Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041)

by Gonzales, Manuel

  The one I’d finally picked, though, turned out to be Wendy’s, which I discovered the first night I spent there.

  The sight of her, silhouetted against the front window, faint moonlight filtering in through the threadbare shades, made me feel drowsy and unhurried, and for a moment I considered going back to sleep, knowing she’d stay standing over me until I woke again.

  “That’s not how you hold a gun,” I told her.

  “It’s not a gun,” she said, knowing, as she said it, she should’ve lied. “What are you doing here?”

  “Is it a cattle prod? Or a spear?” I asked.

  “A cattle prod?” she said, and in her voice I sensed that she wanted to laugh at what I’d said. Instead, she slammed the lamp onto my shin, which was how I understood it to be a lamp.

  It hurt because it was unexpected, not because it hurt. She didn’t have the strength to hit me hard enough, and the lamp was cheaply made, and she didn’t have good leverage on the swing, throwing the end of it down from her chest like a hockey player slapping his stick against the ice. Which made me wonder, briefly, what had happened to all of the ice from the skating rink in the mall now that the mall had closed.

  “What are you doing here?” she said again.

  It had been a long time since I’d had to come up with anything substantial to say to anyone, and when she asked me the question, I didn’t know how to answer.

  She swung her lamp down at my shin again, though this time I was prepared for the attack and moved mostly out of the way.

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

  And she paused, her lamp brandished higher, ready for another, stronger swing, and she waited for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.

  Six or seven or eight years ago I worked a little job for a small zoo near where I lived with my parents, or not a zoo, more a nature trail, or a series of trails that had animals on it. I mean, the land had animals on it, wild animals: owls, bobcats, squirrels, snakes, rats, mice, hawks, buzzards, and other sorts of wild animals; but it also had a small area set aside for an odd assortment of caged animals. These consisted of two dik-diks, four ring-tailed lemurs and two brown lemurs, a porcupine, a pair of wallabies, a greenhouse-like structure full of butterflies, a capybara, and an African wild dog. It wasn’t a good job. I was an office assistant and sometimes they would ask me to watch the ticket desk or to move furniture around in the small conference room they advertised for businesses that wanted to conduct meetings or ropes courses there. I didn’t do anything interesting and I wasn’t paid well and I didn’t receive any benefits, but it was, out of all the jobs I held before leaving home, my favorite, mainly because very little was asked of me, the smallest amount of effort on my part warranted high praise, and when no one was paying careful attention, I could easily sneak away from my desk or whatever clerical task I had been assigned and spend half an hour, and sometimes up to an hour, wandering through the trails.

  This was the last job I had before I left home to go out into the world and make something of my life, and my first thought, after living with my parents again, was that I should live there, that if I was really going to leave my parents’ house, what better place to live than in the woods, among those trails and the animals that inhabited them. I pictured a small, mobile camp, somewhere in between the Hoot Owl Trail and the Woodduck Trail, or deep into the trees off the Bluestem Trail. I pictured a minimal kind of life, a paring down, a small fire just after dark when the weather turned truly cold, nothing to signal that I was there, that anyone was there.

  I pictured all of this so well that the next night I walked to the only bookstore left open in town, which happened to specialize in hunting and survival texts. For an hour or two, I browsed through various survival guides, including books that promised to show me how to survive in any climate and on any terrain, and books that instructed me on brain tanning and field dressing and head and leg removal and flintknapping and on making primitive tools, like a primitive adze or a primitive vise, but ultimately I bought the book recommended to me by a man in his late twenties or early thirties, a pit bull of a man with a short, square haircut and tanned, rough-looking skin, who pulled a book off the shelf and handed it to me and told me if I was looking for a real and a really good survival book, the book I should use was this one, which he owned himself, and which he used when he air-dropped—I think he said air-dropped—himself into Southeast Asia with just a knife and some rope and a small pack and this book and spent six weeks living completely off the land before walking himself back out of the wilderness and into civilization.

  He was an earnest-looking and trusting man, the kind of man who might have served several tours of duty in some part of the armed forces, eagerly, no doubt, and might be gearing up to serve yet another, and I felt a little guilty accepting his recommendation knowing what I had planned to use the book for, but not guilty enough to put the book back.

  When I got back to my parents’ house, I ate a quick dinner, spoke only briefly to my father, my mother having long before fallen asleep, and then hurried upstairs to start learning all I could learn about survival in the wilderness. I flipped to the contents page and glanced briefly at the headings, and then flipped to the section on how to build a hobo shelter, and then flipped to the sustenance chapter and read the section on procuring a snake using a forked stick, and then I closed the book and placed it on the nightstand, and then never opened it again.

  Which was what I told her, the girl with the lamp. Not the whole thing, but the bit about the zoo and the trails. I thought it might appeal to her, or to anyone, really, standing over me with a floor lamp in her hand. How dangerous is the guy who worked for a nature reserve? I told her this and then I began to tell her other things about myself, lying there on the ground, not sure what else to say or how, except to start from the beginning and as quickly as I could, until eventually I pulled us through the sludge of my recent past and into the mire of my present. I had come home again, I said, but I wasn’t sure why, and I had plans for one of these empty houses, but I wasn’t sure what plans. I said this one appealed to me, but I didn’t know why about that, either.

