Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Who started all this?” Rhoda asked. “Who does this belong to?”

  “These are nice folks here,” Dudley said, suddenly stern. “They’re friends of mine. Be nice to them and try not to talk too much.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’m always nice to everyone.” Saint John sniggered, and Rhoda started to tell him to go fuck himself but for some reason she didn’t feel like making Saint John or Dudley mad at her right that minute.

  They had come to the top of a rise. A Caterpillar tractor with a grader blade was parked beside the road. Two Mexican boys sat underneath an umbrella drinking from a stone jar.

  A house was at the end of the road. An old stone house like something out of a nineteenth-century English novel. It was three stories high with turrets and a tower. In the field behind the house were structures that looked like huge greenhouses. They were tall cages, sixty feet wide by eighty feet long. There were three of them, at intervals of forty feet, constructed of steel bars three inches thick. Swings were suspended from the ceiling beams and some of the cats were sitting on the swings. A leopard, Rhoda thought. That’s a leopard. And that’s another one. She was struck dumb. Now she did not have to try to be quiet. Nothing could prepare you for this, she decided, no words could prepare anyone for this.

  Dudley drove the car up to the house and parked it. Children appeared on the back porch. The caretaker’s children. A tall girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, a boy a little older, a smaller girl, an even smaller boy. They were dark-skinned and dark-haired but did not look like Mexicans. “Are they Mexican?” Rhoda asked.

  “Of course.”

  “They don’t look it.”

  “Their mother is Italian. Where’s your momma?” Dudley called out. He opened the door and got out. “Hand me that sack of rolls,” he added. They had stopped at a bakery in Anahuac and bought sweet bread and raisin loaves for the children. Dudley handed the sack to the oldest girl. The boy smiled and held out an animal he was wearing on his arm. “Baby jaguar,” the boy said. “They are all gone for the day, gone hunting with Redman.”

  “We just came by to see the cats,” Dudley said. He patted the jaguar. He got back into the car. “We’ll be back to the house. I want to show my sister the cats.” Rhoda was half in and half out of the car. Now she got back in and shut the door.

  “The momma killed the other one,” the boy said. “We are raising this one on a bottle.”

  “We’ll be back,” Dudley said. He put the car in gear and backed out of the parking place. The children arranged themselves on the porch stairs, the boy held up the baby jaguar, flies buzzed around the porch and the car, the ground was dry and yellow. Rhoda sat on the edge of her seat. Behind them was a fourth cage. It was full of very large cheetahs, at least three cheetahs. “That cage isn’t big enough for the cheetahs,” Dudley said. “We have to do something about it. We didn’t know we were going to have so many. The cougar need better cages, too. There are fourteen cougar now. Too many, but everyone keeps sending them and no one wants to hunt them.”

  “Embarrassment of riches,” Saint John muttered. Dudley ignored him and drove the car from the driveway and out into the field where the cages rose like monuments in the hazy blue sky. We will get bogged down in the field, Rhoda thought. The car will stop and we’ll have to get out. Why do the men in this family always have to drive cars into fields? Why do I always end up driving on a field or in a ditch? Why can’t we stay on the road like other people? Don’t talk. Don’t say a goddamn word. If you object it will just make him do it more. You can’t stop Dudley by telling him not to do something. Just be quiet and it will soon be over.

  “How do you like it?” Dudley said, and laughed. He began to circumnavigate the cages. Tigers were in the first one. At least five tigers, four gold-and-white-striped tigers and one black tiger lounging on top of a concrete shelter. As they passed the cage Rhoda saw that a sixth tiger was inside the shelter, a huge black tiger twice as large as the others, taking up the coolest, most protected spot in the concrete shelter. She shuddered, tried to take it in. Dudley drove on. In the second cage were Bengal tigers, with faces as big as car windows. Three Bengal tigers sitting together on swings looking at her with their huge heads. In the third cage were lions. A lioness and three young cubs. Dudley drove down to a fourth cage, which could not be seen from the house. Jaguars were in that one. There were more cages in front of the house, protected by shrubbery and trees.

