The Animal Hour

by Andrew Klavan

  Behind her, Nancy quietly shut the door.

  The phone squealed. Mrs. Anderson knelt down beside Dr. Schoenfeld.

  Nancy stepped up in back of her. She grabbed a handful of her hair.

  “Ah …!” said Mrs. Anderson.

  Nancy yanked her head back. She pressed the blade of the opener against her throat.

  “I can kill you with this. Don’t be stupid.” The words sounded strange in her small voice.

  “Help me …” The doctor had rolled onto his side again. He was lifting his head. Trying to push himself up out of his own blood.

  Mrs. Anderson’s head was all the way back. Her face was toward the ceiling. Her mouth was forced open. Nancy felt her stiff, lacquered hair tugging against her fist. She was trying to nod, to acquiesce.

  “Good,” Nancy whispered. The nurse winced as she tightened her grip.

  Dr. Schoenfeld shifted again. He lifted his arm, reaching blindly for purchase. His hand fell on the overturned chair. He grabbed hold of it. Started to pull himself up.

  “Phone,” he gasped. The phone answered shrilly.

  “You’re going to walk me out of here,” Nancy whispered to the nurse.

  Mrs. Anderson tried to shake her head. Nancy held her hair tightly. “Can’t do it,” Mrs. Anderson managed to say. “HP—the hospital police.”

  “I don’t care. You have to do it. You have to do it or you’ll die. Now stand up.”

  She yanked on Mrs. Anderson’s hair. The big woman put her arms out for balance. She got hold of the edge of the desk. She braced herself as she worked her legs under her.

  Right beside them in the tiny room, Dr. Schoenfeld was now trying to scale the overturned chair. Slowly, he was climbing over it toward his desk. The phone breeped, its light blinking. Schoenfeld forced his eyes open wider at the sound.

  Nancy got Mrs. Anderson to her feet. She still had a grip on her hair, still had her head pulled back and the opener at her throat. She pressed her own back against the doctor’s desk. Dr. Schoenfeld was next to her, pulling himself onto the desk, dragging himself toward the phone.

  “Listen,” said Nancy breathlessly. She held her mouth close to Mrs. Anderson’s ear. “Listen: I’m sick.”

  “I know that, honey,” Mrs. Anderson said. “But we can help you, truly we can …”

  “Shut up. Damn it. I don’t mean that. I mean, we’re going to pretend that I’m sick. You’re going to hold me and help me walk. Put your arm around me. You’re going to walk me out of here.”

  “We can’t just—”

  “Shut up. Just shut up. I mean it.”

  Bureep. Bureep. Dr. Schoenfeld stretched out his arm. “Phone,” he gasped. He stretched his fingers toward the phone. He touched the base of it. “Phone …”

  With a quick snap, trip-hammer hard, Nancy drove her fist down, drove the handle of the letter opener into Schoenfeld’s temple.

  Mrs. Anderson cried out. Dr. Schoenfeld dropped—a marionette with cut strings. Hands flailing, legs limp, he collapsed onto the overturned chair. Tumbled off it onto the floor again. He lay still, unconscious, wheezing quietly.

  And the letter opener’s blade was back at Mrs. Anderson’s throat before she could blink. Her whole body had gone rigid. Any notion of escape was gone.

  Good, Nancy thought. “All right,” she said softly. She brought the opener down from Mrs. Anderson’s throat to her side. She dug the point into her ribs. “There’s your heart. You’re a nurse. You know.”

  “I know,” said Mrs. Anderson.

  “I go in and twist and you’re dead before you hit the floor.”

  “Okay. I hear ya.”

  Is this any way for Daddy’s little button to …?

  “Shut. Up!” Nancy barked.

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  “I’m not talking to you!”

  “Oh. Okay.” Mrs. Anderson did not seem reassured.

  Nancy shut her eyes, tried to steady herself. The phone—couldn’t they call back later?—it sliced into her. She was busy, for Christ’s sake!

  Her voice came out in whispered spurts. “All right. You hold me. Okay? Hold me like this.” She let go of Mrs. Anderson’s hair. She squeezed around in front of her, between her and the doctor’s body. She pressed herself against the nurse’s front, against her breasts. Clutched her uniform with her free hand. She kept the opener to Mrs. Anderson’s ribs, hidden under her own body. “Hold me against you. Now!”

