Keepers

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “I’m sorry, too.” And I was. He was actually pretty splendid company, once you got past the bluster and brouhaha.

  The entrance to the building was surprisingly small—I almost couldn’t maneuver the wheelchair through it—but once inside it seemed even larger that it appeared from the parking lot.

  The entry area was probably about twenty feet wide and fifteen deep. To the right was a massive steel door with a single, darkened window at eye-level and a SANCTIONED PERSONNEL ONLY sign. It reminded me of the heavy iron door to that cell in every last Frankenstein movie where they imprison the monster and assure one another that it’s strong enough to prevent the creature from escaping. Whatever lay beyond that door took up exactly half of the building. I figured that’s where they probably kept the animal cages.

  The wall facing us was concrete, about seven feet tall, and held three rows of eight cubbyholes, each big enough to hold a good-sized dog or cat; a fourth row, at knee-level, contained cubbies for the larger dogs—Saint Bernards, German shepherds, Dobermans, etc. Each cubby had a door of heavy iron bars attached to it. For the moment, all the cubbies were empty and their doors open. It looked like an automat after lunch rush; you could even see how the back wall of each swung open so whoever worked behind the scenes could retrieve the animals. A sign above stated that once an animal was placed inside, it became the responsibility of Keepers and would not be returned to the donor; it also warned that the locks were magnetized, so once a door was closed it could not be opened again from our side.

  “Why do you suppose they do it that way?”

  Mr. Weis shrugged. “My guess is it’s a safety precaution. Folks wouldn’t be bringing their animals here unless they absolutely had to. If you love a pet enough not to hand it over to those Nazis gas chambers at the Humane Society, then you love it enough to change your mind at the last minute, and that’s not a good idea for you or the animal. My guess is a lot of folks have second thoughts once they see their pet behind those bars. This way, there’s no going back.”

  “So they really only give you one chance to back out.”

  “Damn straight. Once it’s in that cage, that’s all she wrote.”

  The wall behind us sported a long shelf deep enough for a dog or cat to sit on and be groomed; there were combs, brushes, nail clippers, flea collars, bags of treats, and countless other goodies set out for people to use before leaving their animals. There was also a series of wooden lockboxes where you could leave a monetary donation; a sign over each box read: “Keepers is a privately funded, non-profit animal protection organization. Donations from the public, though not required, are nonetheless welcomed. All money goes toward the feeding and care of the animals. Keepers does not believe in destroying animals. Once they are with us, they are here for life, even if a new home is never found. Here they will remain happy. Here they will remain loved.”

  I read the sign again. “Seems almost too good to be true.”

  “Gift horse. Mouth. Looking into it. Bad idea. Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.” Then: “A Danny Kaye fan, as well. There’s hope for you yet.”

  There was no wall to our left; instead, there was a massive and cavernous play area that extended so far back it looked like a study in forced perspective; swing sets for children, sandboxes, rows of folding chairs, picnic tables, music playing from unseen speakers, the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers … if it weren’t for the walls surrounding all of this and the ceiling of skylights, you’d swear you were in Moundbuilders Park on a summer afternoon.

  And the animals were everywhere, dogs, cats, pigs, birds, rabbits, a couple of horses and cows, each fenced off in its own area (except the birds, who flew freely throughout) so that children and adults alike could pet them, either from outside the barrier or from within.

  “Looks like a goddamn 4H convention,” said Weis.

  I thought it was cool. There were children playing on the swings, mothers sipping icy colas as they relaxed on the chairs or played with the dogs and cats. The animals themselves were clean and healthy and seemed quite happy. I caught glimpses of figures wearing tan jumpsuits with KEEPERS printed across their backs weaving through the pens and people, asking questions, making notes, handing out treats. All of them wore tan wool caps pulled down to cover the tops of their ears. Although it was comfortably cool in here—the air-filtration system must have cost a fortune, because you could barely smell any urine or feces or any other potently animal scents you would have expected—it wasn’t cool enough for a cap of any kind.

  A sign on the farthest wall proclaimed this to be the “Selection Area,” and that we should take our time getting to know the animals before bearing them home with us. That was the actual phrase: “bearing them home.” I don’t know why that stuck in my mind. All of the signs contained odd little phrases like that, as if written by someone to whom English was a second language and so its most formal rules of usage were followed when composing the notices.

