For a long while he just sat there, moving only to stir the coals, the clock on the mantel ticking louder and louder and the fire hissing and the four walls closing him in until some sort of curtain seemed to lift inside him, dark to light, and gradually he began to come out of it. Here he was, still ambulatory, with his mind intact, or mostly so, sitting before a fire in the shingled ocean-view cottage they’d traded up to get—and get at a steal, jumping on it when the recession hit and the values plunged. Even better: he’d finally managed to escape Fort Bragg, winding up here in the religiously quaint little tourist village of Mendocino, population 1,008, where you could get fresh-baked bread every morning and afternoon and the world’s best coffee anytime you wanted. Enough, already—he wasn’t one to feel sorry for himself. What was done was done. Move forward. Shake some pleasure out of life. He got to his feet, groggy from the beer and the pill, but inspired suddenly: he was going to call Carolee and tell her to come home, right away, because he was taking her out to dinner—at the Bistro, the place she liked best.
Her phone rang but she didn’t answer and it went to voicemail. “Call me!” he shouted into the receiver and then rang the number again. She was down in Calpurnia, helping out at the animal preserve there where she liked to volunteer two days a week, but it was getting late—past five now—and they would have fed the animals already, wouldn’t they? Or shoveled up the shit or whatever they did? Maybe she was in the car, maybe that was it. He was trying to picture that, his wife, driving, the fog strangling the headlights, her gray serious eyes fixed on the road, which was slick and wet and deserted, when she picked up.
“Hi, Sten,” her voice breathed in his ear, “what’s up?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m just getting in the car.”
“Good. Great. Because I’m taking you out to dinner at that place you like.”
“The Bistro?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“We’re going to celebrate.”
He heard the muffled thump of the car door slamming shut, then the revolving whine of the engine starting up. “Celebrate what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel like celebrating. Life, I guess.”
There was silence on the other end.
“You there?”
The faint distant crunch of gravel, tires in motion, then her voice coming back to him: “Sounds fine to me.”
“Okay,” he said, “okay.” Everything was precious suddenly, his life, her life, the lives of the animals and of everybody else out there on the slick wet roads. He felt so overwhelmed he could barely get the words out. “You be careful out there, huh?”
The restaurant was in Fort Bragg, eight miles up the road from Mendocino. It occupied the second floor of a brick building the size of a department store that had once housed the operations of Union Lumber and it was floor-to-ceiling windows all around so that if you got a window table you could sit there and eat and feel as if you were floating over the whole town and the ocean too. Though it was the middle of August and the tourists were out in force, they got a window table without having to wait at the bar because the hostess was a former student at Fort Bragg High and recognized him, though he didn’t recognize her. “Who was that?” Carolee asked, once they were seated.
“Beats me,” he said, looking up at her, feeling good, if a bit shaky still. “At this point, they all look the same to me.”
There were menus, drinks, a basket of hot bread. He went through the bread without even realizing what he was doing, hungry suddenly, though he hadn’t got a lick of exercise all day.
“You are hungry,” she said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t eat any lunch?”
He ducked his head, grinned. “No, I had something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know—a sandwich. Or cereal, a bowl of cereal.” The fact was, he couldn’t really remember. He had a sudden vision of himself laid out flat in a nursing home, gasping for breath, all his vitals dwindled down to nothing. Old man. He was an old man. “But tell me, how was it down there,” he said, to cover himself, “—they get any new zebras in? Or what, giraffes? Or are they fresh out over there in Africa?”
“Same old,” she said. “But really, I don’t know why you have to make fun of them. If it wasn’t for the Burnsides and a handful of people like them, people who care, those zebras and antelope would be gone from the face of the earth.”
“Then why don’t they send them back? Because that’s where they belong, isn’t it? I mean, zebras in Mendocino County—give me a break. What does he think, he’s Noah or something?”
She was having a martini, three olives on the side. That was her trick: olives on the side so you get more gin, a matter of displacement—or lack of it, that is. She took a long slow sip, watching him. “That’s the idea,” she said. “Eventually. When things are, I don’t know, more stable over there.”
“Right,” he said, and he felt his spirits crank back up and it had nothing to do with the Xanax, or did it? “Because they’d just eat them now, right? Probably the minute they got off the boat.” The mountain zebra was almost gone in its native range, he knew that much, and the Grevy’s too. The kudu weren’t doing all that much better.
“Stable,” she repeated bitterly, sweeping her hair back. “It’s a joke over there. Places like Sudan or Somalia, even Kenya. Everything’s guns. Tribes. Guerrillas.” She paused to back up and give it an exaggerated Spanish pronunciation: “Gare-ee-yas, I mean. Not gorillas—gorillas we could use more of. A whole lot more. But that’s the mentality over there—shoot everything that moves.”
“Over here too,” he said.
She was silent a moment. Then she said, “What are you thinking of having?”