A Carnivore's Inquiry

by Sabina Murray

  My job was to entertain the son of the future ally—someone named Tim, who was twenty years old, and happened to be home that weekend from Bowdoin. I had no idea what Tim and I were supposed to talk about (I was in the eighth grade) and as I greeted the guests at the door, standing with a bland smile between my father and mother, pictured the evening as a complete loss. Tim, however, turned out to be attractive in a boyish, uncultivated way that must have appealed to me in my youth. He had a cut on his forehead, misbehaving hair, and a crumpled jacket. His father was clearly disappointed in him and I felt the blood surging into my hand as I shook his. The adults went to sit in the living room and I waylaid Tim, placing my hand boldly on his arm.

  “How’d you get the cut?”

  “This?” Tim’s hand flew up to his forehead. “Hockey puck.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said and smiled. “Do you smoke?”

  “Do you?”

  I gestered to the door with my head. As we were leaving, my father—aware of my precocity—called after me. “Where are you going?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Tom, I mean Tim, wants to see your golf clubs. Apparently, he’s heard all about them.” My father’s golf clubs were legendary. I smiled my best pissed-off-teen smile, and my father turned back to his group, eager to get the attention away from me. I caught Tim looking longingly at the fridge. “There’s beer on the porch,” I said. It was winter and we usually left the extra beer there to stay cool and leave room for other things.

  The night air was cold, but with no wind I found it pleasant, even in my light sweater. I pulled two beers out from the stack of six-packs and Tim opened them with a well-worn bottle opener he had on his key chain.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Sixteen.”

  “I thought you were younger.”

  I grabbed his face and kissed him. A moment later I asked, “How old do you think I am now?”

  “Eighteen,” he said. “Definitely eighteen.”

  I began walking to the garage. His eyes were following me. “Do you want to see those golf clubs?” I asked.

  We returned to the party forty-five minutes later. My father was annoyed. He’d been waiting to seat everyone for dinner and the servers, hired for the evening, were peering around the doorway to the kitchen with eager, anxious faces. I stood beside him, aware of the smoke that must have been rising off my clothes.

  “Where were you?” he whispered.

  “Just doing my part for the family business.”

  My father looked back to the front door where Tim was rebuttoning his jacket, this time correctly. My mother, who was twirling an empty champagne flute in her fingers, snorted a laugh and then coughed to cover it up. I could see her smiling at me over my father’s shoulder.

  The party broke up around midnight. Tim managed some sort of awkward, groping kiss behind someone’s minivan as his parents were leaving. I remember entertaining a fantasy of visiting him at college, but the visit was unlikely, given my age. I stayed out late drinking beers by myself, smoking. My parents had gone to bed, or so I thought. I was just coming inside when I saw my father rushing down the stairs. He was grimacing and he had his hand cupped over his neck. I could see he was bleeding. I knew he was going for the first-aid kit, which we kept in a kitchen cabinet.

  “Dad,” I said, alarmed, “what happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “But your neck...”

  “An accident.”

  I raced up the stairs, leaving my father to minister to himself. My mother was sitting at her dresser wrapped in a towel. I watched her reflection in the mirror. She was putting on a face mask that was clay green. Her hair was held back in a headband that made her hair fan out around her face. She looked like a marmoset.

  “Mom,” I said cautiously, “what happened?”

  “Do I sense disapproval?” she said, uncaring.

  “His neck is bleeding.”

  “Oh that,” she said. “An accident.”

  I stood in the doorway. My father’s profanity echoed faintly from the downstairs bathroom. I shook my head. “What were you fighting about?”

  My mother turned and looked at me squarely, her glossy green face and sharp black eyes expressionless and calm. “Katherine, what makes you think we were fighting?”

  And then she smiled.

  13

  I awoke in my car. On the passenger seat were two packs of Raleighs and the Best of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The ghost of a headache still lurked; light bothered me and my mouth was dry. I got out of the car and stretched. The night before, I had taken my keys—which were digging into my leg—out of the front pocket of my jeans and set them on the dash of the truck, something I now regretted. Things had gotten out of hand and I’d left in a hurry. And the keys were forgotten. The Rabbit didn’t lock anymore, so I hadn’t thought about them at all.

