by Adam Johnson
I keep my headlights off now as I did then, but tonight, it’s because of the rabbits. They make their way down the empty Salt River bed from the city dumps, and the zoo is overrun with them. Pink eyes are everywhere, ears swiveling in turn, and the sudden sight of me racing through the zoo is enough that they can throw themselves into the bright lights of trouble. You can’t believe what they’re capable of. When they get into the Oasis, they’ll eat whole flats of hot dog buns at a time. They end up in trash cans, air ducts, gummed up in water pumps, or zapped in electric fences, and even if they find their way into a place like Sonoran Predators, it’s not good because they’re dump bunnies, raised on rotting food, full of worms.
I cruise into the night-scent of wet eucalyptus, roll through a funnel of bugs humming under a floodlight, and I stare straight on because I don’t want to get to know the animals the way some people would. I don’t name them or follow too closely their movements. Back on patrol, when I rolled past houses and through alleys, I never looked in those windows or wondered if the sons were in their beds, because if you let up out there, if you let your thoughts start to wander, there wasn’t one house you couldn’t picture without chalk lines in the drive or yellow tape across the door. This isn’t nostalgia, here, not the voice of an ex-cop with a wife and a boy and nine years on the force. My goals these days are less ambitious. I am a security guard now, lucky to get this job, and tonight, as the rising moon blues the asphalt before me, I am hunting only rabbits.
I’ve got a little Remington .22 semiauto, but it’s unwise to shoot at any distance in a zoo, so I’m driving around to check a set of heavy-mesh raccoon traps I put out on my first rounds. The zoo is nestled in Papago foothills that slope into the shallow pan of south Phoenix, which is where I used to patrol. Occasionally, through breaks in the trees, I can see the bright city grid expand below, and every streetcorner, every alleyway, comes back to me in the orange glow. I know these spots in my nightly rounds where my old life appears suddenly and all too bright, and so I have trained myself to look at my coffee in its little holder on the dash, at my hands on the plastic wheel, because it has happened before that I have seen silent red and blues out there, and it let myself wonder is that Ted or Jose or Woco out there running something down. Then it’s all too easy to start wondering about the runner, how old is he, what’s he running from?
No, I try to keep focused on the task at hand. Sometimes high school kids try to jump the gates and occasionally there’s a problem in the main lot because of the adult bookstore down the road, but other than that, it’s best to stick to rounds. Mr. Bern, the zoo director, is still a little leery of me, so we talk through Post-it notes. I come to work, peel my note off the guard shack, and do what it says without thought. Speculation won’t change the animals on the list. Dwelling won’t bring my son in from the parking lots and canal roads below.
I wheel the cart around in the soft mulch of the Petting Zoo and head uphill to an exhibit called Your Own Backyard, which contains species of lesser interest like donkeys and javelinas, animals most people forego because of the hike. At the top, it happens like it always does: the zoo gives way to a wash of Phoenix light, wavering unsteady in the heat. It makes you look, look away, then look again. At the highest point in the park, the zoo also is reduced; it is now only the tops of trees, a rising breath from the green, and for a moment I feel for these rams and sheep, to whom this dangerous city appears brilliant and alluring. From below, there is a faint call of lemurs, and the thought crosses my mind to turn the cart around, to check the trap in the morning, because honestly, I can stare out into that city for hours. But then I near the trap, and the sight makes me stop and set the brake. I turn the headlights on and grab the semiauto.
There is a full-sized dog in the raccoon trap, its bony haunches pressed against the gate, and this, too, is part of my job. It is wedged in so tight it can neither sit nor stand, and it is frozen there, silent, as if in midleap. Its gray fur juts through the mesh on every side, and the bridge of its nose and forehead are pressed flat against the far end of the cage so that it appears to be in deep contemplation of its paws below. I bend to look for a collar but there is none, only the slightest of quivering on its breath. I walk around the cage to view it from all sides, and the dog knows this is not good, that things have gone forever astray, but it is wedged in so tight its eyes can follow nothing but my shoes.
