It was Annie. In the harsh orange glow of the bare bulb above the front door, she looked scared; her eyes were red and swollen. Behind her were two of her brothers, faces dark with fresh bruises and scrapes. Both grasped the handles of two wheelbarrows. The first wheelbarrow held Petunia. The dog lay on her side in a nest of old towels, breathing heavy, almost growling in and out; her front paws were held away from the body, stiff and covered with what looked like melted chocolate. The second wheelbarrow had been filled with knotted, twisted chunks of pine firewood. “I need your help,” Annie said.
Frank didn’t think twice. “Bring her in.”
They wheeled the dog right into the waiting room, and both brothers carried her suspended in one of the towels back into the operating room. Frank switched on the overhead light and got a closer look. Petunia’s front paws were charred black, seeping plasma. “What happened?”
Annie’s little hands curled into fists. “These two cunts trapped her under the porch, knocked her sideways, and then went after her with a lighter and a can of hairspray.”
“Fuckin’ thing shouldn’ta eaten my—” The brother didn’t get a chance to finish. Faster than Frank could follow, Annie’s arm shot out, whistling past her brother’s head. He flinched, too late. Something bloody hit the examining table with a faint slap. Frank realized it was the brother’s left earlobe as Annie neatly wiped the blade of her straight razor on the old towels.
The brother clapped his hand to the side of his head and looked like he wanted to say something as a thin trickle of blood meandered down his neck.
“Go ahead,” Annie taunted. “Spit it out. Swear at me. Please. Next time it’ll be your fucking nose.”
He kept quiet. The second brother hung back, looking the monkeys, at the door, the green tiles on the floor, anywhere but at his sister.
Annie turned back to Frank. “Please help her.”
Frank chewed on the inside of his cheek, wondering if any of the books in the back room talked about treating burns. He didn’t want to appear clueless to Annie, so he said, “She’s gonna need…rest, some antibiotics, and she’s gonna have to stay off these front paws, give ’em a chance to heal.” He met Annie’s eyes. “She’ll have to stay here. Maybe in a cage. She can’t walk on these. We’ll have to keep her quiet.”
Annie nodded. “You do whatever you have to.” Her bottom lip quivered and a fat tear squeezed itself out of her right eye and rolled down her cheek. “Please, just help her.”
Frank had the two brothers hold the dog down as he slipped a padded plastic cup over the dog’s muzzle. A circular rubber tube was attached to the cup; this was connected to a hose that ran to the wall. Frank had been reading about the halothane and isoflurane, anesthetic that was inhaled, instead of injected, since he hadn’t wanted to get close enough to the cats to slip a needle full of Acepromazine into their veins unless they were unconscious. He made a few quick calculations in his head, adjusted the vaporizer output on the wall, and fervently hoped the concentration wouldn’t kill Petunia.
When her breathing and heart rate had slowed, he smeared aloe salve over Petunia’s front paws. Towards the end, she fought through the haze of the anesthesia and snapped at Frank, but for the most part, the dog was remarkably calm, almost as if she understood deep down that he was trying to help. He injected her with antibiotics and encased the front paws in cotton and neon orange vet wrap. The brothers carried the now sleeping dog into the office where they placed her carefully on the vinyl couch.
“You two fuckheads wait outside,” Annie told her brothers. “We’re gonna have that little talk I promised. You run, and I swear to you one night, not too soon, just long enough for you to forget about it, but one night when you’re sleeping, I’ll creep in and cut your balls right the fuck off.” Everyone in the room knew she wasn’t kidding. “Get outside. Now.” When the front door closed, she closed her eyes and another tear slid down her round cheek. “She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said sadly. She blinked her tears away and tried to smile at Frank, but he felt like it was forced. “So how much is this gonna cost?”
“I.... I’m not sure, exactly. Let’s see how the treatment goes. Why don’t we settle up when Petunia is better?”
“I don’t like being in debt to anyone.” She cocked her head. “You’ve been hearing about me. I can see it in your face.”
