Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  Robert picked some dead leaves off a tree and crumbled them in his hands. I watched the pieces fly out onto the sludge as he shook them free.

  “What do you want me to say, Shin?”

  “I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to do something. What do you think I do down here all day? Who do you think I talk to? I mean, really talk to.”

  “I know it’s hard now—”

  “You don’t know, Robert. You don’t.”

  “Let me finish,” he said.

  I sat down and closed my eyes. Rainwater seeped through my pants, cool and slow. I didn’t want to be angry with him, not after a day like this, but it was all I could feel for him then. I opened my eyes and saw him kneeling beside me but looking away toward the impoundment.

  “How fast did it happen?”

  “Fast,” I said. “It felt like it would never stop. We ran away from the house and watched it rise.”

  “They’ve lost everything,” he said. “Everything they worked for. All of them, not just Mom and Dad. I don’t see how something like that can happen. What’s the reason?”

  “There aren’t reasons for everything, you know that. Some things just are. Some things just happen. It’s what you do afterward that counts most.”

  Robert turned to me then, and I curled my knees close under my chin.

  “You can’t fix everything. You can’t get back what’s lost,” he said.

  “You can try, though.”

  “And then what?” he said.

  “And then,” I said and pulled him down next to me, “you see what’s left of what you had and look for where there is still work to be done.”

  Across the water we saw Johnny’s light, its beam twinkling like a star as it cut in and out through the trees and bushes in front of us. The little motor puttered a soft whine.

  “I’m glad we’ve got a way to get back,” I said.

  “It’ll be good to warm up.”

  Robert put his arm around me. Somehow, even then, I knew the hardest days of our lives might still be ahead of us, but I also felt with him beside me, with us moving to Fordyce, that the flood, no matter how ugly and devastating, was going to be a salvation of sorts. Maybe I just wanted to believe that, to find some way to make my own sense of what had just occurred. But we were going to leave the valley, and even if his parents came with us, it would still be something of a new start. Johnny’s light grew stronger as he made his way. I couldn’t see as much of the valley the closer he came. All I could see was the long beam of light growing smaller, pushing into the center of its source, where it grew brighter, until it was in our eyes and his voice called out for us.

  SATELLITES

  ALICE IS NEARLY finished with her father. They have spent this morning with only the crisp sounds of grooming—spritzes of water, the snip of scissors—hardly speaking a word to each other. She had planned on telling him she was moving out of the house, that it was time for him to come back home and take over the farm again, but he had arrived late, eyes puffy and bloodshot, smelling of Nicorette gum and too much aftershave, and when she hugged him, he felt thinner and smaller than the last time she saw him, and she was stifled. She went about cutting his hair, thinking the entire time how to broach the subject. Then, just as she readies herself, Angie Johnson comes ambling through the door of the salon. She’s a chatterbox and the sight of her, though usually unwelcome, brings a grateful reprieve.

  “Well, look here,” the woman says. “Amon Hampton. How are you doing this morning?”

  Alice feels her father’s shoulders tighten underneath his smock.

  “I’m fine, Angie. Yourself?”

  The woman sits down and grabs a magazine off the coffee table and says she’s fine too and peeks over top of her magazine.

  “It’s so good to see you two together. Especially after the year you two have had. It’s good of Alice to take care of you.”

  Her father’s shoulders wrench higher. She readies to speak when he beats her to it. “We’re getting along,” he says. “We’re doing okay these days, aren’t we?” He lifts his eyebrows to her in the mirror.

  “Almost back to normal,” Alice lies. She makes a few more cuts, levels up his sideburns, and then plugs in the hair dryer to blow the cut hair off his clothes and neck. The whir of the machine drowns out the television Mrs. Johnson has now turned on, and her father fidgets in the chair, ready to go. He is already rising before she has dusted off his neck. He pulls out his wallet.

  “Let me give you something this time,” he says.

  “You can pay for mine,” Mrs. Johnson says. “When you get our age, it’s up to the children to take care of us. But, Lord, don’t I hate it.” She smiles.

  He holds some folded money out to Alice, but she shoos it off. They hug again and he says he’ll call, more for Mrs. Johnson’s ears than hers, and walks out. She thinks to follow him and that what she needs to say shouldn’t wait all day, until she closes the shop. This is the worst he’s been since her mother’s sudden passing, since both of their worlds were flipped and rearranged, but before she can even make a step, Mrs. Johnson is heaving her big body into the chair and starting in about her “grandbabies.”

  Alice nods and listens, but she is elsewhere. She trims the woman up, places the foil patches in her hair and brushes dye along each swatch. After she’s done, she puts her under the dryer and tends to the other tasks of running the salon—taking phone calls, marking new appointments, sweeping up scattered and fallen hair. She wants to call her father and check on him, set up a time for them to talk, but she is too busy to call. One customer after another keeps popping in the doorway, and when she finally has a free minute toward the end of the day, the boy from the AutoZone next door comes in and says Terry Thompson has just released all the animals out at his place.

  “When?” Alice asks.