  Then she told me about herself, which wasn’t much to tell. She had just finished school. She had left home when she was sixteen. She liked living in these old houses. She had stored some of her stuff in a few other old empties—she called them empties as if they were beer bottles—around town. She wanted to be a veterinarian. Her dad, before he died, had been a large-animal vet. It all seemed pleasantly run-of-the-mill, and so I stood up, finally, and lightly pushed aside the lamp, which had grown heavy in her arms and dragged along the floor, and leaned in to kiss her, and then a week later she made me leave the house, which I was afraid to leave, afraid I wouldn’t be able to find it or her again, but she forced me to go. “It’s been a week,” she said. “Your parents must be worried sick. You need to go see them.” And so I left.

  I went back to their house and told them what had happened to me, and they were upset, my mother especially, though I can’t say for sure what upset her most, that I had been gone so long without telling them where I was and that I was okay, or that I was still alive yet living so recklessly. When I told them about Wendy and about our plans, my mother locked herself into her bedroom and didn’t come out again until after I left.

  When I made it back to the house, I walked inside, afraid Wendy would have skipped out, that there’d be nothing left, no trace of her, and some small part of me worried I’d made her up entirely, but there she was, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and when she saw me, she jumped up and hugged me and then stepped back and looked at me and said, “I’ve missed you so much, I could just eat you up, like scrambled eggs.” Then she mimed cracking eggs into a skillet and stirring them around with a spatula and then eating them up with a knife and fork, and I said, “Who eats scrambled eggs with a knife and fork?” and then she punch
ed me in the shoulder and then she kissed me, and I knew I was home.

  We thought, Wendy and I, to make a home of the emptied house, mainly by rooting through the other houses on the same block, which I hadn’t considered might be as stripped bare as our own. When, after hours and days of house-looting, we returned empty-handed, I figured we would give up on the idea of furnishings and homemaking of that sort and that we would settle into a less permanent lifestyle, our possessions carried with us on our backs. Wendy wouldn’t have any of that, not since I first convinced her that I had serious plans to renovate and build in one of these houses. “We need something to sit on, at least,” she said. And when I came home with seats I’d stripped out of one of the abandoned cars in a body repair shop nearby, she smiled and kissed me and said, “Now we just need something to sleep on.”

  What struck me now, though, about that first conversation, about our earliest confidences, and what worried me about this house full of animals she had claimed to have only just found, was that small detail of her life that I had at first thought pleasantly bland and unimportant. What girl, at one point in her life, doesn’t want to become a veterinarian? It had seemed a safe assumption that she had long since given up on the idea of becoming a veterinarian. It had seemed a safe assumption that this feckless and transient lifestyle had precluded any faint desire to make something of herself. But then she showed me this house she had found, and I wondered if she had found it or if she had made it herself.

  The fact of the matter was: I didn’t have any actual experience judging homes or estimating what it would take to fix one up, but it was something that came naturally to my father, who owned a now defunct and practically empty hardware store, and I had always assumed that if you were to toss me into a hardware-and-repair sort of situation, push come to shove, a store of knowledge, buried but innate, would bubble up, and I would be just as good at it as he was. And it occurred to me that Wendy had at some point in her life hit upon the same flawed philosophy, that a skill or talent would necessarily pass from father to child, except that she expected to know how to fix these animals because her father had known how to take care of horses and mules.

  I can’t say, then, that it surprised me too much when one night I woke up and turned to look at her and found that she had a bird. I asked her where she got that bird, and she said she couldn’t sleep with all the racket the bird had been making outside and that she’d gone to investigate and that this is what she’d found. It had broken its wing somehow, and she had gathered it to her and tended to it. There was a gentle way to how she was holding that bird that made me certain she had done this before. “Are you going to maybe put that one with the rest of them?” I asked. She shook her head and said, “Not tonight,” and then she put her lips to the bird’s beak, though I couldn’t tell if they touched, and then she said, “Tomorrow, you go into the house with the others, but tonight you sleep with us.”

  The whole night it didn’t make a sound and she didn’t let go of it, and when I woke up, she was asleep but still with that bird in her hand. I sat up and pulled my pants on and then poured some water into a cup for the bird, but the bird didn’t stir, and I thought to myself, I don’t know you, bird, or how to fix what’s wrong with you, but I don’t doubt that you will soon be dead. And for a minute or two, I considered lifting it gently from Wendy’s hand and breaking its neck or smothering or suffocating it, though I didn’t know the first thing about going about suffocating a bird. I thought I should do this for her, anyway, for her peace of mind, and for me, I’ll be honest, for my own peace of mind. It would be harder on her when this frail creature died in a week or two weeks than if she woke up now to find it had died while she slept, but then Wendy began to shift and wake, and the bird lifted its beak and poked lightly at her finger, and my opportunity window had closed.