  “What are in those?” she asked quietly.

  “Leopards and cougar and some more lions,” Dudley said. “We have three lionesses with cubs now and the ones in the pasture.”

  “What pasture?” But then she knew. Dudley had stopped the station wagon beside a flimsy-looking thirty-foot-high fence. Inside the fence was a huge lion. Behind him in the tall grass were two lionesses with their cubs. The lion turned his head their way. Dudley rolled down the automatic windows and opened the sun roof. “Aren’t they gorgeous, Shorty?” he said. “Aren’t they something?”

  “My God,” she said. Dudley got out and walked over to the fence. “Hello, Waylon,” he said. “Long time no see.” The lion roared, a long deep rattling in the throat. Dudley turned his back to the lion and walked away.

  “Don’t worry, Shorty,” he said. “He wants me but not badly enough to do anything about it today.” Rhoda could hear him but she was only looking from the deepest part of the back seat. She had tried looking at the lion out the window but it was like staring over a precipice. Still, she could hear every word Dudley said, every sound of the world, suddenly she could hear every nuance, every blade of grass.

  “Don’t talk to him,” she said. “Don’t do anything else. Get back in the car.” Dudley turned back to the lion.

  “Get in the car,” Rhoda called out. In a very soft voice. “Roll up those windows. Get in the car and get me out of here. Saint John, roll these windows up.”

  “The windows wouldn’t stop him,” Saint John said. “If he wanted to get in the car he could do it.”

  “Well, drive it then,” Rhoda said. She called out the window in the loudest voice she could muster: “Dudley, get in the car. Get in this car and get me out of here. I don’t like it. I don’t like that lion. Or those cats. Get me out of here.”

  “I thought you were into violence now,” Saint John said. “Bullfighters and blood and all that.”

  “Not when I’m part of the ring. Roll the windows up, Saint John, this is madness. That fence isn’t big enough to stop a dog, much less a lion. Get Dudley back in the car. Let’s get out of here. I don’t like it here.”

  Dudley spoke to the lion again. “You want me, don’t you, Waylon. Show Rhoda what you need.” He turned his back to the lion again and began to walk away from the fence. The lion moved toward the fence.

  “Oh, shit,” Rhoda said. “I’m driving off, Dudley. I’m leaving you here. Roll those windows up, Saint John. Roll them up this minute, do you hear me?”

  “It’s okay,” Saint John said. “You’re okay.”

  “I am not okay. I am scared to death.” Rhoda pulled herself into a ball in the very middle of the back seat. She considered climbing into the trunk, but there was no trunk, it was a station wagon.

  Dudley turned back to the lion. “Old Waylon,” he said. “He hates me but he doesn’t know why. You don’t know why, do you, Waylon? Except you know I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Get in the car,” Rhoda yelled. “Get in the car this very minute. Roll those windows up. Oh, God, why did I come down here to fucking Mexico in the middle of July. Have they closed the window yet? Please close the window, Saint John. Dudley, close the goddamn sunroof and get back in the car and get me out of here. I have had all I can take of these goddamn terrifying unbelievable cats. I don’t want to see them anymore. Take me to that house.” He was still standing by the lion. “It’s bad karma,” Rhoda continued. “It’s terrible karma to have these animals here. They should not be here. They should be dead or else back where they came f
rom, where the Indians or Chinese or Africans or whatever can kill them themselves. If they lived where I lived I’d kill them all tonight. Get back in the car. Leave that lion alone.” The lion bounded for the fence. Dudley laughed. Saint John got back in the car.

  “Start the car,” Rhoda said. “Saint John, start the car.”

  “Not yet. Go on up to the house if you’re scared.”

  “Hell no.”

  “They can’t get out, Rhoda. Oh, I guess the lion could get over the fence, but he doesn’t really want to.”

  “Okay, I’m going. I can’t take any more of this.” Rhoda opened the car door. She looked toward the house. The children were standing on the stone steps holding the baby jaguar. “I’m going to the house,” she said. “Fuck being out here with these goddamn lions.” She stepped down on the grass, shut the car door, and began to run. “Don’t get so excited,” Dudley yelled. Don’t get them excited, she thought he said.