  I was going to have to go back.

  The sun was barely up but already the chug and grind of trucks could be heard from the pumps as well as the steady rise and fall of vehicles soaring by on the highway. I flipped down the sun visor and took a look in the mirror. My hair was matted to my skull, showing that my head came to a bit of a point. I was shockingly white. I looked like I needed a shower and a pint of blood. I lit a cigarette and got up.

  The truck was parked out on the cracked concrete, far from the rush of things, but visible from the pumps and the passenger car lot. I began to walk. I was just going to get my keys and leave. What was so difficult about that? I stopped to stub my cigarette onto the concrete, then stalled. From where I was standing, I could see a cowboy boot sticking out in front of the truck, visible just beyond the front left tire.

  I squatted and lit another cigarette. The boot was not moving.

  Maybe the boot was just a boot. Then I saw the boot begin to jerk a bit, then it was still, then it jerked a couple of times again. I was trying to figure out what a person might do to have that kind of movement—a violent dream? masturbation? epilepsy?—when I saw a small, ill-defined shadow extend beyond the tire. Behind the shadow, pushing it along through the gray morning light, I saw the thin snout and hopelessly delicate paws of a coyote. Our eyes met and she bared her teeth. I smoked. Her jaws were dripping with fresh blood.

  I headed down east on Route 70. Indianapolis—according to the atlas—was a three-hour drive. At around ten that morning the highways began to transform from the eternal ribbon to the dip and swoop of broad, urban concrete. I desperately needed a break and decided to take the turnoff for the zoo. If I sat on a bench there, no one would bother me.

  An infant giraffe had just been born the week before and there were signs celebrating the new addition, pointing in exuberant zoo ways to the giraffe corral. I had a headache, just a small one, so I bought a cup of searing hot coffee and walked in the white sunlight wherever the arrows pointed. Once my father had brought me to the zoo. We were in Chicago—some odd combination of business trip/mother sees a new specialist/family vacation—where I had spent the days ignored either on the smooth blue vinyl of a hospital couch, or in the waiting room of the doctor, where I remember one reanimated woman coughing and coughing into a roll of paper towels. She did not rip the towels off, but merely crumpled the tar- and fluid-soaked sections into a paper bag, coughing through the whole roll and regarding me with her rheumy eyes all the while. She was challenging me to say something, but I looked away. In an issue of Family Circle I read how to make a cake that looked like a jack-o’-lantern or a ghoul or Dracula’s castle. You could make fangs for your child’s costume out of marshmallows. Mother must have been in the office for close to two hours, because my father showed up—hassled and unamused—to take me to the zoo.

  He had his briefcase with him and found a bench to sit on, telling me to meet him in an hour. We would have lunch then. (Actually he looked at his watch and said, “You have sixty minutes. After that, I suppose I will have to feed you.”) I headed for the big cats. There was a long hallway, the cats’ inner sa
nctum—where they assembled together for meetings, I supposed. They were separated in their rooms and protected by bars that were clear and almost invisible. All of these rooms led to larger pens where the cats, exposed to the elements, could entertain the usual horde of popcorn-chomping children with their antics—leaping off rocks, licking their paws, swimming gracefully through a pool, or lounging in the low branches of a tree. All of these, except for the swimming, I’d seen Claude perform around the yard (Claude was still alive then) but without the menace. The menace intrigued me. I was down the food chain. My big eyes were the eyes of a mouse, or maybe something more exotic. A monkey or a lemur. I was dinner. The cats’ inner sanctum was as a quiet as a church, because the weather was mild and most of the cats were displaying themselves out of doors. I stood in front of the lion house, where a mural of an African plain had been rendered, although none too convincingly. Perhaps they were scared the lions would try to escape into it and bump their heads. I was considering this when I heard a low rumble that sounded like someone running their thumb down the teeth of an enormous comb. I was leaning over the barrier (in my recollection my face was quite close to the bars) when an enormous lion with a head the size of a dishwasher came strolling out to meet me. He smelled of fresh meat and flicked his tail in a casually inquisitive way. I could see, even in his slow gait, the sinking of his massive weight into his muscles, the pull of gravity about his sides, the luxury of his fur. His mane was long, tousled, and wavy. I could see myself reflected in his deep brown eyes—the whole of me—my distorted big head, diminishing pigtails, shiny Mary Janes poking through the bars of the barrier. He took me in without a blink and I stood returning the gesture. And then he roared.