  Slowly, cautiously, the nurse put her big right arm around Nancy’s shoulder. She pressed Nancy’s head into her bosom.

  “Remember the knife,” Nancy said.

  “It won’t slip my mind, honey, believe me.”

  “Good. Now we go out the door, down the hall to the exit. Right past the cop.”

  “I gotcha.”

  Mrs. Anderson started walking, holding Nancy to her breast. A step to the door.

  “Open it.”

  Nancy felt the nurse hesitate, only for a moment. Then she felt her shift, reach. Heard the door click open. She clung to the front of the big woman, held there securely by the powerful brown arm. They moved together out into the hall.

  “Close the door.”

  She heard the door click shut.

  “Now move,” she said.

  They started toward the narrow waiting room. Mrs. Anderson was no fool. She moved at a swift but stately pace. Nancy moaned into her shirtfront for effect.

  “O-o-o-oh …”

  “There, there, honey,” Mrs. Anderson said. She played it just right. Patted Nancy’s shoulder. “We gonna get you up to the ER, you gonna be just fine.” It was perfect.

  They came out of the corridor into the waiting room. A row of distorted faces stared from the white walls. Nancy pressed against the big nurse. She smelled her smell; a musty Negro smell. Sweat and laundry detergent and some smooth, flowery skin lotion—Jergens, possibly. Nancy closed her eyes. Such a deep liquid pool of breasts under the cool linen. She moaned again.

  “There, there, honey,” Mrs. Anderson murmured. Her voice was warm and deep, like bathwater. Nancy gave a little whisper of pleasure as she pressed deeper into her softness. I’m sorry, she thought. I was a teenager and I was angry and crazy and I’m so sorry. It made no sense but the words came to her anyway. So sorry, sorry …

  “You got a problem there?”

  A man’s baritone, right beside them. Nancy’s eyes snapped open. They had reached the wooden gateway, the metal detector. Nancy could see only the white field of the nurse’s uniform. Blurry stares from the maniacs’ gallery just beyond. But she sensed the cop was standing behind her. She dug the blade into Mama Anderson’s side.

  “Everything’s fine,” the nurse said. Casual but authoritative. “Doctor wants her upstairs for tests.”

  And the baritone of the cop: “You want me to call for escort?”

  Nancy moaned.

  “Yes, yes, there, there,” said Mrs. Anderson, patting her. “No thanks,” she said to the officer, “we’ll be fine.”

  And that was it. They were moving again. Under the wooden canopy. Into the …

  The metal detector! Nancy tensed against the great bosom. The metal detector: Would it pick up the opener, the brass blade?

  But they were already through. The metal detector had not made a sound and they were already out the doorway. Twisting her head a little, Nancy saw the white hall. They were in the long white entrance hall where she had been brought in. Dragged in, screaming.

  Mrs. Anderson released her. “All right,” she said. “Go on then, if you’re going.”

  There was a pause—a moment before Nancy pulled herself away from the nurse’s musty depths. Then she straightened. Looked down the corridor toward the door at the end. The door had a glass pane. She could see the daylight through it. The concrete bay where the cop car had parked. Oh, she could almost smell the cool, the free, the open autumn air.

  She glanced back gratefully at Mrs. Anderson. At the granite dignity of the round brown
face. “Go on,” the nurse said.

  I’m not really like this! Nancy wanted to cry it out to her. To fling herself back into her arms, back against her breast. This is not who I am, Mrs. Anderson. I’m really nice! Really! Nice!

  As if she had heard, Mrs. Anderson said quietly: “You sure you don’t want to just come back in now? No one’s gonna hurt you. I’ll just walk you right back in.”

  Nancy’s lips parted. “I can’t,” she whispered. “There’s someplace I have to …” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  Quickly, she pivoted away from her. Without another glance, she started running down the hall, toward the door. Toward the light. Her hands moved at her side, right fist clutching the letter opener. She heard her feet flapping faster and faster against the floor.

  What kind of person …? She heard it in the rhythm of her own steps. What kind of monster does these things?

  Not me, she thought as she ran. Not me. Not really. Not really me.

  Behind her, far away it seemed, she heard Mrs. Anderson shouting. The door ahead came closer to her. The light at its window brightened. The car bay—its concrete columns—loomed.

