by Jim Shepard
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Lights Out in the Reptile House
A Novel
Jim Shepard
KOMODO
Black cars were passing through the smaller streets. You could see them beneath the streetlights. You could hear them like the wind beneath your window. This was the kind of country that took things away from you, Leda had told Karel. He lay in bed listening to the cars and remembered her telling him the story of the gardener next to her on the bus who had said, “Strict rulers don’t last for long,” talking to himself, talking about the weather, about anything, who knew? And the man opposite him, whom Leda had not been paying enough attention to, had leaned forward and cleared his throat and said with noticeable emphasis, “I don’t quite understand what you mean by that, Mr.—?” And the whole bus had gone silent.
But Leda had seen beatings. Karel had seen his room, his father, the Reptile House. The next morning he rode into the country on the back of Albert’s truck and they stopped in a dense-canopied ironwood stand. Albert was breeding giant iguanas in a new experimental way for the Reptile House. The iguanas were arboreal and herbivorous, so they usually stayed in the trees, he explained, and since he supplemented their diet they remained in that one stand. He tore open one of the thirty-pound bags of feed and inverted it, spilling rich red pellets everywhere, and the trees filled with sound, the leaves in the canopy rushed with the movement, and while Karel watched, the six-foot iguanas rushed down the central branches and then the trunks, scrambling and sliding out of everywhere like black magic, like the invisible suddenly made visible at his wish.
His father sat in their tattered lounge chair watching him build his flybag. Some of the geckos and anoles at the Reptile House were not eating, and Karel thought he’d show a little initiative and raise some different food. It’d be a good thing to know if he ever wanted his own vivarium, besides. He had greenbottle and blowfly larvae.
Maggots, his father said. He had the one son in a forty-mile radius who spent his mornings playing with maggots.
He mixed the larvae with handfuls of bran and sawdust and shook them onto shallow dishes he hoped his father wouldn’t notice. The dishes he put inside the flybag, a muslin bag with a narrow sleeve on one end spread over a wooden box frame. The greenbottles would pupate in a day or two. The sleeve was used for catching flies (he used a little beaker with snap-on lid) and for feeding them bottlecaps of bran and milk mash to keep them going. An old sock that he’d soaked in water he set atop the bag to provide drinking water.
“The world needs more flies,” his father said. “I’m glad you’re doing this.”
“I like what I’m doing,” Karel said. “Do you like what you’re doing?” Karel’s father was unemployed.
The larvae nosed around each other blindly, coated with bran dust. His father kept watching, and Karel sensed in him some desire to share in this activity at least with his son. He thought about explaining some things—the way the extra meals increased the flies’ nutritional value or the way he’d have to cool them before taking them to the reptiles—while he worked, but he didn’t. His father got up and went into the house.
He tied off the sleeve and carried the whole assembly to the shade. His father was crashing plates in the kitchen sink. He stood in the sun wiping his hands on his shorts while the racket continued. It was already hot. He could feel on his arms and the back of his neck an old sunburn. A small whiptail took up a basking position above the kitchen window, near the roof. The roof tiles were red clay, stained olive in the interstices. The whiptail was a few inches long and spotted, and its throat fan bulged out every so often. Its colors would pale to compensate for its heat intake as it warmed up. He thought about that kind of thermoregulation as he went into the house.
His father was sitting morosely in the chair by the window. He was holding a spoon at both ends, and a large brown ant was running up the neck of it. As it reached one end his father would reverse the spoon, forcing the hapless ant to repeat the performance. Karel started the coffee.
His father tipped and tilted the spoon. He was wearing a sock as a cravat, for the dampness, he claimed.
“Why are you afraid of me?” he finally asked, his attention on something outside the window.
Karel didn’t answer. The knob on the gas stove came off in his hand. He tried to worry it back onto its spindle. He was intensely aware of his father’s attention on the back of his head.
His father asked the question periodically and Karel was always unable to answer, partly because of the fear his father was talking about.
“Did you hear me?” his father said mildly. He dropped the spoon into a dish of old soapy water in the sink. “You’re what now, sixteen? You can’t converse with your father?”
“Fifteen,” Karel was able to say. Above the stove was a calendar, with his quietly circled birthday a long way off. The calendar had a different sampler for each month. The current one read Are There Countrymen in This House Who Don’t Display the Flag on the Praetor’s Birthday?
“I’m the one should be afraid of you,” his father grumbled.
Karel got the stove working. Without turning he asked his father if he really wanted coffee in this heat, and his father said yes, he really wanted coffee in this heat. Utensils pinged and clattered, and outside some crows jabbered around on the back shed.
One night a year or two after his mother died in their old house in the city, his father had stayed out all night. Karel had slept on the balcony. By mistake he’d locked the door behind him. He’d stood facing his reflection in the dark glass before settling down to sleep. The balcony had been open to the moon, and he’d noticed in the catclaw bushes at the end of the garden the thin white face of a man. The man had been watching him. The man’s face had performed a series of grimaces. It had not gone away. Karel had stayed as still as possible, his stomach pitching and jumbling with the intentness of its gaze. His only strategy had been to wait for his father to return. He’d remained so still that pains had begun to shoot up his neck and lower back. Before dawn the spaces between the bushes had begun to pale and lighten and the figure had slipped away like a shadow on water. It had left a small branch wavering. Karel’s father had come back after sunrise, and Karel’s story had first frightened and then angered him. He had inspected the catclaw bushes and then had suspended outdoor sleeping privileges until further notice.
