by T. C. Boyle
She ran on adrenalin at first, then switched to the Thermos of coffee she’d brought along so she wouldn’t have to stop. What she was doing, though she was as scared and frazzled and jumpy as she’d ever been in her life, was reversing the route she’d taken back in January, I-80 west to I-70, pushing her limits in the hope she could get far enough away before they discovered Sam was missing. At least it was dark, when nobody would notice what species of being was slumped in the passenger seat and she could rivet her eyes on the rear view for any headlights coming up on her too fast, and maybe she was overreacting – they wouldn’t even know Sam was gone till morning – but she couldn’t help herself. She was wound up, burning through the night in full panic mode, her stomach acidic, her nose running, and yet the thing that mattered, the only thing that mattered, was that Sam was right there beside her.
She didn’t have a destination in mind – all she knew was that she was going west, and not to her mother’s house or the ranch, which would be too obvious – but as the road fled beneath the wheels and the mileposts slashed by, the image of Green River suddenly came to her. It was a good sixteen or seventeen hours from Davenport, but she remembered a campground there on the river with a grove of trees that would at least provide a little privacy – she could set up the tent she’d bought that morning at the sporting goods store and have maybe a day or two to think things through. And if she couldn’t make it that far and had to pull over at a truck stop and conk out for an hour or two, it wouldn’t be like before, not with Sam there – all the cowboys and truckers and garage mechanics in the world couldn’t touch her. But then the main problem, the overriding problem, was Sam himself. He’d never been on a drive anywhere near this long and she couldn’t keep feeding him pills, could she? Plus, he’d have to eat and relieve himself. And so would she. Could she just put him on his leash and lead him into the ladies’ room at some random rest stop? Or take him out to the little circle of crapped-over grass reserved for dogs?
Why not? People travelled with dogs all the time – there were pet-friendly motels, trailer courts, backstreet apartments in towns nobody had ever heard of, not even the people who lived there themselves: Pets Welcome, Smoking Permitted, Barking Encouraged. There were pets everywhere. People loved pets, couldn’t live without them. She’d seen a guy in Santa Monica once walking a bobcat on a leash, and the one time she’d gone to Europe, a woman in spike heels and a tight skirt walking a leopard alongside one of the canals in Amsterdam, or maybe it was an ocelot. And monkeys – a girl in her high school had a pet squirrel monkey she took with her everywhere, Baskin-Robbins, the mall, on her bike even. And once he woke up, Sam would be on his best behaviour because he would be quick to assess the situation and understand that they weren’t going back any more, that they were free, both of them, and he was going to have to live in the world now like he used to when they were at the ranch and she’d take him into town to McDonald’s or the post office or the park with its slides and swings and jungle gym. Her mind shuffled through the possibilities, quick cameos of the future like phantom images flickering on the roadway out ahead of her, and for whole minutes at a time, she forgot just how desperate the situation was. But then, like a record on repeat, it all came back to her – who was she kidding? Sam was a magnet. The minute he showed himself, people would come flocking to him and whether he was OK with it or not depended on his mood, and even if nothing happened, they’d all remember him and if they remembered him, she would be leaving a trail so obvious she might as well be sending postcards.
All those road movies, Badlands, The Getaway, Bonnie and Clyde. How easy it was, pretend desperadoes in their freshly applied make-up and perfect hairdos just gliding across the screen till the inevitable caught up with them – Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Beatty – but all they’d had to hide was themselves or the loot or whatever it was. Try hiding a chimp with the energy level of a supersonic rocket and a face nobody could ever forget. ‘Green River,’ she told herself, said it out loud under the soft pulse of her mix tape, Roadrunner, Roadrunner, Going faster miles an hour, and felt a wave of exhaustion rise up inside her till it obliterated all sense and she was reduced to a pair of prehensile hands gripping a hard black-plastic steering wheel in a white tunnel of the night. She had to pee. She had to lie down. She had to keep going.
Two days later, the tent set back from the river in as protected a spot as she could find, she and Sam shared a supper of Dinty Moore Beef Stew with a beer each to wash it down, then drove to the nearest phone booth. It stood outside one of the gas stations that seemed to be the central attraction of Green River, and she circled the lot twice just to be sure nobody was watching before she pulled up alongside it. By now it was dark and Sam was shrunk down in the seat in any case, mellowed by the beer and her presence and the novelty of life lived in a tent instead of a steel cage, so it wasn’t likely anybody would notice him. He leaned all the way back, hooting softly to himself, drunk, or at least halfway drunk. Out of habit, she admonished him to behave himself, then stepped out of the car and placed a call to Guy because she didn’t know what else to do.
She thought he’d be relieved to hear from her, but he started lecturing her right from the start. She wanted help, she wanted reassurance, but all she got was a guilt trip. Finally, after three or four minutes of going back and forth and settling exactly nothing, he said, ‘But I need to know where you are,’ and she said, ‘I told you – a campground.’