  That roar sounded like the ocean breaking in a storm and I’m sure it moved every hair on my head and dried out my corneas. That roar put me in a warm cloud of half-digested meat and sticky fangs. That roar was a biblical wind, a calculated reminder of God’s omnipotence and my futility. That roar seemed to last for ten minutes until I forgot where I was and then remembered, only to find myself running as fast as I could away from it, past a nanny who was clucking into a stroller, past a little boy scraping gum from his shoe, past a group of muttering Japanese consulting a map, and into the all-cleansing sunlight.

  Here, at the Indianapolis Zoo, I watched the baby giraffe dancing first to the right and then forward, then rushing back to its mother, as if on bamboo stilts. My bench was shaded by a tree and the cold air, through my nostrils, was soothing my headache. The coffee was almost gone. A group of schoolchildren in uniform were lined in two perfect queues waiting to be marched somewhere. An indignant African bird called loudly from a netted enclosure, furious to find itself in the Midwest. My left leg was falling asleep and the cold metal of the bench had worked its way through my jeans, chilling my rear. I thought, perhaps, I should look for the wolves.

  The wolf pen was a ten-minute walk from the giraffes. I suppose wolves make giraffes nervous and the distance was a form of courtesy. The wolf pen was a depressing affair. Perhaps because wolves were native to Indiana, the zoo did not feel the need to comfort them with a jutting ledge of rock or aggressive foliage. It was enough to just mark out a square of the fertile, unremarkable Indiana soil and to say that this was home. As if in response to this, a large male wolf lay panting in the sunshine, overcome with ennui. His side collapsed and expanded, collapsed and expanded, with surprising drama and as he breathed I could see his impressive fangs, which struck me as right out of Red Riding Hood, although other than that, he looked just like a large, lanky dog. There was a reek to the pen—urine, musk, despair—that quickly made me low. I was once again confronted with the horror of being imprisoned. I was jittery, too much coffee and too little sleep, but I decided to free that wolf. There was no one around and I thought if I could only slip behind the building, I could make my way in. There had to be some sort of opening for feeding the beasts. I would let him out and soon, loping through the valleys and piny forests, his howl would call the moon into the sky. His brethren would join him in a lupine circle and a chorus of throaty song would shiver the pine needles and cause the coursing spring-melt streams to glitter magically in their beds...

  All this was the result of a willful, aggressive, romantic denial. It wasn’t even spring, only fall. And, most importantly, I was in the heart of a large city. My freed wolf would probably knock down some garbage cans, go after a cat, and then get hit by a truck while trying to navigate the freeway. But this was far from my mind when I found the door to the feeding area ajar and stepped inside. Inside was dark. I stood still, waiting for my eyes to adjust, overwhelmed by the stink and somewhere, to my left, alerted by the shuffling of something nearby. The light was coming from down the room, which was slowly revealing itself to be a narrow hallway flanked by doors on either side. Something was scraping its nails along the floor. I thought it might be a rat, but it was too large. Also, the gait was awkward, unbalanced. I froze in place, my hands flexing nervously at my sides. And then I felt a cold, wet nub press into the back of my hand.

  “Aahh,” I screamed. Someone flipped a light switch and soon the shivering neon bars lit up the whole room. A zookeeper was running toward me.

  “Shut the door. He’ll get out,” he yelled.

  “What?” I said. I saw a young wolf sitting beside me; it must have bumped my hand with its nose. I went quickly to the door and shut it.

  “What are you doing in here anyway?” The zookeeper was about forty, overweight, with an odd fringe of soft red hair that made him look tonsured.

