by Terri Favro
Scott swings the bug into a huge, empty lot with pictures of animals fastened to the light stands, reminding visitors where their cars are parked. They park beside a rhino. Rummaging in his jeans, he pulls out two twenties and a ten. “First half, up front. You’ll get the rest after you’ve run with the dholes.”
With a rush of relief, Benny stuffs the cash in the front of his jeans—enough to cover two months’ rent. “What the hell’s a dhole?”
Scott grins. Pats Benny’s leg. “An Asian wild dog.”
“Dog?” Benny’s anxiety begins to ratchet up again, despite the money. “How big?”
“Thirty, forty pounds, maybe. They’re like a cross between a fox and a jackal.”
“Small, then,” says Benny, trying to slow the wild thumping of his heart.
“On the small side,” allows Scott. “But vicious. They surround their prey, run them down, and kill by disembowelling them. Sometimes they even chase prey into deep water to drown them, then fish them out and eat them. But don’t worry, I checked the zoo’s feeding times and their tummies will be full of horse meat and guinea pigs by the time we get there.” He offers Benny another gleaming smile. “They’ll give chase, because that’s their instinct. But as long you don’t show any fear, you should be fine. They usually only kill when they’re hungry, not for sport.”
At the front gate, Scott pays admission for the two of them, the ticket booth girl frowning. “You’ve only got about an hour. We close the gates early on Saturdays.”
“We won’t be long,” says Scott, flashing his hundred-watt smile. “We’re doing research for a book about wildlife. Just need to have a look at the Eurasian Domain. Could you give us directions?”
“Follow the purple paw prints. That’ll take you straight to Eurasia,” she says, pulling out a folded map. She traces the route for them with her finger.
As they walk the almost empty pathways, Scott lays out his plan: they’ll find the dhole exhibit, scope it out, then hide until closing time. “There should be lots of places to squirrel ourselves away in a zoo,” says Scott, grinning at his own joke.
Eventually, they reach a sign reading EURASIAN DOMAIN and an arrow cheerily pointing out the City of Dholes.
The dholes live, not in a cage, as Benny expected, but in a fenced enclosure, separated from visitors by a guardrail and a deep trench with a high concrete wall on one side and a grassy slope on the other. Small hills camouflaged by scrubby bushes and trees dot the field beyond the trench. Scott explains that the zoo created the habitat especially for the dholes, who are an endangered species. They burrow into the earth to build their dens, then tunnel between them to join them up. That way they are always ready to help one another.
“They’re pack animals, like wolves, but more like jackals in the way they hunt,” says Scott.
“What do they eat?” asks Benny.
“Meat, primarily. Ungulates when they’re in the wild—yaks, wild boar, that type of thing. The zoo dumps a box of live guinea pigs into their enclosure once a day. That way they can hunt their prey, the way nature intended.”
“How do you know all this?” asks Benny, trying to keep his voice from shaking.
“I used to be a reporter, remember? I’m good at digging up information. I only hope they’re not all sacked out in their dens, hiding from the rain,” frets Scott, training a pair of binoculars on the habitat. “Oh wait. There’s one now. Have a look.”
Scott hands Benny the binoculars. When he gets the animal in focus, he sees a dog-like animal with the pointed muzzle, bushy tail, and reddish fur of a fox. He remembers seeing foxes from time to time at the Andolini farm, hunting rabbits in the fields. This animal is much smaller than Fritzie the Doberman or any of the other terrifying hounds that continue to pursue Benny in his nightmares. In fact, the dhole is kind of cute. Puppyish, even. He feels mildly reassured, until the dhole yawns, exposing a mouth full of long, curved teeth. The kind designed for tearing your guts out.
Fuck, thinks Benny. He’s starting to picture himself sprawled on the ground with the dhole feasting on his internal organs. He puts a hand on his stomach, then over his groin.
Meanwhile, Scott scans the area with the binoculars, looking for hiding places. He settles on a dark green utility shed, tucked unobtrusively behind a thatched hut, so as not to break the illusion that they are actually in Eurasia, rather than north Scarborough.
