“Well, what do you know?” Mauro muttered to himself, audibly enough for them to hear him. “Bringing the animals into the people’s houses? How can that idea be making sense? This town is not a fairy tale!”
While none of the townspeople are particularly happy about the development, Mauro has turned out to be one of the most distressed. When Mrs. McGinn saw him sneaking away from the town meeting the other day, she brought him right back and promptly assigned him several large birds. His store is now home to three wild turkeys, two blue herons, an emu, and an ostrich. Not one of these has Mauro been able to bring himself to love, despite Mrs. McGinn’s assurances. The herons are the most inoffensive—they roost on the shelves of the lumber department and fish for minnows in the kiddie pool Mauro set up for them in aisle six. And Mauro rather likes the two-toed gait of the ostrich, her hairless neck and the black and white feathers that look so soft to the touch. Sometimes he leans on his elbows over the counter for minutes at a time, watching her raise and lower her wings in an odd and delicate movement reminiscent of a lady lifting and rustling her petticoats.
It is the turkeys he hates. They are a gang, the three of them, a bullying gang. They lurk, watching him from behind stacks of canned goods. Sometimes they drive him back behind the counter when he tries to come out to greet a customer, charging at him as he leaves what they must regard as his cage. He sees them picking and eating the beetles from the walls but even that doesn’t change his opinion of them. They make him feel unwelcome in his own home.
“And anyway, this is not my home,” he grumbled. “Rolling stones are too mossy. I should have been going back to Italy all the many years ago.”
It troubles Noah’s wife to hear Mauro so unhappy, just as it troubles her to see the sheriff with his hands torn up. She only agreed to help the zookeeper in the first place because he said that no one else possessed her talent with the animals; he did not warn her about having to deal with the people, as well. Animals are much easier, reflects Noah’s wife. Their wants and their needs are obvious, open, straightforward: they are hungry, tired, satisfied, afraid. The townspeople, on the other hand, with their emotions in knots and their hopes and dreams and fears all tangled up in themselves and in their neighbors—well, what would make her think that she could handle all of that? That is Noah’s job; not hers.
But these days Noah seems to have little interest in communicating with his congregants. He barely eats and he no longer sleeps through the night. He leaves the house before she wakes, and she doesn’t know where he goes. Every time she has tried checking in the church, he isn’t there. The two of them have not made love since before the first service; last night she leaned in to press her lips to the warm skin of his throat, and he turned his head away. She lay awake in the dark for many cold minutes afterward, the muscles in her stomach tense with unease.
And so she busies herself with the beasts that Noah brought into their house: the woodchuck burrowing beneath the quilts in the guest bedroom, the badger snoring in his crate. One of the bathrooms has been transformed into a reptile house, with an orphaned baby alligator half submerged in the bathtub and a tank of lizards sunning by the glow of a light box on the back of the toilet. The one-winged golden eagle surveys the backyard from her perch in the dining room, keeping her eye on the pens with the wild boars, the zebra, and the sheep. In the morning before Noah’s wife leaves and at night when she returns, she makes the rounds around the house and yard with buckets of feed hanging from her wrists, the slender red fox trotting at her heels, and her husband nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps it is better, she tries to convince herself, that she is doing this on her own. How terrible Noah is with the animals! He draws too close to them; he reaches out too quickly when he tries to touch them, and it seems as though every evening she is patching up some new wound. The barricades that he arranges while she is away—chairs, tables, lamps—have not proven successful in keeping the species contained in their assigned spaces. The animals simply do not like him. Within their first few hours with the flamingo, the bird attacked Noah twice and would have done so again if they had not given her up to Leesl. Just yesterday Noah’s wife found Noah in a confrontation with the saddle-billed stork (five feet high, sharp-beaked, bad-tempered), her husband trying to scare the bird away by pressing a spatula to its feathered chest. The stork didn’t budge. When Noah’s wife saw the patches around his beak turning red with anger, something the zookeeper had advised her to watch for, she swiftly stepped between them, took the spatula from Noah, and ushered the bird into the basement. They have heard him cackling through the heating ducts ever since.
She might have tried rehoming the stork, too, but she knows better than anyone that the townspeople have animals enough of their own. Every time she enters a house or a shop with the zookeeper, the occupant looks as skittish and as drained as she feels. No one is happy.
“That animal doesn’t do a damn thing,” complains Mrs. McGinn’s husband when the zookeeper stops by after lunch to check on the sloth and say hello to his fiancée.
“Those monkeys? The little hanging ones?” says one of the firemen later that afternoon. “They eat all the food they can get their thumbs on the second it passes through this kitchen. We haven’t had a piece of fruit for days!”
“I don’t see why I have to have the seals, too,” whimpers the postmistress. “Aren’t they strong swimmers? Can’t they survive outside?”
“The snakes, really?” demands the weatherman, whose bookshelves have been stripped of weather tools and are now stocked with fifteen glass terrariums. “I don’t even live in this town. Was it really necessary to give me all of them?”
