"We need to talk," Judy said.
"Isn't that what we're doing now?" Nick asked, and she could hear the gentle teasing in his voice even without looking at his face.
Nick had said that it was only a few blocks from his house to the garage where his car had been stashed away, and it made sense to simply walk there. Nick was still limping slightly, making it easy for her to keep up with his strides. The streets seemed oddly deserted, considering it was still the early morning; Judy's own neighborhood would have been a bustle of activity, mammals streaming out of their homes to catch the trains or to sell goods on the streets themselves. Then again, the neighborhood where Nick's house was located was quite a bit nicer than hers; perhaps the well-heeled residents didn't need to bother themselves with anything as mundane as a day job. Although the sun had risen, the day was overcast with clouds that threatened rain, and the normal hum of the city sounded far off. It made it seem as though they were the only mammals for miles around, alone in the massive urban sprawl beneath a gloomy gray sky.
"Why are you really helping me?" Judy asked.
She had expected the fox to turn tail and run the moment she had promised to let him go, and while she was incredibly grateful that he was choosing to stick around, she had no idea why.
"You did save my life. I'm much obliged for that, by the way," Nick said.
"Only after I dragged you into this mess," Judy said heatedly, refusing to let it go.
Nick gave an exaggerated sigh, shaking his head. "There really is no pleasing you, is there, Agent Carrots?" he asked, "You complain when I don't want to help, and you complain when I do."
Despite his words, his tone was still mild, and Judy struggled to articulate her thoughts. "I just... I don't want you to feel obligated."
Nick didn't respond for a long moment, and when he did his question seemed entirely unrelated. "Do you know why I helped bring Mr. Big down?"
Judy thought for a moment. She had gotten the impression, from reading reports, that Nick had turned on the gangster only because the nets had been closing in around him, that he had been scrambling to save himself no matter the cost to his employer. Thinking it over again, though, she wondered if that impression had just been an attempt by the mammals who wrote those reports to make themselves look better, to make it seem as though Nick's betrayal had merely sped things along a little rather than being the crucial piece in taking apart the Zootopia Organization. It would have been embarrassing for the Bureau of Prohibition to admit that nearly five years of effort had yielded absolutely no useful results, that they had simply gotten lucky. "No," she admitted.
Nick was silent for a moment, continuing to walk forward, before he spoke again. "I was a lot like you, once," he said, "I was young and dumb and had a head full of ideas about duty and doing the right thing."
There was still no rancor in his voice, even with the entirely unveiled insult. When he didn't continue, Judy prodded him on. "What happened?"
She studied his face in profile as they kept walking, and she saw his lip twitch in a bittersweet smile at the memory. "They sent me overseas. My mother was so proud that her little kit was going to make the world safe for democracy, you know. You saw the picture."
Judy remembered the vixen's beaming face, and then thought of her own colleague at the Bureau. Douglas Ramses had come back from the war missing his left arm, and while Nick didn't seem to have lost any parts of his body it seemed equally clear that he had lost some part of himself, maybe the best part of himself, overseas. She could only imagine the horrors that the fox might have seen, which made it even more puzzling how he continued. "The army didn't trust predators to serve on the front lines, you see."
His ears twitched briefly backwards as he seemed to dredge up some bitter memory. "They were afraid we might not be able to control ourselves."
Nick turned his head and looked down at her, his mouth open deliberately wide to show off a glittering array of sharp teeth. "Afraid we might not be able to stop."
Judy had to force herself not to recoil from the display. If he wanted to, there was no telling the sort of injuries he could inflict, even without a weapon. She dimly recalled, from before the draft began, the debate over whether or not predators should be included. The war hadn't touched Bunnyburrows; since bunnies had been excluded from the draft the war had seemed distant and abstract, much like the far-off government that decided it was necessary. The farmers hadn't given much thought to the inclusion of predators, being far more concerned with the government's price-fixing that eroded their profits, but many of them had fully agreed with Senator Vaardvark. The fiery senator had made dire predictions of what would happen, should they allow predators to be trained for military service, and he found a willing audience. Judy remembered her mother scolding her father for his own fear of what predators could do, pointing out that there weren't even any predators in Bunnyburrows to rebel. Judy herself had thought it equally ridiculous; predators were no longer mindless savages any more than prey were meek victims.