“What? I haven’t heard anything about anyone. Nobody’s told me anything,” Frank said. “Let’s just see how Petunia heals.” He put his hands flat on the table. “Then we’ll talk payment.”
“We’ll talk payment then.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay then. We’ll be talking, you and I.” She gave a mischievous smile, but it looked to Frank like there was something else under the surface, still sadness maybe. Annie squatted in front of the couch, stroking her dog’s broad, flat skull. “You take good care of Petunia. I find out you don’t, I might have to go at your eyes with a screwdriver,” she said without looking at him.
Frank believed her. “Yeah.”
It was good enough for Annie. She stood, wiped her eyes.
“Come by anytime,” Frank said. “Day or night.” He wondered if that sounded too forward. Most of him was disgusted at the cruelty, but he had to admit that part of him was glad that Petunia had gotten hurt. It gave him an excuse to see Annie. “You know, see how she’s doing.”
“I will. First thing tomorrow.”
Frank smiled. “We’ll be here.”
Quickly, almost without thinking, Annie grasped his elbows, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed his cheek. Then, without another word, she left. Frank followed her to the front door and watched through the side window as the Glouck brother who still had both earlobes grabbed the wheelbarrow filled with firewood and stomped across the gravel, following his sister. The second brother, still holding his bleeding ear, reluctantly trailed along at a distance.
They left the lights of the parking lot and disappeared into the darkness of the field. Before long, though, Frank could see the first tentative flickers of a fire out in the star thistles. Frank got a beer and made himself comfortable, sitting sideways on the windowsill, watching the figures, letting his eyes adjust. When the fire had been burning for a good long while, Annie took a long branch and scattered the coals evenly on the ground around the fire and without any warning at all, whipped the thick branch at the closest brother’s head. Frank couldn’t tell if it was the one missing an earlobe or the younger brother. The blow knocked him face first into the star thistles and glowing coals, unconscious before he even started to fall forward.
The smell of burning skin mingled with the smell of rhino shit.
Frank turned away from the windows, feeling good, feeling fucking great. He grabbed another beer and headed back to his cot and .12 gauge. Outside, Annie had the second brother walk around in the fire pit barefoot, using the smoking branch as persuasion. Frank fell asleep to the second brother’s screams and for the first time in months, he didn’t dream.
DAY FIFTEEN
Annie wasn’t the only customer to visit Frank. Two days later, the woman with the brittle red hair from the gas station rushed into the veterinary hospital, clutching a cat carrier. A coughing male cat, just shy of six pounds and twenty-two years lay inside. The coughing jag subsided, and it hissed like a slow leaking tire. It was dying. Frank knew this. The woman with the red hair knew this. The cat knew this.
“Help him. Oh please help him,” she said.
But the cat wanted to die. It was ready. It needed to die. It shivered, breathing about seven hundred miles an hour for a while, followed by that long, low hissing leak that caught the attention of the lionesses out back when Frank took him out of the carrier.
At first, only the two lionesses closest to the back door noticed. They drew themselves upright and cleaned their shoulders, ears cocked. Then the others heard the familiar sound and one by one, stopped and went motionless.
Frank threw as much t
echnical jargon as he could at the woman, trying to stall, anything, wishing the goddamn cat would finally just give up. After two minutes that seemed just a hair shorter than the last ice age, he tried to gently give the cat to the woman, saying slowly, “Why don’t you hang onto him for a moment, and…well—it might be time to say goodbye.”
But she couldn’t say goodbye and wouldn’t take the cat. She couldn’t face the thought of losing her little man, and gripped the side of the table with her right hand, squeezing it hard enough Frank was worried that one of the purple veins across the back of her hand would rupture, filling the muscles and tendons with blood, slowly filling the skin until it resembled a pink Mickey Mouse glove. This cat was her life. It was that simple.
Frank started to place the cat as gingerly as he could on the table, but the woman shrieked, a short, sharp bark that escaped like a hummingbird out of her mouth. She clapped her left hand to her chin and shoved it down at her chest, held it there for the briefest moment, then plucked a towel out of the carrier and straightened it out on the table, so he wouldn’t have to lay on the cold steel.
