t have to sort that stuff, you know. It’s all one bin now, at the curb, right?”

He looked about twenty, maybe older or younger, who could tell. He had black hair that needed cutting, and it danced in lines of static from his hat. He could’ve been part Chinese, or Mexican, or Native American. Maybe one parent from India?

His shoes were screwed up, burned and melted rubber-toed tennis shoes. Maybe he lived in a hobo camp kept warm by a fire in a hidden lot somewhere. Nyla had the urge to find him a pair of shoes.

“Have a good night.” She pulled the paper label off a can in her hands, and dropped the can into one bag and the label into another. He was right, you didn’t have to sort anymore, but she did it anyway—this was how she was raised, old-school enviro—and hoped her extra effort helped the recycling program. She walked forward, a move meant to urge the man out the door the way the principal always led her from the school office.

He said, “Except for bottles. Glass. That’s still separate.” He took a step into the store and balled his knit gloves in one palm. His thin mouth curved into a half smile.

“We open at ten, tomorrow.” The canvas bag Nyla called a purse, with her phone and keys inside, was at the end of the couch closer to the door. She meant to leave soon. She wasn’t used to anybody actually coming into the store.

“What do you sell?” He looked around.

She hadn’t sold anything, ever.

A knife rested on the glass top of a bistro table in the middle of the room. It was a long butcher knife. Nyla used it for slicing cheese and sometimes for breaking up thick squares of bulk dark chocolate.
She’d brought it for celebrations, in anticipation of hosting events at the store, people in their good clothes, talks about the environment. Parties. Maybe a rain forest fund-raiser? It was her old kitchen knife, a wedding present, bigger and sharper than it needed to be to do the party cheese slicing. She saw the man notice the knife. Then he looked at her.

She said, “You need to go.”

“You’re inside and I’m outside,” he said, but he said it quietly. Nyla wasn’t sure she’d heard right.

She asked, “What’s that?”

He said, “You got a bathroom I could use?”

She shook her head no.

He said, “Where’s the money?”

She said, “There’s no money here.” She tried to keep her voice steady. Really, there was no money. The last of her money had gone to fabric for her undyed hemp curtains.

He smiled wider, almost laughed. He said, “Everybody’s got money,” like he knew something Nyla didn’t. “The only difference is how much.”

The mini-fridge hummed. The computer emitted a steady hiss. When the man moved in the direction of the knife, Nyla moved, too, and she moved faster than he did. She had to. She shot out her right hand, from the shoulder, and hit him in the jaw. His head jerked back. She swung with the left, in a crosscut.

She had surprise on her side; the look on his face was mostly shock. He came forward, angry now.

As she swung, Nyla’s muscle memory knew the steps: She heard the electronic Middle Eastern mash-up of her kickboxing DVD sound track and saw in her mind’s eye that Barbie doll coach, a beautiful blonde, all white teeth, long hair, and a boob job, in a pink and black workout outfit. That angel of fitness, Barbie, smiled and said, “Remember—arms up, protect your face!”

The man reached out to grab her. Nyla’s arms were already up. She ducked, knocked his hand away, then pulled back, danced in a boxer’s shuffle, and offered a fast uppercut to his soft jaw that made his teeth click together.

She’d done this thousands of times—five days a week, an hour a day for more than ten years, in Tae Bo, kickboxing, weight training, and cardio.

Angel Barbie in Nyla’s mind prompted, “Remember to breathe!”

Nyla’s foot hit the man’s ribs in a roundhouse, from the right then the left. Her shoe, a soft leather clog, flew off on the way. It smacked the wall.

Barbie said, “Good work! This is your cardio. Keep your focus, ladies!”

The man grabbed his side. His face contorted, and he came at Nyla in a rage. He was a man she’d been waiting for, the man her father locked the house against at night, the man she wasn’t supposed to speak to on the city bus, the guy who offered her a ride once, the dangers. He was here. She brought out a front kick as he lunged—“Heel first! Straighten that leg!”—and used his momentum against him, doubling the impact. He bent in half, hands to the groin.

“Okay, up the tempo! Do it again!” Barbie smiled, her glossy hair flipping side to side.

Nyla dealt another roundhouse from the right automatically because it was the routine and she was deep into it and she was terrified. The man fell toward the floor.
Thwack!
Her foot found the side of his head on the way down. She panicked. She couldn’t let him get up, he’d kill her. If he wasn’t going to kill her before, he definitely would now.
Don’t move, don’t move
, she prayed. What came next was up to him. His decisions would fuel her own.

Barbie said, “We’re halfway through, keep moving! You can do it! Eight more.”

Eight more? Nyla bounced in her boxer’s shuffle and watched, ready.

The man didn’t get up. He moved one hand slightly, that was all.

Barbie said, “Don’t poop out on me now! Finish strong.”

There was blood on the floor and on the side of the man’s face—what had she done? Nyla didn’t want to hurt him! She only meant to protect herself. She bent down and asked, “What’s bleeding?”

He said something garbled, something like “Fuck you,” or “Kill you,” or “Would you—”

Nyla said, “What’s that?”