  And then a police officer moved into the square of glass. The light went out. And it occurred to Nancy as she ran toward that square of shadow that Mrs. Anderson was shouting very loudly. She was sounding the alarm—to everyone—at the top of her lungs:

  A madwoman has escaped!

  Before Zach was born, Oliver and his dad had taken walks together. Hand in hand down tortuous streets. Mysterious jazzy Manhattan streets with slanted brownstones lowering. There had been the smell of garbage, he remembered, and no sun—the sun too low by three P.M. to crest the building tops. There had been old women leaning out of windows. Negroes at the corners slouched into question marks.

  His father had been a graduate student then, at NYU. Reedy and somehow elegant in his rumpled black suits. He had chatted as they walked and then murmured and then fallen silent after a time. He had gazed off into the distance, absently holding Oliver’s small hand. He had still been happy then. Before Zach was born.

  They are going to kill him, Perkins. I know this for a fact.

  Perkins glanced back over his shoulder. He was at the corner of Bleecker now. He glanced back down Tenth at the cop house, a concrete bunker hunkered amid quaint brick apartments. No one was following him; no one he could see anyway. He had to get away from here before they changed their minds. He had to find Zach. Before Mulligan did. Before the fucking feds …

  Your brother is going to be dead.

  He hurried away down Bleecker. Hands in pockets. Shoulders hunched. Heavy with his thoughts, with his solitude. Tons of solitude now. Worse than before. Traffic steamed past him, past parked cars. He strode under green gingkos and yellow elms. The leafy autumn wind curled down out of the blue sky. A T-shirted girl leaned in the laundromat doorway, arms crossed on her chest, a wry twist to her lips. But for Perkins, inside Perkins, it was all a lunar landscape. Cratered vales of emptiness; the black sky; no help from anyone. Had to find Zach. He had to.

  And Nancy Kincaid’s severed head floated along beside him.

  Look what they did to me, Oliver. I wanted to be a dancer. I had a woman’s thoughts …

  He hunched his shoulders higher to ward her off. He stared at the pavement as he walked. What could he do about it anyway? What did he know about any of this? New York City politics? Democrats, Republicans, the FBI? He wanted no part of any of them.

  But the blue eyes stared him down, and he thought of the woman in the leather mask. Was it Tiffany? He thought about standing there in front of Mulligan, unable to speak out. Silence like a wall of glass. Words like moths beating themselves to death against it. Everything felt dead now as the moon inside him.

  Man oh man, am I depressed or what?

  He was depressed, all right. Even the panic of his thoughts—got to find Zach, call Nana, got to—even this was smothered under a powerful nostalgic yearning. Oh, but he longed for the people he had loved. Just to see a familiar face on the interior moonscape.

  So his thoughts went back to the house on Long Island. They had lived in Port Jefferson after Zach was born. They had had a small white house with jolly dormers and gingerbread trim. There had been a steep hill behind it. Straight down from the Hartigans’ picket fence to their own cellar door. The slope glistened with snow in the winter. The gray, naked trees all around it were bright with snow. That’s how he hankered for it now. He remembered tugging Zach to the top on his Flexible Flyer. Kid brother swathed to the eyes in scarves. His earmuff hat pulled down to his brows. His eyes, lamplit with fear and excitement, beaming out at the slit between. And his legs in his huge buckle boots sprawled out before him on the sled.

  “Mom says I shouldn’t get too wet, Ollie.”

  Ollie trudging upward, tugging the rope.

  “We’re not gonna go over the bump, right, Ollie? You’re gonna ride with me, right?”

  Puff, puff, puff—cottony blasts of frost as Ollie panted. “Yeah, Zach, I told you already.”

  “Cause I don’t like it when it gets too fast, okay?”

  “Okay, Zach-man. Jesus.”

  “Mom says it’s because of my inner ear.”

  Perkins smiled grimly now as he edged by a troop of school-children. Trick-or-treaters in black nylon capes, plastic masks. A harried woman shepherded them past.

