“Hey!” she shouted. “Sal! Are you up there?”
She listened to a long interlude of pattering leaves and the cawing of a crow.
“I’m safe! Friendly!”
Lily dropped her bike and began climbing the chain-link gate. Pushing her sneaker toes through the metal diamonds was easy, but the wire dug painfully into her hands. As she grasped the top tube and tried to figure out a way to throw her leg up and over, a deep voice boomed, “Who are you?”
Lily startled so hard she fell off the fence.
A woman stepped out from behind the shed. She held a garden hoe over her head and her heavy breasts bounced angrily as she lunged down the hill. Lily was glad the chain-link fence separated them because it looked as if the woman would not hesitate to hack her to pieces with that hoe.
“I see you riding by every day,” she bellowed. “You’re not allowed out here. It’s university property.”
Sal looked like a cover girl gone off the rails, like her beauty had been lobotomized, sexy with one big shock treatment. She had flashing bright brown eyes; long, thick, and tangled auburn hair; generous breasts and hips stuffed a little too tightly into her clothes. Her hands were rough and cracked, and she had two deep scowl lines between her eyes, evidently from a lifetime, about forty years, of bucking expectations.
“I’m Vicky’s sister!”
“Really?” She’d reached the other side of the fence but hadn’t lowered the hoe. “Where is she?”
“She found a place in East Oakland, by the airport.”
Sal tossed the hoe aside. She sorted through a bunch of keys on the ring attached to her belt loop and then moved her hip toward the lock on the fence gate so she could unlock it. She held the gate open while Lily entered and then locked it up again.
Sal took big steps and moved quickly, despite her size, up the hill. The shed sat in a grove of eucalyptus trees, their smooth skins in shades of cream and taupe and tan, peeling in papery strips. Lily’s feet rustled through the cast-off bark and she stopped to pick up a strip the color of smoke. Someone in another century would have written a letter on the smooth interior of the bark. She tucked the piece inside her backpack, taking care to not crack it.
Sal barged in the door of the shed. Tools and equipment filled the place. A pile of blankets took up one corner, presumably Sal’s bed, and another corner, closed off with half walls, housed a toilet and sink. The biggest object in the room was Sal’s 1966 Harley Electra-Glide, the one that matched Vicky’s, now Wesley’s. It stood rather gloriously next to the back wall, braced by its kickstand.
Sal lit a Coleman stove and put on a pan of water. She opened a plastic bag and withdrew a hunk of bread, which she plunked on the table along with a knife and a jar of jam. She took a seat on a plastic crate and gestured toward the one folding chair. Neither had spoken a word since those at the gate. Sal sat with her knees apart, her hands grasped and hanging between her thighs, her mouth held tightly closed around her teeth. Lily didn’t take the chair. Instead she wandered over to the dry-erase board and pretended to be interested in the purple and green and red data, obviously weeks old and half rubbed off. Across the tops were names. Of the hyenas? Below the names, in columns, were numbers. Pounds of food consumed? Numbers of hours slept? Times they’d bitten their keeper?
In the 1980s, a couple of university researchers brought twenty hyena infants from Kenya to live in the Berkeley Field Station for the Study of Behavior, Ecology, and Reproduction. They had been surprisingly successful in that last purpose, having reproduced themselves into a clan of over fifty individuals. Not too long ago, the researchers gave away many to zoos around the world. There were, at the time of the earthquake, twenty-two left in the compound. The animals weren’t exactly a secret, but the scientists tried as much as possible to keep them under wraps. The public wasn’t keen on the idea of the colony living in their midst. What if they got out?
“Where are the hyenas?”
“They’ve been relocated.”
Lily sat on the chair and helped herself to a slice of bread, spooning on a liberal portion of jam. Sal poured the boiling water into two mugs and dropped a handful of leaves into each.
“I heard that there was a mudslide breach in the fences. That some of them are roaming free.”
