Rundown

by Michael Cadnum

  I stared at her profile.

  She asked, “Where do you work?”

  Chapter 11

  At first Animal Heaven looks like just another pet store, cheese-flavored chew toys for the family Rottweiler dangling next to a display of choke collars.

  Mr. DaGama, the owner, spoke English with a Cuban accent and could soothe even the most high-strung whippet with a touch. Marta had found me the job, three or four half days a week during the summer, tending the boarded animals in the back room.

  The aviaries behind the main shop were a wonderful secret, zebra finches, lovebirds, conures, cockatiels, parakeets, and at one end of the room the royalty of the kingdom, macaws and cockatoos, all of them prized by their traveling owners and left with us because the animals thrived here.

  Cass says “Animal Heaven” sounds like a pet cemetery. Cass used to skip up and down the sidewalk, killing ants. Dad always said we traveled too much to take care of a dog, and Mom said cats could not be trusted.

  I loved the pet store. Droopy, eighty-year-old Amazons perked up under our heat lamps, and egg-bound canary hens laid their eggs after all, singing their happily tuneless female-finch song.

  I slung my leather purse/backpack into a corner. I felt light-headed, and colors were garish, the display of dog dishes, unbreakable, gleaming, primary colors, made me feel like throwing up.

  Mr. DaGama followed me into the back room, a newspaper folded in his hand. “You’re okay,” he said, a tone of surprise.

  Marta, or Marta’s mom, must have called him. I asked how Byron was doing.

  “Byron lives,” he said. Sometimes he ladled out his accent, not trying to speak normal English. Bee-roan leaves. He shook open the Tribune. Suspect New Attack in Serial Terror. I sat down on a big paper bag of sunflower seeds as I scanned the column for my name. I couldn’t find it.

  “Marta’s coming in soon,” said Mr. DaGama.

  “The African gray is saying something,” I said, to change the subject.

  The gray parrot hadn’t been a talker when his new owners left him here five days before, heading for a camping trip, hiking Molokai to the historical leper colony. The new parrot words did not sound like much, but they had the shape and intonation of human speech.

  “Jennifer,” Mr. DaGama was saying, “this country is too gentle with wicked people.” The way he said my name made it sound exotic, the J given just a curl of his tongue. “A man like this should be horsewhipped in the town square.”

  A headache started up, a thrum as steady and ugly as a motor inside my brain. “I can take care of myself.” This was new for me, a flickering aluminum flame at the edge of my vision.

  “I bet you anything this criminal just got out of prison. I expect he is at liberty not one or two weeks. And he begins his old ways.”

  “No harm was done,” I said. Something about Mr. DaGama’s careful, correct English made me speak similar sentences.

  “Jennifer, I think that harm was done,” he said.

  Byron was a sulfur-crested cockatoo with the chalky, gnarled beak of a very old bird. He sat in his food dish, and as I approached, the crest fanned upward on his head, erect in greeting. Byron’s owner was a professor, away in England lecturing on how planets are born. Byron had started sneezing late last week, bubbles of snot crusting his nostrils, and, as I watched, Mr. DaGama put a heavy dose of avian antibiotic into his water dish.

  Marta flings herself into a room, but she never knocks so much as a chew toy off the display table, or slips on a wet floor.

  Mr. DaGama was cleaning up after an elderly teacup pug had peed a tiny bit, excited at his new rubber chew-bone, “flavored with real beef.” Marta hurried into the back room. If she had theme music it would be drums and cymbals.

  “I called Quinn,” said Marta, first thing, before she bothered with “good morning.”

  This startled me. “You didn’t.”

  “I called him and talked to his dad, and then I talked to him in person.” Marta is mouse-blond, but the sun bleaches her gold. Like me, she’s got shoulders and hips, and she stands about my height. In volleyball, she can spike the ball better than anyone, but my serves drop in.

  I thought of crashing the parakeet cage over her head, but parakeets can be startled to death very easily. Quinn had moved to Reno with his family, and I had almost completely trained myself not to think about him.

  “I knew you’d want him to know,” she said. “That you’d want him to hear the news, but that you couldn’t, probably, bring yourself to tell him yourself.”

