Reptile House Read online

  “God damn it,” said Mel. “There’s no heat. Ricardo already said.”

  The cabbie tried the switch again and the heat came on, blasted warm for a mile, then shut off again. “God damn it,” said Mel.

  “What’s eating you?” said Mike. Another mile passed by, cactus waved in the cool wet blue. “My dad lost a finger in France. I do also know that. There’s many things I know.”

  “He could have lost it chopping cabbage,” said Mel.

  “But he didn’t lose it chopping cabbage,” said Mike.

  “What do you know about chopped-off fingers?” said Mel. “Were you there when he chopped off his goddamn finger? Did you see the blood? What do you know? What do I know, what does he know about anything: seas, deserts, girls, or mermaids. Hills of beans, mountains of beans, that’s all.”

  Mike drank, Mel drank. The bottle sloshed. A mile passed. The searchlights fanned the stars. The brown mountains to the north disappeared behind the growing searchlights. A jet could spot Base from one hundred miles with those searchlights waving and dancing, green, red, green: “Come here, this way, come here to land.” The needle swung right, 84, 85 miles per hour, leaned into 86 and quivered there.

  “Faster,” said Mike.

  “It’s fast,” said the cabbie and Mike kicked the seat and the cabbie jumped.

  “Faster,” said Mike.

  The foot quivered on the pedal. The legs in regular brown pants quivered. Fear enters through the ears, eyes, and nose, any orifice, but accumulates and settles itself in the limbs and extremities: 87 miles per hour can seem slow to some. Consider the jet that will fly over soon and land without incident on the runway beyond the gatehouse. The pilot will sleep all morning, take a shower at noon, and lose his father’s wristwatch in the mess. He will ship out without finding it. They will crash on the transport to the Theater: over the Pole, a goose in the engine and a glacier receding at one inch per year.

  “I know I was born too,” said Mike. “I know plenty. I was born. Here I am. You were born. And he was born.” Mike pointed the bottle at the cabbie. “There’s a moon up there, I can see it, way out far. Someone will fly there sometime, pitch a tent and eat cheese.”

  “Ha ha ha,” laughed Mel.

  Forty-four seconds passed, a fast mile, the needle at 89. The cabbie’s knuckles and wrists were green.

  “Sure you were born, yes, but who’s your daddy?” said Mel, sitting up like he was having fun.

  “You need religion thinking that,” said Mike.

  “Luckily, you and your friend Ricardo here are in the exact same boat,” said Mel. “You can grieve your women troubles together.”

  “He’s not my friend,” said Mike.

  “Your pop was a long time in France. Ricardo was a long time away at Utah Beach,” said Mel. “Things can get very lonely back at the casa?”

  “Utah Beach is something else altogether,” said Mike.

  “Women are frail,” said Mel.

  “I’m the spitting image of my pop,” said Mike. “I got that picture by my bunk.”

  “You got an uncle?” said Mel. “I bet you’re the spitting image of your uncle too.”

  “My uncle lives in Milwaukee,” said Mike.

  “So many cows to be milked,” said Mel. “The truck needs tending. A man is needed for many things.”

  “Why you son of a bitch!” yelled Mike, and in the backseat arms and legs kicked and swung and thumped the doors and seat. The grunting and groaning was in earnest at first, then Mel yelled, “Goddamn, lighten up!” When the pistol flashed and cracked, the laughing only got louder, “Crazy son of a bitch, ha ha ha!” A new wind screamed through the fresh hole in the roof.

  The cab slowed to 22, tried to sway to the shoulder, but Mel said, “Keep going,” and the cab drove on. His son Richie had black hair and black eyes. Consuelo, black hair black eyes, Kiki, black black same. Gloria, round and brown and a new front tooth, Gloria Gloria, the children often lifted their heads in the night, turned their pillows without waking at all, a miracle of unconsciousness.

  “We could be dead in a month anyway,” Mel said. “Face down in tree roots we can’t even pronounce the name of, Ping-Pong Bing-Bong, eh, Ricardo? We ship out in a week.”

  “You’re a sourpuss sometimes,” said Mike. “You can really ruin my fun.”

  “We’ll be laying there in the mud. A pack of squint-eyed little yellow men will sneak up quiet behind, quick and nimble through the jungle leaves, and put a pistol to your soft baby temple. Right there.” Mel tapped the cabbie’s temple with his pinkie finger. The cabbie jerked his head away. The needle got blurry at 91. The sand was blue, the black sky was getting blue in the east.

