Hall of Small Mammals (19 page)

“Okay,” her father says, “I get the picture.”

They're rinsing dishes now. Between the bristles of the scrub
brush Fiona sees remnants of scrambled egg. Her father coughs into his armpit and rubs his nose with the back side of his mottled hand.

“How's it up there?” he asks, and nods up to the ceiling, his usual way of asking about the business—and of filling any awkward silence with words.

“It's so-so.”

“What's eating you?”

“The business is fine,” she says, and then tells him about her morning, about Magnificent, about how strange it was to watch a bird fall like that, to see it swallowed up by gravity. She leaves out the part about his ashes.

They move to the couch in the den. Her father offers her a peppermint candy from the green dish on the coffee table. He props his feet up, the bottoms of his athletic socks brown and threadbare.

“Here's the thing,” he says. “Birds are dying every day. There are probably a billion birds in the United States at this very moment. Think about that. You'd think we'd see them drop dead more often. You'd think there'd be bird bodies all over. Where do they go?”

Fiona has never really considered it. She tries to imagine not just one bird falling but a thousand. Then, instead of birds, she imagines people—her mother, her father, the man with the parakeet—all of them twirling down, featherless, naked. She bites down into her candy.

“I only saw it happen once,” he says. “It was a bluebird, I think. Your mom and I were on our way somewhere. Dinner, maybe. It hit the pavement ahead of us. It must have fallen from a long way
because it popped right open. It was a mess. Came down over my shoulder. I thought someone had thrown it at me, that it was a joke. I actually looked around to make sure it wasn't.” He sucks on his peppermint and reaches for the remote. Their plan is to watch whatever movie is on cable, but Fiona can't stay long. She's supposed to stay over at her boyfriend's place tonight. “But it was for real,” he says. “The bird really did fall right out of the sky. Your mom was nervous about it. You know how she can get. She said it was a bad omen.”

He flips through the channels, looks forward.

“What happened next?” Fiona asks, certain he's withholding crucial details, that there's more to say about this story.

“I don't remember,” he says, distracted. “We walked around it, I
guess.”

T
he plane landed but his brother wasn't onboard. The woman at the airline counter pouted her lips (sympathetically?) as Bert tried to explain the situation to her over all the commotion, the reunited families crowing, the baggage carousels whirring, the muscular officer hustling by with his skinny brown drug dog.

The woman behind the counter consulted her computer again and then leaned forward to report that, unfortunately, she had no record for a casket on that flight. She asked if Bert had maybe made a mistake. If it was possible that he'd confused the day or the flight number.

He had the correct information. He unfolded all his paperwork across the counter. He could provide her with confirmation codes and receipts and State Department emails—whatever she wanted. She was a small woman with a tight, pink face. No longer pouting (sympathetically or otherwise), she stared down at the
mess he'd created on her counter as if willing it to combust and swirl away in a puff of papery ash.

“My brother, Rob Yaw,” Bert huffed. “He was supposed to be on that flight. Are you telling me you lost a human body?”

“Hold on,” she said, backing away from the counter on ballerina feet. “Let me check with my manager. Stay here.”

From his pants pocket Bert fished loose his wife's cell phone—he'd lost his phone for the hundredth time—and dialed Mrs. Oliver. Mrs. Oliver worked for the State Department and had been his primary contact throughout the exasperating process of getting his dead brother back into the country. The department wouldn't be paying for the transit. Apparently that was the family's burden. But Mrs. Oliver had promised to do everything in her power to help.

“They're saying he wasn't on the flight?” she asked. “Interesting. Okay, let me see what I can find out for you. I'll have to call you back. Stay where you are.”

Bert hadn't even considered leaving. After all, there was always the chance that his brother's remains would arrive on the next flight, which would land in . . .

“Not until tomorrow actually,” the woman behind the counter informed him. She had just returned with her manager in tow, a fat-faced man with small George Bush eyes and a gray soul patch under his lip that he kept licking. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder in their matching blue and orange airline vests, gazing at the computer, bleary-eyed, somber.

Bert imagined his poor brother's unclaimed casket on a carousel in some forgotten part of the world. A baggage claim
mausoleum: no casket, just a body, his brother's skin waxing under the lights of the arrival gate cafés and newsstands, all those people watching Rob, famous for nothing but this, as he cycled around and around with all the other lost bags.

The manager, as far as Bert could tell, was doing very little to help locate the casket, instead only nodding his approval at various mouse click maneuvers. This was no way to run a business! Companies were only as strong as the people it hired, top to bottom. Bert was diligent when it came to hiring for his own business. He'd retired from real estate ten years ago to open his first Pop-Yop, the soft-serve franchise. If all went well he'd be cutting the ribbon on his fourth by the end of the year. None of it would have been possible if he had employees like these two.

