Reptile House Read online

  Sometimes she’d have liked to hurl a rock: to coil the arm, to let fly at glass, but it was hard to justify such an idea.

  The old friends waved goodbye. They gave thumbs up with empty milk jugs. A show of support, she thought later, for finally getting up and running, surviving her troubles, like writing GO TEAM GO! on the glass.

  The plumber didn’t show. Norm didn’t call. The little golden engine on the car’s console was now a constant. The town’s sudden holiday must have been extended. Days dropped away and away. The sink and toilet were fine, but now the tub was failing. It sputtered a tepid twisting trickle. It groaned as if giving in. Water boiled in pots to supplement, in the kitchen, on the wood stove. She dumped hot over the cold sheen of bubble bath. She stirred the mixture and got in with a book about self-employment, but who could dream with all this worry? In the morning, she drove to the plumber’s house. The door was open, “Hello!” The fire hall lot was empty, the weeks-long party was over. All engines gone. The school was dark. The library drop box was frozen shut. She kept the books.

  Capitol Radio reported frost to twenty-two feet. All Governor’s staff was in the emergency bunker, well-stocked, but the pantry bunker froze. The canned goods were crushed, oozed when heated. The staff cooks asked to bring their children down, but with so little space no one else was permitted. Rivers froze to the bottom. Dams iced in. Rail lines snapped at critical junctions. Coal cars stood in the western fields. Southern news crews showed footage of icicles, people chipping, sucking, so thirsty, so thirsty.

  When she found the hardware store ajar, she borrowed a crowbar and a bag of mousetraps. She pried the back library door. She easily found the plumbing book section.

  First step, the book said, was locate the blockage. The crawlspace was low and dirty with mouse droppings. She crouched at the door. She crawled lower as the ground sloped up. She baited the mousetraps with peanut butter.

  Mapping the kitchen sink was easy with the pencil. She crawled along the copper to the first major junction and marked it. The flashlight shone up on the belly of the house where the junction split. She followed the split to the bathroom sink, to the toilet, to the place where the tub sagged down like a cave explorer. She lay crushed under floor joists, barely room to pull a mitten off, to feel for the frozen place.

  She crawled out and boiled water. She crawled back under with a paintbrush. There was no room for pouring. She painted the pipe with scalding water in the beam of the flashlight. The blockage was enormous, a foot across at least of frosty copper, and the brushed-on water was no match for it. She went to bed dry and cold.

  Days and nights came and went. She climbed on her car roof to the broken window at Food Boy for peanut butter and dog food, which she also fed the chickens. She left IOUs signed and dated. The aisles were flooded and frozen. She screwed screws down through her boots for extra traction. Her car roof got scratched. She picked any shopping cart she wanted. Back home she lit candles under the blockage and steamy bowls of water. If only she’d tried this hard with marriage, employed creativity. When candles and bowls failed, she lit twigs in the frying pan and slid it under. She added paper slowly, but the flames licked the joists and she doused the pan. “Think with logic for once!” she wrote in her journal and thought how if she froze, her ex would come to identify the body. Who else would do it? He’d flip through this journal on the kitchen table. He’d see how much she had learned, how substantial she’d become from new experience, how far she’d advanced as a human being. After the fire, the tub coughed rusty drops that she tried to analyze.

  She tried innovations. She bent a hanger straight and shoved it in. She banged the faucet with a hammer, but chipped the tile. She tried the hammer in the crawlspace too, but made no headway without any backswing. She set the mice on the woodpile for the birds. She washed her hair in the kitchen sink with a mug poured over her neck. Soapy water ran down her forehead to sink to drain through pipes to tank to leach field, then down, down through pebbles and rocks in layers, between faults toward magma, only to steam up again, spit out someday, maybe some geyser, some national park with buffalo romping and children. Anyway, her hair was clean. She reread an old paper by the wood stove while drying the hair, then burned the paper to prevent rereading.

  Some days she crawled under the house and sat with the pipe and the mice. She wished for a weasel, which she understood ate ten mice per day. Sometimes the dogs sat with her. Sometimes the chickens came to be chased by the dogs.

