Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  The horses go crazy in their stalls, and the hair on Alice’s neck rises. She hears her father’s voice pleading to tell him what’s happening, asking where she’s gone, and she kicks the phone away from her, burying it in the hay. Suddenly she hates this barn more than she ever has before. She sees his dark figure—his suit coat flapping in the wind—as he trudged across the field with his head bent forward and sought refuge here after the funeral. She was left alone to deal with everyone in their house, to take their hushed condolences, their hugs that lasted a moment too long, while he hid, probably shoveling out the stalls and keeping himself busy so he wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. It had always been where he ran when her parents got into a fight, and though they were loving parents, she sometimes found herself, especially these last few years, playing traffic cop to them both, trying to ease and explain their angers. After her mother died her father could no longer stand the thought of living in the house and asked her to take it, to take care of everything. She hadn’t expected it to hit him that hard and rather than draw them closer, the grief—the new responsibilities he foisted on her—has driven them to their own corners.

  The goats frantically search for shelter as the lioness creeps along the fence line. Then it jumps over and lands in a sprint. It is so assured and strong that there is grace and gentleness to the movement. Before Alice can register just how fast it is, the lion has plucked a goat from the ground with its jaw and blood sprays from the felled animal’s neck across the lion’s snout. It pushes the goat into the ground with its forepaws, and Alice lets out a loud shriek. She can’t bear to watch the rest, but the animal cries of the goats and the roar of the beast cut through the night and haunt her as she hugs herself and covers her ears. She refuses to look out the window again even after her father pulls up and lays on the truck’s horn in one long continuous note. When her phone rings she must dig through the hay to find its illuminated screen.

  “Are you still in the loft?”

  “Yes.” Her chest heaves. “Can you see it?”

  She does not know that the lion stands before him, its mouth covered in blood. “Yes,” he says softly.

  “Where?” she pleads. “Is it in the field?”

  “Stay where you are.”

  She calls to him, and he says nothing in return. Alice scrambles down from the loft, skipping the last three rungs of the ladder and falling to the ground and skinning her knee. Night is falling, and the truck’s headlights fill the slits in the doors’ cracks and frame. She throws them open to see the lion between her and the truck. Amon steps out of the vehicle, and the animal doesn’t flinch. It merely turns its head to them both.

  He brings a rifle to his shoulder. His fingers fumble with the safety and his arm shakes. The lion roars, and its bloody mouth and whiskers are gruesome in the stark lighting.

  “Get back inside!” he screams. “Close the goddamn doors!”

  She doesn’t move. She sends up a prayer for the lion to simply move on, thinks now she should have lied and told him she was safe in the house. He is on the verge of getting mauled and killed, and it will be her fault. She almost yells, “Be careful!” but realizes how pitiful and ridiculous that will sound and knows he won’t listen anyway. He’ll do what he has to save her, and there is a rising guilt for her earlier thoughts about him up in the loft, about the last year of their lives. The animal steps toward him, and having seen it move, Alice knows it can close the gap to him in a second. She raises her hand, as if reaching for him, and her father keeps his eyes steady. In a blink, and with great relief, the lion darts right and sprints off, toward Thompson’s, and as soon as it is gone her father hurries toward her. His artificial hip makes running out of the question, but he does a sort of skip and hop until he is beside her. She clutches at his arm and pulls him inside. He puts the rifle down, and they can feel each other’s hearts beating hard and fast.

  “Daddy.” Her voice is helpless.

  “I’m right here,” he says.

  He locks the doors. She knows it is now safe, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Then she feels his arms wrap around her with the force of someone drowning. She is so stunned by the strength of his embrace she nearly steps back to take in his face, but then he is shaking with the short spasms that indicate crying, and she presses her cheek against his rumbling chest. She whispers, “I know.”

  He finally releases her and turns to wipe his eyes. Over his shoulder he asks if she is ready. He puts a hand on the doors. She says yes. He grabs the rifle and unbolts the doors and peeks out before opening it all the way. He gives her a flashlight from his coat pocket and instructs her to stay close behind him, and they step into the night.

  Wind rattles tree branches. She aims the flashlight’s beam in front of their feet and keeps her attention there too. Her father’s head swivels, taking in everything around them as they make their way to the back porch where she unlocks the door. Even after they have shut the door and turned on the kitchen lights, her chest is still clenched and knotted.

  He sets the rifle on the table. They go to the living room to watch the news, but her father falls in a slump on the couch, as if everything, at last, has spilled out of him. They watch the reports on the animals and without speaking they are both looking for a glimpse of their lion on the screen, but all the footage shows are the killed animals laid out side by side, mouths agape, like drying timber on Thompson’s property. It’s been a long while since she’s heard a rifle shot, and she finds herself at the window wanting to hear their sonic echoes once more and know it’s all finished.

  Behind her Amon has closed his eyes, and she calls to him in a whisper, afraid to wake him if he’s sleeping. He doesn’t stir, and as she looks on him her heart breaks for him. Their love and their loss have gone unacknowledged for so long they have become like two satellites that circle the same empty space. She thought there would come a time when they could get back to normal, and she’s tried not to resent neither his asking nor her agreeing to live on the old farm, but she misses the rhythms of what she must now call her old life. She sees in his weakened figure the only way to convince him to come back to this house is by telling him that she’s not going anywhere.

