Lights Out in the Reptile House

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Black cars were passing through the smaller streets. You could see them beneath the streetlights. You could hear them like the wind beneath your window. This was the kind of country that took things away from you, Leda had told Karel. He lay in bed listening to the cars and remembered her telling him the story of the gardener next to her on the bus who had said, “Strict rulers don’t last for long,” talking to himself, talking about the weather, about anything, who knew? And the man opposite him, whom Leda had not been paying enough attention to, had leaned forward and cleared his throat and said with noticeable emphasis, “I don’t quite understand what you mean by that, Mr. — ?” And the whole bus had gone silent.

But Leda had seen beatings. Karel had seen his room, his father, the Reptile House. The next morning he rode into the country on the back of Albert’s truck and they stopped in a dense-canopied ironwood stand. Albert was breeding giant iguanas in a new experimental way for the Reptile House. The iguanas were arboreal and herbivorous, so they usually stayed in the trees, he explained, and since he supplemented their diet they remained in that one stand. He tore open one of the thirty-pound bags of feed and inverted it, spilling rich red pellets everywhere, and the trees filled with sound, the leaves in the canopy rushed with the movement, and while Karel watched, the six-foot iguanas rushed down the central branches and then the trunks, scrambling and sliding out of everywhere like black magic, like the invisible suddenly made visible at his wish.

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