Reptile House Read online

  REPTILE HOUSE

  WINNER OF THE BOA SHORT FICTION PRIZE

  Copyright © 2015 by Robin McLean

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  15 16 17 18 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For information about permission to reuse any material from this book please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the County of Monroe, NY; the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 200 for special individual acknowledgments.

  Cover Design: Sandy Knight

  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: Versa Press, Inc.

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McLean, Robin.

  Reptile House / Robin McLean. — First Edition.

  pages cm. — (American Reader Series, No. 24)

  ISBN 978-1-938160-65-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-938160-66-0 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3613.C5774R47 2015

  813'.6—dc23

  2014040140

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

  For Mom and Dad

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cold Snap

  Take the Car Take the Girl

  The Amazing Discovery and Natural History of Carlsbad Caverns

  Rabbit’s Foot

  No Name Creek

  The True End to All Sad Times

  For Swimmers

  Blue Nevus

  Reptile House

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Colophon

  Cold Snap

  In December, the valley cars barely turned over. Batteries died. Blankets were coiled on the sills of frosted windows, tacked over ill-fitting doors. Wood split with a tap of an axe. The ice on the lake was three feet thick, then five, then seven, then the auger froze. When the wind died down, the townsfolk had parties on the lake below the Ledges, the deepest part of the lake, so warmest water, so best fishing. The fish huts all huddled together. The friends built fires in the middle of pallets with brush hauled out in trucks parked behind the huts. The fire was taller than the roofs. It leaned with the wind. They drank hot drinks with gloves, red noses at rims, leaned away from the lick of flame. Their boots shuffled and stamped toes awake; winter’s good fun when it’s a real winter. They breathed steam around hats and muffs, told jokes across the fire, clapped mitts and laughed hard about the cold snap.

  Lilibeth could see all from the boat launch. The party was a mile away from the windshield. She chewed chicken salad from the deli counter. She bobbed her head to the oldies station the next valley over, which cut out while her head bobbed on. This chicken was good. Its plastic bin balanced on the steering wheel so her gloves were free. She’d gotten the binoculars in the divorce. She chewed and watched the huddle move around the flame melting a crater in the ice: no danger in this cold, but what did the fish think? The light, the shapes. Some coming disaster. The lake aboil. The crater would freeze smooth, always did, with charred sticks, broken glass, and bark swimming in it. She’d lost the fish hut in the divorce, but the gambrel roofline was distinctive. She squinted for it in the lenses, but fish huts all look the same at twilight.

  Last winter had been warm, so they weren’t expecting it. The mercury dropped every day. In town, at the school and meeting places, they talked ozone holes and natural cycles and getting suckered by headlines. They wore wool socks. They ordered extra blankets from catalogues.

  It got colder still. The furnace ran 24/7 at the Food Boy, the only store in the valley with a deli and pharmacy section. The snow machiners bought no gas. The station owners groused. The men stayed in and finally painted the babies’ rooms and fixed the drips in basements. Easter Creek froze, the ice dammed up, then the creek burst and overflowed the dam, until the dam broke loose and took Smitty’s Bridge out.

  “That bridge was too low anyway,” people said, taking pictures. “That bridge had it coming.”

  The Town Council voted on the bridge. The road crew erected a fence and sign as directed, then the wind came up and flung the fence in the creek and the sign high up in a downstream tree, Road Closed! Go Back! which they thought was funny and took more pictures. They voted again, a second resolution, calling for a less casual effort, for concrete blocks, no dirt work was possible, secured with reliable knots to reliable trees. The Town Clerk should have arranged the work, but broke his leg the next morning. Lilibeth found him sprawled on black ice, called the ambulance, yelled “Hello!” and waved them into Elm Street. She’d been walking her dogs. Further resolutions were tabled when the pipes froze in Town Hall.

  Lilibeth had once known all the resolutions. She used to take minutes, a public service, given her handwriting. But since the divorce she’d been lying low. She lived with the dogs in a house on the hump of the hill in the middle of Elm Street. The chickens lived in the shed. The house fit her budget and was tucked in the pines, which leaned so far the house was nearly invisible. Electric wires dropped down to the roof through branches and needles. The pines hardly swayed in greatest gusts. Her new address was not yet added to the Newsletter list, so she was not up on things.

  The valley got colder. The pipes froze downtown in the houses and shops on Main Street. The houses up on the hills and slopes lasted longer due to thermal inversions. On the lake, the drifts climbed the fish huts, ramped up the walls until the kids off school could scramble to the roofs then slide back down again and again, their mothers watching from idling cars, calling out “enough!” when they thought about frostbite. At night, the drifts wrapped around the sides until only the doors that opened inward opened at all. One kid stayed overnight on a dare. They tried to cut him out in the morning. The mother was frantic. The oil plugged the chainsaws. The handsaws’ blades snapped in two. The heads of mauls dropped off their handles. Such was the freezing differential between ash wood and steel.

