Reptile House Read online

  His stomach growled and the pigeon scuffed around. His wife and the baby slept. Eight across for “The sea’s diva.” He scribbled S T A R F I S H and thought of Catalina Island, of the tide pools and urchins beckoning with delicate green arms. Once Carl left his wallet at work and had gone back in to find it after hours. The wallet was safe in the break room, but the day’s cash deposit sat unattended in its dirty canvas bag by the till. A heavy bag too, since Friday was a big day at the showroom. That and a gallon of best red enamel came home with Carl that night. Barn Red, it was called, and high gloss. A new floor manager was fired soon after.

  Six across: “Rodents in the Bard’s title.” Carl thought, erased, then wrote S H R E W S in boxes at the center of the puzzle. Good thing it was pencil. The words H Y D R A and E W E S made sense now and appeared.

  Four down : “Places to keep animals.” Carl’s pencil wrote Z O O S, a word with a strange look, but so many words have that. W I F E, for example, or C A R L or L E A P. Look at them. Just lines and dashes cutting and crossing each other and promising sense. But phone lines made sense. Tunnels, conveyor belts. The double yellow, straight as an arrow across the desert in Arizona, made sense.

  G O T O

  Some time ago in the Reptile House at the zoo Carl watched a twelve-foot python open its big detachable jaws and swallow the other snake in the cage, its only companion. Black snake eats brown snake. Big snake eats little snake. Carl stood behind the glass eating peanuts from a bag. Two snakes became one as people flashed pictures, went running, and whispered with quick tongues in the echoing dark. His wife had stayed in the Big Cat House and had not seen the eating. The kids were at the dolphin show with the sitter. Had the snake made some sign before the deed? Some goodbye or explanation with those lidless eyes? Carl wanted to know, tried to remember. He’d witnessed it all.

  To the guys at work he described how the final snake had two tails for a while, one pointing each direction, the gaping mouth in the middle, the brown tail flapping then still. Gulped shorter and shorter until gone. This was odd to see.

  The zookeepers had said of the incident: “Unnatural, unprecedented, as far as we know.” But Carl had doubted that. This was a PR statement if he ever heard one. But there are things zookeepers do not like to admit.

  The pigeon tapped behind the blind and Carl thought how the snake would show that bird a time. His wife was not interested in reptiles. She did not like what Carl liked. Carl did not like what she liked either. Or other things too, so surprising with so little warning. He raised the blind and said this to the pigeon. His wife and baby slept far away, across the room, behind his back.

  In the Reptile House, two windows down from the double snake in the cage, a nest of eggs had been hatching. The little things had tumbled in knots, striking and hissing, but it had been hard to take them seriously, until this.

  Now the walls bleeped and whirred at him. Carl was hungrier. The two, his wife and baby, were a vague white bundle on the bed. At their elbows on a tray was an apple she’d bitten into at eight centimeters and abandoned, with lipstick and tooth marks in the green flesh, now in the sweet beginnings of rot. Apples are so good. Apples are historic and scientific in the morning on Catalina. There were no snakes on Catalina. Too far from shore.

  He walked the apple to the trashcan. He stood in the door. He thought of going. There would be no traffic at this hour. Home fast, in the middle lane, going sixty-five to the turn at Cicero and leaving the tallest of the city behind. The windows would be dark, not ignoring dark, or oblivious dark, just sleeping dark, five of them, three on top and two in each side of the red front door, like a big glassy family. The frozen lawn would roll out flat for him and his legs would walk him home. And don’t switch on the light. Keep it dark until tomorrow.

  His wife stirred. “Maybe open the window.”

  “There’s a pigeon out there.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Carl.”

  When the window opened, the pigeon flew off. The green nurse came and took a pulse.

  “You should go,” said his wife. “We’re alright without you.”

  “I’ll be going,” he said.

  Carl put on his coat and found his keys. He grabbed the postcards and stamps. The elevator carried him down, the postcards slithered down the slot near reception, the revolving glass doors shoved him out to fresh air.

