Hall of Small Mammals (26 page)

We found Anders before Dubose. He was exiting the barn, along with Temp, a dazed look on both their faces. “So you've come,” he said when he saw us striding toward him. We didn't like how pleased he seemed by all of this, by the music, by the celebration. When we informed him of our plan, he said, “Yes, well, I expected you might try something like that.”

We ordered him to take us to Dubose.

“He's in there,” Anders said, and pointed back to the barn. “With his monster.” Every single crack between the dark wood slats exploded with yellow and orange light. We told him we had absolutely no intention of setting foot inside that barn. We wouldn't give Dubose the satisfaction of gazing upon his creation. “Suit yourselves,” Anders said, smiling now. “But if you want to find Dubose tonight, if you want your apology, you'll have to go in that barn. No other way.”

When he moved to leave us, leaning forward on his cane, we grabbed him by the arm. We asked why he couldn't go into the barn and drag Dubose out to us.

“Something has occurred to me,” he said, shaking us loose. “If you made Dubose a member of our Academy, the bones would, in a certain sense, be ours too, would they not?”

He was talking nonsense. We told him so. He shrugged and disappeared into the crowd along with the girl.

We were divided on what to do next, but a quick vote decided our course: we would take our place in line. They were admitting only four people at once, and the line moved at a snail's pace. By the time we reached those immense barn doors and reluctantly dropped our coins into the preacher's jangling bucket, night had fallen and the only light was that provided by the lanterns. Inside, the straw was soft beneath our feet. We saw no sight of Dubose. We were told to keep moving. Smoke danced through the rafters of the barn, and there, up ahead, illuminated by a ring of red and blue glass lanterns, like something plucked from a nightmare, was the creature, lurching toward us with rows of sharp teeth and two long curving tusks, its chest puffed with breath, a single knowing blue eye at the center of its giant apish head. We were very, very quiet.

F
or a long time they do nothing but hide and wait. Very little light creeps in under the pantry's double doors. Brooks examines the cans on the shelf level with his head: beans, corn, soup. This pantry does not belong to him—or to his sister, Mary. They are in someone else's home. Mary has her eye pressed to the door crack.

“Do you have to breathe so loud?” she asks. “I'm trying to listen.”

The pantry is small but not coffin-small, not so small that Brooks can't stretch his arms wide like a—well, like a
what
, exactly? Like a scarecrow on a pole. Okay, a scarecrow, sure, but where did that image come from? From the muck of the way back when, no doubt. “Your long-term memory seems to be hunky-dory,” Dr. Groom has told Brooks more than once, jubilantly.

Sure enough, a student theater production from almost thirty years ago bubbles up fresh, unbattered: the out-of-tune piano at the end of the stage, the hard crusts of chewing gum under the
seats in the auditorium, the flattened cereal boxes cut into rectangles and painted to look like a road of yellow bricks. Fourteen years old, Brooks nearly landed the coveted Scarecrow role in
The
Wizard of Oz
, coveted because of the beautiful blond-haired fifteen-year-old playing Dorothy Gale, a girl who later, according to three munchkins, gave it up to the Tin Man in the janitor's closet. It could have been Brooks she gave it up to if he hadn't screwed up the song in auditions and been cast instead as a member of the dreaded Lollipop Guild.

“If I only had a brain,” Brooks sings.

“That's not funny,” Mary says, and looks over at him. “I really wish you wouldn't say things like that. It's upsetting.”

Say things like what? Oh, the bit about the brain. Brooks gets it now, why he's thinking about the mindless scarecrow after all these years. Somewhere up in his head is the Old Brooks, that asshole, and he's poking fun at this moodier, slower version of himself.
If
you
only had a brain,
Old Brooks is singing, a malicious smile on his chubbier face, his brown hair combed over neatly and not cropped short with scabby scars across the scalp.

“You might feel irrationally angry sometimes,” Dr. Groom has said. If he's feeling agitated, Brooks is supposed to ask himself why, to interrogate his agitation, but God, does he want to punch something right now, anything, the angel-hair pasta boxes or the cracked-pepper crackers, the clementines or the canned chickpeas, so many chickpeas, a lifetime's supply of chickpeas. He could punch the peas into a mash and lick his knuckles clean. Brooks has lost all sense of how long they've been hiding in this pantry. He plops down onto a lumpy dog food bag beside his sister.

“I don't hear them anymore,” Mary says. “They might be upstairs. Maybe they're asleep.”

Brooks nods, then lets his eyebrows scrunch. He can feel his sister studying him.

“Have you forgotten why we're in here?” Mary asks. “Have you forgotten about the dogs?”