“Nope. They’re all safe in Arizona. During the firestorm of ninety-one, they tranquilized everyone and loaded them into station wagons, drove them down to campus where they were kept in classrooms until the fire danger passed. But this time, with the earthquake, the roads were impassable, and so we had to helicopter them out.”
Sal finished her first slice of bread and jam and prepared another one, licking all ten of her fingers after screwing the lid back on the jam jar. She narrowed her eyes at Lily. “They’re probably the most underappreciated, least understood mammals on earth. They’re actually very sweet. They used to nuzzle me every morning after breakfast.”
Lily knew this. Vicky’s eyes had shone with pride when she’d described Sal’s prowess with the beasts. She also knew that with their powerful teeth and jaws and industrial-strength digestive tracts, spotted hyenas could polish off an entire zebra—including every last piece of hide and bone—in a few minutes.
“Still,” Lily said. “You don’t really want a bunch of hyenas at large in Berkeley.”
“I told you: they’ve been airlifted out.”
“I guess that’d be a priority.”
“So you came out from Nebraska.”
“I hadn’t heard from Vicky and I was worried about her.”
“She was staying here with me.”
“I saw the note you wrote her. The fuck-you-don’t-ever-contact-me-again one.”
Sal smiled, or maybe just bared her teeth.
“What’d she do?”
“She slept with some bimbo poet. A neighbor.”
“She only did it because she’s terrified of intimacy.”
“Thanks, Freud. That’s really helpful.”
“So why’d you let her stay here with you?”
Sal shrugged. “She didn’t have anywhere to stay. And, well, you know Vicky. I wasn’t going to leave her on the street. She’d get eaten alive. I have water and a generator. She rigged some solar for me.” Sal swished her tea and studied the leaves; she couldn’t suppress her smile and then a lubricious chuckle. “Truth be told, it was exciting. Kind of postapocalyptic, you know? We actually had a really nice time. For me, it was bittersweet, knowing we were through, but having this reprieve on the hillside, in the woods, away from everything, our own little shelter…” She shrugged again, the smile fading. “It was like an anti-honeymoon. A celebration of the ending.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It did to me.”
“You still love her. That’s why you let her stay.”
“Possibly. But then she revealed a bit more about her tawdry doings. Apparently the bimbo told her husband that Vicky had died in the earthquake. So Vicky was essentially hiding out here, i.e., using me.”
“She was really happy to be with you. It wasn’t just that she was hiding out.”
“Arguable. But the last thing I need is some jealous husband finding my refuge.”
“He still thinks she’s dead.”
Sal shrugged. “Not my problem anymore.”
Lily knew that Vicky loved Sal. That she hadn’t been simply hiding. But this was a new kink in Lily’s scheme: with Vicky at the hyena compound, Sal felt like a target. Before they could all live out here together, the threat of Paul would have to be removed.
“The truth is,” Lily said, “Vicky does love you.”
Sal waved a hand through the air in front of her face as if clearing away a bad smell.
“I grew up with Vicky. I know how impossible she is. And I don’t use that word lightly. But.” Lily knew this was going to soun
d trite at best. “She has such a big heart. She really does.”
“Right. I know that. It’s big enough to include several women.”
Several? Lily had imagined just the one transgression. But of course, besides Gloria in the lime high heels, there was now some Sicilian babe with the mustache. “She’s just scared shitless. That’s something people don’t know about Vicky.”
“And I’m supposed to wait…for what?”
“Maybe she’ll grow up.”
Sal blew her nose. “I’ll put our names on the retirement home waiting list. I’ll look forward to some rousing games of shuffleboard.”
Lily laughed.
“Anyway, it’s my own damn fault. I knew Vicky was trouble from the moment I met her.”
“Vicky is gold,” Lily said. “She just needs a little taming. Or maybe just training.”
That gave Sal pause. She appeared to be considering the possibility, the viability, of taming or training Vicky. But then she said, “Gold is a metal. It can’t be tamed or trained.”
