The Animal Hour by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online

river house. He had sat on the porch there in the evenings and watched the view. The green Catskills rising against the pale and darkening sky. The beaver pond lying in the meadow just below, a black oval in the high grasses. He could see Julia floating on her back down there. Her long body white beneath the black water, her breasts breaking the surface of it. Her white thighs lifting and falling lazily as she kicked along. Sometimes he heard an explosive whap! as a beaver slapped its tail against the water to warn the others she was coming. More often, the creatures swam right over to her. He could see their V-shaped wakes, the domes of their heads. They would bump their black noses against her side and make her smile.
    And Perkins would sit on the porch, balancing a pad on his lap, twirling a pen in his hand. Soon, the evening star would shine dimly in the big sky above them. Other stars would show through the tendrils of mountain mist. Raccoons would waddle to the pond’s edge and drink while Julia floated with the beavers. And deer too would sometimes step from the grass and bow their heads gracefully to lap the water. There had seemed to him a luxury of life and death, night coming like that. And just as the light was almost gone, he would begin writing.
    This is the animal hour.
    The slow October flies, despairing on the porch chairs,
    blink into the shards of the sun they see setting.
    Blue and then a deeper blue ease into the air,
    and bats suddenly dive and butterfly up out of the trees …
    His last good poem. The last poem in the collection.
    â€œChrist.” He groaned, his head going back and forth on the pillow. He rubbed his eyes with both hands. He yawned. “So what did Nana want anyway?” he said.
    â€œWhat?” Avis was at the sink, the water running. She glanced over her shoulder, holding a pot under the stream.
    â€œI said, What did my grandmother want?” Perkins called. “What was the big catastrophe?”
    â€œOh,” Avis called back. “It’s your kid brother again.”
    â€œZachary?” Perkins came up slowly onto his elbow. “What the hell’s the matter with Zach?”
    Avis shrugged. “You know how Nana is.”
    â€œWhat?” he called. He couldn’t hear her over the water.
    â€œI say you know how Nana is,” Avis shouted back to him.
    â€œAgga agga agga,” said the baby, climbing up Perkins’s back.
    Avis placed the clean pot in the drainer. She shouted: “Apparently, he’s disappeared.”

D eep breaths , she thought.
    She was sitting on a bench in City Hall Park. One in the line of green benches that bordered the park path. She was sitting under sycamores. Their yellow leaves rattled above her in the breeze. Brown leaves and red leaves clattered by her feet along the pavement.
    Through the trees, to her right, was the parking lot and the domed, white-stoned Hall. A garden of grass and hedges was to her left, a fountain spraying up out of it. Before her were the tall office buildings on Broadway. Their windows caught the sun, flashed white through the red leaves of the oaks by the sidewalk. She could hear car engines gunning and the rumbling of buses, and the patter of pedestrians too. She could see the streaks of traffic through the low branches.
    She huddled in her tan trench coat. She bent over her knees, her arms crossed high on her thighs. She felt nauseous.
    Just take deep breaths, she told herself. Deep breaths.
    And don’t hear voices.
    Right. Deep breaths and no voices. And no gargoyles either.
    Yeah, lose those gargoyles too. Woof.
    She nodded: right. She took slow, steady, deep breaths. She tried to concentrate on the gray asphalt of the path in front of her. As soon as this pea soup blew out of her head, she thought … As soon as her stomach settled … she would take stock, she would figure this out.
    You’re not Nancy Kincaid.
    The black woman’s voice had been so