His eyes, when he opened them, were furious. He grabbed for her ponytail, catching her hair in his blood-marked fingers. Nyla swung a cocked elbow hard into the man’s bloody nose. She ripped her own head backward, leaving hair in his hands as she stood up fast and stepped away. He grabbed for her foot. Her second shoe
slid off. She gave a ballet leap over the crumpled man, snagged the knife, and reached for the strap of her canvas tote where it rested on the couch. She made it out the door and pulled the door closed, but couldn’t stop to lock it. She’d have to find her keys—too slow! She kept going, then slid the rusted, reticulated metal gate across the outside entryway. The padlock was easy to find: It rested heavy in the bottom of her bag. She forced the padlock through an old metal loop, clicked it, and locked the gate. Inside the store, the man started to get up. Nyla’s heart kicked into higher gear. He got up, his head swaying, and then went down again.

Her phone was in her bag. She called 911.

“March it out!” smiling Barbie said. “Punch the sky! Great for the abs.”

Over her own pounding heart, Nyla told the operator, “I’ve been attacked.” She said, “I have a store, on Williams. Somebody may be hurt.”

The operator asked, “Are you hurt?”

Nyla couldn’t catch her breath. She said, “No.” Her hands were numb, and she couldn’t breathe, but she was okay.

The man in her store howled. From inside, he threw a vase against the front window, and the window shattered in a web of fractures. Nyla hid in the shadows alongside the building but kept an eye on her storefront. Her heartbeat didn’t know the fight was over. Adrenaline made her move.

Her fingers tightened around the knife handle.

When the police cruiser turned the corner, what officers might’ve seen first was a barefoot woman doing a victory dance on a dark patch of sidewalk. At Barbie’s command, Nyla marched it off. She punched the sky and lifted her knees and took deep breaths. The butcher knife in her fist glinted when it caught the streetlight, each time she raised her arm. Blood-darkened spots marked the blade, Nyla’s skin, and her clothes. If she stopped moving, she’d cry. When she tried to stop, her legs shook; her chest was ready to explode.

An ambulance siren called to them from far down the street. A fire truck was on the way, too. They always sent a fire truck, like every emergency involved some kind of fire.

The man was trapped behind the locked gate, just out of the store, but not free to leave. He let out a yodel, yelled to be
let free
.
Amber police lights circled and played over the metal gate. Nyla walked in her cooldown, trying to shake this techno-pop dance version of terror. The police pulled over to the curb.

One officer got out of the cruiser. He said, “Drop the weapon.”

Nyla, still on the verge of tears, yelled, “Don’t shoot! He’s not armed!” She bounced up and down.

The officer flinched. He said, “Drop the weapon.” His gun was pointed at Nyla.

She slowed in her jog.

“Weapon?”

“Drop the knife.” A second officer got out of the car. He put a hand to his holster.

“Ah, the knife!” Her fingers were numb, far away, and curled around the black knife handle. It was a weapon! She didn’t think of it as a weapon, not when it was in her own hands. It was cutlery. It was a wedding present.

“Now,” the cop said. She was in his sights!

She let the knife fall to the ground.

The attacker yelled, “She tried to kill me!”

The wedding present butcher knife hit the sidewalk with a thud and rattle. She said, “No. I called help. I called help for you.”

H
umanity was trampling itself in search of reported action!

On the other side of a plate glass window, in an enclosure, the mandrill patriarch lumbered through the artificial landscape to approach a female from behind. He reached a hand, spread the soft pads of her relatively compact butt, touched her, then smelled his fingers. When he licked his fingers, somebody outside, down below, beyond the window, barked, “Dude!”

Sarah was at tree canopy level; her room looked down over the top of the enclosure, a secret perch. The female must’ve smelled like a hot monkey in estrus; the male stood on his hind legs and mounted her leisurely.

Sarah felt the male’s push and thrust as though in the cavities of her own body. We could be asexual populations, single-celled drifters, built to reproduce without fusing gametes. But we’re not. The mandrill touched his mate with a gentle, determined hand. Sarah held her breath.

Guffaws broke out beyond the glass, out of her line of sight.

The female shook off the male’s long-fingered grip and scampered across fake rock, hesitating near a clump of hanging foliage.
The male rocked back on his striped ornament. He ran his thumb over the folds of his pink member, picked something off the head, and flicked whatever he’d found into the shrubs.

Male mandrills drip a secretion. They rub their sternal gland drippings on mates and on trees, too, until their chests are bloody and riddled with splinters. Their world is one ripe advertisement of virility. Sarah stood above the habitat where the air was thick with musk, breathed in man-ape, kicked a foot through straw scattered on the floor—debris left from bales stored there—and willed her last good egg to stay viable.

She could feel the heat of her own body fluids gathering.

Her timer beeped. She peered through the grate. Baby Lucy picked at a tire on a rope, and trailed a finger through the straw. “Foraging,” Sarah wrote.
Ignoring the adults getting it on
.

A horde of teenagers shrieked the mixed yodel of excited pack animals. The patriarch followed his mate. She waited. He checked her scent again, pulled apart the folds of her vagina, and touched his tongue inside.

It was science!

It was a peep show. The mandrill put his hands on her hips. This time, she stayed still.

“Dude, you taping this?” somebody yelled below. There was a cackle. The humans were loud; the mandrills were silent and purposeful. The patriarch bent his knees and pushed his erect baby maker into his mate. She stayed on all fours. Humans hooted, their voices an ever-expanding choir.

Sarah’s cinder block cell, bleaker than the cheapest of hotels, was pungent with animal sex. She was paid to watch, and now it was like watching porn. The male pushed his hips back and forth, in and out.