Frank put her cat on the towel and grabbed a sealed syringe and a 30 cc vial of Sleepazone. It looked like blue toilet bowl water and would stop the cat’s heart instantly. The woman had her chin in her right hand before he said three words. She knew precisely what he was about to say and she wanted none of it. She demanded that Frank do something, anything to save her cat.
Admittedly, Frank didn’t know much about common housecats. He had only really studied horses in school, but he knew that all the textbooks in the back room weren’t going to help this cat. It was finished.
So Frank cradled the cat in his arms and talked to the cat and the woman in a low, calm voice. He talked about the cat’s markings, the shape of the skull, splay of the claws, praising everything. The woman clasped her hands together, little trickles of tears mingling with black eyeliner and peach rouge rolling down the wrinkles in her face. The cat hyperventilated and leaked air.
* * * * *
It took nearly ten minutes, but the cat finally drifted into a sagging death in Frank’s hands. And then, the woman with the red hair really lost it. She backed away, skipping through the denial stage of death in about two or three eyelash flutters, and plowed right on into anger. A low, keening sound seeped out of her lungs as she tried to wrench the examining table out of the floor, dumped a roll of paper towels in the sink, and scooped a whole armload of vials onto the floor in a shattered mess.
Frank felt sorry for her. He really did. This cat was probably the only thing this woman had for a family, and now it was gone. As she crumpled on the table, cradling the cat, sobbing into the limp gray fur, Frank found himself listening seriously to a calm, reasonable voice inside that suggested just plunging a syringe full of Sleepazone into her ample backside. The medicine would hit her heart in less than a second, and it would be over. She’d sink to the floor, forever joining her cat in whatever heaven that allowed animals. At least then she’d be happy. No more sadness. No more death. Just an eternity together.
Frank actually broke the seal and had the syringe itself out before he realized that he didn’t want to be responsible for another death. Killing her wasn’t the best way to ease her suffering, although he’d be damned if he knew a better way. Instead, he found a small Styrofoam ice chest in the back, and together, they buried the cat out in the field of star thistles, near Annie’s still smoking fire pit. It seemed to make the woman feel a little better, but Frank knew that once she got back to her empty house, the pain would be back with a vengeance, and again, he considered just gently easing her out of this world and into the next.
Before the idea really took hold, he urged her into her car, offering empty encouragement like, “He’s in a better place now, and wouldn’t want you to be sad,” and “It’s going to be okay. It really will get better.” Both of them knew it was lies, but at least it got her moving. She drove away and Frank went inside for a beer.
* * * * *
The phone was ringing. It was Sturm. “How’re my girls?”
“Better. They’re moving around more, picking up on stuff. Eyes are clear. Stool looks good. So far, they seem to be responding quite well to the food.”
“Good to hear, good to hear, ’cause come Saturday, I’m gonna need them to be, well—if not healthy, then active at least. We’ll need four of ’em; one of ‘em’s gotta be the tiger. You think at least four of ’em’ll be healthy? I want them to be able to run. Think they can run?”
“Saturday?”
“Yup. Got an old buddy coming into town. Known him for years. He’s bringing some associate, and we’re gonna have ourselves a good old fashioned safari.”
“Saturday then. I’ll have four cats ready.”
“Don’t forget that tiger.”
* * * * *
At night, Frank would sit in the office with Petunia, reading. At first, she would growl at him from her spot on the couch. But after two or three days, she let Frank sit on the couch with her and before long, she let him touch her back. Frank had lined the floor with newspaper, and replaced it every day. He kept the food and water dishes full and fresh. By Friday night, she was curling up on the couch next to him, throwing her shoulder into his thigh and sleeping as he read aloud about rabies vaccines and feline leukemia.
Annie never came by. Frank didn’t know why. He didn’t have her number. He was even sure the Gloucks had a phone. Whenever he got the urge to drive on out to her house, he thought of the woman across the street at the gas station, and he couldn’t face her again. Maybe he didn’t do anything because he was afraid of that dead tree full of kids with BB guns.