  “I was looking for the restroom,” I said. I looked down at the young wolf, who was still sitting. Then he got up and began to limp over and I saw that the wolf only had one hind leg. He could still move quite quickly and hopped over with agility and speed. “Is he friendly?” I asked.

  “That depends on your definition of friendly,” said the zookeeper.

  The wolf’s hind leg seemed to grow right out the middle of his hindquarters, but at closer inspection, I could see the nub of a missing leg and the twisted angle that the other leg had grown in to accommodate the wolf’s weight.

  “My definition of friendly is that he won’t bite,” I said.

  “I think you’re safe,” said the zookeeper. He was full of bravado and had a superior, nerdy manner. I guessed that he had no friends and probably frequented Renaissance festivals. “His name’s Leto.”

  “That’s an interesting name,” I said.

  The zookeeper gave me a condescending harrumph. “It’s from Dune.”

  “Yes?”

  “Haven’t you read it?”

  “Dune, no.” In my mind, I had already changed the wolf’s name to Quequeg.

  “Dune is the greatest book ever written.”

  “Have you read every book?”

  “I’ve read enough.”

  I smiled coldly and returned my gaze to the tripedal wolf. “What happened to him?”

  “Actually, a tiger got him.”

  “A tiger? How did that happen?”

  “We had the cubs out for some school thing and Leto got away. We found him near the big cats. He’d already lost the leg.”

  I looked into his gorgeous gray eyes. Something yellow glittered there, a memory of evil. “Why isn’t he with the other wolves?”

  “The public doesn’t want to see a three-legged wolf. And the other wolves probably won’t like him at this point. I’ve kept him back here with me for the last three months, but he’s getting too big...”

  “Are you going to adopt him?”

  “Leto? He looks cute, but I know too much about wolves to keep him in my house. Besides, the zoo would never allow that.”

  “So what will happen to him?”

  “I’m going to have to put him down.” Yeah, this guy was a real man, unsentimental, tough.

  “You can’t do that.” I had the urge to pat the wolf, but something made me think better of it.

  “You better go,” said the zooke
eper. “The public aren’t allowed back here, and this chitchat is nice and all, but I have to feed the hyenas.”

  “All right.”

  “I hope you don’t mind showing yourself out,” he said, too busy (or at least he wanted me to believe so) to bother with me. “And don’t let Leto out.”

  “Righto!” I said, surprising myself with the chipper tone of my voice. Also with the anglicism, which had come from some heroic quarter, a childhood Kiplingesque programming that encouraged cavorting with wild animals.

  Of course, I had no intention of leaving Leto in the zoo to be lethally injected, three legs or not. I had a blueberry muffin in my pocket, which I had been meaning to eat, but a truer, higher purpose for the humble pastry had suddenly revealed itself to me.

  It wasn’t hard to convince that wolf to come into the light, and he did, blinking, and soon was bouncing along behind me at a good clip. Luckily for me, the exit was not far from the wolf pen and I was soon skirting the edge of the parking lot, having given the wolf half the blueberry muffin while displaying the other half, which would be his should he make it into the car. When I reached the car, I had a moment’s hesitation. The wolf was large despite its age and had to weigh close to sixty pounds. As he panted in the bright sunlight, I could see his shining teeth and the wall of wild, which shielded all but the surface of his eyes from me. Still, I opened the door of the car, pushed down the passenger seat, and threw the other half of the muffin onto the back seat.

  Soon we were making a right and then another right. I’d decided to stay off the highway. I suppose I was looking for something slightly rural. Of course, the logical thing would have been to take the highway for a half hour or so—urban Indiana does not take long to thin out—but I was also nervous to be driving with an unfamiliar wolf at high speeds. So we wove through a few streets until I found myself driving along a wealthy, suburban street, which would no doubt turn into a cul-de-sac from which I would never escape. I regarded my friend in the mirror. The wolf sat much like any canine, rolling back on his haunches, front feet planted, in the center of the seat. He was whining in a high-pitched way, as if he was controlling himself from barking. He was cute. He didn’t smell at all. His eyes were lovely and that coat of fur very impressive. Maybe he’d look good in a red leather collar—or even better, some sort of punk chic black-studded thing.