Shelter

The pet shop was overly warm and humid and smelled, not unpleasantly, of fur, rabbit pellets, damp newspaper-lined cages, and wood shavings. It was as dimly lit as a cave. Display windows up front were filled with iguanas and ferrets and an African grey parrot perched high up on a wooden beam. A huge, panting yellow Lab lumbered through the store, switching his tail listlessly and bumping his haunches against the occasional customer. Although the pet shop was located on a busy suburban intersection that was always being thrust into further chaos by infinite rounds of construction work, inside it was strangely tranquil, orderly, and rational in character, for a place full of animals. Jack wouldn’t have it any other way and everybody else who worked there understood this, and understood the consequences if things got out of control. Customers who did not yet know Jack sensed, without being able to put a name to it, the presence of a governing spirit and were at once grateful and relieved.

On this morning in July there were few humans in the store. It was quiet, except for the gentle hum of the aquariums and the whir of the big floor fans. In the aquarium aisle—marine on one side, freshwater on the other—Jack was testing the water for nitrates and ammonia. The morning routine in the lull before the onslaught of customers. One of the thirty-gallon tanks on the second tier had a few sickly fish, and Agnes, the owner, suspected a bacterial infection. Jack agreed. He held up a test-tube to the light and examined it. His forehead—high, pale, and intelligent—wrinkled with concentration. The raised arm was bare, muscular, and decorated from the wrists up with tattoos. A fire-breathing dragon. A snarling dog’s head with fierce canines. A Medusa with snakes writhing around her skull. His back was ramrod straight, the way they’d taught him in the Marines. Here he wore a uniform also: blue jeans and a bright green shirt with the shop’s logo. His legs were short and rather stubby compared to his longer torso, but in the service he’d learned to move with economy and grace. No waste, ever. No slouching. He was just thirty, and his reddish brown hair was already thinning. This bothered him, and he was considering shaving his head.

A woman appeared from around the corner that led to the annex, where there were eight-hundred-dollar Dalmatian puppies and Siamese cats with merciless sapphire eyes. ‘‘Would you be Jack?’’ she said. Her voice, tremulous and musical, vibrated at the base of Jack’s spine. Disturbed, he looked up and his frown deepened at being interrupted.

‘‘I would be,’’ he said, continuing his work.

The woman waited for a moment and then sighed and drew a hand across her forehead, pushing away a strand of tawny hair. ‘‘Hot,’’ she remarked.

‘‘Fucking AC is broken,’’ said Jack. ‘‘And it’s 90 degrees in the shade out there.’’

‘‘Oh that’s awful. When is it going to be fixed?’’

‘‘Who knows?’’ he said, gloomily. ‘‘The fish are all gasping for air at the top of the tank.’’

‘‘They can’t breathe in the heat?’’ asked the woman. A blonde, maybe late thirties. Petite figure. Delicate ankles and wrists. Nicely put together. Fresh white dress, sandals. Her purse held clutched against her thighs as if for protection from something making her nervous. Those little rays around her eyes. Her cheeks hollow, shadowy. Maybe she was a bit too thin. She had been crying before she came into the store. It was something Jack sensed: a certain dampness in her exhalations, and again that vibration in her voice, which he could still feel in the small of his back. He picked up another test tube and carefully squirted in a few drops from a bottle, not looking at her when he spoke.

‘‘Oxygen levels in the water are depleted when the temperature rises. Causes all sorts of problems.’’

‘‘Poor fish. What a precarious existence,’’ she sighed. Her lilting voice, with darker tones just beneath the surface that wanted to bring it down and flatten it out. Now he could detect perfume, a flitting scent.

‘‘Nahh, they’re happy enough here. I spoil ’em.’’ He gestured to the row of tanks behind him, where there were plastic water bottles floating in the aquariums. ‘‘They’re frozen. Brings the temperature down a notch or two, makes it tolerable.’’

‘‘How’d they ever get along in the wild without you, Jack?’’ Jack’s smile was mercurial—catch it while you can. For just a second there was the glint of his small sharp teeth.

‘‘Lady, they’ve never been in the wild. Wouldn’t know what a river was if you threw them in it.’’

‘‘Really? There’s something sad about that,’’ she said.

‘‘Sad? Why? They don’t know what they’re missing. They’re better off here. No predators, no pollution.’’

‘‘I suppose,’’ she said, and her eyes lingered for a few moments on his face. Some awareness had come into them. She held his gaze. They were blue or gray, her eyes, or maybe something in between. A gemstone set in silver that she wore on a chain around her neck, and the matching gems on her earlobes, swayed them toward blue.

A nearby fan blew her perfume toward him, and he remembered the flowers his mother used to grow in the garden she kept near the farmhouse, a flower that released its scent only after dark. He’d stumble home summer nights as a teenager, drunk or high from a night of carousing at Ricky’s on Highway 20, his face purple with bruises, his lip split and a tang of his own blood in his mouth, and there it would be—that smell. The air around the porch saturated with it, soaking right into his pores. Dizzy, he’d lie flat on his back on the porch boards, breathing in and out as if respiration were the rare privilege of kings. He’d listen to the cicadas chattering in the fields, the moon a pendulum above his head, swinging in a dramatic arc across the whole night sky, cutting a swathe through the stars. Although he knew there was a hangover and a beating from his father waiting for him in the morning, that hour or so he lay alone on his back on the porch, trying to recover enough equilibrium to drag himself upstairs, was an hour of perfect happiness. It was something he could never explain to anyone. His friends would have laughed at him.

Jack was the first one to look away. He returned to his test tube, inserting a dipstick and replacing it in a special holder. The alcove where he stood between the two rows of aquariums had shelves full of bottles and eye droppers, test tubes, nets, and small box-shaped plastic containers.

‘‘You look like a mad scientist doing that,’’ observed the woman.

‘‘I’m no scientist, lady, I’m just a fish whore.’’

She laughed for the first time. It was unexpected, like rounding a corner on a country path and hearing a brook leaping over stones where you hadn’t known a brook existed. There was no sign of tears now. Her eyes sparkled. A little color had returned to her face.

‘‘Well, fish whore, could you help me with something, maybe?’’ she asked. ‘‘The guy at the counter said you were the one to ask.’’

Jack’s eyes dropped to her legs, took note of her toenails painted pink as the inside of an abalone shell, returned to her face. He grinned. ‘‘What the hell is your problem?’’

She explained that she had been given a twenty-gallon aquarium by a neighbor who was moving out of town. She’d let it sit in her apartment for a long time because she didn’t know what to do with it. But now she thought it would be a good idea to set it up. Her son and daughter would probably like it—although, she laughed, she knew she’d be the one maintaining it. Could Jack tell her what equipment she needed to buy?

‘‘I want to start something new,’’ she concluded, drawing in a deep breath. She smiled and shrugged her narrow shoulders.

With another sort of woman, you might take that as an invitation. A glance at her fingers had confirmed there was no wedding ring; divorced, he guessed, with the kids on her hands, and at that age when a woman begins to wonder what there is she’s been missing in life. She wasn’t the first of that sort who’d come his way. But what she’d said was no come-on. She’d meant it just the way it sounded, something new. He snapped his back straight. A beginning, which was what starting an aquarium meant, after all. There were plenty who didn’t grasp that.

She listened to his famous lecture on aquarium-keeping with bright attention, her head slightly tilted, a smile playing on her lips and in her eyes. Her questions, always inserted with courtesy, were intelligent: ‘‘Doesn’t the shape of the aquarium make a difference in oxygen levels?—I read that somewhere.’’ Her gravity, her gentle, inquisitive air, affected him. Inspired, he went further than he usually did with the new ones. He elaborated upon the various filtration systems, air pumps and tubing, and the importance of establishing the nitrogen cycle in a new tank. He waxed eloquent about the benefits of live plants. (‘‘They condition the water by removing carbon dioxide and sulfur products. And tons more. But don’t get me started, lady, we’ll be here all day.’’) In the middle of his speech, Fred, a new hire, interrupted Jack to tell him there was a man on the phone who had a question about the pH levels in his salt-water tank. Jack’s mouth twitched. ‘‘Tell the asshole to call back.’’ The woman demurred, murmuring, ‘‘It’s all right if you need to . . .’’ But Jack shook his head. ‘‘I’m with you now,’’ he declared. Leaning in close to her and smiling into her eyes, he discussed biological communities and beneficial bacteria, (‘‘you’ve got your nitrosomonas and your nitrobacter, learn the names, it’s important’’), and then, straightening up again, he commanded her to change 10 percent of her water once a week.

‘‘It’s a whole world you start, isn’t it?’’ she remarked. ‘‘Like God.’’

Jack flashed his smile. It was something he’d always known to be true, although he’d never known anyone who had expressed it that way before.

At the cash register, a gray kitten jumped onto the counter. The kitten yawned, showing a pink mouth, and began to worry a package of dog biscuits on display. Jack flicked him off the ledge. ‘‘Go on, get out of here, Pokey. Stop messing with that.’’ The heavy yellow Lab brushed against the woman’s legs, and she reached down to pet him.

While she was signing her charge slip, the same young clerk who had interrupted them emerged from the annex on his way out the door.

‘‘Where are you going?’’ said Jack.

The boy cringed, turned red. ‘‘Just out for a smoke . . . it’s my break . . .’’

‘‘There’s nobody else back there. Never, never leave the annex unattended. Do you understand?’’

‘‘But . . .’’

‘‘Fuck your break,’’ said Jack, ‘‘Get back there,’’ and the young boy slunk back the way he had come. Jack handed the woman her receipt and her bag full of equipment and said, ‘‘Come back in three days, after you’ve set up the filtration system and let the water age a bit, and we’ll get you some fish. Not too many to start out with. And while you’re at it, go to the hardware store and pick up a bucket you’ll use only for the tank. Strictly no cleaning products allowed to touch it. Promise me.’’

‘‘Cross my heart,’’ she said, placing her hand for a moment over the lightly freckled skin just above her breasts. Something twisted in Jack’s chest.

‘‘An aquarium takes a lot of patience,’’ he said, smiling into her eyes, and then she was dismissed.

He had been working at the pet shop for ten years, since his discharge from the Marines. He’d just gotten back from Kuwait, the Gulf War. He’d been living with his uncle in Cincinnati, refusing to stay with either his mother in Cleveland or his father in Minneapolis, where he’d bought a house with his new wife. The farm had been sold while he was overseas. The mother and father had split up. Stateside again, he’d found himself homeless. The hell with them, then. Let them stay where they were. He’d stay where he was. Each in their own place.

He and his uncle got shitfaced every night, sometimes at a bar, sometimes just at home slouching on the lumpy sofa, watching football on TV, eating takeout Chinese straight from the carton and passing the fifth of whiskey. His uncle wept and described to him the horrors he’d experienced in the jungles of Vietnam, the smell of napalm, the severed limbs hanging in trees. More than once he lifted his sweaty T-shirt to show him the shrapnel wound shaped like a jagged tooth that was partially obscured by the thick black hairs on his belly. ‘‘You’re lucky you came back without no scars, man,’’ he told Jack. ‘‘In one fucking piece. I hope you blasted the shit out of some of those towelheads.’’ Jack refused to talk about Kuwait with his uncle, which provoked the older man. ‘‘All you soldiers now are a bunch of pussies. You’re just playin’ games. You drop bombs on people you don’t even see. Hell, what kind of courage does that take? Vietnam, now, that was a real war.’’ He’d punctuate these remarks by jabbing his nephew in the shoulder, hard. One night, after enough needling and jabbing, Jack found it necessary to punch the uncle. He delivered a clean, square, unemotional blow straight to the jaw, and the uncle fell onto the living room floor, sending a bowl of chips flying and knocking over an empty beer bottle. He lay there laughing, one black-socked foot still resting on the coffee table, his big toe poking through a hole. He wagged the toe, rubbed his stubbly chin. ‘‘I guess I deserved that, huh?’’ Jack hooked his hands under his uncle’s armpits and hauled him back onto the couch and got him a package of frozen peas to hold against his face. ‘‘Nobody said you don’t got balls, Jack,’’ said the uncle, admiringly. ‘‘Yeah, you got some. I wasn’t intending to insult you, J-J.’’

The uncle was a slob; he forgot to flush the toilet after he took a dump, clogged the drain in the shower stall with his curly black hairs. Pigs were cleaner than his uncle; they only rolled in mud to stay cool. A cat groomed herself on a regular basis. Chimpanzees groomed one another. During the day, while the uncle worked at the garage where he was a mechanic, Jack vacuumed and washed dishes and took the uncle’s old basset hound, Sally, for a walk. The rest of the time he spent reading paperbacks he’d checked out of the public library. Anything at all, whatever was displayed on the racks in the reading room. Freaky science fiction. Military history. A biography of Patton. A novel about a guy who built a time machine. The Hobbit. Tales of travels down the Amazon. He had no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

One evening after they’d switched off the game, the uncle said to him, ‘‘Hey, I got an old army buddy in Chicago, his wife’s sister, ok, she owns this pet store in one of the suburbs. Does a good business. She’s lookin’ for someone to help manage the place. Why don’t you go down there and check it out? You know all about animals and shit, don’t you?’’

His father had been a country veterinarian, had plunged his arm up to the elbow inside pregnant cows. Jack did know about animals. He knew they were better than humans any day. They didn’t break the rules. They didn’t commit senseless acts of violence. They killed to eat, that’s all. You could trust them.

‘‘Don’t waste your life in this piss-ant town like I did,’’ said the uncle. ‘‘Nothin’ doin’ for you here.’’ The uncle clapped him on the shoulder when he said this, but then withdrew his hand. Uncertainly, he rubbed the gray stubble on his chin that never seemed to resolve itself into a full-fledged beard. When he said goodbye to Jack, he was unable to look him straight in the eye.

From the moment Jack set foot in the pet store, it was love at first sight. It was as if the place had always been waiting for him to claim it. No matter where he’d been in the world—Kuwait, Germany, the Caribbean, his father’s farm outside of Columbus, his uncle’s shack in Cincinnati—the pet store had always existed, serene and untroubled by human lunacy. He’d only had to find it. He was twenty then. If there was a better place somewhere, he didn’t know of it. He felt lucky to have found where he was meant to be. You couldn’t say these things to anybody, but you knew they were true all the same.

Agnes, the owner, had said to him, ‘‘There’s an apartment available above the shop. Why don’t you rent it and take it off my hands? Pets and veterans welcome, Sergeant.’’ He’d said yes right away to her offer—of employment, of the apartment, of everything. He didn’t need to think.

Agnes was tall and bony, with shoulders as wide as a man’s, and a long gray braid down her back. She wore full denim skirts decorated with embroidered flowers. On her long flat feet, white socks and Birkenstock sandals. Felicity, who had a shaved head and rode a Harley Davidson, was her lover. Jack got along with both of them better than he’d gotten along with any females he’d known. You could relax and joke around with Felicity and Agnes, without worrying about the problem of how to screw them, or how to impress them—it was like being with men, only better, because they were women. Sometimes they invited him over to their house for dinner, fed him tofu casseroles and homemade breads with a rough texture and bits of dried fruit poking out of the crust. Felicity, deepening her rasping voice and pounding her fist on the table, would pretend to make fun of Agnes’s cooking: ‘‘Hey, what is this crap? Can’t we have some steak once in a while?’’ And Agnes would flutter her hands and flip her braid in the air and squeak: ‘‘Oh honey, what can I do to make this up to you? Can I give you a blow job?’’ They’d have Jack in stitches. Felicity smoked hashish in a pipe she’d picked up in India and amused them with stories about her ongoing quarrels with an administrator at the city college where she taught art history. Waddling stiff-legged, puffing out her cheeks, she’d bellow, ‘‘ ‘I told you Miss Heath’—that’s what he likes to call me, Miss Heath, can you believe it, a dyke like me—‘I told you that you need to submit Form 862.1, in triplicate, not Form 864, if you want the college to replace the light bulb in your desk lamp!’ ’’ Agnes, who had a steely quiet wit, would also offer them barbed anecdotes about the people she’d encountered during her day. A bigoted man from the gas company who talked about the ‘‘spics’’ who lived next door to him. A woman standing ahead of her in the line at the grocery store who’d made a big stink because the clerk wouldn’t honor a months-old coupon that would have allowed her to buy a bar of soap for fifty cents cheaper. Her father, who belonged to a country club and referred to his secretary as ‘‘his girl.’’ Her mother, who could never sit down where she was seated in a restaurant but was always searching for the ideal table, the one where she would at last attain the elusive fulfillment she’d been pursuing all her life. Agnes’s mockery, Felicity’s sarcasm, wove a tight impenetrable circle around them, and Jack was drawn inside this magic circle, where all was safe. He was a privileged and trusted friend. Felicity had more than once told him what a difference he’d made in their lives. Now that Jack was on board, she said, Agnes could take vacations again. She could read the New York Times on Sunday mornings and make love.

Sometimes he and Agnes quarreled. When their supplier on the West Coast sent them a shipment of diseased Persians, Jack, in a rage, phoned the supplier and called him a cheating bastard. ‘‘You’re way out of line,’’ Agnes shouted at him, after the supplier called her at home to report. ‘‘I’ve had a relationship with that guy for years.’’ They were lousy with distemper, said Jack. They would have infected all the rest. He knew it too. Trying to pass them off. My call, not yours, said Agnes. And don’t you forget it. You’ll run yourself into the ground if you’re not tough on those jackasses, said Jack. I’m only thinking of the shop. What you need to do is go sign yourself up for an anger management class, said Agnes. That’s no way to conduct business. You don’t know the first thing. I’m the commanding officer here, Sergeant. Jack said, You don’t want my help, fine. I’m history. Fuck it.

He was gone for a week that time. He spent all of his self-imposed exile stoned, and when he walked shakily back into the shop the following Monday morning, purged and penitent, Agnes was charting the nitrate readings herself. With eyebrows raised, and with only the briefest of pauses to create suspense, she handed the chart to him. He took up where he’d left off, barking commands at the lower order of clerks. ‘‘Watch your language,’’ said Agnes, ‘‘This is a family shop.’’ But she was grinning at him. Jack grinned too. They had laughed often enough with Felicity about the sticky-fingered children who poked their noses in the puppies’ cages and banged the aquarium glass, the frazzled mothers who tried to maneuver double-strollers through the narrow aisles, knocking merchandise off the shelves.

Someday, when she got tired of the responsibility of ownership, Agnes would sell the shop to him. They’d never spoken of it, but he felt that it was understood. After all, who else would she sell it to, if not him? Often he imagined himself already as the owner, secure for life. Money in the bank, a house where he could set aside a couple of rooms just for the pets if he wanted to. Thinking of himself in this powerful position gave him a warm, well-fed feeling in his gut, a feeling of fullness and satiety.

After the last customer had left at the end of the day, he’d close out the register and secure all the cash in the steel safe in the back room. He and the other clerks would haul out the garbage in big black plastic bags—the animal droppings and newspapers, the stale food, the rags, the used up carbon from the aquarium filters— and swing them into the bins behind the shop. He’d check the cats and dogs one last time, make sure their cages were secure and their bowls filled. When all this was done, he turned the key in the lock. And then, at last, he would lean his back against the brick wall of the shop, smoking a cigarette and feeling the day’s weariness ebb away from him. There would be a streak of pink or orange light in the western sky above the roofs of the business district to mark the end of another workday, the chimneys in the distance already turning to silhouettes. The church bell from First United Methodist faithfully tolling seven. If it had been raining, the dark drops on the cement, and the wet smell from the ground, rainbows in the oily puddles left behind by cars. On windy days, he could hear, if he listened for it above the traffic noises, the thundering of whitecaps on the lake. In autumn, the geese honked and circled against the darkening sky, preparing to go south. His eyes often followed them as they whirled away, until they were nothing but black pinpricks against the clouds. He did not envy them, having to pick up and leave twice a year, abandoning the river banks and marshes and dunes that they’d come to call home.

Jack’s feet were sore from standing on them all day, and sometimes the small of his back ached from lifting equipment. But these aches did not discourage him. There were far worse kinds of pain in the world. He smoked, inhaling deeply, and his eyes moved back and forth, taking a swift inventory of the neighborhood. Over there, the coffee shop where he’d grab a quick fix in the morning. Next door to it, the vintage jewelry shop run by the elderly Korean woman and her daughter. Two doors down from that, the Laundromat; kitty-corner from where he was standing, the bank. Three blocks south, the grocery store where he’d buy crab legs and garlic and butter and cook himself a feast on weekends. Without being aware of it, his free hand would make chopping motions in the air, marking off the perimeters. He smoked his cigarette down to a stub and then, with deep satisfaction, ground the last of it under his heel. Sweeping a last glance over the storefront and the street, he turned to his own door, fishing his key out of his pocket.

It was a week before the woman appeared in the shop again. He was up on a ladder, scrutinizing a tank on the second tier, net in hand. The gray kitten with the pink mouth was balanced next to him on the top rung. When the chimes above the entrance door tinkled he looked and saw that it was her. He flinched, looked away, felt a jolt in his chest, and a moment later the blood seemed to drain from his limbs.

Furious with himself, he scowled in her general direction. ‘‘Hey, lady, what do you want?’’ he shouted. He put down his net.

Her laughter was gentle and musical, as he’d remembered. She approached the foot of the ladder. ‘‘You better be nice to me,’’ she joked.

She wore a soft flowered skirt that swirled around her legs, a blue blouse. Her blond hair was swept away from her face. And the perfume again. He came down a step and, without thinking, grabbed her left hand and covered it with kisses, bowing his head, with its sparse patch of hair, over her arm. He pressed her fingers before he released them; they were thin and ringless, the nails the same pearly color as her toes.

‘‘There, was that nice enough?’’ he said. ‘‘I retracted my claws.’’

She lifted the plastic bag she held in her right hand. ‘‘I’ve brought you my water.’’

There was an eager happiness in her face. Her smile seemed to fill in the hollows, to make her face younger and rounder, and there were those nice rays around her eyes.

He took the bag from her, opened it, inhaled. ‘‘Good vintage,’’ he said, offering up his quick sliver of a smile. ‘‘Well, let’s get you tested then. I make no guarantees.’’

She followed him to the little alcove that she’d said looked like a mad scientist’s lab. Jack dipped several test tubes into the bag of water, then squirted drops of liquid into the tubes from different jars.

‘‘Now we have to wait ten minutes,’’ he told her.

They stood in front of one of the large floor fans, her hair lifting off her shoulders in the breeze. An exultant mood swept over him, loosened his tongue. He told her about the fish in England that was able to walk across land from one pond to another, about a piranha that snapped off a man’s arm at the elbow, the Japanese blowfish that could poison you if it wasn’t cooked the right way. He expanded upon the asexual reproduction of snails and informed her that hobbyists who entered shows often put a dash of paprika in their tanks to enhance the colors of the fish. She laughed appreciatively, sometimes throwing back her head and exposing her white slender throat. Then, remembering her water, he snapped his fingers. The spell of talk was broken. At the alcove, a glance at the tubes told him all was well.

‘‘Congratulations, lady. I’m going to permit you to buy some fish.’’

She lingered over the selection. He would not sell her the guppies; there had been a case of fin rot in the tank. Their immune systems were weakened by too much in-breeding. ‘‘Why not swordtails?’’ he suggested. He netted three with fiery bodies and black tails, as well as three giant white mollies and a pair of dwarf gouramis.

She objected to the gouramis. ‘‘They’re so drab,’’ she commented.

‘‘No way. Look.’’ He held the bag up to the light and showed her. Their scales shimmered with an iridescent blue; their fins were streaked with the faintest hint of gold. ‘‘See? They’re fucking aristocrats.’’

‘‘Yes, you’re right. I see it now. A duke and duchess,’’ she intoned, and there was real awe in her voice. Jack approved.

After that the woman came into the shop several times a week. Once it was because her fish had gotten the white spots typically associated with the common parasitical disease called ick; other times she wanted advice about brine shrimp or algae. But often she had no excuse at all. She always appeared in the mornings; anticipating her arrival, he listened for the tinkle of the chimes above the shop door, and the clicking sound of her high-heeled sandals on the wooden floorboards.

Twenty or thirty minutes she’d spend in the store with him. She accompanied him as he performed his morning’s tasks, learning from him how to care for her aquarium. The fish were subject to all sorts of bacterial and fungal infections; the delicate balance achieved in aquariums was always under siege, and it was a constant struggle to keep disorder and holocaust at bay. He demonstrated how to activate a gravel vacuum by sucking through the long attached tube, spitting the mouthful of water viciously back into the bucket. There were other lessons too: how to net fish without damaging their fins, how to capture the eggs that the parents had laid on a rock. Once, she witnessed surgery. ‘‘See that spotted cichlid with the white stuff that looks like a piece of toilet paper hanging out of his mouth? Fungus.’’ He plunged his arm into the tank; the other fish nibbled eagerly at his fierce tattoos. After he’d isolated the cichlid in a holding tank, he extracted the fungus with a tweezers.

They were often interrupted by the other clerks who came by to ask him questions—‘‘Jack, we just got a shipment of frozen daphnia . . . where do I stock all this tubing . . .’’ He answered their questions sharply, nodding his head to show the direction he wished things to be placed. Children swarmed through the shop with their mothers and fathers and grandparents in tow. If another customer needed assistance, he would break off their conversation abruptly, moving away from her with his brisk, graceful step, his focus already elsewhere. But she would wait for him, standing by the marine aquariums with her arms behind her back, peering up with an amused expression at the neon-blue fish who had become her favorite because, she said, he looked like he was about to break out into a joyous song. As soon as Jack could, he would return to her, and they would resume talking.

Her name was Nina, he knew from the sales slips she signed, but she had never volunteered this information, and he had never asked. He wondered about the children she had mentioned only once, about the husband or ex-husband who might also cast a shadow. He wouldn’t stoop to ask. There was a lot a person was better off not knowing about people. A lot that wasn’t necessary to know—on the whole, women told too much about themselves, and it always ended up ruining things. He didn’t mind if she were a bit secretive. Even if she was married, he wasn’t sure it would make a difference. There had been married women before. On base, during training, his sergeant’s wife. And overseas, a young captain in the air force whose husband was stateside. Four years ago a woman he’d picked up at an outdoor concert, who turned out to be a pest, leaving tearful messages on his voice mail for months after the affair had ended. But this was different from those experiences.

Sometimes he was convinced that when she left the shop she ceased to exist, that she simply vanished; there was a sort of relief in believing this. If he asked for her phone number or she for his, then sooner or later they’d go upstairs to his apartment and then, in a matter of weeks or months, it would be finished. They’d quarrel or get sick of one another. And after that she wouldn’t come into the pet store anymore; there wouldn’t be the sound of her heels tapping on the creaking floor boards, her teasing blue eyes turned upward to his face, the smell of her perfume like the night-blooming flowers his mother had grown long ago near the porch of their farmhouse.

One day he told her the story of how, when he was a kid, his favorite cat had gotten sick, and his father, after trying unsuccessfully to cure it, had decided the most humane thing to do was to put it to sleep. Jack had hidden in the hayloft for a day, refusing to come to meals. But the cat had such a tough and leathery skin from his life spent prowling barns and fields that Jack’s father had not been able to find a spot to inject the needle with the lethal fluid. The needle would snap when he tried. So the cat was not euthanized after all.

‘‘Lived another year after that,’’ said Jack. His voice had gone hoarse. While he was telling her this, the African grey parrot had flown over to him and perched on his shoulder. Jack took no notice of the bird.

A veil of quiet had dropped over the woman’s face. But she hadn’t averted her gaze; her eyes, looking into his, were large and moist and searching. She touched his arm lightly, briefly. The fingers were, as usual, a bit cold. He recoiled. He was surprised by the pity in her touch and in her eyes. For a moment he wondered if by telling the story he’d somehow compromised himself, if it had cast him in a bad or pathetic light. His spine stiffened. He was sorry now that he’d told it to her at all. He’d gone a bit too far.

Then one day something else happened. They had been laughing together; the woman was complaining about the amount of work it took to keep up the tank. ‘‘Oh, I might as well just get a puppy!’’

‘‘What do you want a puppy for? Shitting and pissing all over the place until you get them trained. Worms. Shedding. Why don’t you get a cat?’’

‘‘Cats are much too independent,’’ she cried, shaking her head. ‘‘I want to be adored! I want to be needed!’’

‘‘I need ya,’’ he said. A joke, delivered reflexively, what you’d say to any woman you’d been flirting with, what they’d expect, even, a stock response. But the next thing he knew he’d taken a step forward and his arms were around her; he hadn’t planned to, or even been aware of wanting to at that moment anyhow, but there he was, with his chin just touching the soft blonde hair, and his hands on the delicate wings of her shoulder blades, like two quivering birds about to fly away, and there was her perfume all around him, clouding his senses like a good kind of high; she was nestled against him, her arms around him too, she was hugging him right back, not resisting, which amazed him, and she was just the right size for him, not too tall, not too short, she fit in the curve of his body like she was custom made; she was nearly weightless, he could have lifted her easily with just one arm, as if she’d been a kitten or a rabbit, a small helpless creature, one of the many who looked to him daily for protection. Dizzy, he realized that the two of them embracing had been swept away by the rotation of the earth around the sun, had suddenly become a part of its orbit, and a part, too, of the mysterious alchemy of photosynthesis, of the waxing and waning of the moon, of the tidal pull in the great oceans and of the ubiquitous process of respiration whereby oxygen is converted to carbon dioxide in the body’s cells: a part of everything that moved and breathed and changed, the whole whirling restless universe. And understanding that, the embrace became unbearable; he couldn’t endure it a moment longer.

He let go and sprang away. At the ferret cages, he rattled the latch, disgusted by the trembling in his hands. He dared not look at the woman. Had someone, a customer or one of the other clerks, seen them? His face went hot. He felt the presence of the woman there, waiting, a few feet away; the space she occupied had a different temperature and texture than the rest of the air in the shop. Why didn’t she leave? She was waiting for something, lingering. He held his breath. He didn’t look at her. In another moment he heard the bells above the door tinkling.

Immediately he was sorry and wanted her to come back. But he wasn’t about to leave the shop to run after her.

In the middle of the night, the puppies cried. They were lonely for their mother, whom they had only recently been weaned from but whose teats and warmth were still an enduring memory. It would fade in a few weeks. But for now the three new Alsatians were desperate with grief. Their small plaintive yelps reached Jack where he slept one floor above them. He had been in Kuwait, and the Humvee was exploding again, the thick, black, acrid-smelling smoke billowing out of it. He was running toward it, his pack pressing him knee-deep into the sand, his scorching helmet melting his brains. He was running, zigzagging, while smaller mines were exploding all around him and his brains were oozing out of his ears. He was running, and his fingernails were gritty with sand; there was sand in his mouth, in between his toes, in the crack of his ass; oily tears were pouring down his cheeks, and he was blinded by the smoke. He was running and in a few seconds he’d reach the torched cab and the three bodies inside, burning alive, and he didn’t want to see them but he was going to, was going to witness Biggs screaming for his mother and Weller with his ear torn away from his head, and Appleby with the scorched flesh hanging off of his back in strips. He was running and trying to wake up before he reached the Humvee, but the desert was swallowing him and the helmet was melting his brains.

He sat straight up in bed, dripping sweat, his hands clutching the sheets. He heard crying, and it took him a minute to realize it wasn’t Biggs, Weller, and Appleby but the Alsatians below in the shop. Then he swung his legs over and onto the floor. His eyes were wide open. Rolling his powerful shoulders, he shrugged off the last shreds of his dream. He reached for his jeans that he’d folded over a chair the night before. His shoes were waiting for him also, lined up under the chair, laces untied. The Scottish terrier, Floyd, curled up at the foot of Jack’s bed with the orange tabbies, Grant and Lee, sandwiching him on either side, lifted his snout, twitched his ears, and whined in sympathy with the motherless puppies.

Downstairs the shop was dark except for the greenish light cast from the neon sign outside. The little red thermostats of the aquarium heaters blinked on and off. In the tanks the fish were resting on the gravel, each by the rock or plant or piece of coral they’d chosen for themselves, conserving their energy, trusting that light would come again, that food would appear at the surface of the tank, as it had every day of their existence. Jack made his way by feel to the annex. The puppies, hearing his tread on the floorboards and understanding that relief was near, abandoned themselves to the luxury of hysteria. They scrambled all over one another in their eagerness to get to the front of the cage; they whined and twitched and barked. ‘‘Pipe down,’’ said Jack. He sprung open the latch. He grabbed handfuls of fur, tweaked ears, and stroked bellies, the rough soothing interspersed with the murmured curses and endearments. All the while his fingers were deftly searching for bite marks and signs of ticks or fleas. ‘‘Purebreds,’’ he spat, hoisting one by the scruff of his neck. Another peed on his hand; he swore and wiped it on his pants. Yet another he nestled for a moment in his armpit, letting the warmth of his body penetrate the twitching muscles.

He stayed with the puppies an hour. Upstairs again, unable to sleep, he smoked a cigarette in the L-shaped front room that overlooked the street. He’d furnished the place from the Salvation Army when he’d first moved in, and he hadn’t needed to add much of anything since. There was a couch, plain and tan and clean, and a table with a shelf to hold his CD player and his CDs, a card table where he ate, two folding chairs, the cats’ litter box, a twenty-gallon salt-water aquarium, and a reading lamp with a movable joint on its base. His floors were bare; he swept them once a week. Until recently he had kept back issues of Tropical Fish Hobbyist stacked chronologically in a grocery crate. But he had thrown them out; he didn’t like clutter. Books you could borrow from the library; no need to spend money when it could be put in the bank instead. He’d tacked some posters on the walls—there was one he especially liked of Elvis Costello, caught in a howl, his eyes screwed shut in agony behind the thick black glasses. Agnes had provided him with blinds for all the windows that faced the intersection. He had never raised them. By the time he’d finished his day in the shop, he’d seen enough people.

Ten years he’d lived here. He knew it so well he could get around blindfolded; he didn’t need to be conscious of it. But tonight there was something wrong with the apartment. Everything about it was the same as it always had been, and yet it was different somehow. His nostrils flared; the hair on his neck stood up. Something had come over the place. The smell was off. The floor was a little warped, maybe, and the ceiling was too low. ‘‘Fuckers,’’ he shouted at the darkened, hostile room, and this made him feel better, but only for a moment. He paced from the couch to the windows and back again three times. The apartment was too small, he realized, and he wondered why he hadn’t realized that before. He finished his cigarette and lit another. He was wide awake, his muscles tense; the sun wasn’t going to rise for another hundred years. The way he felt now, he’d pounce like a tiger on that first tender pink morsel of dawn. He picked up some fifty-pound weights from the corner and did a few bicep curls and squats; the pain was good, it was concrete, it had significance and heft to it, it was the way he remembered it from basic training, reliable, and yet in the end, it too was lacking something.

‘‘Fuckers!’’ he shouted again, hoarsely, but the stubborn night wouldn’t budge an inch closer to day.

Thoughts of the woman who hadn’t appeared in the pet store in four weeks pushed their way into his mind and crowded out everything else. Had she come into the shop on his day off by mistake? But, no, she wouldn’t make an error like that. She knew his schedule by now. If she hadn’t come, it was because she didn’t want to. He saw her eyes, wet the way they’d been that first day, and her slender wrists, heard her musical laugh, always with those flat tones underneath threatening to cut it off. A laugh you could pick out of a crowd. He remembered the way she’d looked when he’d shown her the dwarf gouramis. Things she’d said, too—funny, true things. A peculiar way she had of expressing herself, not like other customers. She’d known. Known what? He shook the last cigarette out of the pack, flicked his lighter. He’d gone overboard, grabbing her and holding her like that. It had been a mistake. Or, the mistake had been in not making more of it. Perhaps she’d felt insulted. Women. What they expected from you. Always the same. So she was gone now; so she wasn’t coming back. Trying to make it his fault.

A police car wailed by, and the siren took a long time to die away. Some punk shouted in the alley, rattled the chains on the dumpster. There was the muted rumble of distant summer thunder.

He was better off. She wasn’t young. They could get desperate at that age. He remembered now that her face had often looked a little haggard and worn; her legs were too thin, a bit wasted, maybe. And anyhow, more than likely she was married, and even if she were divorced or separated, there’d be an ex-husband looming somewhere, making trouble. Then there were the kids. He had to bear them in the shop, but outside of the shop he stayed clear. If she had teenagers, that would be even worse; he remembered the way he’d been as a teenager, hell on wheels. You might as well lock them all up in a compound out in the wasteland somewhere and throw away the key.

The tabbies, Grant and Lee, were up now, jumping on a pen they’d found. They were still kittens at three a.m. He watched them play, smoking reflectively, feeling a bit calmer now.

The next day after work, though, he was restless again, and when he looked at his reflection in the mirror, the pale high forehead, the thinning red-brown hair receding farther each day, he was furious and smashed his fist into the door of the shower stall. His knuckles bled. Good. He found the tube of orange dye he’d bought a while ago for a joke, and squirted the whole thing onto his head, rubbing it even into the bald spot. He rinsed and toweled dry and then checked his reflection again. The bright orange hair stood up in stiff peaks; his face, paler than ever, was tense and fierce. He grinned at himself. Fish whore. Agnes and Felicity would get a kick out of it. Freak, Agnes would say. You’re scaring away the customers. This is a goddamned family shop.

He was perched on the ladder, his tattooed arms dangling from the rungs, dispensing wisdom from on high, when the woman appeared in the shop again. The suffocating heat of summer had cracked at the first peal of autumn; late September now, it was no longer necessary to have the big fans going non-stop. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted her but didn’t let on. As it had been before, her presence was more deeply felt than seen. The blood drained away from his limbs; his stomach jumped. The teenage girl standing at the foot of the ladder was wearing tight low-waisted jeans that revealed a belly button studded with a ring; she was twisting a strand of hair as he gave his speech, smiling, thrusting her left hip forward. Lately she’d been coming in the shop a lot. ‘‘I just love tropical fish,’’ she gushed. He repeated this for Agnes and Felicity, falsetto voice. Agnes laughed and wagged a finger at him. ‘‘Jailbait, Sergeant Jack, jailbait.’’

He took his sweet time with the girl. But the woman came and stood a few feet away, waiting. Patient. Her arms folded in front of her, over her purse. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of looking at her directly. So she was back, so what. Did she expect him to drop everything and run to her?

He rang up the girl at the register himself, loading her with more than she’d come in to buy, and at the last minute he slapped a twenty-dollar tube of vitamin drops onto the counter and declared, ‘‘For your tetras. Keeps them healthy.’’ ‘‘Okay,’’ she said, shrugging and giggling, ‘‘If you say so, Jack.’’ She pulled out a credit card and tossed it at him, and he caught it mid-air and grinned at her. ‘‘Hey, you’re good,’’ she cried. She’d be back in tomorrow, and he’d sell her something else. She was seventeen, eighteen. Attended one of the local private high schools. She’d told him her father had given her a slightly used Mercedes coupe for her birthday. Only thirty thousand miles on it, she said. It could do one hundred miles per hour easily; she’d tested it on a country road.

Then the girl left, the door tinkling behind her. ‘‘What can I do for you?’’ said Jack briskly, stepping forward before the woman herself could cover the ground between them. He did not smile.

One full glance was all it took to register the shocking change: she’d lost weight, the hollows in her cheeks had deepened, and there were dark circles underneath her eyes, which seemed to have sunk into her face. Instead of the pretty dresses and slacks he’d been accustomed to seeing her in, she wore a pair of velour sweat pants and low-heeled walking shoes. The pants were too loose; they hung off her hips and sagged. And she was wearing some kind of a turban, a blue cloth; without any hair showing, her skull looked small and fragile, like something you could crack open in your fist, like an egg. He looked beyond her at the high shelves with the power filters and larger heaters. He felt sick to his stomach. A savage confusion, a raw panic had set its teeth into him. For the first time in a very long time he did not know what to do next. He barely trusted himself to speak.

‘‘What did you do to your hair?’’ she said, smiling and pointing. Her eyes were the same, only larger than ever in her thin face, blue under the blue of the turban, a little moist, radiant.

Jack’s hair was beginning to grow out, inflamed only at the tips now, his original color showing through in ragged patches.

‘‘It was a while ago,’’ he mumbled, shrugging. He moved past her, scooped up a magnetic algae scraper from the fifty-gallon tank, applied it to the wall of a thirty-gallon tank on the lower tier. Agnes got angry if she saw too much algae. She claimed it was bad for business, made the tanks look unattractive.

The woman followed him. The muscles in his belly clenched; he kept his face averted. ‘‘I haven’t been here for a long time,’’ she said, standing close to him.

There was nothing he could say to that. He continued his scraping, concentrating on the difficult corners, where the dark green plant grew thickest. She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds.

‘‘I want to buy a fish,’’ she said. ‘‘I think I have room for one more.’’

He nodded, looked quickly at her and then, turning whiter, looked away. They both studied the row of tanks in silence. The fish darted back and forth, nipping at the leaves of the plants, chasing their reflections up and down the glass, circling one another with playful or amorous intentions.

Finally she pointed her finger at a tank. ‘‘There, that one. That gaudy orange tough guy who almost looks like he’s wearing a crown.’’

A golden angel discus. She wouldn’t be able to care for it anymore, not in her condition. A delicate fish, it needed coddling. She looked like she could barely lift a bucket of water.

He hesitated and then said, ‘‘Cost you sixty bucks for that one.’’

Her laughter had grown a little wilder since he’d heard it last, no longer a pleasant brook but the rushing torrent of a river that had overflown its banks. An exaggeration to it that made him recoil. ‘‘Well, I have sixty bucks. That’s one thing I can safely say I do have. After tallying up the losses.’’

Still he was reluctant. There was a sharpness in her voice he’d never heard before when she spoke next. ‘‘Sell me the fish. I want him.’’

‘‘All right.’’

He picked up his net and approached the tank, grateful, at least, to have something to concentrate on so that he would not have to speak to her for a few moments. He squinted at the aquarium, his high pale brow furrowing. With net in hand, Jack was pure will: a Samurai warrior, a crazed Antarctic explorer, a Crusader in quest of the Holy Grail. No fish could withstand him.

He bagged the discus, squirting a few drops of bluish liquid into the bag to offset the damage done to the fins by the net. All the while he felt her eyes on him, blue searchlights boring through him. He couldn’t get away. There was a heaviness in the air, the ungainly, unseemly weight of words, unspoken words. Don’t, he silently pleaded with her. Don’t speak.

Then she was close to him, her breath on his shoulder.

‘‘Why don’t you look at me?’’ she said in a low voice. ‘‘You used to look at me. Am I that repulsive?’’

He twisted the bag shut, picked up a black marker and wrote the price on the plastic. Silently he handed her the fish. She received it in her palm but hardly glanced at the pricey rare fish. Her eyes were still on him. She’d cornered him now. Caught.

‘‘I’ve been sick,’’ she told him. ‘‘They’re treating it, but it won’t make any difference. Not really. A few months more or less.’’

He nodded, cautiously. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ he managed. He looked over her shoulder now, scanning for a customer to rescue him. The shop was empty.

‘‘I’m thirty-nine years old,’’ she said, in a voice that hovered just above a whisper. ‘‘I have a twelve-year-old daughter, her name is Vickie, and a ten-year-old son, Ryan. My husband and I divorced just a year ago. He has a girlfriend now. And do you know . . . do you know . . .’’—she took a deep breath—‘‘do you know what I don’t think I can bear? What is the absolute outer limit of my endurance?’’

He felt sweat breaking out on his forehead. The fish in the bag flopped wildly.

‘‘The thought of my children sitting down to dinner with another woman—not me—sitting across from them. Someone else driving my son to soccer games. Someone else—not me—shopping for a prom dress with my daughter. That I won’t be there.’’

What could he possibly say more than ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ which he’d said already?

Still she went on. ‘‘I do want to bear it. I know I have to bear it. But there are some things that are beyond human capability.’’

Silence. He strained his ears for the tinkle of the bells above the shop door.

‘‘Look at me,’’ she commanded, and he was afraid she might touch him like she had that time he’d told her about his cat. ‘‘Say something.’’

Then salvation arrived in the form of a tall unbathed middle-aged man with a gray ponytail. A local eccentric and fish enthusiast who showed up at aquarium shows, loitering by the prizewinning tanks, chatting up the female hobbyists. Don’t let him hang around too long, Agnes had warned. As long as he buys something. This place isn’t a halfway house, appearances to the contrary. ‘‘Hey, Jack,’’ said the man in his phlegmy voice, approaching tentatively, and Jack turned sharply on his heels to face him, his back to the woman. Customer —she’d understood that before, and it was no different now.

‘‘You have any clown loaches, perchance? I’m on a quest.’’

‘‘You’re in luck. We got a shipment yesterday.’’

‘‘Excellent, man. Bag me up a couple of ’em, will you?’’

Engaged with the pony-tailed man, Jack was only partly aware of the woman moving to the cash register, paying for her fish; he did not see her leave the shop, but he could tell when she was gone. Some release inside his chest. A taut spring loosened. A panicked squirrel found the open window in the house in which he had been trapped.

He was busy all afternoon. At the end of the day, the usual routines: counting the cash and receipts, making the rounds of the cages, hauling out the trash, locking up and pocketing the key. Then hanging out in front with the other clerks, chewing over the customers, the day, smoking. Fred and Sylvester and the new one, Lonnie. Today he had more patience for them than usual, and they sensed his indulgence; they lingered, basking in the warmth of Jack’s patronage. He didn’t want them to go; aware of this sudden weakness, he silenced himself, drew his mouth into its thin closed line, and said no more. It was chilly, an edge to the weather now, and one by one they said good-bye and left for home. Alone, he finished his cigarette, sore back braced against the brick wall. A wind had come up. The dry yellow and red leaves swirled in the street, first one way and then another. A sign across the street rattled, blew back and forth. Cracked acorn husks littered the gutter. Autumn would be short this year.

He ground the cigarette under the sole of his shoe; suddenly he was cold, gooseflesh rising on his tattooed arms. He shivered, resisted the impulse to hug himself. His mind turned, unwillingly, to the woman, thin and wasted in her sweat pants, bald under the blue turban. He shut his eyes rapidly and opened them again. ‘‘Say something,’’ she’d told him. Across the street everything was just as it always had been: the coffee place, the Korean vintage jewelry shop, the Laundromat, the bank. His hand moved, taking its familiar inventory, chopping the air. All the autumns he’d passed in the pet shop, all the seasons he’d seen come and go. A third of his life so far. And here he’d be for the duration. Wouldn’t he? The question coming out of nowhere and the doubt buried like a seed at its core surprised and irritated him. ‘‘Fucking-A,’’ he swore, watching his breath blow white from his mouth. In his short-sleeved cotton shirt, he was cold. He thought about lighting another cigarette but decided against it. Best to make the pack last as long as he could. He already had fifteen thousand saved against the day when Agnes would say to him, finally, ‘‘I’m tired, Jack-O. I want a rest. Take this place off my hands.’’ And of course she would say that to him; it was only a matter of time. The day was coming soon. It was foolish to doubt.

Copyright 2008 University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.