  I wondered if the woman in the car and her two children had made a morning of it in here, playing with dozens of puppies and dogs before selecting the one that just seemed to love them so much they couldn’t bear the thought of leaving without it.

  Everywhere I looked there were women—well-dressed women, women who drove expensive cars and wore white gloves for afternoon tea and had a standing appointment with their hair stylist each week and whose children attended private schools—playing with a dog or cat or bunny, smiling as the animal wagged its tail or whiskers and licked a hand or face, and these women would grin from ear to ear saying, “How is Mama’s little baby? Is Mama’s little baby lonesome?” It was sweet.

  “Beth and Mabel need to see this,” I said to Mr. Weis. “I really think they’ll feel a whole lot better knowing how this works.”

  “You don’t suppose they’ve got an elephant stashed away somewhere, do you?” asked Weis. “I was expecting just cats and dogs, but this”—He made a sweeping gesture of the Selection Area—“is like a traveling zoo. I’m not trying to be a wet blanket or anything, so please let’s not get into a discussion of my dreadful personality problems, but do you notice anything odd about the way the animals are behaving?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not—that would require actual powers of observation, and since you’re wearing mismatched socks, we can assume that’s a lost cause. So allow me to assist you: Take another look. See that pen of cats over there? Three times now the same bird has landed on the fence within easy jumping distance, yet none of the cats have tried to get at the thing. None of them are even hissing at one another. Cats are territorial as hell, yet all of them are getting along just fine. None of the dogs are fighting or growling at each other. And despite all the noise and the kids and the movement, the horses don’t look nervous. Ever spend time around horses? I love horses, hope I’ll be one in my next life. Damn nervous animals most of the time, sudden movement and loud noises are no friends to their nerves.”

  “So the animals are well-behaved, so what?”

  He looked at me as if I were drooling. “So it just doesn’t seem right to me, that’s all. The Peaceable Kingdom’s good in theory, but this is just weird, seeing it in practice like this. You don’t suppose they drug the animals, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. Would they be this active if they had sedatives in their system?”

  “Hell—I’m on sedatives half the time and you don’t see it slowing me down any, do you?”

  “No, but then you’re freakish.”

  “Pot. Kettle. Black. Fill in the blanks.”

  “Me. Go. Bring women and dogs.”

  “Here. Me. Wait. Air-conditioning. Bring adverbs when you return.”

  Beth and Mabel were very matter-of-fact as they placed the dogs into the cubbies and closed the doors, each of them trying for the other’s sake to look strong, but I knew that on the inside they were crumbling. Mabel wrote out a generous check that she deposited in one of the boxes, a
nd then I took her into the Selection Area. Beth said she wanted a moment alone. I wasn’t going to deny either of them anything they wanted today.

  Mr. Weis had gotten us a couple of sodas and hot dogs from one of the snack stands, and as we ate Mabel wandered through the Selection Area for about fifteen minutes, shaking her head in wonder, stopping occasionally to pet a dog or pick up a cat, and she tried to smile and be happy and enjoy it, and maybe she succeeded to some degree, but her mind and heart were still stuck in the barred cubbies—which had been emptied while my back was turned.

  “That was fast,” I said. If Mr. Weis heard me he gave no indication of it. I patted his shoulder and excused myself, wandering back out to the cubbies.

  The steel door on the opposite wall was open just a crack. The breeze wafting through the crack wasn’t just cool, it was outright cold. Could this be some sort of refrigeration area where they kept food for the animals?

  I reached out to pull the door open farther and it swung out toward me.

  Beth was standing there, shaking, her skin covered in goose bumps, holding a wrapped package the size of a shoe box. She looked dazed.

  “Are you okay?”

  She blinked, looked at me for a moment as if she had no idea who the hell I was or why I was bothering her, then came out, closed the door behind her, and said, “Yeah, I’m … I’m fine. Damn it’s cold in there.”

  I began rubbing her arms. “I noticed. What’s back there, anyway?”