The phone rang, and the woman snatched it up, cradling it between her shoulder and ear. Someone was talking very fast and high on the other end of the line, a garbled mess of sound that Bert did his best to decipher from his side of the counter.

“This might be a while,” she whispered to Bert after a minute, hand over the receiver. “You can go sit down. We'll come and find you when we have something.”

But Bert didn't want to sit down. He refused to sit down. Sitting down was giving up. No matter how much his legs ached, he would stand here, checking his wristwatch, breathing deep. He would hold them accountable.

His wife's phone rang—a chorus of chirping frogs in his pocket—and Bert was relieved to see Mrs. Oliver's overseas number blink onto the screen.

“You were right,” she said when he answered. “Rob wasn't on
the plane after all. I'm afraid I have some unfortunate news. They're telling me now that they can't release the body. Not yet anyway.”

“Can't release him?” Bert asked.

(Behind the counter the airline employees glanced at each other, clearly relieved to learn they weren't at fault and this was no longer their problem to solve.)

Mrs. Oliver was talking in a rush, her voice low but airy, as if they were connected not by a phone but by a paper-towel tube that spanned the ocean. Each phrase landed in his ear with a thump: security issues, protocol, red tape. She said they wanted to be certain before they risked bringing his brother back into the country.

“Hold on,” he said. “Certain of what?”

“Of what it was that killed him.”

“I don't understand. I thought we already knew that. I thought the autopsy confirmed the aneurysm.”

“It did. Or it almost did, I guess. The bottom line is, they want to do a second one.”

“Is that typical?”

“I don't think so, no,” Mrs. Oliver said. “None of this is typical. It's a very unusual situation. I'm afraid I don't have much more information for you. They're being a bit cagey about all of it. But you have my word: I'll stay on it. If I have to take this higher up the chain, I will. I'll be in touch, Bert. More soon.”

•   •   •

Bert and his wife were eating dinner at an Italian restaurant near the movie theater that night. It was a muggy May evening, but
beside their outdoor table a heatless electric fire flickered in a bowl-shaped pit painted a sooty black.

“God, do they think he was murdered?” his wife asked.

“No one's said anything about murder,” he said. It was a silly idea, he knew, but, strangely, also a somewhat pleasing one to consider. He didn't wish his brother to have been murdered. Not at all. But it was a new angle for them to discuss. “He wasn't even forty yet, it's true. He was healthier than me. I'm the one who had the bypass. If anyone was just going to drop dead in a hotel pool, it's me, don't you think?”

Ever since getting the news about Rob, he'd been doing his best to avoid that particular image, his brother's chlorinated corpse, the swirl of his brown hair on the surface of the water, his swim trunks bubbled out, floating, floating, floating.

They'd almost polished off an entire bottle of wine, and the food hadn't arrived. Bert was hungry, so hungry that he yelled over to the waitress when she delivered plates to a nearby table whose occupants—Bert couldn't help but keep an eye on such things—had sat down ten or possibly even fifteen minutes later than them.

“Have you forgotten about us?” he called over to her.

“Of course not, sir. I'll check with the kitchen again.”

The waitress scurried away, and Delia, Bert's wife, pretended to need something out of her purse, embarrassed that he'd raised his voice in public. She didn't like it when he was ornery with people, particularly with waitstaff. As a teenager, she'd worked summers at a fish camp, serving up fried catfish and hush puppies on newspaper in plastic baskets, and despite the fact that she
hadn't worked a single day since marrying Bert, she still professed an allegiance to anyone working in the service industry.

“I'm sorry,” he told her quietly. “It's just that this has been such a strange week. What did the girls have to say?”

The girls—his daughters—were not really girls anymore. The oldest was working for a tech start-up on the West Coast. The youngest was a senior in college. Delia had talked to them both that afternoon on the phone while he was at the airport.

“Well,” she said. “They hardly knew him.”

Her phone chirped. She glanced at the screen and held it out for Bert. It was Mrs. Oliver again. “What's the latest?” he asked, rising from his chair. His black napkin slid from his lap and landed in a heap on the concrete. He darted through the tables to a far corner of the patio where he might be able to hear her better.

“They're telling me now it was some sort of infection. That's what caused the aneurysm.”

“What sort of infection? Did they say?”

“That's what they're trying to figure out. That's the next step, apparently.”

“Is this something he could have picked up at one of his sites?” he asked. His brother was an exploratory geologist and had worked for a company with mines all over the world. He'd traveled constantly.