That this dog cannot fully see me is a small relief, though it is not enough to stop me from wondering if, when it happens, his body will have room to go limp, or whether it will behave as if nothing happened, and be just as hard to pull out afterward. The thought is neither sentimental nor cold. My snake was a Post-it note. So was my bird. But I already have a dog, and eventually you have to decide how much you can afford to care. A couple years on Traffic will teach you that. They put you on Traffic first, so you got used to such things. On Traffic, you’ll see pelvic wings unfold against steering columns. There’ll be breast plates you can see light through, dentures imbedded in dashboards. Stuff you need the kitty litter for. Kitty litter was standard procedure. The older cops said you could even get used to the sight of kids getting hurt, though I pretty much quit before that. Regardless, I lift my gun. The dog will be easier to get out after, I decide, and turn my back to the city lights as it stares at the old police shoes I have quit polishing.
This bothers me though, this dog staring at my shoes, so I swing around to the back of the cage and figure I’ll do it from there. But right away I know this is a mistake because I see its haunches and wonder how hungry a dog has to be to worm into a cage for rabbit feed. I see its tail jammed in the trap spring and start to think about my own dog for a moment, am bending down to loosen its tail even before I consider if this is best. I release the spring catch with my thumb, and the only reaction from the dog is a light trickle of urine. Standing, things only get worse for I am suddenly faced with that great bank of city lights.
Before I can realize what a minute of wandering thoughts will cost me, I am held fixed for a moment, mesmerized, because nearly all the people I care about in the world are out there tonight, including my son, Mac. I stand, mouth open, held, until I come to my senses, until I remember the dog and my finger feels for the semiauto’s safety. The way you shoot a tiger is the way you stick your head into the smoking cab of a Traffic rollover. It’s the way you kick down a tenement door or pull the covers to shine your Maglight on the sheets of a rape scene. You just take that breath and go. It’s how you drive your son home from school after he’s broken another boy’s fingers, three of them, for no reason, he says. It’s how you keep from thinking what it means to have this dog’s piddle on your worn-out cop shoes. You just take that breath. You go.
* * *
The next day, Woco and his new girlfriend, Tina, show up in the late afternoon to barbecue. I have already hosed down the patio furniture and stoked up the grill, and it is still hot enough out that the smoke doesn’t want to rise. Sue is silent as she chops vegetables. She has been in the library all day and still has that fluorescent glow on her skin. The neighbor has informed her that Mac’s eye is the result of his “arresting” and “detaining” two of the younger boys down the street, and coming home to the news we’re having company is yet another ambush in her eyes. She could care less about my plan, she says as she goes at the carrots, whacking them down. She hasn’t shaved her legs in a week, she adds. In the midst of all this is Mac, standing on a kitchen chair repeating mumbled words over and over to the African gray parrot. About his hair, Sue won’t even speak.
So it is with caution that I answer the door when they arrive. Woco does a finger quick draw as he comes through the threshold and Mac spins and drops to the kitchen floor. Sue shoots Woco a wicked glance over the salad spinner as I watch my son jump up and smile after his near-death experience.
“Look at that hair,” Woco says, his voice booming through the kitchen. “No wonder the kid’s got a shiner with a haircut like that. What’s
next, you gonna make him wear a dress?” But even this gesture seems forced, and Mac doesn’t quite buy it.
In the backyard, I put on hot dogs and pass out beers. We sit around a picnic table in the shocking heat, Sue leaning against a post with her feet in my lap and Tina massaging Woco’s shoulder. It could be pleasant, this scene, but after the initial greetings are over, uneasiness settles. Sue takes soft pulls off her beer. Tina feigns interest in the empty yard behind me.
Woco opens his mouth a few times, but always pauses and thinks better of it. He is unsure these days of what’s safe to talk about, and without news of holdups or hit-and-runs, there is little to say and we are silent. These are the dangerous moments in my life lately. As the hot dogs sizzle and our eyes float around the yard it seems we’re all wondering how many more of these fumbling evenings we have left in us, how long before we’re all at a loss. On the force, there were two levels of response to things: one and ten. It was either a polite are you aware this is a school zone? or you were reaching for the thumb break on your holster. On the force there were no in-betweens. What I have learned in the past year, since the time my son first felt a finger break in his hand, is that life on one is the harder of the two.