  She was looking at the empty cubbies where the Its had been a short while ago. “They don’t waste any time, do they? That’s good, you know? Get them out of sight as quick as possible. I doesn’t hurt as much that way. That’s important. For it not to hurt too much.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  She nodded her head, and even though she looked right into my eyes, her gaze was elsewhere. “I’m fine, I told you. Come on, let’s round up the troops and blow this pop stand.”

  “What’s in the package?”

  “Huh?” She looked at the box in her hand. “Oh, something I need to mail out, no biggie.”

  I did not recognize the name of the person to whom it was addressed, but couldn’t help noticing that the return address was the same.

  “Beth?”

  “Huh?”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Uh-huh.” Wherever she was, she still wasn’t all the way back yet, and I almost asked her if she’d snuck off into cold storage to fire up a joint, but then a burst of laughter from a couple of children in the Selection Area startled me and Beth sailed past to retrieve Mabel. I started to roll Mr. Weis out but he stopped me.

  “Give me a minute, will you?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s all these women,” he said. “Look at how they fawn over the dogs and cats. How they hold them like they’ve been the family pet for years. They’re going out of their way to make the animals love them.”

  I looked, and he was right; it’s one thing to pet an animal and play with it only briefly—most of the animals are happy for whatever little attention they get—but many of these women of the afternoon tea and white gloves were taking it three steps further: the more they played with the dogs and cats, the more their own tired beauty seemed to be revitalized, as if they were drawing a few moments of time-stolen youth back from the animals’ energy and affection.

  “There was a fellow I once knew,” said Weis, “who was one of the ugliest men you’d ever laid eyes on—I mean, this guy had a face that would make a freight train take a dirt road. Used to get him work in horror movies all the time because he didn’t need makeup. Thought he might go on to be the next Rondo Hatton. Anyway, every time I saw this guy, he was in the company of the most beautiful women—real jaw-dropping traffic-stoppers. Women who’d make Sophia Loren envious. One day I asked him what his secret was, and you know what he said to me?”

  “If I yawn it’s only in anticipation.”

  “Funny guy. He said, ‘Regardless of how beautiful a woman is, there’s always someone who’s tired of her, who’s glad to leave her. And they’ll take any attention they can get, even if it’s from a mug like me.’

  “Look at these women here. I’m not talking about the younger ones with kids, but the others, the forty and forty-five crowd, the ones who’re paying so much attention to the animals. They’re all beautiful, and they’re all here alone. You know why? Because someone is tired of them and was glad to leave them. Their husbands go off to the office, their kids go off to college, but they leave them alone, understand? They love their families, but their families always leave them in some way. Who’ve they got to leave? No one. So they come here. I’ve been sitting here listening, and every last one of them has at some point asked one of the attendants, ‘Will they go to good homes?’ But it’s not out of concern for the animal, it’s because they don’t want this on their conscience. They have no intention of adopting one of them. It’s the leaving that’s the important part. It matters that they have someone to leave, so they leave behind this dog or that cat, some lonesome little animal who’d never leave them if they had the chance to give them their hearts.”

  Mr. Weis blinked, and for a few moments his eyes were every lonely journey I’d ever taken, every unloved place I’d ever visited, every sting of guilt I’d ever felt in my life; for that moment his eyes never focused on me, they brushed by once, softly, like a cattail or a ghost, then fell shyly toward the ground in some inner contemplation too sad to be touched by a tender thought or the delicate brush of another’s care. You’d think God had forgotten his name.

  So that’s what lonely looks like, I thought. Mr. Weis caught my stare and for a moment looked humiliated; then he blinked and said, “I got snot hanging out of my nose or something?”

  He was shaking so intensely I thought the arms would rattle right off his chair.

  I touched his shoulder. “Why are you so upset?”

  “Because!” he snapped. “Just … just because, that’s all. Christ—five minutes once a week, is that too much to ask for?”

  “Not at all.”

  He stared off at something only he could see. I let my gaze wander for a moment but stopped scanning when I saw something that seemed really, genuinely, seriously wrong.

  In one of the pens sat a very chubby gray rabbit. Behind the rabbit was a large German shepherd. Next to it lay a cat. In front of the cat a duck wandered back and forth. A long, glistening snake slithered in, out, and around all of them, occasionally stopping to lift its head to flick its tongue at someone’s nose. And perched on a pile of straw beside the entire scene was a gorgeous brown marsh hawk.