  Outside, she stretched. She reset her scarf over her nose. The sky was patches through branches and needles. Not a puff of wind. Birds pecking frozen seeds.

  She drove to the lake with the little gold engine beaming. She parked at the boat launch. She walked across the ice over ten-foot drifts and slid down the back sides, then bare patches, on and on. The ice groaned sometimes, made lines and cracks in spider webbing. Pine branches had blown and impaled themselves upright in drifts, such tender new forests, so sudden and stupid.

  She walked to the fish huts. She circled the fire crater. She peered in windows. When she found her old fish hut, the door opened to the armchair. Fishhooks stabbed up the armrests. A fish was penciled on the wall—Bass, 8 lbs, the date under it—and a picture of the ex with a girl and a girl with a fish hooked from gills and thumb. A jigsaw puzzle glued together. She tugged the handle of the door in the floor. The skin of ice was thin. She bashed it in with the pick leaning on the cooler.

  “Hello!” she called down.

  She tied a hook to a line. She tied the sinker. She sat in the armchair. The beer in the cooler had exploded into aluminum ribbons. She dropped the hook down into deepest waters where it floated in the warm current with the fishes.

  As the glaciers moved south toward the Capitol, some high points and valleys were spared. Ice slipped around them, while the rising sea pressed the coastlines. Planes dropped from the sky, no one knew why. Engineers volunteered from the private sector. They repaired and upgraded. They drilled for heat in the earth, hot water or steam, to turn the turbines. It was proven science, but the crews were stressed and components untested. Reactor waters were ice rinks boiling in the middles when the sea crawled up over boardwalks and streets, consuming bike paths and smashing hot-dog stands against shopping districts and schools.

  Lilibeth studied copper and drew maps.

  Once, she drove to the spring looking for the old miner. She’d seen him there sometimes removing tires from abandoned cars. She honked when she saw him. He wore a leather cap tied under his chin. He dragged a sack through the parking area. He dropped the sack, darted off in the wrong direction, up the hill, his canteen swinging. She ran after him for a while up through the trees, but this slope was difficult. How did the old man do it? On the steepest pitches she clawed on hands and knees, but this old miner was very fast. Sometimes she stopped to spit, to call toward the ridge top, “Wait for me!”

  The sack contained a half-skinned opossum, a snare and fishhooks. She studied how he’d done the skinning. She kicked the snow for his knife. She took the sack.

  She called the plumber again, then Norm once more, then threw the phone in a dumpster behind Fish and Game.

  Back home, she walked the TV to the curb. Her neighbors’ trash was no better than hers, a sanitation strike she guessed. She’d so lost track of current events. She blew on her gloves. The dogs ran around while she wandered the trash. She dragged a couch down Elm Street. On the corner she found a three-bladed fan on a pedestal base with an oscillating cage. She walked it home and ate dinner with the fan across the table.

  She found an extension cord in the hardware store. She plugged the cord in on the porch and dragged it all around to the crawlspace. It was almost night time when she tried it. The flashlight wagged. The mice scattered.

  The fan wedged between the ground and joists, as close as could be to the blockage. She dialed the oscillation off to focus all energy and clicked the fan on. The three blades hummed like moths on the window. She took
a nap.

  She took chicken from the freezer to celebrate. She boiled rice in a pot and shared it with the dogs like a party. The fan purred below. She filled the tub, hot and fast, peeled off everything, and sank into a miracle; the tangible principles of airflow science she’d never learned in school, the kinetics of wind, surely, derivative of planetary motion, most likely, solar storms flared millions of miles arriving at the earth eight minutes later, parting like water around a stone in a creek, excited atoms in thinnest atmosphere bumping and shoving the next bunch down, again and again. Atoms prevail! Comprehension so overrated! The healing phase very truly takes time. Don’t push Lilibeth or she’ll head for the hills! Lilibeth likes to feel she’s in charge!

  She soaked until the book was soaked when she woke, her bottom teeth under. She spit out and toweled off.