  “I heard that’s so, quick little squint-eyed yellow men by the millions,” Mike said and drank. “I’d like to shoot something tonight.”

  Mel said, “If he doesn’t shoot you on the spot in the mud, he’ll take you back to his hole in the ground and tie your hands. Bind your eyes. Spin you round and laugh his yellow head off before he shoots you, or guts you, or worse.”

  “What could be worse than gutting?”

  “There’s plenty worse. These squint-eyes have been at it five thousand years. It’s an art form they practice.”

  “I wouldn’t let him,” said Mike. “I’d kill him first.”

  “How’d you kill him first?” said Mel. “He’s got you at gunpoint.”

  “I’d have my knife. It’s tucked in my boot and I’ll slit his yellow belly up the middle like a calf.”

  “That might do it,” said Mel. “Now you’re thinking.”

  “Pull his insides out and leave them for the dogs,” said Mike.

  “And the birds,” Mel said. “Picking each last bit of him. Swallowing some and bringing the rest home to the hungry mouths at the nest.”

  “I hate him, that’s what,” said Mike. Five deer in a set leapt all together along the right shoulder, dashed across in the headlights, and stopped in a set on the left shoulder. “Quick give me that pistol,” and Mike. “I’ll get some practice right now.” He rolled down the window and shot three times.

  “Don’t use them up!” said Mel. “We might need them.” He tried to snatch the pistol, but Mike held it up and away. “Suit yourself,” said Mel.

  “I think I got one,” said Mike.

  “Those deer will live to be sixty-two,” said Mel. “You’ve gotten nothing tonight.”

  The cabbie took the brass picture frame from the mirror and slid it in his pocket. His hand stayed in the pocket for a mile, then two miles. The searchlight swung greater and greater, taking everything up, taking the whole sky. The gatehouse to Fort Bliss shone as a small gold gleam on a hill. Miles passed quickly. The gatehouse grew bigger and brighter, a yellow seed, a kernel. “I love this night,” said Mel. “I vote for driving out as far as we can go.”

  “Tarred and feathered,” said Mike, and yawned. He rolled down the window, spit, rolled up, yawned again. He sniffed the barrel of the pistol. “Solitary confinement. Scrubbing the latrine for AWOL. I’m tired.”

  “We can hunt down some dolphins and squid. Mark down every variety of sand. I say let’s drive out.”

  “Reveille’s at six. We can’t goddamn drive out.”

  “Of course we can drive out,” said Mel. “Ricardo will drive us out. We are free men, aren’t we?”

  The cabbie sweated in the chill. His hands on the wheel were slender hands, like a piano player’s hands or a girl’s. 95 miles per hour bent the needle into copper green . . . 96 . . . 97 . . . 98.6 . . . a brain will cook at 108°F, but this chassis was built for speed: 180 miles per hour at the end of the green dial where the needle could lie down and rest some.

  “My dad’s into the chickens by now. Chickens were always my job. I bet the tractor’s cranky.” Mike yawned again.

  “He’ll hire a hand,” said Mel.

  “A hand’s not the same,” said Mike. “He’s old.”

  The cab rocketed toward Base. The gatehouse gleam
grew on a hill, and in every direction nothing but sand.

  Across those mountains there is no dirt or clay in the ground, no forest, no fields. The earth is a ball of sand to the middle, and heavy. There are no cities with cobblestone or brick or cement cracking. There is no rain, since the sky is sand, no pond or puddle, sand cliffs drop to sand seas. This is no lake with vines and fishes, no river with trees on the banks that from time to time plunge into the stream to be washed down three thousand miles until snagged on the bottom, the roots looped in the roots of some other tree that fell fifty or five hundred years before. The two will never harpoon the bellies of small frail crafts, never tangled and linked in mud, never rotting as one, since there is no such thing as mud. Nor is there a boat in the desert, of course. No oak anywhere to build one, iron for an anchor. No house with a sink and soap, no bed with a wife who wakes at the sniffle leaning in the doorway. Here are only lizards and beetles, sand and aboriginal thinking.

  The cabbie wiped his brow on his sleeve.

  “I love this night,” said Mel. “It’s our desert tonight.”

  The gatehouse two miles ahead is an A-frame. The A-frame has a black-and-white gate next to it. The black-and-white gate swings up and down by way of a crank. A man stands by the crank. The cab will turn slow to the gatehouse, like a Sunday drive. The blinker ticking right, right, right.

  “I was born for this desert,” said Mel. “I vote for driving out.”

  “My wife’ll be worried if I don’t get back,” said the cabbie. “Be calling everyone looking for me, like all get out.”