  His inner ear, Perkins thought, shaking his head. Christ, he had to find the guy, inner ear and all. Little Zach, in the playroom with his carpentry kit between his legs, his hammer going. Or down in the cellar like Dr. Frankenstein with his chemistry set—he had known more about science at seven than Oliver knew now. He had known more about everything. He could take apart their father’s typewriter and put it back together. Ollie had tried to do it himself once, just to prove he was at least as smart as his baby brother …

  Oh, if the feds hurt him, Perkins thought … if the cops got hold of him … Jesus …

  He could remember standing at the top of that wintry hill. Breathless. Zach sitting on the sled by his feet. Both of them looking down over the slope of snow. The stretch of darkling sky over the housetops. The lighted windows in the house below. Their mother’s anxious face at the kitchen window, the fluttery spirit of the house. And upstairs in the northern dormer, their father. Seated at his desk. Turning from his work to the round window. Turning as if to glare at an intruder. Turning like a wolf from the innards of a deer.

  Jesus, where had that look come from? That snouty rage? Zach and Oliver had debated the question endlessly. Back and forth from bed to bed in their little room upstairs in Nana’s mews. Dad was gone by then, of course. Off to California with one of his students: a chirpy twenty-year-old brunette who called Zach and Oliver “the boys.” Dad hardly even wrote them anymore, but “the boys” couldn’t let the matter rest. They wanted to understand it: Why had he become such an angry man?

  “When you were a kid, he was a promising young grad student,” Zach would say mildly. And the fact that he said it mildly made Perkins feel guiltier still. “When I was a kid, it was all failure already, it was all disappointment.”

  Dad had been an associate history professor at the university when Zach was a kid. He was popular with the students. A favorite lecturer; all that reedy, abstracted charm. Everyone talked about how much they loved him. “And they hold that against you,” he often said—grumbling at the dinner table, snapping his mashed potatoes off the fork. “According to academia, you can either be popular or scholarly. They won’t let you be both. If the kids like you, then your work is looked down on. How can it be any good? You’re popular. You must be shallow. That’s that.”

  Perkins came to a stop on the corner of his block. Ran his fingers up through his hair. Looked down the narrow lane of brownstones and slender trees. Yellow leaves blowing in the gutter past the closed windows of the café. Only a few cars parked way down at the far end, near Sixth. A few pedestrians. Two older men,
a couple, carrying groceries. A sheepdog dragging its dumpy matron for a walk. They could be cops, he thought. Any one of them could be watching him. Could be feds even. He stood, feeling obvious and exposed. Feeling guilty.

  Look what they did to my head, Oliver.

  Yeah, yeah, but for God’s sake, what did he know about it?

  And again, he thought of the woman in the leather mask. Her strands of black and silver hair. The curve of her naked spine. The man—this Fernando Woodlawn—was drawn back from her a little so you could see most of her ass.

  And all at once, he felt a chemical change. His loneliness, this bittersweet nostalgia, thickened into real sadness. Oh. Oh. Oh. He shuddered. For many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.

  Little Zachie, man. His father had grabbed him by the back of his neck. Pinned him facedown to the big writing desk, his cheek crushed against it. The little boy’s legs were dangling over the side. His corduroy overalls were dangling around his thighs. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” he kept screaming. But Daddy kept lifting that heavy brass ruler. “This—will—teach—you—to stay—away—from my—things!” Bringing it down on the child’s bare ass till the flesh turned purple and then practically black. While Zachie screamed till he was hoarse. And Mom stood to the side, her fingers fluttering helplessly at her lips. Staring with blank eyes. Smiling a dazed smile. And Oliver stood in the doorway. Drawn from his homework by his brother’s shrieks. Stood with his hands out from his sides and his fists clenched. And he couldn’t speak then either. His throat felt bunged with excitement and terror and he could only stand there, thinking, But I broke it. I broke the typewriter.

  A breath riffled out of him. He shook his head. “Fuck,” he said aloud. He started toward his building, head down. And fuck Mulligan too, he thought. And the NYPD, and the fucking Republican FBI, all of them. He’d get a lawyer, that’s all. He’d go to the newspapers, break this thing wide open. Kill his brother, would they?

  God, he was depressed.

  He reached his stoop. Paused there for a last narrow-eyed look around. A bald man in a red dress strutted past the end of the block, his high heels clicking. And Christ, you can’t tell if you’re being watched or not. The entire Village is in disguise. He waved off the world. Fuck it. He jogged up the steps to his door and pushed inside.