Apparently oblivious to her thoughts, Nick continued. "I got assigned to work in a warehouse. But if that was how the army wanted me to help the war effort, I was going to do the absolute best I could. Why, you wouldn't believe how hard I worked. Even the captain noticed, and all she wanted to do was wait out the war as far away from the trenches as possible."
Nick's look became brooding as he described his former commander. "Captain Capricorn's family had enough pull for that, I suppose, but not much else. She was about the laziest goat you ever saw, though—her uniform barely fit, and it wasn't because she was tall. So she handed off more and more of her duties to me, and she promised me the world."
Nick shook his head in apparent disgust at his former naïveté. He briefly imitated a nasal coastal accent, "You help me, and I'll help you make sergeant, Private Wilde. This warehouse wouldn't run without you."
He dropped the accent and continued. "But I started noticing numbers that didn't add up. Little things, at first. A few cartons of cigarettes, ten pounds of sugar... Nothing that couldn't be overlooked as an error. It got to a point, though, where I knew that someone had to be stealing from the warehouse. And like a fool, I went to Captain Capricorn. She said it was probably the locals, but she promised me she'd look into it herself. That was that, for a day or two."
Judy felt as though she knew where Nick's story was going, but she couldn't interrupt. The fox's aloof mask was gone, and he made no attempt at hiding his loathing for what had occurred. One of his paws clenched into a fist, apparently unconsciously, and he kept talking, his voice low. "Then she asked me to take inventory one night. She told me that she had evidence it was a couple of young calves sneaking in, and all she wanted was for me to catch them and tell them to stop. I had picked up a little of the language, you see."
Nick swallowed hard, and they continued walking in silence as the fox apparently struggled with how to continue. Judy didn't know whether she should prod him to continue or allow him to gather his thoughts, but before she could make a decision he resumed his story.
"She locked me in that warehouse and set it on fire," Nick said, and while his tone was bland Judy could feel the undercurrent of emotions in his words.
She looked up at him in quiet horror. Judy remembered his panic when her apartment had been burning down around them; she had no idea how it would have felt to be trapped in a burning warehouse alone. Still, she could picture in her mind's eye how it must have happened, seeing Nick in his uniform dutifully counting cans and crates on shelves that stretched far around him when suddenly everything burst into flames.
"Somehow, I got out," Nick said.
A thin smile touched his lips, and he added, "Obviously," but it dissolved again as he continued.
"But Captain Capricorn had been working harder than I think she ever had before. She framed me and set it up so that she won either way: either I'd escape the fire that I set to hide my crime, or I'd be a victim of my own arson. She'd never written me a single commendation, either. She had a stack of paperwork going back months that all said I was a lousy soldier. I was still covered with ashes from the fire when the MPs cuffed me, muzzled me, and hauled me off to the stockade."
Nick's eyes appeared haunted, but he forced himself to go on. "I'd probably still be in a stockade if she hadn't gotten greedy. She got caught trying to sell goods stolen from the warehouse about a month later."
Judy was appalled at what his commanding officer had done and couldn't imagine the toll that his imprisonment must have taken on him, knowing he was completely innocent of the crime he was accused of. As she thought through the story, though, something occurred to her and she interrupted for the first time. "But if they caught her, why did you get a general discharge?"
The file that the Bureau had on the fox hadn't provided any real details on his military service, but she knew that general discharges were just a step short of a dishonorable discharge. Nick laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You think I'd get an apology? The war was all but over and the brass just wanted it to go away. I got kicked out and last I heard Capricorn's family pulled some strings to get her a medical discharge. Moved to Miaouseilles and started a family of her own."
"That's terrible!" Judy said, and her heart burned at the injustice of it all.
"That's what happened," Nick replied with a shrug that didn't seem as carefree as he probably meant it to be, "I ended up in Purris. There was nothing left for me here, anyway."
"No one?" Judy asked, remembering the photograph.
"No one," Nick agreed quietly.