“They’re social creatures. We needed to keep them all together,” lies the zookeeper, his face blank. He shoves a sack of live white mice into the weatherman’s empty hands and then he spins heavily on his heel. Noah’s wife knows that he intends for her to follow him, but instead she drops into a wicker chair by the weatherman’s window and turns her face to the glass. The weatherman watches her, suspiciously—at this point he is wary of all the townspeople, who scowl when they see him and reject his attempts to drive them out of here. And can he blame them? Noah’s wife asks herself, gazing out into the street. No one likes being told by a complete stranger that the time has come to abandon ship—especially when they are so desperate to stay afloat that they are grasping at feathers, sharing their beds with marsupials and their bathrooms with amphibians.
“So whose side are you on?” the weatherman demands, interrupting her reflection.
“Excuse me?” she says.
The weatherman heaves a sigh of impatience. “Don’t play dumb,” he says. “I know what people are saying. They think I’ve holed myself up in this apartment because I’m up to no good, that I’ve come here only to torture them with my threats and my predictions. They don’t think there’s any truth to what I say: that this town is in danger of going under.”
He grimaces and leans back in his chair, away from her. His feet are propped up on his desk and his arms are crossed over the buttons of his plaid shirt, his slicker draped behind him. The desk is lined with tools: hygrometers, barometers, and others she doesn’t recognize. The walls are tacked with maps of the region, topographical charts of the river and the hills. Beside the door hangs a lunar calendar, its pages warped with water damage.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “I haven’t been here long enough to say.” How should she know if they should stay or go? Noah was called here, and so she came. She will stay here until he is called away again. Her path is as clear and as simple as that.
The weatherman raises his eyebrows. “You’re not sure,” he repeats. “But you’re the minister’s wife. Shouldn’t your husband be providing some kind of leadership right now? Don’t you think that it’s your job to know what’s going on with his little flock?”
Noah’s wife hears the contempt in his voice. “It’s my job to help Noah,” she says, bristling. “It’s not my place to
make decisions for him or for his congregation.”
The boa constrictor lifts a gleaming head from its basket in the far corner of the room and pours itself in a rush of copper coils from the wicker to the floor. It slides across the room to the weatherman’s desk and slips into the shadows. The weatherman shudders.
“Right you are,” he says. “That’s the only intelligent remark I’ve heard since I arrived in this place. People make choices. They’re the ones who get themselves into messes like this one, so let them try to get themselves right out again. Your neighbors aren’t anyone’s responsibility but their own. Isn’t that so?”
Noah’s wife recalls the first service, remembers her husband’s despair. The people he tried to help only turned against him. Is it their fault that he is not himself? Would everything have turned out better if he had left well enough alone?
The weatherman clasps his hands together, continues. “You know, they told me how strange this place was. They told me that its economy was built on a goddamn zoo, of all things, and then when the rain started, tourists stopped coming and the money stopped flowing.” He narrows his eyes, glancing quickly at a forked tongue flicking inside the glass tank to his right. “I was warned that the people who were left here are stubborn and tactless and set in their ways. But I was also told that in spite of all that it is my job to get them out. They haven’t listened to me yet, but I’ve got to give them one more shot. That’s why I’m calling a town meeting—whether that McGinn woman likes it or not. Last night I combed through all the town statutes: if she tries to oppose a meeting for emergency measures, she hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”
Noah’s wife shakes her head. “You don’t understand how invested they are in this place,” she says. “To be honest, I think you’re wasting your time here.”
He stares at her for so long that she begins to feel uncomfortable. “What choice do I have?” he finally says. “My career depends on this. I used to chase storms. I used to love it. No people, no problems. Just the four winds and me. Then I made one or two poor calculations, and all of a sudden they’ve got me on the evacuation circuit, running around to the towns nobody else will touch. If I don’t get this right, I’ll be out of work.”
He pauses. For a minute the room is silent, but for the rain against the windows and the snakes shifting in their tanks. When the weatherman speaks again, his tone sounds less callous. “This is all I’ve got,” he says flatly. “Didn’t you ever have something like that? Something you were good at, that you would be sorry to lose?”
Noah’s wife looks back to the window. “I used to take pictures,” she says after a moment. “In the city. I used to work for a studio. I suppose I miss photography, sometimes.” She checks herself. “But Noah needs me here.”
The weatherman jolts upright. “You’re a photographer?” He reaches for a small leather bag resting on the corner of his desk, opens it and draws out a plastic canister with a roll of film. “I’ve been taking pictures, too, for proof. I’ve got shots that show the river is rising, shots of the trees hanging over telephone poles and all the rotting, abandoned houses. The ruin, the devastation. If they insist on being blind to the situation at hand, well, I’ll just show them these photographs in order to make them see.”
Noah’s wife looks uncertainly at him.
“You’re a photographer,” he repeats. “You’ve got the supplies for making prints, don’t you? The only camera store in this town closed a year ago, and now there’s no place for me to get these developed. Can you help me out?”
When he extends his arm toward her and releases the canister, she instinctively cups her hands to catch it. The weatherman grins. It is the first smile she has seen from him; the first real smile she has seen from anyone, she realizes, in days.
“So you’ll do it,” he declares. It is a statement, not a question.