“They haven't ruled anything out yet,” Mrs. Oliver said. “They put him on a plane this morning. He landed in Singapore a few hours ago, and now he's on his way to Sydney.”

She reported all this as if Rob had boarded the plane himself, as if he'd upgraded his seat and was currently knocking back a
few complimentary cocktails in business class. None of this made any sense: instead of bringing Rob home, they were sending him farther away?

“Keep in mind,” Mrs. Oliver said, “his company is Australian. This is all being done through the proper channels. There's an infectious disease center there that's offered to look into his case. They might be able to figure this out. Okay, more as I have it.” The line went dead before Bert could ask any more questions. At that very moment, his brother, poor Rob, was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in the belly of a plane, very likely sealed up in hazmat bags and labeled with all sorts of biohazard warnings and destination stickers.

When Bert sat back down at the table, his food was waiting for him, a giant plate of chicken puttanesca. Delia had already started nibbling at hers. She ate like a mouse. It was no wonder she'd never struggled with her weight like he had. He discovered that he'd lost his appetite but he still somehow managed to finish most of his meal.

•   •   •

It was a virus. Or at least something very virus-
like
. That is, the culprit behaved similar to and had the characteristics of a virus but was possibly not an actual one. Bert had trouble keeping it all straight as information trickled in over the next few weeks from the lab, via Mrs. Oliver, but Bert's personal theory, one that he offered his wife one night in bed, was that his brother had been exposed to some sort of subterranean flu, a dangerous little bug that had been hibernating in the rocks or the ice for millions of years and that had been released by the mining drills. The earth
was on the verge of a pandemic against which it had no immunity, and his brother was Patient Zero.

“Yes, maybe,” his wife said. “Or maybe it was the protesters.”

“What protesters?”

“The people against the mines. Surely there were protesters. I was reading recently the new blood diamond is computer parts. Our phones and televisions, everything needs these certain minerals, and it's a very nasty business. It was a very upsetting article. Maybe someone read about it and spiked your brother's drink. Maybe he was assassinated. For political reasons.”

Bert wasn't sure what to say to that. In truth, he knew very little about his brother's work. They'd never really discussed their careers. They'd never really discussed much of anything over the last few years beyond college football and what to do with their parents when the time came (hospice for their mother; and later, a nursing home for their father). Age was partially to blame for the distance between them. Rob was fifteen years younger, and sometimes Bert felt as though they'd been raised by entirely different families. Their father had already sold his insurance business and retired by the time Rob was out of diapers. Their mother had been forty-nine when she found out she was pregnant again. She'd always treated Rob like some kind of minor miracle. Like something out of the Old Testament. “Just call me Sarah,” she used to joke.

Rob had never married—“Too predictable,” he'd always said—but he'd cycled through plenty of girlfriends over the years, women he mentioned in passing but rarely brought along to family gatherings. Bert could remember meeting only one or two of them. His brother had dated a red-haired book critic named Monica (that one had really raised their mother's hopes), and then
there'd been that hippie girl with the big wire glasses, the one who made soaps—what was her name? Aspen? Bert wondered if there were people out there who wouldn't have seen the obituary in the local paper three weeks ago, people who'd want to know Rob had died, suddenly, tragically, and far away.

Pending the investigation, everything that Rob had been carrying with him while abroad was being held in storage, but that still left his apartment in Atlanta, a place he'd used only two or three nights a month. Possibly he'd kept an address book or a computer with an email account Bert could crack.

“And just how will you
crack
it exactly?” his wife asked him as they drove down to Atlanta on a Saturday morning.

“I could know people who do that sort of thing,” he said.

Rob's building was ten stories high, a red-brick behemoth, on a block full of newer stucco condominiums. They didn't have a key to his apartment, so they knocked on the super's door in the basement, hoping she might help. A skeletal woman emerged in a frayed red cardigan, gray wisps of hair like miniature storm systems over her head.

“Yeah?” she asked, and crossed her arms.

“My brother lives here,” Bert said. “In 8F. He died, and we'd like to—”

“You're too late,” she said.

“Too late?” Delia asked.

“Some people came a few weeks ago. They took all his stuff and sealed up his apartment. Apparently I'm not even supposed to rent it out. They tell you what was wrong with him? They wouldn't tell me. I figured it was pretty serious, for all the trouble it caused.”

Bert told her he knew very little. The woman gave them a
disappointed look and retreated into her apartment. Outside again, standing next to the car, Bert counted up eight floors, shielding his eyes from the sun, guessing at his brother's window.