  “I just heard it on the radio. Must have been an hour ago,” the boy says, pushing his baseball cap back on his head. He’s so casual about it. He often comes in the salon on his breaks and reads the magazines or watches the television. And he always has a story. A bigger gossip than any of the women that come in here, Alice has sometimes thought. He has no idea she has animals of her own at home or that Thompson’s house is close enough to the farm that she fears they are in danger.

  Alice says nothing, but her eyes go to the traffic out front, and she doesn’t expect it to be moving along steady and unalarmed.

  She shuts up the salon, leaving in a fright with all the lights turned on. She speeds home through the business district and every few seconds expects something to leap out from behind a building, but all she sees are people running errands. Grocery. Doctor’s office. Hardware store. By the community college, students cross the street with their hands cinched around their backpacks’ straps, worry-free, even though the radio has confirmed the boy’s story and message boards have been rolled onto the shoulder of I-70 with alerts that read WARNING: WILD EXOTIC ANIMALS LOOSE. The announcer tells everyone to get inside and stay there.

  She makes it to Kopchak Road, to a turn she’s made a thousand times in her life without any problems, and then her stomach lurches. Instead of stepping on the gas, as she normally would, she puts the car in park. Terry Thompson’s place rests on a soft hill of grass to her left, and if not for the police cruiser’s lights swirling in the misty, late afternoon at the top of his driveway, nothing would seem out of place.

  Tigers and lions. Leopards. Grizzlies. Monkeys, too. Nobody knew for sure how many animals in number or species Thompson kept up there, but Alice remembers him building the compound, the cages shipped in on flatbed trucks. Word got around that Jack Hanna came in from Columbus to check on the animals at one point, but that wasn’t verified. There wasn’t much she’d ever been able to verify about Thompson. Not that she’d tried much. Rumor said he was a mobster from New Jersey on the lam or in protection after testifying against his mob bosses. The one time she saw him up close—at the Kroger with two grocery carts fill
ed with only steaks and whole chickens—he looked like any other person in any other grocery store in any other town. She was surprised by how normal he appeared. Khaki pants, white collared golf shirt. No sweat suit or gold chains. He smiled, soft and sheepish, and asked how she was while he pushed those overflowing carts ahead of him. No one wanted those animals up there, and people who had been invited to see them said they lived in filth and Thompson had no business keeping them.

  A truck comes toward her now and in the back are two sheriff’s deputies in plainclothes holding big black assault weapons in their hands. A chill spreads through her. The truck slows and the two men stare. They are only boys, she thinks. Not much older than twenty-five and doing their best to appear grim and tough. The driver, who has on his uniform, rolls down his window.

  “You need to get on, Miss. We got an emergency.”

  “I know,” she says but makes no move to put the car in gear. She is focused on the boys, the muzzles of their rifles pointed skyward. She chances a question. “How bad is it?”

  “I can’t say for sure, ma’am.” She shifts her attention back to the driver, knowing he sees her as older now than he did at first. He looks to be her age. His hair is close cut and gray at the temples, and his eyes are the palest blue she has ever seen, like they have the faintest dab of paint in their irises. He might be someone she went to high school with, but she cannot place his face.

  “Have you seen any of them?” She puts her hand on the gearshift.

  He shakes his head. The boys in the back of the truck fidget with their rifles; they no longer eye her. The driver must be their commander.

  “What will you do to them?”

  “We’ll take care of ’em,” he says.

  “Meaning what?”

  He nods to the back of the truck, presumably to the younger officers and their rifles.

  “Just like that?” she says. “Not a single thought about it?”

  “It’s them or us,” he says. “Not much choice, is there?” But it’s not a question. “You have to go,” he says. “It’s not safe here.”

  She looks at the hillsides, the grass and trees, the sway of the land, her father always called it. She grew up five minutes from here and has always felt nothing but calm on this road and drive to home. She rolls her window up without saying goodbye and guns the engine of her car, causing the tires to squall.

  As she approaches the farm she sees the two horses and herd of goats huddled at the far edge of the field to the left of the house, at least a hundred yards away from the barn. She skids to a stop in the driveway, and the house blocks the view of the animals. The barn doors sit open thirty yards away directly in front of her. Phone in hand, she presses it to her forehead, knowing she must run for it. She closes her eyes and works up her courage. Then she is out of the car and moving through the gate and yard. She ducks inside, momentarily collecting her breath, then grabs two lengths of rope by the stalls for the pair of horses and comes out, facing the field. She makes out their pawing and stomping in the grass. If they were people they’d be cowering. The adrenaline in her veins causes her to shake. She imagines torn animal fur and gnashing teeth, and before she can let herself think much more, she sprints for them, forgetting that inside her house on the hall closet’s top shelf rests the shotgun and its slug-filled shells.

  She counts to three and takes off. The soles of her ballet flats slide off her heels and slip and slap against the wet grass, and in two forceful strides she kicks them off. Her toes grab at the damp earth and her lungs seize with strain. She is careful not to come up on the pair of chestnut beauties right away and reaches slowly for their haunches, clucking and cooing between breaths, until they feel her hands. She runs her palms down the length of their bodies, talking the whole time in a soft voice. Their big muscles twitch with unease and they snort, jerking their heads. At any minute they could run all out, away from her. Once she is in front of both horses, the goats bay louder. She senses trouble near but can’t bring herself to search the woods.