  “It’s too cold to keep trying,” the police chief said since it was too late anyway. “You people go home.” They all did but the mother.

  Many went to the fire hall. They huddled around the radio. The broadcast died during the lead-in: post office frozen three towns north.

  “POs should be immune,” they agreed at an emergency meeting. “Given federal regulations on pipe depth.”

  “The plumbers must be making a mint,” they said as backup generators hummed.

  The price of stove wood went sky high. Families played board games together for the first time in years.

  When the broadcast died, Lilibeth was listening in a bathtub not deep or fancy, but hot and reliable. Her dad had bought the radio in Hong Kong in the service. It was top of the line in its time. She’d got it in probate. She got out of the tub to shake it. She dripped on the floor, which was cold on her feet.


  She’d gotten the house cheap, a foreclosure, as-is. It needed paint. The porch sagged, with mice in the crawlspace, but the furnace was good as were the roof and well. She jiggled the toilet handle, which was running nonstop again. The plumber had not called back yet. She brought the phone to the edge of the tub and got back in. She’d given Norm her number weeks ago, a fireman. It was his idea despite his wife’s death last year. Norm was a shy one. He had only one friend outside the crew, an old miner.

  Lilibeth splashed.

  She’d met the old miner once on Norm’s doorstep. They’d popped by Norm’s at the same time. Lilibeth rang the bell. The old miner carried a tray with a turkey.

  “I need the oven,” the old miner had said when Norm appeared.

  The turkey was pink, freshly plucked, and pimpled. The old miner stepped in past Lilibeth, searched for salt and pepper, took a shower. He slept on a rug by the wood stove as the turkey roasted.

  Turkey scent filled Norm’s house just as Lilibeth was leaving.

  “That old boy will be the last man standing,” Norm had said.

  The miner’s face glowed in the firelight. He was very thin, but used no blanket.

  “I don’t know about that,” Lilibeth had said.

  In the bath, she watched the phone when not watching her knees, which were islands washed in the tropical sea with hot foamy bubbles. The washcloth was a baby eel, which dove around coral reefs, her calves, ankles, and thighs. She dried her hands and pressed a few digits of Norm’s number. She did not understand. She set the phone down. She’d turned up the thermostat in the hallway and the furnace rumbled. “Let the man come to you,” the book said. “Never push a man or he’ll head for the hills. A man likes to feel in charge.”

  The pines tapped the roof gently as the wind whipped and arched over Elm Street and everywhere.

  “We’ve never seen such a cold snap,” they said when Fish and Game closed. “Till the road gets better,” the Game Warden said. Some went to Florida. Roads drifted in over notches and passes. Some wells had hand pumps and people pumped into buckets until their eyelashes stuck together. The ice on the lake was twenty feet deep according to the high school science club, which met anyway.

  Tree limbs snapped power lines, candles burned low, and oil tanks emptied. Animals made dens. Emergency meetings served hot chocolate and sweet rolls. Birds tucked away somewhere. School closed for another week. Story time moved to the fire hall for the littlest kids. The engine bays had never been fuller. The kids loved the ladders and pole from the bunk room and the first-aid kit was near at hand. The firemen peed down by the creek where the bridge had been, jogged down through trees in full gear and masks.

  “Someone will forget and drive right off that,” one said. His beard was ice.

  “Even lawyers need to eat,” another said. They zipped up quick and jogged back through trees again. Masks fogged then cleared, fogged then cleared.

  Town Council resolved to call the tank farm two valleys over for additional oil trucks. They were told to call the Capitol and left messages. The fire hall was busy. They ate on paper plates around the blower. The dogs chased the cups that cart-wheeled away.

  “This is fun!” the kids said.

  “The capital N in Nature,” the librarian said.

  The leach fields and septic tanks were soon rock solid, then septic lines. Old outhouses were cleared of shrubs grown in. Others rolled trashcans to the edge of decks with curtains around them. Holes were cut in the seats of wicker chairs and buckets placed under. This was hardest on the sick, elderly, and shy. City fathers looked the other way. They’d decide on the collection and disposal at next Town Meeting.

  Lilibeth read like a scholar. The books on self-improvement were stacked by her bed. Her TV had been broken since her last boyfriend. It sat on the porch as if looking for the street. He’d kicked the screen in, a sheriff’s deputy-in-training. Maybe Norm felt a conflict of interest that she’d dated a fellow man in uniform. She did not understand. Until the radio died, she’d not missed the TV.

  She took baths while reading. She took baths and filled out job applications. Norm’s wife was the most likely reason. “He needs time before his next commitment,” the book on grief said. “Don’t be overeager during the healing phase,” another said, “Soul-mating takes time.” He’d suggested she trim back the pines, a fire hazard. “I like the closed-in feeling,” she’d told him. He had not offered his chainsaw though he was certified. It had been their one night together.