While his father wasn’t looking he tipped the salt shaker into the coffee grounds. His father was humming a victory march without enthusiasm. The coffee took forever. Karel kept his eyes on a print his father claimed his mother had always loved of a brook and some meadows, with a pale red sky and some brushstrokes intended as birds.
“Did you hear screaming last night?” Karel asked, as if they hadn’t yet spoken. “Off by the square?” He’d heard a shriek, while he lay there dreaming of Leda. In the darkness it had inhabited all parts of his room. It had shaken her from his mind and he’d had trouble reassembling her image in the darkness.
His father shrugged, playing with his empty coffee cup. “Lot of things go on nowadays,” he said. He trailed off. “Nowadays” was a common euphemism for the regime.
“Did they say they might take you on for a while?” Karel finally asked. His father had gone north along the foothills of the mountains for the last few days to get some spot work in the quarries. They’d been hoping he could catch on with something steady. That was one of the reasons they had moved here in the first place. It was more or less clear that that hadn’t materialized.
“They don’t want to keep
us around,” his father said. He brightened when Karel brought the finally ready coffee over and poured some. “They want us in and out like phantoms.”
“What’s that area like? What did you see?” Karel asked. When his father wasn’t looking he binked a sugar cube across the table toward him.
“We were bused in, bused out,” his father said. “No stops, no talking. The only thing I saw on the whole trip was an oxcart with a dead driver alongside it. Is there any sugar?”
Karel indicated the cube near his cup.
His father put his concentration into the coffee, stirring by swishing the cup around. Karel went to the window and leaned out on his elbows. He didn’t work at the zoo today, and the morning felt empty with possibility. Near the flybag an almond-shaped horned lizard stirred its camouflage and resolved itself back into sand. Some puffballs trembled in the heat.
He turned from the sill, and his father sighed and eased up and down in his chair. He had a hernia, which had been aggravated when he’d been taken into custody. He refused to say how. He had disappeared for three days and then had been returned. He refused to talk about any of it. One of the policemen had jingled coins in his trouser pockets while waiting for him to get dressed. It occurred to Karel, standing there, that his father was always intentionally and unintentionally creating absences or leaving them behind him.
They were both looking at one of Karel’s study sheets on the kitchen table. It was crosshatched with lined columns for each reptile’s common name, scientific name, size, description, voice, range, and habitat. He could make out a column: Banded Gecko. His father said, “I’ve asked you about finding me something over there. I could handle animals. Of course, that’s too much to expect.”
It was. Sometimes he felt more guilty at not having tried to land his father a job at the zoo. But he worried too much about his own position, and they wouldn’t have hired his father anyway. There was something else, too: he couldn’t imagine the reptiles in his father’s care.
His father clearly didn’t intend to look for a job today. He spent the morning wandering the house in his shorts with the sock still around his neck, eyeing Karel and making sad clucking sounds. He was in the dark little bathroom wrestling with the window sash and talking to himself when Karel left.
The sun was blinding. In the next front garden Mr. Fetscher sat hatless despite it, scraping potato peels into a metal bucket as if scraping potatoes were precision work. They nodded to each other, and Karel walked down the street to the Schieles’. When he got there he peered over the tall and prickly hedge but did not see Leda. Her mother came into view instead with clothespegs in her mouth. She caught his eye and he ducked below the hedge line, embarrassed to be so often caught hanging around. He headed instead toward the square, reminding himself to walk with some show of purpose. His father always complained that he seemed to just drift around when outside.
He believed himself to be in love with Leda. She wasn’t really his girlfriend. When she wasn’t home on weekends she was usually in the square, trapped with other girls her age in the semicompulsory League of Young Mothers. It was organized locally by a dim-witted farmer’s wife whose main qualification to the regime, besides her ferocious belief in everything she was told, was her having had eleven children. They were all glumly present at the meetings, pressed into service to swell the crowd when they would rather have been anywhere else. The league was composed otherwise of twelve-to-sixteen-year-old girls. They stood around and itched and squinted in the heat. The farmer’s wife performed for them household chores as they’d been done before the people had lost their sense of their own heroic history, their special characteristics and mission. She beat clothes on a rock. She threshed grain by hand. The girls were not the best audience. Whatever their enthusiasm (or lack of it) for the new regime there was a universal sense that in terms of household chores the glorious old ways were backbreaking and idiotic.
Boys loitered around the square to hoot and show off and otherwise establish themselves as annoyances. Karel usually found an unobtrusive position across from Leda where he could watch her in peace. She saw him sometimes and half-rolled her eyes to communicate how dreary and pointless she found all of this. At other times she didn’t notice him. At no point did she seem to recognize or acknowledge that she was the sole focus of his attention.
