The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  As usual, Max looked sleepy, as if he’d just woken from a nap, his hair tousled, in need of a comb, and his large, drowsy body filling Leah with the urge to grab hold and hug him. “You make sure it cuts effectively. You make sure it causes minimal tissue damage. You make sure it staunches bleeding. In short, you use it.”

  “Why on dogs?” Leah asked.

  “They’re similar enough to us, and they’re affordable.”

  “So you cut a few dogs up and see if it works or not. Then you’re done.”

  “I’m afraid we need more than a few dogs. We need a few hundred if we want a statistically significant sample.”

  “Okay,” Leah said. “So why not let them recover?” Leah was sitting at her big, perplexing clerk’s desk and listening to the light-rock station turned down low. She’d tried to listen to the jazz station, but the sounds of horns—saxophones, trumpets, trombones—made her dogs (she had five of them now) howl in a forlorn, heartaching way. But harmless old rock songs like “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” didn’t seem to bother the dogs.

  “That would be too expensive,” Max said. “Too expensive and too painful for them.”

  “Don’t you think they’d rather live than be spared pain?”

  “I’m not sure what they’d prefer,” Max said. “I’m not sure they have preferences. They’re dogs. We’re humans.”

  “I know that,” Leah said, irritated by his insistence on playing the role of the teacher. All the same, Leah knew exactly what the dogs “preferred.” She saw it in their every gesture, every bark, howl, and scream. They preferred to live. “We’re killing them so that we humans can piss more easily.”

  Max laughed a little. “You’re confusing the gallbladder with the urinary bladder. The gallbladder secretes gall.”

  “OK,” Leah said. “We’re killing them so that we can secrete gall.”

  “Not exactly,” Max said. “We’re killing them for knowledge.”

  “And it’s worth it?”

  “I think so. Eventually. In the long run. Yes.” Then he added, “These dogs aren’t pets, you know. They’re not even strays. They’re bred for the lab. No one has trained them. They’ve never lived in a home.”

  Leah nodded thoughtfully. “I guess I agree.”

  And for some stupid reason, Max had to ruin their little discussion of science and ethics by repeating his cautionary note to her. “It’s not a good idea to befriend them, Leah.”

  “No duh,” she said. Then she asked an odd question that had been on her mind for some time and that seemed both wrong and necessary to ask. “How much do they cost?”

  “Not much,” Max said. “They’ve been donated to us. The transportation, the food, and your services are our main costs.”

  Leah was surprised to learn that she was part of these costs. “Ten bucks? Twenty bucks?” she asked.

  “More or less,” Max said.

  It was to teach Max a lesson that Leah befriended a dog the next day. It was a medium-sized, long-haired mutt, its white coat spattered with muddy brown spots. He’d been delivered that morning with two other dogs, and Leah had noticed him immediately. He was the calm one, serene almost, amid his barking companions, who would probably spend the next hour jumping and howling at their cage until they discovered that it would not budge. He looked at her in the same moment she looked at him. And when she walked up to him, his companions becoming more frenzied even as he remained calm, she could not help saying, “Sit, boy.” Amazingly, the dog sat. “Lie down,” she said, and he obeyed. But what excited her most was when she said next, “Roll over,” and he did absolutely nothing. That decided it: He would be hers for the day.

  As soon as he sauntered out of the cage and calmly plopped himself beside her desk, she sensed that she’d made a mistake. She liked him—liked him a lot—but she didn’t want to like him. He edged closer until he was beneath her chair, resting his head on her feet. He licked the rubber toe of her shoe, then closed his eyes, snorted, and all at once fell asleep. Trying not to disturb him, Leah didn’t move for nearly an hour. When she did, he followed her everywhere, as if terrified that she might leave him. He wanted to be close. He was at her side as she watered and fed the sheep, as she swept their cages and replaced the wood shavings; then he trailed her back to her desk. He was hungry for her fingers, licking them, nibbling on them whenever they came near. She tried to stop herself from touching him, but he looked at her with a wide, dopey gaze that pulled her in. She wanted to get him back into his cage, get him away from her, but she couldn’t make herself do it.

