The puma rested on an artificial tree branch in his cage. His muzzle was massive, more like a dog’s than a cat’s. His whiskers were short, stiff bristles. He did not deign to notice anyone.
“He needs a shave,” Jim said.
Rachael said, “Growl at him and he growls back.”
They went on, plodding listlessly.
Suddenly Rachael said, “What’s there to do?”
He was at a loss to answer. “Lots of things.”
“No.” She shook her head. “There isn’t anything to do. I don’t mean just now, either.”
“Pretty soon you’ll have plenty to do. When the baby comes.”
But even to him that did not seem enough. He wanted to give a better answer than that.
“For a man,” he said, “a job is the most important thing. And I don’t see anything wrong with that. It’s something to focus yourself on. You get better at it, whatever it is. You learn more. You become more skilled. And you can expand that . . . it can be more than just a job.”
Rachael said, “I thought that was important, what you did. Not reading that commercial.”
“It wasn’t,” he said. “I was just tired. Fed up. Troubles with Pat.”
“That was the day we saw you,” Rachael said. “Did it have anything to do with us?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Did we upset you?”
“Yes,” he said, “you made me feel strange.”
“Then your job wasn’t the most important thing to you . . . you were willing to give it up for something else.”
He said, “Why did you give me that roll?”
“Because I liked you. I wanted to give you something so you’d know. You did a lot for us, with the program. We always listened. You were somebody we could trust. When you said something, it was true. Was that why you wouldn’t read the commercial? Was there something in it that wasn’t true? Sometimes they’re so one-sided: they just say what’s good about the product. Did you feel if you read it people would think you believed it, and you knew you didn’t believe it, you knew it wasn’t true? When I heard what you had done, I thought that was probably the reason. Because if you didn’t believe it, I knew you wouldn’t read it. You never told us anything that wasn’t true. If you had, if you lied to us, we wouldn’t have listened.”
“You shouldn’t expect that much from some guy sitting at a microphone,” Jim said. “Some disc jock with a bunch of pop tunes to play and three hours to kill.”
“All right,” she said, “who should we listen to, then? They used to tell us stuff in assembly . . . we read the same stuff in magazines and they say it in churches. There’s always a bunch of old ladies, like the PTA; they’re always telling us what to do. But I figured that out a long time ago. It’s what they want; It’s what would be nicest for them. Wouldn’t it be nice if we just curled up and died? If we never asked for anything, wanted anything—never bothered them. They have all this stuff that explains why they’re right. But you know, they’re always talking about dropping hydrogen bombs on the enemy. I hope when the war comes the bombs get dropped on them, too.”
“You mean us,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Them. What do you mean, us? What do we have for them to bomb?”
“Your lives,” he said.
“I don’t care. What difference does it make? What do we have to look forward to?” She plodded along, past the animals in their cages. “I read in a book about frontier women. They churned butter and they made their own clothes.”
“Would you like that?”
Ponderously, she said, “Who does that anymore?” She had a point.
“You know,” she said, “I know a girl, a Jewish girl. And she went to Israel. And she worked on a farm. And she was out there in the desert . . . she carried a gun while she worked. And they all ate together, and everything they owned belonged to all of them, and they didn’t get any money, they were part of this—” She hesitated. “I don’t know the name. It’s a Jewish word. Sort of a community settlement. And before that, she used to live like us, sitting around doing nothing, wasting her time with nothing to do. Like we all used to walk down to the show together on Saturday night, me and her and a bunch of girlfriends, and just sit there in the show, and usually it was a love picture—you know?—where they finally get together in the end, the good guy and the good girl, and you see him kissing her and everything’s wonderful. And they have this place up sort of in the country, with a lot of furniture and one of those big windows.”
“And two new cars. And the furniture is sort of blond and modem.”
“Well,” he said, “there are houses like that.”
Art, ahead of them, pointed and said, “H-h-hey, look over that way.”
Speeding along the street beyond the Zoo was a red-and-white convertible; in it were four boys, well dressed. The car was new and shiny, and the boys wore sweaters and their hair was neatly combed. With a scream of tires, the convertible turned a corner and disappeared.
“Bactrians,” Art said.
“Never mind,” Rachael said.
“They were, though.”
She said to Jim, “Did you know, I was engaged to Bill Bratton. When I was in high school. We went steady for a couple of months.”
“He’s president of the Bactrians,” Art explained. “Their families have a lot of d-d-dough; his father’s an attorney. A-a-and they have real new cars and they have these d-d-dances.”
Rachael said, “Bill used to take me dancing up to these expensive supper clubs. Sometimes we’d drive over into Mann County and up along the highway. We’d have dinner and then we’d dance. I even wore his club pin.”
“How’d you meet him?” Jim asked.
“At a school dance. They all used to come into the gym in a group, with their shoes shined and their hair combed; they looked pretty good.”
“They danced good,” Art said. “They took instructions.”
“Bill liked to rumba,” Rachael said, “and mambo, and I guess now they’re real good at the cha-cha-cha. And I liked to dance, so I used to go around with him. Art never could dance very good. I even had dinner one time up at the Brattons’ home, up on Nob Hill. They have a sort of mansion, with a gardener to take care of the lawns, and a library and a lot of rooms, and this huge table; there must have been twenty people sitting at it. And then later on, Bill got into a lot of trouble up in San Rafael.”
“Yeah,” Art said, “they made a mistake because the police up there d-d-don’t know who Bratton is, and they put a whole lot of B-b-bactrians in jail one night.”
“They were driving through San Rafael,” Rachael said. “They cut up the tires of cars and pushed some cars down a hill, and they beat up some people going home—it was real late—and the car they were in was stolen. But the police caught them on Highway 1 near Olema. And they had beer in the car. And usually their families could get them off, but not this time. And some of them paid a lot of fines and one kid, I guess he was over twenty-one, went to jail for a year. Bill got a suspended sentence. I wasn’t going around with him then. I stopped going around with him because of this initiation thing. They were down at Cannel, and I went along with Bill. I stayed at night with these girls, but during the day we went around and had a lot of fun. And then they wanted to make these guys they were initiating do these things . . . it was disgusting and I left, and that was the last time I went out with him. It was really awful. I mean, it wasn’t like people; I can’t say what some of the things were. But finally one kid was killed and then there wasn’t so much of that.”