Finding the shed unlocked, the two crouch behind a wheelbarrow and large sacks of fertilizer and grass seed. The smell reminds Benny of the Andolinis’ toolshed, where Rocco kissed him and Frank beat him up. He closes his eyes and rests his head on his bad knee. It still hurts sometimes when it’s damp.
He considers leaving. Claire needs him, he’ll say—that would probably be the truth. She looked pretty bad when he left the basement that morning. But Scott might ask for the money back. And without money for food and rent, he and Claire might as well be dead.
He’s got to see it through. But at least if he could get the entire hundred dollars from Scott, up front, he’d still have the cash, even if he chickened out at the last second. Then he’d just have to figure out how to get back downtown from the wilderness of Scarborough. It’s worth a try. If he has the money, he has options; if he doesn’t, he has to run with the dholes. Otherwise, who knows what would happen to Claire and her baby?
At five p.m., a loudspeaker announces that it’s closing time. All visitors are asked to leave. Benny hears Scott moving next to him.
“How long should we wait?” asks Benny.
“Not long. Dusk. They’ve usually finished their rounds by then.”
Benny decides to make his pitch for the full fee up front. “Look Scott, what you’re asking me to do, it’s a little dangerous.”
A pause. “Well, yeah. That’s why I’m paying you so handsomely, Ben.”
“Right, but—I think you should give me the whole hundred up front. It’s only fair.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“It’s just the way I like to do business,” says Benny.
Scott fishes in his pockets. Instead of money, he presses his car keys into Benny’s hand. “I don’t have the other fifty on me, but here’s the car for collateral. That do it for you?”
Benny fingers the keys and slips them into his jeans pocket. “Yeah, that’ll do it.”
When they come out of the shed at dusk, the rain has turned to a fine mist. The two walk side by side to the edge of the trench that fronts the dhole habitat. The dholes themselves are nowhere to be seen. Benny glances down at the deep trench. He figures he can hop the guardrail and drop over the wall, cross the trench, and scramble up the dirt slope on other side.
“Don’t be nervous, Giro,” advises Scott. “They’ll smell your fear.”
Benny looks at him. “Why are you calling me that?”
“Role playing helps get me into the creative headspace of my hero.” Scott pats Benny on the shoulder. “Off you go.”
Benny swings one leg over the guardrail, then the other, takes a deep breath, and lets himself drop into the trench. It’s a surprisingly long way down, but the ground is soft from the rain and, luckily, he’s wearing construction boots, a new rule the car wash reluctantly put in place after the government got on their asses. Once at the bottom of the trench, it’s an easy scramble up the dirt slope on the far side.
As Benny slowly pulls himself to standing at the top edge of the trench, he’s hit by a powerful odour. A wild animal smell of feces and rotting meat. Urine too. Dholes must mark their territory to warn off intruders, the way dogs do. Benny is acutely aware that he is an intruder.
When a dhole finally appears, it freezes and stares at Benny. At first, Benny thinks the animal is more frightened of him than he is of it. Then the first dhole is joined by a second. And a third. And a fourth.
The first dhole—the leader, Benny thinks�
�sniffs the air and takes a few cautious steps toward him. The other three crouch behind him. All the dholes are staring at him, fixedly. Their eyes are colder and wilder than a dog’s, more alien. Shark-like. Benny starts to wonder whether he and the dhole pack will stay locked in a staring contest all night—until he hears a low, steady, malevolent chorus of growls.
Stay calm, stay calm, he reminds himself. They smell your fear. Despite that, his heart picks up speed. He breaks into a sweat. Every hair on his body stands at attention. His knees began to shake and his teeth chatter. The pack leader stares him in the eye, opens his mouth, and makes a sound exactly like a human scream.
On instinct, Benny screams too.
The dholes charge at him as a pack, long legs flying through the air, jaws open, eyes fixed. Their hunting screams fill the air.
Benny turns to run, but forgets about the trench behind him. His foot comes down on nothing but air, and he goes over on his ankle. As he falls forward onto the muddy slope and starts to roll, he hears the screams of the pack surrounding him, and feels the pressure of powerful jaws clamping down on his foot. He’s still rolling, but now he’s dragging a dhole by his foot. He forces himself to look, expecting to see a bloody stump at the end of his leg, but the animal can’t pierce his safety boot. It gives Benny’s foot a frustrated shake, loosens its jaws, and tries to clamp down on his calf. Benny rolls out of reach.