  The next day she walked the thermometer to the curb, stuck at minus 75 for weeks, more proof of cheap modern manufacturing. She stitched her snowpants. She walked the fan to the car and turned the ignition. She aimed the blades through the steering wheel at the little golden engine. She cracked a window and napped. When she woke the car started right up. She drove to town. The fan sat in the passenger seat.

  At the library, she borrowed volcano stories and Spanish grammar in case she and Norm ever got to Mexico. A sign at the gas station said, “Take What You Need,” so she filled the tank.

  In the square, sandbags lay scattered where they had fallen off some speeding vehicle. A truck was turned over against the cannon. The sandbags looked like kids at nap-time under small brown blankets. She carried several to her trunk for traction.

  “Hello!” she called.

  The rope of the flag clanged the pole. Keep trying. Keep trying. She drove to the dumpster behind Fish and Game and climbed in. Her phone was right on top.

  “Hello!” she called from atop the dumpster. “Hello! Hello! Hello!”

  The waves of her sound rolled down the lake. The words bounced to shore and up the slopes and ricocheted off a glacier dammed in the next valley over. When her voice hit the ice, it bounced back down: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” it said. Though the words were smaller, they were distinct and friendly. This new blue wall made the ridges look silly.

  Her neck ached from gazing. She memorized the new skyline.

  She drove by Norm’s house one last time. His car was parked at the curb and a deputy’s cruiser was parked in the driveway. Both drivers’ doors were wide open. All Norm’s tires were missing and the cruiser’s were flat. She walked the perimeter of the cruiser with the fan. If the tires inflated, it was very slowly.

  The smell of wood smoke was unmistakable.

  “Hello!” she called at the door. “This is your last chance!”

  She used a rock to break the window. The wood stove stood in the middle of the living room. She circled it. The fire was low with bark and papers. The old miner from the spring lay bundled on the hearth, filthy and ripe, she could smell him from the doorway. She knelt and approached him on hands and knees. When she sniffed him, his eyes opened on her. His tongue circled like a slug along his lips, cracked but still plump and trying to speak. She’d have liked a few questions answered: why’d you run from me, for example. Why did you run? But his lips were down-turned and dismal, prone, it seemed, to gloom and disappointment, though gloom was understandable. Perhaps the spring froze up finally. Perhaps he’d lost his dog. Perhaps Norm had ordered him out of the house. Perhaps he’d quit looking for his dog and family, but how can things improve if you stop the search?

  She didn’t ask. She wasn’t in the mood for gloom. Silence was better.

  When his mitten lifted, it pointed for the canteen, and she backed away. His lips sucked. His tongue licked, so thirsty. His canteen lay on the braided rug, the very rug she once told Norm was like her rug at her house, what a pleasing design, what a funny coincidence.

  The canteen was a good one, Army surplus. She reeled it in by its cord. She unscrewed the cap.

  His mouth spoke in a frozen language. She shushed him with her finger to his lips. She squatted by him like an island, explored the face with her hands, the neck, the shoulders. She found the knife on his belt. The blade was sharp, well cared for. The knife cut with urgency, now telling him: Be quiet, Don’t speak, spoke in slicing motions across his neck, not silent, but speechless until his frown was gone. His eyes were wide and she dropped the knife into her bag. She would clean the blade later with snow, between thumb and palm, snap it shut.

  She hung the canteen over her shoulder. It sloshed half-full and swung like a toy. Before she left she searched down the cellar steps for supplies. The rooms were smaller than she remembered. Her head seemed to scrape the ceilings, to stoop low under lintels. She’d grown so big and strong. She could have snapped a chair over her knee.

  At home, she set the fan to oscillate in every room. She fanned the chickens one by one. They looked like dogs on a ride, so happy and free. She guessed the radio station was Cairo, still garbled weeks after installing the antennae from her neighbor’s roof. She had cut down a sapling for better reception.