  Usually when people talk about what you would have wanted, you’re a corpse and unable to overhear. My dad has headaches like this, migraines that send him to the medicine cabinet. I had never experienced anything like it.

  “Quinn was very upset,” Marta was saying. She reached into a conure’s cage and looped a squabbling, half-wild bird onto her finger. The scarlet and azure bird had bit everyone, even Mr. DaGama, until this moment. “Quinn was really worried about it and wanted to know how you were doing. He thought you’d be in a hospital, and I said you were at home.”

  Marta drove me home in her Toyota, a car with stuffing bursting out of the upholstery. Marta was definite that she wanted to be a veterinarian, but with a specialty in either tropical fish or birds of the rain forest. She was fascinated by any living creature with symptoms of illness, got wide-eyed with concern, and needed a running account on any symptom. Including me.

  “You don’t have any diarrhea, though,” said Marta. “Do you? Loose stools are a key in diagnosing illness. In any animal. And that includes humans.”

  Sometimes when Marta starts to talk she never stops. I said, “Stop the car.”

  But diving or driving, Marta is deft. She had the car at the curb in a wink, and I opened the passenger door and deposited the contents of my stomach into the gutter.

  Bernice has a brace of corporals and sergeants. They creep, snipping the privet bush in the garden, dusting the bottom rungs of the dining room chairs. A dust expert knelt on the stairs, spraying a substance onto his yellow cloth, applying it to the bare wood on either side of the Turkish carpet.

  Slung low to the ground, feeling like a rhino, I stumbled past this dust engineer. I found myself in Dad’s bathroom looking hard into my reflection, brown hair, brown eyes. I don’t use a conditioner on my hair, just baby shampoo, brush it. When Cass is around sometimes she braids it for me.

  Dad’s new medicine cabinet was replete with Demerol and Tylenol with codeine. He had Percodan, generic oxycodone, and painkiller suppositories, in case he became too nauseated to swallow. But he hoards old pills, in case he needs them. The capsules outlast their sell-by dates, some of the prescription labels still sporting Dr. Rigby’s name, an internist who retired a year ago.

  I slept, huddled in my bed in my shadowy cavern, and as I drowsed I heard voices. I sat up at one point, sure that I heard Detective Margate downstairs. I strained my ears, but then I decided the muffled voice belonged to Mom.

  Footsteps tiptoed up the stairs. Someone knocked softly and peeked in.

  It was Bernice. She gave me a cool, wet washcloth, like a Victorian remedy for the vapors.

  “Let yourself rest,” said Bernice. Life for someone like Bernice is a matter of allowing—letting herself sit, permitting herself a moment of rest on the back step in the afternoon sun.

  When I woke the headache was gone, and I felt that strange, deceitful sensation of lying down on a nice day, sunlight slicing through the crack in the curtains. I heard Dad’s voice somewhere far away, and I knew this was impossible—he was in L.A.

  I lay still, looking at the empty landscape of my ceiling, but the rich drowsiness was over. I put my feet on the floor and sat, doing a systems check, shoulder, blackberry scratches, bruised hand. I experimented mentally with a prepared statement, sounding like something Mr. DaGama would say: None of it is true.

  Dad makes the gentlest noise when he knocks on my door, an excuse-me-for-living tip-tap.


  I felt a ripple of guilt as he peeked in.

  I said, “You’re supposed to be gone.”

  “I told them I’d come down in a day or two.”

  He sat on the end of the bed, the mattress canting subtly with his weight.

  “I think it must be in the chromosomes,” I said. I felt a little wobbly. I had taken two very large capsules, choked down with not enough water. Once I had heard Dad reading the warning leaflets that came with the pills, possible seizure and coma if you overdosed.

  He made the pleasant expression he wears when he doesn’t get what I’m saying.

  “I inherited your headaches,” I said.

  I didn’t mean this reproachfully, but Dad put a hand to his head.

  “My mother had them, too,” he said. “About one Sunday a month she couldn’t get out of bed.”

  “I thought she never got sick.” It was a family legend, Grandma’s iron constitution, until she smoked so many Kools they had to hook her to an oxygen tank.