  “My mother’s a real worrier too,” said Mike. “I vote for turning in.”

  The cab hugged the right shoulder, Our Father who art in Heaven. One mile yet to the gatehouse and the gleam of that gatehouse was strong, “Come this way.” Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done, the cab sped on. The cactus everywhere were the low, many-armed breed with spiked hands. They did not tremble.

  An A-frame, a good solid A-frame. The soldier at the gatehouse will lean at the window, while the searchlights wave behind him like wings. He’ll say, “I hope you boys had a fine time so late. You’ll suffer for it come reveille.” He’ll smile as he says it, a kind man, a forgiving man, deliver us, please deliver us, just a boy really, his cheeks pink from sunburn and coldburn, any trace of pigment in this Viking soldier’s skin was from some slave girl from Greenland or Nova Scotia, some kind of trespass in the belly of the ship. The ship had floated east and procreated. The soldier at the gatehouse will crank up the gate and the gate will rise. It will rise up and the cab will roll on, deliver them through.

  The caves are a constant 52 degrees. Jim’s mother never saw his caves, since she was not one for the underground. She lived her whole life on floorboards. When Jim’s mother lay dying, Jim left the caves to see her off. “Jim, my dear son,” she’d said, “I want to look fine for my Maker, but this hair of mine is a real shame.” The very next day Jim loaded his mother in his cart. He hitched his horse and toted her across the river to a beauty parlor of repute. She prayed on the way, out loud so passers could hear it. They bowed their heads too, the gravity of it. People stepped clear as he carried her in. Jim lay her head in the sink and the cowboy washed the hair now gray forever and ever, Amen. Once Jim wrote of the caves, “Mother, the columns hoist the ceiling like Hercules! They are twisted and vined like a giant’s arm, so big as to make the tallest redwood look puny! As for bats, it’s true their faces are ugly to look at, but the bats do keep your son from getting lonely. I wish you could see them fly like angels through my silver stone forest, for surely it is the nearest to Heaven on Earth, Glory be! Gloria Gloria and Hallelujah too!”

  “She’ll be waking soon,” said the cabbie. “My wife will send men looking.”

  “A worrier wears a man down, don’t she just?” said Mike. “With my mother, it’s chickens first and foremost. Then what’s leached in the well: arsenic, lead, polio, scarlet fever. Lice and the sheets need changing and if the cans in the cellar went bad.”

  The cab slowed.

  “She’s a good woman,” said the cabbie. “A good wife. The best wife.”

  “It’s always in the water,” said Mel. “This sickness, the fever.”

  “I don’t have a wife at all,” said Mike.

  “Shut up,” said Mel, “I want some quiet to cool my head.” The land was perfectly flat. It tilted hard up and ramped toward the mountains and up at the sky, except there’s no such thing as sky, it’s only a word. The cab rolled on between sand and sky. Slow, slow, careful. The cab blinked red, metal striking metal, right right right at the A-frame half a mile ahead.

  “I’d like a house with red curtains,” said Mike.

  “Dengue fever and hemorrhagic fever,” said Mel, “They’re the very same thing when you get them.”

  Mike said, “I’m tired of this night.”

  “Bleed out your ass, then die,” said Mel.

  The road made an X in the desert with the gatehouse, and here was the gatehouse with gate and soldier. “We’re not turning in,” said Mel. “Tell him. We’re not turning in just yet.”

  “Things aren’t so foolish as you think,” said the cabbie. The cab coasted and slowed to near stopping. The sky hovered as usual. “Lock his door,” said Mel. Mike slapped down the knob, the cab rolled slow into the X.

  The soldier stationed at the gate had seen the headlights coming for miles. Flat has new meaning in the desert. He’d thought Duluth was flat, Minnesota was flat, but no flat is flat until you’ve stood in the desert at night and seen headlights at fifteen miles. His mother had sewn his name in the back of his shorts. He had rubbed his backside and watched the headlights come.

  He had tucked his clipboard under his arm. He had slipped his pen in his shorts to warm the ink. He’d snugged on his helmet. He’d stepped into the cold and stamped his feet. He’d go far in the service. His mother said his father had said that. He would ship in three weeks with two thousand souls and some other boy would stand graveyard at the gatehouse. Once, long ago, the soldier had sat by a tree. He’d watched a squirrel on a branch and also a large bird, which flew and hovered. It was after that squirrel. The bird had swooped and pecked and the squirrel had parried and slashed. There must have been something in the nest. The afternoon had passed that way: the soldier picked his teeth with a twig, the sun dropped down, and when the soldier’s hand found a stone of handy size, he’d flung it, “Quit that squabble,” and the squirrel ducked and the bird flew up and away. They were back at it before long. The soldier took a nap in the roots of the tree. His helmet hid his face.