  The chickens would be kinder to each other if spring came, with great bundles of buds to break all records, a bumper crop in the sudden heat and gush of creeks. The leaves would burst open. The turkeys would hatch. “La piñata fiesta,” she’d pronounce on the porch to pine trunks and to acorns forming tiny, nearly-nothings on stems, in the swirl of the great unfolding green. She sat on the roof with binoculars scanning in all directions. She did not mind waiting.

  Take the Car Take the Girl

  William had called at five for a table for four at six. He got the best table in the house as usual: the round and white by the bay window, a little apart from the others, facing the street behind the glass and the cars parked at the line of meters. The streetlights had not come on yet. The tablecloth fell off sharp and cast a blue edge on the blond wood floor. As the sun went down, the edge got wider and bluer, and would swallow the restaurant to the back wall.

  Tweedy sipped opposite her husband, William, and William talked to Michael on his right, a new man from the Club. Tweedy’s hiccups were at eighteen-second intervals. The doctor had given her pills. She needed a refill. Her blouse was pinned at the neck with a sterling bee. Her hiccups were, for the most part, quiet and unoffending. The waiter refilled the wine with a twist of his wrist. He wore black and white and circled like a planet, pouring. He almost bowed in his duties but did not bow, while Tweedy’s busboy did seem to bow to the table as he delivered a new shaker of salt. His black pants were so big on his slender frame that the belt cinched tight was required. His white shirt billowed out over the belt. His father’s clothes, she thought, or stepfather’s. “Can I help you?” she wanted to say, poor thing. This boy needed some petting, anyone could see that. The waiter circled and poured. Her busboy was a beautiful boy, pink and blue in the face, with a basket of bread. At the other tables, he bowed and scraped crumbs into his hand.

  Tweedy hiccuped. The waiter said, “More water?” and Tweedy said, “I have some, thank you,” but he filled her glass anyway and she hiccuped again.

  “Poor dear,” said William, glancing at Tweedy. He leaned back toward Michael who was taller than William, thirty pounds lighter, still with a sense of future about him. William grasped at the air when he spoke. He reached at territory across the tablecloth. Michael’s hands chopped back. They talked the news of the week: the new trash contract Uptown, the judge off to jail, the council meeting gone so very amiss, bosses gumming the works, and how. The new blueprints of the footprint of the central headquarters were planned by the river with a fountain in the atrium, glass and more glass, a high-rent view. Tweedy hiccuped and sipped. “Poor dear.”

  “We are awaiting our fourth,” William said to the waiter. He nodded at the empty seat at his left. Helene was always late.

  “Have you tried holding your breath?” said Michael to Tweedy.

  “She tried it in the car,” William told him. “
Holding her breath hardly ever works for Tweedy.”

  When Tweedy was a girl she had wanted things like tea parties and lemon cake. Michael straightened his tie. Tweedy dabbed her lips with the cloth napkin, a little smudge, what a shame. She had wanted clean white napkins and a husband with a crown on his head, crystal doorknobs to the powder rooms. Her busboy delivered napkins folded like tents to a table in the back. He was a lovely boy, that busboy.

  “The election will be tight, I’ve heard that said,” said Michael to William and they got going about it. The side of Michael’s hand chopped the table. His hair was dyed black but his eyebrows were graying.

  “I disagree completely,” said William. “Murdock will run away with it, I disagree.”

  “I’ve heard it from several good sources at the Club,” said Michael.

  “Well, you are so naive,” said William with a smile. “So young still.”

  “No really! Just think of this, stop and think of this,” said Michael.

  “Truly, you surprise me,” said William.

  William went to the men’s room. Tweedy asked Michael after his family, what schools, what church, what street? William came back and looked at the door. Tweedy hiccuped after seventeen seconds. William looked at his watch.

  “I’m sure she will be here soon,” said Tweedy. The men went on and Tweedy counted to fifteen seconds, a downward trend worth tending to. She excused herself to the powder room with a glass of water and her turquoise leather handbag. In a stall she bent over and drank all the water down, her head between her knees, her lips sucking on the far side of the glass. She looked in the mirror, her face, the bee at her neck. Someone else entered, a lady in pink, and they stood side by side in the mirror. Tweedy counted: twenty-four seconds this time.