To distract himself from waiting on Annie, he had been thinking about the vet office’s role in the town. Found himself rearranging the vials of medicine on the stainless steel shelves in the examination room. Sweeping and mopping the floors. Thumbing through the clients’ address book. Testing the radio. Writing down a proposal to spay and neuter the stray cats roaming the town. Lining up vials of vaccines for a rabies clinic.
Petunia squirmed and farted in his lap; she lay on her pack, all four legs splayed against him and the couch, and it hit him like a bullet in the chest that he was dreaming. Here he was, squatting in one place like a goddamn elephant with constipation, when he was up close and personally responsible for the deaths of at least three men.
Closing the book softly, so as not to disturb Petunia, he knew he needed out of the country, out of this town, out of his skin. But the same problems were still there, waiting for him like a patient cat watching a mouse hole. He didn’t know where to go. And wherever he went, the ten grand from Sturm would only last so long. He’d hidden the cash under the frozen meat in the freezer in back of the barn, just in case he had to get out in a hurry. He eased back into the couch, vinyl giving a squeaking sigh, grabbed the bottle of rum from the bookshelf, and unscrewed the cap with his thumb.
It tasted harsh and sweet and when he got to the bottom, he figured his problems could wait outside the door forever.
DAY SIXTEEN
Pine found him sprawled on the couch with Petunia in the morning. “Goddamn,” he said. “You’ll fuck anything.”
Petunia growled at him.
Sturm had sent the clowns over to the vet hospital with a large horse trailer. Frank and Pine lined the inside with chicken wire, preparing it to haul the cats out to Sturm’s ranch, listening to the monkeys chatter and screech at the two men. It took a while, mostly because the construction took a back seat to drinking beer.
* * * * *
Sturm pulled in, followed closely by a giant white SUV. The guy who got out of the driver’s seat was big, as big as Sturm was short. He was near the end of his fifties, and looked like he might have been a football player in his day, but fat had grown off the muscles like a fungus and now everything kind of wilted off his large frame. He walked with a barely perceptible limp as if he was casually cheating at golf wherever he went. H
e looked like he’d swallowed about a gallon of red food coloring and tried to vomit it back up straight away, but it leaked out and soaked out through his face instead.
He shook Frank’s hand with a hand big enough Frank thought the man might have been wearing a catcher’s mitt. “Bob Bronson. How ya’ doing.”
It was like Castellari: Frank wasn’t sure if the guy was asking a question or just stating a fact. Frank went with a generic, “Good, good,” but Bronson was already moving down the line, attacking the clowns’ hands, beaming, saying, “Bob Bronson. Nice to meet ya,” and “Bob Bronson. Good to see ya.”
The other guy’s name was Fairfax, and he might as well have been wearing a sign that said, “Lawyer.” He wore clothing so new Frank wasn’t surprised when he saw a long sticker on the back of his thigh, announcing to everyone that he wore a 54 waist, 28 length. His boots were so stiff that he winced whenever he took a step.
Sturm wanted to introduce the men to the cats, acting like a proud father showing off his infant daughter for the first time, so Frank walked everyone through a tour of the facilities, having fun with his new words and calculations. The real problem was administering the anesthesia to the animals. You couldn’t just shoot them with tranquilizers every time.
“Why not?” Pine asked.
Frank didn’t have an answer right away. He just felt it was kind of cruel to the cats, but he didn’t want to give that as his real reason. “Lotta problems with that. You never know how much of the tranquilizer was administered for one. Two, there’s always a strong risk of striking the animal in the bone, perhaps tearing cartilage. And if the subcutaneous tissue gets infected…well.” He looked at all of them. “I think we all know what would happen then.”
Everybody nodded sagely.
“Gentlemen,” Sturm said, “I suggest we get this show on the road. My boy, Theo, will be hunting one of these fine animals this afternoon, and Jack and Chuck should be back by now. I’ve been promised that dinner will be served at eight o’clock sharp, and it’s gonna be a goddamn treat, I’m telling you. I got just one word for you, just one word to start them taste buds.” He sucked in a breath, looking around at the semi-circle of men. “Abalone.”
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