  The animals stretched, touched and groomed one another, but made no sounds. Even the hawk was silent. This did not seem right to me. Considering what I knew of the various natures of the individual creatures in this pen, most of them should have tried to attack and kill the rest by now.

  Then, almost as one, all of them looked right at me: Something we can help you with, pal? Take a picture, it’ll last longer.

  In theory, The Peaceable Kingdom; in actuality, an icy touch at the base of your spine—at the base of mine, anyway. This might be peaceful and happy and healthy, but something here was just … off. Definitely off.

  Mr Weis tugged at my shirt and said: “How’s that new Spielberg movie sound to you, that one with what’s-his-name from that space opera?”

  “Raiders of the Lost Ark?”

  “Supposed to be pretty slam-bang, from what I hear. I think maybe I could use a little slam-bang, how about you?”

  “Sounds good.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d already seen it and that it left me with the mother of all headaches but had at least cleared my sinuses quite nicely, thanks very much. I knew Beth hadn’t seen it yet, which meant Mabel hadn’t, either.

  It was a blast. I found the movie even more obnoxious, contrived, and over-the-top than I had the first time but, damn, was it fun. It took Beth and Mabel a litt
le while to get into the spirit of things, but once they did, they went all the way with it, clapping and cheering along with the rest of the audience, and by the time the Ark itself was about to be opened, it was almost like the bad parts of that day hadn’t even happened; we were just four friends—scratch that—we were just a family out for a night of fun. Later we had a couple of loaded pies at Tammy’s Pizza and played every song on the jukebox while Mr. Weis regaled us with endless anecdotes from his glory days. Only once, at the end of the evening as we were driving home, did I give that package another thought. I knew damn well that Beth hadn’t had it with her when we left that morning, so the only place she could have gotten it was at the Keepers facility. In the cold storage area. But who’d given it to her, and why? And more to the point, why had she agreed to mail it out for them?

  Mabel and I checked Mr. Weis back in that night. He hugged both of us before we left his room. The day had meant so much to him, it was so wonderful of us to take him along, did we think maybe we could do it again sometime soon? A movie and pizza again? He’d surely love that. I thought he was going to start crying. It was so out of character it seemed downright mawkish; as a result, I almost lost it myself, but Mabel—ever the graceful professional—assured him that we’d enjoyed his company, as well, and that, yes, we’d all do it again very soon. That seemed to please Mr. Weis—who gave me permission to call him Whitey from now on. I knew what that meant, and hugged him once more before we left.

  Most of the truly significant moments of your life don’t come with a blare of trumpets and roll of timpani. Half the time you’re not even aware of their importance until well after they’ve tipped their hat to you on their way into the past. God knows most of the benchmark events of my life have only gained meaning through later reflection—why didn’t I realize this at the time?—but that day was different. As we went into the house that evening, Beth squeezing my hand with a hard, damp strength of feeling that told me she wanted to make love until we couldn’t breathe, I took a breath and filled myself with the night; the blackness above deep and comforting and nearly total, excepting a few distant stars that winked past the cold silver coin of the moon like children who’d succeeded in fooling “It” during a game of hide-and-seek. And I knew—with as much maturity and wisdom as I had within reach then, I knew—that something profound and irreversible had happened, that there would come a time decades from now when I would look back on this day, this night, this moment of her hand in mine as a smoky hint of autumn lingered under the summer night breeze, and I would be able to say with unbreakable certainty: This was it, right here. You can see it on my face. This time, this breath, this moment. It didn’t matter that I had no idea what exactly had happened or why it was so important, but sometimes you get a feeling in your core that is so clear and strong it can’t be anything but the truth in its most potent and undistilled form. Call it an epiphany if you want to be melodramatic, but I knew that this summer dimming into autumn as all summers must would be the last for me as I was right now; my youth was turning to look at me over its shoulder and smile farewell. Hope you enjoyed the ride, pal. It’s been a real kick, but you’re on your own now. Don’t make love with your socks on, never cross against the light, and don’t take any wooden nickels.