  His keys clinked in the parking lot and the little car waited. A satellite beelined the blackness, bent toward the horizon. Like it was planning something big.

  G R A V I T Y. Carl raised a hand up at it.

  The parking lot, the side street, on-ramp, eight lanes, sixty-five miles per hour. The four-door whizzed away by the Lake, over the river, zigged and zagged by wharfs, beacons blinking, stone lions and white-capped waves, missiled through the tunnels of towers and past ballparks put to bed. Finally he zoomed under the massive central post office that squatted over the entire eight lanes like a big brick mother. Then the open road.

  When Carl was a boy, the neighboring farm boarded horses. There was one young horse who was so tame they didn’t tie him up or keep him in the paddock. The people just let the horse stand in the driveway or walk in the yard because he never went far from the house. He was too scared. But once on a full moon night, Carl had been walking the road, thinking of his future. At the neighbor’s house, this horse came into view. It stood alone, a white shadow in that moon, and maybe not a real animal at all. Carl was startled at first, then recognized the horse and kept walking. This horse started to follow. Twenty feet back, then fifteen, then ten and Carl started getting scared. This horse had never been so far from the house before. And what if it was not the same horse, but a different horse of a different temperament? Or a different creature altogether? Young Carl found a tree and climbed up into it. The horse stood at the trunk until dawn and went home.

  Carl’s little white four-door whooshed past the Cicero exit. The fringe off the dirty berm swirled up like a laugh. Walls, corners and rooftops stacked high and low, marched on neat and trim. The billboards shouted and flashed: an umbrella, a mustache, a bottle of rum, as big as trees. Near the airport a cord of jets lashed fifty miles out over the Lake, heading past places like Kansas City or Maui, past landing strips and volcanoes with telescopes. A jet with landing gear slung low roared over the highway, and the little car flinched, swerved left, then righted itself to the middle lane.

  Beyond the airport the city thinned and dimmed, private and pleasing. The billboards grew faint and quiet. The walls, corners and rooftops purpled and settled away lower and lower to the ground. The night split open. The car sped on.

  The little car slowed for a bank of toll booths spanning the road that Carl did not remember. As the window rolled down and fingers fumbled for change, a pair of tall white lights, growing bigger, approaching fast, sprayed the rear window. The eighteen-wheeler purred to a standstill behind the little white car though all the other lanes, left and right, yawned entirely vacant. Its chrome face nuzzled in, steamed, licked closer until the grill grinned red in the taillights. It growled low at idle and the tollbooth shook as the quarters flew from Carl’s hand, the nickel and two dimes too, and were gulped down. The white lights blinked to high beam blue. The gate snapped up, a green light said G O, and the little car went. The high beams winked a salutation as the car flew away around the next long curve.

  In the dark, the white dashes dashed west and the little car threaded between them. It was not long before the high beams came again bearing down fast from behind the long curve. Steady now, easy now. In the rearview mirror, the truck stalked closer, crept and reached, until, grasping, the little car was snared in a whizzing ball of light. Closer, closer, closer, the truck eased to looming within yards, within feet, inches of, and all was blue: the gripping hands, the trembling wheel, the shadow of the head on the dash. The dashes leapt on, the car, and the light, until at 84, something kissed the car’s rear bumper, tenderly, and the shadow shook.

  89 . .
. 92 . . . 95.

  Shortly, the others came too. They passed two from the left, one from the right, shiny black eighteen-wheelers, swirling rims and red rivets, without a single marking on their faces or flanks and no identifying plate or registration at the rear. The first of them slid from left into the lead, while the others sidled up even and cinched at the little car’s sides, leaving no crack for daylight when daylight came. 97 shuddered through steel and rubber and Carl’s mouth said something to no one in particular.

  So it went for miles. The white slowed, the black slowed. The black surged, the white surged too. Nudge, bump, flinch, shove. Chrome fright roar bite knuckle knees teeth please faster stop faster please.