  “Watch out,” Saint John called. “Watch your step.” Rhoda sprinted toward the house, which seemed a mile away. She ran faster and stepped into a gopher hole and turned her ankle and went sprawling down across the dry yellow grass. Pain shot up her leg, then something was on top of her. It was Saint John. He knelt beside her and began to feel the bones in her foot. “Get me into the house,” Rhoda was yelling. “Carry me into that house and lock the door.”

  Rhoda lay on a filthy horsehair sofa in the parlor of the stone house. One-half of the sofa was covered with the skin of a mountain sheep. Her broken foot lay propped on the sheepskin. By her side was a marble table with a statue of Mercury, wings on his feet. Saint John had gone into the kitchen to call the hospital in Laredo. Dudley was outside the window helping the young girls feed the jaguar. I am lying on this sofa catching ringworm, Rhoda decided. The worms are going into my ankle through my wound and into the soles of my feet from where that dreadful little abandoned jaguar shit upon the floor. The children will have ringworm too. They will be bald and dead from the bad karma in the place. Live by the sword, die by the sword. There’s no telling what will happen now. I don’t even know if Saint John is a good doctor. Being my cousin doesn’t make him good enough to set my foot, even if we do think our genes are superior to everyone else’s in the whole fucking world. “It hurts,” she called out. Then yelled louder. “My goddamn foot is killing me, Saint John. Please come give me something for my foot.”

  Dudley stuck his head in the open window. “What’s wrong, Shorty? What’s wrong now?”

  “My foot is broken. And I want to go to the hospital. I don’t want to wait another minute. It’s your fault for not taking me to the house when I asked to go. I didn’t know we were going to see these lions. Who said I wanted to go see a bunch of real lions? That fence wouldn’t hold a lion for a minute if it wanted to get out. It could get out and kill everyone in the place.”

  “We’re going in just a minute,” Dudley said. “As soon as Saint John gets off the phone.”

  “Then hurry up,” she said. “It’s killing me. It’s about to kill me, Dudley.”

  Saint John entered the room carrying a glass of water and a bottle of Demerol pills and stood by while she swallowed one. The water will give me amoebic dysentery, she decided. But I can’t help that for now. “Where did the water come from?” she asked. “What kind of pills are these?”

  Then the pain was better and finally stopped, or, at least, Rhoda didn’t have to suffer it any longer. They carried her out to the station wagon and laid her out in the back seat beside a box of frozen palomas blancas and two cases of German wine and the guns. Saint John borrowed an embroidered pillow from the children and arranged it underneath her head and propped her injured foot on a duffel bag and then Dudley made long elaborate farewells and they drove off down the line of caged animals. The panthers scurried around their cages. The lionesses flicked their tails. The lion cubs played with their paws. The Bengal tigers turned their stately faces toward the car like huge Indian sunflowers. The kudu pricked up their ears, they moved like leaves before the wind. The peacocks flew up to the fence posts. The Mexican guards waved and opened the gate. Dudley returned their wave and drove on through. Then he reached down into the glove box and took out the secret leather-covered tequila bottle and passed it to his cousin.

  “When was the first time you two ever went hunting together?” Rhoda asked drowsily.

  “When Saint John was ten and I was eight,” Dudley answered. “Remember, Saint John, Uncle Jodie lent us his four ten and that little rifle, that twenty-two, and we went bird hunting, across the bayou behind the store.”

  “We were quail hunting,” Saint John added. “We scared up a covey but we missed and then you shot a rabbit. Back where Man’s cabin used to be.”

  “We skinned it and Babbie cooked it for us that night for dinner.” They leaned toward each other in the front seat of the car, remembering.

  “I took my old harpoon out of my dirty red bandanna,” Saint John began singing. “And was blowing sweet while Bobby sang the blues.”