  When Max came by that morning to say hi, the dog was still at her feet. “What’s he doing out?” Max was angry, and this made Leah angry in turn.

  “He’s my friend,” she said. Max shook his head and seemed too upset to speak. “His name is Ten Bucks.” She hadn’t intended to name the dog, and as soon as she’d said those words the dog leapt to its feet, seeming to recognize its name, and once again Leah felt that she was wrong. She was making a mistake. And yet she couldn’t stop herself. “Watch,” she said. She made him sit and lie down. “You said these dogs aren’t trained. But he is. Somebody trained him.”

  “You’re playing with him, Leah. He’s not to be played with. He’s here for a specific reason. He’s to be fed. He’s to be treated with respect. But he is not a pet. He is the subject of an experiment.”

  “I know,” Leah said.

  “He belongs to the lab. We can’t let you have him.”

  “I don’t want him,” Leah said. She felt something go cold in her. She felt something reckless and compulsive, something she’d felt too often lately, something that made her want to strike quickly and do damage before she could reflect enough to stop herself. Max didn’t understand her. He didn’t understand her the least bit. “We need a dog this afternoon, don’t we?” Leah said. Max nodded. “We can use Ten Bucks. It’s fine with me.” She looked down at the dog, who was again licking her shoe with that unbearable gaze of affection and dependence trained on her. It angered her. At that moment, everything did.

  “Don’t call him that, Leah.” She thought she saw Max squirm, inwardly shiver. Leah herself felt woozy, off-kilter. I’m sorry, she wanted to say. But she was determined not to. “Put him back in his cage now.”

  She called the dog to the cage, opened it, and he readily—too damn readily—complied, though once she closed and latched the door, he looked at her from the other side with muted injury, with a few simple questions: Why? What next?

  Max crossed his arms. “I take it you’re protesting what we do here. I take it you’re not willing to work by our rules. Perhaps you don’t really want to be at the lab with us.”

  “No,” Leah said. “That’s not it. I want to be at the lab.” And she did. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the summer without her job. “I want to be here,” she said again.

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “The point is,” Leah said, “that I’m not a baby. I don’t fall in love with dogs and sheep. I can handle it. It doesn’t bother me. What you do here doesn’t bother me.”

  Max looked down at his old tennis shoes and seemed to consider Leah’s words. From the back of the room, a sheep bleated. The radio began to play an old Chicago tune with a horn section that made the dogs begin to howl and yip so loudly that Leah had to turn the music off. “All right,” Max finally said. “You can take it. I get your point. That doesn’t mean that you can play with these animals. They’re not toys, Leah.”

  Leah put her head down. “OK,” she said.

  “The dogs stay in their cages.”

  She nodded, and Max left her basement.

  When he returned that afternoon and asked Leah to bring a dog, something terrible, if not altogether unexpected, happened. Ten Bucks, a name she could not take away, could not now disassociate from him, stepped out of the cage first. She had no one to blame but herself. She’d made herself his master and caretaker, h
e’d accepted, and now here he was, wagging his tail and wanting—she saw this in his eyes—to be her dog. So he volunteered himself. And when Leah pushed him back into his cage, into safety, the dog lunged forward again and was free. Had Max not been at the door waiting for them, had he not said, in his very concerned way, “Are you sure you don’t want to start with one of the others?” Leah might have saved him, at least for a few more days.

  “He’s got to go eventually, doesn’t he?” Leah asked.

  She put Ten Bucks on a leash, though it wasn’t necessary. He heeled perfectly, his head at her knee all the way down the hall. As usual, Max held the rubber ball and was ready to play with the dog as soon as he saw it become fearful. But Ten Bucks wasn’t aware of any danger. It was dumbfounding: the trust of this creature, the strange, boundless faith it placed in Leah, of all people, and in Max and now in Diana, a complete stranger, at the sight of whom Ten Bucks wagged his tail and sat on his haunches. So happy to meet you, the dog was saying with his eyes, his open, slack mouth, his whole excited body. Cradling the dog in his arms, Max lifted him to the table. Most dogs were so frightened of the electric razor that Leah and Max had to hold them down. Not Ten Bucks. He licked Max’s palm as Diana stripped his shoulder of hair and exposed a bony, pinkish swath of hide. “He’s a sweet one,” Max said.