  For the next few weeks, I tried to ignore the toll that house full of animals took on us. But it wasn’t easy. She was never home, it seemed. She was always at the other house, or she was out searching for other injured or sick or stray animals to ensnare. Our house, the house we were living in, had begun to take on the other house’s smell. I don’t know how this happened. Maybe that smell grabbed hold of her clothes and her hair and her skin and snuck in that way, or maybe it followed her home, some physical thing trailing behind her like a cartoonish wisp of smoke. Anyhow, I could smell it and I mentioned this to Wendy and she shook her head at me (scattering wisps of stink everywhere) and told me it was my imagination. And more than once, I woke up to find her asleep with another animal tucked under her arm like it was a stuffed animal she’d been sleeping with since she was a child. How she managed to coax these creatures into these docile positions, I never understood. Nor did I know where she found them in the first place, and when she wouldn’t tell me—or told me only vaguely “Here and there” or “At the park” or “On the side of the road”—and when it appeared to me that some of them were less sick and more just stray, I began to suspect her of sneaking into people’s homes, or into pet stores, or into the neglected city zoo, and stealing these creatures to bring back to our house. And if I hadn’t become more and more engrossed in how angry this was all making me, I might have stopped to admire her way with animals, but in truth, I wanted desperately for them to die off or break free, but they didn’t seem to want to do either. And after a month of this, and of living in a house that became increasingly dirtier and dingier, I decided I should leave Wendy and this house, that I should let her have her animals and this other house she had found herself and return to my parents’ place before setting out in search of another abandoned shack where I could set up camp. Or maybe I would leave town altogether, start fresh again somewhere new.

  Then, before I decided I would leave for good, she got sick. She was nauseated and throwing up, light-headed and weak and sweaty. I gave her some water. I stole into my parents’ house and found her some variety of pills—for headache, for sinus, for cough—but none of them helped much. In the end, she asked me if I could go on my own to the house with the animals in it and change their cages and administer their medicines. I wanted to ask her, Is that really a thing we need to concern ourselves with? Is this an exercise we need to be devoting our time to? Instead, I asked her what she wanted me to do and then how to do it, and she explained, retching and looking green and unwell, and then I said, “Do you need anything while I’m out?” and she shook her head and lay down, and I left.

  It would be easy enough, I thought to myself, to show up at my parents’ house. To show up and let myself in and climb upstairs to my old room and go to sleep, and then to wake up the next morning and act as if nothing had happened, as if nothing more than a long walk, one really long walk that I’d only just now returned from, had happened. My mother would act diffident toward me, would refuse to smile at me, and would tilt her head my way and say, “You think you’re so funny, don’t you?” but she would be happy to have me home. That much I knew.

  And there would be no consequences, either, nothing that might damage me, anyway, in leaving Wendy and those sickly creatures, and there would be potentially bad consequences in returning to them. I thought of all of this as I walked, and I knew I should have turned around and gone somewhere else, anywhere else, but I didn’t.

  The house smelled, of course, as it was full of sick or dying animals, smelled of their fur, their hair, their feathers, of the mucous that dribbled from their noses or the pus-filled sores on their footpads or on their bellies, and it smelled of their piss and shit and of the disinfectant Wendy sprayed throughout the house to hide that smell, and of their breath, and of the animals themselves, whatever their smell was, a smell I associated with zoos and circuses, and, I supposed, this collection of monsters, ordinary monsters, was as close to a zoo as our small town was likely to see. But there was another smell, too. It was an overpowering and metallic smell that a part of me recognized at once as the smell of blood, but since there was no reason
for there to be this smell in the house, I dismissed the idea.

  Moving quickly through the house, hoping to root out the cause of the smell and get rid of it so that maybe the smell would have faded by the time I finished administering to the animals, I slid on something and fell forward, only barely throwing my hands out in front of me in time to break my fall. Turning to see what had tripped me up, I felt a wetness on my knees and saw a blooming red stain on my pants, and for a moment I was scared that I’d seriously hurt myself, hurt myself so badly that I couldn’t even feel the pain of whatever wound resulted in so much blood, but then I realized I’d fallen into a pool or a smear of blood, and that what had tripped me in the first place had been the metal gate to one of the cages, pulled apart, twisted and mangled and tossed into the open doorway.

  Eventually I found five more cages with their doors also torn from their hinges. Studying these cages, I couldn’t remember what had once lived inside them, but they were empty now, the only sign that the cage was once home to some living thing being the trail of blood leading away from the bent or broken frame. The sight and the smell of all this carnage was upsetting enough that I quickly left that place without opening a single cage or refilling a single bottle of water, and when I finally walked back through our door, I found Wendy asleep on the floor, and, taking my pants and my shirt off, I went to lie on the floor next to her, but didn’t fall asleep until just before morning.

  I didn’t tell Wendy what I had found. Instead I told her everything went fine, and then I asked her how she felt, and we went about our day, the secret of what was waiting for her at the animal house making me tense and nervous. I would act surprised, of course, shocked and devastated, would offer theories—It must have come in after me, whatever it was, early this morning, maybe?—when she told me what horrors she’d found, and then offer to help her clean the mess up and console her as best I could. But when the time came for her to go tend to her animals, she began to throw up again, and I left in her place.