“Gonna be busy this afternoon?”
“Who knows,” Rachel says. “We did get a bunch of new videos in, so maybe, yeah.”
“Okay if I come in for a while? I could keep an eye on the rats for you.”
“Better not today, Sam. I’ve got some stuff I gotta get sorted. The rats are fine for now.” She looks down at her hands. She runs her thumb over the strap on her book bag, polishing the buckle. I think how much she looks like the woman in the lithograph: pensive, a little lonely, waiting to fly away.
“You know, Rach’, I think we ought to go out sometime,” I venture.
She doesn’t seem to get my meaning. “Go out where?”
“Go out. To dinner or something. A movie.”
“Like on a date?” She’s surprised. A new light creeps into her face, a wary look.
“Well, not exactly, but--”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Sam,” she says slowly. “I mean, we’re really good friends...” I imagine the woman in the lithograph with her hand on the horse’s mane, ready to swing up into place. “And you’re a great lab partner, but...” The horse’s wings unfold.
I hurry into words. “Yeah, you’re probably right. We’re just friends. Besides, I’m pretty busy with school and all.” I give the Rocket Sled’s engine a little revving. “And you’ve got to work.” She nods.
“So,” I change the subject, getting businesslike, “what d’you think about the snake?”
“About Sid?”
“Yeah. D’you think we ought to give him the rats?”
She’s distracted. “I don’t know. I can’t think what else to do with them.” She sighs.
We sit for another minute or two, and I begin to wonder if she remembers where we are, that I’m double-parked, that she has to go to work, but then she says, “My mom likes to tell this story: When I was about five years old, my grandmother bought me a pair of gerbils as pets. They were supposed to be two females--I named them Betty and Girl--but it turned out Betty was a male, because after about a month, Girl started having babies. Soon, we had a lot more gerbils than we knew what to do with.
It was summer, and my grandmother was having a yard sale, and my mother suggested that I put the gerbils in the sale, with a sign on them that said ‘Free.’ Well, little entrepreneur that I was, I insisted that we sell them for five dollars each, which is what I knew the pet store charged. We tried this for a while, but nobody bought any, so my mother crossed out the ‘Five dollars each’ and wrote ‘Free’ on the sign.
I threw a fit. Screamed. A real tantrum. My mother grabbed me and carried me into the house to calm me down. She and my grandmother tried to reason with me. Nothing worked. I demanded my five dollars each. Finally, my mother threatened to turn the gerbils loose in the foothills in back of our house. According to her, I burst into tears, cried, “NOOOO!” and said, ‘You know what happens. A big bird comes swooping down, swooping down, swooping down!’ My mother said that I made wild diving motions with my arm to illustrate the swooping bird. She said it was so dramatic, so perfectly descriptive of all those nature shows you see on the Discovery Channel, that she and my grandmother both burst out laughing, which, of course, made me angrier and set me off crying again.”
Rachel stops talking and stares out the front window of the car. A man with a little dog on a leash comes out of the Post Office across the street from Pegasus. He pauses to adjust the clasp on the dog’s collar and unknot a kink in the leash. Rachel and I watch him.
“So what finally happened?”
She turns to me as if coming back from a long way off. “To the gerbils?”
“Yeah. Did you give them away?”
“No,” she says, and watches the man move off down the sidewalk. The dog follows reluctantly. The man gives a few sharp jerks on the leash, and the dog picks up the pace, its short legs pumping quickly to keep up. “No,” she repeats, her voice floating softly back into memory. “A couple of weeks went by and the weather got warmer, and one afternoon my mother and I climbed the hill behind our house with all the gerbils in a box--even Betty and Girl. And we let them go. I put Girl down on the ground, and she looked around for about two seconds, and then she ran under a big sagebrush. They all did. Never saw any of them again.”
“And the ‘swooping down’? Didn't you worry about the big bird?”
“No. Not that I remember. Somehow, by then, it seemed like the right thing to do. Kinda inevitable.” She pauses. “You know what I was feeling while Sid ate that gerbil? Respect. I was feeling respect for a snake. He was just so much more in charge than the gerbil was. More powerful.”
Far off down the block, the man and his dog are tiny figures, miniatures fit for a doll’s house. They turn the corner and disappear. “Actually,” says Rachel, “the thing I remember most about that day on the hill was the sagebrush. How rich it smelled. Rich and dusty. And how Girl ran away from me right under it, like she knew just where she was going.”
I lean over Rachel and open her door. “You’re gonna be late for work,” I say. She gets out and gives me a little wave goodbye. She shifts her book bag onto her shoulder and walks to the front door of Pegasus. I hear the jingle of the elephant bells as I drive away.
[To order a copy of the book, Walking Pocatello, call the Idaho State University Bookstore, (208) 282-3237, or send me an email.]
