Biting the Moon (33 page)

Reuel put down the wood. “What happened back then? It must've been pretty bad.”

Andi told him about the bed-and-breakfast, but not about the man, only that she'd been there with “somebody.” She didn't know what happened.

Reuel regarded her as he ran his thumb over the bone handle with its intricate carving of a bison or buffalo. It was the way Rosella (Mary thought) might knead a bit of jasper in the palm of her hand for its magical properties. Reuel, though, was not the kind who would have
much truck with magic. He gave his wrist a little flick to close the knife and stuck it in his back pocket. He said, “I kind of thought something was wrong. Though I sure never thought of amnesia.” He shook his head. “It's a funny thing. You take Mary, here”—and he nodded toward her—“she seems born and bred of a past you could almost touch.”

“My mom and dad were killed in a plane crash. My sister was murdered.” Mary blurted this out in a kind of desperate attempt to show that her own life was as bad as Andi's. But she knew it wasn't. At least she herself had a past, which was what Reuel meant.

Reuel was silent for a few moments. He pulled out his knife again and picked up the piece of wood. He said, “I'm real sorry, Mary. That's an awful lot for a person to have to bear.” The knife's point probed a place in the wood. “But I guess it's what I meant: with you, Mary—well, a person can almost see the baggage you've got to carry around—all of your past, I mean. All them ghosts and so forth. But you”—he spoke to Andi—“you're like somebody that just turned up.”

“Out of nowhere,” said Mary, sitting down hard on the polished surface of the granite rock. She watched where Andi was hunkered down on the ground, sitting back on her heels with her thumbs hooked around her ankles in the way kids do. She looked like one, like a small child. In the evening sun her hair became almost transparent, like strands of light.
Out of nowhere.
That's what it was, she thought, that feeling that Andi had just materialized before her, back there in the pharmacy, in the cubicle where Dr. Rodriguez filled his prescriptions: Andi standing there in a cone of light. Mary remembered thinking how eerie it was. She felt bleak, as if something important were slipping away, as if one of Rosella's precious stones had given her a quick glimpse into the future and some great lack in it, some awful absence. Something cold began in the pit of her stomach.

Reuel went on. “I expect you're going to be leaving soon?” He looked from Andi to Mary and then back at his task, oiling the pipe. “I remember you said you was to be here only a few days.”

Just then, she thought Reuel looked like a man who'd lived a hard life and not been rewarded for the hardness of it. As if the staying or going were up to her, Mary said, “Well, we can stay maybe another day. I don't much want to leave right now; it'd be as if I was running
out on Floyd.” And saying it, she realized it was true. “I can't do that.” She shrugged, feeling grim. “But we can't stay long.”

Reuel nodded. Then he said to Andi, “But that ain't home to you, girl, is it, so you'd just as well stay here with me.”

He snapped the knife closed, purposefully.

Mary could hardly believe what she'd just heard, along with the matter-of-fact tone of the man who had said it. She looked at Andi, expecting—what? Amazement? Laughter? But Andi wasn't even smiling; instead, she gazed at Reuel with an intensity that even for Andi was remarkable. Now she looked as if she'd been handed an especially difficult puzzle to work out: Andi appeared to be seriously considering Reuel's offer.

Reuel turned to Mary. “I can drive you back, as I think you've probably not yet got a license. And then I could find my own way back here. Train, plane, don't much matter.”

To Mary, his suggestion was so outlandish she had to start first with a minor objection. “Drive me? But . . . the woman who looks after me, Rosella, she'll be back in Santa Fe by then.” Of course, Reuel wasn't aware of this complication. “She'd wonder who you are and . . . everything.”

Reuel blew sawdust and splinters from the piece of wood he'd been fooling with. “We could concoct some story or other, between us.” He went back to planing the wood. “Must be awful important, then. For you two to drag yourselves all these hundreds of miles.”

Mary looked at Andi, feeling it was her place to explain, if she wanted to explain, that is; it was she who'd been damaged badly enough to travel those miles. But Andi said nothing. Mary said, “The thing is, we're really not supposed to be here at all.”

He gave her a slow, considering smile. “I kind of figured that.”

What Mary couldn't understand was why Andi didn't reject Reuel's offer immediately, even though in this case it was obviously motivated by kindness and concern. So Mary herself raised another objection. “If Andi stayed with you, people at the trailer park would think . . .” Mary shrugged. “You know what.”

Reuel had picked up the pipe and was sighting along it. “Uh-huh. But don't worry. I'd come up with something to explain her.” He lowered the metal. “I could maybe say my brother's girl's come to visit awhile.”

That was kind of weak, thought Mary. Her throat hurt; she feared she'd be crying in another minute. For she thought that Andi would accept Reuel's proposal to stay—nothing permanent, of course, just on a trial basis. It was, in a way, a solution: not only would she gain a sense of belonging but she'd be right here on Harry Wine's doorstep. Mary thought she herself must be jealous, pure and simple. His invitation hadn't been extended to both of them, not even as an afterthought.

Andi still said nothing, but had this considering look on her face. A silence lay over them, over the landfill. The only sound was the scraping of Reuel's knife point inside the metal tube.

And then Andi suddenly asked, “Where's this canned hunt?”

They both stared at her. She hadn't, Mary thought, been turning over Reuel's offer at all. With a small shock, Mary thought she'd misunderstood Andi all along. Whatever reasons she would have for going or staying had nothing to do with Reuel or Mary either, nothing to do with her personal wishes.

Reuel had picked up a hammerhead and now tossed it on the reject pile, disgusted. “Why you want to know
that
?”

He didn't (Mary knew) really have to ask that question.

“Because I want to see it.”

Reuel snorted in a way meant to imply he had no intention of discussing it. “Ain't none o' your beeswax, child.”

He used the word deliberately, but if he thought he could deflect her from her question by calling her a child, he was wrong. If Andi minded (and Mary didn't think she did) this charge of childishness, she would waste precious few seconds in defending herself against it.

Andi said, “It's not a secret, where it is. It's public. And it's not illegal here.”

“Some of it sure as hell is. There's animals floating around that ranch that's considered endangered species. Last time I looked, that's illegal.”

“But it's
not
a secret. So all we have to do is ask around.” This was said without rancor as she blinked slowly, like a cat.

“
We
?” said Mary. “I never said
I
wanted to see it!”

Reuel inclined his head toward Mary. “Younger'n you, and she's got more sense.”

That they had no time for this canned-hunt operation didn't seem to bother Andi one whit.

“Girl,” said Reuel, his eyes leveled and narrow on her own, “you got enough grief in your life you don't want to go adding on.” He had picked up and was scrutinizing a length of pipe that brown rust had riddled with holes big enough to stick a finger through. “They wouldn't let you in there anyway.”

“I wasn't thinking of asking.”

As if giving her only part of his attention, he got up and rolled over a hubcap that probably came from some sporty car and fell to inspecting that. But Mary knew his whole mind was concentrated on Andi.

“Well?” Andi asked.

Reuel had a wearisome way of shaking his head. “Ain't enough happened in the three days you been here? What kind of foolishness are you up to now?”

Andi, who deemed the question rhetorical, didn't answer.

“Just how do you propose to get in? It's over at the Quicks' ranch. The Double Q, they call it. Clyde Quick, his name is. He keeps that gate closed tighter'n a tick on a dog. Keeps it closed
and
padlocked. Don't think you're goin' to climb the fence, neither.”

“There's always a way in. That's the least of it.”

“Then I don't want to hear the most of it.”

“Most of it's getting you to drive us.” Andi smiled.

“
Us
?” said Mary.

Reuel got more serious, squaring off. “Listen to me: those so-called hunts are full of guns and booze, and guns and booze don't mix. That
so-called game ranch, it's got folks going up there that'd shoot anything that moves. And them Quicks, they don't give a bloody damn all hell breaks loose, excuse my language.” He stopped and looked at Andi. Then he let the hubcap clatter to the ground, irked to pieces with himself. “I say we best go back to the trailer and have a conflab on this.”

•   •   •

They had their “conflab” sitting around Reuel's tiny patio, where the evening light spread slowly like honey across the picnic table.

Reuel had brought out Diet Pepsi and beer and was in the act of lighting up one of his cigars and told them about the Quicks' ranch. “Used to be a cattle ranch, but things've got so dry around here their parcel of land couldn't sustain a herd of cattle. Now it's a ‘game ranch.' The Double Q, it's maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred acres. They got half a dozen people working for 'em. Foreigners, mostly. Like Sergei.” His voice diminished, he bent over his cigar.