  “Blowing soft while Bobby sang the blues,” Rhoda corrected sleepily from the back seat. “Not blowing sweet.” She sank back down into the Demerol. The hunters looked at each other and shook their heads. A hawk high above them in the air spotted the car and was blinded by the reflection of the sunlight in his eyes.

  “From the coal mines of Kentucky,” Saint John started again. “To the California hills, Bobby shared the secrets of my soul.”

  A few days later Rhoda was back in her own house, safe from spotted fever and hookworm and amoebic dysentery and adventure. Her ankle was in a cast. She had a pair of rented crutches and a rented wheelchair. She had a young girl from the nursing school who was coming by in the mornings to fix her breakfast. She had an old boyfriend who taught history who was coming over in the afternoons to cheer her up. She had accepted an offer to teach Latin during the fall semester, replacing a young man who had gone crazy in the summer and run off to California without telling his department chairman. He had sent a note. “I can’t bear their wretched little faces,” the note said. “What do they need with Latin?”

  The department chairman had called Rhoda and asked her if she could fill in. He had gotten her on the phone the day after Dudley had delivered her to her house. “Yes,” she had said. “I will teach your class. I need some order in my life.”

  Now she sat in the wheelchair on the patio and watched the robins picking up seeds on the freshly mowed lawn. Her hands lay on her legs. She thought about her boring boyfriend. She thought about the sweet little nursing student who was fixing her such boring sweet little meals. She thought about lying in the back of the station wagon all the way home from Mexico and Saint John’s hopeful, grating, off-tune voice singing the collected works of Kris Kristofferson and the collected works of Willie Nelson.

  She thought of Dudley and how long they had all managed to live and how strange that they still loved each other. We know each other, she decided. Nothing has to be explained. No questions asked. I wish them well. Even if they do think it is all right to fuck around with a bunch of lions and tigers and risk their lives and keep on hunting when it is the twentieth century and for a long time men have dreamed they could evolve into something less dangerous and messy and bloody. Still, there was that bullfight.

  The sun came out from behind a cloud and flooded the patio. Rhoda sank deep into herself. Moved by the light.

  She considered her boyfriend, who did good dependable useful work in the world and how boring and pointless it was to make love to him. With or without her foot in a cast she had no passion for the man. Her chin fell to her chest. We are not making progress, she decided. This is not progress.

  I will go back with them in September. To kill the beautiful and awkward palomas blancas and pluck them and cook them and eat them. Anything is better than being passionless and bored. There’s no telling who might be down there this fall. No telling what kind of gorgeous hunters might shut me up for a few hours or
days and make me want to buy soft Mexican dresses with flounces and rickrack and skirts that sweep around my ankles. Bullfighters are waiting and blood on the arena floor. Blood of the bull and fast hot music and Mexico. “I should have left a long time ago,” she began humming. Progress is possible, she decided. But it’s very, very slow.

  Several weeks later, when her ankle had healed enough that she could walk, she drove downtown to the travel agency to buy her ticket back to San Antonio. At the corner of Spring Street and Stoner she changed her mind and went to her old psychiatrist’s office instead. She parked the car and went in and asked the receptionist to make her an appointment. Then she went home and began to write letters. It was a cool day. The first cool day in months. The light was very clear. The trees were just beginning to turn their brilliant colors. Fall was coming to the mountains. Life was good after all. Peace was possible. Ideals were better than nothing, even if they were naïve. Here I go again, Rhoda thought, one hundred and eighty degrees a minute. She stuck some paper in the typewriter and began to write letters.

  Dearest Dudley [the first letter began],

  We have been the victims of Daddy’s aggression all our lives. The pitiful little victims of his terrible desire for money and power. All he understands is power. He doesn’t have the vaguest idea how to love anyone and neither do you and I. We must save ourselves, Dudley. Don’t go back to Mexico and drink tequila and run around with lions. Come up here and visit me and we will sit on the porch and drink coffee and try to think of things to do that are substitutes for always being in danger. We could play cards. I will play cards with you for money, how about that? I don’t know anything now. I don’t know where to begin.