Keepers

by Gary A Braunbeck

  You grabbed the canvas pouch by its strap and lifted it from the hook on the wall. “Who are they, Whitey?”

  He laughed. “You might say they’re not from around here.”

  You held the pouch through the bars. It must have weighed ten pounds. “What is this?”

  “Dinner,” he said, moving forward into the light.

  His arms were gone, that was the first thing that registered; in their place were two large clumps of ugly knotted scar tissue that protruded from his shoulders like the padding under a vaudevillian’s oversized coat.

  Then you acknowledged the whole of him and went numb. All you could hear was the blood surging through your temples and the echo of Whitey’s voice from another time, another world.

  I love horses. Hope to be one in my next life.

  He was almost halfway there.

  His head had been shaved except for a hand-sized, Mohawk-like patch directly in the middle; the rest of his exposed, scabrous scalp was implanted with the same silver matchboxes you’d seen on the others, only these weren’t hooked up to any electrical wires dangling from the ceiling. His now-massive torso was lacquered in thousands of short brittle hairs that grew more dense as they neared his waist. His neck was twice as long and twice as thick as it should have been, glistening with sweat and frothy streaks of lathered mucus.

  Before you could snap out of your stupor, Whitey cantered forward, dipped down, craned his neck, and slipped the handle of the pouch around the back of his head, all the time singing the words to the Mr. Ed theme.

  “Oh, a horse is a horse, of course of course …”

  From somewhere nearby a low, thrumming groan began to take form, rolling across the floor, slowly growing in volume and power.

  “Nothing like room service,” said Whitey, then shoved his face deep into the pouch and spun around as the thrum grew louder and stronger.

  The heavy white mane flowed from the center of his head all the way down his dense, ashen, solid back. His spine was thick as a forearm; with every move its powerful muscles stretched and quaked and rippled. His gaskins and hocks were mostly concealed by the leather towel—which wasn’t a towel at all but something organic, something sentient, a living mass that pulsed and breathed as it made itself a part of his flesh—but the rest of his legs were clearly visible; the hard cannons, the steel-like tendons, the pasterns and fetlocks and, worst of all, the burnished, astonishing, impossible hooves. Moving in stops and starts as he fed, hooves scraping through the straw and clopping loudly against the cement floor, his mane fanning out like a column of bleached flames, Whitey continued to shake his head and chuff.

  “… an no one can talk to a horse, of course …”

  The thrum whip-cracked like the snap of a bone and became an eruption, bouncing off the walls, resonating up and down the corridor, spiraling overhead, within and without, a ripped-raw, berserk, frenzied, lunatic siren of a sound with enough power behind it to throttle you to the floor, legs scrabbling to push yourself backward, far back, away from the harrowing shriek, and you began to cover your ears but each time the sound tripled in volume and force, there was no stopping it, no blocking it out, it engulfed everything but you couldn’t think of anything else to do so you ground the heels of your hands against your ears and held them there, throwing yourself totally into the rattling cacophony as something shredded deep in your throat and you realized the sound was even closer than before because it was coming out of you, had been coming from you this whole time, but you didn’t care, couldn’t move, and wouldn’t stop screaming, screaming, screaming.

  Whitey pulled his face from the bag and clopped forward to kick a hoof against the bars.

  “Will you stop that irksome racket? Stop it right now! Stop it!”

  You pressed the knuckles of your fist into your mouth and bit down, choking off the noise; whether the blood you tasted was your own or Mabel’s, you couldn’t tell.

  “That’s better,” said Whitey, cantering around the cage. “Hysterics are so unbecoming. Downright distasteful, if you ask me. I personally feel diminished by your behavior and think you should”—he shook his head and chuffed, spraying gummy globs of oatflaked spit—“apologize at once.”

  You pulled your fist away and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  “You damned well ought to be. Is that any way to behave when you visit a sick friend? I think not. Sincerely.”

  “Please, please tell me what’s happening.”

  “No begging, if you please. Hey—would you like to see a trick? Ask me what two plus two equals, go on—oh, never mind, you’re a terrible audience. I’ll do it myself.” He cleared his throat and said, “Whitey Weis, the renowned Double-Dubya, here’s your question—quiet in the studio, please. For a handful of sugar cubes, tell us … What’s two plus two?” He extended his left leg and scraped his hoof against the cement four times. “Listen to that applause, folks, isn’t he amazing?” He trotted forward, pressing his face against the bars and looking down at you. “Did you like that? Please say you did, it’s my best one.”

  You could only nod your head.

  If the heart makes no sound when it shatters, then the mind is even quieter when it begins to collapse.

  Whitey’s head jerked down and to the right once, twice, three times; he held it like that for a moment, then a shudder ran down his sides and he stamped a hoof down against the floor; when he turned his face toward you again his eyes were still and his expression pensive. “Look at me, kiddo.”

  “What?”

  “Watch that tone. Mind telling me why you had to come here?”

  You pulled in a ragged, snot-filled breath and wiped your eyes. “I’m trying to find Beth.”