  She pulls the ropes from her shoulder and loops each around the horses and her gloveless hands tug at their fighting necks to guide them back across the expanse of field. She tries to be quick but not hurry, that little nugget of John Wooden’s that her high school basketball coach said time and again. She clucks and coos some more, but the horses step gingerly, as if testing each patch of turf for firmness and solidity. The ropes serve more as conduits for the electrical current of their fear than leads. Thompson’s house is a mile and a half north with nothing between it and Alice but treeless slopes. She steals a glance in its direction, feeling that ever since he brought those animals to Zanesville they have been lying in wait.

  Step by small step she keeps the horses moving and then, halfway to the barn, her cell phone rings. Startled, both horses rear up on their hind legs and their stomachs stretch ten feet above her. “Easy, boys. Easy.” She pulls down on them as gently yet as forcefully as she can, but the phone cycles into its ring once more and the horses rise back up, lifting her arms with them. Her shoulder sockets pop. The rope fibers dig in and split her palms. She straightens, gives each rope a good snap, and settles the horses, and they seem to calm and focus, like scolded children.

  Once she has marched them into the barn, she shuts them up in their stalls and nearly collapses from the effort. She sits on the ground and cold air burrows into the open wounds on her hands and sweeps over her wet and muddy feet. She curls her toes against the barn floor’s dust and makes her hands into fists, feeling the sting of the burns. The goats are still alone, and she forces herself back to the entryway. They have moved even closer to one another in their corner of the field. For over a year she has been there in the early mornings to find every one of the newly born kids, sometimes coming as twins and triplets, sucking from their mother’s teats. She has cuddled them close to her, savoring the soft fur and the kissing of her knuckles. And, in a small way, with each arrival they have reminded her of the children she will never have, of how quickly that part of life sped right past her. There’s no way to get them all moving in the same direction toward the barn and she doesn’t think they’d all fit anyway. Then there is still the matter of Thompson’s animals, of how many might be near, and the fact she is without her rifle. She can’t save them.

  Behind the barn, the mountain that borders the field is covered in spindly beeches and poplars that sway between cedars. Everything is quiet, too quiet, and though she can’t see anything, she is sure a pair of large, spark-filled eyes gaze down on her. Spooked, she retreats inside, slams the barn doors closed, and climbs to the loft where a glassless window looks over the field and gives her a clear line of sight to the goats. She pokes her head out the opening and turns her head to the motionless woods. She reaches in her pocket for her phone and calls her father back. He answers on the first ring, and something in his voice tells her he is panicked but trying to remain calm.

  “The sheriff and his deputies are out now,” he says. “They’re going to kill ’em.”

  “I know. I saw them earlier. Where are you?”

  “In the truck headed back. I was in Granville when I heard.”

  “What were you doing over there?”

  “We can talk about it later.”

  “What if there isn’t a later?” she says.

  He tells her not to be dramatic, to sit tight, and then asks what the news is saying.

  “I’m not watching,” she says. “I’m in the barn.” She tells him about the boy coming in the shop, the horses, and how she is readying to go in the house for the shotgun once she has the nerve. She settles against the wall and pushes her feet out in front of her. Tips of hay prick through her jeans. Then a loud rifle shot echoes out. She leans forward and twists to her knees so she can see out the window. Her mind returns to the pickup truck from earlier.

  “Don’t go anywhere. It’s too dangerous to run for it,” he tells her.

  Her head is outside, searching and listening in the di
mming light. “I can make it to the house,” she says.

  “You can’t outrun a damn lion. You stay right where you are. I’m on my way to you.”

  The goats clamor louder. They have huddled so close to the corner of the fence she is certain they are trying to push it down and break free.

  “Is there anything on the radio? Do they have a count?” she asks.

  “They’re not sure.” She can tell by the faint sound of his voice he’s dropped the receiver below his mouth. “Maybe five lions and fifteen tigers.”

  “I should try to save them,” she says under her breath, to herself, in a way that acknowledges, with finality, that the tight-packed mass out in the field is helpless.

  “No,” he shouts, and it startles her. “I’m twenty minutes out. I’ve got my rifle. We’ll walk into the house together.”

  Another shot explodes in the air. Then another. Boom. Boom.

  Boom. She’s never heard such loud and rapid gunfire in her life. The blasts seem so close it’s as if the compressed air of each one pushes against the barn. The goats run in small circles and crisscross one another. They seek escape, and yet they cannot stand the thought of not being near the others. Then she sees it in the woods. She pulls her head back in and drops the phone in the hay. Obscured by the trees and more than forty yards away, a lion prowls through the woods. A female. Lean and lithe. The animal’s coat stretches taut over its muscles. Alice has never seen such power. It walks unhurried, surveying, and the animal’s slow swaying tail only adds to its sense of indifference. The goats spot it and scramble. Their chatter rises and Alice waits for it to attack, but it walks along the fence, eyeing the goats as if curious.