Although Judy felt like asking what had happened to his mother, Nick continued. "I made up my mind then and there, once they let me out of the stockade. No one cared what I said in my defense. It was my word against Capricorn's and the word of a fox meant nothing."
He spat the word as though it was a curse, and maybe for him it was. "If all anyone was going to see was a liar and a criminal, I was going to be better at it than anyone. And you know what? I was."
Nick seemed more ashamed than pleased at his boast, but he didn't seem to be able to stop. "I could get anything, if the price was right. I learned all the laws, greased all the right palms... everything was Jake until I met Mr. Big. Back then, he was just Al Biggliani, a small-time importer, but he was betting big on Prohibition. He thought he could make a fortune, become powerful beyond his wildest dreams, but he needed someone with my skill-set."
Having seen how smoothly Nick was capable of handling other mammals, when he chose to, Judy had no doubts that he had been an incredible asset to the mob boss.
"We had a couple good years, at first. I ran the numbers and made some introductions and he took care of everything else. Mammals wanted alcohol, and all we were doing was supplying it. But as he built up the Zootopia Outfit, as he got more powerful, Mr. Big started getting paranoid. He was terrified that someone would betray him and bring it all crashing down around his head."
Considering that Nick had done exactly that, the shrew's fears didn't sound unfounded. "He had been reasonable, once, but he became crueler. He came up with elaborate tests of loyalty to see how far mammals would go for him, and he'd ice them if they failed."
From the reports she had read, Judy knew that one of Biggliani's favorite punishments had been to throw mammals into freezing water, only pulling them out once they had turned hard as rock. "He asked me to make him a skunk rug."
"A rug?" Judy asked, unsure if she had heard him right.
"A rug," Nick said, "Made out of a skunk who wasn't paying his protection money. A skunk who was very much still alive."
Judy felt sick at his words. Asking someone to do such a thing went beyond mere cruelty and into a realm she wasn't sure she could describe. Sadism didn't seem to cover it.
Nick looked into her eyes, and when he spoke he seemed entirely sincere. "I couldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. I couldn't lie to myself anymore. The stories I heard about what Mr. Big would order weren't exaggerations. They were the truth, and I couldn't be a part of it anymore."
"What did you do?" Judy asked.
"I went to the police, and they brought the Bureau in."
He smiled, and it almost seemed to have a measure of his normal cocksure charm. "I am pretty good at making deals, after all. Well, besides ending up in Podunk."
Judy could hardly believe what he had done. He had taken a terrible risk, thrown away what was clearly a life of luxury, all because there was a line that he refused to cross. If Mr. Big, or someone else at the top of his organization, really was behind the rash of murders, then she had exposed him to almost unimaginable danger. He had no reason to trust the government; the military had turned its back to him when it had been the path of least resistance, and even after he had handed the most notorious gang leader in history to the authorities on a platter, they had rewarded him by stranding him in the middle of nowhere. Then, after all of that, she had barged in, pulling him away from a life that had likely been dull but was at least safe.
"I'm sorry," Judy said.
It seemed woefully insufficient, but she meant it, as sincerely as possible. Nick looked down at her. "You weren't there," he said, "You didn't do anything."
She reached out one paw and touched his tentatively, trying to give him some of the comfort that he seemed to desperately need, even if he wouldn't say it. "I'm sorry it happened. I'm sorry I misjudged you."
He accepted the brief touch, and nodded slowly. "Me too," he said quietly, and neither one spoke another word until they reached the garage.
Author's notes:
The title of this chapter, "Rememb'ring," comes from a 1924 number by the Duncan Sisters. Given that this chapter consists mostly of Nick reminiscing, it seemed entirely appropriate.
There are a lot of little historical details to comment on in this chapter, as well as how I chose to have certain things play out. In the real world, the US army remained segregated until the signing of Executive Order 9981 by Truman in 1948, and it wasn't until 1954 that the last fully segregated unit was disbanded. During WWI, therefore, there were divisions that consisted entirely of African-Americans, most of which had white officers. While there were some African-American officers, they were extremely rare—less than 700 officers total out of about 350,000 African-Americans who served—and they weren't put in a position to be able to command white soldiers. While some of the segregated units did fight on the front lines of the war (including the Harlem Hellfighters, who fought as part of the French 16th Division and earned their nickname for never losing so much as a foot of ground or a single man to capture by the enemy), most of them were relegated to support roles like working in warehouses, unloading ships, and the like.