She wasn’t there. She’d been missing more of these things. He admired and envied her independence even as he regretted the lost opportunities to see her.
Old men contemptuous of the regime sat under the café awnings and followed the farmer’s wife’s efforts with head shakes and derisive low comments, hawking and spitting in the dust. She was holding up a whisk, to a purpose Karel could not make out. He decided to wait around on the chance Leda would show up late, and because he had nothing else to do.
Besides the old men in the café he could see three uniformed men lounging around a table. They wore the pale gray uniforms with black-and-white trim of the Civil Guard. The one clearly in charge was a handsome man with impressive cheekbones. They seemed uninterested in the league. One of the old men bumped the one in charge, and then said something. The other two uniformed men looked away. The one in charge seemed composed. He stood, took the old man’s hand in his, and flexed it back onto itself, so that Karel could hear the cracking where he was. The old man howled and went down on his knees, and the one in charge let him go. There was a small uproar. The other old men surrounded the one in charge, who turned from them and took his seat as if he had no further interest in the incident. Karel thought something would happen but the uniformed man turned, again, and looked at the old men, and they stopped what they were doing. They helped the hurt one up. They escorted him across the square. He held his hand out in front of him and made small outcries. The uniformed man looked over at Karel and saw him watching. He did not look upset or surprised. The other two uniformed men leaned closer to say something to him, and he nodded, still looking at Karel.
Karel’s face heated, and he backed into the shade. Some children on the other side of the square were playing a game involving beating each other on the arms with whip-like reeds. The dust rose at their feet like miniature weather patterns. Where the road began to lead out of town, passersby swerved to touch a begging midget for luck. Under the awning near the uniformed men a large dog, tawny in the sunlight, placed a paw on a smaller dog’s back, as if to hold it still for contemplation.
He moved farther from the café and the uniformed man’s gaze. With Leda gone he tried eyeing other girls. He felt the uniformed man watching with him. A blonde too old for the meeting sat on a bench in the shade with a vacant expression and her hands crossed on her knees. Her lower lip was drawn slightly into her mouth. She bobbed her head every so often against the occasional flies. He looked back at the café, and the uniformed men were gone.
He had written on his last school essay that he was not unhappy never talking to anyone or getting to know anyone well. His teacher had disapproved and commented on his unhealthy attitude. He’d thought of explaining later that like everyone else he wanted to be part of things, but had not. He was not popular in school. He had his reptiles and the Reptile House, but besides Leda, no friends. He had at some point become a hesitant, stammering speaker, and he blamed his father. He was excluded from all cliques, including the outsiders’ clique. At times he would stand in a group listening to the talk and someone would say something incomprehensible or meaningless and the group would break into noisy laughter, leaving him standing there like an imbecile, like a tourist subjected to obscure jokes by the natives.
The blond girl drew her hair slowly back into a ponytail and held it, her elbows out. He envied in people like her their effortless adaptation to the world. He was always puzzling it out, trying to understand and possess by observation. He never succeeded, and he was usually left with something like a sad, studious awe for the spectacle around him.
The league meeting was winding down. He turned from the square and
came face to face with the uniformed man from the café. His breath stopped, and the man lowered his eyelids and smiled. There was a badge on his chest of a sword penetrating a nest of snakes into a skull. He moved aside to let Karel by. Karel left at a trot, following two men hauling a pig by the nose and legs to a waiting cart.
He wanted to tell his father about the uniformed man, but naturally his father was gone. He spent the rest of the day in the shade of the back garden watching red-and-black diamondback beetles climb his chair leg. The street was completely quiet. The uniformed man’s gaze still bothered him, and he worked to put it out of his mind. He thought about storm surges and swelling green waves in the funnel-like bay below their old house. The houses had been packed so tightly into the cliff slope that he could spit into his neighbor’s window. The third floor on one side was the ground floor on the other. Red brick patios with weedy gardens stepped downward and dropped away to the port below. Lines of foam edged the beaches.
His new house was flat and dry and hemmed in by desert. All there was for him here was reptiles and Leda. Some ants were circling the flybag at his feet, interested in the bran and milk mash. He picked up the faint dry smell of sage and something else and thought of the sea smell from his old home, especially after a rain.
His father did not come back for dinner, and he made for himself a thick bean soup with some onions and a little meat. He ate it out in the back garden, listening. When it was dark enough that his plate was only a dim glow on his lap he went inside. At the kitchen table he drank some coffee, the sound of the metal cup on the saucer desolate and thin. He sighed and leafed through his reptile study sheets until he found a buried take-home essay he had neglected, due Monday. Across the top he had doodled the labials of the Komodo dragon, and along one column he’d drawn a desert iguana improbably perched in a creosote bush. He reminded himself with dismay that he had to erase all of this. Near the iguana’s open mouth he’d written: Karel Roeder. Standard Seven. Political Studies. That was as far as he had gotten. The questions were unappetizing. He knew what his instructor wanted—only the chronically absent or stone-deaf didn’t—but had no enthusiasm for organizing the material into something readable. He reread the questions the way he would read the ingredients on a can he had no intentions of opening. He read his notes for the answers, scribbled underneath as the question sheets had been passed out: