by Adam Johnson
Her foot drifts over to scratch an itch against the hair on my legs, and near sleep, I hear Mind The Wolves. I say it to myself, now wondering if instead of take care of the wolves, it means watch out for the wolves. Stay clear. Beware. Suddenly, I wonder what Mac is dreaming under his Bart Simpson bedsheets. We gave him the street-side room when he was little and I picture him fitful and turning now as late-night cars drive by and headlights steal in his windows.
My eyes are drawn to the wall, to an unseen boy not twenty feet away, and I want him to be restless, to dream about his black eye, about bent fingers, but I know what is really true: he is dead-to-the-world asleep, eyes rolled back, sheets on the floor, sunk so deep in his unconscious he is lucky to be breathing. He was as easy with a fist as I was with a wolf, and I want us both troubled by this in our sleep. My hand pulls against the flex of Sue’s ribs. “Gon a sle,” she says as her hand finds mine, squeezes, goes limp.
* * *
I decide Mac’s hair is best fixed by professionals, but a trip to the mall, it turns out, is a bad idea. Even at noon, on a weekday, we are forced to park a quarter mile away. Daytime is generally more difficult for me, and entire days, one-on-one with my son, have recently given me reason to be leery. Any lightness I felt last night is reduced to the uneasiness of walking on heat-weakened asphalt and the feeling of dark potential that can come from a sea of fuming cars. I have decided to be “up” today, a carefree father despite the fact that Mac now refuses to wear his shoes, which he woke me up by announcing were for “pussies.”
This is how we move through the parking lot: I, holding his sneakers, walk down the middle of the lane, while he zigzags back and forth before me from the relative cool of one car shadow to the next, saying ow, ow, and this motion, it seems to me, in the oven-breath of the mall, is the essence of our relationship.
Mac has never before had a store-bought haircut, and it is the tools of the trade that interest him. He leans over to pump himself up in the chair. He uses the vacuum hose to suck red circles in his arm. He smells the blue fluid the combs are in. The young woman cutting his hair says something to him and he laughs. He closes his eyes, rolls his head to grin toward her shoulder, and I can see in his reflection a boy who’s forgotten his sullenness, forgotten his father the ex-cop is waiting with his sneakers.
But with a razor nick at the back of his neck I see his fists lift on instinct and I feel a pang in my gut that makes me want to curl. He sits stark, straight up, his head whipped around to glare at the girl with the comb. What you need to understand about this, what I need to make clear to you is that regardless of what Sue or anybody says, I’ve lost this kid, I’ve lost him. I can get him back, I know that. What hurts, here, on this bench, amid waves of passing families, is that I have no idea how.
* * *
At work, there are three yellow notes waiting for me on the guard shack, and I walk right past them to the front power panel, where I shut down every light in the zoo. I step into my golf cart, and for a long time, just stare through the windshield into a night I have blackened. A light wind, unusual for this place, floats down from the Papagos, bringing a taste of wolf-scent like warmed ammonia, and I can feel those notes hanging on the guard shack behind me. Then I hear him bay. The wolf’s voice rises and turns in the bowl of the zoo, curls down around me and resonates in my bones. The two females join in and their wail rings from the rocks like dished metal, a clear, sonorous sound that hangs in the air and moves me long after they stop, and I hope the call rolls far into the city below, makes people sit straight up from their sleep.
I drop the parking brake and wheel the cart around, drawn to the lesser animals, the mule deer, the desert burros, to the spot where I shot the dog. A wave runs through me as I remember the swooshing thud he made as I grabbed his paws and swung him into the Dumpster. I feel the urge to stand on the spot where I first found him trapped, to look at it again. But I don’t do that. What I do when I reach the top of the hill is sit and stare for hours into the brazier of city lights below, looking and looking.
Eventually I hear the short whoop of a police siren in the main lot and I cruise down the cart path until I can see Woco far below, leaning on his patrol car, thumping his Maglight against the front tire and watching the light short on and off. I hold up and observe from a distance as he approaches the chain link with a cardboard box from the crime lab, and I know they have finally cleaned out my locker at the station. He just stands down there, holding all my old gear, waiting longer than I am comfortable with, and it is like the barbecue last evening, the awkwardness, the distance, the desire to jump shotgun into his cruiser and race off with him, the silent waiting for him to leave.