Sue finally breaks the silence. “Are you going to tell him?”
Woco smiles and looks from her to me and back. “What?”
“Go get the paper plates,” she says to Mac.
He just rubs the shaved back of his head. “What for?”
“Kitchen. Counter,” she says and glares at him until he’s inside and the door is shut. She leans back again and speaks to the porch roof, not quite bitter, but more or less resigned. “He’s got a plan. He thinks if he gives you all his old uniforms in front of Mac, it will solve everything. He’s got them dry-cleaned, in the hall closet, ready to go. His big plan. Uniforms.”
Woco looks to me for confirmation. Listening to Sue describe the scene I can see it for the foolish notion it is. The grand symbolic act, she’ll be calling it, his solution to the bomb. I shake my head at Woco.
“What can hurt at this point?” I ask him. “I mean, it’s worth a shot.”
“Worth a shot,” Sue mutters to the roof.
Tina speaks. She hooks her hand around Woco’s neck and takes a drink off his beer. “What’s this all about?”
Woco pats her leg under the table. “Kid’s got growing pains.”
“It’s more than growing pains,” I say as Mac comes out the door eating a carrot. He walks with the other hand on his belt buckle like it’s a light he’s shining in your eyes, a habit picked up from me. Orange mouthed, he’s grinning, so I know something’s up. I watch him all the way to the bench, where he tosses the paper plates, face down.
Inside we hear the parrot screech twice. Then it says, “Code—nine.” What was Mac’s silly phrase yesterday now has me by the collarbones, a sudden anxiety that stuns me until I realize the parrot has the perfect scratchiness of a radio dispatcher. Code nine, the parrot repeats and a knowing smile comes across Mac’s face so obscene it scares the shit out of me. I watch him silently mouth fuck yeah.
I feel myself moving toward ten. “Did you teach that bird to say that?”
Mac blankly chews his carrot.
“It’s going to say that forever. Do you know that?” All of us are watching now, and suddenly it’s not so easy for him to smile. His face is bunching up, getting flustered, and I want this. I want to get through to him. I want him to stand in the hot glow of ten. “Forever. Did you think about that?”
“Okay,” Sue says, “enough.”
“Answer me,” I say. “Answer.”
But then something strange happens. There is a splash in the dog pool, a sharp plunk. Something bounces off the barbecue, sending sparks out the dome. Then I see it, a short hail of rocks sailing in from the alley. There is the crunching of feet in the alleyway and the stones bounce off the roof and skitter onto the porch as a group of kids yells and taunts Mac.
Mac is moving across the yard before I know it. With one high step and a leap, he’s over a six-foot fence and all I have of him are streaks of pumping arms through fence slats as he begins his pursuit. Sue shakes her head like I should get up to follow, but I don’t. I will not chase my son like a fugitive down our alley.
“So much for the grand solution,” she says.
We sit there in the quiet, looking at each other through the smoke of burned hot dogs, listening to the sounds of disappearing feet. On the force things would be easy. On the force I would know what to do. But now, there is no procedure, and I can only close my eyes and try not to think.
After a while he appears, breathless through the side gate. His ribs are heaving, his feet a throbbing mess. “I need my shoes,” he declares and then puts his hands on his knees, breathing deep. “I need shoes.” Sue glares at me.
* * *
At the zoo a yellow Post-it waits on the guard shack. I don’t look forward to these notes, to the extra duties Mr. Bern has waiting, but it’s best to just plow onward and get it over. Though tonight I pull up short. Mac is in my thoughts, has been since he pedaled down the drive at sunset, and as I picture him weaving off into the dark neighborhood, I can’t help feeling a connection between my son and a distant note I can’t quite read, though I know what news it will bring.
