Part Wild by Ceiridwen Terrill

Author:Ceiridwen Terrill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Noah’s Ark

They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.

—Clint Eastwood

Thelma and Argos slept in Crystal’s spare bedroom with Ryan and me. Inyo had to stay outside on a chain except for short supervised visits indoors, and though I took her for rides in Hanna and our daily runs, I was gnawed by guilt. I added ten feet to her tether as if that made any difference. Chaining was supposed to be a temporary measure, but “temporary” was getting longer and longer.

For a month I searched the ads in the Reno Gazette-Journal, Reno News & Review, and the Big Nickel, looking for rental houses with fenced yards. Dizzy with advertisements, I saw their headlines in my sleep: “Rent Reduced!” “A Real Charmer.” “Doll House.” “Summer Special.” As I scanned the ads, inevitably reading “no pets” or “small dog ok,” empty hangers in the guest-room closet made a tin-tin sound when the dry summer wind blew through the window. I kept my clothes in a cardboard box and my doctoral exam books stacked on the floor in tidy columns, as if by staying always ready to go, we’d find a home faster.

A sign for a new housing development off U.S. 395 read, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now.” Other developments sprang up all over Reno, expanding farther into the sagebrush. Coyote Ridge Road and Cedar Waxwing Court appeared overnight. Leveled and staked, lands once covered in sagebrush and shadscale now lay smooth where new homes would go. At the finished houses, sprinklers soaked the carpets of newly unrolled sod. I took Inyo running in one of the neighborhoods under construction. Clouds of hot dust carried the arrhythmic clanking of hammers and the groan of heavy machinery down the slopes of Peavine. As we jogged up a recently paved swath of desert, automatic sprinklers pumping cht-cht-cht all night had created a steady runnel downhill, filling the gutter along a newly poured sidewalk. California quail chicks with their bobbing teardrop plumes floated like tiny sailboats, spinning down Archimedes Lane, unable to escape the flood. I tied Inyo to a pole and scooped up one quail chick, and then another and another, cradling them in my shirttails. Their chests heaved from exertion as I set the faint chicks under a clump of sagebrush in hopes that their parents would find them. Inyo watched me, quiet and intense. If she’d had her druthers, she’d have gobbled them.

Although I wouldn’t have wanted to live in one of those developments—the houses packed close and the “gorgeous view” soon to disappear once the next development crept up the face of Peavine—it occurred to me that if we bought our own place far outside the city, there wouldn’t be any neighbors to complain to animal control, no poisonings, no eviction notices, no more sleeping in a kind friend’s spare bedroom, no more phone calls—“I have your wolf in my garage.” And no more chains! I skipped the rentals and went straight to the For Sale ads.

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