The events of the afternoon float and constellate in his memory: a turkey sandwich, his sister's Taurus, a small brass key from under a rock, a tiled kitchen floor, two snarling dogs. It's like standing inches away from a stippled drawing and being asked to name the subject. And the artist.

Mary gives him one of her pity smiles, where her upper lip mushrooms around her bottom lip, consumes it. She is a compact, muscular woman, still a girl, really, with a body for the tennis court, not the sort of person you could knock over easily.

The dog food pebbles crunch under his sharp butt bones when he shifts. He's lost weight, probably twenty pounds since the accident. Brooks doesn't remember anything from that night, but according to the police (via his mother), he was alone at the time, unloading groceries from the back of his car on the street in front of his townhouse. Someone smashed the left side of his head with a brick. A brick! The police found it down the street in some bushes, along with bits of Brooks's skull. The assailant took the car (which still hasn't been recovered and probably never will be) and his wallet. “A random act of violence,” his mother called it. “A totally senseless thing.” Unnecessary qualifiers, he sometimes wants to tell her, as the universe is a random and senseless place.

“I need to go,” he says.

“We can't.”

“Go, as in pee.”

“Right,” Mary says. “Of course. I'm sorry. Let's just give it a few more minutes. Just to be safe. The last thing we need is to go out there and get bitten.”

He squirms.

“Here,” she says, and offers him a third-f bottle of organic olive oil. “You can pee in this.”

•   •   •

You can pee in this.
Mary feels like one of the nurses. Brooks is staying with her for a month, and that means she is responsible for his meals, for his entertainment, for getting him to all his appointments.

Yesterday they had to wait forty-five minutes for the doctor to return to the examining room. Brooks was a broken record while they waited: “Pencil box screen door pencil box screen door.” Dr. Groom was to blame for this. One of his memory games. The doctor often began his checkups by listing a random series of words for Brooks to later repeat on command, a test of his short-term memory. Before leaving on her month-long adventure to Bread Island, Mary's mother warned that Brooks might attempt to scribble the words on his hand when the doctor wasn't looking. Brooks, her mother had explained, wanted his independence back almost as much as they wanted to give it to him. But that wasn't possible yet. He still had what she called “little blips.” He could be coherent and normal one minute, and the next . . . well.

“Pencil box screen door pencil box . . .”

“You don't have to remember it anymore,” she said. “The doctor already asked you, and you got it right. You already won that game.”

That didn't stop him. He hammered each syllable hard, except for the last one,
door
, to which he added at least three extra breathy
o
's. He ooooohed it like a ghost or a shaman might. Maybe he
is
a shaman. Who can say? What the doctors call hallucinations and delusions—maybe they are something else entirely. Mary read an article somewhere online explaining that people with brain injuries sometimes report unusual and even psychic side effects. There was a stroke victim who said he could read a book and be there—actually be
in the book
, tasting the food, smelling the air. A teenager in a car accident lost his sense of taste but said he could feel people's emotions. It had something to do with unlocking previously unused parts of the brain.

Watching her brother clumsily tap his fingers on the shiny metal table, Mary wondered if it was possible he was in communication with something larger than both of them: a cosmic force, the angels, Frank Sinatra, anything. She doubted it. Her poor brother could barely button his shirt. And as for those words, the skipping record, maybe he'd fallen into some sort of terrible neural feedback loop. He seemed to be saying it involuntarily now.

She was almost ashamed by how much she wanted to slap her brother. Her whole life, Brooks had been the one looking after her—and so what right did she have to be irritated now? When things got rough with her boyfriend Tommy after college, it was
Brooks who drove all the way down to Atlanta and helped her pack. It was Brooks who defended her to their mother when she quit her job with the real estate company. It was Brooks who wrote her a check to buy the Pop-Yop, her soft-serve franchise.

She worried that it would never be that way between them again, that the balance had forever shifted, and then she felt selfish for worrying about such a thing. Brooks needed her. It was her turn.

“Your pants, Brooks,” she said, and handed him his khakis.

He stood there beside the exam table in his white underwear and a wrinkled blue shirt, holding the khakis in front of him like a matador's cape. Mary was supposed to have ironed his shirt for him before leaving the house that morning, and that she hadn't fulfilled this duty was a source of some anxiety for her big brother. He could no longer tolerate creases—in clothes, in paper, in anything. Watching him step into his pant legs, she worried that he was about to bring up that morning's ironing debacle again, but he tucked the shirt and zipped his pants without comment.

His crease intolerance was one of many changes that had come with the accident. A longtime smoker, he now said that smoke made him feel sick. A closetful of dark clothes that these days he deemed depressing. In fact, his new favorite article of clothing was a tight bright pink and purple sweater that they wouldn't let him wear outside the house because it wasn't his but their mother's.

