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, and 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