Lily pressed on. “The other thing about Vicky is that she never lies. She loves you. That’s a fact.”
Sal bit a nail and looked to the far corner of the room. “Enough about that little shit. Come outside. I’ll show you my garden.”
Sal had leveled and cultivated a rich bed of soil behind the shed. She’d planted neat rows of ragged greens, including chard, squash, green beans, and lettuce. “I foraged the plants from abandoned gardens. Most were volunteers.”
“You have traps, too,” Lily said, pointing to one of three.
“Oh, yeah,” she said dismissively. A breeze blew through the tall eucalyptuses. The leaves shuddered with a passing secret.
“Are you, like, eating rabbit?”
Sal squatted by a corner of the garden plot. “I don’t get enough sun here. I’ll be lucky if anything grows at all, but I have to try.”
“You have the Harley. Why don’t you leave?”
Still resting on her haunches, Sal didn’t answer that question, either. Instead, she asked, “Why are you camping on my hillside?”
Her hillside? It was a fitting claim, actually. Sal looked like a woman who’d lost herself to the wild, as if ancient strands of survivalist genes were knotted up in her DNA. She wasn’t leaving because she wanted to reinvent agriculture and trap game. In another few years, she might be making moonshine, too. Her hillside.
26
Dear Lily,
There is so much I want to say to you.
It was such a shock to meet you in person. I’ve always known you were the real deal, the most genuine person I’ve ever “met.” I used to like to think of you as my epistolary soul mate. Maybe I just didn’t expect our connection to hold up in real life. Or I was afraid that it wouldn’t.
The first thing I want to say is that I’m sorry about the gun. I wish I’d put it in a dresser drawer before you had to discover it in my pocket.
But maybe I can explain. About it, and everything else.
The morning of the earthquake, I was lying awake in my own bed, wondering why I’d left Melissa’s. I’d stayed until almost two in the morning. It was unkind to have gotten up then and come back to my own apartment. There were only those few hours left of the night, and I couldn’t sleep anyway. We could have had coffee together. What would that have cost me?
I’d only been back in the country a couple of weeks. I’d found the apartment, right by campus, and there she was: Melissa, in her Indian print skirts and white peasant blouses, those little red Moroccan slippers with tiny mirrors stitched all over them, her extra-long hair and quiet voice. She was very upfront in saying she didn’t want a relationship, and that suited me fine. I couldn’t bear to want more.
So there I was, lying in my own bed, feeling guilty and worried, until finally I fell asleep.
Gunshots woke me. A fast sweat drenched my entire body. I threw off the covers, tried to remember which Kinshasa hotel I was sleeping in. The soldiers were right outside my room, smashing things, blowing things up. The walls were slamming and the floor was cracking. My head ached with confusion. I didn’t know where I was. Maybe still at the sanctuary? I ran to the window, thinking I had to get to the bonobos.
No. The apes were already gone.
I was in Berkeley, California. But a war in Berkeley? How could that be?
The floor beneath my bare feet plunged, tearing the floorboards from the walls and knocking me to my hands and knees. So many screams, in a dozen different tones, put me back in the bush, the apes and birds vocalizing their terror at a predator in their midst.
I tied on my shoes, ran across the buckled floor, and tried to open my door, but it was jammed shut. When I kicked it out, I found nothing but a hole in the stairwell. I ran back to the window, looked out, and saw that the ground was much closer than it used to be. The parking level below my apartment had given way. I jumped.
A sharp pain shot from my foot up my leg, and I sat on the pavement, thinking, earthquake. This was an earthquake.
Another part of the apartment building gave way and the entire structure sank several more feet. I tried to get up but couldn’t put weight on my sprained ankle, so I used my arms to push and scooted backward on my butt, away from the tumbling building, until everything stilled.
“Carlos!” a voice screamed, and I looked up to see a woman leaning from the window of the top floor. She lifted a baby out the opening and held it over the space between her arms and the pavement below.