When Nick refers to "making the world safe for democracy," that's a direct quote of Woodrow Wilson, the US president who oversaw the American entry into the war.
While I've drawn on real world history for the participation of predator and prey in the war, the motivations are slightly different; as I've mentioned before, it's not a simple matter of prey being equivalent to white people and predators to black people. In the real world, the racism that motivated the US to keep its forces segregated was fueled largely by white supremacist views, concerns that mixed units would not be able to maintain their effectiveness, and the expectation that white soldiers wouldn't accept even the possibility of having to follow orders from black soldiers. While the equivalent of all of these factors would motivate the segregation of predator and prey, I thought it make sense for one of the bigoted ideas to be the fear that predators would be too good at fighting, that they would be so prone to bloodlust that they might lose control and start killing indiscriminately heedless of orders. Another difference between this version of events and the real world is the presence of a female officer, which would be unheard of in the US military in WWI. However, as I've previously noted, I figure that the division between predator and prey has far more weight than the division between male and female, particularly in a population so much more diverse than our own. Captain Capricorn, a goat, is named after the zodiac sign, which is a fish-goat hybrid.
Based on the years provided, Judy would have been 14 in 1917 when the draft started, while Nick would have been 22. Her recollection of a Senator Vaardvark is a reference to real world Senator James Vardaman, who was one of only six senators to oppose the US's entry into WWI and strongly opposed military training of African-Americans. Vardaman was an all-around terrible person who was a staunch believer in white supremacy; the following is a direct quote from him: "If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy."
While WWI started in 1914, one of the reasons for the US not getting involved until 1917 was a strong isolationist streak in the American public. The sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 by the German Navy did result in some calls to war due to the deaths of 128 Americans aboard the ship, but even that wasn't enough to fully turn public opinion. It was the German effort to recruit Mexico as an ally against the US and the German use of unrestricted submarine warfare that sank seven American merchant vessels that finally led to the US declaration of war.
The US government really did fix the prices of certain goods using the Food and Fuel Control Act of 1917, also called the Lever Act. It faced strong opposition from farmers out of the belief that it had set the price at which they could sell wheat too low, and cost Woodrow Wilson's party, the Democrats, dearly in the 1918 elections after he vetoed an attempt by Congress to raise that price.
While in the movie Bunnyburrows obviously has predator residents, I'm imagining the 1920s version to be more like Nebraska of the same time period—not much besides farmland and extremely homogenous.
Also, a tip of the hat to TrekkerTim for correctly intuiting that this version of Nick would have a reason to react so strongly to being caught in a fire. I was deliberately a little obtuse in my response to avoid giving anything away, but I'm glad that I was able to successfully convey the emotion of it.
MP stands for Military Police; although the current Military Police Corps started its existence in 1941, the US did have military police in WWI. The timing of Nick's story would put it around October of 1918 since the armistice was signed on November 11 of that same year, and as previously mentioned in chapter 5 he was discharged from the service shortly thereafter.
Miaouseilles is an awful French language pun on miaou, the French equivalent of meow, and Marseilles, the second largest city in France.
I think one of the defining aspects of Nick's character in the movie is that deep down he does want to be good, a motivation that I've tried to keep. This story has a somewhat grim take on the skunk butt rug, but I think murder would definitely be a line that Nick would not cross.
"Everything's Jake" was 1920s slang to indicate that things were going well.
One of my self-imposed limitations for this story is that, except for the first chapter, the narration is entirely from Judy's perspective. Considering that he was summarizing the events of his life from 1917 to 1925, there are certainly plenty of details that Nick glossed over as he told it, but I think that it works pretty well. This chapter does basically consists of two characters walking a few blocks while one of them does most of the talking, but I thought it important that this be its own chapter; the next chapter will see things start to pick up again. As always, though, I'd love to hear what you have to think.