  “He sure is.” Diana was cooing at him, speaking in a baby voice, which irritated Leah. Once shaved, her dog had lost a subtle measure of dignity, seemed partially naked and skinnier than Leah had guessed, and cooing at him did nothing to compensate for this fact.

  “I’ve got a vein,” Diana said, and she sunk a needle into his shoulder. Ten Bucks yelped, but was quickly distracted by the ball that Max now let him mouth. At this point, Leah usually left. But because she had made things difficult that day and because she wanted more than anything to leave now, she felt obligated to stay.

  The dog made no protest until the sedation began to take hold and he whimpered. He gazed up at them with a look Leah could not place at first, and then saw that it was fear. Max seemed to sense Leah’s need for an explanation. “It’s not feeling any pain. It’s just a little scary for the animal when the drug begins to take effect.”

  “Oh,” Leah said.

  “Such a good boy.” Diana was still speaking in that baby voice.

  “Please don’t talk to him like that,” Leah said. Diana gave her a cool look, and Leah understood she’d overstepped her bounds. “Sorry,” she added in a quiet voice.

  Before Max began to cut, he made Leah wear the same turquoise-blue medical mask over her nose and mouth that Max and Diana wore. What followed was mortifying to watch, though surprisingly bearable. Leah could handle it. She could take it. Ten Bucks was out, his head thrown back on the table, eyes closed, and tongue dangling from his mouth. With his laser scalpel, Max sliced through the soft, white belly, making his incision to the left of the dog’s penis. He worked quickly. Following each rapid cut, Leah took in the odor of burnt flesh and something else, something she hadn’t experienced before, the earthy, sulfuric scent of the animal’s open body, its hot insides. Max described the anatomy as he worked, but Leah could see only a scarlet chaos of blood and flesh. She nodded. She uttered variations of the affirmative—Yeah, uh-huh, I see—to Max’s instructive comments, even though what she felt was a typical, girlish disgust. She wanted to turn away, throw up, faint even.

  When it was over and they had deposited Ten Bucks into a large yellow bag labeled Medical Waste and Diana had rolled the bag on a cart into another room, Max looked at Leah with concern. “How was that?” he asked.

  “That was interesting. I’ve never seen a gallbladder before,” Leah said. And Max seemed reassured by her answer.

  That evening, Leah allowed herself to be coaxed to the dinner table. She wanted to appease her father, to show him she’d listened to his request of the other day. She was also a little spooked and on edge, and felt relieved to escape the isolation of her room. She couldn’t stop thinking about that dog, about the way Ten Bucks had responded to her roll-over command by doing absolutely nothing. By sitting there and looking expectantly, its eyes expressing a terrible eagerness to please. And so Leah found herself at the table hoping she’d be distracted by conversation, by company and good food.

  Noelle, who’d changed out of her business suit, looked great in a floral sundress that showed off her toned shoulders and her small waist, a dress that most women in their late forties could never have worn. Noelle was aware of it, too. She was proud of her body—too proud, Leah thought. Nearly every day, Franklin would tell her how great she looked. In fact, he did so now, and his compliment turned on her smile as if he had flipped a switch. Yet as beautiful as Noelle was, she was nervous. She was always nervous around Leah. Dumpy, slovenly, seventeen-year-old Leah, who shouldn’t have given this woman a moment’s pause, made her clumsy and cautious. And when Leah sensed Noelle’s vulnerability, she became all the more hostile. At the moment, for instance, Noelle was watching Leah carefully without seeming to do so. She watched as Leah took a serving of wild rice and a serving of coq au vin—chicken with red Burgundy sauce, Noelle had just explained—and finally a serving of broccoli raab. “With butter and lemon,” Noelle said, though Leah hadn’t asked. Noelle watched as Leah took a taste of each. She knew exactly what Noelle wanted from her, and she usually wouldn’t have given it. But tonight Leah did. Tonight, she looked up at Noelle and told her her food was delicious, as, in fact, it was. “Even the green stuff tastes good,” Leah said.