When, finally, Dr. Groom returned to the room, Mary stayed seated in her little plastic chair, eyeing all the instruments, the cotton swabs and tongue depressors in the glass jars, the inflatable cuff of the blood pressure device, the trash can with the metal step-lid, biohazard stickers plastered across it, all of it highly
unadvanced medical paraphernalia, stuff you might have seen in a doctor's office a century ago. The bigger, more impressive machinery was somewhere else, in another building. The nurses had trouble keeping Brooks still in those machines. Apparently he got antsy.

A frail smile formed on Dr. Groom's face. His eyes were large and blue behind a pair of fashionable glasses. According to Mary's mother, he was the best traumatic brain injury doctor in the state.

“Pencil box screen door,” Brooks blurted, all trace of shaman gone from his voice.

“Very good, Brooks,” the doctor said, and then leaned back against the table to explain the scans, how they were looking fine, better than expected given the nature of the accident and Brooks's age, which was forty-four. Of course, he said, it wasn't
all
about the scans. The scans wouldn't show any shearing or stretching, for instance. But Brooks was doing well, that was the bottom line. He wasn't slurring his words. His headaches were less frequent. Even his short-term memory was showing signs of improvement. A fuller recovery, the doctor said, might very well be possible.

•   •   •

Brooks is not sure how possible it will be to pee, cleanly, into a third-f bottle of organic extra virgin olive oil, especially given the tiny circumference of its plastic top. The tip of his penis will not fit into that hole. The bottle is a little slippery. He pops off the black top that controls the outward flow of the oil and hands that to Mary. He turns away from her and unzips.

“I've got this can of Pirouette cookies if you run out of bottle,” Mary says.

“I just need you to be quiet.” He concentrates—or, doesn't. What's required is the absence of concentration. That should be easy, shouldn't it? He's a pro at that now. He sees a yellow brick road. The urine comes in splashy spurts at first and then streams steadily. The bottle warms. The urine pools in a layer above the olive oil, all of it yellow. Thankfully, he doesn't need the cookie tin for overflow. Mary hands him the top when he asks for it and tells him job well done.

Bottle plugged, they decide to store it under the lowest shelf, out of sight for now. He plops back down onto the dog food bags. If he had to, he could sleep like this. He checks his wristwatch with the shiny alligator leather strap, a gift from a long-ago girlfriend. Which girlfriend, he couldn't say.

“We've been in here for an hour,” Mary says. She stands and peers again through the crack in the double doors. “Maybe we should just go for it. I don't see the dogs.”

Her left eye still at the crack, she crouches down for a new angle on the outside world, her small hands on either side of the white doors for balance.

“Let me,” Brooks says, rising. He grabs the brass knob near her left temple. He shoves the doors open, outward into the house, and Mary slides away to let him pass. He emerges from the pantry. To his right, through another open doorway, he can see a kitchen with high white ceilings and recessed lights. To his left a long unfamiliar hallway unfolds, hardwood floors with wide dark red planks, at the end of which a cantankerous grandfather clock ticks.

“Not that way,” Mary says when he starts down the hall.

He hears a distant clacking of nails, a jangling of collars.
Never has such a tinkly sound seemed so ominous. Mary is behind him now, tugging at his shirt, his arms, pulling him back into the sepulcher of the pantry. The dogs are approaching, their stampede echoing down the hallway. When his back collides with the food shelves, two fat cans drop and roll at his feet. Mary pulls the doors shut again. Seconds later, the dogs galunk into them. Their bulky, invisible weight shakes the flimsy wood of the door so hard Brooks wonders if the hinges might pop. Mary holds the brass knobs tight, as if worried the dogs are capable of turning knobs. The dogs growl. It's hard to think straight over that noise.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “I shouldn't have let you go out there. That was dumb of me.”

“What are they exactly? What breed?”

“Rottweilers? Dobermans? I don't know what they are, but they're freaking huge. Biggest dogs I've ever seen. Genetically modified, maybe. Wynn would do that. Order a bunch of genetically modified military dogs. That would be so him. There are two of them, Baba and Bebe. Wait, let me try something. I think I just remembered it.” The dogs are still clawing at the pantry door. She sticks her lips to the crack and says, “Baba Ganoush.” The dogs don't stop their attack. “Bebe, Baba, Baba O'Riley. It's something like that.”

“What is?”

“The safe command. Oh, Goosie, I'm sorry I got you into this.”

Goosie.
When was the last time she called him that? Back at his townhouse, in the drawer to the right of the stove (his mind still has
that
power at least, the power to conjure up images, to see things that aren't directly in front of him), he must have a hundred thank-you cards addressed to Goosie. Thank-yous for the loan,
the money that helped Mary buy the soft-serve place that she had, until then, only managed. The golden egg, she called his loan. Him, the goosie.