  She takes an afghan from the back of the couch and places it on him and goes into her parents’ bedroom to make up the bed. She has avoided it and not once slept in here, instead sleeping in her old room with its twin bed. She works fast, pulling the musty sheets off and replacing them with fresh, clean ones. Her shoulders ache from stress, and she sits on the bed after tucking all the corners and closes her eyes, rolling her head in circles to loosen the tension.

  She hears a door close and opens her eyes. She comes out the bedroom and down the hallway. The afghan is folded and the television turned off. She calls for Amon, but the house has no answer. In the kitchen the rifle is missing. She picks up her phone.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I’m at the foot of the driveway,” he says.

  She opens the front door and a breeze shivers her. Exhaust clouds the truck’s brake lights.

  “Come back inside. There’s nothing more to be done.”

  “I’ll keep watch and check around the house after a while. I want to make sure you’re safe.”

  “But you’re not safe out there.”

  “Better me than you.”

  “That’s not true. You were just sleeping.”

  “I feel fine now.”

  She doesn’t want to fight him but must keep him talking. “People say he loved those animals.” She grabs a coat from the hook and puts it over her shoulders and stands in the open doorway. “None of this makes sense.”

  “You can’t make sense of it. You know better than that,” he tells her.

  She lifts her chin to pull the coat tight at her collar. Stars fill the sky, and she is about to tell him it’s a beautiful night, something he has pointed out to her all his life on nights like this, when he speaks first.

  “They’re saying he ki
lled himself.”

  “Who?”

  “Thompson,” he says. “That crazy bastard.” He tells her how the man unlocked the cages then took a pistol and shot himself in the head.

  She doesn’t know what to say in response but stares into the black distance toward Thompson’s and imagines the man outside in the light of day, going about the business setting free the animals with a ring of keys in one hand and a pistol in the other. The simple movement of turning a key has wrought so much chaos on their lives. Then, remembering, she says, “Why were you in Granville?”

  “I should pay attention here,” he says. There is heavy sighing and the rustling of him adjusting his posture in the seat. She tries to picture him down there in the cab.

  “Why were you there?”

  Another deep breath. “I was looking at some land,” he says. “Just outside of town.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m thinking of buying it and moving there.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “Soon,” he says.

  “You’d just leave?” she asks. “You’ve never lived anywhere else.”

  “There isn’t anything here anymore,” he says. “Just you. And you’ve got your own life. I know you’ve put it on hold because of this year.”

  He stops short of saying he is sorry, and Alice is glad. She doesn’t know if she could stand to hear it. As she looks down on the truck, thinking about the heat in the cab, the radio stations that are nothing but static at this hour, how he’s all alone, surrounded by the night, she knows he will walk away, that they will continue to drift even farther from each other. And she wants to say to him it doesn’t have to be this way and they can talk about her mother and what he misses, what life has been like, but she knows she can do nothing for him but go on being his daughter.

  Resigned, she is ready to tell him good night and to come inside when he gets tired when she hears a sound. “Did you hear that?”

  “No,” he says. “Let me cut the engine.”

  The parking lights and brakes shut off, and only the slight metal tint of the truck glows in the darkness.

  “It sounded like the lion,” she says.

  “Your mind’s running wild.”

  “How can you be sure?” she asks.

  “I can’t.”

  “Daddy.”

  “It’s late, honey. I’ll come up to the house in a little while. You go rest. Sleep.”

  “You promise to come back?”

  “I do,” he says.

  She thinks about the lives that have come to pass for both of them and how each has been littered with the unexpected, and it’s not lost on her that this is the definition of life. She never thought she’d be a spinster, living in Zanesville, traveling roads she grew up on. He thought he’d be a grandfather and still living on this farm he built. They both thought it was only a routine surgery. Where life once seemed about possibilities it has now become about making peace with what has transpired.

  She ends the phone call, and as she does the truck comes to life. Taking her time, she goes to the closet and pulls on her tennis shoes and a sweatshirt and steps out the front door. She glances left and right like she’s about to cross a busy street, and then takes off down the hill, keeping her focus on the burning red of the taillights. The heavy footfalls jar her. When she arrives at the truck she beats on the door and pulls at the locked door handle. She’s startled Amon and in the confusion he hits the gas and the engine revs loud and high before he reaches across the seat and opens the door.

  “You scared the life out of me,” he says, breathing heavy.

  “I didn’t want to be alone,” she says.

  “You should have gone to bed,” he says flatly then hands her the shotgun.

  She rests the stock on the floorboard between her feet and keeps the barrel toward the windshield. He stares at her, no longer startled, or even seeming to be afraid. “Like you did,” she says and looks at him crossly, and he shrugs his shoulders. “How can I sleep when it’s still out there?”

  “You don’t know that it is.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because it might be and you’re my daughter and I’m supposed to take care of you.”

  “I’m a grown woman. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time now.”