  Things could always be better. The warning light in her car was a little golden engine. The guy from the shop had not called back. She tried to remember if she owed him money. The trees around her house seemed bigger and thicker in this cold, to lean down like a tent. She’d missed her period, and though the test was negative, her message no doubt had upset Norm. When she ventured out with job applications, his car was at the fire hall, not his normal shift. The parking lot was full, some party, the faces and heads behind the frost of the roll-up glass of engine bays. She pulled in and watched. Some people waved at her. Even her ex-truck was parked there, the one with the hitch to pull the fish hut. She must have forgotten some holiday because all the shops were closed on Main Street. She’d knocked on the glass, “Hello! Hello!” She left the applications in doorways, under flowerpots and stabbed by the edges of shovels. The flag at the cannon in the square had been ripped by the wind. The cars were drifted-in. The meters were red, all out of time, not a single ticket.

  She saw a group, a family, and called, “Hello!” The family was so bundled, she could not be sure if they were male or female. A bundled baby swung from a parent’s hip, its small face crushed to the larger shoulder, perhaps crying over a frostbitten nose or ice-cold feet or numbed earlobes. She squatted to study their stampede of tracks. They turned down an alley. They never turned. She nearly felt their heat under an awning, almost sniffed their smell around a corner. She followed for a while, then she looped back to the square past the antique shop and hardware store.

  It felt colder in town than at her house. She stamped her boots and hugged her arms. It felt much colder. She marveled at this impression. How real it seemed, how actual, factual, reliable, true. How apparently based on sensory perception, the nerves in the face, for example, the capillaries of the ears when the hat flew off and tumbled away. The pain in the lungs, deep breaths required for catching the hat, for leaping a drift.

  She stood at the flag by the cannon. She folded the last application and stuffed it in her pocket. She would have to rewrite it. The chase had rumpled it terribly. Her car rumbled and puffed all alone by the library, and she marveled at the power of the mind, since she knew from her readings that such impressions of doom were purely psychological: mere exaggerations of the current conditions caused by the scar tissues of grief—swollen up layers of disappointment, sadness and anger, the book said, which ganged up to distort perception, to disable the afflicted. Don’t believe this empty town. This coldest cold. This Death of the World.

  She wrote her real problems on paper. They hung on the fridge behind a magnet. She studied the list while eating soup from a can at the oven door, open to 350°:

  Mice in crawlspace.

  Percolator plug / missing / lost.

  Woodpile low / get wood

  Dogs tracking bark into house

  Dogs chewing braided rug

  Engine light / engine light

  Chicken feed

  Find job / anything

  Toaster adjustment

  When the bath started acting up, she added it below: Bath / coughing / investigate.

  There were other issues: In the morning, she found the chickens huddled together under the light bulb. They were not happy. They pecked each other out of boredom and stress, the chicken book said. She dabbed cream between feathers on the scabby parts. She told them to simmer down, look on the sunny side. Things are always worse for someone else. Her snow pants pockets needed patching, for example. Quarters fell out and anythi
ng smaller. Her phone card minutes ran to zero. She lost the charger for her phone, so how could the shops call for an interview? She drove down Main to add notes about the charger. Her applications still flapped in the doorways. The extended new holiday apparently continued. She would buy a calendar after her first paycheck.

  The plumber’s office door was open. She left a note on the desk chair about the tub. “I can’t live without it.”

  When the hand pumps froze, people filled their jugs at the Easter Hill Spring, an old pipe in the slope that poured out constantly. The plows cleared the pullout to it. The pipe was the width of a thumb. It filled a cistern built by a Water Committee decades back. A historical plaque said some old miner dug the spring out for his mules.

  “It’s artesian,” some Committee members had argued.

  “Geothermal,” said the ones who’d been to college.

  “It’s God either way,” said the religious faction. “The Flock will not go thirsty.”

  During the cold snap, they kept a fire burning by the spring. Each family backed in with empty jugs and a stick of wood they threw on the fire. Kids tapped the fire’s edges with their boots. As the cold pressed in, the pipe lengthened and thickened with days and weeks, until the ice on the pipe was an elephant’s trunk with a smirky tip where wind had shaped it and the water dripped out. Some women wouldn’t look at it. Men and boys made jokes. Exhaust from the tailpipes sank and swirled, and people coughed. They filled buckets and tubs and screw-top jars. They dragged the heaviest through snow to tailgates. Birds landed on the cistern and were shooed away. Town dogs licked the runoff.

  Once, Lilibeth pulled in at the pullout to see about the hubbub: cars abandoned, jumper cables hanging out, water jugs half-buried. She waved at friends she’d not seen for ages. She shook her head and mouthed her question. “No water?” her lips said. “I’ve got water at my house!” Her eyes and teeth were big and her mittens excited as they pointed toward Elm Street. The friends tapped on windows too iced up to roll down and pointed at their phones. “On the line to the Capitol,” their lips said, and Lilibeth nodded as if she understood they were requesting reinforcements, water trucks and propane rations, a generator at school so the kids did not fall behind.