Later, after I have read Mr. Bern’s notes and done my work, I leave the zoo early and patrol old neighborhoods with my cruising lights on. I turn the Ford down low-lit streets and roll past residence after residence where homeowners raise their juveniles. I put down four kit fox pups before I left. The zoo listed them for three weeks on the National Animal Bank, but no one wanted foxes, so Mr. Bern must have decided today was the day. His note suggested I use Ambutol on them but I didn’t. It is a slow drug, painful to watch, and they deserved better. The fifth one is on the seat next to me, in the empty crime lab box, wide eyed and unsure. Already his piddle has soaked through to the fabric. In a few months he’ll begin marking the house with fox spray, which is some of the worst, and I’ll have to get rid of him. But for now the world outside the car windows does not concern him; he just sits amid the passing darkness with his legs spread, trying not to fall down in the turns.
I find myself near home, two blocks from my street, when I see a figure dash from the road in the murk of streetlamps, a blur of a boy, it seems to me, diving for the cover of bushes. I give chase. I pull down the alley and reach for the spotlight lever that is no longer there. I prowl the backstreets of my neighborhood, figuring, following, until the fox is asleep, until it is my own house I patrol past.
At home, Mac is in the kitchen eating cereal by himself. I enter and stare at him, at his hands and ribs and feet, as if some element of what I felt out there might still linger on him.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asks and stretches, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and I can’t tell if this move is genuine, if he’s a sleepy five-year-old or a devious fifteen.
“I almost had you,” I say.
He squints at me. He lifts the bowl of sugary milk and downs it before rising and silently returning to his bedroom. “Here I am,” he says from down the hallway.
It’s when I go to put my gun away that I notice a chair pulled up against the cabinet, the footprints on the counter below the locking doors. The clasp and hinges have not been jimmied, are untouched, but I can feel his presence here, feel that he’s been meditating long on what’s inside, cheek to wood, and I decide here, in the kitchen, that he will shoot a gun.
I stride down the hall, and in his room, grab his wrist. Two more hours of dark, I think, looking into his seditious eyes, and his shoulder socket knocks as I tow him down the hall and out toward the car, still idling in the alley.
Past the zoo gates, he lags far behind as we cross the footbridge that will land us in the park. That is how I see him nearing me, a black outline against the bank of city lights behind, and as I grab the .22 rifle and two boxes of shells from the guard shack, I want him to look into the leukemia-yellow eyes of a tiger. But rabbits are all I have left to scare my son back to me.
Mac is sitting in the driver seat of the cart when I come out, and without speaking we are off, rolling past the Arizona Collection, in what seems an underwhelming first driving experience. He’s driving one-handed, eyes wide and unfocused, a style he’s learned from me. I give him no directions because the zoo is circular, though he doesn’t know that, and he heads best speed through unknown turns, clacking the pedal up and down on the floor, upset the cart will go no faster.
We pass through the main exhibits, and I kill the lights as we near the rea
r of the zoo and reach over to turn off the key as we pass the makeshift wolf pen, leaving Mac to coast us past the last reaches of the fences. Standing in the fields that foot the Papagos, the stars brilliant despite the glow of the city below, I show him how to lever the little bullets, the features of the safety and sights. He inspects the rifle like he is viewing it through the wonder of another boy’s glasses. I make Mac click the safety off and on to make sure he can finger the operation in the dark, but this does little to reassure me.
I bring the cart about and set him up in front of it, Indian legged on the ground with the barrel benched on the grill. He points it off into the black landscape.
“The lights will come on and you’ll see the rabbits,” I tell him. “They’ll stand on their hind legs and then the eyes will light up.” He looks from me to the darkness and back. “Aim only that way or the bullets may come back to the wolves or burros.” I point toward the dark field but he doesn’t follow.
“Where’s the wolves?”
“Over there.” He turns to look but there is only the hood of the golf cart. “Are you sure you’re ready?”