  I thought, I’d rather get double pneumonia than another migraine.

  “You’ll never guess what I have for you,” he said.

  Chapter 12

  The dashboard clock said 4:36.

  Summer afternoon, plenty of sunlight, lawn sprinklers chattering, a breath of spray across the windshield. If you rarely swallow painkillers you know why they call them drugs. I felt about three pages behind everything that happened, the sun too bright.

  “I told you keep your eyes shut.”

  I shut them an exaggerated way, bunched up my face, and then feathered one eye open just a bit

  “Shut tight,” he said.

  Dad was prime at times like this, in control. I’ve seen him sweep into his restaurant five minutes before opening, the regular chef out with the flu, the staff rattled, all elbows and feet. One of Dad’s pep talks and the evening is won.

  I used to want to be a chef, soups my specialty, the kind you make from a simmered beef broth, so thick it’s honey. Then I wanted to be an architect, but I’m terrible at math. My test scores are a range of spikes, off the chart verbally, below average at telling which cube nestles into which hole. Mom said it was hard to follow in Cass’s wake, and never fought to change any of my grades.

  It wasn’t a long drive, but the car was pulling uphill, cresting, my stomach feeling airborne with the sudden descent.

  You can tell when you’re traveling through a grove of eucalyptus. The air smells clean, like mothballs and fresh, spice countryside. The tires crunched and whispered up a dirt road, shadows playing across my eyelids. Jays called, smart birds who know exactly what a car is and probably count the passengers.

  I caught a whiff of manure, a golden, sun-ripened scent, and the hollow wooden buildings echoing the breathy thrum of Dad’s car as he eased it along, the independent suspension handling the heavy ruts.

  I told myself, surely not.

  It was just my imagination.

  “Still shut?” Dad was saying.

  I gave a tentative laugh, knowing my face was comical, squinched up, but committed to the rules.

  My vision was having trouble adjusting to the patches of black shadow, scissor-bright sun, light reflecting off a water trough and the arcing blades of eucalyptus leaves.

  I knew Sandalwood Ranch well, only a mile and a half from our new house, but another world. I was delaying, blinking, pretending, letting my sight settle on the comfy, boxy black interior of a stable, two horses gazing out, white muzzled pintos who had nothing to do with me.

  The horse Dad was indicating was dancing sideways, all loft and spirit, at the limit of a long, looping bridle.

  She was wheat yellow, with a blond mane, her nostrils brunette. When a fly touched withers her skin jumped, shaking off the insect with a lightning shiver. Her head tossed, but her eyes were calm, taking in her wrangler, the gleaming rails of the corral, everything but us.

  Even with the words spoken, I was sure I had misunderstood.

  My dad took in my silence and stepped toward the corral, propping one leg up on the wooden rail.

  “Flower’s all excited, Mr. Thayer,” said Tommy Dixon, dressed like a cowboy, with his hand on the end of the leather restraint, wheeling and following the mare’s ballet, his face in a silent laugh.

  “Bring her over, Tommy,” said my dad.

  The horse dipped her head, nostrils flaring, her breath blowing a eucalyptus leaf out of her path. She gave a few sweeping nods, the kind horses make when they are alive to what is on the ground, maybe starting to feel hungry, but aware of other creatures, too, horses nickering, people standing, a man with his hand outstretched.

  Dad reached out and nearly touched her, the horse keen at the sight of his hand, thrusting her muzzle toward his face, but holding back. Then my father withdrew his touch, and turned to me.

  He said it again. “She’s yours.”

  And this time I couldn’t pretend not to hear, as I watched my hand rise and almost touch the soft, silken wrinkles of her mouth. I knew how she would feel before I laid a hand on her, although I had ridden only a few horses in my life, as a thirteen-year-old, when Marta and I took lessons.

  I touched her warm breath—hot, really, too moist to be exhalation from an animal’s lungs. Then she offered her muzzle to me and jerked away after a kiss, my hand, her lower jaw. And then back again, allowing me to stroke her, thrusting her head between my father’s chuckle and my silence.