  “Your fair lady-love? Stands about yea-high with one of the ten greatest smiles in the history of history itself? The gal you’ve been in love with your whole life but who doesn’t really share your feelings? Or if she does, she’s too scared to act on them. That Beth?

  “She was here earlier. She told me about Mabel, the poor old girl. Not that you’ll understand or even believe me, but I wept when I heard the news. Mabel was one of the good ones, and there are so very few of them left in the world as the days go by.”

  You stumbled to your feet. “Where did she go?” You pointed to the right. “Did she go down there? Down those stairs? Is that why I can’t find her?”

  Whitey stretched one leg forward, bent the other back at the knee, and leaned low. “If I say ‘yes,’ you’re going to go down there, aren’t you?” He shook his head in the slight, subtle, human manner, then gave a disapproving whistle. “I don’t know, kiddo. I was serious when I said you don’t want to do that. You have to be pretty desperate to get this far, but down there … once you hit the bottom of those stairs, there’s no coming back as you once were.”

  You slammed a fist against the bars. “Goddammit, Whitey! For once in your miserable life would you give someone a straight answer?”

  He smiled at “miserable,” then bent even closer. “How very interesting that you chose that word. Tell me: do you have any idea what it’s like to be one of the forgotten, the discarded, the unloved or the damaged? Can you even for a second imagine how it feels to reach a point in your life where the only promise a new day brings is one of more loneliness? And don’t you dare piss and moan to me about the pain of puberty or adolescent angst—those are hangnails compared to what I’m talking about.

  “Think about this: a child is born retarded or deformed and knows only the mockery of other children and the embarrassment of its parents; a woman who’s worked for years, worked without complaint or much thought for herself, who’s struggled and sacrificed to build a good home for her family in the hopes they’ll love her as much as she loves them, this woman is rewarded with what?—the disrespect of her children and bruises inflicted on her by a husband whose own life hasn’t gone exactly as he’d planned, so he has to take his aggravation out on someone. Do you think that makes her feel like her life’s labors have b
een worthwhile?

  “Consider people like you, people who grew up in this town, people in their twenties and thirties who were born into this best of all possible worlds to find only poverty, abuse, or sickness waiting to greet them; they grow up afraid, cold, hungry, full of resentment and despair because from the moment of their first breath everything was already ruined for them—what reason do they have to hope for anything? They wander around with no real sense of purpose, going from job to job, place to place, person to person, nothing and no one lasting for very long, so once again they’re left with only their thoughts and a gnawing emptiness and a heart that was born broken. Where can they go to feel wanted?

  “And then there are the old farts like me, bone-bags who eventually become a burden to their families and a joke of what they once were or dreamed they’d become. We are asked to pack the whole of our life’s remaining acquisitions into a single bag or box, along with a dusty photo album or two, then are driven to a colorless room and left to sit and stare at a television that gets lousy reception, or old pictures on the wall that some bozo thinks will make us feel all warm and fuzzy and not remind us that we’ve outlived our friends, our usefulness, even the place we once held in our childrens’ lives … so there we remain, sitting, staring, wishing for a visitor or someplace to go, just some little variation in the routine that’s slowly depressing us to death. But there’s never any variation, so our bodies continue to deteriorate and our skin turns into tissue paper as we fill our noses and lungs with the smell of approaching oblivion. Are any of us with our sadnesses, our deformities, our bruises, broken hearts, declining health, the whole index of personal miseries—are we somehow undeserving of consideration? A five-minute call once a week, a kind word or affectionate smile, an understanding touch? What effort does that take? When exactly were we deemed unworthy? Who decided this?”

  He was getting more and more agitated as he spoke, shifting his weight from leg to leg, stamping his hooves against the floor or kicking them against the bars, continually shaking his head as if to break apart the thoughts and scatter the pieces from his head, chuffing and snorting to disgorge the bitter taste of the words in his mouth.

  Up and down the corridor, the occupants of the various cages began to stir and move toward their barred doors. Their voices and growls and peeps wove a soft, murmuring cloth of sound that spread out between the cages like a picnic blanket over green summer grass.

  “Well, guess what, kiddo,” said Whitey. “There is a place for us. A way to be loved. A way home. Not just us, not just people, but any living thing whose existence becomes intolerable. Are you paying attention? There may be a quiz later.”

  The music was being turned up in small increments. Whitey craned his horse’s neck up and to the side. “Almost time.”

  “For what?”

  A smile. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  There was a loud buzz, followed by an ever louder metallic click.

  “Whitey, what’s going—”

  “—wait for it. It’ll come around again in a minute or two.” He winked. “A pro knows when ‘Places’ is being called.” Then he cleared his throat again and said, a bit too loudly: “Shall I tell him?”

  The murmuring blanket whispered agreement. Whitey cantered around his cage, his head thrown back. “Yes, yes, yes!” He stopped, shook himself from head to hooves, then clopped to the bars. “Human beings running the show, kiddo, was a mistake. Got that? Wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  “See, way back when before there was a ‘when’ to go back to, when the world was new, there were only the animals, but they weren’t animals as we know them now, nuh-uh: they were capable of abstract thought and speech and all the other qualities we now call ‘anthropomorphic.’ And they were happy, and they gave thanks to their creator—the First Animal, the one from which they all sprang into being.