He’s still straining to see the wolf pen. Then he looks up, his face blank, and the safety clicks off. “Affirmative,” he says.
I walk to the power pole unsure if I’ve made a big mistake. Grand symbolic act number two, I hear Sue say. I take a breath, for both of us, and throw the toggle switch to the floodlights above. They glow a dull sodium orange before flashing to show an empty field, and slowly the rabbits begin to stand up and stare toward the light. The semiauto snaps to life as Mac levers eleven rounds with amazing speed, just the way I taught him: pump sight breathe squeeze, pump sight breathe squeeze.
Little patches of dust stand frozen in the distance as we walk together, our shadows long before us. Mac opens and closes the breech to smell the smoke. I try to read the expression on his face, and as the moment I’ve been banking on nears, the moment he sees what a gun is capable of, what he’s capable of, I begin to change my mind and hope he has missed.
I am wrong. We find a rabbit sprawled beside a small outcropping and I realize the worst has happened: Mac is neither scared nor disgusted, only indifferent. He picks it up by its long ears like he were handling a milk jug. It slowly rotates by its stretched skin. With his finger he inspects the little hole in its chest. With his finger he opens its mouth and looks inside.
“Maybe we could feed it to Sam,” he says.
“Negative.”
“Ten-four,” he says, mocking me, and spots another a few yards away. It is larger than the last one and Mac picks it up and shakes it. “What about this one,” he asks, holding it up, as if weighing it in the light. I watch its front legs circle in the air.
Jesus, I think. “Put it down.”
“No. It’s still good,” he says and shakes it hard. Its body rocks some and then its back legs slowly rear up, as if charging, and suddenly tear down his arm. Mac drops it and moves to kick it but I stop him. I grab his shoulder and pull him, squeeze him to my stomach until I can feel my pulse in his back. The jackrabbit skitters away and overbounds into the dark and I am left pressing my boy to me while trying to think of a way to explain the difference between killing an animal and beating it.
I turn him around, but I can’t deal with his sullen, angry face. Mac’s arm is scratched pretty good. But I can’t even deal with him. I take the gun, hand him the flashlight, and walk away for the first aid kit. I should bring him to the cart, to where the light is better, though honestly, I don’t want to see him any closer tonight.
Anger has settled to a kind of emptiness by the time I reach the cart. I find the first aid kit and begin the slow walk back to Mac, my son, whom I will patch up with gauze and Bactine. I make my way along the edge of the open desert and I know in a little while I will have to call Sue to come pick him up because even here, in a simple field under the stars, I am ill-suited for any of this.
I reach the spot where Mac should be, and it takes a moment to bring my head back down to earth and realize he is gone. I do a slow turn before I see him standing down by the wolf pen, shirtless, with a rabbit in his hand. He is rattling it temptingly against the chain link while his flashlight follows in its beam the dim image of a wolf in the dark, more eyes than anything as it sidles, circling, on loping legs. Mac is saying things I can’t quite hear. His free fingers hold the mesh, and he is bent some, talking in hushed tones.
I call to him but he does not respond. He seems to finish what he is saying and his awkward body stands up straight. The light turns off. Then his arm lifts to lob the rabbit over the fence and I am moving. I see the rabbit do two slow turns in the air and I am almost running. It lands on the other side, not four feet from where he stands transfixed, fingers wrapped in the fence. Mac, I call.
He rolls his head to look at me blankly and I slow some. Soon, I am stopped, breathing heavy and watching from behind. It becomes quiet, and as I notice the shh of late-night cars on Van Buren, I wonder what had me running a moment ago. Then it appears from the dark, cautiously, legs wide, watching Mac as it comes close enough to shovel the rabbit into its mouth before it is gone. Mac is glued to the scene, and the thought that he feels connected to this animal brings him closer to me in the one way I do not want.
And then the wolf is back. It is only a gray glow in the moonlight, but belly low it nears the fence again. It pauses and sniffs, then nears more, and I have never seen anything like it, this wolf and my son. Through the fence its nose runs up and down his jeans, and Mac seems almost to press himself against the fence as it sniffs, neck stretched to Mac’s shiny legs. Then it turns away from him, as if to leave, yet pauses. At first I think it is smelling the spot where the rabbit had lain, but the wolf lowers its head, and with a quivering of its hindlegs, sends three great blasts of spray and foamy urine trolloping down Mac.