He and the dhole are both at the bottom of the trench now, the other three circling. While he’s trying to deke out dhole number one, the teeth of dhole number two penetrates the flesh at the back of his leg. Benny screams to Scott for help and kicks at the top of the dhole’s skull with his boot. The animal retreats, but dhole number three snaps at Benny’s hand, catching a finger—not solidly enough to sever it, but the pain is so sharp it triggers a burst of adrenalin. Benny hurls himself up, leaping for the guardrail, not quite making it—but his fingertips find the edge of the concrete wall. He hangs helplessly, barely able to maintain his grip. Meanwhile, the dholes scream as they spring at him from below, jaws snapping.
The pain in his wounded hand is beyond excruciating but he’s more afraid of the animals eating him alive than he is of the pain. He sees Scott gazing down at him, slack-jawed, from the guardrail. His fly is open and he’s jerking off as he watches Benny fight for his life.
“Give me your hand! Pull me up!” Benny screams, but Scott doesn’t react. A white arc of semen hits Benny’s face. The message is clear: save yourself, or be disembowelled. Benny is not sure which outcome would be better for Scott’s book. He either wants to fuck his hero, or kill him. As he dangles by his fingertips, twin rivulets of blood trace down his arm and splash onto his face.
As Benny’s feet scrabble against the wall, trying desperately to gain purchase, Claire’s face flashes into his mind. Will she have enough strength to call for help from Vera or Marco if the baby is coming? He honestly doesn’t think so. If he dies, she dies, and the baby from the black ooze dies. This thought gives him the strength to pull himself onto the wall and over the guardrail, collapsing at Scott’s feet.
Scott stares at him, glassy-eyed. “Oh, Giro Giro Giro, my love,” he breathes. “Look at you, you’re injured, let me help you.”
Benny kicks out at Scott. “Stay away from me, you sick fuck!”
“No, no, no. Let me bind your wounds, sweet Giro,” he coos, like some sort of fairy queen from a fantasy novel. Scott tears off his wet shirt and wraps it around Benny’s leg as a tourniquet, still cooing at him, when they hear the police sirens. The sound yanks Scott back to reality.
“Run!” yells Scott, abandoning Benny on the ground.
Benny sits up and watches Scott run for the utility shed. What a stupid move. Doesn’t he realize that’s the first place they’ll check?
Slowly, Benny staggers to his feet and limps into the shadows, leaving a blood trail behind him. Once he’s off the paved walkway, in the darkness of the trees and bushes and earth, his blood will be invisible to all but the dholes themselves. He can still hear them growling and screaming at the bottom of the trench.
Quietly and steadily, he keeps moving, ignoring the agony of his mangled finger and punctured leg. In the distance, he can hear voices and footsteps. Flashlights ripple along the pathways. Benny doesn’t move faster or slower, just keeps heading for his goal: the parking lot.
When he reaches the front entrance, he sees a zookeeper and a cluster of cops gathered under a light stand just outside the ticket booth. Hands on their hips, laughing among themselves, the cops seem surprisingly relaxed.
“What is it this time? Someone taking tea with the tigers?” asks a cop in a voice that makes it sound as if he’s there every night. “Or did some pervert expose himself in the giraffe cage?”
The zookeeper clears his throat. “This is a modern zoo, officer. No cages of any kind. In answer to your question, we believe an intruder breached the dhole enclosure.”
“What the hell’s a dhole?”
“Asian wild dogs. Quite dangerous when provoked.”
“Maybe they took care of the intruder on their own,” suggests one of the other cops.
“If so, we’ll need a coroner,” answers the zookeeper. “They’re fierce, merciless predators. I just hope the pack hasn’t been liberated by this individual or we could have a civil emergency on our hands.”
The cops settle down when they hear that.
“Okay, let’s take a look,” says the lead cop. As they walk past Benny’s hiding place, he unholsters his sidearm.