The zookeeper calls to her impatiently from below, and she shoves the film into her pocket as she rises. She leaves the weatherman’s apartment, feeling pulled in more directions than she knew existed. How did Noah ever manage it—the weight of all these requests and expectations? By the time she arrives downstairs she has made up her mind to tell the zookeeper that she is serious, she is finished with all of this, that she simply cannot do any more for anyone except her husband—but before she can speak, a battered blue car speeds through the crosswalk right in front of them and then, a moment later, there is the screech of brakes and the scream of an animal in pain.
And how could she have walked away then? When she saw Mauro’s car stalled in the street, one peacock dead at the curb and two more struggling out from underneath the bumper with broken wings and mangled tail feathers dragging along behind—how could she have left him? With the exhaustion weighing down her limbs, she helps the zookeeper bundle the remaining birds into the van while they are too dazed to fight back. She places her hand on Mauro’s shoulder when he wails and wrings his hands. She nudges him into his own passenger seat and then slides behind the wheel to drive him back to his store.
In the car she listens to his confession—he was driving too fast because he was distraught. He tells her that he had gone to search for the savings he had hidden in an old fishing dory along the banks of the river, only to find that the water had risen and swept the little boat away with the bills wrapped up and tucked under the seat. His dream of going home went with it. He contorts his face like a child and says that he is sorry for trying to leave but sorrier still that now he cannot. His eyes well up with salty tears and he covers his face with his gnarled hands.
“I was so wanting to be going home,” he says.
And how could she have left him afterward, when the zookeeper arrived with the two peacocks in tow, their wings set and their broken tail feathers clipped? Mauro is appalled at the sight of them, and appalled further still when the zookeeper tells him that there is no place for the peacocks but here, in Mauro’s store.
“They can’t go back outside,” he insists when the Italian tries to argue with him. “And who is responsible for them but you?”
But Mauro seems to cheer up a little after Noah’s wife pours him a glass of his own wine from a bottle she finds below the register. The peacocks rustle their good wings and crane their iridescent necks, cooing as gently as mourning doves. In between his first glass and his second, Mauro builds a nest for them by pulling towels from the shelves of the outdoor aquatics aisle and arranging them in cottony folds on the bottom of one of the standing bathtubs for sale in the plumbing department. After some thought he drags over several of the tall potted plants from home-and-garden to make the birds feel more comfortable. He admires them there, their masses of feathers shimmering like precious jewels. They consider him with shining eyes and as soon as he returns to the front of the store they climb out and follow him, leaving long four-toed footprints on the concrete floor. They flutter up to the counter and dig their beaks into their pinfeathers, preening, before finally settling themselves down beside the cash register. Mauro beams: the second smile Noah’s wife has seen that day. She does her best to smile back. She doesn’t ask him why he would choose to hide his life savings in such an irrational place; she understands that there can be no good answer. Instead she keeps the question to herself and stores it away with all the others that she has been burying in a dark place in her heart.
“This is all temporary, right?” she asks her husband when she finally returns home, physically and emotionally drained. She pictures the river rising in its banks, sees Mauro’s homecoming being swept right out from underneath him. “Do you really believe that the rain will end and the water will go down?”
“I do and it will,” he says more loudly than he should, looking up in surprise from the stack of papers he is reading. He rises and comes to stand behind her, resting his broad hands on her narrow shoulders. “Try not to worry so much, love. Try to have some faith.”
I do, she wants to tell him, and she thinks she really does. He drops a kiss into her hair and she
slowly climbs the stairway toward the bedroom. It is true that she doesn’t have much faith in this plan, or this town, or this God to whom Noah swears he is praying daily for strong winds and clear skies. But she has always had faith in Noah—and for as long as she has known him, that has always been enough.
eighteen
When Mrs. McGinn’s husband spots a dark figure shuffling down the muddy road ahead of him, he mistakes the shape for yet another lost or wounded animal.
He has become accustomed to braking for runaway mountain goats and reindeer, and he keeps his eyes peeled for other strays. Just last week he spotted a seal splashing in the ditch; and while he was climbing out to deal with that, a zebra went galloping by on the other side of the truck. Mrs. McGinn’s husband simply stood and watched it go. There are only so many animals that one man can handle on his own.
The only creature he is glad to have found is the smaller of the two giant tortoises. He doesn’t know why he stopped when he saw her paddling in the gravel at the end of someone’s driveway, but he did. After a few minutes of watching the rain cascading down the sides of her shell, he stretched his arms into the mud and heaved her up into the bus. He calls her George, feeds her canned fruit, and slaps the gnarled plates of her shell when he is irritated or amused. He feels more satisfied in the presence of this silent, sullen companion than he does with anyone else these days, and so when he runs his errands, George goes with him.
It is only when he and George draw closer to the figure on the road that he recognizes the minister: the black hood pulled low over his forehead, shoulders hunched, steps sluggish. He is at least two miles outside town; did he walk in the rain all this way alone?
“Hey,” grunts Mrs. McGinn’s husband, throwing open the door and swinging the bus to the side of the road. He doesn’t bother to ask whether the minister wants a ride or not; he simply stares the man down until Noah gives up and climbs in.
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