  Dad let the car roll slowly up the hard-packed dirt road, the sun brilliant beyond the bay.

  “Desert Flower,” he said. “Pretty name. I made some phone calls to some of my contacts in the horse world. Tommy Dixon said this is the first time an animal like this has been on the market in a couple of years.”

  “She isn’t actually a race horse,” I said.

  “Just a horse with an interesting ancestry,” he said. “Distant relation to a horse who used to race in England, Desert Orchid.”

  We were home before either of us spoke again, the black iron gate swinging open. Then he said, “Tommy’ll take care of the horse, him and his staff. Those guys are very knowledgeable.”

  I’d need to ride it every day, I told myself, and concern myself with its psychological and physical demands.

  I had outgrown horses, moved on in my mental life, and was now more interested in sea otters and tropical birds. Dad was remembering a former version of me, trying to give an earlier image of me something we never could have afforded in the old days.

  My dad swerved around the red, four-wheel drive Jeep in the driveway, giving the vehicle a long look, maybe wondering if he should have picked something sportier for the family car.

  “Great moments in science,” he said, mock-TV-announcer. “Cass is here early.”

  I wondered how long I could hide in the car.

  Chapter 13

  You hear about the aftermath of a migraine, a feeling of tranquillity. I felt tired and apprehensive. A soreness in my shoulder throbbed, a neon nerve, flashing on and off. I knew what people would think of me if they knew the truth, and they would be right.

  There’s something about Cass that draws you forward. You want to see what mood she’s in, what she has to say. You can’t stay away.

  Although you can delay for a while. The back garden was a hodgepodge, tall straight junipers and closely trimmed hedges, a maze that didn’t lead anywhere. A knot garden, interlocking sage and lavender bushes, attracted orange skipper moths and work-dazed honeybees. The shadows fell across the patio from the massive square-topped yew.

  The previous owner had been an economics professor turned state senator, a man who had finally drifted off to Arizona, delighted to see “a thriving bunch” taking the big garden off his hands. As a little girl I would have lost myself in the secret harbors of nasturtium and rosemary. Even now I was tempted to slip among the climbing roses, dodge a few late-hour wasps, and make a point of staying away from Cassandra.

  The wasps troubled Dad. He’d have a cup of c
offee in his hand and pull a bench out under the wisteria, and one of those little yellow bullets would have him hunching his shoulders and saying, “I’m all right, they don’t really bother me.” As a little boy, the story went, he had nearly swallowed a dead wasp in his lemonade.

  Cass had already fixed me on her radar. There was no clear evidence for this, but I knew.

  So I walked right up to her. She stood in that distinctive way she has, absent-mindedly rubbing one shin with the other. She has a natural physical glow, effortlessly good at tennis, arm wrestling, arguing. If you walked down the street with Cass, she was the one people turned to watch. She was standing on the patio, among pots of leafy bamboo and dwarf pines still wearing their plastic nursery tabs, instructions on light and water.

  Cass was flipping the pages of a garden magazine, spotting Post-its Dad had inserted to mark an especially pleasant floral arrangement. But you could tell she was just being polite to Dad. All the red-letter decisions had been made, and I suspected Cass was just looking for a splendid two-page spread of yellow roses, to prove to Dad that if they had to make a change it should be a clergyman who got axed, not flowers.

  She heard me coming and saw me out of the corner of her eye, all the way, so she had to whisk through the last few pages of the magazine before she could fling it down and give me a big hug, sisterly and strong, saying how glad she was to see me all in one piece.

  She said it like a joke, something casual and barely meant, but she took me by the chin, the way an adult will take a very young child, and looked right into my eyes.

  “Where are you hurt?” she asked.

  I indicated with gestures, the way a stewardess gives the preflight instructions, exit rows, oxygen masks, accompanying the voice on the intercom.

  But there wasn’t any commentary, just my silence.

  Cassandra shook her head solemnly. Cass is twenty-one and blitzed through high school with sterling grades, with a little coercion of the teachers from Mom. Cass tore through her undergraduate years with honors in everything, and was all set to continue graduate school at Stanford, studying sports psychology.