  “I know you have.” Then after a beat of silence, he says, “When you were a baby and couldn’t sleep your mother and I drove you around town. She always made me drive, and she’d sit in the back of the car with you,” he says and eases the truck onto the road.

  “Think it’ll work tonight?”

  “No, but it won’t do us no good to just sit here.” They have a small laugh, a leavening of their anxiety.

  He drives slow enough that she hears the tread on the pavement. She doesn’t ask where he is headed, and when he steers toward Thompson’s, she keeps quiet still. At the head of Kopchak Road traffic cones have been placed to block the way to the compound. He pulls past them, taking the truck onto the shoulder.

  “Don’t,” she says.

  “I want to know what happened to that damn lion.”

  Up ahead, blue cruiser lights turn round and round, spreading over them in intervals. A deputy throws open the car door and comes out waving his hands and a big Maglite. They’ve made it far enough down the road to see the animals on the ground, lit by emergency floodlights. They stare past those ghosts and up into the shadows on the hill, imagining what once lived there and what that man set free to be destroyed.

  The deputy bangs the fender with his hand and Amon rolls down the window. “You see that roadblock back there?” He is a young man and he is jittery with wide eyes and a small crack in his voice.

  Her father ignores the question. “Have you gotten all of ’em?”

  “I asked you a question,” the deputy says.

  “And I asked you one.” He adjusts his hands on the steering wheel.

  “Daddy,” Alice whispers.

  “You need to turn this truck around and go home.”

  “Did you kill all those damn lions?”

  The deputy ducks his head and pushes back the brim of his hat to eye the shotgun. “I won’t tell you again. Go home and put that rifle in a safe place.”

  “It’s safe where it is,” her father says.

  The deputy stands and reaches for the radio receiver on his shoulder.

  Alice quickly leans across Amon and tells the officer thank you, that they’ll be on their way.

  “That’s a good idea,” the deputy says and points the flashlight on Amon’s face and keeps it there as Amon rolls up his window and throws the truck in reverse, spinning the tires.

  He drives them back faster than when they left and stifles a yawn. His face is lit from the dials on the dash, and he looks even older than she remembers, worse than this morning.

  “I’m going to sell my house,” she says, deciding it right then. “I’ll stay on at the farm, and I want you to come back.” She can’t even begin to picture a life in which she never drives to the farm again and sees the house and its black shutters from a hundred yards off, the gray and weathered barn tucked against the mountainside. “We’re getting older, Daddy—”

  “Speak for yourself,” he says, cutting her off. He grins, though. He sits up higher in his seat. “I’m not coming back. I won’t be a burden to you,” he says. “I don’t know if I can be in that house anymore.” His voice has gone soft and it’s the only time he’s ever said anything about the grief that drove him away from the farm. She knows his memories of the life he once lived on the farm pull at him every day because they pull at her too. She misses her mother as much as he does.

  “We don’t have anyone but each other,” she says. And the truth of it, spoken for the first time, fills the space between and around them.

  They turn down the road for home, and the lion stands in the driveway. It faces the truck and lets out a loud roar. They stop. The truck’s radio hisses static.
Alice thinks about the remaining goats in the field, the never-ending rawness of this day, and grips the barrel of the shotgun. The lion moves toward the truck and roars again. From the corner of her eye Alice is vaguely aware of Amon reaching for his cell phone in the cup holder, hears him explain the situation. She is focused on the animal, its eyes and movements.

  “We can go get one,” she hears him say. “We just talked to one not five minutes ago.”

  Alice spins in the seat. “No,” she says. “We can’t lose her. We have to keep her in our sights.” And with that she jumps out of the truck with the rifle raised to her shoulder.

  “Alice! No!” He is out too, shouting from across the hood.

  The lion is twenty yards away, directly in the halogen beams. Amon waves his arms and hollers at the animal, trying to distract it. He slaps the hood, hollering, “Hey, hey, hey.” Alice is so stunned she can’t tell him to stop or ask what he’s doing, but the lion takes the bait and charges. It springs into the air, disappearing from the lights briefly, and Alice aims down the sights and fires into the darkness. An awful, anguished cry pierces the night.

  The shotgun’s recoil sends her backward and she nearly topples. She regains her footing and fires the second barrel and as she steps forward, the fallen animal is in front of the truck, wounded, on its side. Blood spills from its rib cage and its breaths are fast and deep.

  Amon, in his retreat, has fallen behind the truck. She sees him on the ground, rubbing his hip, and she comes to him and crouches down. They both see the animal’s mouth open, as if it wants to ask for help. The barrels of the gun throw heat onto her cheeks. She grips her father’s arm and helps him up, and then they stand over the lion, awash in brightness. Neither of them can speak. Alice’s hands and body vibrate. Her ears ring in deafness, and together they watch the animal’s final moments—its fight for oxygen and inability to lift its head from the grayed asphalt. Before they place the call to the police and then walk inside to talk about their own future, Alice thinks of an African prairie and dry heat. How far this animal is from where it should be, how it can never go back there, how cold and alone it must feel on the ground in this strange land with the last swell of its lungs drifting past the two figures before it, who appear suspended in the light.