THE TENT
It was like skin, like a jacket of cool, smooth blue skin that ballooned out over him and kept the sun off and the rain too, except there was no rain. He could almost see through it and then when the sun was directly overhead, all of a sudden he could – or at least make out shapes and movement and the tall straight poles of the trees. It wasn’t a CAGE. Touch it and it gave beneath your fingers, touch it again and it was the same, and then again, and again. He made a game of it, tapping it both inside and out, thrusting his head and arm through the door – the FLAP, new word, finger-spell it – until she told him to stop. He signed, WHY? and she said, ‘Because we have to hide,’ and he signed, WHY? and she said, ‘Because they’ll take you back to your cage,’ and he felt a hard plug of fear and hate and rage break loose and rocket through his veins, which made him breathe hard and erect all his hair until he calmed down enough to sign, WHO?, though he already knew the answer, and she said, ‘The Big Man.’
I WON’T GO.
‘I won’t either. That’s why we have to hide and be quiet – can you be quiet for me?’
I WON’T GO, he signed, but the FLAP distracted him, the way it fell open and closed with the touch of a single finger, which led him to glance beyond it, outside where there was a view of other TENTS and CARS and the cold, hard glint of the river, which was where he wanted to go and catch things that hopped and jumped and tasted like mud and slap BUGS and put his feet in the water, so he flipped open the FLAP for the hundredth time and just started running for the pure joy of it while she shouted his name and came chasing after him. It was fun – and funny too. She couldn’t keep up with him, not any more, and he ducked behind the trees, the rocks, only to pop out and sign, YOU CHASE ME.
‘It’s not funny, Sam,’ she said, breathing hard. ‘You come over here and stop fooling around or I’ll get your lead, you want me to get your lead?’
That was when a man appeared in the picture, coming up the path from the river, a man like Josh or Jack with BLUE JEANS and a T-SHIRT and a beard that was like a weed growing out of his face and he had a stick in his hand, a long, thin black stick. Birds were making noise and there was the shush-shush-shush of tyres in the distance. The trees were scrawny, with pale trunks, and the sun slapped at the water and jumped high up into the leaves. The man had a stick in his hand and he felt something he couldn’t name, something beyond naming, and his hair stiffened in the same moment he snatched up a stick of his own and rose to his feet, and Aimee said, ‘Sam, no,’ her voice gone high and thin in her throat. That
was when he saw that what the man had in his hand was not a stick at all, but a long, flexible whip-like rod that had STRING attached to it for catching FISH, and it was like a thunderclap inside his head because that was exactly what he wanted to do in that moment, catch a FISH like when he and Alice and Aimee were on the island and they stabbed the hooks through the pale squirming flesh of the WORMS that tasted of the dirt they came from. He dropped the stick and went right up to the man and it didn’t matter in the slightest bit that she was running towards him, repeating, ‘No, Sam,’ over and over.
‘Whoa,’ the man said, grinning now to show he was friendly, ‘I didn’t realise what it was. He’s not a dog, I can see that now. Really, I thought it was a dog at first, because you don’t… what is he, a chimpanzee, right?’
‘He’s OK,’ she was saying, and she was right there beside him now, heaving for breath, her face as white as the paper on the roller in the TOILET out by the road. ‘He’s harmless. He just – I think it’s the fishing rod?’
He had his hand on the rod now, his fingers on the string, on the flexible bow of the rod, working the thing back and forth from the point where the man clutched it in one hand as if thinking he was going to take it away from him – which he was, which he did, and now he had it, bending and releasing it again. And again. FISH. He wanted to catch FISH.
‘Really? You mean, he knows how to fish?’
She was smiling now, everything OK, everything fine, FISH! ‘It’s his favourite thing, or one of them, anyway. Isn’t that right, Sam?’
He was listening but at the same time he wasn’t. He’d been in a cage. Now he wasn’t in a cage. Now he was here under the trees with her and this man and a fishing rod. He nodded. Emphatically. Two times. Three.
She had her hands on her hips, gazing down at him as if she were showing him off. And she was, he understood that, and he knew his role too – to be calm, non-threatening, cute. That was it, that was all it took when the door of the cage or the house or the car swung open, and you were out in the world where everybody strutted around on their two legs with their heads held high and shopped and ate cheeseburgers and drove down the streets in their CARS. How many times had she cooed that word to him, that designation that had no fangs in it, no nails, no grip of iron: CUTE. He was going to go fishing. He was going to take the man’s rod – borrow it, use it, tangle the line and untangle it again – and the whole time he was going to make himself every bit as CUTE as he could.
DESERT HAVEN
She’d always remember the day Aimee first came to the trailer court, and not because of anything in the news, which basically just featured whatever humanitarian catastrophe was going on at the time, or the weather either, which was the same as it always was in summer, high-ceilinged and hotter than it had a right to be, but because of Sam. You couldn’t forget the first time you saw him – he was a novelty, to say the least. She and Gary had never experienced anything like him before, not up close and personal, anyway, though they’d both seen the Tarzan movies on TV when they were kids living in cities a thousand miles apart, and of course, Planet of the Apes, but there were no apes in the desert. Which made Sam stand out all the more – Arizona didn’t have a whole lot in common with the African jungle, where chimps were as ordinary as lizards out here, though from what she’d heard the Tarzan movies had been filmed in Florida. Same difference – there was a jungle there too, wasn’t there? Cheetah, that was the name of Tarzan’s chimp – his sidekick, really – and if they used different chimps in different pictures, the same as with Lassie and Rin Tin Tin and all the other animal stars, they were stars just the same. Sam himself had been on TV at some point, so he was a kind of star too. Did she remember To Tell the Truth, which was on till just a couple years ago? She did, but in the way of distant recollection, flickering and hazy, and whether she’d seen the episode with him on it or not, she couldn’t say.