  It was four miles per hour at the X, but the needle dropped below 0 and sat there quiet.

  “Tell him,” said Mel. “Tell him before he turns.” The cab stopped in the X. The soldier at the gatehouse saluted the cab and waved it in.

  “Keep driving,” said Mike. “We’ll stick together.” Mike held the pistol at the cabbie’s neck, a silver pistol with a big black hole for a mouth.

  “Like he said,” said Mike, “We’re driving out.”

  The cab revved through the X. Ran through north. The soldier at the gatehouse stepped back, tucked his clipboard and watched it go. The soldier at the gatehouse will make Major after two tours. He will marry a girl from Roswell who will lose her liver to a virus, a cure found the year after she died.

  The cab rolled on the narrow rough road beyond Base. A car had not passed that way for thirty-six hours and fox and deer scattered in surprise from mile to mile. The mountains loomed. Mike held the pistol close to the cabbie’s temple when the cab slowed or weaved to the shoulder. “Steady on, Ricardo. Steady on.”

  “I’ll have a pack of kids someday,” said Mike after a mile.

  “Sure,” said Mel. “You’ll take them on field trips to visit those caves.”

  “I don’t care for caves either,” said Mike. The cab rolled north and north. “He’s never going to like you,” said Mike to the cabbie. “He just can’t.”

 
; The soldier at the gatehouse watched the taillights a long while. The right blinked right for miles after he walked back to the A-frame, which was warm and bright. A mouse ran across the floorboards at 0400. He might bring the General’s cat. The moon made a new cloud silver and the soldier took a paper and wrote a letter that mentioned the cloud. The taillights rose and fell ten miles out, crested again in twenty, he yawned at one hundred miles, right right right, a jet floated down, the landing gear was tinted green red green. In a hole, some tail covered its nose at the jet sound. A lizard licked the air with her tongue.

  There was no turn at mile 109, but the tracks in the sand started there. The tracks cut east, fishtailed through succulents and creeping vines, wound around the cactus. The tracks were plain as day in the last of moonlight until the wind ate them.

  “My dad’s in the field by now. He’s fighting with that plow.”

  “He’ll get a dog.”

  “What good’s a dog?”

  “Dogs are fine.”

  Mike drank the last of the bottle and threw it out onto the sand.

  “A nice home for some bug or mouse,” Mike said.

  “They’ll cook in that bottle by noon,” said Mel. “Some friend you are.”

  “Jungle men cook bugs and mice from the mud in a bottle,” said Mike.

  The cactus gave way to the tires and grill. The cab lunged and weaved through sand.

  Once, Jim White kicked over his lamp by a pool. That was darkness! The useless lamp rolled to the edge and rocked there on the lip. Jim dropped to his knees, if there were such things as knees. He groped in his kit. The bats screeched in their usual way. Jim’s fingers fumbled, the box burst open, and the matches fell to the ground.

  Way back, this desert was an inland sea. Those mountains were coral reefs with caves big enough to fit a town. The reef hugged the eastern shore, eel and sharks, the sponges and urchin had children who grew up and had children who died on the reef and it rose up fine and tall with all their corpses. Fifty million years, lava spit and lava cooled, great lizards slept on islands. One day, the sea dried up. The land filled with sand in a blink. The reef was gone. Then two hundred million years. Jim rubbed his leg in the dark, the real dark, and a real leg with a real boot on the end of it. This desert was once an inland sea and Gloria tripped on the foot of the table. Just a little sprite. Of course there was blood, the girl had cried, any girl would have cried, but Jim had groped the ground and found her tooth. Time passed, ten million years. Jim dipped the tooth in the pail till clean, the roots of the tooth were exactly like a screw. He held her head between his knees, the small glorious head, one million years passed, and the reef busted out lean and sharp, those mountains there, brown and pretty, a girl’s round belly, round as a melon on account of breakfast, and screwed that tooth back in her head. An inland sea: where the deer and mice ate the grass, grew fat and died, a tree grew from the guts, then the wind smoothed down the ridges and ribs and knocked over the tree. A mountain soaked in an acid bath hollows at the roots like Swiss cheese, it all makes sense. Jim was hungry by the cave pool in the dark. He ate a leg of roasted chicken from his kit. His stomach growled. It unsettled the bats.