He turns, mouth open, a mist coming off him beyond smell, and his is the kind of terror I was getting used to on the force. I move to embrace him with everything I’ve got, but when he sees me run at him, he is gone; his legs shudder then burst, a flash of a boy racing down dark paths.
I chase him. I take a breath and run, my keys jangling, my nametag flying off to scramble in the green-black grass. We are running for all we are worth, and soon he is losing me, soon he is only the glint of working shoulder blades and the white arcs of elbows in the moon, and I run. I run until the saliva puddles in my mouth and I am only following his scent. I feel my gun belt take on its familiar cantering rhythm, and I picture him hopping the zoo gate to blur down Van Buren Avenue under dim streetlamps, chasing the traffic, running shirtless past the adult bookstore. I ditch the Maglight and revolver and belt and pull my shirt off until there are only the sounds of my breathing off the asphalt. I round into the wide open of Your Own Backyard, and I know he has gotten away from me, suddenly I’ve chased this kid a thousand times, in an instant I am heading again down old alleys and yards, over hedgerows, across empty causeways, and as a stitch starts in my side all I can do is follow that awful smell on my son and hope it will never leave him because there’s no other way I’ll find him in the dark.
THE DEATH-DEALING CASSINI SATELLITE
Tonight the bus is unusually responsive—brakes crisp, tires gripping—jockeying lane to lane so smoothly your passengers forget they’re moving as they turn to talk over the seats, high heels dangling out into the aisle, teeth bright with vodka and the lemon rinds they pull from clear plastic bags in their purses. Some stand, hanging loosely from overhead handles, wrists looped in white plastic straps, smiling as their bodies lean unnaturally far with the curves. Off-balance, half-falling, this position has its advantages: hips flare and sway behind you, ribs thumb their way through fabric, and this it seems is the view you’ve grown used to, daring you to touch, poised to knock you down.
You don’t even know where you’re driving yet, but through breaks in the trees, you can see red and blues on the Parkway and know traffic cops are working
the outflow of an I-High baseball game. The school is not a place you want to be near tonight, especially bumper-to-bumper with old teammates, especially as a nineteen-year-old go-nowhere who drives a charter bus for a cancer victim support group on Thursday nights. So you’re banking a turn onto the Cascade Expressway instead—not an easy feat in a fifty-six-foot BlueLiner—when you catch a glimpse of Mrs. Cassini walking down the long aisle toward you, her figure vibrating in the overhead mirror, and you know you’re in trouble. Her husband built the Cassini Satellite, the one powered by seventy-two pounds of plutonium, so you know what you’re dealing with.
Your eyes double back from carloads of teenagers behind victory-soaped windows to the sight of Mrs. Cassini growing in the mirror: she’s running the tips of her fingers across the green-black vinyl seat backs, and she’s closing on you in a black Lycra cocktail dress that’s Olympic time-trial tight. The streetlights through the bus windows are flashing across her torso, her arms and neck taking on the cobalt blue of barium dye, and even from here you can make out the bubble-gum ridges of her mastectomy scars. All the other women seem to lean in her wake, as if she is their talisman, this woman who’s walked through the flames, who’s beat cancer three times. The old BlueLiner wants to wander in the fast lane.
Only when Mrs. Cassini reaches the front of the bus do you notice the flask in her hand. At the sight of your SAT study guides on the dash, she says, “Relax, Ben,” and sloshes back some scotch. Amber traces down her chin, pauses at the base of her neck. She slips a tape into the deck and Blue Danube starts over the loudspeakers.
As she leans the backs of her legs against the dash, the door lever forces her closer to you, and the black wing of her pelvis glows an edgy green from the dash gauges. She stares at you hard—eyes rimmed a renal yellow, the color of canary diamonds—then lifts and places a heel in the pocket of seat between your legs. This move hitches her skirt high enough that you can see the white-clamped tip of her catheter dangling before you, and you’re trying not to stare, but man . . .