Benny listens to their voices disappear into the distance. He’s worried that they’ve already impounded the VW but when he looks out into the parking lot, there it is, quietly waiting beside the picture of the rhino.
Leg screaming, Benny limps to the car, his bleeding hand clamped under one armpit. When Scott’s key slides smoothly into the door lock, he almost drops to his knees in relief.
Once in the driver’s seat, he considers waiting a few minutes to see if Scott shows up, but rejects that idea. When you run with wild dogs, you better be ready to leave the stragglers behind. Especially a straggler willing to sacrifice his friend for the sake of a good story. Benny slips the key in the ignition and peels out of the lot as quickly as the sewing machine engine will allow.
8. NOBODY’S BABY
TORONTO, DON VALLEY PARKWAY, OCTOBER 1975
BENNY ONCE SAW a headless chicken run itself to death on severed nerves. That’s why he resists the urge to floor the gas pedal, forcing himself to stay under the speed limit all the way home from the zoo. He doesn’t want to lose his head and attract attention from cops or anyone else.
To calm the tango in his heart, he tunes in to an Easy Listening station. Dionne Warwick is singing about guys who give her pneumonia every time they kiss, then never bother to phone her. Sounds like Scott, thinks Benny. I’ll never fall in love again again, either.
Benny navigates the tangle of Toronto’s outer suburbs by instinct. If you’re lost, aim for the giant prick they’re building, Scott once told him. He’s relieved to finally see the almost-completed tower rising from the edge of Lake Ontario.
At a stoplight, he examines the leg wound through the rip in his jeans. He’s still oozing blood but the bite is not as bad as he imagined—the dhole’s teeth didn’t go deep. The fucker did more damage to his hand, ripping open the flesh of his middle finger above the knuckle.
He rewraps his T-shirt around his left hand, grips the steering wheel with his right, and fixes his eyes on the horizon. No matter what’s ahead of him, nothing could be as bad as what he’s just left behind.
He cuts the engine in front of Scott’s house. All the windows are dark. Even the security light at the front door is off. Benny toys with the idea that Scott’s wife might have left him, once she heard from the cops. You fucking asshole, Monica would yell when Scott called her to bail him out. She’d pack her ba
gs and go, leaving a void in Scott’s life that Benny would have been more than happy to fill, before Scott tried to feed him to the wild dogs. There are worse things than living in a big house with a good-looking bottom who has money and lots of books, even if he is a homicidal maniac.
Benny locks up the VW, leaving the keys in Scott and Monica’s mailbox so no one can claim he stole the car. With his bloodied shirt back on, he limps for home, grateful not to meet anyone on the dark street.
Letting himself in to his basement flat, he hears a sound, sharp and high and feral, so alarmingly similar to the cry of the dholes that he wonders if one of the pack tracked him home. Claire is curled on the mattress, knees to chest, hugging herself. The wild animal sounds are coming from her.
“Claire?”
She lets out a ragged sob. “Benny, where you been? It hurts so bad. I thought you’d never come back. I think I’m gonna die.”
Crouching beside the mattress, he rests his hand on Claire’s cheek. In the weak glow of the crookneck lamp, she looks as puffy and washed-out as the pillow she’s lying on. Her skin feels chilled and damp. That can’t be good.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” he says firmly, picking up his jacket from the floor. “Can you walk?”
He expects Claire to put up an argument—she hates anything to do with doctors and nurses—but she struggles to her feet, offering no resistance as Benny gently tugs a baggy sweatshirt over her head. Trailing from his hand like a leaky balloon, she shuffles and sighs and weeps as they make their way down Robert Street to College, stopping now and then to catch her breath, bending over with her hands on her knees while Benny rubs her back. The five-minute walk to the hospital takes them almost half an hour.
The Emergency Room at Doctors’ Hospital is packed. Not one of the blue plastic chairs is empty. Benny stares down a kid holding his arm against his chest at a funny angle, who eventually stands up and mumbles something about giving his seat to Claire. She lowers herself into it with a sigh, then looks up at Benny, eyes wide. “I feel funny.”