The first thing Aimee asked her when she pulled into the lot, even before she enquired about price and availability, was ‘Do you take pets?’ It was nine in the morning and she was alone in the office at the time, doing the crossword in the Daily Miner, and Gary was out and about somewhere, collecting the lot rents from the people who always seemed to conveniently forget it was the first of the month. The TV in the corner was on, without sound, a jumble of images like a bright little mosaic set in the wall, and she had the fan going. It was early yet and not much more than eighty or so, but the weather said it was going to climb up into the nineties, maybe even hit a hundred, so she figured she might as well be prepared. She looked up from her crossword and saw a pretty girl standing there in the doorway, one leg in, one leg out, as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether to come in or not.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we do. As long as the owner’s responsible for cleaning up after them – nobody really likes stepping in dog poo, right?’ She gave her a smile but the girl didn’t smile back. ‘But tell me – you interested in a rental or purchase? Because we’ve got a single-wide just came up for sale or we could do a rental – is it just you, or—?’
‘Just me.’
That was fine, business as usual, but Sam didn’t make his appearance until things were already settled – first and last month’s rent, option to buy – so any objections she might have had were moot. Aimee had parked her car just inside the entrance, a good hundred feet from the office, as if she couldn’t decide if she wanted to be there or not, which as it turned out was partly from shyness and partly calculation, since she didn’t know how people were going to react to the sight of her particular brand of pet. (She herself wasn’t prejudiced, or not especially – she’d rented to people who kept all sorts of animals – chickens, goats, horses, even one guy, now gone, thankfully, who had six terrariums full of poisonous snakes and a Burmese python he let wander the trailer at will and twice got away through the water hook-up under the sink. And was that a nightmare? First thing everybody did was get their guns out.)
When Sam did finally show himself, all head and ears and big, round, staring eyes, he just seemed to pop up out of nowhere when Aimee went to move her car. One minute there was nothing there, and then there was this thing, this animal… it gave her a scare, or maybe not a scare, actually, more of a surprise or jolt or whatever you want to call it. She’d thought a dog maybe, a big dog, a Rottweiler or Dobermann or something, but Sam was no dog. Once you saw that, you still had to blink twice, because he looked like a buffed-up overgrown kid in his jumpsuit and polo shirt with the sleeves cut off, a sixth-grader on steroids. A chimp, she said to herself, how about that? A chimp like Cheetah, only bigger.
Aimee had him in a harness with a leash clipped to it, and after she parked in front of the trailer (the last one down the second row in the spill of big boulders at the foot of the mesa), she went around the car to let him out the passenger door, though he could have opened it himself, which no dog could have done. And that was something – there he was, climbing down out of the car as nice as you please – and though she should have gone back to the office and the thousand irritating little tasks that awaited her there, she couldn’t move. Or no, she could, and did, but it was in the direction of Sam. It was as if she’d been hypnotised.
Nobody else was around at that hour, which would have been unusual except that it was the first of the month and the people who conveniently forgot to pay their lot rent conveniently decided to stay out of sight and pretend they’d gone deaf when Gary knocked on the door – and that was just as well because it gave her the space to process what she was seeing without having to place it in the context of what anybody else might think. In the next moment, Sam bounced down out of the car, humped up the three steps to the door of the trailer and paused there to look back over his shoulder at Aimee, as if asking permission. Aimee said, ‘Yes, Sam, it’s OK – this is your new house, go on in and see how you like it,’ and she dropped the leash and let him go free. The amazing thing was that he understood every word she was saying – he reeled in the leash, swung ope
n the door and disappeared inside as if it was the sort of thing he did every day.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said, coming up behind Aimee, who was pulling an overstuffed backpack and a bag of kibble (Monkey Chow, actually) out of the trunk of her car. ‘That is the most precious thing I’ve ever seen.’
‘Oh, hi,’ Aimee said, blushing as if she’d been caught out – and she had. She set the bag of kibble down on the gravel and turned round to face her. ‘I’m just – I mean, give me a second? Just to get settled? And I’ll introduce you.’
But here was the chimp, pushing the door back open and reaching up to dangle from the door frame on the twin cables of his arms like an enormous spider, except that spiders don’t have faces and spiders don’t grin. He made a cooing sound and looked right at her. ‘This is Sam,’ Aimee said, glancing from her to the chimp and back. ‘Sam, come on down here and say hello.’
He seemed to think about that a second, as if he had better things to do, but Aimee repeated his name in a low warning tone, and he dropped from the door frame and came down the steps and across the gravel in a way that managed to be both ungainly and graceful, if that made any sense, and the next thing she knew he was holding out his hand for a shake.