  “But creating the world and the galaxy around it and the universe around the galaxy and all that snazzy razzamatazz, well … it wears out A Divine Being. It’s anybody’s guess what specific whatchamacallit El Heffe was in the process of creating when He screwed the pooch—that’s just one those Great Mysteries that we have to live with, but, again, I digress.

  “What happened was: God blinked. Can’t really blame Him, He’d been working without a break for six days and you can only stare at something for so long before you can’t see it anymore … so He blinked, looked away for a moment, and just left this new thing He’d been working on laying around, unfinished.

  “During the Big Blink, as I like to call it, certain cells in this whosee-whatsit super-dingus mutated while others fused together, creating metazoans and—whammo!—the DNA dominoes fell into sequence and the double helix did its ninth configuration dance and by the time the Almighty Anybody checked back, an amusing accident called evolution had taken place: here stood Man, effulgent and curious and all starkers, scratching his ass and looking for a good place to build the first mall.

  “So He let Man hang around for a while to see what would happen, and of course it didn’t work out, but by the point in the show where the whole Forty Days and Forty Nights production number was to go on, Man had convinced the animals that they couldn’t survive without him. Know how he did that? He whipped, beat, humiliated, starved, and worked them until they were so weary and sad they stopped using speech and abstract thought. With each new generation, they’d become more silent and simple-minded and had no choice but to depend on Man. So God wrote a reprise called Noah—not just because He didn’t much cotton to the idea of expunging this interesting accident called Man, but because, by then, the ‘beasts of the field’ were too stupid to know it was time to pair up and save their collective hide.”

  Another loud buzz, followed by another click. Whitey craned his neck once more, shaking off foam. “Shit, I got all caught up in things and lost track—was that the second or third time?”

  “Second.”

  “Okay, got one more to go.”

  Every synapse in your brain was firing at you to get the fuck out of there but you couldn’t; you had to hear the rest of this—if for no other reason than because he still might tell you where Beth had gone.

  Appalachian Spring was reaching its most famous movement, and from up and down the corridor, human voices and animal sounds began to merge …

  … and sing:

  “‘Tis the gift to be simple,

  ‘Tis the gift to be free,

  ‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

  And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

  It will be in the valley of love and delight …”

  It was impossible to tell which voices were wholly human and which were wholly not; and then you thought: Maybe that’s the point.

  “I’m hogging the spotlight, friends,” shouted Whitey. “Let’s not be shy here, come on, get in on the fun!”

  A woman’s voice called out: “There was a beast no one remembered, alone of its kind, who did not have a mate …”

  Another voice, this of a child: “ … and it was left behind in the storm that day …”

  They started coming rapidly after that, maybe human, maybe not, maybe something in between, but their words rang clear and high:

  “… but it found a place of safety, another world just beyond the great scrim of this world, and there it waited, and when the rains stopped and the sun shone once again, God asked this creature if it was lonely and it said ‘Yes … ’”

  “… so God shared with it one of the secrets of Creation …”

  “… and with this secret, the creature was able to use part of itself to create another like itself …”

  “ … and they were called the Keepers …”

  “… and God gave the Keepers a Task, and sent them out into the world, the world of the First Animal, to create their own kingdom, separate from that of Man …”

  “Figuring it out, kiddo?” asked Whitey.

  “Ohgod… .”

 
“I think it’s sinking in,” he called down the corridor.

  A third click, followed a third buzz.

  Whitey did a quick canter-dance around his cage, chuffed, shook off some foam, then said (in a dead-on impersonation of Bert Lahr as The Cowardly Lion): “Lemme at ’em, lemme at ’em—it’s showtime, folks!”

  From the bottom of the railed stairway someone or something screamed.

  An alarm began screeching a staccato squawk.

  Bright security lights snapped on, mercilessly illuminating everything beneath.

  And the cage doors opened.

  Blinking against the too-bright lights, you turned to run but the corridor behind you was already filling with those you’d passed before; the ox, the goat, the teenaged man-of-war, the coelacanth woman and bear and all the rest; they slid, rolled, scooted, flopped, walked, and crawled toward you. Bringing up the rear, hunched over because it was still getting used to walking upright, the dark sleeping thing from the cage across from the ox loped and stumbled forward, slick flesh stretched so tightly over its skull and face it looked as if it might tear at any moment. There was something of the wolf about it, or so you thought, but by then you’d turned and started to run toward the hidden stairs only to find the way blocked by a dapper gentleman who tipped his bowler hat in your direction.

  Behind him stood four other well-dressed men with their bowlers pulled down to cover the tops of their ears. And you knew why: the tags. They were hiding the blue tags stapled to the backs of their ears. Whitey had one, the ox had one, the goat, the boy on the cot, everyone and everything had a blue tag stapled in the same place.

  Whitey stepped out of his cage, whispered “Follow my lead, kiddo, or you’re toast burnt on both sides before your time,” and nudged you with his scar-knotted shoulders until you were backed against one of the opened doors. He winked once more and stood in front of you.