They should just get it over with. Let him pump away for five minutes with those soft, unexercised forearms gathering her up in some dense unmowed glade and then maybe they could take a selfie together and move on. Just this morning she had asked Masha for tweezers to pluck her eyebrows into shape, and before she left her bungalow had carefully checked her teeth in the mirror. Still, she wouldn’t dress up for him. Let him eat fleece.
Animals began to present themselves as they walked. A golden ruffed hawk floated directly above them, surrendering to an updraft. “That must be nice,” Dee said. “To just coast.”
“I glided once,” the Actor mumbled, but he wasn’t even sure if that was the right verb to describe what he had done once over a patch of the Mojave Desert, the sun like fire on his back.
They passed another sheep meadow, this one a much more ramshackle version of the one near Senderovsky’s estate. A black sheep was sunbathing on its haunches away from its comrades. That was me as a child, the Actor wanted to lie to her, but restrained himself. He had been sleepless and working through his own biography all of the previous night in preparation. They passed a rabbit who stopped in fear as they approached and craned his thin, breakable neck, his cottontail shaking miserably. Perhaps that too was me at some point, the Actor thought. But at which point? A deer on the road stopped, looked at them, then very slowly and elegantly lifted up one leg as if he was about to play the piano.
“A deer,” the Actor said. Great. He was identifying common animals now. “Beautiful,” he added to qualify it.
They passed a man petting a horse over a fence with great tenderness. “Hey, Echo,” the man was saying, looking deep into the saucers that showcased the vastness of the animal’s soul. （On the way back, they would see the horse, alone, looking them over expectantly and licking his sensitive, prehensile lips.） “You have a real pretty pony there,” Dee said to the besotted man, who waved friendly to them.
They passed a country family, their faces glum and consumptive, the kids wearing oatmeal-colored sweatshirts with the names of local public schools. The adults glared at them hatefully, assuming they were from the city, until Dee said, “Hi, y’all. They say it’s gonna get warmer any minute now.” And then there followed an exchange of waves and minor humanity. “Ed loves it when I engage like that,” Dee said to the Actor.
“I bet you keep him safe on your walks,” the Actor said.
“We passed a pickup with a Confederate flag that read HERITAGE NOT HATE. Hoo-boy, those folks looked about ready to murder Ed, until they saw me.” They both laughed.
“What would we eat if they murdered our chef?” the Actor said. “Oh, look at that. A box turtle.”
“She’s a snapper,” Dee said, bending down to the creature beginning her long and dangerous journey across the road. “Wonder what she’s up to. It’s too early for her to be traveling to lay eggs.”
“Poor thing’s going to get run over,” the Actor said. He decided to grab the prehistoric animal by the shell and carry her over to the other side of the road where a pond the consistency of split pea soup awaited her.
“Hold up, Ranger Rick,” Dee said. “Don’t just grab her like that. We had them alligator ones that could really take a finger off.” The Actor sighed. He wished he had had that level of engagement with nature growing up and the vocabulary to articulate it. Senderovsky’s little girl had said something strange the other day （among the many strange things she would say）， “You can always trust nature.” He didn’t know if it was true, but he envied the little girl her youth in the country. He usually avoided roles that were set in the vast amphitheaters of the West because the silence of nonhumans mystified him. But Dee was now talking to the turtle.
“Here you go, honey,” she said. “Now I’m just taking you by the back of the shell, not going to touch your tail, sweet pea. Don’t want to hurt your spinal column. And now I’m turning you around just so I can drag you better. So you’re looking backward, but you’re going forward.” The Actor watched the animal’s Jurassic legs scramble against the tarmac as her shell left a wet trail across the road. She snapped her jowls behind her once, but soon succumbed to Dee’s measured motion.
A black pickup truck slowed down and would not pass until the operation was concluded. It sat there in the middle of the road, its engine growling with expectation. The animal’s eyeballs turned continuously within their scaly enclosures, showing all black or all white, and the Actor wondered if she was scared. He wanted to comfort the creature, but did not know how. To pet it? The shell was an obvious impediment, and nothing about “snapping turtle” suggested an easy exchange of warmth. One could only do what Dee was doing.