It’s foolish, I know, standing here in the parking lot, afraid of a note. For the first time I think I’d rather Mr. Bern told me in person the animals I was to cull, that one night he’d follow me around to see what it takes to make these notes good. But, like I said, he’s weary of me, and it was only because Sue’s veterinary professors put in a good word that I was hired at all. When people find out you used to be a cop, you can see the options run in their eyes: couldn’t hack it, not good enough, crooked. Or worse, they imagine some tragic life-and-death scene that makes you quit, that changes a guy forever. The stray bullet that hits a tourist. The kid with a toy pistol. People never pause to think that such scenes can stop being tragedies after a while.
I tell you, the only thing I ever shot on the force was a cow, which was one of the reasons Mr. Bern hired me. Still, I don’t think he ever shot anything. I’d like to tour him around Traffic for a while, show him how to take that breath before you crawl underneath the axles of a tractor-trailer underride. If everyone did a year on Traffic, we’d all speak another language. My wife and I wouldn’t end up silent in the kitchen, at a full loss. There would be no need for yellow notes.
In the distance, a caribou ruts his horns against a fence and calls in the heat. It is a lonely sound and I decide I will set no traps tonight. I pull myself together, tell myself such speculation is foolish, will only make things worse. But before I take two steps toward the guard shack, I again reconsider things. Into my head comes the notion that maybe I was wrong, that nobody should have to go on Traffic, that my son shouldn’t feel he has to face the world, head on, before he’s even ten. And, of course, he’s learned what’s out there from me.
The note, though, is not what I’d expected. It simply reads: Mind The Wolves. I examine it closely in the sulfurous floodlights. It’s the first time I’ve been asked to look after an animal rather than put it down, and as I aim the cart around toward the lower zoo, I can’t help feeling a little high. I drive faster than usual and flip on the headlights to get a glimpse of animals that swivel their long necks to watch me pass. Rolling through Down Under, a wallaby bounds to pace me inside its fence. I sink into the light mist of Flamingo Island. Coming out of Sonoran Predators I see them, ruby bright eyes fixing me from a temporary enclosure near the Papago boulders that mark the end of the zoo.
There are three of them, Mexican Reds, and I watch them all night, forgetting all else. I have never seen a wolf before, but I know these are fresh off the range. The enclosure is only a fifty-foot square of chain link, yet the females manage to show little of themselves. But the male, he is magnificent, a coat of deep amber, slimmer, smaller than you might think. Soon I find myself ru
nning the outside of the fence with him as he lopes, bandy-legged, circling his pen in a rocking-horse motion that pulls up and freezes at the slight sounds of distant rabbits, now a little less sure about descending into the zoo. He is used to being pursued. I am used to pursuing, and we fall naturally into this motion.
His ears prick, he pauses. At these moments I stop with him. Earlier in the day he has sprayed these new fence posts to mark them as his, as if to say the world can come no closer than this, and in such a pause there is only the mutual huff of our breath, the musk of wolf-spray rising like spilled fuel, and the absolute silence of rabbits. I kneel down at the fence, and the wolf does not know what to make of me. He stands, wide and low, ready to be knocked down, but for a moment we speak the same language and he is unafraid. We seem to recognize we are both in from the range, to agree the chase can end.
At home, the house is quiet, unlit, and I look forward to a half hour in bed with my wife before she rises to go to school. I lock my gun above the refrigerator and slip out of my clothes in the kitchen. Naked, I make my way down the hallway. There is the slightest wolf smell on my skin and I am glad for it. In the bedroom, open books are spread along the foot of the bed and Sue, in her deepest sleep, is beyond peaceful. My dream about Mac will not come tonight, I know that now, looking at her. It is a simple dream, short as a school play, yet can come sudden, lung-punching, like high-speed chrome.
I slide my leg under the covers and am drawn to the warmth of her back, the slightly sour smell of her hair. She is curled away from me but her head rolls back, craned to her shoulder. One eye opens. Wide and unfocused, the pupil slowly floats across the ceiling, moving through her puffy lids as if in sea water. “Baba,” she murmurs. “Cum sle wis me.” I wrap my arm around until my fingers fit the slots of her ribs. She hums a single, short note. At the scent of her shoulders and the sound of her sleepy talk, I know her so fully it loosens my jaw, makes me exhale deep.