  And though she’d meant it, she saw her father look up at her suspiciously. She’d never freely offered a compliment to Noelle.

  “I really do,” Leah said. “I like it.”

  “Thank you,” Noelle finally said.

  A long silence followed in which the bare sounds of clattering knives and forks, of chewing, swallowing, and drinking, could be heard too loudly. No doubt to put an end to the crude sounds, Noelle asked Leah what she’d done at work that day. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Leah said. Franklin gave her that look again. “I don’t. I’m not just saying that to be a jerk.” And now the evening was going wrong, despite the fact that Leah wanted it to go right for once. There was no conversation. Everyone felt awkward and looked down at their plates. So Leah told them the truth. “I demeaned an animal,” she said. “I demeaned it and then I killed it.”

  “That will do,” Franklin said, raising his voice.

  “I did,” Leah said. “I’m just telling you what happened.”

  “Okay,” Franklin said. He clearly didn’t believe that she was being honest. “Maybe we could discuss something else.”

  “I like Noelle’s food. I like it a lot,” Leah said again. But she was irritated now and couldn’t hide it. Noelle smiled, but no one said anything for a while. Because it was clear to Leah that the dinner was ruined, she decided to shut up and let Noelle and Franklin carry on their own conversation about a closing Noelle had completed that day. Leah would have remained silent and that evening would have come to a usual and dull end had Noelle not turned to Leah at the end of dinner with a question. “What do you think your father would look like without his beard?”

  Leah had known this was coming. That’s all she could think. She had known it and had even warned her father. Noelle had asked the same questions about his clothes, his hair, his shoes, and had, with this kind of rhetorical innocence, changed him completely. “I like his beard. I like it a lot,” Leah said too insistently.

  “I do too,” Noelle said, though she was staring at Franklin now, studying him, imagining him without it.

  “He’s not shaving it!” Leah hadn’t meant to yell, but it was too late. Franklin was upset. She saw it in his face and heard it in his voice.

  “I’m not?” he asked her. “Are you sure of that?” He seemed to think that what he was about to do was funny, a simple joke. He put his cloth napkin on the table, excused himself, and headed down the hallway to the bathroom. By the time Leah got
there, he was facing himself in the mirror and holding a pair of shearing scissors. Gobs of thick brown beard were falling into the sink. The scissors made a crisp, resolute click and snap. “Daddy,” Leah complained. He shut the door and locked it. Leah felt her chest tighten and the tears rise, but she pushed them back. She banged on the door. “Don’t do it,” she said. He didn’t respond, so she charged down to her room and stayed there until she could no longer bear the silence, the cramped aloneness of it. Upstairs, Franklin was still locked in the bathroom and Noelle had not moved from her place at the table. Leah sat back down and said nothing for what seemed a very long time. Finally Noelle said in a voice that was far too sweet, “That was unexpected.”

  Bitch, Leah thought. And then, without looking at Noelle, she said it, with a deadpan tone that made the word all the more brutish. “Bitch.”

  When Leah looked up, she saw that word working its effect on Noelle. She saw the shock in Noelle’s face, a frozen moment of hurt. Noelle struck Leah then. Not hard, though hard enough for the unexpected blow to sting, hard enough to make Leah scream out, “Noelle hit me! She hit me!”

  Franklin came out of the bathroom, one of Noelle’s peach-hued towels draped over his shoulder. The evening sun was still out, and he stepped into a spot of it in the hallway as if to show himself more clearly. His beard was entirely gone; only a few bright curls of shaving cream remained at the edges of his face. His brooding scruffiness was gone. His shadowy, deep-set eyes were gone. He seemed to have lost half his age, half his weight. His jaw was surprisingly strong and handsome. A moody graveness had left him. He almost seemed to float down the hall and into the clean whiteness of the kitchen. “She hit me,” Leah said again, though without much volume or conviction.