“Si, si, si!” shouted the man who must have been Carlos, and the woman dropped her baby, the air billowing its diaper, head fuzz standing on end, a wail opening its mouth. The head jerked back as the baby landed in Carlos’s arms.
I swear, Lily, I felt something like an electric jolt to my heart. The man had done it. Carlos had caught the baby. I feel like he saved my life, too. Seeing that baby safe in Carlos’s arms. It was possible: falling and being caught. Several minutes later I witnessed the mother somehow emerging from the wreckage to be reunited with her baby and Carlos.
I finally stood up. I could walk on my ankle, though it hurt like hell. I found Melissa. Her legs and feet, including the little red Moroccan slippers with the tiny mirrors stitched all over them, were sticking out of the rubble. Her elderly dog Jagger sat by her legs, growling when I tried to take the slippers. So I sat down next to both of them and waited. Even though it was stupid to stay so close to the unstable building. How could I leave her? Jagger whined and panted. I pet him and told him, “Easy, boy.”
I have no idea how much time passed. Maybe only minutes. Maybe hours. My mind kept slipping back to the Congo, with all the shouting and swarms of people, and the air so thick with panic you could chew it. I pet Jagger and tried not to look at Melissa’s legs and feet. Somehow, even with all that chaos flowing all around me, an important realization came to me: this was a disaster in which I had no hand. More, this was my opportunity for redemption.
I got up and made a crutch out of a board. That old dog decided to trust me. He got up, too, and shambled right alongside me as I walked away from the wrecked apartment building. You should have seen him. He had big dopey eyes, a gray muzzle, and one misshapen front leg, the result of having a car door shut on it when he was a puppy. We had matching limps.
That night we slept in the wooded area on the western edge of campus. The next day we hobbled around Berkeley gathering food from grocery stores. When I met someone I thought I could trust, I told them my plan. Soon there were four of us and I’d found a classroom on campus with a broken window, and that’s where we stockpiled the provisions.
It was so easy in the beginning. The National Guard hadn’t yet arrived. Everyone was focused on getting out or finding loved ones. You just walked in, smashing a door or window if necessary, and took what you needed. A few of the property owners tried to put guards in place, but most
of these gatekeepers abandoned their posts within a few hours. No one wanted to stick around.
Most survivors took just enough food for their own use, but we hauled garbage bags full of cans, jars, apples, oranges, hams, and beans back to the classroom on campus. When we weren’t harvesting, we distributed, pushing loaded shopping carts, stopping when we found people, and offering up the food. We also built shelters using whatever we could find in the earthquake wreckage—wood, chunks of cement, sheet rock, plastic tarps. Sometimes we simply left these shelters for homeless families to find, and sometimes we steered folks to them. Doing the construction was fun, and people were grateful. On the third day, I found an abandoned black Chevy Blazer, and Vinh hotwired it. This allowed us to travel farther afield and collect even more food. I loved it when we got to broken places in the road and all four of us—in the early days it was just me, Vinh, Janis, and Josh—would build road patches to help travelers.
All the while, I felt like I’d finally begun doing what I am meant to do. This, I thought, is what life should be. We weren’t the only ones helping, either. All around the city, people’s bonobo natures were manifesting themselves. I hadn’t felt this happy since my first year at the sanctuary.
Of course, there were exceptions to the decency of most people. Josh had a gun, and I was glad he did. It made us feel safe camping next to the creek on campus. Looking back now, those first days after the earthquake seem so innocent, so easy and energizing. We made shelters for stranded families and then brought them food. I could have done that forever.
But when the National Guard arrived, they cleared campus. We had to decamp. By then, we had twenty-four members and we needed a better site anyway. We moved to the western shore of San Pablo Reservoir. That was an exciting day. I’d anticipated the move, so we’d already liberated a number of tents and sleeping bags from REI. Our little tent city went up in just over an hour. We dragged four picnic tables into the meadow.
The Evolution of Love Page 17