  Boxed in.

  The five lifted off at the border. If Carl’s mouth made a noise, from a pink place in his lungs, it was a very small noise. They made good time in the dark, over the land and Lake that, by this time of night, was knocked over and licked up. To the rim and beyond it.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the editors of the journals in which the following stories have previously appeared:

  Gargoyle: “For Swimmers”;

  The Carolina Quarterly: “Cold Snap”;

  The Common: “The Amazing Discovery and Natural History of Carlsbad Caverns”;

  Green Mountains Review: “Rabbit’s Foot”;

  The Malahat Review: “No Name Creek”;

  The Nashville Review: “Reptile House”.

  I will ever be grateful to Peter Conners for finding, having faith in and improving this collection, to Jenna Fisher, Melissa Hall, Sandy Knight, and all the BOA staff and supporters for their hard work and vision in making the book ready for the world.

  I owe an incalculable debt to Chris Bachelder, who guided the collection into being, also to Noy Holland, Sabina Murray, Jim Shepard, John Vinduska, Gloria Barrigan, Sandra Jenson, Michael Carolan, Scott Salus, and Tim Sutton, all who, in one way or another, were essential in inspiring, crafting, and refining these stories.

  I am grateful to too many friends and family to list, from old worlds and new ones. Please accept my thanks, all of you, for your wisdom, fun, and faith. Thanks especially to Nancy Wainwright, Saunders McNeill, Betsy Hopkins, Peter Corbett and family, who were with me through the writing.

  Finally, thanks to Margaret Eagleton and Mike Wissemann, my three sisters and my parents, for their bottomless support and love.

  About the Author

  Robin McLean was a lawyer then a potter for fifteen years in the woods of Alaska before leaving to pursue her MFA at UMass Amherst in Massachusetts. Her first collection, Reptile House, was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize in 2011 and 2012. McLean’s stories have appeared widely in such places as Western Humanities Review, Cincinnati Review, Carolina Quarterly, Nashville Review, Malahat Review, Gargoyle, The Common, and Copper Nickel, as well as the anthology American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers. She currently teaches at Clark University and splits her time between Newfound Lake in Bristol, New Hampshire, and a 200-year-old farm in western Massachusetts.

  BOA Editions, Ltd. American Reader Series

  No. 1

  Christmas at the Four Corners of the Earth

  Prose by Blaise Cendrars

  Translated by Bertrand Mathieu

  No. 2

  Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry

  By William Heyen

  No. 3

  After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches

  By W. D. Snodgrass

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  Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry

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  To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry

  By W. D. Snodgrass

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  You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke

  By Lou Andreas-Salomé

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  Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee

  Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll

  No. 8

  I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These

  By Anthony Tognazzini

  No. 9

  Unlucky Lucky Days

  By Daniel Grandbois

  No. 10

  Glass Grapes and Other Stories

  By Martha Ronk

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  Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters

  By Jessica Treat

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  On the Winding Stair

  By Joanna Howard

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  Cradle Book

  By Craig Morgan Teicher

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  In the Time of the Girls

  By Anne Germanacos

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  This New and Poisonous Air

  By Adam McOmber

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  To Assume a Pleasing Shape

  By Joseph Salvatore

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  The Innocent Party

  By Aimee Parkison

  No. 18

  Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words

  Interviews by Tony Leuzzi

  No. 19

  The Era of Not Quite

  By Douglas Watson

  No. 20

  The Winged Seed: A Remembrance

  By Li-Young Lee

  No. 21

  Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories

  By Aurelie Sheehan

  No. 22

  The Tao of Humiliation

  By Lee Upton

  No. 23

  Bridge

  By Robert Thomas

  No. 24

  Reptile House

  By Robin McLean

  Colophon

  BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high-quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations.

  The publication of this book is made possible, in part, by the special support of the following individuals:

  Anonymous x 2

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