“What?” Andi sat up. “Sergei? I can't—”

Reuel gestured with his hand, defensively, as if pushing her back. “Can or can't, makes no difference.”

“So where do they get these animals?” asked Mary, not really wanting to talk about it but not wanting to appear weak-stomached. She was surprised, too, about Sergei.

“Different suppliers. Zoos. You ever wondered about what happens to the animal population at zoos? Animals mate, they have offspring. Where do all those animals go when things get crowded?”

“How does a supplier get them?”

“Easy. Just goes to one of them exotic-animal auctions. Don't make no difference some spotted leopard or ibex is on the endangered list. There's just no way you can control animals being bought and sold.” He turned to Andi, said, “Now you listen up, Andi.” He spoke her name with an air of command Mary was sure he didn't feel. It was fairly useless trying to pry loose Andi's mind from whatever it was stuck on. “You don't want to mess with these people.”

Again, Andi didn't bother commenting. The truth of what he said was only too obvious. She drank her Diet Pepsi, watching Reuel. Then she asked, “Do they pay him a lot?”

“What? Pay who?”

“Sergei. Do the Quicks pay him a lot?”

“I should hope so. A man like that, with his experience of big cats.” Reuel tossed down Sinclair's stick. “Stop acting like you got the answer to Job's predicament.”

Mary wished he wouldn't let his argument wander upward, into the ether. She wanted her answers down here on the ground.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” said Andi.

Well, that was a comfort, thought Mary, who was trying to recall the exact nature of Job's predicament—other than the fact he was having a hard time.

“I'm talking about you only just met the man yesterday; now you're decided on the way he's to live his life.”

Andi said nothing.

“A man's got to live, after all.”

“That's no reason. Look at what he was doing before he was mauled nearly to death. You can't hardly go from being a guide or whatever he was in that wildlife reserve in Siberia to working for these Quicks without good reason.”

Reuel slammed down his beer hard enough to make Ruth and Ethbert look over, crane their necks, and give worried little smiles. “My lord, girl, you are so godamighty pious!”

Mary saw Andi blush, but she didn't look away from him.

“Look at you: sixteen, seventeen years old, pale and pretty as a misty morning—”

“Eighteen,” said Andi.

“—and sitting in judgment on a man like Sergei?”

With perfect equanimity, Andi said, “That's what I said, that's just what I mean: ‘a man like Sergei.' He's seen more wild animals than all of us put together; he spent some of his life with those animals and knows more about them than any of us do. Doing that kind of work you've got to respect them. And yet he winds up with these dirty little people who the last thing they have is respect.”

“Just because he got in a fight with a tiger, that don't mean he was sittin' down to dinner with 'em before that.”

Mary could tell, from the way Reuel defended Sergei, it bothered him too.

After a few moments of roughing up Sinclair's neck hair, Reuel said, “Stay away from that place. Quicks ain't going to take kindly to you messing about. It's their business, and they probably take in a hundred thousand in a month's trade.”

Andi sat, unspeaking, her eyes on Reuel. Mary knew that look. It just wore a person down. It was Mary who broke the ice-locked stare. “You might as well tell us how to get there, Reuel, for if you don't she'll just ask around.” Her sigh was an old person's, resigned. “She'll want me to drive us out there to wherever.”

“At least if you do the drivin' you can talk some sense in her or watch her or both.” He took a long drink from his bottle of beer. “Quicks' spread is north of town. Five miles north you keep a lookout for a blue-painted water tower. It's barely half a mile from that. You can't miss the gates: ‘Double Q Ranch.' If a person wants to shoot something, there's a price for each and every exotic animal they have on the land, and some not too all-fired exotic. Like white-tailed deer.” Reuel lit a cigar, waved out the match, started talking again. “They were asking six thousand dollars for a Bengal tiger. I couldn't hardly believe they could find animals like that and get 'em shipped in.” He looked at them as if he'd meant to say something, had thought better of it, and then decided to say it anyway. “Harry Wine's their main supplier. Jack Kite says Harry's guys, they been stopped several times with animals in their truck, but the trouble is they were in-state.”